September 1st round-up

It's been gorgeous the last few days in Edmonton, almost completely unlike the rest of the summer.

Still, there's something about knowing it's September that makes me uneasy. I wonder if people were happier before calendars.

Anyway. Books.

From my friend T. and his coworkers, suggestions of other new ways to pillage Jane Austen's work:

"Given the runaway success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters will arrive shortly, the inevitable, ahem, modification of Austen' much-loved (definitely by you) canon is at hand. My co-workers and I started throwing around titles. What do you think?

The Vampire of Mansfield Park (thematic too!)
Emma and Mr. Hyde
Northanger Abbey's Alien Invasion (sort of thematic?)
Haunting Persuasion"

I personally love the idea of vampires overtaking Mansfield Park. Especially if that means Fanny becomes some sort of Buffy-esque vampire slayer, which would mean she has a personality and new toughness. But T.'s suggestion Capt. Wentworth get the chance to exorcise a ghost-like Anne Elliot.... why, that's just blasphemy for a girl whose favourite Austen is Persuasion.

This, on the other hand -- Darcy gone vampire -- is not?

On another note, what are you reading these days?

If you're in book club, hopefully you've started reading Lorrie Moore's collection, Birds of America.

I'm really digging it so far -- I know this is a strange line to pull out of the story, "Which is More Than I Can Say About Some People," but here goes nonetheless:

"It was really the world that was one's brutal mother, the one that nursed and neglected you, and your own mother was only your sibling in that world." p. 46

I'm also half-reading Vanity Fair. And have decided to give my first child the middle name Makepeace. No matter gender.

Becky Sharp is, obviously, hateful in a Scarlett O'Hara kind of way. But you kind of have to appreciate a 19th century girl who realizes she has to get married to net income to survive. And so she goes about making it happen.... or trying to make it happen.... without romantic aspirations. (I'm less than 100 pages in, I realize that.)

This is kind of funny:

"If a person is too poor to keep a servant, though ever so elegant, he must sweep his own rooms: if a dear girl has no dear Mamma to settle matters with the young man, she must do it for herself. And oh, what a mercy it is that these women do not exercise their powers oftener! We can't resist them, if they do. Let them show ever so little inclination, and men go down on their knees at once: old or ugly, it is all the same. And this I set down as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry WHOM SHE LIKES. Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts of the field, and don't know their own power. They would overcome us entirely if they did." (p. 40)

My my, what power I must have at my fingertips....

Last of all, how gorgeous is this bookshelf?

channeling Austen

(May I preface this entry by apologizing to my friend Erin, who thinks she does not like Jane Austen -- and so is probably sick of reading about her on this blog -- even though she’s only ever read Persuasion. Not that I could ever judge someone for making such a decision since I think I do not like Mordecai Richler even though I have only ever read the first 30 pages of Barney’s Version. Three times. But Erin has never read Pride and Prejudice, regarded in most circles as Austen’s best book and one of the best English-language works of the late 17th century.So I think I’ve finally found her.

The One.

The character created by Jane Austen who I can best identify with.

If Austen’s women were characters in Sex and the City, I think most people would identify with Elizabeth Bennet the way most women think they are shades of Carrie Bradshaw. Miss Bennet has the best lines, Ms. Bradshaw the best shoes. Miss Bennet sees the irony all around her, ditto Ms. Bradshaw. Mr. Darcy? Mr. Big.

For those who see themselves a bit more Charlotte, I offer up Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne -- ever the dreamy, frankly not-swift romantic.

Samantha? The sexually avant garde Ms. Jones does not lend herself to 17th- or early 18th- century comparison. Mr. Wickham was too much a cad. Mary Crawford too sly. Mr. Willoughby too stupid.

Now, I have always thought of myself as something of a Miranda. Career-driven. Cake-driven. Prone to obsessing the failures of technology.

Miranda isn’t just commitment-phobic. She doesn’t need to be in a romantic relationship.

Love it, love her.

Love Emma.

Just hear me out for a second.

I have no familiarity whatsoever with Northanger Abbey. But the balance of Austen’s work is about relationships between men and women. Not love stories, really, though certainly stories about the importance of marriage.

