Youtube + Pride and Prejudice

Yes, I should be working. But instead, proof that sometimes it is all in the editing:



And for something even more different...

Eponymous: Or, Eighteenth-century novelists liked using names as titles

Talking to someone at the birthday party this weekend, I was asked which novels I'm writing my dissertation on. The list made me realize just how many eighteenth-century novels are titled after their heroine's names (and how protagonists in eighteenth-century fiction are routinely referred to as "heroes" and "heroines" in the scholarship).

From my dissertation, four out of five:
Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson
Cecilia, Or Memoirs of an Heiress, by Frances Burney
Belinda, by Maria Edgeworth
Emma, by Jane Austen (along with Mansfield Park)

And then...
Moll Flanders and Roxana, by Daniel Defoe
Evelina and Camilla, by Frances Burney
Shamela and Amelia, by Henry Fielding (who is more famous for the likewise eponymous Tom Jones and Joesph Andrews)
The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless, by Eliza Haywood
Adeline Mowbray, by Amelia Opie
Pamela, by Samuel Richardson
Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, by Frances Sheridan
The History of Miss Emily Montagu, by Frances Brooke

The above list was compiled from my bookshelf alone. There are plenty more, but I think I've made my point.

There are also many novels named after their heroes, such as Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison, Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, and Sterne's wonderfully titled The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. But it turns out that a dissertation about domestic interiors leads me to write about novels about women. I wonder why that is.

Speaking of writing and eponymous novels, I have started chapter two, which is on Frances Burney's Cecilia. However, I'm experiencing a weird brain fart where, as I type, I think "Clarissa" (the topic of my first chapter), but then I type "Cecilia". It's like my brain is eight months behind my fingers.

Chapter Two:
Pages written: 1
Pages written and then deleted and then rewritten: 1

Taking stock: the yarn stash

I have finally organized my yarn stash into a handy plastic drawer unit:

Click to embiggen the following:


To be honest, I thought there would be more yarn than this, so I guess I'm doing okay. Frankly, organizing the stash reminded me of how little I've been knitting recently, what with trying to work on the chapter and finishing up the teaching. (And knitting three R2D-toques in a month kind of necessitated a bit of a break.) If it wasn't for our semi-regular Stitch and Bitches, I don't think I would ever pick up the needles.

Or, in other words...

I can stop any time I want to. No, really.

Floaty thoughts

Lack of sleep leads to inability to form coherent paragraphs, so herewith my point-form blog entry:

1. With all the questions about whether Earth Hour actually reduces a significant amount of carbon dioxide, perhaps we should just be thankful that it encouraged people to think about consuming less, in general.
2. I spent Earth Hour at the (lit) dwelling of a friend of mine, who hosted a clothing swap where everyone came with unwanted clothing and left with other people's unwanted clothing (that fit. and looked good. For the most part). Leftovers went to charity and photos are here. We rationalized the need for electric lighting (candlelight is inaccurately flattering and impractical for our purposes) by noting that while one apartment was lit, the homes of all the guests were dark. Also, the clothing swap enabled us to reuse goods (clothing) and reduce our consumption of new clothing (in others, I don't need to go shopping for a while).
   
3. It has been a week of material lightening; in addition to raiding my closet for the clothing swap, I also culled books for a charity book sale. Good bye, third copy of Bridget Jones's Diary.
   
4. The workload, ironically, gets heavier as the end of term means essays and more marking.
5. I'm trying to figure out why this story about an abstinence club at Harvard annoys me so much that I currently can't get past the third page. Is it the sensationalist spin taken by the article writer? The puritanical leanings of some of the club's predessors at other universities? The article's attitude towards the club's female leader or her attitude about what she's doing? Is it the headline's use of the more value-loaded word "chastity" vs. my (to my mind) more neutral "abstinence"? I might get back to you on that one.
6. I bought a bottle of "reward wine" for when I finish writing chapter two. As of today, I have... 100% of it left to write. I'll get back to you on that one, too.
   

