Jane Austen and PBS
Or perhaps that header should have a question mark after it? For in today’s Sunday Globe TV guide I notice that, unless I’m very much mistaken, Jane Austen has been quietly dropped from the PBS prime time line-up. I couldn’t find her anywhere.
We were promised the whole series of novels, and so far we’ve not had ‘Sense and Sensiblity’ nor ‘Emma’, two not insignificant parts of her life-work. Some would say that to talk of the complete Jane Austen without these two makes no sense at all.
PBS had intended to fill these slots with two already famous versions, as I understood from their frequently-repeated ads; the Emma Thompson “Sense and Sensibility” (a gem for the half dozen people still left in the world who haven’t yet seen it ), and the Kate Beckinsale “Emma”, which is also good, although perhaps not as good as Gwyneth Paltrow’s interpretation.
So, have they saved money and reneged on their promise?
If their dreadful version of ‘Mansfield Park’ is anything to go by, which shrieked low-budget in every frame, I think they did this whole thing on a shoe-string. The shoe-string now seems to have broken.
Why PBS is going broke is another discussion, I’m sure. Whatever we decide, and whomsoever we blame, it’s not a good sign for our culture.
Responding to Your thoughts
I’d like to reply to the excellent comments Julie Stiles sent into this blog about Jane Austen (in the ‘comments’ section two blogs ago), because she’s hit the nail right on the head.
One of the real delights of television and film is that we can see the characters’ faces up close, and when we have an actor as gifted as Jennifer Ehle this means that every nuance, every half-smile, and twitch of the eyebrow can carry an invitation to complicity. We can see what the character feels and recognize that the character herself cannot say out loud what she does feel. It gives a very intimate feeling. It brings us into her confidence without resorting to any of the clumsy machinery of ‘the diary’ or ‘the letter’. Jane Austen uses these tropes, of course, but she does so for the conveying of information, first and foremost; this is both economical and more real, since few people are in the habit of sharing their judgments of situations at length, and anyway, it’s a clanky way of doing it when a raise eyebrow will do.
This isn’t just an idle thought. In a novel where it’s almost impossible to now what Mr Darcy thinks most of the time (because he’s stonily impenetrable), and where so many subterfuges exist (Wickham is just the most plausible, and disruptive) - facial expression becomes very important.
As screens get larger (visit Best Buy if you don’t believe me) and more money goes into films than ever before, isn’t it a pity that the larger screens are used mostly for spectacle, and rarely for the close observation of humans? I’d take 2 minutes of Jennifer Ehle responding to Mr Collins over the whole of ‘Pearl Harbor’, for example.
So thank you, Julie, for your excellent comments. Again.
Jane Austen again
This week PBS put on a one-hour special called ‘Appreciating Jane Austen’, or something of that sort. I watched some and then turned it off without any real regret.
I suppose it’s hard to follow the Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice (4 episodes) without allowing a brief breather, so this is good.
This version of P&P is probably the best production most of us could wish for. Yes, there are a few liberties taken with the plot and if one has to go for the shorter version then Kiera Knightley’s is much more emotionally edgy, but there was such intelligence put into this , the longer version. As a bit of a purist I was delighted to see characters speaking their speeches very much as they are in the book, and directed to the people they actually speak with in the book. This was not the case in Persuasion or Mansfield Park I wonder if the same script writers would have allowed, say, Hamlet to mutter his soliloquies into Claudius’ ears with the same degree of freedom as they mixed up speakers and listeners in Jane Austen?
But it’s easy to be critical.
I like the faithful productions of original material because they can lead us back to something closer to the author’s personal vision. That vision may not be any clearer than ours, of course. At times it may be almost incomprehensible. But it can save us from some unhelpful preconceptions (dare I say Prejudices?) that may blind us. Let’s put it this way: if I were to move into Windsor Castle and decide to modernize it I could rip out all that old furniture, install a party room with a granite topped bar in the long gallery, place a media room in the Great Drawing Room with wide screen plasma screens, and turn the Reception Room into a gym with a jaccuzzi and hot tub. That would tell anyone who could bear to look at it a great deal about me and my tastes, but it would cheerfully eradicate any sense of what Windsor Castle is, and remove the values it enshrines.
Well, and who needs all that old patriarchal stuff anyway? Ah… and this is where so many political critics get things wrong. Reading Jane Austen in 2008 does not mean we are expecting to live by her values, or compelling others to do so. It simply means we’re agreeing to assess what she has to say, in case there might be some pleasure or wisdom in it for us. We could do the same with Plato’s Republic without wishing in any way to cause a revolution.
Watertown and the Arts
I went down to the Watertown Arts Center this evening to view the faculty art show, and I have to say that if you have a free half hour or so you could do far worse than to spend it looking at the art.
