Re-re-reblog

I shan't write a proper blog post because the universe might just implode, but Naja reblogged about my reblogging about her reblogging about my blog about graphic novels, and you can read it (that is, the first one in that list) here.

Sometimes when Naja talks about literature, I feel like she's plucked the thoughts right out of my brain and articulated them in ways I couldn't possibly. This is one of those times.

Reblogging

This is how awesome thinking comes about. Collaboration.

The fascinating, wonderful Naja linked to my previous post about graphic novels via Tumblr. I met Naja in the course of my English degree. She kept cropping up in my classes, in those delicious English classes about children's lit and fairy tales which felt like cheating because it wasn't work to study these things, not really, it was fun.

Anyway, here's something Naja says in her blog about my blog which, by the way, you can read right here:

Novels are only just a majority in my favourites collection, and sometimes I feel like a bad lit student for it, because I have such a short attention span and I much prefer WHAM POW PICTURES! to some weird snooty elite.

It's certainly not the most interesting thing she has to say (you really should read the whole blog) but I'm quoting it here because I relate to it. I have very little patience for long books, for wordy books, for overly literary books or for classics. I almost quit literature at uni after having to read Wuthering Heights in first semester, first year, but lucky for me I took a class on fantasy the following semester and fell back in love with books.

All this made me think about another blog I recently read, incidentally by Doc-in-Boots, the academic who runs all those classes on children's lit and fairy tales which Naja and I attended.

Literature and technology

The ill-fated matchmaking and meddling of Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse, for example, was seamlessly updated to include cellphones in the 1995 movie "Clueless." Of course, an Emma transposed to 2010 would have a field day with Facebook, nudging acquaintances to friend each other and forming little groups like "People Who Have Heard Quite Enough in Praise of Jane Fairfax," to the dismay of Mr. Knightley.

Which classic literary characters would embrace modern technology? Read Laura Miller's musings on the topic here.

Sony Reader Touch - my new toy

My Sony Reader (Model PRS 600) arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago. I was terribly excited about receiving it, but completely unprepared for the resulting love affair. I know, I know! I am a book lover! This blog is, after all, entitled 'Paper and Ink and Glue'. But I want to be honest with you, and the truth is that I adore my ereader.

Characters to hate

I've dealt with my favourite characters, but what about the least favourite?

I often find that the characters I truly despise aren't the villains and the supervillains- there is pleasure in disliking these, they are literary devices and they are there to be disliked. But what about the characters towards whom I'm supposed to feel sympathetic, and simply don't? Those, I really cannot forgive.

1. Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë – there seems to be nothing to Heathcliff’s personality but abuse and manipulation. He was bent on destroying the lives of all he knew, including the woman he was supposed to love. Where is the heroism in that?

2. David Meredith, My Brother Jack, by George Johnston – David’s self-serving morality never won any points with me. Even worse, he recognized his own failures and refused to do anything about them.

3. Queen Jadis, The Magician’s Nephew, by C.S. Lewis – In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the White Witch is something of a literary device, a villain, not truly despicable. But before she became the White Witch, Jadis was a Queen who, even in the prime of her very human youth and beauty, thought more of her own power than she did of her people.

4. Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, by Shakespeare – Enough said.

5. Captain Kennit, The Liveship Traders Trilogy, by Robin Hobb – Kennit is pretty much a pirate version of Heathcliff. I will concede to Robin Hobb, however, that Kennit is a masterfully complex character, the most difficult on this list to hate.


As you might gather, I have no truck with the Byronic Hero. Life throws terrible things at all of us. Being ‘damaged’ is never an excuse for abuse, manipulation or compulsive lying. The Byronic Hero is a large part of the reason I avoid many classics, and the reason I refuse to read Twilight.

I do, however, have quite a soft spot for the antihero, who is different.

Miller on Austen

Laura Miller remains insightful as ever:


"Marvin Mudrick published 'Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery' in 1952. Irony (the real kind, not the Alanis Morissette variety) was Austen's predominant mode, as Mudrick pointed out, and this not only made her 'almost inhumanly cold and penetrating' but also positioned her against 'all the delusions intrinsic to conventional art and conventional society.' That was the manly '50s speaking; by the 2000s, Austen became, in the popular mind, a wistful reminder of all the chivalrous pleasures of a long-lost social order -- a society that would have driven the average contemporary Janeite to insurrection if she actually had to live in it.

"Like Dumbledore's mirror, Austen's fiction seems to have the ability to reflect whatever its readers most wish to see. Austen is the grandmother of chick lit, much as that fact may irk her highbrow admirers. But that's not all she is, and to persuade yourself that her novels are only about being courted by rich, handsome men well-versed in ballroom etiquette is to be as dangerously silly and frivolous as Elizabeth Bennet's youngest sister, Lydia. The chick-lit take on Austen is forever trying to subtract the brutal social and economic realities from her fiction (as well as ignoring the mortifications her heroines undergo)".


