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Thursday, April 11, 2013

Thursday, April 11, 2013 8:56 am by Cristina in , , , , ,    No comments
The Yorkshire Post reports that Kate Bush as received a CBE. The headline reads:
Wuthering Heights of generosity as Kate Bush dedicates CBE to family
The Daily Mail also uses a Wuthering Heights reference for its headline:
Heathcliff, it's me getting my CBE: Kate Bush at Windsor Castle
Many more news outlets are reporting the news, though.

Speaking of music, Pretty Much Amazing reviews James Blake's album Overgrown. Here's the story behind the name:
The title of the album comes from the Emily Dickinson poem, “All overgrown by cunning moss.”  It’s a poem about a bird stuck in a cage watching the moss grow higher around it.  The bird then leaves in the winter and never returns to its nest.  Dickinson wrote these words for Charlotte Brontë, a writer that Dickinson loved but had since lost.  The poem is not only about the author’s admiration for Bronte, but it is also about the impermanence of life and the uncertainty as to where exactly one will be when the moss starts to become overgrown.  These sentiments are a part Blake’s album. (Drew Malmuth)
Writer/artist Barbara Earl Thomas is interviewed by Crosscut:
Do you have a book or two that you’ve re-read over the years?I re-read Jane Eyre all the time. I love it when the plain girl gets the rich crazy guy and they live happily ever after in a landscape full of fog. (Valerie Easton)
Jane Eyre is indeed on The National's list of '50 novels you should have read'.
Jane Eyre (1847), Charlotte Brontë
WHY Worth it just for the moody Mr Rochester, who is second only to Emily Brontë's Healthcliff in the Byronic hero stakes.
WHAT TO KNOW The young orphan Jane is sent to live with her wicked aunt, then to the notorious Lowood School (based on a real school in Yorkshire the novelist sisters went to) that is even worse than her aunt's home. Things improve once she gets a job as a governess at Thornfield Hall and meets the grumpy Mr Rochester. The rest, dear reader, is history...
HOW TO FAKE IT "This is the first feminist novel. When she wrote that 'women feel just as men feel' and talked about their need for intellectual stimulation and suffering from restraint, Charlotte Brontë opened up a whole new world." [...]
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys
WHY The best title ever.
WHAT TO KNOW A prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, it tells the story of the first Mrs Rochester, who is the madwoman in the attic of the Brontë novel. Here though, Antoinette Mason is a lively, vulnerable and real woman, not just some lunatic.
HOW TO FAKE IT "Such a great post-colonial novel."

Wuthering Heights (1846), Emily Brontë
WHY Passionate love, betrayal, lust and revenge intertwined with the cruel landscape and harsh climate of the north of England create one of the most memorable love stories ever written.
WHAT TO KNOW A Yorkshire spinster had the imagination to come up with one of the cruellest and most passionate novels of all time. A story that stays with you for life and makes you wonder if you have ever really been in love.
HOW TO FAKE IT "The question of whether Heathcliff is a hero or a villain is so last week. Clearly he is a hero." (Helena Frith Powell, Rick Arthur and Rupert Wright)
The Daily News (Sri Lanka) discusses poetry.
But with Emily Brontë we find another tendency developing. She actually addresses the imagination directly in her poem 'To Imagination": "Thy kind voice calls me back again O my true friend, I am not lone While thou canst speak with such a tone....But thou art ever there to bring The hovering visions back...And call a lovelier life from death, And whisper with a voice divine Of real worlds as bright as thine...With never failing thankfulness I welcome thee, benignant power, Sure solacer of human care And brighter hope when hope despairs."
This is not a merely poetic personification of the imagination. It is a recognition of it as something that is not only within but external to and greater than the poet. It is reminiscent of how Wordsworth speaks of nature. Imagination here is not just a faculty of the mind, it has become a presence or a force that, like nature for Wordsworth, exerts an influence on the poet who, in turn, becomes its devotee. The question is whether this elevated notion of the imagination is unique to Brontë. Seemingly so in her own century, for other poets of the nineteenth speak of the imagination mainly by implication and in reference to the poetic effects or creative abilities it facilitates. Thus, for example, Keats' references to gusto and negative capability and Hopkins' to inscape and instress. It is in the twentieth century that we find a true successor to Brontë in this virtually devotional attitude to the imagination. It is a poet whom, like Brontë, we have already discussed in this series, namely Wallace Stevens. [...]
But Stevens would hardly acknowledge the influences of Coleridge or Marvell. As he says elsewhere: "While I come down from the past, the past is my own and not something marked Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc...I know of no one who has been particularly important to me. My reality - imagination complex is entirely my own even though I see it in others." What he does not see, however, in thus disclaiming the influence of the past is his affinity to Emily Brontë. This is surely evident from such statements as these: "The imagination is one of the forces of nature" and "Imagination is the next great power to faith." In fact, in the poem from which we have just quoted, he goes on: "We say God and the imagination are one...How high that highest candle lights the dark. Out of this same mind, out of the central mind, We make a dwelling in the evening air. In which being there together is enough." Like Brontë Stevens speaks of the imagination as Wordsworth does of nature. Unlike Brontë he says explicitly what she had only been implying - that the imagination has come to stand in the place of divinity. [...]
It is Stevens' 'angel of reality' that he invokes in the poem 'Angel Surrrounded By Paysans (Peasants)':
"I am the angel of reality, seen for a moment standing at the door...I am the necessary angel of earth, Since in my sight you see the earth again, Cleared of its stiff and stubborn man-locked set...Am I not, Myself, only half a figure of a sort, A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in Apparels of such lightest look that a turn Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone."
Thus we see that with Stevens, following on from Brontë, the Coleridgian concept of the imagination is extended from that of an artistically functional agency to that of a religiously mediatory one. What matters, however, is whether the poetry produced through the agency of the latter fulfils the standards established by the former. (Priya David)
Paris Normandie (France) interviews actress Emmanuelle Devos.
C’était l’effet Gabriel Bryrne?
« Gabriel, il est beau, il est beau… c’est inimaginable. Il a une présence incroyable. Il a un truc romanesque, mystérieux… Il sort d’un roman d’Emilie Brontë. Il est très timide, réservé, et je pense qu’il avait très peur des scènes de baisers. Il s’est détendu après. » (Geneviève Cheval) (Translation)
Artechock shares in German a 2012 interview with Andrea Arnold. Leituras Brontëanas is thrilled to find out that there will soon be a new Portuguese translation of Jane Eyre.

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