The Further Adventures of Deluzy

Treasure trove

Okay, clearly I'm on one of my recurring obsessive Bronte tears that strike every few years or so (you can tell this from my preceding few posts).  For those of you who couldn't care less, move on right now because I'm about to rave into the night.

I've just run across the blog of an M.A. student in Halifax, Nova Scotia devoted to the Brontes that's really good (I've added it to my sidebar), and thanks to her, I've bumped into a treasure trove of  Jane Eyre-related material (of all kinds) on YouTube (well, and elsewhere also -- her blog is worth spending some time with and clicking through if you're interested in things Bronte).

Now, I admit to being behind the times. My students all know about YouTube and while I certainly know about it, I have yet to get used to searching it routinely for unexpected gems whenever there's something out there that's media-related that I or my students might be into. 

Anyway, naturally there are endless Jane Eyre fans out there, many of whom have access to desktop editing software, and some of them have put together images from their own favorite film (or television or theatrical) version of Jane Eyre with all manner of contemporary music -- and some of the results are kind of fascinating.  I've always been attracted to various kinds of popular culture fan interactions with primary, favorite texts: they are almost always performed as labors of genuine love, admiration, and (yes) obsession.  Okay, so the editing isn't always fabulous, and the music isn't always wonderful, but hey -- I teach media, I like Jane Eyre, and hell, I'd give some of the efforts As if they were done as class projects.

Here's only one of many, and I include it simply because it comes from my personal favorite adaptation of the novel, mentioned in earlier posts:  the 1983 BBC paroduction with Zelah Clarke and Timothy Dalton.

Portrait of a governess (part 1)

This 2006 production of Jane Eyre was a two-part Masterpiece Theatre presentation  in the U.S. this past January.  It's taken me until now to watch it -- partly because I wanted the leisure time to enjoy it (if, indeed, I were going to enjoy it) and partly because I've usually felt divided about adaptations of this, my favorite of all novels, and wanted to delay any disappointment.

(Before I continue, let me say that the Masterpiece Theatre site devoted to this production is worth visiting if you have any personal, historical, or academic interest in a) this or other film production of the book; b) the Brontes; c) governesses. Good site -- I hope it stays up.)

Last night I watched Part 1 and the jury is still out about the overall quality, as far as I'm concerned.

Its significant weaknesses so far?

• Only the most cursory treatment of Jane's time at Lowood School and her relationship with Helen Burns, both of which are  critical to an understanding of Jane's later interactions with and choices between Rochester and St. John Rivers (I also love this earlier section of the novel which most adaptations neglect, and I particularly liked reading the Lowood chapters when I was a child).

• Some occasionally lamentable dialogue that's anachronistic and out of keeping with the  characters (one of the things I liked best about the 1983 BBC production with Zelah Clarke and Timothy Dalton was its absolute insistence upon Bronte's sometimes admittedly stilted but still famous passages between Jane and Helen, and Jane and Rochester).

These are pretty big drawbacks, in my view.

Among its strengths?

• It's cinematically more interesting than the aforementioned BBC production -- and that's not usually the strength of Masterpiece Theatre presentations, no matter how strong they may be in other areas.  I'm not sure how I feel about the opening subjective shot (that's so not in the novel) of a young Jane imagining herself into the exotic landscapes about which she reads -- but it's inventive, it's an immediate and visual reminder of how important interiority and subjectivity are in Jane Eyre (specifically, how important her subjectivity is), and it's a vivid evocation of the white/red theme that runs consistently throughout the novel (if not terribly evenly in this production of it).

• As weak as the Lowood section is, there's a great panning shot of small, scattered wood coffins in a graveyard that eloquently sums up the devastation that disease wreaks on the student population there.  Too bad very little narrative context is provided in which to understand this, if you haven't read the novel.

• There's a clever introduction of Adele Varens, Rochester's young French ward, who sings a song (that I'm assuming is an actual song from the period) that's coquettishly  precocious and indicates volumes about her history. (Jane's reaction to the song and her deliberate sugar-coating of its translation to housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax is wonderful.) The song itself is not in the novel, but it's a good way of narrativizing that back story. Unfortunately, when Rochester tells Jane of his history with Adele's mother, there's a literal flashback to that period, which is entirely uninteresting and unnecessary.

