Live-Tweeting and Consumption

Let's first start with a Twitter project using Wuthering Heights. A live-tweeting read of Emily Brontë's novel:

Liveblogging some event is not real news, as a thousand bloggers have already set their minds to the Oscars, Super Bowl and Presidential election returns. Live-Tweeting however strikes me as just a touch more novel, and, hopefully, fun. In lieu of an event, though, I’ve decided to live-Tweet a book. I started Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights this week and have commenced the feed. My Twitter username is TheBrothersBell, a nod to the pseudonyms Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë used (watch those initials): Currer, Acton and Ellis Bell. I really have no idea how this little experiment will turn out, but at the very least it will serve as a decent journal of my thoughts as I go. My sincere hope is that others will join in the conversation and hopefully an informal book club will start. Check it out @TheBrothersBell or come check me out @ThePocketSquare.

By the way, a few days ago BrontëBlog also started posting on Twitter. Another curious Wuthering Heights net-experiment is this Haiku sequence found on Gnoetry Daily.

Queen Rania of Jordan reveals herself as a Brontëite (and Janeite, by the way) in this article published in The Times:

My favourite English book has always been Pride and Prejudice (with Wuthering Heights a close second). I could not imagine a world where Mr Darcy didn’t exist, or where Heathcliff was chirpy and cheery. Neither could the millions who have also been to Netherfield Park and back; this one thing we have in common. (...)
Imagine then, for a moment, you had never curled up by that fire or hid under those blankets. Imagine you had never been introduced to Mr Darcy or Heathcliff. Imagine your mind had never been taken beyond the boundaries of your brain. Imagine you couldn’t read. This is the case for 774m adults around the world. Those are the unlucky masses, 13 times the population of the UK, who have never had the tools to build a better life, taken refuge from reality, or time-travelled.

Probably Her Majesty will have no problem answering the following question published in today's Bookwise in The Times:

Can you name these characters associated with hunger? In which books do they appear and who are the authors?
1 Learning the man she was about to marry already had a wife, she fled over the moors. After three days, she was starving and begged bread from a farmer eating his lunch. Next day she begged for a mess of cold porridge in a pig trough — the pig had rejected it. She devoured it ravenously. (Barbra Hall)

Charles McGrath discusses in the New York Times writers still writing well into their seventies and eighties. And, of course, the Brontës are quoted as a counter-example (although Charlotte's death is postponed a few years):

The geriatric writer, the one who persists into the twilight years, is something new. There were always exceptions, of course — long-lived authors who defied the actuarial tables. Thomas Hardy, for example, wrote (poetry, not novels) well into his 80s and once modestly confided that he remained sexually active as an octogenarian. (He was too old-fashioned to think there might be a connection.) But by and large writing used to be a profession whose practitioners, the great ones especially, died relatively young. Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë both died in their 40s. Balzac, Proust and Dickens all checked out in their 50s — spent, if not burned out — and so did Shakespeare, come to think of it.

EDIT (April 26): The New York Times publishes a correction on the article:

An article last Sunday about writers’ twilight years misstated the ages of Charlotte Brontë and Flaubert when they died. Brontë was 38, not in her 40s. Flaubert was 58, not 68.

The Brontës happen to appear in a playword used by Hardeep Singh Kohli in The Scotsman:

I realise that at this point I am about to sound like an old man who is searching for his dentures, but stuff really isn't as well made as it used to be. Obviously we are all now consumers and consumers need to consume things. The more consumers consume then the greater the appetite for consumption. (I remember when consumption used to be merely a disease in a Brontë novel).

On the blogosphere, Morbid Anatomy recommends Villette, Naturally, Mary Beth and Time in a Bottle post about Wuthering Heights, Sue W Sews has visited the Brontë Parsonage and Danny North has made a series of promo pics of the singer Blue Roses (aka Laura Groves) in Top Withens. PearseLeaves has uploaded to YouTube his song 'She Only Likes Fictional Men' with funny references to Charlotte Brontë. Finally, the Peruvian radio programme (RPP) Letras en el Tiempo talks about Jane Eyre in El Mundo Interior de Charlotte Brontë. The Peruvian author Gaby Cevasco also gives her opinion (curiously, Jane Eyre is here retitled Jane Eyrer).

Categories: Jane Eyre, References, Websites, Wuthering Heights