Sunday's news jumble

The Montreal Gazette steps forward as a counsel for the defense of Haworth after the unscrupulous attack of the Guardian's public prosecutor some days ago:

Cities should take advantage of their literary heritage
With walking tours and on-site readings, urban areas can celebrate local booksWhen I drove on the narrow roads of England's Yorkshire region on a winter night, I recalled a BBC television production of Wuthering Heights that I had watched long ago. I headed to Haworth Village, home of the Bronte sisters. As the car rattled in the gusty wind, I remembered the scene of Heathcliff's nighttime return to his childhood home for revenge.

Regrettably the rest of the article is just for subscribers, but it looks promising.

In The Peninsula (a Qatar newspaper) we read about a school quiz on English and Literature. One of the teams were the Brontë sisters no less!

There were six teams of senior students each consisting of six members with shingles commemorating Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Agatha Cristie, Bronte Sisters, Sarojini Naidu and Tagore. (...) Kimberly Fernandez, Neethu Shaji, Olympia Dutta, Jeslyn Elizabeth James, Geena Mary Felix and Sruthi Sreedhar were the "Bronte Sisters" members.

But who were the winners?

In The New Zealand Herald, Peter Griffin reviews Brain Age on his technology column, the computer game that we presented before.

On first look I wasn't too impressed, but the game becomes addictive in the way Sudoku is (...) Brain Age is a series of mini-games designed to sharpen your mind. (...) There are handwriting exercises that require you to write on the DS' screen and you'll also be required to read extracts from literary greats such as Joseph Conrad and Charlotte Bronte into the DS' speaker.

In The Greenwich Time, another columnist, David Podgurski writes about how love itself, in literature and life - indeed, often in the lives of writers - can so easily border upon madness.

Certainly the classic example is Heathcliff and Cathy in "Wuthering Heights," where the emotional force of the passion breaks the frame of the story (and the participants themselves). By "breaks the frame" I mean that these two characters, like Romeo and Juliet, the other classic example in English lit, seem to exist apart from their story now and survive as cultural exemplars. In the plot, Heathcliff survives the relationship, but Cathy does not, so surely it's a cliche to say that love like that can't last, at least, not in life (and in books, either?). Most of us think that's the allure, the poignance of such tales, of the Romeo and Juliet myth as well - and its status is mythic - that young love can so overwhelm that lives are lost.

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