Tuesday Open Thread: When Metaphors Go Bad Edition
Random somewhat-related Austen links for the week:
- Tony Blair is Wickham? We always knew he couldn’t have those forearms for nothing.
- We love it when they use Jane Austen for sports metaphors.
- Laurel Ann at Austenprose asks: should Jane Austen fans help save Mark Twain’s house? (We say: let the Mark Twain Society of North America do it! Oh, wait…)
- Edward Austen, the author’s brother, founded it in 1894? Interesting, since he died in 1852.
- “Oh! it is a very nice word indeed! — It does for every thing.“
It’s an open thread: discuss the above or what’s happening in your patch of Janeiteville!
July 15th, 2008 at 11:12 am
LOL, I love this bit…
State-of-the-art =
How such a clumsy and lengthy phrase that stinks of the worst kind of Americanism became credible is a mystery lost in the 1970s, the decade that style forgot.
Thanks for the laugh.
Cheers, Laurel Ann
July 15th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Just last night I took a look at the book Reading Lolita in Tehran, which includes a chapter on reading Austen, and they included their own version of the famous and now cliched first line of P&P. So I had to mention to my husband how much this line gets abused. Now, here is a ridiculous example of it in a sports story — so I emailed it to my husband to prove my point.
July 15th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
I love that article comparing British politicians to fictional characters. That sounds like an awesome Jane Austen party game; maybe using the Imaginiff board with modified rules…
July 16th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
About Mr. Twain’s abhorrence of Jane Austen’s writing, I read also on this site:
http://www.theloiterer.org/ashton/polar_bear.html#Twain
It is evident that his confrontation with Jane Austen have little of civility and decorum and I think it should not be considered seriously nowadays and such a behavior sometimes is due to psychological problems and complexes, there is not consistency in his thoughts:
“…… once you put it (an Austen novel) down you simply can’t pick it up……”
but:
“ ….. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ ….. ”
He must have read it many times to be so furious …. _.
July 17th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Maybe he was jealous of the way she regulated her thoughts and her plots. There are several places where I feel like his spiral out of his control, but maybe he valued that quality in his own writing.