Coloured Chalk

The Irish Times asks John Connolly about the one book he would like to see everybody in the world read. He chooses Alexandre Dumas's Les Trois Mousquetaires but:

I have a deep and abiding affection for this book, which I feel is possibly the greatest adventure novel ever written. It features whenever I’m asked to give a list of my five favourite novels, along with Bleak House, The Good Soldier, Wuthering Heights and, cheating slightly, the Jeeves-and-Wooster stories of PG Wodehouse, without which no desert-island exile would be tolerable.

The Hindu reviews a favourite of BrontëBlog's, Jude Morgan's The Taste of Sorrow:

The Taste of Sorrow is a historical novel. Read it not to know the biography of the Bronte sisters, but to glean a whole mine of psychological insights.(Read more) (...)
There are matters the novel touches on, leaving you to explore more fully in your own imagination. The father's great pride in his son, for instance, and his relative neglect of his daughters; the bitter disappointment that Branwell brings to the family as he squanders his talents and falls prey to addiction. Much to the dismay of the Pastor-father, Branwell oversteps the bounds of Victorian sexual morality, something his sisters would dare in their novels, never in real life.There are interesting insights on freedom and love here. With a houseful of sisters who have never been in love with a flesh-and-blood man, Branwell feels cocksure that none of them will understand him. What he does not realise is that Charlotte, with whom he had been strongly bonded as a child, had continued to mirror his life into adulthood. Only, with greater reverence for the married bond, she had felt compelled to restrain herself, hold back, and put her emotions on a leash.
The Taste of Sorrow is a novel about novelists. Even William Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell feature briefly in it. But it's a saga of love, domesticity and struggle, one that will appeal even to that rare reader of English literature who has never before heard the name Brontë. (Katharine Varghese)

The New York Times' The 6th Floor magazine asked their staff about what they are reading, watching or listening to this weekend:

Finishing the Charlotte Brontë novel “Villette,” to get in the proper mood for next week’s opening of “Jane Eyre.” (Rachel Nolan)

On the same magazine, Sam Anderson chooses a quote from Charlotte Brontë's Roe Head Journal as the best quote/sentence of the week:

C. “There is only one person in this house worthy of being liked — also another who seems a rosy sugar-plum but I know her to be coloured chalk.” (Charlotte Brontë)
And C, a delightfully nasty note written by a young Charlotte Brontë inside the front cover of one of her schoolbooks, when she was unhappy and far from home: “There is only one person in this house worthy of being liked — also another who seems a rosy sugar-plum, but I know her to be colored chalk.” (The phrase “coloured chalk” feels totally devastating in this sentence — it makes the word chalk sound, somehow, like the world’s biggest insult.) And the winner is: Brontë. At the end of the day, anyone can write a counterintuitive aphorism (e.g., “the purest flavor in the world is mud”). And the more I read sentence C, the more affection I have for it: it’s full of such lived human drama. It gets an extra bonus, probably, because I saw it in person this week at the Morgan Library’s exhibit on diaries, and Brontë’s handwriting is magical: tiny and precise, with gorgeously architectural lowercase g’s. (I want a shirt covered with them.) Plus it’s marginalia, which I’ve been thinking about lately. So congratulations to Charlotte Brontë, first-ever winner of Shamblanderson’s Sentence of the Week Contest. The prize is a year’s supply of rosy sugar-plums.

And the real estate section of the NYT mentions once again Villa Charlotte Brontë in the Bronx:

Just a few doors down, at No. 2501 Palisade Avenue, is River Terrace’s stylistic polar opposite: the 17-unit stucco confection called Villa Charlotte Brontë. Elevated ramps and crisscrossing staircases girdle the 1926 complex, where no two units are alike.
It was designed by Robert W. Gardner, who trained with Calvert Vaux, a designer of Central Park, and its position, tucked low into a hill, seems to embrace the naturalistic Vaux agenda.
The idiosyncratic Charlotte Brontë has an almost mystical reputation in Riverdale’s social circles, said Stephen Seltzer, a resident.
In 2009 Mr. Seltzer, a high-school English teacher, and his wife, Ambre Nerinck-Seltzer, a lawyer, bought a three-level 2,100-square-foot unit in the Charlotte Brontë. The price was $880,000, according to city records.
Mr. Seltzer is so smitten with his Shangri-La on the Hudson that he professes no shred of envy for even the swankiest buildings in Manhattan. “We might,” he said, “even have more charm than the Dakota.” (C.J. Hughes)

