Not to mention all over the map! The Jane Austen allusions are coming thick and fast this week!

Alert Janeite HeatherL sent us a link to an article about a boxing match that contained a number of delightful allusions to Jane Austen and her work. This first bit sounds like it came off the Feature page, not the Sports page:

Accustomed to speedy plots and flimsy characters in disguised screenplays written to pass hours in an airport hangar, who of such readers, anymore, has time for the subtlety and irony of an author like Jane Austen? Really, who but a writer driving from Phoenix to Las Vegas could possibly enjoy reading or listening to Northanger Abbey?

*raises hand*

Oh, you weren’t talking to us then? Sorry.

Irony, that literary device wherein a novelist implies something very different from her words’ meanings, is lost on many of today’s readers, too – and consequently abandoned by our bestselling writers. But there was a time when a master like Jane Austen invented characters who spoke in double and triple meanings, and Ms. Austen’s readers stopped and considered every possible intention of her characters’ words.

Complicated as an Austen character, then, Marco Antonio Barrera promoted his left hand, to Rocky Juarez and three ringside judges and the postfight press corps afterwards, without once treating what he’d done with his right. Remember, it was Rocky Juarez’s job to make the first round of last Saturday’s rematch something like Round 13 of their May bout. Just go forward and maul the old man, Rocky!

But about five minutes into their rematch, when Rocky Juarez got Marco Antonio Barrera in something of a clench and set about roughing-up the veteran, Barrera launched a right uppercut devastating enough to move Juarez a step backwards and change his commitment to infighting for the next half-hour. And while Barrera only landed this same right uppercut a handful of times through the rest of the fight, he threw it repeatedly to remind Juarez of its potency.

And so, like a nineteenth-century novelist, Marco Antonio Barrera used subtlety and irony to create a technical work that pleased him as its creator. But here is where Mr. Barrera and Ms. Austen differ. Where Jane Austen’s works occasionally allow readers to deceive themselves and expect a different outcome from what they’ll later discover, Ms. Austen’s surprise endings are always pleasant for her readers.

Or perhaps it’s better put this way: Jane Austen’s novels do not wear raised and shiny script on their covers, they do not feature portraits of half-naked barbarians with blood-drenched swords, and most importantly, the teasers on their back covers do not promise five hundred pages of explosions and savagery. Marco Antonio Barrera events, and their prefight campaigns, it seems, do assure their potential buyers that something quite different from what happened last Saturday night is in the offing.

Nobody made this point better than Mr. Barrera himself, instants after “Too Close to Call’s” final bell. In a surprising show of hostility, Barrera yanked his mouthpiece out and yelled at Juarez that Rocky had both lost the fight and failed the lesson Marco Antonio Barrera, as his teacher, had given him. This image of Mr. Barrera as the professor and Rocky Juarez as the confounded student also was a repeated theme at the postfight press conference.

But if Marco Antonio Barrera was justified in calling himself Juarez’s master – by virtue of ringside judges’ marks in his favor – so too were Mr. Barrera’s disgruntled fans justified in reminding him that he’d promised to turn MGM Grand into a gladiator pit, not a classroom. Ringside reviews of Mr. Barrera’s lesson also varied greatly, with some on press row scoring the fight 116-112 for Barrera and some scoring it 115-113 for Juarez.

So, perhaps Professor Barrera’s lecture lacked clarity. Or perhaps last Saturday’s fans, like their fiction-reading contemporaries, have let their tastes deteriorate to where only what is at first obvious is pleasant to them. Hard to say – but it should be just the thing to contemplate on a long drive home from Las Vegas, Jane Austen playing in the background.

This is fabulous stuff. And incidentally, we are of the opinion that Henry Tilney could go a few rounds with some Pet of the Fancy and perhaps pop one in over his guard. Oh, yes.

Slightly more prosaic is an article in the Washington Post about literary-themed bed and breakfasts, including one with a Jane Austen room.

It took all of five minutes to settle into the Jane Austen Room. It is a homebody’s nest: welcoming queen-size bed, reading chair with lamp, and a stereo, made to look like a Victrola, for listening to recorded readings from “Pride and Prejudice.” Flopping from one comfortable perch to another, book in hand, I was at home.

Sounds lovely! But then…

Elizabeth Alexander, manager and co-owner, re-tooled this 116-year-old Queen Anne house into a bed-and-breakfast for book lovers. A different literary star inspired each of the three guest rooms. The Langston Hughes Room is decorated with a portrait of the famed poet, an LC Smith typewriter and other period pieces from the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes’s heyday. The Robert Louis Stevenson Room is filled with works by the author, paintings of seaside settings he favored and other nautical touches. And the Jane Austen Room exudes a Victorian aura.

D’OH! They would have been better off with the nautical touches.

From Desk Incomprehensible, we have a blog entry from the Orlando Sentinel blog called Shakespeare’s Coffee (great name) about upcoming books that should fly off the shelves.

1. Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette by Sena Jeter Naslund (Morrow): Explore the lush, world of pre-revolution France through a detailed portrait of its most notorious queen. Richly researched, Naslund offers a humanizing characterization of a young woman born to wealth and accepting of her role as a tool for political maneuvering. With Sofia Coppala’s new Marie Antoinette film coming soon, Marie is going to be the new Jane Austen literary darling for a while. This book looks like the best of the crop.

Huh? We guess she means “the new literary darling, like Jane Austen was last year.” HA! Little does she know.

Lastly in our Pantheon of Allusion, we have an article in the Herald about why people torture themselves reading unpleasant memoirs such as James Frey’s.

One would-be writer was told by an agent that the memoir market was “massively crowded”, to the extent that “it’s really only the things that leap off the page and grab me by the throat that I can take on … the kind of thing readers expect from openings like A Million Little Pieces, for instance”.

(Frey’s opening line is: “My four front teeth are gone, I have a hole in my cheek, my nose is broken and my eyes are swollen nearly shut.” Jane Austen eat your heart out.)

That just made us laugh, and in a good way! We are connoisseurs of fine snark here at AustenBlog.