Hilts is excited about Persuasion. I am too. I reckon it vies with Pride and Prejudice as my favourite Jane Austen novel, which is saying something, because I love Pride and Prejudice. I have a problem trusting people who dislike Jane Austen wholesale, to be honest - I just can't work out why and immediately suspect they haven't actually read Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion. Charlotte Brontë didn't like Jane Austen's writing much; I think her objection ran along the line of her characters being 'more real than true'. I love Jane Eyre more than almost any other pile of words, so it pains me to reconcile such a dinky comment with such a mammoth author. There was plenty of truth in Austen's characters, particularly in Persuasion - and not to be snarky about it, but Louisa Musgrove alone has more 'truth' in her than all of Charlotte Brontë's secondary characters put together.
The 1995 version of Persuasion is the only film version of a Jane Austen novel that I like, and it, along with the BBC miniseries of Pride and Prejudice with Jennier Ehle, is the only film version of an Austen novel I've seen that hasn't made me want to spit nails. To be fair, I've stopped watching them. Two of them pissed me off irretrievably - the Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and the Pride and Prejudice with the skinny chick from the pirate movies. Those two punked out at the emotional climaxes so pukably. Eleanour is not the sort of woman who's going to burst out in tears in front of her lover. Making her do that to prove a point about sense and sensibility being best as a delicate balance is as fucking laboured as a Kevin Smith movie. And Darcy and Elizabeth traipsing around in the dewy fields in their pyjamas to wind up Pride and Prejudice! Holy fuck.
The worst thing about that Pride and Prejudice, though, is how it turned the spat after Darcy's first proposal to Elizabeth into the equivalent of two teenagers whining at each other, for no reason that I can accept. Austen's dialogue for that spat is concise and some of her best, and the filmmakers wouldn't have wasted any time using it instead of using the made-up adolescent shit talk they replaced it with. What's more, it's what the rest of the novel hangs on; the idea that Elizabeth can point out to Darcy that his behaviour hasn't been gentlemanly in such a way that he's going to spend the rest of the book realizing she's right, feeling bad, and trying to be more gentlemanly. And so get her to fall in love with him; with the help of his gorgeous estate and fabulous wealth of course, ladies being only human. But take that away - as the film makers did - and all you've got left is an unexceptional shitty Hollywood romance that isn't worth suspending your disbelief for because there aren't any knobs in it.
Anyways. That wasn't what I meant to go on about. This is the problem with blogging before work - one goes off an a tangent and realizes one hasn't mentioned how great the documentaries of Adam Curtis are and how you can find some of them streamed online, and that there isn't time to go back and change anything - sigh. But I would like to mention that the F-word and I got back together when I was 27, and a spinster in that I had decided that extended romantic relationships were for the naïve, poor, or those without hobbies. It gives me a new feeling for Anne Elliott of Persuasion, which is cool, since previously the fictional chick I'd identified the most with was Rochester's crazy wife.
giovedì, gennaio 17, 2008
mercoledì, gennaio 16, 2008
Model me this
When I use my words out loud, I sound like a bigger bitch than I feel myself to be in my head, because I'm not very good at using my words out loud. For example, yesterday I nearly started yelling at a co-worker because she couldn't understand why she, a bird in her 20's, was getting her television role models from aged types like the flakes on Sex and the City.
Fuck, I hate Sex and the City. The first season was funny and then it was all whine, whine, whine, tick, tock, tick goes the biological clock, oh, Mr. Big, blah blah blah. Imagine dubbing a man Mr. Big on a television show that ran for WAY too many years and never giving the audience a shot of his marriage tackle. I don't know how Chris Noth is set up but surely they could have hired a stunt cock if it was called for. Fucking fatuous. Call yourself groundbreaking, jeebus. I've seen more ground broken at ancient Indian burial grounds.
Anyhoo, I was polite enough to refrain from pointing out that having a role model your own age was more narcissism than modelling, or that it's just daftery to look at television for life guidance, and instead pointed out that people in their mid-twenties aren't attractive to advertisers. The perception is that they're struggling with some sort of debt, be it retard debt from not understanding credit cards or else student debt or both; they have less disposable income than teenagers, who don't have fixed expenditures AND who have parents buying for them; and they have less money overall than people in their thirties, who're generally not struggling by on entry-level wages anymore - and while they may have more fixed expenditures than twenty-somethings, those fixed expenditures are for things you can advertise at them - cars, baby stuff, furniture. Whatever.
