Heathcliff goes to see the wizard, the magical wizard of Oz... and other news

The Sunday news brings together several topics: books reviewed, memorials, bad jokes, music and how the Wizard of Oz and Wuthering Heights are connected.

The Scotsman reports how the Muriel Spark Society is trying to erect a memorial to the recently deceased author and Brontë biographer:

A MEMORIAL to Muriel Spark is set to be placed at the top of Edinburgh's Royal Mile.

The Muriel Spark Society is to apply to the Scottish Writers' Museum for a stone slab to be placed in Makars' Court. The area near the top of The Mound holds memorials to Scotland's top writers. (Murdo MacLeod)

Miranda Seymour in The Times reviews Thomas Bewick: Nature's engraver. A life of Thomas Bewick by Jenny Uglow that we reported last week. The reviewer seems to agree with our post, because it begins with the same Jane Eyre quote that we used:

“Every picture told a story,” Jane Eyre confided to her readers in Charlotte Brontë’s best-known novel. “With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy.”

Brontë was drawing on her own memories of a North Country childhood, not far from where Thomas Bewick grew up in the 1750s. For Brontë, as for Jane Eyre, the charm of Bewick’s tiny, detailed engravings was in the fact that they showed recognisable scenes from everyday life. Children had, shortly before his day, learnt to read from sturdy primers in which the pictures offered moral lessons; Bewick, chiselling by candlelight on the hard end of a boxwood plank, showed them a world they knew and filled it with humour. And, because woodcuts were cheap, his books reached a wide audience. Farm labourers, as well as their employers, could thrill to the familiarity of his images of a fieldmouse or sparrow, and smile to see a man like themselves fording a river or peeing against a wall. This was popular art, at its best.

The Scotsman also talks about the cover that the Puppini Sisters have made of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights song that has appeared previously on this blog:

Indeed, their most memorable song is about as unlikely as you could get: a foot-tapping rendition of Kate Bush's 'Wuthering Heights'.
"That came about because we wanted a gig at this gay cabaret night in London," says Mullins. "It attracts a really discerning crowd, and their anthem is 'Wuthering Heights'. Marcella's dastardly husband called them and said: 'You've got to hear my wife's band. They do this amazing version of 'Wuthering Heights.' Which we didn't at the time! So we had two weeks to arrange it and practise it. (Alison Kerr)

Garry Bushell in his Bushell on a box section in The People makes this rather bad joke with Adèle's pronunciation in the the las episode of Jane Eyre:

ADELE referred to a ghost as "the goose" on Jane Eyre. Fancy being haunted by a bird! Who you gonna call? Goosebusters!

And finally, what you were waiting for. The Wizard of Oz meets Wuthering Heights:

My 11-year-old son, when I called home to tell him I was in Kansas asked, "Is it flat and gray and are you bored?" He drew this inspiration from the opening lines of L. Frank Baum's book, "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz." (...)

Kansas is not entirely flat -- half is rolling hills worthy of the Lake District in England. It is not dull -- at least not to a stranger. It looks nothing like the bleak horizon in the first 15 minutes of the movie, which was filmed inside the MGM studios in Culver City, Calif., possibly after the set director had read "Wuthering Heights." (Dennis Roody)

Categories: In_the_News, Books, Music, Wuthering_Heights, Weirdo