I’ve been away from this blog for so long I feel almost obliged to fashion some adroit explanation — picnic, lightning — but the truth is, I was doing other things. Reading, writing, rethinking, rewriting. (When does rewriting have an end? I can only say, not yet.)
After “The Golem and the Jinni” I proceeded to read a string of amazing books I wish I had stopped to write about, for now I cannot do justice to them: Continue reading
Rainy Tuesday, a rare day off, and I indulged myself as I seldom do, by going to a movie. In the daytime! My choice was “Fill the Void,” an Israeli movie about the insular world of the Haredim. It came to my notice through my Jane Austen Google alerts; the New York Times review, in the lede, compared the heroine to one from Jane Austen; that intrigued me. Living in Brooklyn, one also cannot fail to be intrigued by the Haredim, who seem to go about their lives as if the 20th century, and even the 19th, and maybe the 18th (and the Enlightenment! and the Haskalah!) just never happened. Obviously, it cannot be that simple, but that’s how it looks from the outside.
The Jane Austen comparison was far more apt than the reviewer may have realized. Continue reading
Inspired by Juliet Barker’s amazing Wild Genius on the Moors, I’ve been reading Anne Bronte for the first time.
Among the drawbacks of dying young is that other people get to tell your story, and so it is with Anne. Continue reading
That New York is a city of writers goes without saying. But sometimes the words are unexpected: brief and witty as a haiku. From an outing in Lower Manhattan yesterday:
What Jane Austen would have made of either of these, no one alive can say. But I am sure she would have enjoyed observing the Sunday-morning bagel-sandwich-buying scrum at Russ & Daughters, in its own way better than the Assembly Rooms at Bath.
Inspired by a need to understand the market, and my potential readers, I’ve recently embarked on a different kind of Jane Austen Project: reading more widely wildly a thing I’d been largely avoiding until now, out of fear it would either make it me give up in despair or unintentionally become a plagiarist: fiction inspired by Jane Austen.
So far, I am left with one overwhelming impression: astonishment at the iron hold that Mr. Darcy (specifically, as depicted by Colin Firth in the 1995 A&E film version) has left on the imagination of the producers, and, one can only suppose, the consumers of this kind of fiction. I’ve joked about the wet shirt scene
One problem with trying to write a novel, you can never really say you’re done. Continue reading
The Jane Austen Project: A Novel 