So while you might have some crap ripoff where-cool-goes-to-die consultancy like my old bête noire Youthography promising to help advertisers tap into Generation X2, Generation Y, Generation Get-The-Fuck-Out-Of-My-Face-I-Bought-What-You're-Selling-Already-Even-Though-I-Can't-Afford-It-Because-of-My-Student-Loan, or whatever the fuck they're calling us now, the odds of any production companies investing substantially in producing television programming aggressively geared towards people in their twenties is poor. Sensible advertisers will just not be into it.
Anyhoo, I pointed this out to my co-worker, whose response was that she felt she wasn't being served by television. Like she was the customer. After all that time working in television advertising I know that viewers are not the customer; that advertisers are the customers, viewers are commodities of varying value, and television programmes are merely ways to deliver the commodities to advertiers. Surely I should be capable of of expressing that in reasonable terms. All I felt like like expressing, however, was a bellowed 'you have a fucking Oxbridge degree! What the fuck do they teach you there?'
I didn't yell, though. Instead, I changed the subject to how shitty Sex and the City was.
Fuck, I hate Sex and the City. The first season was funny and then it was all whine, whine, whine, tick, tock, tick goes the biological clock, oh, Mr. Big, blah blah blah. Imagine dubbing a man Mr. Big on a television show that ran for WAY too many years and never giving the audience a shot of his marriage tackle. I don't know how Chris Noth is set up but surely they could have hired a stunt cock if it was called for. Fucking fatuous. Call yourself groundbreaking, jeebus. I've seen more ground broken at ancient Indian burial grounds.
Anyhoo, I was polite enough to refrain from pointing out that having a role model your own age was more narcissism than modelling, or that it's just daftery to look at television for life guidance, and instead pointed out that people in their mid-twenties aren't attractive to advertisers. The perception is that they're struggling with some sort of debt, be it retard debt from not understanding credit cards or else student debt or both; they have less disposable income than teenagers, who don't have fixed expenditures AND who have parents buying for them; and they have less money overall than people in their thirties, who're generally not struggling by on entry-level wages anymore - and while they may have more fixed expenditures than twenty-somethings, those fixed expenditures are for things you can advertise at them - cars, baby stuff, furniture. Whatever.
So while you might have some crap ripoff where-cool-goes-to-die consultancy like my old bête noire Youthography promising to help advertisers tap into Generation X2, Generation Y, Generation Get-The-Fuck-Out-Of-My-Face-I-Bought-What-You're-Selling-Already-Even-Though-I-Can't-Afford-It-Because-of-My-Student-Loan, or whatever the fuck they're calling us now, the odds of any production companies investing substantially in producing television programming aggressively geared towards people in their twenties is poor. Sensible advertisers will just not be into it.
Anyhoo, I pointed this out to my co-worker, whose response was that she felt she wasn't being served by television. Like she was the customer. After all that time working in television advertising I know that viewers are not the customer; that advertisers are the customers, viewers are commodities of varying value, and television programmes are merely ways to deliver the commodities to advertiers. Surely I should be capable of of expressing that in reasonable terms. All I felt like like expressing, however, was a bellowed 'you have a fucking Oxbridge degree! What the fuck do they teach you there?'
I didn't yell, though. Instead, I changed the subject to how shitty Sex and the City was.
martedì, gennaio 15, 2008
Give me a simile about womanhood, with a shark
Today I would like to get excited in blog form about how awesome Steven Mithen is, about how he might not have the smoothest prose in the world, but how he can hack his way through a subject with his unwieldly sentences while somehow delicately gather a million far-fetched strands into one elegantly proved proposition, like how the essence of modern humanity is our ability to use metaphors in The Prehistory of the Mind. I have an obsession with metaphors and simile that the book really pandered to.
For example, last night I dreamt that the F-word was sick so I had to go teach his English class. It was awkward because I was stoned, in fact still sucking on the spliff when I walked through the door. But it was alright, because the subject that day was metaphor and simile. I briefly explained the concepts to the class and decided to start the practical work with similes.
