Persuasion

This is the thread where I'll be posting my thoughts while reading Persuasion, should any occur.

Here's the permanent address of this post:

http://babyruthless.blogspot.com/2007/12/persuasion.html

Bookmark it or you can subscribe to the RSS feed of just this post (I think.) God forbid you miss a single syllable of Johnny's so-important thoughts.

A Black And Hooded Head

After the Pequod has killed its first whale, Captain Ahab retreats to his cabin "as if the sight of that dead body reminded him that Moby Dick was yet to be slain." However, after the crew has gone below deck for their dinner, Ahab approaches the decapitated head of the sperm whale and delivers a soliloquy alone on the deck:

Speak, thou vast and venerable head, which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed--while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!

Austen; Shitty Limits

Here's a fun idea that I'll inevitably abandon and end up feeling even worse about myself: starting January 13th, the retooled Masterpiece Theater is showing adaptations of all six Jane Austen novels, and I thought I'd read each novel in advance of the movie.

Here are the air-dates for the various adaptations:

January 13: Persuasion
January 20: Northanger Abbey
January 27: Mansfield Park
February 10 & 24: Pride And Prejudice
March 23: Emma
March 30 & April 6: Sense And Sensibility

This seems like a lot to read, but now that I've typed it out it doesn't actually seem like that much. I read Pride And Prejudice a couple of years ago, so I'm not going to re-read it this time around. That means I have to read three novels in a month, which doesn't sound like that much--except that this will be the busiest month of the year--and after that I have two and a half months to read another two novels. I think I can do it.

I'll post an entry about each book, and in the comments I'll post my trite and banal thoughts as I'm reading. If anyone else is reading along with me, we can have some sort of discussion about the book. (Sample discussion: "Leave me alone! I have to read all of Mansfield Park in one week!")

If you're interested, you can find texts of all the books at Project Gutenberg and Daily Lit. I respect your internet abilities enough to not coddle you with a hyperlink.

I guess this is a pretty annoying undertaking, but look on the bright side: most asshole bloggers would have named this The Jane Austen Project.

Netscape Theme

America Online, which is apparently still around, announced this week that they were discontinuing the Netscape browser, which was apparently still around.

But don't get too bummed out...you can download a Firefox theme that makes your browser look like Netscape 3 running on Windows 3.1. For some reason.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3471

A Big Deal

From the The Economist's article about the Poker industry:

"As he partied away the declining years of his career, Errol Flynn incurred some excruciating poker losses, including, on one particularly bad night, a Caribbean island he had hoped to develop into a holiday resort.

"John Wayne had some shockers too, though in one memorable game he won Lassie from the canine star's desperate owner."

Affluenza: December 26

A *Lucite* headboard:

http://www.thresholdbydesign.com/store_item.fsp?id=96947

WHOA.

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It's been so long since we've featured a Toaster Concept I sorta forgot we did that:

http://www.designboom.com/contest/view.php?%20contest_pk=16&item_pk=11744&p=1

RELATED...Resurrecting a Toaster Concept from the 40s, the Toast-O-Lator:

http://www.jitterbuzz.com/indtol.html

"The Aristocrat Of Toasters!" (Don't miss the hilarious in-depth warnings about how dangerous it is.)

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Pencil Shaving necklace in sterling silver:

http://www.victoriamason.com/homeSplash.htm

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The Prouvé Potence lamp:

http://hivemodern.com/products/?view=sub_product&sid=375&cid=5&cid2=31

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You guys know I hate "coffee humor" (HURF DURF I SHOULD INSTALL AN IV DRIP etc) but this mug is cute and relatively harmless:

http://charlesandmarie.com/lifestyle-gems/details/product/on-off-mug-1/

Smiley Face

The new Gregg Araki movie, written by Dylan Haggerty, is called Smiley Face. But when the script first started making the studio rounds, it was literally titled The Being John Malkovich Of All Pot-Smoking Stoner Movies.

In terms of unremarkable mediocrity rewarded by New Yorker articles, though, she's still no Jason Kottke...

I cannot BELIEVE there's ANOTHER Cat Power article in the most recent New Yorker.

By my count, this would be the third article in as many years about Ms. Marshall to appear in the magazine. There was previously a long, curiously non-negative, review of one of her terrible shows, and before that there was that profile that scarred many of us by running with a infamous picture of her coyly pulling down her low-rise jeans to show off her pubic hair. Gah...these days she claims she was a drunk back then, and I sincerely hope that's true.

