Welcome to the Eyre Casino

Alice Jones in The Independent talks about Mumford and Sons' song 'The Enemy', specially written for Wuthering Heights 2011:

It's official: Marcus Mumford is the new Kate Bush. The London folkie has perhaps the most consecutive lines of anyone in Andrea Arnold's bleak and determinedly taciturn new version of Wuthering Heights. The film, out next month, closes with a song, "The Enemy”, specially written by Mumford and Sons after Arnold saw the band in concert and asked them to contribute. Coming after twoand- a-bit hours of spare dialogue, long silences and no soundtrack, Mumford's robust tones come as rather an anachronistic shock. Bush's histrionics would probably have been less jarring.

Thinking Faith didn't enjoy Wuthering Heights 2011 at the London Film Festival but the journalist from Sveriges Television at the Valladolid Film Festival (Seminci) did:

Vad har du mer gjort?
- Jag har sett ett par filmer på festivalen. Den ena är "Wuthering Heights", regisserad av Andrea Arnold.
Hur var den?
- Spännande och vacker, men lite pretto också... Men Andrea Arnold är en gedigen filmberättare. (Fredrik Sahlin) (Translation)

The film has also obtained some awards at the Seminci Festival: Best Photography for Robbie Ryan (who also was awarde in the latest Biennale) and a Special Mention to the young actors Shannon Beer & Solomon Glave for Wuthering Heights ex aequo with Thomas Goret for Le gamin au vélo.

The Toronto Star reviews Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant:

Her version of Napoleon has a bean shaped body, the Brontë sisters are boy mad for broody weirdoes, Batman is sexy and gay and her Mystery Solving Teens are the Hardy Boys if all they cared about was being jerks and smoking behind the rink. (Raju Mudhar)

GQ interviews the actress Kat Dennings:

"Maybe it's a movie thing? I want to see as many movies as I can and I covet a lot of weird influential movies. I have a lot of favorite authors...Douglas Adams and Charlotte Brontë and Richard Brautigan. I get obsessed. (Lauren Bans)

The writer Alice Hoffmann is another known Brontëite. The Independent asks her:

Choose a favourite author, and say why you admire her/him
Emily Brontë, and 'Wuthering Heights' is my favourite book. I think she was a psychological genius. If I had to choose someone living rather than someone dead, it would be Toni Morrison. I feel I could read just one sentence and know it was her. She creates a world in the most spectacular language that you know is hers. (Arifa Akbar)

And The Monitor (Ugandas) asks the writer Sneha Susan Shibu:

Which are the most memorable books you have read?
I still remember what I read in college, but besides that, Emile (sic) Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is an all time favourite. (Beatrice Lamwaka)

An upcoming exhibition on the Liverpool Tate following the history of Alice in Wonderland's illustrations is discussed in The Guardian:

The Tate show reveals a lineage of art works that have not been explored before: the long interest, especially in this country from the early Victorian era onwards, in graphic illustration. The future Lewis Carroll was born during the heyday of a form of British art that has been sidelined as minor for too long, and the story of Alice's rise to mythic status also belongs to this history of a great 19th-century enterprise: the picture book. Thomas Bewick, a pioneer of the form, is vividly remembered, for example, by Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847). In the novel, Jane is also a little girl at the beginning and we see her happily mind-voyaging through the pages of Bewick's History of British Birds: Jane confides to us how "Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting: as interesting as the tales Bessie sometimes narrated on winter evenings … and when, having brought her ironing-table to the nursery-hearth, she allowed us to sit about it, and … fed our eager attention with passages of love and adventure taken from old fairy tales and other ballads …"With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way."
Charles Dodgson was 15 when Brontë's novel exploded into Victorian consciousness, but he doesn't have to have known this book directly for us to imagine that he knew and even shared the heroine's feelings. When Alice thinks crossly, at the beginning of Wonderland, about her sister's reading matter, "What is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?" she speaks as a Victorian child from a similar background as young Charles Dodgson. (Marina Warner)

We sincerely hope that this Daniel Fisher's prophecy about Las Vegas (published in Forbes) doesnt't turn into reality... ever:

If these people thought a Charlotte Brontë-themed casino would make money, they’d build it  tomorrow.

Global Grind recommends an 'American classic':

We're keeping it digital today because we know how broke you are!
If you're bored and have a smartphone, why not get off Twitter and read a book? Specifically Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights which is available for a free download here.If you don't want to download it, then browse it online.
So, why read this American classic? For one, it's filled with romance, fashion and old school ideals, something we're sure you are curious about. Plus if you want to learn about suffering and being strong, this is the book for you.

The Southwestern Minnesota Independent has a curious way of contextualising a local children arts festival:

While they might not ever be a Tae Kwon Do champion, pop star or the next Emily Brontë, Michelangelo, Emily Dickinson, Charles Schulz or Fred Astaire, Westbrook-Walnut Grove students in grades K-6 got to imagine what it would be like as they explored a number of art forms at the 16th annual Elementary Prairie Winds Art Festival on Thursday in Walnut Grove. (Jenny Kirk)

Tim Robey in The Telegraph thinks that

With Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Steve McQueen’s Shame and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, 2011 is shaping up as a terrific year for British cinema.

Financial Times reviews The Gentry. Stories of the English by Adam Nicolson:

Similarly powerful are the love letters written in the 1810s by the feckless Harriet Capel to the dashing Baron Trip. Her passionate prose suddenly takes us round the corner from Jane Austen to Charlotte Brontë. Unfortunately for Harriet, Trip was showered packets of similar letters from other women, left them all unanswered, and eventually committed suicide. (Lucy Worsley)

Yestarday, October 28, took place the 21st annual Dead Writer’s Party in Fairbanks, Alaska. In the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner:

It’s not limited to strictly writers, though. Many people come as characters from the writer’s achievements. 
“One year, someone came dressed up as Bertha, the crazy wife from Jane Eyre,” said Christie Van Laningham, the public relations assistant for the University of Alaska Fairbanks English department. The department organizes the event each year. (Molly Lane)

University News defends the use of the Oxford comma:

The Oxford comma is essential to the sentence. When it is omitted it can lead to ambiguity within the sentence. For example, if I said: I love my sisters, Jane Eyre and Catherine Morland, there is ambiguity about the meaning of the sentence. Am I saying that my sisters are Jane Eyre and Catherine Morland? (Lindasy Adams)

Página 12 (Argentina) reviews Robert Goolrick's A Reliable Wife:

Bien comparada con la escritura de Brontë o Du Maurier, la historia de Una esposa de fiar se desliza en sentido contrario al amor. (Laura Galarza) (Translation)

Back to SaloLand, thinkerviews, Il Faro, Paperblog (in Italian) and Helsinborgs Dagblad (in Swedish) post about Jane Eyre 2011; ABC (Spain) presents the film which will be premiered in Spain next December 2; Paperblog reviews Agnes Grey (in Italian).