Igenlode Wordsmith

YouTube decided to show me (presumably due to my having watched the entirety of the first one) a whole series of fan-vids on the BBC "Musketeers" -- which apparently I never actually wrote about here, despite having watched it diligently throughout its run[s], and in fact named one of my Raouls in tribute to a character whose arc I particularly enjoyed!

I had forgotten just how *intelligent* that show was( Read more... )


Of course the fan-vids didn't go into any of that beyond the action sequences and the one-liners :-p
But YouTube proceeded in consequence to recommend me a 'review' of the various different screen versions of "The Three Musketeers" by someone who started off his upload with a scathing plot summary of the original story, saying how much he disliked the characters, accusing them of murder (for duelling) and rape and elitist behaviour, and generally demanding that a 19th-century novelist writing about the seventeenth century should adhere to the tenets of his 21st-century Internet-advocated ideology.( Read more... )

My immediate reaction was a strong desire to reread the novel in the original French, of which I own a copy! But I ended up by remembering that I had once been halfway through the animated series which was recommended to me by Violonaire as a childhood favourite, Sous Le Signe des Mousquetaires, a.k.a 'the one where Milady has green hair and Aramis is a girl' ;-)
( Read more... )

I managed a fairly crude repair on my copy of D.K Broster's "The Vision Splendid" by pasting a tube of brown paper (a rectangle cut from a brown paper bag to three times the width of the spine, folded in three, with the upper flap glued down over the lower one) inside the loose back, which was hanging on a few threads of bookcloth. ( Read more... )

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Meanwhile I have been persevering -- or rather procrastinating -- with La machine à assassiner. It is not quite as bad as I had remembered (perhaps thanks to the fact that I now *know* the plot, and am not impatiently trying to extract it from a seeming mass of irrelevant verbiage!), but I feel that it's pretty symptomatic that I have currently reached page 148 of 200, that is to say three-quarters of the way through, and we have only just learned -- via a brief summary account -- what Gabriel and Christine have actually been up to in all the time since he kidnapped her dramatically at the start of the book and set everyone looking for them. ( Read more... )

I've been re-watching La Poupée Sanglante; I was rather disturbed to discover that there is apparently a recent English edition of Leroux's book in which the translator is under the impression that Bénédict Masson is a mass-murderer and the entire first part of the story is the confession of an unreliable narrator... I mean, while I can see that you *could* come away with that impression after only reading half the story (although I certainly didn't) the fact that Bénédict is innocent is pretty much one of the pivotal points of the overall plot, so the publisher really shouldn't be issuing explanatory notes based on a misconception and flatly contradicted by the subsequent dénouement of the novel :-(