Speed-reading and bad spelling

An initial note on just how important it is to spell things properly in order to have at least a bit of credibility. From Dominica News Online:

[Headline] Prevost proposes Jean Ryes Museum and Alice Wyllis Heritage Home on Fields Lane
UWP candidate for Roseau Central, Norris Prevost, at a community meeting in Fields Lane, Roseau on Saturday night pledged to give his full support to the owners of the Historic Heritage Building where Jean Ryes, one of Dominica's most renowned authors lived.
“My goal is to create jobs for Roseau. The establishing of a Jean Ryes Museum will bring tourists to Fields Lane. This will create permanent jobs and business opportunity,” Prevost said.
Jean Rhys was born in Roseau, Dominica on August 24, 1890. Her father, William Rees Williams, was a Welsh doctor and her mother, Minna Williams (Lockhart family), was a third-generation Dominican Creole of Scottish ancestry. Jean Rhys was educated at the Convent School and moved to England when she was sixteen. She is best known for her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, written as a "prequel" to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Rhys's writing often centers on the lives of displaced and disenfranchised women left to die at the whims of unfamiliar societies — echoing her own life experience. (Wikepedia).

Please note that this is a 'Press release from Office of Norris Prevost'. And it is both hilarious and awfully sad. We find remarkable how the correct wikipedia spelling doesn't seem to make them even want to check their own spelling. Not to mention the fact that they then spell wikipedia wrong too. And our conclusion is, if they can't be bothered to check a spelling, can they really be bothered to move ahead with this otherwise interesting initiative?

And Love Letters - a Boston Globe blog - has an often misspelled surname:

The letter consists of a well written apology about how badly I felt and how I would love to have a chance to fix it. A bit Jane Austin/ Wuthering Heights, but I believed what it said, it before email him. (Meredith Goldstein)

What worries us even more than poor Jane Austen's badly spelled name is the fact that 'a bit Jane Austin/ Wuthering Heights' is considered a good enough description. We don't know what it means at all since Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen are actually worlds apart.

A more apt mention - and correctly spelled too! - comes from The New York Times in an article on Paul Bishop's company, The New English:

For him [Paul Bishop], British design didn’t end in the 19th century. He says that the DNA of English style today is just as much about the Sex Pistols and Damien Hirst as it is about Wuthering Heights and J.M.W. Turner. (Arlene Hirst)

James Reaney has written a list of (alphabetical) thoughtful gifts for the London Free Press. And look at the Z:

Zamorna! And The House by the Churchyard is a play by my late father, Canadian poet and playwright James Crerar (Jamie) Reaney. Zamorna is about the Brontes. It is one of seven plays collected in Reaney Days in the West Room (Playwrights Canada Press), edited by an old friend, the Toronto actor, director and teacher David Ferry. The Essential James Reaney (The Porcupine's Quill) collects some of dad's best poems, as selected by Nova Scotia poet and professor Brian Bartlett. Visit playwrightscanada.com or call 416-703-0013 for the plays. $45. Visit porcupinesquill.ca or call 519-833-9158 for the poems. $13.

You can read a bit more about Zamorna! in this old post of ours.

The Guardian Book Blog discusses speed-reading:

The celebrated academic Harold Bloom is a lightning fast reader; blink and he's probably turned the page – twice. In his prime he could churn through 1,000 pages an hour, which means he could have digested Jane Eyre during his lunch break and still had time to chew through half of Ulysses before returning to classes. I don't know about you, but that makes me feel like a slow, slack-jawed simian struggling in the frontal-lobe department. (Evan Maloney)

It does indeed.

And now a bit of Twilight zone courtesy of Trading Markets.

The unexpected ways that teens can go from one book to another has been illustrated by the recent surge in interest in Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" at the Westport Library, Lewis noted.
The heroine of the "Twilight" series -- Bella -- reads Bronte with enthusiasm, so the girls who adore the character have been doing likewise.

GrownUps is giving away two copies of the Wuthering Heights 2009 DVD. You only have to email them answering the question 'Who adapted the classic novel for television?' before the competition closes on December 18th. (Bear in mind that the DVDs are probably Region 4, as GrownUps is a New Zealand-based website).

And of course you can also participate in our own contest! See here.

The Brussels Brontë Blog has a post on this year's Brussels Brontë Group Christmas Lunch which includes pictures and a very nice poem entitled 'Christmas Eve in Haworth' written by Sheila Fordham.

YouTube user xxashface has uploaded a school assignment interpreting Charlotte Brontë's poem 'On the Death of Anne Brontë'. Finally, Parenting-Journals puts Jane Eyre as an example to how to raise a child with good self-esteem.

Categories: Books, Brussels, Movies-DVD-TV, Poetry, Theatre, Weirdo, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights