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1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 89: Sense and sensibility

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of even a few female relations, who marries into a family in which females preponderate, will be exposed to screen adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels until his conscience compels him to read the source material.

I just read Sense and Sensibility (the working title of which was Elinor and Marianne), and I’m within a hundred pages of finishing Pride and Prejudice. This is a good time to reflect again on Austen.

(See this earlier review of Pride and Prejudice.)

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The movie Sense and Sensibility (1995) clocks in at a mere two hours and sixteen minutes. Necessarily, the story it tells is an abridgment.

Mrs. Dashwood (Gemma Jones) is widowed. Her daughters, Elinor (Emma Thompson) and Marianne (Kate Winslet), are left virtually penniless while their older half-brother, John (James Fleet), inherits everything. (A third and much younger sister, Margaret, is an amusing background presence but adds little to the story.) Mercifully, Sir John Middleton, a distant relation, invites the Dashwood women to live in the spare cottage on his Devon estate. There they decamp, but not before Elinor has grown attached to the brother-in-law of her half-brother: Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant). Edward is much kinder than John Dashwood’s dreadful wife – his sister – but he is painfully awkward: when he makes social calls, he blushes and stammers, and he struggles to cross the room and to put his bottom into his chair.

The Dashwoods are welcomed to Devon by their boisterous relation, Sir John (Robert Hardy); and by Sir John’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Jennings (played with gusto by Elizabeth Spriggs), who relishes matchmaking. Soon, Marianne has two suitors: middle-aged Colonel Brandon (Alan Rickman); and dashing young Willoughby (Greg Wise), with whom she falls in love. But, to the Dashwoods’ confoundment, Marianne is “ghosted” by Willoughby and Elinor by Edward. Marianne breaks down and almost dies; Elinor bears her own grief stoically but is tormented by devious Miss Lucy Steele (Imogen Stubbs), Edward’s old flame. The main theme of the story is the contrast between Marianne’s self-destructive passion and Elinor’s dutiful restraint. Because there is little doubt as to which husbands Marianne and Elinor ultimately will be paired with, the story’s interest lies in the moral scrutiny to which each party is subjected.

I say this is the story’s interest; the movie’s lies in what each actor chooses to do with this old material. Rickman, especially, delivers his lines with hammy verve. Winslet, whose Marianne strives to maintain high-flown ideals, paradoxically gives the least affected performance: her cry of relief when she sees Willoughby across a London dancefloor is endearing and pitiful. Thompson, meanwhile, projects exquisite, quiet suffering. It’s lovely when, at the movie’s conclusion, Elinor’s reserve is shattered.

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One episode in the book that the movie surprisingly omits is a duel between Willoughby and Colonel Brandon. (“He [dueled] to defend: I to punish,” the Colonel explains.) Neither man is wounded, and the book dispenses with the matter in a few lines. It spends more time on caddish Willoughby’s (not entirely uncreditable) self-justification. Bizarrely, the movie’s nearest thing to a defense of Willoughby is spoken by Colonel Brandon, whose magnanimity is thereby exalted further. (An unprejudiced viewer might suspect that Willoughby isn’t getting a fair shake.)

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Some minor characters are excised from the screen: Sir John Middleton’s wife, who, in the novel, combines flawless manners with an utter lack of interest in humans other than her children; and Miss Anne Steele, Miss Lucy Steele’s elder sister, a gossiping nitwit.

Thus, the movie leaves us thinking of old Mrs. Jennings as little more than a gossiping busybody. Her kindness and good sense aren’t hidden, but they’re less conspicuous due to the absence of the book’s more injurious gossip, Miss Anne Steele. And it’s harder, once we’re deprived of the sedate, self-absorbed Mrs. Middleton, to notice that Sir John’s helpfulness springs from a keen curiosity about his fellow creatures. Take away just a few minor characters, and the others are impoverished.

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Why look to Austen for moral insight today, now that – in theory, at least – we no longer venerate the aristocracy? Do we care so much about her implicit criticisms of that bygone society? No; what affect us are her descriptions of timeless differences between individuals.

