Emma, we need to talk.

,     Emma and I have parted ways.  Our relationship ran its course.  We're still friends, but we had to be honest with each other.  She's a Highbury highbrow and I, an Orange County lowbrow, minus the cat fights, Botox, Restylane, sugar daddy and jumbo mortgage, though the use of "low brow" sort of makes the explanation redundant, and I have a job, not a line of skin care products.

     I could start with the list of fascinating field trips I was going to take outside Orange County to hide the fact that I'm not going to be a big Jane Austen fan, but they aren't materializing so I'm thinking honesty is on the agenda.  The only thing I can think of is that Jane Austen and Jerry Seinfeld appreciation sit on the same gene. The one I don't have.  The Seinfeld thing is a problem in my family. I hope the Austen thing doesn't become another one. Don't get me wrong. I like Emma. A lot, but I read to give my brain a break. I don't want to have to think when I read and I have to think when I read Jane Austen.

     Horrible. I know.  I am what's wrong with readers ( the world ) today.  I told Lesa she needed to add  "Too stupid ( me, not the book )" to the Mrs. BG poll, "Why do usually give up on a book?"Okay, stupid is a little harsh, but lazy.. yeah. That would be much better.  "Too lazy ( my flesh, not my spirit )."  That's why I didn't finish reading  "A History of Pi", the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter in Euclidean geometry, not the baked good. It was by Petr Beckmann in case you're interested, and if you understand why Seinfeld is funny you probably are.. 

I did finish Emma, and at some point, when I get my own line of skin care products, I'll start reading Pride and Prejudice.  In the meantime, I still plan on taking those field trips outside Orange County, if for no other reason than the plastic lady parts and puffy lips are starting to look normal.

Rumi

Emma and I are working on things, but she’s moved out of the nightstand. She’s admitted she has feelings for Frank Churchill and I’ve seen how she looks at Mr. Knightley. She says it's all for Henry's sake, but I have my doubts. There was even talk of us ending it altogether, but we’ve decided to slow things down until we know where our relationship is headed. We’re still seeing each other a couple times a week for lunch or drinks after work, but I haven’t told her I’m reading another book. 

It’s a book of poetry originally written in Persia during the thirteenth century, by Rumi, poet, sage, student, Sufi, whirling dervish. The collection I’m reading now and read often when I feel myself swimming too hard in the wrong direction, or too hard in what I think is the right direction for that matter, is “The Essential Rumi”, translated by Coleman Barks.  Do people even read poetry any more? Should I have admitted I do?

Reading Rumi is reading about love, the vast deep what-we’re-made-of  kind. It’s about letting go and occasionally it's about laughing at our egos, our smallest self. The titles alone make me smile: Love Dogs, Chickpea to Cook, Dissolver of Sugar, Unfold Your Own Myth, Where Everything is Music These are, for the most part, beautiful poems, but there are pieces in this collection that are better passed over if you're squeamish. 

The allegories Rumi uses are sometimes very crude. He talks about the pitfalls of unbridled physical attachments to things, including bodies very graphically and is occasionally coarse in an effort to make his point strongly. An example of this is The Dervish at the Door, who takes it upon himself to turn a selfish, hoarding man’s home into a temporary privy. It makes perfect sense to the dervish to “fertilize” since nothing vital or living or bounteous is  happening in the place, otherwise, why would the man have denied him dry bread, gristle or water. I cringe occasionally, but read on, knowing anything that has lasted almost eight hundred years must have merit. I also read on because the majority of the works are like this untitled piece:


"The way of love is not
a subtle argument, 

The door there
is devastation. 

Birds make great sky-circles
of their freedom. 

How do they learn it?
They fall, and falling,
they’re given wings."

Mean girl?

Just in case anyone needs to reach me, I'm having my mail forwarded to the sixth circle of heck.
As I tighten the chin strap on my hard hat in preemptive defense against the incoming rocks, I have to say, I'm not sure I'm liken' me some Miss Woodhouse. Austen's book, yes, very much, but for Austen's "heroine", the best I can do is "meh".
I was more than a little put out when "handsome, clever and rich" Emma Woodhouse used emotional blackmail to manipulate her "own sweet little friend", Miss Harriet Smith regarding one Mr. Martin of Abbey-Mill Farm. I gave Miss Woodhouse a time-out. She spent several days in the corner thinking about what she'd done. Okay, well, I'm actually the one who's been thinking about what she's done, and what I've been thinking is, "Shame on you, Miss Woodhouse."
I know I know. Emma wants to help. Emma likes Harriet. Emma's scheming seems motivated by a desire to better Harriet's standing in society during a period in time where that sort of thing is very very important to a connectionless woman. Emma is hemmed in by her own standing in society, prettily hemmed, but hemmed none the less. I get all that. I'm just not happy about it, but I am surprised. Aren't all these Austen heroines dear, angelic creatures?
Emma is the protagonist, and so, like all Austen's protagonist, she should be likable. Right? I now suspect she could just as well be the antagonist and the book becomes much more engaging when Emma isn't the girl with the "happy disposition".
According to her nephew and biographer, James Edward Austen-Leigh, Miss Jane Austen was said to have written Emma intending that we NOT like its main character. Austen-Leigh quotes his aunt before she began Emma as having said, "I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like." Well done, Jane. I'm not all together sure Miss Woodhouse is to my liking, but I'm reading again.

