Fall

Fall is here. The ants and spiders are coming inside trying to postpone the inevitable. Plants are going the other way; prostrate on the ground, they grasp at the hem of the retreating sun. I haven't been doing anything nearly so poetic. Does refrigerator shopping count? I've also been having an Austen fest which seems like a good fall activity. How did such pure escapist pleasure come to be considered literature? I've re-read P&P and Persuasion and now Emma. I hate to say it, but Emma was just a little boring. No one comes within a hair of ruin or nearly dies, and our heroine believes that she must be forever unhappy for only a very short time. P&P is perfection, and my only complaint about Persuasion is that I wanted there to be more of it.

A found 'Lost in Austen' for me, a four-part BBC mini-series in which a character I'll call Mary S., an Austen fan, ends up in the story of P&P and manages to mess everything up. It didn't end as well as it started; it's easier to mess things up than to cleverly make them right again, but it was fun. Also A sat through all 600 hours of the P&P mini-series w/ Colin Firth. I consoled him with the fact that this version is chock full of heaving and historically inaccurate (AFAIK) bosoms. And then he soldiered through the Emma with Gwyneth Paltrow, besides.

Also went to see RED which was fun but completely forgettable.