weather: wintry mix …
labyrinths, labyrinth walks, “Solvitur Ambulando” : Wintry mix at the Davidson labyrinth today … But very enjoyable first wintry mix walk! Blessings!
NYC, labyrinths, The Labyrinth for Contemplation – Battery Park, YouTube: They actually filmed their walk …
The Labyrinth for Contemplation, Battery Park, New York – YouTube.
In the last 200 years, Austen’s “darling child” has spawned hundreds of literary offspring, making it one of the most frequently adapted novels in history. The novel, which centers on the rocky romance between the spirited, obstinate protagonist Elizabeth Bennet and the proud, taciturn aristocrat Fitzwilliam Darcy, has been through countless parodies, film, TV, stage and Web adaptations and erotic retellings. It has been reimagined as a comic book, a board book for toddlers, mashed up with zombies and remade as a Bollywood musical. Austen acolytes have published hundreds of literary reboots.
Austen wrote anonymously, and died, unmarried, in her creative prime, leaving just six complete novels behind. But from this narrow canon, a vast industry took shape, and today her brand has become more marketable than ever.
In celebration of the 200th anniversary of ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ a homage to the illustrious author, Jane Austen.
Now the field’s about to get much more crowded. To mark the 200th anniversary of “Pride and Prejudice” this year, novelists, scholars, biographers and filmmakers are releasing a flood of new homages and critical studies to cash in on the seemingly bottomless appetite for all things Austen. More than a dozen books about the author will hit bookstores in coming months, including a new biography, a book that explores her cult status, two studies of Austen-era England and two books about Austen and economics.
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“Austen really is inexhaustible,” says Claudia Johnson, a Princeton University English professor and author of the 2012 book “Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures.” “Each generation tends to think they have discovered her.”
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But for die-hard fans like Sandy Lerner, co-founder of Cisco Systems and founder of Urban Decay cosmetics, there will never be enough. Ms. Lerner discovered Austen in college in the 1980s. She has read “Pride and Prejudice” well over 100 times, and “Persuasion” more than 200 times.
When Cisco went public in 1990, Ms. Lerner used part of her fortune to buy Jane Austen’s brother’s estate in Chawton, England. She founded a library there and created her own publishing house, Chawton House Press, an imprint dedicated to publishing books about Austen and other 18th- and 19th-century English women writers.
Chawton House’s first title, released in 2011, was “Second Impressions,” a sequel to “Pride and Prejudice,” which follows Elizabeth and Darcy on a trip through Europe 10 years after their wedding. Ms. Lerner, who wrote it under the pen name Ava Farmer, spent 26 years researching the book. But she still feels the weight of her predecessor.
“I tried really hard, but I read some sentence she wrote, and it’s so much better than mine, it’s crushing,” Ms. Lerner said.
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As anyone who’s ever debated the finer points of Colin Firth vs. Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy will tell you, women have a bottomless appetite for the small oeuvre of Jane Austen. Every generation gets the Pride and Prejudice adaptation it deserves, each version performs well and reliably reignites sales of her books. She’s backlash-proof. Now the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice is upon us, and the Wall Street Journal reports that a whole new cast of publishers and producers are lining up to cash in.
Universities are reportedly closing doors to Austen scholars, but Austen mania, and its direct descendants, Twilight mania and Fifty Shades mania, continues to prop up some corners of the dejected publishing industry. First, there are the cross-genre spin-off books: Death Comes to Pemberley (murder-mystery), Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (gore-parody), and Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife (erotic). Then there are the nonfiction homages — What Matters in Jane Austen? Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved, Jane Austen: Game Theorist, and Jane Austen’s Guide to Thrift — all due this year. HarperFiction has commissioned remakes of all of her novels by well-known writers, including Prep author Curtis Sittenfeld.
via Women Will Buy Basically Anything Related to Jane Austen – The Cut.
Sundance Film Festival, “Smashed”, Speakeasy – WSJ:
Last year at the Sundance Film Festival, James Ponsoldt’s second film, “Smashed”—about a couple struggling with alcoholism—won the Special Jury Prize and got picked up by Sony Pictures Classics. This year, Ponsoldt returned to the U.S. dramatic competition with “The Spectacular Now,” a coming-of-age drama starring Shailene Woodley “The Descendents” and breakout star Miles Teller, who won raves for his portrayal of an alcoholic teen.“When I saw his audition I thought he has that John Cusack thing mixed with Elvis mixed with Bill Murray,” says producer Andrew Lauren following a Tuesday screening of the movie.The film’s plot, adapted from Tim Tharp’s novel by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber “500 Days of Summer” centers around Teller’s character, Sutter Keely, a charismatic but often drunk high-school senior—the actor described him as a “sad clown” in a Q&A session—who falls in love with Woodley’s Amy, a brainy type with problems of her own. The film garnered positive reviews: The Daily Beast called it “one of the most poignant and gratifying films of this year’s Sundance” Critics drew comparisons to 1980’s John Hughes films, Cameron Crowe’s classic “Say Anything,” as well as last year’s teen hit, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower.””We never looked at [“Perks”] as our model,” says Mr. Lauren, who financed the film for under $5 million, less than a third of the budget of “Perks,” which starred Emma Watson and brought in nearly $30 million globally at the box office. “Hopefully we can have that kind of success.”The film, which was made for an “under $5 million” budget, was among the first features to sell following strong interest from multiple distributors. A24, a new multiplatform player announced that it bought the North American rights to the film on Monday, and has plans to release the movie theatrically this summer.“They think it has commercial viability which is very important to us,” said Mr. Lauren. “They see this as a ‘Garden State’ or a ‘500 Days of Summer’—the type of films that kids are dying to see.” As for the common theme of alcoholism all of Ponsoldt’s three feature films, Mr. Lauren says it is “coincidental.”
