Duty and Desire

"Who would not choose red and gold over  black and a silly old wig?" Trenholme offered. "Wickham knows, as does any man, that the ladies go faint with admiration over a uniform. Is that not true, Miss Avery?" he quizzed.

Miss Avery colored alarmingly as the attention of the table centered upon her. She looked helplessly at her brother, whose only encouragement was an irritated frown. "A u-uniform is n-nice," she stuttered miserably.

"Nice? Bella!" Manning's withering tone caused Darcy to wince while the others became fascinated with their silver service or wineglasses. "Good Lord, speak up and stop st---!"

"But she has spoken, my lord, and much to the point!" Lady Felicia smiled gently into the swimming eyes of the very young lady. "A uniform is nice." She faced the others, arching one brow. "It makes a plain man smart; a dull man intelligent; and a timid man brave with merely putting it on-- at least, in his own estimation!"A chorus of masculine denials mixed with chuckles raised the spirits of the hapless Miss Avery.

"And what will a uniform do for a more talented man, Lady Felicia?" asked Lady Sayre. "I vow, it is more than 'nice' work then."

"Oh, my dear Lady Sayre." Lady Felicia looked to her hostess. "It is well known that a uniform makes a smart man dashing; an intelligent man a genius; and a brave man a hero in no more time than it takes his batman to brush it and ease him into it." A new howl went up from the gentlemen, and the ladies were forced to resort to their fans. Darcy smiled approvingly. Her rescue of Miss Avery by the turning of Manning's embarrassing treatment of his sister into a clever conceit was well and compassionately done.

-- Pamela Aidan, Duty and Desire (the second book of her Darcy series), p. 122-123

The Faerie Queene

This is the summary my Renaissance Lit class was given for Cantos 7 and 8 from Book 3. Don't they make you want to read it?

"These cantos treat the adventures of the true and false Florimells. Always in flight, Florimell narrowly escapes a series of disasters. The son of a witch in whose cottage she takes refuge is smitten with passion for her; when she escapes in the night the witch sends a hyena 'that feeds on women's flesh' to capture or kill her. To escape him she leaps into the boat of an aged fisherman who promptly tries to rape her; she is saved by the god Proteus, who carries her off to his bower in the sea and presses his suit to her continually, in every shape and guise. Meantime, to save her pining son from death, the witch creates for him a false Florimell made of snow but he loses her quickly to the braggart knight Braggadochio, who himself loses her to a stranger knight. Meanwhile, Sir Satyrane (1.6) tames the hyena and rescues the Squire of Dames (a knight whose name reflects his promiscuity) from the giantess Argante, a figure of unnatural lust in female form. These two knights meet up wiht a third, Paridell, and all seek shelter from a sudden thunderstorm in Malbecco's castle."

I'm not making this up. Honestly.

My Girlfriend

I got a new girlfriend, though I don't like girls.
I haven't much money, but I buy her pearls.

I'm always embarrassed, but I give her flowers,
and talk on the phone every evening for hours.

We go to the movies, and she gets to pick.
She wants to hold hands, though it makes me feel sick.

She likes when I smell good, so I take a bath.
I do what she asks me, and she does my math.

--Kenn Nesbitt

Anna Karenina

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."

-- W.B. Yeats

Thus begins the introduction to my very favorite translation of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The quote is, in my opinion, an apt one. Most people who have studied this particular work are of the opinion that Tolstoy wrote himself into it as Levin, a man who has every reason to be happy yet finds himself deeply, perhaps even suicidally, unhappy. This struggle is, of course, the mirror image of Anna herself, the woman who has many reasons to be unhappy yet is happy until she meets a man (not her husband) who has fallen for her.

This novel is a beautiful one, and if you have not taken the time to familiarize yourself with the Russian classics, this is a great beginning. Don't worry; as the back cover says, this translation is "neither musty, nor overly modernized, nor primly recast as a Victorian landscape" (Caryl Emerson).

So, basically, what I'm saying is: "Read it. Read it now."

A Preview

Dr. Seuss Got It from Shakespeare

The work: Troilus and Cressida. Do you recognize it?

Hector: O, like a book of sport thou'lt read me o'er;
But there's more in me than thou understand'st.
Why dost thou so oppress me with thine eye?

Achilles: Tell me, you heavens, in which part of his body
Shall  destroy him, whether there, or there or there?
That I may give the local wound a name
And make distinct the very breach whereout
Hector's great spirit flew. Answer me, heavens!

Hector: It would discredit the blest gods, proud man,
To answer such a question. Stand again.
Think'st thou to catch my life so pleasantly
As to prenominate in nice conjecture
Where thou wilt hit me dead?

Achilles: I tell thee, yea.

Hector: Wert thou the oracle to tell me so,
I'd not believe thee. Henceforth guard thee well;
For I'll not kill thee there, nor there, nor there;
But, by the forge that stithied Mars his helm,
I'll kill thee everywhere, yea, o'er and o'er.

_

Sound familiar?

(from Shakespeare's T&C, p. 120: here)