The Authors Examiner interviews Sara J. Henry:

Some of my primary influences were John D. MacDonald, author of the Travis McGee series I loved, and Mary Stewart, who popularized romantic suspense with books such as Nine Coaches Waiting, This Rough Magic, and The Ivy Tree. And I’m sure there’s some influence from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and the tightly paced suspense novels of Charlotte Armstrong. (Paige Crutcher)

And another author, Alessia Gazzola on Mangialibri:

La costellazione del thriller americano, nelle sue declinazioni che vanno da James Ellroy a Patricia Cornwell, è tra le tue letture preferite o ritieni che la tua formazione, diciamo così, “letteraria” sia attribuibile ad altre letture (magari italiane)?
In realtà no, non li riconosco come letture preferite. Amo molto i libri di Murakami Haruki, di Banana Yoshimoto, di Marcela Serrano, i romanzi di Jane Austen e Cime tempestose di Emily Brontë. (Angelo Piero Cappelo) (Translation)

More on the Sebastian Faulks hero/heroine debate. Janice Turner mentions it in The Times:

Faulks pompously explained that in his programme on heroes, he had included Becky Sharp as the sole woman, because by his definition a “hero” must be motivated by more than just finding love. This was why Jane Eyre, merely a heroine, was not included.

And La Nación (Argentina) echoes the controversy too:

La polémica se desató cuando el escritor Sebastian Faulks dijo que por todo esto Jane Eyre, protagonista del libro de Charlotte Brontë, es considerada "una heroína". Becky Sharp -una trepadora y manipuladora- puede ser considerada la antiheroína de Vanity Fair, de Thackeray, pero Faulks cree que la forma en la que imprime su personalidad sobre la sociedad opresiva y su rechazo a dejar que sus sentimientos por un hombre sean la prioridad conforman un tipo de heroísmo universal no teñido por el género. Y la llama, a diferencia de a Eyre, un "héroe".
La opinión pública se dividió entre Eyristas y Sharpistas. Unos pocos dijeron que Jane Eyre también es un héroe universal: al abandonar a su pretendiente cuando se entera de que él está casado con una loca encerrada en el altillo, desafía sus propios deseos en nombre de sus principios, con lo cual son éstos el eje de su vida y no un hombre. (Juana Libedinsky) (Translation)

The Brooklyn Rail reviews the recent performances at The Kitchen (New York) of the dance piece Medium (M), also known as (M)imosa, the latest piece in the multipart work Twenty Looks, or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church by Trajall Harrell. Apparently one of the dancers, Cecilia Bengoelea, makes a sort of Kate Bush impersonation:

The evening concludes with final solo sets from all of the performers, including [Marlene] Freitas’s eerily faithful rendition of Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” and Bengolea’s cover of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights,” both of which undoubtedly steal the stage. (Christine Hou)

Diario Provincia (Mexico) covers a recent talk by José Antonio Valdés Peña about Luis Buñuel. According to the article the Spanish director had regrets about his free adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Abismos de Pasión:

Una de las [novelas] que más le apasionaron fue Cumbres borrascosas, de Emily Brontë que llevó a la pantalla grande en 1954 bajo el título de “Abismos de pasión”, la cual, según Valdés Peña, se arrepintió de haber filmado. (Translation)

Le Monde (France) reviews the film Winter's Bone and begins the article with an unexpected Brontë reference:

Aux côtés de la Belle qui s'en fut vivre avec la Bête et de Jane Eyre : voilà la place de Ree Dolly, l'héroïne de Winter's Bone. (Thomas Sotinel) (Translation)

Sharon Schmidt Tyler reflects on Associated Content that Jane Eyre 1983 is the best Brontë adaptation ever; TravelAgent Central announces one of the Wayfarers trips to Brontë country; alita.reads. thinks that Do The Right Thing by The Dudes is a good soundtrack for Jane Eyre, a book that Walk on a Dream (in Spanish) recommends; Suite101 reviews Juliet Gael's Romancing Miss Brontë; Iliad posts about Wuthering Heights; Zeit (Germany) has some nice pictures of the KWVR train line (and a mention of course to Haworth).

Finally, coquiero posts on Daily Kos: Books That Changed My Life a very nice personal vindication of Jane Eyre.

Categories: Books, Brontëites, Haworth, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Wuthering Heights