I am still alive, and I am still reading.

I finished Amusing Ourselves to Death last month, just in time to read it with my friends for book club.
I finished Moll Flanders last month, too; it had a surprisingly redemptive ending.
I bought Technopoly by Neil Postman; I couldn't help it. It's quite good so far.
I have 13 books checked out from the library. And 5 borrowed from the Badgermum's library. Will I never learn?

On a slightly different topic, I have decided that my favourite place to be is at R & C's house, sitting on the front porch with E in my lap. On the porch swing, of course. Porch swings and rocking chairs are my favourite items of furniture.

To end, here's something I found in my e-mail archives:

When R & C were here we had a long argument about whether or not Jane Austen was a Christian. R was very passionate, and I was angry, until I asked him if he had ever even read any of her books. When he said no, I had to laugh. After that, he had nothing to say that would sway me. And when he began to rail against Rev. Leithart (re: his book on Austen), I asked if he had bothered to read that one either--no again. I was triumphant. That's what he gets for arguing from ignorance.
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In Defense of Jane
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, November 21, 2005 at 08:22 PM

Reformed writer Andrew Sandlin is taking on Jane Austen:
"I first saw with Jim West the 1995 theatrical permutation of Sense and Sensibility (starring Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson) at its initial release. I disliked it then and deplore it now. In seeing this movie again on TV yesterday I was reminded how I've come increasingly to abominate much of the Victorian era — its conventions, sleights, artificialities, prejudices, scientism, formalism, class structure, hypocritical morality, and sublimated ferocity."

I suppose it's a sign of my own enthrallment to Victorian sensibilities that I rise to the lady's defense. But I am constrained. For starters, Austen was safely in her grave before Victoria came to her throne, so her books do not qualify as Victorian. She lived through the era of romanticism (which Sandlin endorses in his short discussion) and she was not untouched by its sensibility. She writes like Samuel Johnson, but there's a romantic spark running throughout her work.

Besides, one should hardly form an opinion about Jane from those who put her novels on film. Her best qualities as a writer are her wit, style, and social commentary - not things that translate easily to an hour-long visual medium. More importantly perhaps, no one can read far in Austen without recognizing that she abominates conventions, sleights, artificialities, prejudices, etc, etc. She is one of the best social satirists in English - far more devastating and subtle than Dickens (who actually was Victorian).

One of the oddest bits in Sandlin's discussion was this: "I have come to believe that there is no substitute for simple, immediate, unadorned, direct, blunt, bottom-line living." Surely, Sandlin has read deeply enough in postmodernism to know that someone who chooses to live in a simple and unadorned and direct manner has not foregone conventions; the simple and unadorned man simply chooses another set of conventions, a different ordering that is no less artificial than Edwardsean or Victorian refinements. Nakedness is a sartorial choice.

To all of Jane's detractors, I say: Unhand the lady.
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