• It makes no narrative sense whatsoever, but there are a couple of wonderful shots of a skein of red cloth fluttering from an attic in the window where (spoiler ahead, except that everyone knows this by 2006) Rochester's mad wife is confined. Actually, it does make a certain amount of narrative sense: those shots are from Jane's point of view, and one wonders if she's imagined them or really seen them.  Red, of course, is linked to Jane's own passionate nature as well as to the mad wife's, so another nice detail is that, the morning after the infamous near-burning of Rochester in his bed and the incredibly sexy scene between him and Jane, the latter wears a red ribbon around her neck as an ornament, then and later (that's cleverly linked to Bronte herself, in that it closely resembles the same ornament that Charlotte Bronte wears in a well-known portrait of her that currently hangs in the Bronte Parsonage [pictured, left]).

• Finally, the two main actors, Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens, are good.  This is admittedly, perhaps, the most important element. I could quibble about their looks (she's too pretty, he's too young), but hey, I can suspend disbelief, and they do have a convincing energy between them that's essential for any successful production of Jane Eyre.

All right, upon reflection, I confess I'm more inclined to like than dislike this version, on the whole, despite my reservations because I am looking forward to watching Part 2, whenever I get around to it (which will hopefully be later tonight). 

Can you say denial?

Well, that's probably not the right word, but there's some Freudian shit going on with me, that's for sure. I'd planned to get my 18-month labs done this past Tuesday, still hadn't received the order for my HbA1C test from my PCP by that point (I signed up for MyFax and thus have faxing capabilities at home now -- figuring that it would make life on all fronts, not just the medical one, easier), and so postponed doing the labs until today.

Okay.  Fair enough. Sounds plausible. I had all the lab orders this morning. All systems were go. I woke up, had my morning cup(s) of coffee with Splenda and cream, and ...

Shit! It's a set of fasting labs, idiot -- nothing to eat or drink except water for 12 hours before they're drawn -- and I'd just swilled down a white coffee (two, actually)!  I'd paid attention to the time I stopped ingesting food and drink last night, but I was on auto-pilot this morning.  (Coffee isn't drink to me, you see, it's fuel.)

If I hadn't put cream (well, half and half) in my coffee, I'd have gone ahead and done the labs anyway -- but I do so I didn't.

So now Monday's the day. 

Sigh. I know: excuses, excuses.  It kind of makes me ill, too. (How hard is it to get this done?  Not hard. I'm not even scared of needles.  The labs themselves don't bother me. It's the cattle call atmosphere of the lab I go to  and the anxiety surrounding the results.)

The thing is, I've been feeling pretty tired for the past week or so.  It does occur to me that my iron is low again, and it may be time for another infusion.  (Er, correction: my iron may be low still. The infusion brought it up some and was considered effective, but it never got into normal range -- just less low.) Normally I see my hematologist once a month, but I skipped last month because I didn't want to run duplicate blood work (what with her orders and my surgeon's) and run the risk of not having all of it covered; I knew Dr. K's 18-month orders would include the same tests and more.

Well, okay, but then I have to get the tests done, for god's sake!

Sometimes I get sick of myself.

I think I'll pop another iron pill, eat some protein, and take a nap.

Fat

Link: Elastic Waist: Rant: Taking the Bite out of Fat.

It's a description, not a judgment.  Unless, of course, you live in our fucked-up culture where the word's connotations outweigh (pun intended) its dictionary definition.

Let me say here and now that I had weight-loss surgery purely for health-related reasons.  It's paid off, though in my view, one must be prepared to exchange one set of chronic health conditions for a possible other set, not necessarily known in advance.

But I did not do it to Be Thin, per se.

Do I think it's a bad idea to do it only to Be Thin?  Um, yeah, I think I do. It's a pretty radical surgery and a pretty radical thing to do to your body.

Easy for you to say, someone thinks.  You did it for your health, sure, but you also lost weight. You got to have your cake -- ahem -- and eat it, too.

Okay, if the same surgery had been available to correct my health conditions but wouldn't have induced weight loss, would I have done it?  Yes, I would definitely have done a portion of it (namely, the gastric reduction, or VSG that's often performed separately now on non-obese patients to reverse Type II diabetes). I'm not sure that I would have taken on the malabsorption component of the duodenal switch itself, as that's where the later health problems usually come into play and what helps maintain weight loss.

