a roll a roll a roll in ze hay ~

[lookingland]

today's scene is sorta half-baked, but i'll set the timer and let it keep cooking a while.

From Slaughter Mountain: take 187 (this scene: "Do Fathers Never Know").

4,000 / 10,000,000,000 (0.0%)

scene synop: it's the 4th of july (a sunday in 1862 ~ edit: turns out i can't even read my own notes. this is not a sunday, it's a friday. oops) and Lewis and Morse are at Morse's house on furlough. Lewis has a strange run-in with Morse's father, a retired sea captain in his dotage who is not as senile as he appears.

darling: it needs some tightening, but i like Lewis's impression of Morse's bedroom best of all. the mysterious wardrobe reveals strange things about Morse much later on when Lewis does finally open it (one of the things i've always loved about this story is how "normal" Lewis thinks Morse is and how that appearance of normalcy crumbles throughout their relationship. Morse's strange bedroom and the way his father talks about him are early clues that something's "off" about him).

Lewis resisted the terrible urge to open the wardrobe and see what was inside. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find, but decided against it. Something about the austerity of the arrangement and the lack of personal affects unnerved him. Morse had always struck him as someone who might hold onto his childhood toys, so Lewis had built in his head a room full of fancy notions. Instead, it was starkly monastic: no fancy wallpapers, no tasseled drapes, no gaily bedecked rocking horse or painted puppets or a pair of lovingly preserved rolling skates set aside by the hearth. And for all of Morse’s learnedness there was not so much as a book of colored pictures. It was as though he had never really lived there at all.

mean things: Captain Morse says a lot of unflattering things about his son (even calls him "stupid"). the irony, of course, is that Captain Morse knows his son better than we think.

random fun fact: roller skates were invented around 1760ish by a belgian mechanical genius musician named john joseph merlin (just like the wizard!). the "petitbled" he patented in 1819 was a three-wheel inline contraption (see picture below) incapable of turning corners (that wouldn't come until 1863). merlin wore a pair of his new skates to a masquerade party in london and although he was great inventor, he was apparently a lousy skater. he couldn't control his speed or direction and crashed into a large mirror, injuring himself severely.




doesn't merlin look like a nice bright fella?

Comments

date

[(Anonymous)]

July 4, 1862 was a Friday

Re: date

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

oh jeez ~ my perpetual calendar has been lying to me all these years.

well...that (as they say) is that.

another scene bites the dust.

: o p

[prints fresh calendar]

[gwyn-hwyfar.livejournal.com]

Merlin sounds like he was a lot of fun. He's kinda cute, too (minus the wig! I hate those things)

[lookingland.livejournal.com]

hahahahaha ~ i have a love/hate thing with the wigs. it's impossible to imagine the time in which people went to such extravagances.

and yet somehow 18th century geniuses always strike me as less geeky than more contemporary ones.

: D