'You,' I said, pointing at a boy who'd looked like he'd been ready to dive into the trashcan when I threw my roach in there. 'Give me a simile about sex, using dogs.' He blushed. Oh well, I thought, at least this is just a dream and I'm not really humiliating myself and teenagers every day in the course of my job. 'Thrashing around like dogs in a duckpond,' he said suddenly and hopefully, and the class went from tittering to oooing and ahhing. Then I woke up before I could congratulate him on the alliteration.
I've been having odd dreams lately, easy to remember and easy to interpret, which is good; now that I'm too cheap for analysis it's reassuring to know I can still keep in touch with my beastly but awesome shadow and keep up an integrated self, to a degree. The strangest simile that came to me in a dream was just before Christmas, about how womanhood is like a shark thrashing to death on the grounds of an amusement park. The best simile I heard over Christmas was how some people had faces like bulldogs licking piss of a thistle.
For example, last night I dreamt that the F-word was sick so I had to go teach his English class. It was awkward because I was stoned, in fact still sucking on the spliff when I walked through the door. But it was alright, because the subject that day was metaphor and simile. I briefly explained the concepts to the class and decided to start the practical work with similes.
'You,' I said, pointing at a boy who'd looked like he'd been ready to dive into the trashcan when I threw my roach in there. 'Give me a simile about sex, using dogs.' He blushed. Oh well, I thought, at least this is just a dream and I'm not really humiliating myself and teenagers every day in the course of my job. 'Thrashing around like dogs in a duckpond,' he said suddenly and hopefully, and the class went from tittering to oooing and ahhing. Then I woke up before I could congratulate him on the alliteration.
I've been having odd dreams lately, easy to remember and easy to interpret, which is good; now that I'm too cheap for analysis it's reassuring to know I can still keep in touch with my beastly but awesome shadow and keep up an integrated self, to a degree. The strangest simile that came to me in a dream was just before Christmas, about how womanhood is like a shark thrashing to death on the grounds of an amusement park. The best simile I heard over Christmas was how some people had faces like bulldogs licking piss of a thistle.
lunedì, gennaio 14, 2008
Rolling along
Went to the symphony last night for, I'm ashamed to say, the first time since we arrived in Brussels. Combine the F-word's thriftiness and my cranky exhaustion at the end of the working day . . . anyways, we'll be better in 2008. So we went last night, to see the Charlemagne Orchestra. Certainly the best looking orchestra I've ever seen. We were sitting right in front of the first violin section, which contained two specimens of breathtaking human beauty, and was quite fit in general.
But then the baritone, Stephen Salters, started singing and it was as though there was no one else in the concert hall. The Black Russian - hah. I liked the arrangements of Pushkin's poetry very much; it was as though it had been written for him. And perhaps it had, or at least arranged for him - I had the impression he worked very collaboratively with the arranger, Maria Alvarez. Liked the Mendelssohn 'Airs of Elijah' a lot less and felt it suited him rather less. But no probs. He got encored and sang a spiritual. Nice. Not as nice as this:
Anyhoo. The concert concluded with a Mendelssohn symphony that was fucking ace, certainly much fucking acer than the Airs. Violent and sexy. At that point the F-word and I were exhausted and jonesing for some ice cream but from the opening phrases we were suddenly wide awake and frisky again. Left the hall on a high, but the Häagen-Dazs shop was already closed, the staff gawping at us from where they were lounging behind the counters. Had a moment of hating Belgium again. What sort of fuckwit country closes its ice cream parlours just as the concert halls let out? This sort of fuckwit country. Oh well.
But then the baritone, Stephen Salters, started singing and it was as though there was no one else in the concert hall. The Black Russian - hah. I liked the arrangements of Pushkin's poetry very much; it was as though it had been written for him. And perhaps it had, or at least arranged for him - I had the impression he worked very collaboratively with the arranger, Maria Alvarez. Liked the Mendelssohn 'Airs of Elijah' a lot less and felt it suited him rather less. But no probs. He got encored and sang a spiritual. Nice. Not as nice as this:
Anyhoo. The concert concluded with a Mendelssohn symphony that was fucking ace, certainly much fucking acer than the Airs. Violent and sexy. At that point the F-word and I were exhausted and jonesing for some ice cream but from the opening phrases we were suddenly wide awake and frisky again. Left the hall on a high, but the Häagen-Dazs shop was already closed, the staff gawping at us from where they were lounging behind the counters. Had a moment of hating Belgium again. What sort of fuckwit country closes its ice cream parlours just as the concert halls let out? This sort of fuckwit country. Oh well.
