22 January 2018

Notes - F-F.14 / a question / a project?



         Afternoon. You had left over pizza for lunch. Ran a couple errands and just finished chapter fourteen of Fire and Fury. Carol is drying her hair, planning on renewing her driver's license on her birthday, tomorrow morning. You drove over today to renew your automobile handicap placards for five years, as you had a letter from Dr. Merling but you have to wait until the end of June to renew them. - Amorella

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Chapter Fourteen focusses on the Syrian chemical attack on a rebel held town where many children were victims. Trump liked having generals around but wasn't sure what he wanted to do about the attack until he saw videos from the area. He was heartsick for the children and then wanted to do something, to act. More politics but eventually the U.S. struck back. Trump felt better but it didn't take too much imagination to see Trump at first, waited to see how the wind blew. The chapter ends at Mar-a-Lago with Trump visiting  with the Chinese. Trump's weakness is seen in having to wait for the videos, being informed by military data was not his style. Odd, I think, for a man who is a billionaire, one would think he would love to use numbers in the situation room rather than videos. Fire and Fury is an interesting read and provides small insights into Trump's actions or lack of them along the way. (1633)

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         You would like more insight into the Amorella, insight such as: 'How does Amorella define herself in relationship to the unfolded spirit world of humans after physical death, descriptions throughout the blog and the first three self-published Merlyn books.? - Amorella

         1638 hours. I would. I didn't know how to phrase the question; I didn't really have an exact question, but what you just wrote describes my muddled thoughts with less ambiguity.

         Post. - Amorella


         2205 hours. My first notion on the above is to attempt to write a character sketch of the Amorella so I checked online and found MIT has a list of 638 primary personality traits. I made a copy but these relate to human traits of course. I also have a list (article) from Psychology Today and an article from Wikipedia to reinforce my sense of what character is. First though, I feel I have to define what you are. The best way to me is to think of you as an imaginary character I made up. Last night we watched "60 Minutes" and John le Carré was the focus.

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John le Carré
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931) is best known by the pen name John le Carré. He is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and '60s, he worked for both the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller and remains one of his best-known works. Following the success of this novel, he left MI6 to become a full-time author.

In 2011, he was awarded the Goethe Medal.

Selected and edited from Wikipedia

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         One of the points the author made was that his characters were themselves in his head and he used was George Smiley. This is  selected from Wikipedia's and is out of order. The 'Model's section appears after the 'Analysis' section in Wikipedia.

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Models

In 1995, le Carré said that the character of George Smiley was inspired by his one-time Lincoln College, Oxford tutor, the former Rev. Vivian Green—a renowned historian and author with an encyclopaedic knowledge.However, other than the thick spectacles and Green's habit of disappearing into a crowd, there were too many dissimilarities between the loquacious Green and the reticent Smiley to make this a clear match, and so other sources for Smiley continued to be named. It has been suggested that le Carré subconsciously took the name of his hero from special forces and intelligence officer Colonel David de Crespigny Smiley. More commonly, it was rumoured that Smiley was modelled on Sir Maurice Oldfield, a former head of British Intelligence, who physically resembled him. Le Carré denied the rumours, citing the fact that Oldfield and he were not contemporaries, although he and Alec Guinness did lunch with Oldfield while Guinness was researching the role, and Guinness adopted several of Oldfield's mannerisms of dress and behaviour for his performance.
Oldfield himself believed that, although Green probably inspired le Carré, the character of Smiley was primarily based on John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, who had been le Carré's boss when he originally joined MI5 prior to his career in MI6. In 1999, le Carré confirmed that Bingham was also an inspiration for Smiley, and in 2000 went further, writing in an introduction to a reissue of one of Bingham's novels that "He had been one of two men who had gone into the making of George Smiley. Nobody who knew John and the work he was doing could have missed the description of Smiley in my first novel".
Various le Carré works involve other characters resembling Bingham; the most notable is Jack Brotherhood in A Perfect Spy.
In an introductory essay dated March 1992, le Carré wrote:
"And it is no surprise to me that, when I came to invent my leading character, George Smiley, I should give him something of Vivian Green's unlikely wisdom, wrapped in academic learning, and something of Bingham's devious resourcefulness and simple patriotism also. All fictional characters are amalgams; all spring from much deeper wells than their apparent counterparts in life. All in the end, like the poor suspects in my files, are refitted and remoulded in the writer's imagination, until they are probably closer to his own nature than to anybody else's. But now that Bingham is dead...it seems only right that I should acknowledge my debt to him: not merely as a component of George Smiley, but as the man who first put the spark to my writing career."