For Austen, each person may fit into a slightly different place in the social hierarchy, but the crucial moral ingredient is character. (And if character isn’t determined by position, neither is it a matter of choice; if we’re to believe Mr. Darcy’s old housekeeper in Pride and Prejudice, it’s settled in infancy.) Even so, intrinsic worth of character is judged comparatively, each person against other members of the same family or class. Elinor may be considered on her own; but, for Austen, what really tells is how she compares against Marianne. Similarly, we know that Edward is almost saintly, not because he’s flawless but because his mother and siblings are so awful. Even the conniving Miss Lucy Steele is shown to be worthy when measured against her sister. (Analogous things could be said about many of the figures in Pride and Prejudice; I haven’t read the other novels.)

Austen’s reformist point, then, is that a person is not to be judged by whether he or she comes from a distinguished family or class; social background doesn’t constitute virtue but merely supplies a context for discerning it. The book begins:
The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. Their estate was large, and their residence was at Norland Park, in the centre of their property, where, for many generations, they had lived in so respectable a manner as to engage the general good opinion of their surrounding acquaintance.
It’s this “general good opinion” attaching to certain families, so coveted in her day, that Austen seeks not to falsify so much as to banish as irrelevant. Why praise the Dashwood family when John Dashwood is far less admirable than Marianne, and Marianne is not as wise as Elinor?

Here love dies

This is the abstract of an article in the most recent issue of the premier journal for the philosophy of religion:
THE AI ENSOULMENT HYPOTHESIS
According to the AI ensoulment hypothesis, some future AI systems will be endowed with immaterial souls. I argue that we should have at least a middling credence in the AI ensoulment hypothesis, conditional on our eventual creation of AGI and the truth of substance dualism in the human case. I offer two arguments. The first relies on an analogy between aliens and AI. The second rests on the conjecture that ensoulment occurs whenever a physical system is “fit to possess” a soul, where very roughly this amounts to being physically structured in such a way that the system can meaningfully cooperate with the operations of the soul.
This inquiry appeals to me not one whit. It might initiate a nice little debate in Faith and Philosophy, though.

Funny thing is, were this in a journal for cognitive or technological studies, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, or general philosophy, the inquiry still wouldn’t appeal to me, but I wouldn’t be annoyed.

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These are the first two paragraphs of Brideshead Revisited:
When I reached “C” company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the gray mist of early morning. We were leaving that day. When we marched in, three months before, the place was under snow; now the first leaves of spring were unfolding. I had reflected then that, whatever scenes of desolation lay ahead of us, I never feared one more brutal than this, and I reflected now that it had no single happy memory for me.

Here love had died between me and the army.
Here love dies between me and the journal Faith and Philosophy.

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P.S. On the plus side, this book review appears in the same issue.

“Engagement”

This is nicely put by Marco, who was a few years ahead of me at school.


It’s Cunningham’s “Law” (somebody comments). Wikipedia:
[Ward] Cunningham is credited with the idea: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.” This refers to the observation that people are quicker to correct a wrong answer than to answer an unanswered question.
It’s (kind of?) interesting to ponder the ethics of asserting a falsehood in order to elicit the truth. Lying is wrong. But, plausibly, there are exceptions (e.g., to keep persecutors from finding their murder victims). What about the following case? A lie sparks crowd-sourced inquiry and, thereby, is predictably truth-conducive in the long run. (Ditto for other kinds of dishonesty.)

And mightn’t it matter in what institutional setting the lie is asserted? Police interrogators lie to elicit the truth, with society’s blessing. And if I publish an academic paper that asserts a thesis that’s almost certainly false – so that other scholars in this publish-or-perish economy are spurred to publish rebuttals explaining why the thesis is false – am I doing a bad thing? Don’t I advance respectable epistemic goals? (And is it so terrible if I elicit the truth in this manner for non-epistemic reasons: to get hired, promoted, grant-funded, etc. – i.e., for money – so that I can feed my children and mentor college students, who are as innocent as babes?)

But I see what Marco means. I do encounter the sort of thing he describes. I found a particularly shameless example tonight.


Most of the commenters are like, What happened to the state of New York? The Ivy League is dumb.