domenica, gennaio 13, 2008
Cyclical cycles
Am I dumber now than I was ten years ago? At 29, I've reached the age when it becomes a serious question. The answer is still no, of course. When I was 19 I was practically vegetal, and the evidence suggests I must have been a late-bloomer, or possibly some sort of insect that went through a sticky smelly stupid stoned chrysalis period. But I suppose with each passing year, the question 'am I dumber now than I was ten years ago?' will get more and more thought-provoking.
When I was 19, one of the people who University foisted on me who I was not at all ready for was Mircea Eliade. In my defense the Romanian was hardly translated so his unwieldly sentences were a pain in my baked ass, and I still won't say Mircea Eliade was a good writer. But once I left humanities, started studying international relations and fully accepted how shittily 'academic' literature could be written, a whole new world of poorly expressed brilliancy opened up to me and suddenly Mircea Eliade was my new best friend. Besides the whole Fascist thing, but dollars to doughnuts says you would have been a Fascist too if you'd been a Romanian between the two world wars.
Anyhoo, one of Eliade's contributions to thinking about religion is the explanation of the eternal return; that by participating in religious rituals, a person participates in a sort of cyclical, mythic time, and removes themselves from the horror of historical time. I think part of the reason I didn't like Eliade when I was 19 was that the idea of historical time being horrible was baffling. Last night I understood it, though. I heard the expression 'noughties' to describe the decade through which we're living, and then started imagining what stupid names we'll give approaching decades, and was filled with an intense relief when I realized I'll almost certainly be dead before we deal with three syllables in the first part of the year-date, for example 'twen-ty-one-el-ev-en'.
Another thing that filled me with horror this weekend was realizing Alicia Keys, who apparently people take seriously, is the person who wails that whiny shit over a farty bastardization of Pachelbel's Canon. Good lord, we live in decadent times.
Anyways, there were several things this weekend that didn't fill me with horror. One of them was a Portugese band called The Gift - some friends of ours who'd just come back from there gave me a copy of Facil de entender, which is just as well as I don't suppose I would have stumbled across it on my own. The singer, Sonia Tavares, has exactly the sort of pop chick voice I like. Like if Marlene Dietrich actually had talent as a vocalist. And the instrumentation is suberb. Here's a video:
When I was 19, one of the people who University foisted on me who I was not at all ready for was Mircea Eliade. In my defense the Romanian was hardly translated so his unwieldly sentences were a pain in my baked ass, and I still won't say Mircea Eliade was a good writer. But once I left humanities, started studying international relations and fully accepted how shittily 'academic' literature could be written, a whole new world of poorly expressed brilliancy opened up to me and suddenly Mircea Eliade was my new best friend. Besides the whole Fascist thing, but dollars to doughnuts says you would have been a Fascist too if you'd been a Romanian between the two world wars.
Anyhoo, one of Eliade's contributions to thinking about religion is the explanation of the eternal return; that by participating in religious rituals, a person participates in a sort of cyclical, mythic time, and removes themselves from the horror of historical time. I think part of the reason I didn't like Eliade when I was 19 was that the idea of historical time being horrible was baffling. Last night I understood it, though. I heard the expression 'noughties' to describe the decade through which we're living, and then started imagining what stupid names we'll give approaching decades, and was filled with an intense relief when I realized I'll almost certainly be dead before we deal with three syllables in the first part of the year-date, for example 'twen-ty-one-el-ev-en'.
Another thing that filled me with horror this weekend was realizing Alicia Keys, who apparently people take seriously, is the person who wails that whiny shit over a farty bastardization of Pachelbel's Canon. Good lord, we live in decadent times.
Anyways, there were several things this weekend that didn't fill me with horror. One of them was a Portugese band called The Gift - some friends of ours who'd just come back from there gave me a copy of Facil de entender, which is just as well as I don't suppose I would have stumbled across it on my own. The singer, Sonia Tavares, has exactly the sort of pop chick voice I like. Like if Marlene Dietrich actually had talent as a vocalist. And the instrumentation is suberb. Here's a video:
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