I really, really enjoyed this essay, on more points than I can list. Just so you can get a sense of its overall effect, you've inspired me now to read these other works of GBS, and to see the Leslie Howard Pygmalion.
I hope you like them!
Can you elaborate on Footnote 1? The first link requires logging in (and I'm lazy), and when I searched on Flipping Hades Terwilliger (surname only known to me from the Simpsons), I found him as a character in Daniel Pinkwater books, so I'm confused.
Sorry. That's not you; that's my four-in-the-morning shorthand. Flipping Hades Terwilliger is a character in Daniel Pinkwater's The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (1982), but I was using his name as an exclamation, e.g., "Flipping Hades! Watch where you're going!" The first link is a contemporary review of Berkeley Square (1933), a time-travel fantasy in which Leslie Howard played both a modern-day architect and the eighteenth-century ancestor he swaps minds with; it's one of the romantic classics that still isn't out on DVD, although it shows on TCM every now and then. What I hadn't known is that it was also the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time" (1936). I mean, what? I keep forgetting the world was all happening at the same time.
Do you think--and I'm only asking, not challenging, because it's been a while since I saw My Fair Lady, and I haven't seen Pygmalion--that it needs to be a sense of rivalry that opens up Higgins? That is, is that he senses someone who is superior to him in some way? And if so... if so...
I think Higgins is very much used to being the smartest person in the room, and used to getting away with things because of it. Eliza interferes with both of these habits.
no subject
I hope you like them!
Can you elaborate on Footnote 1? The first link requires logging in (and I'm lazy), and when I searched on Flipping Hades Terwilliger (surname only known to me from the Simpsons), I found him as a character in Daniel Pinkwater books, so I'm confused.
Sorry. That's not you; that's my four-in-the-morning shorthand. Flipping Hades Terwilliger is a character in Daniel Pinkwater's The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (1982), but I was using his name as an exclamation, e.g., "Flipping Hades! Watch where you're going!" The first link is a contemporary review of Berkeley Square (1933), a time-travel fantasy in which Leslie Howard played both a modern-day architect and the eighteenth-century ancestor he swaps minds with; it's one of the romantic classics that still isn't out on DVD, although it shows on TCM every now and then. What I hadn't known is that it was also the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time" (1936). I mean, what? I keep forgetting the world was all happening at the same time.
Do you think--and I'm only asking, not challenging, because it's been a while since I saw My Fair Lady, and I haven't seen Pygmalion--that it needs to be a sense of rivalry that opens up Higgins? That is, is that he senses someone who is superior to him in some way? And if so... if so...
I think Higgins is very much used to being the smartest person in the room, and used to getting away with things because of it. Eliza interferes with both of these habits.