For me, though, the final word about Cat Power came in this 2006 GQ article:

***
More than a few rock writers have called Marshall a drama queen. "For all the reverence Cat Power receives from disaffected art students" critic Michaelangelo Matos opined a few years back, "her posture as an artist whose soul is so fragile that it threatens to break in front of her audience may be the most purely showbiz conceit alt-rock has produced in years. Eat your heart out, Marilyn Manson."

Cynical? Maybe. But it's hard to believe that the way Marshall behaves in public isn't to some degree schtick. There are things about her story that don't add up. There's the Gap ad she did a couple years ago, and the fashion shows she's been spotted at [not to mention SHOWING HER VAGINA in The New Yorker. -Johnny], and the larger question of what would motivate someone so purportedly uncomfortable looking the world in the eye to pursue a career in which microphones, cameras, and large groups of strangers play such a key role. People who are really afraid of the water don't join the Navy.

Or as Patterson Hood, of Georgia's legendary Drive-By Truckers, put it in "Cat Power" a wry but affectionate tribute to Marshall:

"I don't mean to sound unsympathetic to your plight
But if you're really so shy
Why are you standing in the light?"

Godwin Marketing

Yes, Will Smith was horribly misquoted. And, yes, he has a valid opinion that I agree with.

http://www.digitaljournal.mobi/article/247933/OP_ED_Will_Smith_Suffers_The_Aftermath_Of_A_Reporters_Poison_Pen

But come on, Will: WHY DOES PROMOTING YOUR NEW MOVIE INVOLVE YOU TALKING ABOUT HILTER!?

They should send him back to Publicity 101:

PUBLICIST: So basically, one of the big rules is that you probably shouldn't mention Hitler.

WILL SMITH: Ha ha, got it. Don't mention Hitler unless you're making a point about moral relativism.

PUBLICIST: Actually, uh...yeah. We prefer you just don't talk about Hitler at all.

WILL SMITH: Not even if I'm trying to make a point about the seductions of evil, and how the road to hell is paved with good intentions?

PUBLICIST: Don't get me wrong...I hear ya. I really do. It's just that Hitler is sort of a big topic, and people tend to get a bit touchy.

WILL SMITH: But I'm not DEFENDING Hitler, I'm just...

PUBLICIST: Believe me, I know! But still...there's a time and a place for everything. And promoting a movie about vampire cancer patients probably isn't it.

WILL SMITH: Huh. Well...huh. Does this mean I also can't talk about how I think that Americans with low I.Q.s should be put on reservations?

Horrid Tragedy In Private Life

In 1847, William Makepeace Thackeray published a cartoon in Punch that was so inscrutable, a rival magazine offered a not-insignificant reward to anyone who could explain it:

http://crummy.com/2007/12/19/1

Somewhat surprisingly, the explanation turns out to actually be sort of amusing.

("Horrid Tragedy In Private Life" could be the title of a latter-day Morrissey track. Or, you know, a much better name for this blog.)

From the same website, an enormously entertaining look at a 1989 book of predictions for the year 2000:

http://crummy.com/writing/TheFuture/

It's so fascinating that (as the website points out) the cellular phone, the personal computer, and the Internet were all invented by 1989, but neither the authors nor the inventors were able to realize the extent to which these three things would revolutionize our lives by the year 2000 (a scant 11 years after 1989), rendering many of the inventions pointless. I guess this is sort of a trite observation, but it makes me wonder what technologies are out there right now that are going to have completely changed our lives by 2019. (I'm gonna go with Dippin' Dots.)

There's an Isaac Asimov essay on this very subject. He describes an issue of, I think, Popular Science from let's say 1880 that discussed various ways in which man would reach the moon. There was, you know, hot air balloon and giant cannon, all the usual suspects, but no mention of a thousands-year-old technology, the rocket. Then in the back of the magazine there IS an article about a "Rocket"...but it's the name of a racehorse.

(Wow. Typing that out just now made me realize that Asimov totally MADE THAT STORY UP.)

One of the predictions on the site is "The World's Smallest Weather Station," a device for amateur meteorologists that would monitor the weather and send the data to their home computer. By a totally weird coincidence, I was just today reading this in a 2005 New Yorker profile of Phillip Pullman:

"He's also an amateur meteorologist; in the back yard is a small weather station that sends readings on temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind velocity, and ultraviolet radiation into his laptop computer, via a wireless feed."

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/26/051226fa_fact?printable=true

Being really into monitoring the weather as a past-time seems like such a distinctly British hobby they should have an etching of Robbie Williams fiddling with a weather station on the back of the ten pound note.