Thank you, Laura Miller. The rest of the story is here.

I’m all for resistant reading, but I think it’s just annoying when tragedies, satires and comedies get turned into ‘romance’ in the public consciousness. Think Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights. Yes, romance is an aspect of these stories (and one which I enjoy, with the exception of Wuthering Heights) but if you read them purely as romance you’re missing so much.

For the record, I’m a Darcy fan because I like intellectual, argumentative, challenging men with integrity, not because I have any illusions about how ‘nice it would be’ to have doors opened for me by a 'gentleman' for the rest of my life.

Merch, merch, merch

Alas, summer brings with it summer reading habits. For me, this usually means a general inability to commit to a book from beginning to end unless it is a.) incredibly engaging, or b.) a piece of fluff. The result is that I have nothing interesting to report in terms of my personal reading.

I did, however, discover a fabulous website where you can order t-shirts with all kinds of esoteric and hilarious slogans. There are a lot of wonderful Jane Austen Ts. I'm going to order these:

If you don't get them, brush up on your grammar and read Pride and Prejudice. Both will enrich your life.

Highlights '09

I'm subscribed to quite a few book blogs and book news feeds. At this time of year, a lot of 'best of ' and 'highlights' lists start coming through, pointing readers to the best books of the year. But the problem with book news is that it's all about new realeases. I started reading books towards the end of the 20th Century- I have the whole history of print to catch up on!

So these are (some of) the highlights of my '09 reading:

January - four weeks off in Toowoomba and Brisbane
   -The History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell (1946)
     A fascinating look at a fascinating topic
  -The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, Terry Pratchett (2001)
     A magically intelligent cat and clan of rats figure there's always money to be made in faking rat plagues.

March-April - Semester 1
   -Beginning Logic, E. J. Lemmon (1965)
     An excellent guide to formal logic. I read it for uni, and it rocked my socks!

March 31- I meet Shaun Tan and a friend leaves the country
   -The Arrival, Shaun Tan (2006)
     A gorgeous graphic novel about the strangeness and beauty of immigration. I cried.

June - cruising on the Nile in Egypt
   -I was reading, but I don't quite remember what. The view was distracting me. =P

June/July - London & Oxford, England; and Wicklow, Ireland
   -The Inkworld trilogy, Cornelia Funke (2003, 2005, 2007)
     Because you have to read fantasy in Oxford.

July - a very long flight home
   -The Ghost, Robert Harris (2007)
     A surprisingly engaging modern thriller from a historical novelist.

August-October - Semester 2
   -The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (2008)
     Brilliant. =)
   -The Magicians, Lev Grossman (2009)
     Equally brilliant. =)

mid-September - an awful sickness strikes
   -Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (1811)
     Thus completing my aim to read all of Austen's novels.

November-December - mixing up my reading habits
   -Preludes and Nocturnes, Neil Gaiman (1988/1989)
     The first installment of the classic Sandman comics. An excellent read.
   -Good Omens, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (1990)
     Read it.

(As always, I've posted links to authors' sites where possible. It's not my fault if their sites aren't helpful. Where these weren't available, I've posted links to the best information I can find about the book. Sometimes this means Amazon.)

Team Darcy

So I saw New Moon last night. It was god-awful, though not quite as god-awful as Twilight. Unfortunately this also meant it did not provide as much amusement as Twilight did. Of course I'm talking about the film, not the book, because I refuse to (publicly) judge something I haven't read.

Anyway, I didn't get the film. I didn't understand who I was supposed to be rooting for, or why I was supposed to care what happened to any of the characters. Except maybe Jacob. Victoria was kind of cool, but I suspect I wasn't supposed to think so. I do think I finally understand all that 'Team Edward'/'Team Jacob' stuff. As I see it, this is how it stands:

JACOB
Pros: hotness; charm; charisma; allows Bella her own autonomy; funny; fun to hang out with
Cons: might accidentally scratch half her face off

EDWARD
Pros: ... Um ... (thinking really, really hard) ... No, I've got nothing.
Cons: way too pale; looks like he's about to cry all the time; no sense of humour whatsoever; makes Bella depressed; has a strong desire to eat Bella; stalks her; won't allow her to make her own life choices

OK, I suppose that makes me Team Jacob. Except that I think Jacob could do way better than Bella. I think Jacob belongs in a different film altogether. In any case, Jacob is all well and good but he ain't no Darcy. At least in Pride & Prejudice the Byronic Darcy meets his match in Lizzy (as opposed to taking over her entire life and controlling her), and I don't have to feel like an old perv for having a little crush on him.

Now, for your viewing enjoyment, a picture almost as weird and impossible to understand as the film:

What Would Jane Satirise?