Sweet Valley High (on a diet)

There's been a lot of comment online about the rerelease of the ghostwritten-by-committee young adult novel series Sweet Valley High that was immensely popular in the 1980s and 1990s, specifically the modern updating of the twins from size 6 to size 4. I agree that it's stupid (why provide their sizes at all?) and unnecessary.

But why hasn't anyone really pointed out...

That the books aren't that good to begin with? Predictable, soapy, formulaic, they suffered due to the episodic nature of the series (Jessica, forget all the lessons you learned in the previous book!) and the writing was straightforward without being at all interesting. I wasn't obsessed with SVH like some of my classmates were in junior high; I just couldn't get on board with a series where you could see the ending by chapter three.

Does someone want to explain to me...

why toilet paper commercials must prominently feature cute animals?

Cases in point:

TP#1, which, if the Youtube description is to be trusted, has been using (secretly demonic?) fluffly white kittens in its TV ads since 1969.



TP#2, which demonstrates animated proof that indeed, bears do shit in the woods.



And finally, TP#3, which features a puppy sniffing human butts (apparently other puppies were not cheekily available). Your tolerance of this commercial will depend on your feelings on Zach Braff, who gives voice to the pup's interior monologue. (Shakespeare it's not.)



I suppose toilet paper is difficult to advertise, associated as it is with perfectly natural but impolite bodily functions. I'm just not sure if cute animals are really the best approach.

50 greatest books (available in English, by dead white men whom you've all heard of)

I have been following with increasing dread the Globe and Mail's Book section series of the 50 Greatest Books ever written. Not because I don't think people should read (of course I do!) or that lists like this seem rather arbitrary (they will at least spur discussion). But frankly, the list has been kind of... predictable.

Let's see: Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, James Joyce's Ulysses, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Marx's Das Capital, Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Dante's Divine Comedy. Bonus points for Origin of Species, but points taken away for another famous dead white guy (Charles Darwin).

Okay, fine, yes. I'm going to rehash the "dead white guy" argument. Look, I know that one reason a disproportionate number of books are written by dead white men is because the number of educated white men has historically been high compared to educated women and/or minorities. (I also know that there are currently more dead authors than live authors.) But my issue with the list isn't that the books so far have been written by dead white guys, but what the preponderonce of dead white male authors suggests—that the list will tell us nothing new or encourage us to re-think what it means to be a "great" book. Many of the chosen books are of great historical import, but any undergraduate student currently making his/her way through a liberal arts degree will encounter many of them in time. In fact, an undergrad student of 40 years ago would have encountered many of these books in time. At the rate the exercise is going, the list is beginning to look like the "great hits of the Western canon."

Every week, I have greeted the announcement of the next "great book" with a deflated resignation and a touch of resentment. Oh, Machievelli's The Prince! How original! How exciting! How daring to select a book by an author whose name has entered everyday vocabulary, becoming synonymous with ruthless dictatorial actions, on the basis of this book.

There are any number of "great books" lists in the world, fiction and nonfiction, all easily found on Google. There is even a list of great books lists! Considering all of this, the Globe and Mail list seems redundant at best and frankly, a little wanky at worst.

And to test my precognitive abilities, herewith are my guesses for books that will appear on the Globe's list of the 50 Greatest Books E-VAH:

Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Paradise Lost, by John Milton (unles Dante's Divine Comedy cancelled it out in the balloting?)
The Republic, by some guy named Plato
The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith
Don Quixote, by Miguel Cervantes
The Cantebury Tales, by Chaucer
something by Nietzsche
War and Peace

Some off-the-wall guesses:
Johnson's Dictionary (or possibly the Oxford English Dictionary, but Johnson's came first)
Strunk and White's The Elements of Style
Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien

And if an Austen novel does make the list, I hope it's the superior Emma, rather than the go-to Pride and Prejudice.