Jane Austen stamps.

"So, placing the candle with great caution on a chair, she seized the key with a very tremulous hand and tried to turn it; but it resisted her utmost strength. Alarmed, but not discouraged, she tried it another way; a bolt flew, and she believed herself successful; but how strangely mysterious! The door was still immovable. She paused a moment in breathless wonder. The wind roared down the chimney, the rain beat in torrents against the windows, and everything seemed to speak the awfulness of her situation."

See the rest of the new stamps here.

"Everybody can't be taken to Everest."

Just my favorite part of my favorite movie, "My Dinner With Andre":

***

If you go way deep into the reviews of the movie at that Amazon link, above, you will find one written on August 16, 1999 by "a customer," which 125 of 129 people found "helpful." Let it be known that that "customer" is me. I wrote:

This is my favorite movie of all time. Period. You can sit in on the most interesting conversation ever and I've done it many times, every time finding myself thinking of different things, contemplating my own life and wondering about how crazy Andre actually is and how seriously to take his ideas about how human life came to an end a few decades ago, leaving us all robots in search of some twinge of real feeling. But the dvd is so bad I suspected it was a bootleg. When the camera switches from Andre to Wally the color completely changes. It's all grainy as if recorded on bad tape off a badly receiving tv. At one point a little white hair appears and vacillates on the lower screen for oh about 30 minutes. Are they kidding? There needs to be a new edition of this great movie, and those of us who bought this sham of a version should be allowed to trade it in. Here is a film critiquing the falseness of what our modern life has become: fine, but I don't need an object lesson costing me $20. Out of respect for the sublime Louis Malle, put out a new version!

Using the iPhone as an eBook with the app Stanza.

I'm a sucker for eBooks. I bought a Rocket Book years ago and, in the last year, a Kindle. (Here's a vlog I did comparing the 2 quasi-rectangular objects). And I haven't much liked either of them. I complained about the Kindle here, and I haven't touched it in months. I have to remember not to throw away hundreds of dollars on eBooks!

But now, here's an app -- Stanza -- that makes the iPhone work as an eBook. It's free, so if I don't like it and don't use it, I won't have to feel like a chump. Anyway, it works nicely. I've set my font size. The print is, of course, bright and clear. And you don't turn pages, you "cover flow" to the next page with a finger swipe.

The on-line libraries are fun to browse. For example, I can see a list of the most commonly assigned high school books. The top 5:

1. "Pride and Prejudice," by Jane Austen
2. "Jane Eyre," by Charlotte Bronte
3. "Wuthering Heights," by Emily Bronte
4. "Death Comes to the Archbishop," by Willa Cather
5. "The Awakening," by Kate Chopin

Notice anything? Has high school become Women's Studies? Well, to be fair, the next 20+ are by men: "Heart of Darkness," "The Divine Comedy," "Don Quixote," "A Tale of Two Cities," "Crime and Punishment," etc.

It's also interesting to see what books are most popular among those who download free digital books. From the Freebooks list, #1 is "The Art of War." Hmmm. The top 6 are by men, and #7 is good old "Pride and Prejudice." (When did that get to be the greatest novel ever written?) But generally, this list is pretty masculine, and I'm glad to see it's not all novels. Charles Darwin ranks high. So do Freud and Nietzsche. From the Project Gutenberg list, Albert Einstein is #1, followed by Confucius, "The Art of War" again, and Plato's "Republic." The Gutenberg crowd is really ambitious. What's the top novel for these folks? "Siddhartha"!

Anyway, highly recommended, if only for the fun of browsing lists of what other people read. But I've downloaded a few things to read in full.

Obama "had yet to learn to be laught at" and sometimes "a deeper shade of hauteur... overspread his features."

Maureen Dowd thinks Jane Austen's description of Mr. Darcy apply well to Barack Obama:

If Obama is Mr. Darcy, with “his pride, his abominable pride,” then America is Elizabeth Bennet, spirited, playful, democratic, financially strained, and caught up in certain prejudices....

In this political version of “Pride and Prejudice,” the prejudice is racial...

So the novelistic tension of the 2008 race is this: Can Obama overcome his pride and Hyde Park hauteur and win America over?

Can America overcome its prejudice to elect the first black president? And can it move past its biases to figure out if Obama’s supposed conceit is really just the protective shield and defense mechanism of someone who grew up half white and half black, a perpetual outsider whose father deserted him and whose mother, while loving, sometimes did so as well?

Can Miss Bennet teach Mr. Darcy to let down his guard, be more sportive, and laugh at himself?

If we're going to get all English proffy, heavy on the race-and-gender talk, shouldn't we critique Dowd for portraying the black man's pursuit of political office as a sexual exploit?

***

I like this little statement at the end of Dowd's column:

Frank Rich is off today.

Isn't Frank Rich always off?

A Christmas tree.

I'm terribly late this year buying a Christmas tree. I used to like to buy the tree the day after Thanksgiving, but that was back when I bought it early because I was going to toss it out the day after Christmas, when I would drive the family down to Florida to do a late Christmas with my mother. My mother died some years ago, so I've let the after Thanksgiving tree tradition slip away and become haphazard about how long to leave the tree up after Christmas. In my family growing up, we used to put up the tree on December 16th, which was my mother's birthday. (It's also Beethoven's birthday.) One thing that keeps me from thinking I'm horribly late with the tree this year is that it's still not the 16th.