Not necessarily marriage for love -- though that’s all well and good if you can put aside your pride and your prejudice, etc. etc. Instead, marriage to keep a woman going, keep her under a roof with food in her mouth, yadda yadda.

But Austen’s Emma deals with a girl who does not need to marry at all. Emma Woodhouse will do perfectly well, thank you very much, with a very large inheritance. And, while “it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,” not so for a single woman in possession of the same.

Thank you very much.

Yes, Emma is snobby. Very smart, but given to stupidity because she lets her imagination run away with her.

(Me! Me!)

But she isn’t some wimpy Anne Elliot. Or sad sack Fanny Price. Or chin-up martyr Elinor Dashwood. Or vaguely bull-shitting Elizabeth Bennet.

Emma doesn’t just think she doesn’t need a man.

She knows it.

She thrives on friendships and family. She honestly wants for nothing.

Take this haughty line, in the middle of a heated argument with her sister’s brother-in-law, Mr. Knightley:

“Oh! To be sure,” cried Emma. “It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anyone who asks her.”

I know, I know, just halfway through the book I’m getting ahead of myself.

Anyone who’s familiar with the Austen formula, or who has watched Clueless, knows what will happen. Emma will surely get her come-uppance. Probably more than once. She’ll realize snobbery is bad, or at least not to be celebrated as a virtue. She’ll hook up with the naggy brother-in-law. Who seemed rather less naggy and more hot when played by Paul Rudd.

I guess I might just be early Emma, rather than fully-developed Emma.

Sort of like being early Miranda rather than lives-in-Brooklyn-with-a-baby-and-a-puppy-and-a-bartender-husband-and-his-Alzheimer’s-stricken-mother Miranda.

if you wanna be happy for the rest of your life....

What does one read while wrapping up the chore that is moving?

Something light. Something brain candy. Something about someone who, you feel, could sympathize with you.

For example, you would not want to read Austen. Those girls never had to move a thing. Rich they weren't, but poor they weren't either. (Except Fanny in Mansfield Park. She might understand the pain of cleaning a bathroom floor that can never ever look clean.)

Biographies in general, and of any formidable politician specifically, would be all wrong. Jean Chretien definitely would not start to cry because the shelf over the kitchen sink fell down when you were dusting it. Neither would Sylvia Plath -- and yes, a volume of her complete diaries remain on my to-do list from a summer past.

(By the way, I have a feeling the heroine of any piece of self-respecting feminist literature would not have to call a man over to fix the whole shelf problem. Possibly the heroine of a chick lit novel would, but then it would go to the gutter rather quickly. Ew.)

And so, moving is a time to pull out your Weiner.

Jennifer Weiner, that is. (Excuse the bad joke. I'm really, really tired, and this will likely be my last blog entry for about a week.)

The heroine of one of Weiner's latest books, Goodnight Nobody, lacks confidence and common sense and, well, smarts. But she's quirky. And hilarious. When she finds a mom in her neighbourhood dead in the kitchen, she sets off to solve the mystery on her off-hours. Kate barely has time to take care of her three kids, let alone clean her house, or solve a murder mystery. But she's sleuthing, and it's hilarious, and the woman would feel my pain.

(My obnoxious, misplaced pain.)

Mixed up with memories of a crush gone bad from years before, the book's a light read. And it's sort of startling how Kate's marriage is a backdrop to the whole thing, but it's difficult to tell whether she's happy in it or not. Her husband is little more than a bit character, similar to Vera on Cheers....

One morning's wedded bliss:

".... What was his job?"
Ben turned his back on me, tossing last night's shirt into the closet, where it would join the knee-high pile of clothes I'd been meaning to take to the dry cleaner's for the past two weeks. Possibly three. "I'm running out of shirts." This remark was delivered under his breath, at a volume just loud enough for me to hear.
"I'll drop off the dry cleaning this morning." I hopped out of bed, bent over, and scooped dress shirts into my arms, hoping that the view would entice him to stay a few minutes longer.
"Insurance," said Ben. Score one for my black silk underwear. (p. 132)

It's like everything Desperate Housewives was supposed to be, but a helluva lot more witty.

And did I mention it could scare a girl off of having kids from 100 miles away?