Golden medals and moors

Keighley News announces Unbound Moor, a symposium to take place in Haworth next October:

History, art and science will come together at a conference in Haworth to discuss aspects of Brontëland.
Unbounded Moor is a symposium on landscape and literature organised by Worth Valley photographer and artist Simon Warner.
The gathering on October 6 will be part of Ilkley Literature Festival, as well as being linked to the three-year Watershed Landscape project.
The project, a wide-ranging programme of activities promoting the South Pennines, has enlisted Simon as its latest artist-in-residence.
The keynote speaker at the symposium is poet Simon Armitage, whose poems were recently carved into stones at remote locations including Ilkley Moor.
Other speakers will look at humanistic geography, walking and writing, new methods of mapping wilderness and the history of settlement on Haworth Moor.
Artist Rebecca Chesney will describe her Brontë Weather Project, Hope’s Whisper, while painter and printmaker Carry Akroyd will document her work with the poetry of John Clare.
Tickets for the symposium cost £15 including lunch and admission to the Bronte Parsonage Museum. Contact jenna.holmes@bronte.org.uk or 01535 640188.

The Basingstoke Gazette recommends a visit to the British Library's exhibition Writing Britain:

But, my goodness, a bibliophile won’t know where to look first, or what to get most excited by. Handwritten drafts of so many canon works and classic novels abound, including Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, Eliot, Arnold, Orwell, Heaney, Wordsworth and Joyce.
You can read the corrections of Thomas Hardy on the preface of an 1874 proof of Far From the Madding Crowd, peer at Emily Brontë’s tiny writing in her personal notebook, or wonder at the immense brick that is George Eliot’s Middlemarch manuscript, such a neat artefact with very few visible corrections or alterations.  (Joanne Mace)

It seems that Yorkshire is doing quite well at the London Olympic Games according to The Globe and Mail:

So far, the white rose county, famous for terriers, pudding and the Brontë sisters, has won five gold, two silver and three bronze. That's more gold medals than Canada, which has one; Australia, four; Japan, two; South Africa, three; and Poland, two. In fact, on gold medals alone Yorkshire would rank 11th at the Games. (Paul Waldie)

Reuters complements this information:

[David] Wootton said the brooding landscape of hills, dales and moorland described by Emily Brontë in "Wuthering Heights", may sound a perfect setting for the gruelling training of the Brownlees or cyclist Lizzie Armitstead, but that most of the county's medal winners came from industrial towns.  (Paul Casciato)

And the Daily Express says:

In literature and poetry the county bequeathed the Brontë sisters (whose best-known creation was that other brooding Yorkshire archetype Heathcliff), Alan Bennett, Ted Hughes and WH Auden. (Fergus Kelly)

WQXR's Operavore lists operas set in England:

Wuthering Heights by Bernard Herrmann. In 1943, American composer Bernard Herrmann, best known for his Alfred Hitchcock scores, was working on the music for Robert Stevenson’s cinematic adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (which starred Orson Welles as Mr. Rochester) when his eye was caught by another Brontë sister: Emily. Tailoring her best-known novel to the operatic form—focusing on the first half of the novel and incorporating some of Emily’s poetry into the libretto—Herrmann sonically captures the Romanticism of the source material and captures the gloominess of the Yorkshire moors. It provides a compelling backdrop for a young, brooding man destroyed by love, as this excerpt from the Minnesota Opera and featuring soprano Sara Jakubiak reveals.

Broadway World announces that next September (Sept. 28 – Oct. 2) a new production of The Mystery of Irma Vep will open at the WaterTower Theatre at the Addison Theatre Centre (Addison, TX):

The Mystery of Irma Vep is a send-up of theatre (specifically Victorian melodramas and farce) and cinema that's filled with literary references (particularly to William Shakespeare , Oscar Wilde , and the Brontë sisters) and classic films like Wuthering Heights, Alfred Hitchcock 's Rebecca, The Mummy's Curse and more are satirized in this hysterical romp.

