On Lucas North, read this!

Richard Armitage as Lucas North, responding to flashbacks of his imprisonment in Spooks 8.4. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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A character study and emotional/analytical reaction by alyssabethancourt. A notice that it’s very long. I want to get back to this piece, but I didn’t want to delay everyone else from reading it.

Normally I’d say “comments over there,” but it’s hard to leave a useful comment on tumblr that’s more than two lines long, so I’m leaving comments open here in case anyone wants to chat about it here.

I will be publishing later today, but this should give everyone who wants a fascinating afternoon Armitage read something really great to enjoy.

Thorin Oakenshield moves Richard Armitage’s posterior proportions from Lysippan to Polykleitan canon

Still from Best-Buy Blu-Ray documentary feature attached to The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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Referencing Obscura’s previous discussion about the proportions of Richard Armitage’s body: Where do you suppose Thorin fits into the classical canon of sculptural proportions? Especially if we look at that one crucial feature?

***

I think we’re talking Polykleitan now, don’t you?

Solid, compact, beautiful? With those additional thigh pads?

I mean, honestly, that was already a really sweet moment on Armitage’s body, but now?

It’s almost rude to say.

I think the costumers gave Mr. Armitage the cutest patootie of all the dwarves, don’t you?

Do you think it’s too late for me to write to Peter Jackson and ask him to make sure that we get some rear views of Thorin that are not covered up with armor or a coat or something?

Also, I note here that Armitage is listed as 6′ 2″ while Graham McTavish is listed as 6′ 2.5″.

Richard Armitage Legenda 79: Stuff worth reading

Legenda offers a brief, non-inclusive index of stuff about Richard Armitage that I noticed and enjoyed since the last episode. It doesn’t usually include materials presented on the major fansites, which I love dearly, but which are linked in the sidebar. Because I always forget or just miss stuff, please add additional pieces of interest via link in the comments.]

Thorin threat

Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

Richard Armitage Archive

Some of these are tumblr links but nothing risqué — put them in here b/c I didn’t really read tumblr this week.

• Gorgeous: Richard Armitage and the canon of classical sculptural proportions.
• Is Richard Armitage boring? On the utility of exploration.
• Her computer’s gonna make her marry Richard Armitage.
• Loving the fluffy part of being an Armitage fan.
• The conclusion to Bechep’s “The Day I Met Richard” series: Part 3.
• Misha makes it to 10,000 hits. Give her some love!
• Update on the status of the fan campaign to bring North & South to PBS.
• Why Denni loves that picture and needs a scratch ‘n’ sniff Richard Armitage.
• On Richard Armitage as Dreamlover.
• Armitage GIFs and understanding context.
• The arrival of an Armitage fangirl package in the mail (in German). When I’ve gotten one of these it’s been tremendously exciting as well.
• Should Richard Armitage play Zeus?
• Reactions to the Popcorn Taxi pre-interview at Obsessive Behavior and Love, Sex, & Other Dirty Words and the discussion in both places.
• Another great response to Armitage’s statements at In Praise of Wickedness.
• Loving Thorin’s pelt — or is it Richard Armitage’s face?
• Would definitely to have that on my bed.
• Guy of Gisborne or John Mulligan for dinner?
• I saw this a long time ago, can’t remember where, and it’s reappeared, the frame of credits listening Richard Armitage as “Swing” from a CATS video.
• And Fabo has a new video about how Armitage fascinates her:

Please love on CDoart

• Her computers are revolting. Leave her a comment here.

Richard III news

• What’s up with the Richard III story in Leicester and elsewhere. Worth it for the link at the end regarding Richard III and Darth Vader.

Armitageworld novelist news!

• Kate Forrester / “Khandy” (author of one of our favorite Lucas North fanfics, “The Gruinard Project” and the much-beloved Sparkhouse fanfic to original novel, “In the Bleak Midwinter”); now has her first completely original novel out on Kindle and in paper: Degrees of Silence (2013). [Buy on amazon.com or buy on amazon.co.uk.] I have not read this one yet, but I know everyone who’s followed khandy’s other projects will be interested. Khandy was interviewed on “me + richard armitage” here.

Servetus’ pic of the week

Via Grendel’s Mum. This is like the perfect Servetus picture.

Richard Armitage-related fanfic

• Trudy’s “In Consequence” goes to ch. 19. (Retelling of N&S w/significant character study / exploration). Aaaah.

Richard Armitage-related fanfic, mature themes, sexy, and/or RPF

• “The Saga of Vaenomar” goes to ch. 27. (Pre-history of the Erebor exiles).
• Wattpad: “Broken” goes to ch. 32. (Lucas North + OC).
• Wattpad: “Love is a Wound” goes to ch. 14. (Guy of Gisborne + OC).
• Wattpad: “A Willing Heart” goes to ch. 2. (Thorin).

