No Use for Jane Austen

[mallorys_camera]

Max’s virtual swearing-in ceremony.

He is now a member of the California State Bar, sworn to uphold the constitutions of both the United States of America and California.

The judge is the gentleman on the upper right. He sits on the California Supreme Court and has mentored Max for the past eight years or so. Max first met him when Max applied for a job as a babysitter for his kids.

“He was their favorite babysitter of all time,” the judge told us.

I got the distinct impression that the judge thought being a babysitter was at least as important—possibly more important—that being a lawyer although of course, he knows the pay is not commensurate.

I note that Bill and MaryAnn—my first husband and his second wife—have started to look like one another as married people do who share a compatible relationship and the years stretch out.

Another reason how I know divorcing Bill was the right move! I could never have looked like him.

###

The virtual ceremony should have made me happy.

But instead, it made me deeply depressed.

The day had been hot. And humid.

I tromped the Walkway because cool river breezes!



But there were no cool river breezes.

Shortly after Max’s virtual swearing-in ceremony ended, we had the most ferocious thunderstorm. Thunder rolling up and down the valley for a full half hour before the sky broke open and the deluge came.

A glimpse of greenish sky!

And indeed, there was a tornado though it never actually landed.

Very apocalyptic!

###

I tried to reread Mansfield Park. And gave up after 30 pages. The truth is that except for Pride and Prejudice (love) and Sense and Sensibility (like), I have no use for Jane Austen.

Comments

[annie_r]

Oddly, it looks like you post from DW normally (even though crossposting to LJ appears to be down), but your photos are hosted over on LJ and don't appear here.
Congrats to Max.

Mansfield Park is maybe my least favorite Jane Austen. Not going to look it up, but I think it was one of her earlier novels. P and P is my favorite also.

[mallorys_camera]

I ran out of photo space on DW, and I have tons of photo space on LJ, so yeah! I'm using it. I don't know why you wouldn't be able to see the LJ photos here. They're set to "public."

I believe Mansfield Park was published after P&P, but who knows—it may have been a trunk novel that was published to capitalize on P&P's popularity. I think I've read all of Austen but except for P&P and S&S, I can't say I'm an enormous fan. In my mind, I compare and contrast her with the Brontes, and I much prefer the Brontes.

[johnny9fingers]

Heresy.

Along with F R Leavis (appeal to authority - hahaha!) I think Persuasion is the best of Jane Austen’s work; when she re-sorted the denouement and explanation into two chapters, obvs.

😆

[mallorys_camera]

I find Pursuasion absolutely unreadable. 😀

[johnny9fingers]

Shocked. :)

Out of interest, why? I find P&P a bit trite; but accept it pretty-well delineates and defines a whole set of subgenres derived from it. Emma irritates me. Mansfield Park I feel to be Austen's most subversive work. There's lots going on in there, in terms of morality, ethics, and society; but I don't warm to the narrative. However Fanny Price may be the best joke Austen played on her reading public, and maybe led to folk like Fleming and his "Truly Scrumptious" or "Pussy Galore" idiocies. When Austen does it, it is somehow decorous.

S&S... ish.

I think Persuasion has one of the greatest comic characters of all time in it. Sir Walter Eliott is Donald Trump's C19th spiritual forebear and brother-in-vanity; and one who thankfully has not been made POTUS or Prime Minister. A true comic rival to Mr Collins.

[mallorys_camera]

Well. To be honest, I haven't read Pursuasion in like 50 years. 😀 So I'm not qualified to have any opinion on it at all!

My memory of the book is that it included a lot of social climbing, which in Austen's view could only be accomplished respectably if you were an officer in the British Navy.

Neither the British Navy nor social climbing has ever particularly interested me. 😀

[johnny9fingers]

All of Austen's novels have a lot of snobbery and social climbing in them. As does Trollope a few years later, and all the other C19th century English novelists until we get to Dickens and Hardy, and even then. O temporarily, o mores, as the autocorrect said. (I absolutely had to leave that one un-recorrected as it is so good.)

The navy, well, chaps of my age and nationality were brought up to revere it as the Senior Service; even though that is palpable nonsense in terms of armies always predating navies. When you get Hornblower with the nursery milk you have to accept there will be distinct cultural differences, even if folk turn into urban and urbane types often indistinguishable to the external eye devoid of particular cultural references.

Is there such a word as aculturality? If not I've just found a use for it.

[mallorys_camera]

Ha, ha. I don't like Trallop or Hornblower either. (Heresy? 😀) I do like Dickens quite a bit, but he was only obsessed with social climbing as a plot device. Hardy is sublime! But, of course, he viewed societal structures as filaments in a spider's web; if you were a fly and attempted to crawl them, you courted certain doom.

I think "acultural" is a word. It means outside the realm of culture. Kind of equivalent to "amoral." Don't know about "aculturality," though. 😀

[johnny9fingers]

I don't much like Trollope excepting Becky Sharp, obvs. I do however adore Hornblower. The library of the English nursery certainly seems to confirm the Jesuit's claim about education, the child, and the man.

And I still love Wodehouse beyond all English prose stylists, and I include in that Joyce, Waugh, Orwell, Dickens (though Charlie could be terribly funny), or anyone really. No-one has ever danced with words like Plum.

I am saddened that I will be, possibly, part of the the last generation which will find Wodehouse a pleasure. Of course, as with Bach, the A.I. will get it; so that will do.

[mallorys_camera]

Becky Sharpe is Thackeray so you can feel free to dislike Trallope without exception! 😀

I've never read Wodehouse. I do have a number of friends whose writing skills and literary tastes I admire who absolutely revere Wodehouse, so I suppose I should give him a shot at some point.

[johnny9fingers]

Going mad. Of course Vanity Fair is Thackeray.
Which character in the Barchester chronicles am I thinking of? Dammit. I'm not going to reread them just to find out. Sod.

Wodehouse is special in a way that is not really describable excepting as a sort of pre stream-of-consciousness, authorial wordplay stream-of-consciousness... I think Kerouac was a Wodehouse fan, strange at it may seem.

[mallorys_camera]

Jack Kerouac? That is interesting! 😀

[johnny9fingers]

Try some Jeeves/Wooster: The Mating Season, Joy in the Morning, or Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit. (This is just off the top of my head - the rapidly deteriorating noggin can't dredge up paragraphs of prose from memory any more; and the books themselves are inaccessible ATM so I can't check on them.)

Do you know the opening to Kotzwinkle's "The Fan Man"? (If not you should; you really, really should. I think I still have much of it by heart.) I considered it as a hippy tribute to Wodehouse via Kerouac.

[johnny9fingers]

Lucy Robarts. Not Becky Sharpe. Different sort of girl from the wrong class. Brain decaying as we speak.

We all adore Ms Sharpe and her elbows though.

[smokingboot]

The swearing-in ceremony looks great, all those beaming faces, especially the one in the centre! You look great!

Me, I love my Austen, though there is a point when someone should have said, 'Darling, no more epistolary explanations in the closing chapters, hmm? Let's have a rider turn up at midnight or something.' You're not alone in finding MP a difficult work to enjoy. But Henry Crawford is a piece of work for sure. If I was going to direct a version of this for film, he would be the most important character to cast, a serious predator, the kind of charismatic man who breaks women for fun and no-one believes it, no-one sees it.

I can see you as a Bronte lover. The wild wind sweeping over the moors! At least it blows away the stillness of an oppressive time...

[mallorys_camera]

Yah, if Austen and the Brontes are the two great poles, my heart totally swing Bronte! 😀

It's kind of weird because I have a very strategic (Austen!) mind.

Hence my heart and my mind are often at odds with one another. 😀