They made some troll richer by commenting, is what happened.

A sad realization for the boys

Out strolling, the boys didn’t want to go home just yet, so they begged to go to Kroger. “There isn’t much food there anymore,” I told them. (The store’s final closure is scheduled for this evening.)

They begged to go anyway.

So, we walked up and down the all-but-empty aisles. The boys were shocked. Samuel cried all the way home.

“I’ll only drink water now,” he said.

“Why, Sammy?”

“Because Kroger is closing forever.”

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A few remarks about my other sons, so as to be fair to all.

Daniel was treated to another solo outing (that is, without his brothers). Here he is at the zoo, with his Grandpa Scott. Notice how he’s leashed.


Abel has learned to scoot forward on his belly. When not impeded, he beelines for the cats’ plates. He overturns them and licks the pellet-food.

Today he seized the Trollope novel I was reading and tore its cover.

It was The Warden, which details the misdeeds of churchmen and reformers. A novel of enduring relevance.

I’d turned to it after reading Hatch’s Democratization of American Christianity (for the group).

(Jane Austen is a clergy critic, too.)


Body-text fonts, pt. 41: Aldus

If you’re an Irish novelist publishing a masterpiece, c. 2017–2018, chances are, it’ll be typeset with Hermann Zapf’s Aldus.

Exhibit A (Sally Rooney):


Exhibit B (Anna Burns):


Edoarda & Stephen have returned from Dublin, Aberdeen, and Shetland (where Edoarda took grant-funded knitting lessons). I told Stephen I wanted a tree from Shetland; failing that, a jar of jellied eels, although that’s more of a Londoners’ food; failing that, a tabloid. Stephen found no trees, eels, or tabloids on Shetland. He did bring the July 4 issue of the Shetland Times. Front-page news: “Ponies Draw Crowds from Afar”; “Council Spends £2.4m on Agency Staff for Ferries.” The body text (Miller) is the smallest I’ve seen in any newspaper.

Screwball

I took time off from Tubi murder shows to watch Cannes-/​BAFTA-/​Oscar-crowned Anora. It earned its hype, and then some.

What was the last screwball comedy to win it big? It Happened One Night (1934)?

Another instructive comparison is with Cronenberg’s too-serious Eastern Promises, which also is populated with (less believable) Russians in a Western metropolis. Anora, too, changes gears during a remarkable “fight” scene, albeit one with less lethality and nudity (although Anora is not bereft of nudity). Anora’s “fight” scene is not so different from Viggo Mortensen’s showpiece sauna tiff with Russian gangsters – but it’s hilariously dragged out. Over days. In mansions, clubs, restaurants, private jets, and courtrooms. (Re: anarchic luxury travel and divorce court: see Preston Sturges.)

Mikey Madison is the first Gen-Z Oscar winner. I kept thinking: Kids these days! – absolute savages. But I cheered for her title character, more than for anybody in a while.

Of chainsaws

It’s Prime Day, Prime Day
Gotta get down on Prime Day

Karin bought herself a chainsaw. It arrived a few hours ago and I haven’t seen her since. I wonder what she’s doing with it, out in the yard (rumble, rumble).


I finished re-reading Out of the Silent Planet. I read from this handsome omnibus edition published by Scribner.

I have two complaints about this edition.

(1) The text isn’t always transcribed correctly:
  • some paragraphs aren’t indented
  • terminal possessive apostrophes are written with double quote marks, as in: suns” blood

This must have been due to a “find-and-replace” error.

(Earlier U.S. editions of OSP follow British convention. They use single quote marks to indicate dialog. Scribner must have decided to replace these marks with double quote marks.

Nothing wrong with that. But it seems to have been done in one fell swoop, sans proofreading.)

The error mars this three-book omnibus edition and various single-book editions of OSP issued by Scribner.

I don’t expect to find this problem in Scribner’s editions of Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. Earlier U.S. editions of those books, e.g. those of Macmillan and Collier, already USify the dialog, enclosing it within double quote marks.

(2) My second complaint is that the omnibus lacks the first thirty pages of Perelandra.

Maybe that’s just my copy. Probably not.