via Drunk Boy Meets Nerd Girl Love Story Wins Sundance Raves – Speakeasy – WSJ.
lists, Audible: Audible Essentials | Audible.com.
Vine, Twitter: 6 seconds or less…tweeting chats …
Today, we’re introducing Vine: a mobile service that lets you capture and share short looping videos. Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity. Now that you can easily capture motion and sound, we look forward to seeing what you create.
You can read more about the app on the Vine blog. Vine is currently available on the iPhone and iPod touch. You can download it for free from the App Store. We’re working now to bring it to other platforms, so stay tuned for that.
Valentine’s Day, London: Sounds like a nice combination. 🙂 Valentine’s Day in London – now.
Milky Way, technology, Maria Popova, @brainpicker: Astounding zoomable tour of the center of the Milky Way galaxy!
This image is a 1 billion pixel RVB mosaic of the galactic center region (340 millions pixels in each R,V and B color). It shows the region spanning from Sagittarius (with the Milky Way center and M8/M20 area on the left) to Scorpius (with colorful Antares and Rho Ophiuchus region on the right) and cat paw nebula (red nebula at the bottom). This mosaic was assembled from 52 different sky fields made from 1200 individual images and 200 hours total exposure time, final image size is 24000×14000 pixels. The images were taken with a SBIG STL camera + Takahashi FSQ106Ed f/3.6 telescope and NJP160 mount from the clear skies of ESO Paranal Observatory in Chile. This mosaic is one of the three parts of the ESO Gigagalaxy Zoom project together with this incredible whole sky mosaic image by ESO/S.Brunier and this fantastic ESO mosaic image of the Lagoon nebula region.
via Galactic Center Mosaic by Stéphane Guisard/ESO, Los Cielos de Chile.
Edith Wharton, Birthday: 11 Reasons The Author Was A Badass. 🙂
The phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” might be about Edith Wharton’s family.
Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones. Her family, the Joneses, were a prominent, wealthy New York family. Some historians believe that this idiom may have been originally referring to her family (though there are also other guesses at to where it came from). (This image is Edith Wharton as a child. What a cutie).
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She designed and built her own home.
She was great at garden designing and interior designing. She designed and built her home ‘The Mount,’ which is seriously one of the most beautiful buildings we’ve ever seen. Lots of weddings are now held there (hopefully one day that will include mine).
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She was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize!
via Edith Wharton Birthday: 11 Reasons The Author Was A Badass.
icons, American products, Made In The U.S.:
Over the past couple of decades, a number of brands have outsourced the production of some of America’s most iconic products to cut down on manufacturing costs. Even America’s greatest past time, baseball, is played with balls stitched together in Costa Rica.
via 12 Iconic American Products That Are No Longer Made In The U.S..
Michael R. Bloomberg, New York City, Sandy:
There are no panaceas or magic bullets. No matter what we do: the tides will continue to come in, and so we have to make our city more resilient in other ways, especially when it comes to our critical infrastructure. New Yorkers have never been shy about taking on big challenges, and taking our destiny into our own hands. I have every confidence that by confronting this challenge head on we will succeed, just as we have so many times before. There is no storm, no fire, no terrorist act, that can destroy the spirit of our city, and keep us from looking forward, envisioning a better tomorrow, and bringing it to life.via Michael R. Bloomberg: Reshaping New York Citys Future After Sandy.
Out Of Sight (and Outside The Law), Sebstian Junger: Really good speaker …
Whether covering ground wars, drug wars, or a war on terror, journalists undertake enormous risks to uphold Americans’ right to know what’s done in the name of democracy, revealing the human costs and truths veiled in secrecy. Sebastian Junger (Which Way Is The Front Line From Here?), Jeremy Scahill (Dirty Wars), Peter Bergen (MANHUNT), Shaul Schwarz (Narco Cultura), James Ball (We Steal Secrets), and moderator Stephen Engelberg (ProPublica) walk us through the war zones and the corridors of power.
via Out Of Sight (and Outside The Law) – Festival Program | Sundance Institute.
Dennard's Clipping Service 