Saying A Fond Farewell

I've decided to put this blog on semipermanent hiatus. With a regular political blogging job and another gig blogging for VCFA about to commence, I just don't have the energy to maintain something like this project.

So the time has come to say my adieux for the time being. It's been well over four years, and they've been wonderful years. But all of our favorite novels have to end sometime, hopefully with a tasty marriage banquet (mine did!) and in a feminist world, with the heroine going back to school and landing new work. I love happy endings!

The nice thing about this chapter closing is that thanks to social media, I am now acquainted with most of my RSS subscribers and followers and regular commenters (there have been a whole lot of you at various points, thanks to Un-Becoming Jane and various liveblogs of Masterpiece Classic) on twitter, facebook and the like, so we will see each other with great frequency.

And a lot of you have started your own blogs--looking at you, most accomplished young lady. So I'll visit you there, and leave my calling card. When the time comes to let you know where my thoughts on reading and writing will next be seen, I'll do so either here or on twitter...Well, actually, I'll tell you now. It will be a blog attached to my website.

Lastly, here's a quick plug for my regular writing career: For an RSS feed of my bylines (approx 3-4 per week) click here. For a newsletter with highlights, (approx 2-3 times a year) click here.

Thanks for reading. It's been so much more than esteem and admiration on my end, readers. As EBC patron saint Andrew Davies once put in the immortal Wickham's bombastic mouth: "Let us not say goodbye - but as the French have it - Au Revior!!""

Downton Abbey: What Did You Think of Episode 1?

Readers, I loved it. An occasionally pat line of dialogue aside, I thought it was a splendid first episode and definitely made me eager for next Sunday night. I don't understand all this talk of "jobs" and "week-ends" however.

Leave your thoughts in the comments. They will not be entailed away to the nearest male heir, I assure you.

Here are some roundups from around the web.

Downton Abbey: My Top 5 Favorite Characters from Episode 1: "Masterpiece fans are hailing Downton Abbey as the greatest thing since Bleak House (high praise, indeed!) and Amy and I are in complete agreement so far. "--from Kim at Romancing the Tome.

Downton Abbey Poll: First Episode of this PBS Masterpiece Classic, From Jane Austen Today.

Oh, and be sure to check out The Daily Beast's roundup of the best Masterpiece shows, in honor of the venerable series' 40th anniversary.

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Jane Around the Web...

Was Jane Austen Edited? Does It Matter? : NPR via Numero Cinq

Iconography: Jane Austen, a Contemporary Kind of Lady: Bitch Magazine blogs (feminist consideration of Jane FTW).

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Revisiting Franzenfreude, and A Roundup of Female Writers

This Year Female Writers Kicked Up Literary Dust is my annual year-end literary wrap up at Women's eNews, with a twist of Franzenfreude.

"(WOMENSENEWS)--The year's biggest literary controversy was set off by two women who write "women's fiction:" Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner.

The two complained on Twitter and in a joint interview on the Huffington Post about a culture of "white male literary darlings" who mesmerize influential critics at publications such as The New York Times Book Review and leave female authors--particularly commercial ones-- out in the cold..."

read more!

And happy holidays, readers.

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Buy Books for the Holidays, or the World Will End Up This Way

Books for Christmas? at the New Yorker's "Book Bench" blog.

"

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"Hidden Gem" Books of 2010

Weird And Wonderful Books: 2010's Hidden Gems : NPR lists a few books that are too offbeat to make it onto year-end lists.

Speaking of year-end lists, more on that tomorrow...

HAPPY SOLSTICE, readership.

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Goodbye, Poetry in motion

Literary Quotations on Subway Trains Come to an End, by my good friend Mike who covers transit for the Times.

"The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has decided to discontinue a program featuring signs with poetry and other literature on the city’s subway trains."

This is a nice elegy for a program I loved. My little "Poetry in Motion" book was one of my favorite, well-curated anthologies. Like a "Rattle Bag" for the modern age.

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It's Never The Wrong Time for Some Feminist Readings of Jane Austen

Happy belated birthday, Jane Austen! at feministing, by Chloe Angyal, who includes these tantalizing lines:

"If Caroline Bingley is a bitch, it’s not her fault. Society made her that way...

... resist the urge to hate on Caroline Bingley. Remember: don’t hate the player. Hate the game. Jane Austen did, and it made her one of the most adored authors of all time. "

Read on...

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Literary Birthday: EBC Patron Saint #1 Jane Austen

They never made 'em like her again, as best expressed in a chat between me and my twin brother, after he had read "Emma" followed by "Ethan Frome."

Daniel: finished ethan frome

me: whatdjoo think? no "emma" right"

Daniel: no emma.

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Downton Abbey Trailer

Masterpiece is sooooo back.

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Jane Austen and the Youth in the WSJ

Jane Austen's Popularity Grows With Young on the Web - WSJ.com

What these articles always neglect to mention is that young people love Jane not just because she's like, totally relevant to our man problems, but because she's you know, profound and a genius.

Still, the article is good and it quotes lots of friends of this blog, including folks from my local JASNA chapter and Laurie Viera Riegler, author of "Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict."

So click on through!

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JANE EYRE TRAILER (be still, my heart)

Back from blog-hibernation to squeal over this one.

It looks Gothic, and overwrought and hollywoody, and AMAZING. Yes, we've already seen three or four adaptations but this is Jane freaking Eyre we're talking about here. Too much is never enough.

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NBR Finalists Include 13 Women. Yay?