An article in this week's Wall Street Journal, What Would Jane Do, discusses the moral virtues of Jane Austen's writing and asserts that Austen's foremost goal "was to provide moral instruction."

My first response was to dismiss the article altogether. Austen wrote satire, everyone knows that. Then I thought about it more carefully. I still do not agree with the article. I don't believe Austen's 'formost goal' was to advise young women to act with sense, propriety and humility. (It is certainly clear that Austen admired these traits, but whether she preached them is a different question.) I have, however, come to the conclusion that Austen's satire and moral values are quite closely tied.

In Austen's time, she was criticised for the 'morals' of her books. Persuasion, for example, was criticised for “its moral, which appears to be that young people should always marry according to their own inclinations and upon their own judgement” (The British Critic, March 1818- in Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction p.149). Of course, whether or not Persuasion advocates this principle is up for debate.

Books for the people?

Another Guardian blog this week (found here) discusses the new Penguin Classics range, released in the original orange striped covers. The wonderful thing about the range is that the RRP of each book is $9.95. The books even have a little blurb on them explaining how Penguin was founded to make good books affordable for the general public.

The item pictured here, however, is not one of these books. It is a notebook. Blank except for the lines.

Released with the orange-striped books was a range of 'Penguin Classics' products. Love Pride and Prejudice? Get the notebook for only $19.95! Or the mug for only $24.95!

Anthony Cummins makes the astute observation that this attempt to make Penguin Classics into 'culture products' undermines the ethos of providing affordable books for ordinary people.


EDIT: Tony Davis, who instigated to project to sell these products, makes a reply here. Basically, his response is What's wrong with book-related products if they promote reading? Fair point, but he completely fails to address the problem of the price of the Penguin Classics merchandise. The high prices on this merchandise makes Penguin into a brand for the wealthy and (already) cultured.

They are products for people already in love with reading and books, for people who have already collected the books. There's no way these products are going to make reading 'cool' for those who aren't prone to reading anyway and/or can't afford expensive books. In other words, expensive culture products can only serve to alienate the demographic Penguin Classics were meant to serve.

The Divine Ms. Austen

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen was a satirical genius.

If you’re an intelligent reader of Austen’s novels, you’ll find any romantic “I-wish-I-lived-in-times-of-gentlemen-and-high-society” notions quickly supplanted by the more realistic impression that we can certainly be glad we no longer need to conform to the social pressures of Austen’s time.

Her novels are characterized by:
• the inescapable interference of well-meaning but overly-nosy family friends
• awkward encounters with past crushes
• lots of faked civility and pretending to be friends
• the obligation to ‘be seen’
• and the public broadcasting of relationship status.

Thank God we don’t endure any of that anymore!

Hang on a minute, did I just describe facebook?

Lost in Austen

I came a little late to Lost in Austen (coming late to TV shows is a deliberate habit of mine- I prefer them on recommendation and on DVD), but when I finally popped the first disc into the player and settled back with the thought 'I'll just watch one episode,' I found myself compelled to watch the next... and the next... and the last.

The show follows Amanda Price, a modern girl who inadvertently swaps places with Elizabeth Bennet, finding herself in the world of Pride & Prejudice, right at the beginning of Austen's classic story. From there, everything starts to go wrong and Amanda desperately tries to make events follow the book (most of the time, she only makes things worse).

I've never been a purist when it comes to film and TV adaptions of books (after all, what's interesting on the page is so often boring on the screen) and the series is probably best avoided by those who think the role of an adapted screenplay is to slavishly copy every detail of the original text. Pride & Prejudice is one of my absolute favourite books, but nonetheless I am unashamed to admit that I enjoyed every moment of this adaption, which works to honour the book as well as highlight the irony of modern girls daydreaming about a 'romantic' world in which most of their liberties would be removed.

Some favourite moments: Amanda's 'postmodern moment' (pictured), and the vindication of Mrs. Bennet. If you're planning on watching the series, watch out for these!

Some observations: it's interesting that the show, like many readers, seems to conflate the BBC series with the book. It has always mystified me that the literary buffs, usually so nit-picky when it comes to screen adaptions, embrace the Colin Firth version so readily. It seems that Colin Firth's Darcy is Darcy (forget Austen's Darcy who, dare I say, was somewhat different). I suspect this has something to do with the fact that many readers saw the series first. It is a bit of a shame that it seems to be a job requirement of all screen Darcys since (and probably all that will follow) that they look very much like Colin Firth.

Nevertheless, Elliot Cowan is a wonderful Darcy. If I were in Amanda Price's shoes, I'd spend less time worrying about getting the plot right and more time trying to steal Darcy.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

T. S. Eliot's ' The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' has been my favourite poem since I first read it in 2003. This image is currently on my desktop, and it reminds me every day to eat my peaches.