Wait a minute! I might have found the first person I intend to throw off with due decorum!

Which Bookmark for Emma?

Do you match your bookmark to your book? Lesa has written before about bookmarks, in particular, lagniappes, but she didn't discuss the process of choosing a bookmark to match the text.

I collect few things, but bookmarks are one of my weaknesses. Being adverse to clutter, I am drawn to bookmarks. They are small and easily corralled. They can be souvenirs of an art exhibit or travels. Some of my most treasured bookmarks were purchased in Paris with Tracy, Leslie and my beautiful mother. Others were made by my girls.

So from this collection I went to choose a suitable companion for Emma.

These two are just wonderful. I got them at the American Impressionism and Realism exhibit at the Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art. They are both from paintings by John Singer Sargent, and are absolutely commanding in person. They were huge and moving. Simply spectacular.

The subjects are American, and Colonials are perhaps not exalted enough to keep company with Miss Woodhouse. However, they are redeemed by their beauty and station in life. These are qualities esteemed by our protagonist, and she might deign to entertain them.

I think Mrs. Hugh Hammersley 1892 is the most elegant person I have ever laid eyes on. She just oozes confidence and elegance.

But the best, in my opinion, to grace the pages of Austen's work is Mr. and Mrs. IN Phelps Stokes 1897. They are happily married, and Mrs Stokes exudes health, just as Mrs. Weston describes Emma to Mr. Keightly. I thought Mrs. Stokes looked almost smug, as if she had everything right where she wanted it. Emma often thinks she has everything sorted.

Which bookmark are you using at the moment?

Oh Jane, Jane....

C.E. Brock circa 1898
The rest of the watercolors from Emma

Not to hog the blog, so to speak, but I’m almost beside myself about Jane Austen’s Emma and am more surprised about that than anyone. In fact, this has been so pleasurable that I read the first four chapters, felt like I was being rushed, so I started over from the beginning.

The long forgotten pleasure of slowly savoring each delicious sentence of a book is gift from Miss Austen. She's already given me others, and I’ve only really Read (capital R) two chapters.

Until this slow read, I couldn’t have told you why women in particular seem to love Austen. Now I know. I read this enlightening passage of Emma out loud to my husband last night as he watched football, and though we aren’t one of "those" couples, he did have the good sense to nod and grunt affirmatively in all the right places.

Austen was forty when she wrote Emma, if Wiki is to be believed and the wisdom of years comes through in her evaluation of what constitutes happiness within a mature relationship or in the case of the above passage, the lack of said same. It should be laminated and stuck into every bridal magazine ever published. In fact, (spoiler alert *waves at DeLynne) I might take this up as my personal mission, which tells you I have yet to learn the pitfalls of meddling in other people’s lives and should keep reading.

The other thing that has surprised me is that Austen is a mistress of devastatingly subtle humor. I don’t know if humor was her intention, but funny is funny. I cannot tell you how very much I truly want to “throw” some offensive someone “off with due decorum” and to disapprove of their “sort of spirit” with Austen's level of understatement. No one in particular, yet, but that is a social art worth cultivation, to my mind. The beauty of it is that they wouldn’t know they’d been insulted until they were far enough away to discourage retaliation. What’s not to like??

Here I invite, encourage, prod and meddle. Read Emma with me if you haven’t already. Read it again if you have. If nothing else, you’ll find you can call someone a whining hypochondriac without them taking offense. Just use the word valetudinarian and leave off the whining part.

The shame.

Hi. Uhm, my name is Tracy and, uhm, I, uh…oh geez.

Well, okay, it’s like this: I haven’t read most of the classics. It’s worse than that. I haven’t read any of the classics unless I was compelled to do so by someone with a Ph.D. who had the power to keep me from getting my B.S. I hang my head in shame, ask for lenience and wonder if I would still have had to spell check lenience if I had paid more attention to literature and less to “books.”

Still, I really gotta say, I’ve always found the classics to be a lot of work. My right brain doesn’t mind. My left brain objects and it does so vehemently, but I’ve been inspired by everyone here at Mrs. B.G.’s to rectify the situation.

Kindle has 49,990 books under the heading “Fiction Classics” so I decided to begin with the 140 ^th to correspond with what will be the 140^th post of Mrs. B.G.’s, this one. It turned out to be an Agatha Christie novel. Somehow that wasn’t quite what I had in mind, so I decided to start here:

“Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition…”

I think my left brain likes her already.