By way of introduction

Last fall a friend introduced me to the BBC dramatization of the novel, “North and South,” by Elizabeth Gaskell. I enjoyed it but didn’t think about it much, until another colleague, seeking to comfort me in distress, pushed another copy of it into my hands over the holiday break. I wasn’t going to watch it again, but I did. And I have been watching it almost every day since then. I’ve incorporated it into a class I am teaching.

It’s Richard Armitage, pure and simple, who keeps me glued to the screen. Learning about him has got me surfing the web like crazy, and looking at his other work.

Some days, lately, it’s the possibility of getting to see Mr. Armitage on screen that gets me out of bed.

I’m bothered by this at times, especially because Mr. Armitage is not real in any meaningful sense to me. I won’t ever meet him, and though he has been fairly forthcoming in interviews, one also gets the sense that a great deal is not being said, either because he is trying to preserve a private sphere in the face of millions of women who regularly express their desire to undress him, or because the people interviewing him are dolts. So as much as the actor and his work and his body delight, and as much as one extrapolates from things said or not said in the press, there is a great deal I can’t know, and I replace that lack of knowledge with projection.

The experience of watching Mr. Armitage on screen thus fuses his acting with my own projections about him and the character he is playing. And (or rather, thus), the acting he does has turned into a lens for looking at my own life. Hence the title of the blog.

~ by Servetus on February 26, 2010.