"Famous authors asking you out"
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This post links to three shorts by @ellecordova — "This is what I think it would be like if famous authors asked you out".
The first one features Kurt Vonnegut, Emily Dickinson, Dr. Seuss, Jane Austen, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway:
In the second one, we get we get Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Tolkien, (an interruption by) J.D. Salinger, Oscar Wilde, Tolkien con't, Charlotte Brontë, and e.e. cummings:
The third one features Franz Kafka, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Brontë, and George R.R. Martin:
Beyond the evocative parodies of writing styles, it's interesting to consider what she does with performance styles — accent, facial expressions, voice quality. Compare the dialect approximations that she adopts for Agatha Christie and Tolkien:
…with the use of something close to her native American English for Charlotte Brontë and Oscar Wilde:
Perhaps this is because of differences in how strongly she feels the association between authors and speech varieties? Or because of differences in how easily she imagines herself in the authors' roles?
Dave said,
March 10, 2024 @ 7:27 am
For the opposite, Neil Gaiman's advice on seducing writers: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/600485-in-my-experience-writers-tend-to-be-really-good-at
ardj said,
March 10, 2024 @ 7:51 am
Thank you. Off to see what else she's done ….
Paul Clarke said,
March 10, 2024 @ 1:03 pm
My guess is that there are recordings of Tolkien and Christie but not of Bronte and Wilde.
Philip Anderson said,
March 11, 2024 @ 8:19 am
@Paul Clarke
Since Wilde lived in a period when voice recording was possible, I would have expected some examples, but apparently not:
https://amp.theguardian.com/uk/2001/jan/28/books.booksnews
/df said,
March 12, 2024 @ 12:10 am
However this lecturer has some relevant comments on Wilde's accent. Or we could ask Professor Higgins, whose creator, some two years younger than Wilde, also grew up in Dublin, though no College boy, and moved to London at about the same age, and made plenty of recordings.