That's not to say that I'm not very happy to be a regular-sized person now. I am.  Life in our culture is a hell of a lot easier on all fronts for average-sized people than it is for fat people.  You can fit in public spaces more easily, you don't stand out, you don't get teased, you don't attract negative attention simply because of your weight, you find a greater and less expensive variety of clothes, blah, blah, blah. Every fat person out there knows the drill -- and every fat-phobic person does, too, because they're often one and the same, or the latter category is dishing it out to the former.

When I was fat, I did not hate the way I looked nor did I hate myself for being fat. I looked pretty nice most of the time.  Note:  I didn't say "fat but nice."  I said "fat and nice".  (I have a sister who's 14 years older than I who told me when I was a teenager, laughingly, "I'm glad you're porky -- otherwise  I'd have to worry about you being prettier than I."  She didn't actually mean to be unkind, and when you think about it, it reveals more about her own issues with weight than anything else.  Fortunately, even at the time, I thought that that thinking was kind of fucked, though -- what did weight have to do with being pretty, for god's sake?)

One of the things that makes me simultaneously sad and uncomfortable in both weight-loss related blogs and online discussion forums is the degree to which some people (men and women both, but I'm more familiar with women) really hate their former fat selves.  Sometimes the hatred is bone-deep, sometimes it's only skin-deep, but it is, in my view, really disturbing and debilitating. In such cases their weight is so connected to issues of self-esteem that it indicates something essential about themselves to themselves.  Yes, that can happen in this culture.  But not all fat people hate themselves or feel ugly as a result of their weight.  It doesn't have to happen. It often doesn't happen. It didn't happen with me, though I won't pretend that society's negative stereotypes about fat people had no impact on me whatsoever.

Don't even get me started on compulsive reconstructive surgery (okay, I admit it: this post has turned into a bit of a rant -- and note that I said compulsive, not all).  I'm a lot less narrow-minded about plastics than I used to be, having now watched formerly morbidly obese people deal with the medical and psychological issues that can accompany excess skin. I myself am even considering a muscle-tightening tummy tuck if I ever must have my abdominal hernia repaired (and the fact that I'd even consider one is pretty stunning to me right there). I think reconstructive surgery is up to the individual (note: not the surgeon, not the WLS practice, but the individual), and if folks have their heads screwed on right, I think it can be a really productive experience.  If they don't, no amount of reconstruction in the world will touch their core issues.

Furthermore, surgery is no laughing matter.  Reconstructive surgery is painful, from all accounts, and it's risky.  That right there scares me!

But there's another issue that runs in the background for me, too, as I think about this topic. Do I want to erase every sign of my morbidly obese self?  You know what?  I don't. I really, really don't.  Is that because, at my age (46), it would be impossible to do that anyway (i.e., there's only so much that plastic surgery can do with aging skin)?  Honestly? 

Maybe that does have something to do with it.

That is, since that past can't be totally erased by surgery, perhaps my choice is to embrace most of the ways in which the history of morbid obesity has been etched on my body -- as something of which I am not ashamed and by which I am not disgusted. The body bears witness to its own history. Not to assert the same burden of history or significance, but look at the way in which PTSD often manifests itself bodily in the survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Think about the choice of millions of Holocaust survivors to retain their Nazi-imposed tattoos after World War II.

This really happened.  This experience is part of me. It's part of who I am -- for ill and for good.

And the winner is

A propos of yesterday's post, I wish to observe  that, for me, the obvious Elizabeth Gaskell work with which to begin is The Life of Charlotte Bronte, given that I'm winding up Villette and already love Jane Eyre.  I mean, duh. Why didn't I see that before?

I located the biography, Ruth, Wives and Daughters, and Crandon in the university library today and I read the first couple of chapters of the biography over lunch.  Perhaps because of the mid-Victorian prose, or because Gaskell is a novelist herself, or because her subject lends itself to narrative, it's rather like reading a novel.  Not quite, but enough so that it piqued my interest, over and above the topic of Bronte herself.

