Why are most things never where they are supposed to be? A light bulb just turned on in my mind. Flash! It’s simply because I never put things back where they belong to start with

 

If you think Trump is going to let the Democrats win the midterms and take over the House and Senate without an illegal fight you are naïve and stupid. We are in a totally dangerous situation in this country

 We print natives still have a good time. We still know to fondle a newspaper. We can walk around with a paperback in our back pocket. Better than having to fumble for an e-reader. Pretty pictures are prettier in print than on a screen. We don't need to be online. People can see us reading War and Peace. Holding a book with a finger in the book preserving your place is a sensual pleasure not known to many of you. Speaking of sensual pleasure, there is the smell of print. We print natives still go by/buy the book.

 Fred Hudson

3h · 

Shared with Your friends

Saturday mornings are the best times to read with a stack of books in reach, contemplate, and come to terms, getting even. A Starbucks breakfast, corroborating with my favorite barista that I am NOT going to see the controversial Wuthering Heights movie. My principle is that a movie adaption of a classic novel should be faithful to the book, and by all accounts this movie is not appropriately faithful. My barista friend, who has seen it, agrees the movie goes down rabbit holes rather than being faithful to the text. No thank you.

"Love to all the chaps." Making my peace with Lady Brett, that slut. Jake should have dispensed with her early on.

Harvey Mansfield, the legendary Harvard government professor, with his Machiavelli arch-conservative views, in his new screed. I could get some shots in though he would outclass me of course.

 A few days after Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” came out, a friend sent me an Onion headline about a bookseller frantically pulling classics off the shelf before Fennell enters the store. No beloved novel could be safe from the dangers of the director introducing anachronistic costumes, original songs by Charli XCX, selectively color-blind casting, and explicit B.D.S.M. scenes for its Byronic hero.

What We’re Reading

Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

In the case of “Wuthering Heights,” though, there was no further need to worry. The books had already flown off the shelves. In mid-February, Publishers Weekly reported that a hundred thousand copies of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel had sold in the first two months of this year, compared with a hundred and eighty thousand total last year, attributing the increase to book clubs and influencers of all stripes embracing it. People I spoke to who’d never read it before confessed their omission as a sin tantamount to not yet having watched “Heated Rivalry.” My own confession was that I’d never much liked “Wuthering Heights.” The nihilistic attachment between its doomed lovers, Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, was too stormy and unruly for my tastes. But in rereading it for my own Substack book club, in advance of the release of Fennell’s film, I came to respect both its discipline and its perversity, though not in the way Fennell’s movie might make you think.

In a certain light, “Wuthering Heights” is a respectable, conservative tale. (Hear me out.) At the beginning of the novel, we meet the cantankerous middle-aged Heathcliff and his two wards, Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Heathcliff. The relationships eventually become clear: Hareton is the son of Hindley Earnshaw, Heathcliff’s chief childhood tormentor (and the original Cathy Earnshaw’s brother); Catherine is Cathy’s daughter and the young widow of Heathcliff’s son. The novel closes with the news that Hareton and Catherine will marry, united by a bond of true affection. Thus, the Earnshaw line survives and thrives, and the social order remains much the same at the end as it ever was.

Get early access to new short stories, and more from the literary world, when you sign up for our Books & Fiction newsletter.

By signing up, you agree to our user agreement (including class action waiver and arbitration provisions), and acknowledge our privacy policy.

But, to get there, Brontë enlists some of the ubiquitous tropes of her time—the foundling hero, for example—only to ruthlessly unravel them. The orphan is a Chekhov’s gun of Victorian fiction: if there’s an unattached child, expect an eventual reunion with a long-lost relative, or a sudden serendipitous inheritance that enfolds the orphan into a family line. Both of those things happen in “Jane Eyre,” also published in 1847, by Emily’s sister Charlotte Brontë. Jane stumbles upon three kind people who turn out to be her cousins, and into a fortuitous bequest of twenty thousand pounds from their shared late uncle. Emily Brontë resists such a dénouement for Heathcliff. He is introduced when Mr. Earnshaw, Cathy’s father, deposits him unceremoniously in front of his wife and his two children at Wuthering Heights, having picked the boy up off the streets of Liverpool and bundled him into his coat: “a gift of God; though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil.” (“It,” to be clear, refers to Heathcliff.) His origins are unknown, and they stay that way. There’s no explanation for his heritage, no clarity as to the nature of his darkness. As a young adult, he disappears after Cathy declares her intention to marry Edgar Linton, the son of their wealthy neighbors at Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff comes back three years later a gentleman, in affect and appearance if not at heart. But that time away and the source of his changed fortune also remain a mystery.

-Radhika Jones in The New Yorker

 My favorite new question of a person I’m speaking to for the first time is, “Where are you from originally?” this after the nice lady sees my Gavin Newsom book in the purchase line at the Summit B & N. She’s from the Mississippi Gold Coast, Biloxi, Gulfport, etc, and I receive a Missippi geography lesson. Then I move on to the cashier. Sometimes you get new perspectives on the fly.

 Our moral senses have been deadened. We get use to coarse, uneducated, public language. We are not shocked by revelations from the Epstein files. Our sense of outrage is virtually nonexistent. Everything is reduced to pictures and entertainment. Don't read a book; find a video or a snippet on the internet to help you or psuedo-educate you. The better angels of our nature (Lincoln) seem to have vanished. Heaven help us.