Analysis

Le Carré introduced Smiley at about the same time as Len Deighton's unnamed anti-hero (Harry Palmer in the film versions). This was a time when critics and the public were welcoming more realistic versions of espionage fiction, in contrast to the glamorous world of Ian Fleming's James Bond.
Smiley is sometimes considered the anti-Bond in the sense that Bond is an unrealistic figure and is more a portrayal of a male fantasy than a realistic government agent. George Smiley, on the other hand, is quiet, mild-mannered and not at all athletic. He lives by his wits and, unlike Bond, is a master of quiet, disciplined intelligence work, rather than gunplay. In The Honourable Schoolboy it becomes clear that he is not as adept at bureaucratic manoeuvring as the duplicitous Sam Collins and Saul Enderby, who are able to use even a great success to force him into retirement. Also unlike Bond he is not a bed-hopper; in fact it is Smiley's wife Ann who is notorious for her affairs.
When Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was published, the reviewer of The Spectator described Smiley as a "brilliant spy and totally inadequate man." However, Smiley has his pride, and in the end, in Smiley's People, he refuses to take the beautiful Ann back, despite her pleadings.
Smiley is depicted as an exceptionally skilled spymaster, gifted with a prodigious memory and a talent for getting people to talk. His subtle interrogation methods, derived from psychology and experience, he imparts to his understudies, such as Jerry Westerby and Peter Guillam. These are depicted as far superior to the heavy-handed tactics of the Americans, who are called "the Cousins" in Circus jargon, and whose entry into a mission always ensures that things will get a lot rougher.
A student of espionage with a profound insight into human weakness and fallibility, highly sagacious and incredibly perceptive, he is very conscious of the immoral, grisly and unethical aspects of his profession. At the same time he works to inculcate loyalty and discipline into his pupils, and a sense of moral obligation to the espionage service, and to the country. Smiley has no patience with the political niceties of Whitehall and their distaste for classical espionage tactics, including bribery, blackmail, and turning enemy agents into British double agents. On the other hand, he is not one of the "hawks" who are given to the sharp, militaristic attitudes of "the Cousins" (clearly depicted during the climax of The Honourable Schoolboy).
Despite his series of retirements, Smiley's own unflinching loyalty to and support for his people inculcates loyalty in them. Thus, whether in or out of the Service he is able to maintain an extensive range of aides and support-staff, extending even to "retired" police officers, former and present Service members.
Le Carré describes him in A Murder of Quality as a somewhat short and fat man, who always wears expensive but badly fitting clothes (he "dresses like a bookie... short and stubby"). He has a habit of cleaning his glasses on the "fat end" of his necktie. Also in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, le Carré wrote that his wife describes him as "a reptile that can regulate his body temperature". Gary Oldman, in an interview with Charlie Rose promoting the film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, said that this description is "the key" to Smiley
In March 2010, while giving a talk on his life and works at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, le Carré responded to a question concerning what became of Smiley by telling the audience that although he would like to think of Smiley as a Holmesian figure, never having really retired, he acknowledged that to his mind, the character would now be "very old and getting past it—certainly in his nineties". This accords with the later chronology. Le Carré envisaged Smiley now to be "keeping bees somewhere", still alive but very much retired.

Selected and edited from - Wikipedia - George Smiley

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         2242 hours. The above was also mentioned in the "60 Minute" broadcast. This is what gave me the idea of putting together a character study of the Amorella.

         If you set this up properly you will also have to show how I was used in the first three Merlyn books, that is, as the characters I chose to be. - Amorella

         2249 hours. This may be a very interesting project in that I also have to show evidence of you within the encountersinmind blogspot blog. I should like to do this as objective as possible.

         There will have to be a transition from the Amorella as an Angelic-like character to an imaginary one. How will that be written with authenticity? - Amorella

         2254 hours. I will need your help, I am sure Amorella.      

         How can you maintain 'objectivity' with my help? - Amorella

         2255 hours. Good question. Perhaps I will have to do this project without your help.

         How can you do that? - Amorella

         2256 hours. Good question.

         You come up with writing projects such as this as a study for yourself. You want to bring me to life like le Carré did George Smiley. - Amorella

         2300 hours. It's just the concept of a writing project.

         More tomorrow. Post. - Amorella
         

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