So tired. Will I ever blog, or even free write, again? After a very long day yesterday (one involving needles, and x-rays, and considerate strangers), I found an interesting looking movie on Netflix and decided to watch. The movie was three hours long, and totally worth it.
Lost in Austen is about a 21st century London girl who becomes trapped in a version of Pride and Prejudice from which Elizabeth Bennet has removed herself. The dialogue was impressively good, the casting was stunning. The movie was almost a cross between Bridget Jones's Diary and the BBC's Pride and Prejudice, which might qualify as ironic considering that Bridget Jones's Diary is based on the BBC's Pride and Predjudice, or may be it's just poetic. (I have trouble with irony as a concept, which has been further complicated by comments made on ABC's Castle recently.)
I totally dispised the American Pride and Prejudice starring Kiera Knightly that came out several years ago. Not enough attention paid to dialogue or Jane Austen's mastery of what I'll call sitting room satire. I should have realized that Britain was practically guaranteed rearrange Austen better. They mock, but they do so with style.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Many a Trip to the Library
This may be a waste of everyone's time except for mine, but since I've been complaining about having nothing to say, and since I haven't posted anything in almost a month, I'm just going to start writing and see what comes out, almost like a Peter Elbow exercise.
I'll start with books. I've been getting in a lot of reading over the last several months. When I go to the library, if I visit the stacks at all it rarely takes me long to come up with authors and titles I simply must begin reading immediately. I visit the online catalogue on a semi-regular basis. If you aren't a big reader (you probably aren't wasting your time on my blog, but if you aren't a big reader), you may wonder who we come up with those titles and authors. The answer is that they come from everywhere, e.g, memory, previous reading, television and radio (if your paying that sort of attention), friends, family members, etc. [By the way, I've been practicing use of i.e. and e.g. after reading about them in Grammar Girl's Fast and Dirty Tricks for Better Writing. The abreviation i.e. can loosely be translated into something like "in other words," and e.g. means something like "for example." Before reading Grammar Girl I had some idea of what they meant, but not their specificity.] I'll give you an example. I met my friend Lisa's Dad a couple of weeks ago, and got to join him and his wife, and Lisa, for dinner. Lisa's Dad reads a lot of mystery fiction. While I've enjoyed mystery fiction since highschool, it's been years since I read it with any sort of regularity. When he mentioned the top 100, that was my [completely personal and arbitrary] cue to make a point of reading mystery fiction. Any conversation can fuel a literary expedition.
Right now I'm reading Dorothy Sayer's Gaudy Night, Middlemarch by George Elliot, and Strong Women Eat Well by Mirian Nelson (with a bunch of letters after her name).
Unfortunately this is all I have time to write since the babies are not napping like I expected them to.
I'll start with books. I've been getting in a lot of reading over the last several months. When I go to the library, if I visit the stacks at all it rarely takes me long to come up with authors and titles I simply must begin reading immediately. I visit the online catalogue on a semi-regular basis. If you aren't a big reader (you probably aren't wasting your time on my blog, but if you aren't a big reader), you may wonder who we come up with those titles and authors. The answer is that they come from everywhere, e.g, memory, previous reading, television and radio (if your paying that sort of attention), friends, family members, etc. [By the way, I've been practicing use of i.e. and e.g. after reading about them in Grammar Girl's Fast and Dirty Tricks for Better Writing. The abreviation i.e. can loosely be translated into something like "in other words," and e.g. means something like "for example." Before reading Grammar Girl I had some idea of what they meant, but not their specificity.] I'll give you an example. I met my friend Lisa's Dad a couple of weeks ago, and got to join him and his wife, and Lisa, for dinner. Lisa's Dad reads a lot of mystery fiction. While I've enjoyed mystery fiction since highschool, it's been years since I read it with any sort of regularity. When he mentioned the top 100, that was my [completely personal and arbitrary] cue to make a point of reading mystery fiction. Any conversation can fuel a literary expedition.
Right now I'm reading Dorothy Sayer's Gaudy Night, Middlemarch by George Elliot, and Strong Women Eat Well by Mirian Nelson (with a bunch of letters after her name).
Unfortunately this is all I have time to write since the babies are not napping like I expected them to.
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