BONNETS MADE OF CHEESE: literary voice on Twitter

Today I received a link to a blog post about Rosanne Cash "channeling" Jane Austen on Twitter. (Surely there is a simpler way to express all that, but it is Monday evening and I can't think of it.)


Until this little snippet it had not occurred to me that one could tweet in persona, as it were. Somehow, using Twitter in my own already overused voice has never seemed very festive, and I have hence been avoiding adding yet another task to my eternally overlong and underdone to do list. Buttweeting in the crisp and dulcet tones of a literary heroine...now, there's an entertaining thought.

According to the blog Austenprose, Ms. Cash, an accomplished memoirist and singer-songwriter when not tweeting, offered a particularly amusing series of Janeite observations on Twitter during the Super Bowl--certainly an occasion that might bring out the swooning maiden in a gal.

My favorite among them was surely "Some ladies are determined to sport bonnets made of cheese. I must take to my bed."

The thought of enjoying such dainty and ironic snippets isn't quite enough to make me sign up on Twitter just so that I can follow Ms. Cash.

But it's close.

FILM-ETTES NOT QUITE ON FRIDAY: good things come to those who wait

Working Writer had what felt like a multitude of meetings on Friday and, while each was festive in its way, felt far too exhausted to post the usual Friday film-ette here. However, though belated, the Jane Austen Fight Club is one of the most delicious filmettes this blogger has ever seen (seen four times, so far). The slaps, the kicks, the blood (yes, slaps, kicks, and blood! in JANE AUSTEN!) the hats, the Bichon, the lovely multicultural presences...it's a little gem. (Though I must credit here the lovely snippet of music that is uncredited in the filmette; it's from Dario Marinelli's soundtrack for the 2005 Joe Wright film of Pride and Prejudice.)
Make some Lady Grey tea, find a crumpet, and enjoy.

Or I'll have to punch you right in the kisser.

AUTHORS ON AUSTEN: but not for "jane-ites" only

A friend recently lent me A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen, edited by Susannah Carlson and published by Random House in 2009, and I have been stealing tidbits of time away from my work to browse guiltily through it ever since, like a woman with a sweet tooth who keeps on sneaking away to hit the Chips Ahoy bag hidden in the back of the pantry for one more cookie...just one more...just one.

It goes without saying that a book like this is easier to understand and enjoy if you have read something by and about Jane Austen. But the broader themes of which the collection speaks aren't about Austen per se at all; she is the exemplar, but not in some sense the point. This is a book about why some novels endure while others vanish, about what each new age brings to its readings of earlier literature, and above all about how existing books shape the imaginations of other writers. In that way it's relevant to all of us writers, whether we adore The Great Jane or abominate her.

In the collection there are classic essays I read at some long-ago moment: Virginia Woolf's Jane Austen at Sixty and an excerpt from Lionel Trilling's Why We Read Jane Austen. There are classic essays I feel like I should have read but hadn't, including pieces by E.M. Forster, Eudora Welty, and Somerset Maugham. There are people from my past: an essay by Janet Todd, whose class on British writers I took in college and who I had pretty much forgotten since (no offense to a good and entertaining teacher intended). And there are visions very much of the present. Among this group, I especially enjoyed was Benjamin Nugent's The Nerds of Pride and Prejudice, which calls Mary Bennett of that novel "one of the earliest examples of a nerd in a famous work of literature." But every piece in the book is interesting, articulate, and insightful. Martin Amis, Amy Bloom, David Lodge, Jay McInerney, Fay Weldon: it's fun to see writers we know from their own very diverse and contemporary fiction weigh in on an author from the past who has become part of the collective imagination.

I started to include some quotations from the book in this post, but that became impractical more or less immediately given the multitude of little gems to choose from. I'll offer just one, chosen not because it's the grandest or most meaningful thought but because it reminds us all of something important. This is from Amy Heckerling, whose film Clueless is a brilliant and in a deep sense very accurate updating of Emma. Her essay, which shares some of the story of making her film, is called "The Girls Who Don't Say 'Whoo'!" and reads, in part:

...here is one area where I have some beef with many of the Jane Austen films. The novels Jane Austen wrote are classics, but that doesn't mean they should be interpreted in some sort of "classy" style. They don't require slow, swooping shots of idyllic landscapes. There is no mention in Emma of lush symphonic music heard as the wind sweeps through the heather on the hill. The trees, clouds, and birds can do whatever they want. It's not about them, it's about the people, and the people in Emma are BUSY. The book has the pace of youth—sometimes headed the wrong way, but fast, restless, and exuberant.

A reminder that reading great literature requires us not only to see the differences between its time and our own, but also the things that stay the same.

Sam Sattler's blog, Book Chase, has this as its quote of the moment: Mark Twain's “Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” Very amusing, and new to me. You might think that I, well known to be a "Janeite," would bristle at this, but in fact I always forgive harsh criticism as long as it is funny. (Well, harsh criticism of others' books, at least.) I don't know what bugged Mr. Clemens about Miss Austen, though I could certainly hazard a score or two of guesses, or why he chose the shin-bone in particular. It sounds sort of like a Great Books version of the game Clue, doesn't it?— Mr. Twain, in the Library, with the Shin-bone.