The Fruit of 'Franzenfreude': "

The National Book Award finalists were announced yesterday. And for the first time ever, 13 of the 20 finalists were female. They included Lionel Shriver, (acclaimed Jewish novelist) Nicole Krauss, and most wonderfully, alternative punk rocker Patti Smith for her recently published memoir. Jonathan Franzen, subject of so much acclaim and backlash in recent weeks, was notably not on the list.

Read the full blog post here.

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Two Literary (Re) Discoveries

Good morning, readers! two interesting literary "discoveries" on the internets yesterday:

*Jezebel reminds us of an unpublished excerpt of Edith Wharton's sexually explicit erotica--but maybe it was unpublished because it was, erm, about incest? Warning: this content is NSFW, even though it was written by Edith Wharton (I always said that her novels simmered with thwarted desire)

*In the Guardian, a discussion of the last Ted Hughes "birthday letter" a poem which he wrote about Sylvia Plath's death but never published.

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Universally Acknowledged

Some of you may have read this new list of the best 100 first lines in literature. It's basically all over the place, with some excellent choices and some bad ones. Anyway, Jane came in at 2 with "it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," which is pretty much universally acknowledged to be a damn good first sentence. But it's become so overused, so shorthandish, that sometimes it's easy to forget WHY this sentence works so well. Here is what i said in its defense over at Numero Cinq:

Austen’s sentence has become a cliche, but it’s actually so perfect, so laden with irony (Her “truth” is in fact, not universally acknowledged but rather assumed to be so by her characters. So the statement that it is universal is, itself, a specific non-universal viewpoint. This is how people talk when they’re unable to justify their weird social ideas–they assume “everyone knows” x or y). It sets the tone for her playful use of free-indirect discourse, the way she never lets you stay comfortable knowing whether there’s an omniscient narrator or she’s taking the limited viewpoint of her heroine. And it also introduces he themes of her book: the flawed perspective of individuals, the absurdity of social assumptions. All in all, a job well done.
Never question Saint Jane!

And here is what Simon said, helping me formulate the above argument. As you can see, I spiced up my own argument with his brilliance.

Simon: it's a well constructed sentence that flows very nicely

me: also it's not universally acknowledged

Simon: there is a level of subtly accomplished irony

me: thats the whole point

Simon: the statement that it is universal is, itself, a specific non-universal viewpoint

irony!

1:01 PM exposes the way people talk

assert things as givens when they don't want to (or are unable to) explain their reasoning

attempt to just establish certain mores/assumptions as fact

and since clashing perspectives and mores are the major theme of the book, it sets that out quite nicely

1:02 PM but these things only become clear once you have read the book and become acquainted w the characters

hence, good sentence

me: this is in line with what I'm writing

Simon: WORD

1:03 PM the book is all about why people say certain things at certain times, and how that lines up with what they actually believe / what is actually true

Readers, why do you love this sentence, or any of Jane's first sentences (they're all gems, as far as I'm concerned, particularly Emma, Persuasion, P+P, NA)?

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A.O. Scott Revisits Howard's End

Enjoy the video!

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"The Tempest" Trailer

So here's the trailer for Julie Taymor's "Tempest" with Helen Mirren as "ProsperA" and a celeb-heavy cast. It looks extremely over the top, but only time will tell if it's over the top in a good way. I've seen some great and awful adaptations of "The Tempest" in my time, including a trippy 70s art-house version that freaked my friends and me out so much we turned it off twenty minutes in (we were cramming for a Shakespeare final in college). And then, of course, there's "Forbidden Planet." What think'st thee of the trailer, fair readers?

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Banned Books Week and Sex

Banned Books Week: It's (Almost) Always About Sex | RHRealityCheck.org:

Just in time for “Banned Books Week” 2010 came the censorship related scandal du jour--isn't there one every few months? I wrote about the way the abstinence-only folks and the book-banners are in league for my latest column.

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Me, on Beat Poetry On the Big Screen

I saw the movie "Howl" which is a tribute to the Ginsberg poem, and wrote about it:

Howls of Anger, and of Liberation | The Nation

"More specifically, Howl helps its audience, likely familiar with the poem and author, re-examine how challenging and unprecedented this complex poem was in the context of its time. It encourages us to recognize that 'Howl' not only changed the life of letters in America through sometimes-crude vernacular and new jazz-like rhythms, but it also changed the life of its author, who used it as a vehicle to assert his identity as a practitioner of same-sex love during an era when homosexual acts were deemed illegal in some places and a mental illness in others. Ginsberg's poem was a howl of anger and hurt, yes, with its famous destroyed minds, 'starving hysterical, naked,' but also a howl of liberation and affirmation, as seen in the poem's incantation-like 'footnote': 'The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy!'"

Read the rest here. And read this blog post, by EBC reader and friend gettsr, about Ginsberg vs. Kerouac, here.

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Literary Birthday: Elizabeth "I Rule the BBC" Gaskell

Happy bicentennial birthday to the best 19th-century author whom I discovered as a post-adolescent, Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell. She was a literary supergenius in her own right whose books have made some of the yummiest, most emotionally potent, romantic, social critiquey BBC miniseries of all time.

• Here are all my thoughts about various Gaskell books I've read post-EBC-founding.

Here's some Gaskell-mania around the web:

• A Guide To Gaskell Around the Web at Jane Austen Today
• An Appreciation of the BBC Gaskell Adaptations, the best evah, at Enchanted Serenity
• Elizabeth Gaskell as seen through the words of Charlotte Bronte at Bronte-Blog

And may John Thornton stalk all our dreams. Amen.

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