One of the advantages of having a faculty library card is that the books are checked out until December 1. I've made rapid progress through Villette, and I'm normally a quick reader, but during the school year I have very little time to read for pleasure, and so sometimes I never make it to the books on my list. Read I do, of course -- quite a bit, as an academic -- but one of the things I miss about being in literature is that the bulk of my work-related reading these days is articles- and journals-based.  (Well, of course, that's probably true of English professors as well, really ... maybe what I actually miss is having been an M.A. student of English Victorian literature when making my way through the novels on a syllabus was pleasure, not work!)

So, during these summer days, I'm attending to my chosen profession by day, though on break from teaching, but in the evenings I'm reading novels, or related books -- and loving it.

And on a tangentially related note, I see that I still have the 2006 BBC adaptation of Jane Eyre Tivo'd , and I must remember to watch it. It's been there for months in the line-up and I've been postponing watching it for just the right moment.  It could suck, of course -- most of the Jane Eyres do (though not all: I have my two favorites), partly because so much of the novel is interior, subjective, and a challenge to externalize. That's another reason I'm putting off watching it.  It's a novel I know by heart, and then film is my area of expertise.  Strung as I am between literature and film -- personally by inclination and professionally by training -- there's often no making me happy when it comes to issues of adaptation.

But I could rave on into the night about that and there'd be no end to this post -- so instead I shall change into my nightgown and curl up in my comfy chair in the living room to finish Villette.  Lucy Snowe is having a hard time of it right now because M. Paul has left without bidding her farewell ...

Summer reading

I'm just about to finish up Charlotte Bronte's Villette (see sidebar on the left), and I think I'm going to move on to Elizabeth Gaskell next, though I'm not sure which novel I'll pick up first. 

I've never read read any Gaskell, though I think I own her biography of Charlotte Bronte, and I did buy North and South at Julie's recommendation this past spring.  Knowing myself as I do, I think I need to start with a more overtly melodramatic tale, however -- possibly Ruth or Wives and Daughters.  I know I want to give Cranford a try, as I believe Jo March mentions it in Little Women -- or at least, my recollection is that Louisa May Alcott has Jo reading the book in the attic and munching through crisp apples as she does so, which is how I know the title in the first place.

My perennial favorite of Charlotte Bronte's will always be Jane Eyre, probably because I imprinted on it when I read it for the first time at 12 or 13.  But as I read Villette, I realized that I'd read half of it before, and in many ways it is, indeed, a more sophisticated work. These days it's generally regarded as Bronte's finest.

I do note that Bronte's provincialism comes in loud and clear through Lucy Snowe's disapproval of all things non-English and her distaste for Catholicism -- but of course Jane Eyre (book and character both) are much the same.

Still, when you consider where and under what circumstances Bronte was raised  and her unhappiness when employed abroad, none of that is surprising, and she's still remarkable.

(Haworth is still a windswept, lonely spot, despite its fame among international tourists -- the Japanese especially. Signposts on  nearby moorland are actually in Japanese as well as English. [My guess is that it's Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights that's the draw for the Japanese, even more than Jane Eyre, though I could easily be wrong about that. Oh Ayako???]  The countryside is beautiful, yes, but it doesn't take much imagination to transport oneself back to the 1820s and 30s when the Brontes were young and envision their isolation in that small village atop what I remember to be a very steep street indeed.)

R.I.P. strawberries

For the second time this summer (and the first time since my DS), I've had fresh strawberries (a fruit I love), and for the second time they made me sick.

The first time I tossed my cookies. The second time I had terrible stomach rumblings and painful gas.

I really like strawberries.  For the record, bananas sit well with me these days, as do apples. I haven't really tried other fruits because, of course, fruits have carbs and, well, I like to save my carbs for more evil treats. But the occasional banana or apple hasn't been a problem.

A pity I can't say the same about strawberries.

Of course, I've also learned in the last 18 months that the DS inhabits a constantly changing landscape, and what can be true in the way of food tolerance (or lack thereof) one month can alter without explanation the next.

This year, however, I guess I'll be sitting out strawberry season.

Matters geek-related

I bit the bullet (in terms of both money and separating myself from my desktop computer for longer than five seconds) and took my PC into the store to get a memory upgrade this morning -- from a half-gigabyte to 2 gigabytes. It's summer, after all, and although I have plenty of work to keep me busy, school is not in session, and it's a good window of opportunity to get that upgrade done.

