Friday news

In the news today:

David Noh, from GayCity News, talks about his European Vacation and tell us how Polly Teale's Jane Eyre doesn't fullfill his expectations:

Seemingly, no detail of the novel was left out of the epic adaptation of “Jane Eyre,” but I tired of the gambit of having the lunatic first Mrs. Rochester ever-present onstage—something director/adapter Polly Teale also employed in her superior “After Mrs. Rochester”—while Monica Dolan as Jane gave a manically busy performance that made Meryl Streep seem a minimalist.

Slate reviews the book Far From the Madding Gerund by Robert Lane Greene, and tells us how Emily Brontë's writings are used to dealt with the that/which touchy issue

Take, for example, their insistence on using "that" in restrictive clauses and "which" in nonrestrictive ones. (Say "The house that Jack built is nicer than the one I built," but "The house, which Jack built, is white.") If you substituted "which" for the "that" in the first example, the Elements of Style, Microsoft Word, and the Slate stylebook would flag your choice as an "error"—even though your point would be perfectly clear. Pullum argues that the prohibition is unnecessary. With the help of some electronic book searching, he shows that Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville and, yes, E.B. White all use "which" with restrictive clauses—often. (White, for example, does so in the second paragraph of Stuart Little.) If great writers break a rule frequently and naturally in writing, everyone else follows suit in speech, and doing so creates no confusion, that rule is a waste of everyone's time.

We read on Wands and Worlds how the fantasy books author O.R. Melling qualifies as Brontëite as:

There is a book “soul” behind many of her books; the book behind The Hunter’s Moon is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the book behind The Summer King is Wuthering Heights.

Categories: In_the_News, Theatre, Jane_Eyre, Brontëites