Thursday, February 07, 2008
A snip
Lovers of Jane Austen may be pleased to hear that they can buy her collected juvenalia from the Cambridge University Press for the modest sum of £60 or so. Plus postage. The 2006 edition, so it would seem that this is not the first attempt. Clearly literary studies are sufficiently alive and well for someone to spend a great deal of time lovingly assembling this stuff. Is this really any better than stamp collecting? Now some successful adults manage to destroy their juvenile jottings before the establishment get hold of them - but Jane clearly failed in this department. One feels rather sorry for her to have all this stuff exhibited for dissection; this one at least prefers to stick with what she saw fit to publish and am content to leave what was left at the bottom of the cupboard where it is.
But perhaps it is all of a peice with the rest of the Austen industry. Most of us are far happier seeing films about Jane or costume dramas derived from her books, rather than bothering with the books themselves. And to be fair, I am among the most, for I have probably seen more costume dramas than read books over the years. And the costume dramas do prompt one to go back to the book. Then one can have a good moan about all the liberties taken by the adaptor.
I remember once being tempted to buy the collected works - or at least woodcuts - of Eric Gill for what was, at the time, the very large sum of £80. But the book, despite being beautifully produced, was spoilt for me by the inclusion of all kinds of more or less pornographic jottings. The man might have done some good work, but he had an interesting private life which he was happy to share in these jottings - and which, to my mind, would have far better been left in the cupboard in question. Whatever were the canons of Westminster Cathedral thinking of when they commissioned him to do their stations of the cross? Can good works be produced by bad people? A nice question for the Jesuits. For myself, I guess the answer is yes, but I do not need to see the feet of clay.
Readers may remember the saga of the older persons' buggy, now in the great skip in the sky. On which topic, I am pleased to say that two more keys for it have turned up from Leisure-Lift of Kansas City. They paid the $0.97 postage, paid for the jiffy bag, enclosed the keys and didn't bother with an invoice. Granted, processing a small cheque from the UK would probably cost them more than it was worth, but still not a bad bit of customer service. Even if it did take around a month for them to get here. I wonder whether a UK purveyor of older persons' buggies be as helpful to a caller from the US?
Having suddenly decided that it was a pain having one computer running new Excel and another running old Excel, found myself in John Lewis buying a new one - having found the PC World in Kingston a bit grotty and BH having heard that John Lewis was now the place to go for such things. Which indeed they were. So now the proud owner of a Hewlett Packard desktop with a (for me) huge 22 inch screen. Monstrous great thing which can display an awful lot of spreadsheet at once. All for a lot less than I paid a year ago for my Evesham laptop. Also have become a Vista user. Also learnt that computers no longer have recovery discs - there is somewhere inside where they keep all that sort of stuff. And I thought I was so geekfull knowing about such things. But I did manage my second installation of Microsoft Office 2007 with no pain at all. Beyond it being nearly at the point where having a computer which is not connected to the Internet is not going to work. So much of the whole business assumes that one is.
Also interested to see the large range of very large laptops which you can now buy - and which did not seem to be available a year ago. Very large in the sense that they had very big screens and appeared to be intended to show films. Not clear to me why one would not use one's television for such a purpose but there must be a point somewhere.
Back at the allotment, now got the first row of broad beans in. A couple of weeks later than last year but if I keep at it I should have the seven rows in before the end of the month. And it looks as if someone very nearly got stuck where I got stuck last week. Very impressive tyre marks, completely distracting the eye from the modest disturbance that I made.
But perhaps it is all of a peice with the rest of the Austen industry. Most of us are far happier seeing films about Jane or costume dramas derived from her books, rather than bothering with the books themselves. And to be fair, I am among the most, for I have probably seen more costume dramas than read books over the years. And the costume dramas do prompt one to go back to the book. Then one can have a good moan about all the liberties taken by the adaptor.
I remember once being tempted to buy the collected works - or at least woodcuts - of Eric Gill for what was, at the time, the very large sum of £80. But the book, despite being beautifully produced, was spoilt for me by the inclusion of all kinds of more or less pornographic jottings. The man might have done some good work, but he had an interesting private life which he was happy to share in these jottings - and which, to my mind, would have far better been left in the cupboard in question. Whatever were the canons of Westminster Cathedral thinking of when they commissioned him to do their stations of the cross? Can good works be produced by bad people? A nice question for the Jesuits. For myself, I guess the answer is yes, but I do not need to see the feet of clay.
Readers may remember the saga of the older persons' buggy, now in the great skip in the sky. On which topic, I am pleased to say that two more keys for it have turned up from Leisure-Lift of Kansas City. They paid the $0.97 postage, paid for the jiffy bag, enclosed the keys and didn't bother with an invoice. Granted, processing a small cheque from the UK would probably cost them more than it was worth, but still not a bad bit of customer service. Even if it did take around a month for them to get here. I wonder whether a UK purveyor of older persons' buggies be as helpful to a caller from the US?
Having suddenly decided that it was a pain having one computer running new Excel and another running old Excel, found myself in John Lewis buying a new one - having found the PC World in Kingston a bit grotty and BH having heard that John Lewis was now the place to go for such things. Which indeed they were. So now the proud owner of a Hewlett Packard desktop with a (for me) huge 22 inch screen. Monstrous great thing which can display an awful lot of spreadsheet at once. All for a lot less than I paid a year ago for my Evesham laptop. Also have become a Vista user. Also learnt that computers no longer have recovery discs - there is somewhere inside where they keep all that sort of stuff. And I thought I was so geekfull knowing about such things. But I did manage my second installation of Microsoft Office 2007 with no pain at all. Beyond it being nearly at the point where having a computer which is not connected to the Internet is not going to work. So much of the whole business assumes that one is.
Also interested to see the large range of very large laptops which you can now buy - and which did not seem to be available a year ago. Very large in the sense that they had very big screens and appeared to be intended to show films. Not clear to me why one would not use one's television for such a purpose but there must be a point somewhere.
Back at the allotment, now got the first row of broad beans in. A couple of weeks later than last year but if I keep at it I should have the seven rows in before the end of the month. And it looks as if someone very nearly got stuck where I got stuck last week. Very impressive tyre marks, completely distracting the eye from the modest disturbance that I made.
# posted by Jim @ 9:11 AM 