There are some truly energizing pieces by Deb Putnoi that leap off the walls at you. There are delightfully whimsical pieces, with a real sense of humor and joy by Cathy Bennett (my perennial favorite at these shows), plus the evocative mood pieces by Bev Snow, and the astonishing larger pieces by Kaetlyn Wilcox. Make sure that you walk around to the back of the stairways, to the galleries at the wings of the theatre to see these. I didn’t catch on that there was more art lurking there until I’d been there half an hour or so, and when I ventured into those regions I found myself deeply pleased that I had. Profoundly so.
I won’t spoil the fun by spelling out in clumsy words the images that were so very pleasing. Go take a look.
Mark your Calendars, if you wish
In the shameless quest for self promotion I’ve discovered a few things. One is that Suzanne Strempek Shea is also treading the self-promotion path just now for her new book (her eighth) ‘Sundays in America’ (Beacon) which takes a look at a different church service every sunday for a year. I love her writing and I can’t wait to read it. Suzanne was gracious enough to share some promotional ideas with me, and so I’ll up my hours at the publicity desk after being inspired by her example.
Which leads me to the next point. March 12th I’ll be on the radio with Dr Valerie Kirkgaard and Tony Wilkinson who wrote ‘The Lost Art of being Happy’. That’s at 2:45 on the ‘Waking Up in America’ show. Tony’s a wonderful man and has such a great, clear book in which he urges us to embrace happiness as a habit we can consciously grow. That’s my first radio interview of the day, and in the evening I’m on with Santa Fe radio’s Diego Mulligan.
It’s nice to be getting the word out…
The Radio…
I’ve just found the radio broadcast that I did with Dr Pat Baccili last week and it’s in a form anyone can play for themselves. I will attempt to get it onto the main webpage too, but for now…. go to: www.thedrpatshow.com/guests.php?guest=676.
This should lead you to a link that will provide the complete audio of the delightful interview Dr Pat. arranged.
Enjoy!
Synchronicity
It’s a term first coined by Jung to explain that odd phenomenon of things suddenly working out exactly as they’re supposed to, especially at times when we’re able to keep our minds open enough so that we can receive the information.
There was a certain amount of that with the Eckhart Tolle - Oprah program. I learned that technology isn’t always all it should be, and that it’s perfectly all right for it not to be. People didn’t seem dismayed by the failures. If anything it allowed them to see just how daring this webcast was. For me it went one step further because about the only bit of the show I did manage to see that night had to do with being fully present. It came at a time when I truly needed to be reminded of that message. I’d found myself slipping into some old spaces, feeling old hurts that had nothing to do with the present.
Of course, feeling old wounds is what keeps grudges alive. It feeds the negative part of the ego its daily dose of poison. We need to be present to the now.
And Eckhart is right - we have to learn to think and be in a different way, because if we don’t we’re going to keep polluting, keep destroying, and keep on killing each other until we are in a wasteland (if we are fortunate enough to survive to see it).
To be reminded why we are here is no bad thing. We’re here to become more aware so we can be more loving and more peaceful.
Oprah and Eckhart Tolle
Last night I tuned into Oprah’s web-cast class with Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now,and A New Earth) along with perhaps several million people world-wide. It’s a marvelous idea - to have a class channeled directly into one’s home computer; no ads, no interruptions, and a world-class speaker unfolding his wisdom in conversation with Oprah.
And the content was excellent also. I was certainly in tune with Tolle’s description of how ‘The Power of Now’ came to him, telling him to write it, and how this was a metaphor also for what we need to do as we go through life: we need to ask what it is that life needs us to do, rather than asking what we can do with life. It’s an important message and one that we can all too easily forget.
Just as I was getting refreshed and inspired by all this the screen froze. It remained frozen. This morning a note from Oprah on the email said that technical difficulties had let them down in their pioneering program of the series.
My reactions were several. First I was grateful to Oprah for pioneering this type of outreach, for if no one tries it then the glitches can never be worked out. I was also relieved by her wisdom in arranging for re-runs and text transcripts to be made available.
The final emotion I had was one of relief; for I too have been let down by technology this year. I’ve switched computers having been promised total ease of use, and this has not been even close to the case. I arranged to be helped in creating a better web-page, which has proved to be a huge disaster for Cathy (who’s worked hard at it) and as of now no new webpage has appeared. In fact with all the changes going on it turns out I can actually do less than before. Case in point, I’ve lost the ability to italicize or underline in this blog. And so on.
Oprah’s experience reminded me that my troubles are small potatoes. She’s not discouraged, and neither will I be. It also reminded me that the hype in the computer world about all the marvelous things we can now do is, unless you’re very much an expert, just hype. The machines can’t do all the things they say they can. I’m not terminally stupid for not being able to work it out. But until now I’d felt it was my fault and I’d never be competent in this new computer age.
If we’re not careful the computer will become just another end in itself. Like those movies that are so spectacularly animated that the director forgot to pay attention to plot or meaning, the keyboard and screen can get us lost in the ‘how’ rather than the result. I don’t care that much about bells, whistles and sgva port-compatible interfaces. There’s important stuff to explore and understand out there, and not all of it is technical.
