Good morning, lovely Newdists.
It’s Caturday again.[Sometimes I wish there were two Saturdays…]
Diary featherhed -— Scarlet Tanager — Piranga olivacea:
The vivid red and black male Scarlet Tanager, a harbinger of spring in eastern North America, is among the most colorful and striking of our breeding birds. The smallest of the four species of the genus Piranga that breed north of Mexico, it is a long-distance Neotropical migrant, annually making the journey between northwestern South America and the eastern United States and southern Canada. In eastern North America, its breeding range closely corresponds to the boundaries of the Eastern Deciduous Forest Biome, where despite its brilliant coloration it is often overlooked because of its unobtrusive and secretive behavior. Fortunately its hoarse, burry song and frequently uttered Chip-Churr Calls are quite distinctive and alert us to its presence high in the canopy.
As a species of the forest interior, it is sensitive to forest fragmentation, suffering high rates of predation and brood parasitism in small forest plots and often absent completely from plots less than a minimum size. Breeding Bird Surveys since 1966 indicate a relatively stable population, but with a slight decline in areas of intensive agriculture. In such landscapes where the forest is highly fragmented, the species appears to exist as a dynamic mosaic of source and sink populations.
This tanager is monogamous and aggressively territorial throughout its range, seldom occurring in high densities. While establishing its territory and early in the breeding season, it sings incessantly from perches in the mid- to upper canopy.
From LINK
A Big Warm Caturday Welcome to all the Newdists!
Grab a cup of coffee or tea, something to eat, and please join us.
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Certain books and movies become part of our mentalscapes. What were the most memorable books you read when you were twelve? I have more than a few. I’m sure you do too!
I’ll name two which everyone here will recognize — Little Women and Jane Eyre. As it turns out, Little Women and Jane Eyre have been made into movies and remade, multiple times.
Usually on Thanksgiving day, I watch the entire Star Wars series, The next day, I watch at least two versions of Jane Eyre or Little Women or Pride and Prejudice or Emma. You could say it’s a screen habit. The problem I have is that Little Women — has not been remade to my satisfaction. Yet. I have held on to hope that one day that will heppen. I used to feel the same way about cinematic renditions of Austen’s Emma, until BBC made its 2009 version.
Getting back to screen versions of Little Women, I’ve seen three versions on TCM. They were made in — 1933, 1949, and 1994.
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In the 1994 version, directed by Gillian Armstrong took a bolder approach —
Robin Swicord, who wrote the screenplay, created virtually every line of dialogue from scratch, saying that she had imagined what Alcott might have written had she been “freed of the cultural restraints” of her time. The result swerves from the usual homey scene to offer a politically engaged drama in which Marmee (Susan Sarandon) and Jo (Winona Ryder) advocate for women’s suffrage and none of the Marches wears silk, because it’s produced using slavery and child labor. Males are relegated to the margins: The March household is a matriarchy, presided over by a fierce feminist and reformist crusader who emphasizes the importance of education and moral character rather than interior decoration. Swicord even names Marmee Abigail, which was Alcott’s mother’s name.
Focusing on the Marches as more than just daughters, sisters, and wives, Armstrong’s Little Women also foregrounds its characters’ creative talents—their plays, their newspaper, Jo’s writing, Amy’s art—without sacrificing the aspects that readers have come to love, not least the have-it-all denouement that Alcott fiercely, and by now famously, resisted delivering in its most treacly form: Chafing at the pressure to marry Jo off, she made sure to flout readers’ desperate desire to see Jo end up with Laurie. Alcott instead paired her with the older, far less glamorous Professor Bhaer—a subversive step beyond which a late-20th-century director and audience plainly weren’t ready to go, aware though Armstrong surely was that the author herself had yearned to leave Jo single.
In 1987, there was a Japanese anime version of Little Women —
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Louisa May Alcott took ten weeks to write the first volume of the novel. It was originally published in two parts. While Alcott was writing the second part, fans were demanding that Jo marry Laurie:
Alcott, who never married herself, wanted Jo to remain unmarried, too. But while she was working on the second half of Little Women, fans were clamoring for Jo to marry the boy next door, Laurie. “Girls write to ask who the little women marry, as if that was the only aim and end of a woman’s life," Alcott wrote in her journal. "I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anyone.”
As a compromise—or to spite her fans—Alcott married Jo to the decidedly unromantic Professor Bhaer. Laurie ends up with Amy. LINK.
There was also a PBS version in 2018. I missed that one. However, now there is another remake in the works:
Greta Gerwig doesn’t remember reading Little Women for the first time. “It must have been read to me,” she says when I ask for her earliest memories of author Louisa May Alcott’s classic tale of four girls imagining a world beyond their humble surroundings outside Civil War–era Boston.“I always knew who Jo March was,” Gerwig continues. “She was the person I wanted to be.”
In that, Gerwig has had plenty of company. Little Women is one of the most popular books in the history of American letters; after the first volume sold out its initial run of 2,000 copies in 1868, the novel has never been out of print. Simone de Beauvoir, born in 1908, pretended as a child that she was Jo—Alcott’s protagonist and stand-in, a determined, stubborn tomboy with a flair for writing. Ursula Le Guin says that Alcott’s Jo made writing as a girl feel possible. In film, Katharine Hepburn played Jo in 1933; Winona Ryder, in 1994. Now, Gerwig has created her own Jo for the screen in Saoirse Ronan, who also starred in Gerwig’s debut as a solo director, 2017’s Oscar-nominated Lady Bird.
Like many other twelve year old youngsters who read Little Women, I too was entranced by the character of Jo March. For the twelve year old me, a female writing a book looked like Jo March. Many authors have felt that way too, including authors like Ursula Le Guin, Barbara Kingsolver and Simone de Beauvoir.
A couple of images from the new upcoming screen version of Little Women, from IMDB.
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New Day Cafe Open Thread.
What do you want to talk about?
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