And is Anne Rice a Gothic Romance writer?
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Platonic_Caveman — 5 years ago(September 17, 2020 02:08 AM)
Looking back I applaud my English teacher for exposing us to the English classics. But "Vanity Fair" was I think the only novel I ever used cliff notes to avoid reading. I read about two chapters and gave up.
So the movies are as bad as the book?
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Loki — 5 years ago(September 17, 2020 12:44 PM)
Yeah. It wouldn't be the first time the center of the story was an unlikeable character but that's not what really put me off. I just didn't care for the story at all.
I watched the 1998 BBC version with Natasha Little and the 2004 one with Reese Witherspoon. The BBC version was better but it that that awful, bombastic soundtrack that did a lot to ruin it. -
Platonic_Caveman — 5 years ago(September 17, 2020 02:05 AM)
You should read Rice's earlier novel, "Cry to Heaven". It's not about vampires, but eunuchs. The Vatican would castrate boys before they reached adolescence to maintain their unique high pitched male singing voice for the choir. They were called "castrati" and it was a common practice in the middle ages. Can you imagine the barbarity?
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Platonic_Caveman — 5 years ago(September 17, 2020 02:46 AM)
Here's the Wiki article on singing eunuchs:
A castrato (Italian, plural: castrati) is a type of classical male singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto. The voice is produced by castration of the singer before puberty, or it occurs in one who, due to an endocrinological condition, never reaches sexual maturity.
Castration before puberty (or in its early stages) prevents a boy's larynx from being transformed by the normal physiological events of puberty. As a result, the vocal range of prepubescence (shared by all sexes) is largely retained, and the voice develops into adulthood in a unique way. Prepubescent castration for this purpose diminished greatly in the late 18th century and was made illegal in the Papal States, the last to prohibit them, in 1870.[citation needed]
As the castrato's body grew, his lack of testosterone meant that his epiphyses (bone-joints) did not harden in the normal manner. Thus the limbs of the castrati often grew unusually long, as did their ribs. This, combined with intensive training, gave them unrivalled lung-power and breath capacity.[1] Operating through small, child-sized vocal cords, their voices were also extraordinarily flexible, and quite different from the equivalent adult female voice. Their vocal range was higher than that of the uncastrated adult male. Listening to the only surviving recordings of a castrato (see below), one can hear that the lower part of the voice sounds like a "super-high" tenor, with a more falsetto-like upper register above that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castrato
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Vlad. — 5 years ago(September 17, 2020 12:50 AM)
Men don’t enjoy romance novels because the “romance” in them is work. The men are stupidly charming and say and do all the right things effortlessly. Real relationship building requires unsexy effort and compromise whereas these fantasy romance novels present the work as effortless, but any real man knows it’s a ****load of annoying ****ing work and ain’t nobody got time to fantasize about work.
Stop. -
Platonic_Caveman — 5 years ago(September 17, 2020 02:52 AM)
Well I was castigated for calling Anne Rice a women's Gothic Romance novelist. So I wanted to give the background. I was not dismissing her. She's one the great modern authors. It is an excellent literary tradition which includes both Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley (
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
).
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"filmboards is a bold experiment in free speech and anarchy"
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Schrodinger's Cat walks into a bar, and doesn't. 