Posted by Ed Kiser on July 07, 2015 at 08:03:50 user Kisered.
In Reply to: Re: Times posted by Peter Ceresole on July 07, 2015 at 01:02:11:
Perhaps the word is an American interpretation, and thus has escaped the implications of other meanings by our Brit friends, but here in the USA the name "John" does have one of those (teenage snicker here) meanings, as that is where us elderly types have to get to sometime in the middle of the night, usually in a bit of a hurry.
For what it is worth, from my point of view, if the name of this production is to be "Swallows and Amazons" and if that is to be based on a work written by AR, then they should use the characters to have the names that he gave them.
This production being a BBC effort just might spare us colonials on the other side of The Pond from viewing this aberration and its deviations from what we AR fans consider to the "the right way."
In a way, the reader's personal character image, which AR gave us so skillfully the descriptive words to allow us to draw those conclusions, is somewhat like in my youth of long ago, in the days of RADIO (pre-TV), that I had a "picture" of what those characters looked like based on just hearing the voice, but when those radio shows were ported to the new vehicle of TV, the image they showed was something of a jolt as being not what I expected.
It is this image that has grown over the years of repeated visits with my childhood friends that is firmly in my mind to where it becomes a disappointment when I see some actor trying to be that character, one that I feel I know so very well. These images in my mind are not just limited to the people, but the places as well. I feel I know Beckfoot, Swallowdale, the Gulch, the Dogs' Home, and yes, Wild Cat Island. Ransome's words took me there. No weird attempt to produce some visual representation can truly match the "Reality" that is already firm in my mind. For these images I have, I am truly grateful to AR for his words that painted those pictures for me. Perhaps this is really a testimonial to applaud his verbal skills as a writer.
Ed Kiser, Kentucky, USA [ kisered@aol.com ]
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