OT, collateral attractions, and things I think about

• What’s so special about the dwarves in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey?
• I wasn’t planning to see the movie, but Didion and JustMeMike have published this wonderful review of the Baz Luhrmann The Great Gatsby (2013). So now I’m pondering whether to write how I feel about the novel, at least.
• Elizabeth Smart (kidnapping victim) about why we need to stop putting so much emphasis on female purity — because after her abductor raped her, she thought, based on her upbringing, that she was worth nothing and no one would want her anymore.
• The latest sockpuppet scandal at wikipedia.
• Paris apartment remains untouched for 70 years — since its owner fled the German occupation.
• Geek time: Map of early modern England (useful for historians and novelists).
• Tweet your way to stardom!

Richard Armitage recharge: Some free associating about pictures vs. film vs. fantasy

Talk about Mona Lisa Armitage: Richard Armitage at Union Station, Toronto, December 3, 2012, to promote The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com

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I wrote one of these posts almost a year ago to the day — and it’s kind of depressing to read it now, given just how many things I haven’t written in the last year. Although I’ve posted more than once per day … Well, both the summer and the year were really derailed, the summer by my parents’ illnesses, the year by the Erebor quest. Oh, and then there was the premiere of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which took up weeks and weeks of energy to react to. (Somebody — I don’t remember who — wrote me rather perspicaciously that she felt like the flood of stuff from the premiere was affecting the blogosphere because we were essentially losing status versus Armitage — as information crashed over us, we were losing the capacity to write with authority about a subject that was changing as we spoke; we were falling more into the position of admirers and out of the position of critics. I thought that plausible. And if that’s true, I hope that we’ve recovered now. Because we’ve got a lot to chew on.)

I guess it’s good to have a list of things I still want to write about. And there are a few more topics, now. And I have Guylty inspiring me onward. I remember that when I thought I was going to be unemployed, back in 2011, a colleague said to me, well, it’s not like you’ll run out of stuff to write. You can do a scene by scene analysis of everything Richard Armitage has ever done.

That certainly still awaits!

The pictures of Armitage, as Guylty has been documenting for us, are increasingly present and improving drastically in quality. Many of them are positively transfixing (see above). And it’s so easy to use those pictures and the related fantasies to get through the day.

I was thinking recently, however, that when I became an Armitage fan, pictures of Richard Armitage played a much smaller role in my fan life than did watching his actual work. Well, at the time I was basically immobilized in every sense except physically, especially for the first three weeks of it. All I did for that three weeks was go to work, come home, watch North & South, over and over and over again, and sleep. But the record of my early Armitagemania, which I cataloged under a rubric called “Obsession Update” for most of 2010, reveals that I was spending dozens of hours every week watching Mr. Armitage on DVD and on my computer. It was taking up a ridiculous amount of time, actually. At some point it waned slightly and also bothered me less, so I stopped documenting the watching and rewatching.

I’m not watching Armitage’s work with that single-minded devotion now and I sometimes read in the evenings again (!) — but I am still watching fairly continuously, if not as repetitively. I’m watching The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey over and over again as well. And so I really want to get back to the acting, for a few reasons.

One is that unlike in 2010, when I had practically every scene Richard Armitage had been in on DVD memorized, I now have the experience — if I haven’t watched a particular production for a certain amount of time — of watching it with new eyes. And frankly, when I turned Strike Back on again a few days ago after a couple of months off, it was like a kick in the stomach. Armitage still does it for me and to me, and I want to know why. There’s more to understand, stuff I haven’t explored even on top of the lists of themes I’ve targeted. I want to get to the “beyond.”

Second, on the whole question of Armitage’s emotionality as an attractive model for me, that’s something else I need to tap into, both on the level of understanding how he puts it together consciously or unconsciously, and also on the level of figuring it out for me.  This ties into the question of fantasy — both as fanfic and on other levels, which I’ve been using a lot to make it through the days. (A03, what did I do before your writers learned about Armitage?) The fantasy is a manifestation of things I (and other people) see in Armitage’s roles and acting (and identity, but that’s a slightly different issue — and I need to get the next chapter of the “My Richard Armitage” interpretive biography ready to go as well. That really did get sidetracked by the premiere of The Hobbit — but it’s held up surprisingly well, Armitage’s inability to remember exactly when he was on stage in the Birmingham production notwithstanding).

Third — and I just figured this out a few days ago — I’m feeling more calm on the whole beauty – talent relationship than I have in a while. I’ve always said it was a false dilemma, even as I conceded that at that decisive moment of Armitagemania onset, the beauty was necessary for me. However, I’ve been finding some of the other actors who play dwarves interesting lately — especially Graham McTavish, Dean O’Gorman, and Adam Brown (in that order) and maybe a little bit of Jed Brophy. Frankly, I see a picture of Dean O’Gorman on my computer screen and I grin and my hips jerk of their own volition. How can someone be that gorgeous and live? With McTavish and Brown it’s a little bit more complex than that — I’m responding to different things in McTavish and Brown is more cute than heartthrob material — and Brophy is more of an occasional pleasure. But that’s it. It’s all limited to pictures and occasional news reports. As with my sort of momentary puzzlement over Tom Hiddleston last summer, I haven’t explored it any further. No hunting through Netflix, ordering of obscure DVDs, or watching of violent productions in genres I’d never touch in my ordinary life.

