Undying Life

The Telegraph and Argus reports that Wuthering Heights 2009 will be premiered in Bradford on August 25th before it is broadcast on TV:

A small-screen adaptation of Bronte classic Wuthering Heights will be unveiled at a preview to celebrate Bradford’s UNESCO City of Film status.
The two-part television drama was filmed at locations across the region including Oakwell Hall, Birstall, East Riddlesden Hall, Keighley, and vast areas of bleak, untouched Yorkshire moorland.
It will be shown to lucky ticket-holders at the National Media Museum on Tuesday, August 25, ahead of the rest of the country getting it on ITV1.
The drama is a Mammoth Screen production supported by Screen Yorkshire, the organisation that promotes film-making in the region, through its Production Fund.
Production company Mammoth Screen also filmed the critically-acclaimed drama series Lost in Austen in the region in 2007.
Hugo Heppell, head of production at Screen Yorkshire, said: “We’re delighted to have had another opportunity to work in partnership with Mammoth Screen so soon after the success of Lost in Austen, to produce this stunning interpretation of Wuthering Heights.
“We hope it will further cement Yorkshire’s reputation as the top destination in the UK for location drama, alongside other recent acclaimed productions such as Red Riding, Unforgiven and The Damned United.”
Michele Buck, of Mammoth Screen, said: “Together with the wonderful diversity of landscape and locations all within a reasonable travelling distance, that made it the natural home for filming our new adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
“Screen Yorkshire’s valuable investment and production support along with the fantastic crew and facilities in the region enabled us to deliver a production of which we are extremely proud.’’ Yorkshire and Humber minister Rosie Winterton MP said: “From the diversity of locations, to the wealth of talent and skills available and the excellent support from Screen Yorkshire, this proves our region really does have it all.’’ There are a limited number of tickets to the preview screening available from the museum box office.
The production will be broadcast on ITV on a date to be announced. (Tanya O'Rourke)

And the Guardian has picked Emily Brontë's No Coward Soul Is Mine as 'poem of the week'.

Charlotte Brontё described Emily as "a solitude-loving raven, no gentle dove". She had often experienced her sister's lack of gentleness, not least on the occasion when she discovered Emily's notebook of poems and verse fragments, and insisted they should be published. Emily was horrified by the idea. But the Haworth household was urgently in need of income, and eventually, uncharacteristically, Emily gave way.
Those poems, with a smaller group by Anne and Charlotte, were assembled into a collection, and published in 1846. Literature, the Victorian male establishment had decreed, was not the business of women, so the collection, prudently disguising the sisters' gender, was entitled The Poems of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The sisters themselves paid the publishers' bills. They sold a mere two copies, and had two reviews. Presentation copies were despatched to the leading poets of the day, including Wordsworth, but no word came back.
Emily Brontё's poems might be called elemental lyrics. The "epic poem" she had it in her to write turned out to be, of course, the novel Wuthering Heights, and she did not live to enjoy any maturer phase of development. She died at 30, and thus, like Keats and Shelley (and even, to a degree, Byron) left her successors with an unfinished legacy of influence. She too might have lived on to become a great power in Victorian poetry. The work is not faultless but it is gloriously free of the period's favourite faults – sentimentality, blandness, religiosity.
"No Coward Soul", this week's poem, epitomises the fierce, almost biblical authority of her tone, and the generous sweep of her imagination. Its topography begins with the poet's soul and culminates in "universes" – a wonderfully unexpected plural.
A super-Protestant sense of the "spirit within" informs the vision. The Deity inhabits the poet, and is not to be found in feeble religious "creeds". Her claim goes even farther: in stanza two, she seems to construe God as an ally, who provides potency in return for her soul's hospitality. Is "Undying Life" (line eight) a term of address, or a reference to the speaker? The punctuation invites us to take it both ways.
The poet employs her quatrain form not for a simple song of praise, but to assert a balance of power, an exchange between equals. Perhaps it's significant that this is one of the last poems she wrote before the creative upsurge of Wuthering Heights. She is praising an immortal deity, while preparing her own immortal life as a writer.
It's said that Emily Dickinson chose this poem to be read at her funeral. It's a pleasing thought. The two Emilys had a good deal in common: their solitude and independence, their hymn-like metres, the crystalline directness of their language, the art of thinking big on a miniature scale.
There are interesting formal features to this poem; most obviously, the alternating tetrameter/pentameter pattern of the quatrain. But look also at the running-on of stanza three into four. This technique, unusual then, shows a bold approach to poetic syntax.
The massing of verbs in the last two lines of stanza fives is also bold. The word order in the last line is not cumulative, as might be expected, but an undulation, suggesting a dynamic, evolutionary creative process. The spirit has to "dissolve" the life it acts upon before it becomes regenerative. By giving such importance to the terms "creates and rears" the poet suggests her deity is maternal as well as fatherly, enfolding, perhaps, the qualities of the mother she had lost in early childhood.
Poets like Emily Brontё, under-mothered, under-schooled, make their own nurturance. Her work variously calls on Imagination, Nature and God, infusing these forces with the surge of her own energy, bravery, honesty and need. So closely acquainted with death and loss, Emily Brontё can be almost terrifyingly on the side of life. (Carol Rumens)

The Philadelphia Examiner poses an interesting question:

Similarly, how do you convince a person he should be enraptured by reading King Lear or Wuthering Heights if he finds them boring or silly or perplexing instead? These reasons only convince people who already believe in the importance of literature. (Peter McEllhenney)

Perhaps having to 'convince' them rather defeats the purpose, though.

And we are perplexed by an article from the Huffington Post entitled 'In Search of Older Women Role Models'.

... I'm always scanning for older women I can look up to and emulate. [...]
Other women from history are inspirational: Margaret Sanger, for instance, who founded Planned Parenthood against great odds. Authors such as Edith Wharton or the Bronte sisters, photographer Margaret Bourke-White, artist Georgia O'Keeffe are all great role models. (Pamela Redmond Satran)

We do believe the purpose of the article is very well, but in our day and age considering the Brontë sisters - who died between the ages of 29 and 38 - 'older women' is rather strange to say the least. That is, unless you take the age they would have been nowadays.

On the blogosphere, icon lovers have new icons inspired by Wuthering Heights 2009 on Vanilia & Chocolate and new icons inspired by Jane Eyre 2006 on Life is a Road. Ping's Notes has watched the latter and discusses 'the problem with Jane Eyre'. And finally Les lectures du mouton posts about Wuthering Heights in French.

EDIT: An alert from Plainview, Texas for tomorrow, August 18:

LITERARY LUNCH Bunch will meet at noon Aug. 18 at the Van Howeling Education Complex, Room 104. Books to be discussed over a light lunch will be "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln," by Doris Kearns Goodwin; "Outliers: The Story of Success," by Malcolm Gladwell; "Parallel Journeys," by Eleanor H. Ayer, Helen Waterford and Alfons Heck; "Wuthering Heights," by Emily Bronte; "Alice in Wonderland," by Lewis Carroll; and "New Moon," by Stephanie Myer. (Plainview Daily Herald)

Categories: Alert, Movies-DVD-TV, Poetry, Weirdo, Wuthering_Heights