I noted, previously, that the baddie, Weston, is a longtermist. He thinks that humans’ most important task – which they should try to fulfill no matter how high the cost – is to colonize other planets before their own planet becomes uninhabitable and humankind dies out.

I wonder, did Elon Musk ever read Out of the Silent Planet?

Should we require all of our governmental officials to read it?

July’s poem

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Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony
Stuck a feather in his cap
And called it macaroni

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

Father and I went down to camp
Along with Captain Gooding
And there we saw the men and boys
As thick as hasty pudding

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

And there we saw a thousand men
As rich as Squire David
And what they wasted every day
I wish it could be savèd

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

The ’lasses they eat every day
Would keep a house a winter
They have so much, that I’ll be bound
They eat when they’ve a mind to

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

And there I see a swamping gun
Large as a log of maple
Upon a deucèd little cart
A load for Father’s cattle

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

And every time they shoot it off
It takes a horn of powder
And makes a noise like Father’s gun
Only a ’nation louder

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

I went as nigh to one myself
As Siah’s under-pinning
And Father went as nigh again
I thought the deuce was in him

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

Cousin Simon grew so bold
I thought he would have cock’d it
It scar’d me so I shrink’d it off
And hung by Father’s pocket

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

And Cap’n Davis had a gun
He kind of clapt ’s hand on’t
And stuck a crooked stabbing iron
Upon the little end on’t

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

And there I see a pumpkin shell
As big as mother’s basin
And every time they touch’d it off
They scampered like the ’nation

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

I see a little barrel too
The heads were made of leather
They knock’d on it with little clubs
And call’d the folks together

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

And there was Cap’n Washington
And gentle folks about him
They say he’s grown so ’tarnal proud
He will not ride without ’em

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

He got him on his meeting clothes
Upon a slapping stallion
He sat the world along in rows
In hundreds and in millions

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

The flaming ribbons in his hat
They look’d so tearing fine, ah
I wanted dreadfully to get
To give to my Jemima

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

I see another snarl of men
A-digging graves, they told me
So ’tarnal long, so ’tarnal deep
They ’tended they should hold me

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy

It scar’d me so, I hook’d it off
Nor stopp’d, as I remember
Nor turn’d about till I got home
Lock’d up in mother’s chamber

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy
⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Transcribed, accurately, more or less, from Wikipedia; resembles this version, more or less.

Independence weekend

It was our most traditional July 4 in who knows how many years. The people next door fed us hot dogs, ribs, and chicken. Then they launched fireworks. The whole neighborhood put on quite a show. Samuel and Daniel twirled sparklers. Samuel dropped his, stepped on it, and burned his foot. What an ordeal that was.

No one displayed much patriotism. The neighbors told me they expect violent upheaval, sooner or later. So, their mood was: It’s party time!

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Today we saw my cousin Matthew and his family. They’re visiting from Montana.

Matthew works in academic support at a small university campus. He worries that his job’ll get DOGE-ed out of existence (or whatever the local equivalent of getting DOGE-ed is).

Not that things are better here: Indiana has passed legislation that’ll axe hundreds of public academic programs.

(See this Forbes report [of limited free access]. And see this list of items for the chopping block.)

Anyway, perhaps Matthew, like me, has caught the apocalypticism bug, because he agreed to read Late Victorian Holocausts with me when the schedule permits. It’s nice when readers of this blog say they want to read things with me.

Here comes the tooth

For Abel:


Karin took Daniel to the county fair.


I was very worried. I thought he’d run away or climb out of the Ferris wheel. He didn’t.

I visited ancestors with Abel and Samuel. Samuel doesn’t like the fair.

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I’m reading Pride and Prejudice.

I’m re-reading Lewis’s Space Trilogy (it’ll be my first time through Perelandra, actually). It’s better than I remember it. Then again, I was twelve or thirteen when I last read Out of the Silent Planet.

I’d forgotten that Weston, the baddie, is a longtermist.

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A good bit from a good Substack:
LARPing as an Inkling is at least 15% of the point of the classical education movement. I say this with only love in my heart.
Samuel: “Dad, what’s LARPing?”

John-Paul: “You don’t need to know, Son.”