And I was wondering — okay, you have that reaction to Armitage as well at times, the instinctive drawing of breath when you see a beautiful picture of him. And you love documenting his career — the footnoting, the excavating the sources, the linking, the writing. So why don’t you start a blog about these auxiliary dwarves if you like them so well?

And then I thought, well, it would essentially just be a kind of scrapbook. A sort of tumblr. I don’t want to say anything about any of them. They’re beautiful, but they don’t make me want to speak. I don’t care where the pictures came from or how they were made or why their acting looks the way it does. I just want to smile at them and imagine them smiling back.

That’s it: Unlike Richard Armitage, they don’t make me want to speak. They don’t inspire me to engage in the production of knowledge about them. They don’t make me want — when I’m feeling blocked or uncreative — to get unblocked or creative again. They don’t pull me onward on any journey.

So yeah — I need to get back to the pieces of Armitage that make me want to speak, and I need to do that speaking.

Weird how this blog just goes on and on and on and on and on …

OT: Self-serving Servetus, or: A conversation about the inevitability of writing for yourself

One week of summer school down, five to go.

There’s a student in this class who’s extremely critical of me. Professors are not immune to suspicion from their students, and I’m perhaps especially not immune to it because I self-undermine on purpose.

“Don’t believe anything I tell you,” I say on the first day, “unless you can confirm it in at least two other places. I don’t lie to you on purpose, but I will always tell you what my sources are for the assertions I make in lecture, and so you should be able to verify what I’m telling you without too much difficulty if you want to.”

The student is a little older than most of our undergraduates, late twenties, and has that self-confident, “I know why I’m here and what I want to learn” vibe. This type of student is actually the kind I enjoy the most. I like her.

The issue seems to be the course readings. This class studies five major primary sources, and it begins with a memoir written by a conquistador. The student objects to the fact that the memoir is “biased.” How will we learn, she wants to know, what the real truth of the conquest is?

I say: Studying history will not tell us that.

She says: We just need a better textbook than this piece of crap.

I say: Where do you suppose another textbook would get its version of history from?

She says: Neutral sources.

I say: And those would be?

She says: You’re supposed to tell us.

I wait.

She says: Instead you tell us something, and you just say, “So and so says this about it, and so and so says that about it.”

I say: Should I not be doing that?

She says: You’re not doing your job. Because you’re not telling us what actually happened. It’s obvious none of these people you are talking about were neutral.

I say: No speech is neutral. No human can speak or write without a perspective. The best we can do as readers is come to terms with the perspective.

She says: A textbook wouldn’t include all this information from biased sources. It would tell us the truth.

I say: A textbook has to come from somewhere. As I believe I mentioned, accounts of this incident in secondary sources rely on four kinds of primary sources, each of which is problematic. All of the indigenous written sources for the study of this particular topic date from the post-Conquest and their creation was influenced by Europeans. Some cultural / oral / folklore evidence survives, but it’s affected by the period of time between us and the later recording of it under particular political circumstances. Some European sources date from during the Conquest, like this one we’re reading, but others date from afterwards. And some archaeological evidence has been uncovered by scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

She says: So when are you going to tell us about the neutral sources?

I say: There isn’t any more to tell. That’s all there is. There are other sources than the ones we read in this class, but they come from one of those groups, and they create the same problems for the historian.

She waits.

She says: So what am I learning? This is a total waste of time. I can’t even answer the simplest question about the Conquest after two hours of class.

I say: What do you want to know?

She says: I want to know what happened so I can tell my students when I have my own classroom.

I say: So you can be a neutral source about history?

She says: So I can tell them what actually happened.

I say: This class that tries to teach you how we know what can be known about the subject so you can practice coming to conclusions, and then to practice applying that skill so that eventually you can use it on subjects we don’t have time to tell you about in university or that may not even exist yet.

She waits.

I say, as gently as I can: If you’re this unhappy, maybe you need a different course.

She says: I just need a neutral textbook that will tell me what happened. Not like this book.

I say: See you next week, then.

I turn and start to erase the whiteboard.

They’ll start again on Monday!

Report at TORn.

I’m excited!

There’s the whole weird, now I can place where you are thing going on in my mind. I’ve written about this before. See if I can find the link.

[ETA: I think this was the post I was thinking of.]

[ETA: Also wishing Mr. Armitage a happy reunion in Wellington with friends and coworkers and a safe, healthy, productive, creative ten weeks, of course!]

John Porter dreams, Richard Armitage bedtime fantasies

 

John Porter (Richard Armitage) dreams of an encounter with Danni Prendiville (Shelley Conn) in Strike Back 1.3. My cap.