No, I didn't go to Frys, where I could have gotten the memory cards for less, and yes, I realize that I could have installed them myself.  I didn't want the hassle that's nearly always involved in dealing with Frys' employees who generally know less than I, and the machine was so dirty that I figured it could use a good inner cleaning with a mini-vacuum cleaner once it was opened up.

(My now-retired software engineer husband worked for a major high-tech firm for a couple of decades and you might think he'd be a good resource. He is, in many ways, but he was also used to deal with mega, corporate-sized machines, servers, and the like, and not so much computers for personal use.)

Bottom line: I dropped it off, wandered (into a Borders, a See's Candies, a PetSmart, and a Starbucks), and an hour later I got the computer back again. It was a nice break from the work that waited for me at home.

Once I got it back and hooked up again, I defragged the hard drive, deleted a huge number of cookies, and between those activities and the added memory, my PC is now running more quickly. Not miraculously more quickly, mind you, but at least markedly so.  It was getting to the point where I'd have to walk into my study first thing in the morning, hit the power button to turn it on, and then go away to have a cup of coffee while it booted up -- and to where Internet pages were taking so long to load that it kind of defeated the purpose of having DSL rather than dial-up and where I was swearing at the lack of speed as I might swear in automotive traffic. (Yes, I have a lot of needless non-essential gew-gaws that run in the background and suck up memory [Holiday Lights, for example?!] but they make me happy, and I don't intend to do without them.)

Anyway, it's much better now.

I'm lucky in that I have a very nice little Mac iBook laptop that's a few years old and a perfectly stunning Mac PowerBook Plus laptop with a 17" screen that my department bought for my use last fall. However, when I'm at home I prefer to work on a desktop, and my desktop is a PC.  Macs are higher-quality machines than PCs in my experience.  (No, I'm not a mindless Apple fan, though I first learned computers in an Apple environment in the mid-1980s; however,  I do appreciate a well-constructed, durable product in this age of instant obsolescence.)  Nevertheless, when I migrated into the business world for five years, I had to get used to the PC and to Windows, and I'm now more comfortable in a Windows environment (my PowerBook Plus is equipped with both Windows and OSX -- I use its different sides for different purposes and applications).

Thus, though I appreciate the laptop Macs I do have and I'm lucky to have back-up computers of any kind, I'm happy to have my PC tuned up and running more smoothly.

Kittens - Day 13

Cute or what?!

Three male kittens, available singly or as a group, to well-qualified, loving homes.

I'm guesstimating they're 9-10 weeks old right now. Our plan is to have them neutered next week, but we want to give them a little more spoiling and cuddling before that. All three purr at this point, particularly when one of our own big kitties trots by for a look. 

The little guy in the back (Darryl 2) is the shyest while the buff-colored boy up front on the right (Larry), by contrast, would trot up to Attila the Hun and start purring.  The sweet one on the left is Darryl 1 (a.k.a. Narcoleptic Kitty, thusly dubbed because he falls asleep, purring, in one's lap or on one's shoulder).

(Don't blame me for their temporary names. My husband is a fan of Newhart, the second major TV sitcom that comedian Bob Newhart had and that aired in the 1980s. He was an inn-keeper in that one.  Myself, I preferred the earlier The Bob Newhart Show in which he played a psychologist.)

Sigh.  I am so going to cry when it's time to give these kitties up.

I hate spreadsheets

However, I have finished entering all my labs, pre- and post-op, into one. 

Naturally some tests are not ordered as often as others, so there are inconsistent data, and of course my surgeon is not as interested in an HbA1C test as, say, my PCP or I is, but they can be run at the same time. Result:  I'm going to have to pay a visit to my PCP to get her to write up an order for that test before I head to the lab on Tuesday with my surgeon's own orders.

(Yes, it takes a physical visit to my PCP to get this all coordinated, I'm afraid. English is not the first language of her receptionists, and the list of labs that my surgeon has ordered is, in the manner of most DS surgeons, too extensive -- except for the HbA1C, of course -- to read over the phone.)

It's all a little crazy-making, even for an OCD type like me.  I mean, I get some of the reasons why folks don't follow up after their DS, particularly the logistical issues.  It's just that it's not a good reason to jeopardize your health in that manner.

Remind me of that come Tuesday morning.

On another note, the kittens are still cute.