This year, I want a small tree. Why do people want really big trees? It's as if they see the ceiling as a challenge, or they like to get up on a ladder. Nowadays, the trees are too perfect. I see everyone wants Fraser firs because Martha Stewart endorsed them. I always bypass the Frasers and go for the balsams, which I've always assumed people preferred. They are the ones that smell like Christmas trees. They are rejected now, I see, because the Frasers have a thick and bushy "perfect" silhouette. And they hold onto their needles. I'm opposed to that. First, part of the excitement is in the needle shedding. And part of the fun is the imperfection of the shape. You should have a lot of gaps to fill in with ornaments.



Back in the 1950s and 60s, nearly everyone got a balsam pine tree, and they were always asymmetrical and much sparser than today's trees. There was a lot of strategy to deciding which part to face toward the wall, and when you went to someone's house you could talk quite a bit about the shape of the tree. You got a really nice tree meant something back then, when a fair amount of hunting was involved. Now that they are all nice, I'm going to hunt for one that is as sparse and asymmetrical as I can find.



UPDATE: Sarah writes to say that December 16th is also Jane Austen's birthday. Excellent birthday! Too close to Christmas to be desirable (for those in the Christian tradition). My own birthday is also too close to Christmas, though, and the only famous person I share it with that I know of is Rush Limbaugh (same year too!). Well, let me check: I see I also share with Rob Zombie, Jeff Bezos, Howard Stern, Joe Frazier, Tex Ritter, and Jack London. A real guy day, apparently.



Speaking of birthdays: today is Frank Sinatra's birthday.



ANOTHER UPDATE: An emailer notes that "Wikipedia is awesome with dates" (an email subject line with a spammy tone to it). Here's December 16th, with more birthdays than the link I used, plus famous events and deaths that occurred on the day.



YET ANOTHER UPDATE: An emailer explains why the trees of today look too "perfect":

I used to grow Christmas trees in Canada -- Balsam fir, of course. The 'perfection' about which you speak is a result of pruning techniques rather than being related to species. As the tips of the branches are repeatedly cut with a machete-like tool two side branches grow out. The next year their tips are lopped, and it's lather-rinse-repeat until you've got one of those near-perfect cones ... which I detest.

So, basically, you're buying a big pruned shrub. It's just not tree-like anymore.



When I bought my house, there were immense, ball-shaped evergreens on either side of the front stoop. Despite all sorts of work that needed to be done on the house inside and out, we devoted many hours to cutting these things down and digging out the stumps. I find over-pruning quite ugly. I have a leafy hedge around my front yard, and I keep it trimmed with hand clippers. When people walk by and snicker about power shears, I have to struggle not to growl at them.

The professor and the calypso singer.

The NYT reports on Christopher Ricks, a 70-year-old poetry professor who's written a 500-page book analyzing the lyrics of Bob Dylan songs and is taking the whole mass of verbiage deadly seriously. He takes the concerts awfully seriously too:

Dylan concerts have a particular beauty and also a certain sadness, he explained, because Mr. Dylan himself is the one person who has to be at a Dylan concert and also the one person who can't go to a Dylan concert. "It's sad," he said, "the way it's sad that Jane Austen couldn't read a Jane Austen novel."

I thought a lot about the meaning of Dylan lyrics when I was a teenager. When I got a little older, I still liked the songs but thought a lot of the lyrics were chaotic ramblings that were often entrancing but had no real meaning to give up. But this professor was already an adult when Dylan arrived on the scene and he's been taking this stuff seriously since 1968, when some Smith College dinner party host imposed "Desolation Row" on him. The line "Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot/Fighting in the captain's tower/While calypso singers laugh at them" got his attention. He was already a poetry professor when that struck him as "wonderful" and "great." Interesting, I think, that the "calypso singers" were laughing at the fighting poets, isn't it? You'd think the poetry prof would identify with the poets, yet the poets appear as the object of ridicule. Perhaps the "calypso singer" would have seemed to be Dylan himself, laughing at the fighting of two serious poets, poets in a tower, and the 34-year-old poetry prof would have felt that he had been spending his life struggling over serious poetry in his ivory tower and that perhaps the "calypso singer" was laughing at him too. That's my speculation about how the old prof was seized by a deep passion for Dylan.



The book is called "Dylan's Visions of Sin."



UPDATE: And I bought the smitten professor's book. Borders had to pull the book out of the back room. "It just arrived two days ago." If I ran a bookstore, I'd make damn sure I knew what books were talked up in the morning paper and put it right out on the shelf where people will see it. Who knows how many shy people walk out without asking for a book they came in to buy? "Dylan's Visions of Sin"? I was almost too embarrassed to ask, for a number of reasons. (I'm still looking for the meaning of life in Dylan lyrics, like a teenager? Visions? Sin? It's all too pompous and ridiculous!) Now I know I sound like I'm making fun of the book throughout this post, so why did I buy it? This is a case where I can tell you the exact sentence I read that made me decide to read the book. It appears at the top of the second page, in the introductory chapter, as the author explains why he decided to use the seven deadly sins as the framework for his discussion of Dylan's lyrics. This is a paragraph of Ricks', with no quotation marks to show where the Dylan lyrics are:

She opened up a book of poems and handed it to me, written by an English poet from the fourteenth century: Handling Sin. Handling sin is for me the right handle to take hold of the bundle. My left hand waving free.

So that last sentence is what got me. I'm utterly charmed by the old professor talking about Dylan, seamlessly weaving in the words he loves.