Brontë, Villette and Heathcliff meets Conan

Some Brontë mentions on the net today.

A new tidbit about the Brontë biopic directed by Angela Workman appears in the New Zealand's Herald. It's an article about Emily Barclay, our new Anne Brontë:

While Barclay moved to Sydney last year, she is currently in the UK filming Bronte, in which she plays the youngest Bronte sister, Anne, alongside Michelle Williams and Nathalie Press. She could not be reached for comment. (Michelle Coursey)

Probably you have read already the shocking news about the French Prime Minister, Guy Mollet, offering to British Prime Minister Anthony Eden of a formal union between the UK and France in 1956. Libby Purves writes in The Times about French and English differences and Villette is taken as an example:

Years later, reading Charlotte Brontë’s Villette about a 19th-century school in France, I immediately recognised the culture of “surveillance” in France and the contrast with the English dependence on internalised self-discipline and being “put on one’s honour”. To this day I note the after-effects of “surveillance” whenever I see how French schoolchildren behave in museums when their minders aren’t looking.

Not only Villette but classics in general is what this article in the Christian Science Monitor vindicates. The absence of classics in teen-reading lists and libraries reminds us the recent discussion about libraries turning into Wal-Marts.

"Do you want chick lit, a page-turner, or a romance?" the saleswoman asked. Oh, how I wish she had asked, "Do you want Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, or the latest translation of 'The Iliad'?" I felt as though I were at Wal-Mart instead of the bookstore, and that prompted me to wonder what other adults were reading. I asked around at the bookstore's cafe. Nobody had read Dickens since college and even then it was a chore. "I hated all that detail," one woman complained. (Janine Wood)

And now for our weirdo selection of the day:

This article on using ChikaZune's graphics to chat (we try to be serious, but sometimes it's really hard) uses a Monty Python reference:

It’s not Jane Eyre in semaphore, but it’s pretty darn close.

Well... no so close, it was Wuthering Heights in semaphore as a matter of fact.

But the best reference of the day, of the week, and we rather thing that the best reference in BrontëBlog's short history is this review of a newly edited Conan Comic for the Centennial of its creator, Robert E. Howard:

When Howard created Conan, he created more than a throwaway, flavor-of-the-month pulp hero. He somehow dragged a dark and brooding archetype out of his subconscious, part Heathcliff, part Hektor, yet all American in his independence. (Geoff Hoppe on ComicBookBin)

Heathcliff, a sword & sorcery hero... that was really unexpected.

Categories: In the News,Movies-DVD-TV,Villette,Weirdo