The Herald Sun tries to be funny here:

Jack White’s all female band were dressed in sultry hues of blue and the blues is what White peppered his Blunderbuss-heavy set with, ejaculating (it’s a Charlotte Brontë figure of speech, grow up the lot of you) like a schoolboy into pretty much every microphone and encouraging his band to break out into solos. (Mikey Cahill)

The New Zealand Listener announces that Jane Eyre 2011 will be screened at a local TV station:

Wednesday, August 15
Jane Eyre (Sky Movies, Sky 020, 8.30pm). Oh Michael Fassbender, is there nothing you cannot do? He becomes Charlotte Brontë’s capricious, tortured Mr Rochester in this new adaptation and still manages to make him appealing. (He “pulls off the ultimate acting feat in such a much-played role: he makes his predecessors look like his understudies,” said our reviewer David Larsen.) And despite her ethereal looks, Mia Wasikowska does Brontë’s most true heroine justice. Director Carey Fukunaga (Sin Nombre) and screenwriter Moira Buffini make sure this is a gothic thriller (all harsh winter light and dark corridors), and Buffini takes the unusual step of beginning with Jane’s stay with St John Rivers and his sisters and telling the story in flashback. (Fiona Rae)

The film is reviewed on La Prune Blogueuse (in French).

It seems that the reviewer of the New Zealand Listener had some problems in the screening of Wuthering Heights 2011 at the New Zealand International Film Festival:

Greatest irritation: every single one of the handful of screenings I attended at the festival’s only multiplex venue had sound bleed-over from the theaters next door. In every single case, it was the sound of Bane beating the crap out of Batman. Wuthering Heights: desolate silence attends the moors, except for the sound of Bane, beating the crap out of Batman. (David Larsen and Hugh Lilly)

A.V. Club reviews the TV show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo:

Not since Wuthering Heights has there been a better battle of nature versus nurture in a popular art form. I exaggerate, of course, but the actually interesting parts of Honey Boo Boo come in the moments in which the vaudeville act performed by the Thompsons drop away and accidentally reveal some kernels of truth and humanity underneath. (Ryan McGee)

The Hindu reviews a local theatre play, The Green Zone by Aditya Sudarshan, performed in New Delhi:

Aditya Sudarshan’s The Green Room deals with the predicament of English-educated Indian artists in this country. Actors, directors and playwrights weaned on the Brontës and Browning, graduating from colleges boasting theatre clubs proficient in Moliere, Ibsen and Tennessee Williams. Steeped in inspiration that comes from the West, but living lives rooted in India and unsure how to define themselves. (Shonaly Muthalaly)

Racked discusses what your nail polish brand says about your personality (or something like it):

If you're an Essie girl: You can't go wrong with the basics. Although Essie has taken some forays into cool colors and topcoats, they like to stick with what works for them, and so do you. There's a reason that year in and year out their most popular color is the pale pink Ballet Slippers—it works. If you're an Essie girl, you're the kind of chick who reads lots of books but always goes back to Wuthering Heights. (Lilit Marcus)

Mass Musings interviews the author Jean Mckie-Sutton:

If you could dive into the pages of any book, which book would it be and what character would you be?
(...)The second character is Jane Eyre. The novel, written in 1874, was ahead of its time. Although Jane suffered oppression at a very young age, she develops into a strong individualist who values freedom and independence.

Mainzauber (in German), The 1000 Novels, W Duszy Ksiazek (in Polish), Tra le pagine di un libro, un gatto (in Italian), Classic is Our Contemporary and Girl with a Pen and a Dream review Wuthering Heights; Wuthering High posts several caps of Wuthering Heights 1967; Glencoe Public Library reviews The Flight of Gemma Hardy; Journal d'un Lectrice (in French) and In Which I Read Vintage Novels post about Jane Eyre; Hannah Grace has visited Haworth; The Briarfield Chronicles posts an interesting review of The Professor; TLC Book Tours is already announcing the October Book Tour of Tina Connolly's presenting Ironskin; A Trail of Books Left Behind reviews A Breath of Fresh Eyre.