National Poetry Month--Ing Poems--Fridge Food Now--For Jane

Today we're doing Ing Poems. Clueless? Go here. And here are my poems:

Fridge Food Now

Enticing

Cooling

Steaming

Tasting

Salivating

Smiling

Fridge Food Later

Molding
Smelling
Desiccating
Hardening
Growing
Nauseating

©2020 by H. Linn Murphy

And now for something completely different:
I'm doing a dictionary of Jane Austen words and terms she used in all her writings with pictures I'll draw, plus some words from contemporary writers. I feel Jane and I have become friends of a sort. I don't know if she would have turned up her nose at me, but I hope not. I feel we have much the same acerbic wit at times. This is a poem for Jane:

You stand in the vanguard,

A woman alone,

Writing about the heart,

From a broken place of your own.

Your work still speaks

From the dust

Down through the years

For you understand

Basic goodness

There is no need for

Sex or violence

When an incisive mind

Is set to untangle

The human condition.

When sacrifice has

Flavored your words

With truth.

I am in awe of your

Delicacy of mind

Your stinging comentary

The way you can

Excise the ridiculous

With a few sharp words.

You expose the selfish,

The greedy, the proud,

The wistful, the hopeful.

All of humankind's

Foibles filleted for us

By your willing scalpel.

Words are your tools,

Oh wordsmith extraordinaire!

Would that I could be

A ready disciple.

©2020 by H. Linn Murphy

Emma: A Latter-day Tale Review

 I love Jane Austen and have read all her books plus many of her letters. She's a brilliant writer absolutely a marvel of her time and forever afterwards. The fan fiction doesn't always stack up. In fact, Jane's wordplay is rapier-sharp and tends to slice most "copies" to ribbons.
Rebecca H. Jamison's EMMA: A LATTER-DAY TALE is not one of these weak copies. I enjoyed this book to the hilt.


Jamison seamlessly weaves Austen's story into modern day. I enjoyed trying to figure out how she'd change places like Box Hill and people like Mr. Elton's simpering wife to fit in with today's problems and technologies. Ski trips and hiking fill the bill nicely. I can totally see Emma shushing down the slopes in her signature snowplow.

 I was happily surprised. The story was effortless and fresh. I empathized with Emma's angst about measuring up to the amazing Jane/Jena. I loved that Emma was flawed but lovable and well-meaning. She tracked well as a motherless girl trying to make her way through the boulder fields of society. I have my own mountain of regrets and half-finished projects to dig through and finish.

If you love Jane Austen, you'll love this modern version of Jane's beloved story Emma.

Put on your invisible visiting bonnet and long gloves and get the book here.

Loving Austen

austengame.com

Being a lover of Jane Austen's work has energized me into going places I never would have visited without her lamp to light the way. I have read works penned by obscure authors, and gone sleuthing down lanes through which I'd never ventured before. One of those places is a weblist of scholars focusing on Jane's life, times, works, and the people of her time.

There are a wide variety of people on said list, most extremely intelligent and some utterly gifted as sleuths. They have opened a whole underworld to my view full of treasures of word and history. I keep their posts to study later in the hopes of knowing the ins and outs of my favorite author.

Some scholars, however, seem to me to be that type of person who looks at a painting and is absolutely certain that they know everything which ever skittered through the brain of the artist in conjunction with said painting. They loudly proclaim their opinions as fact and refuse to listen to arguments from opposing viewpoints, however knowledgeable.

This phenomenon is not relegated merely to students of art or the written word. There are archaeologists who take such stances, postulating hypotheses which they tout as absolute truth, although those hypotheses would not stand up in court due to their circumstantial nature.

In my humble opinion, it is folly to take a stance based on little or no actual evidence simply because of extant evidence or a postulation built on practices of the time period.

Here is one example: Recently I saw a program called Secrets of the Dead. In this particular program they were examining the bones of a man found at Stonehenge. Because of a hole in his head near the top and back, they conjectured that the man had to have been a criminal as it was most certainly a punishment wound.

Photograph by Richard Nowitz

I have been a reenactor of medieval warfare for some twenty five years. I fight in heavy armor in varied scenarios ranging from castle battles to field battles to bridge battles and all sorts of other sorties. I have "fallen dead" many times due to tripping or being pushed over "corpses" or weapons. It is extremely easy to come by such a wound as the Stonehenge Man was sporting.

We can certainly make hypotheses, but canonizing such conjectures as fact is absurd. Even carbon dating has been proven in some cases to be faulty. DNA can be polluted. Hair samples can be unstable (just ask Hermione of the Harry Potter books). Tree rings can lie. Any number of suppositions can be boundless and false. 

The further from the point of interest one goes, the easier it is to be wildly wrong about that original point. What's to say these wild conjectures about Jane Austen's propensity for labyrinthine word puzzles strung together throughout all her works and letters is necessarily all true? I doubt she pondered and festered over every single word she ever wrote, trying to weave it into such deeply Stygian cyphers that those cyphers rarely saw the light of day.

Sometimes a grocery list is actually just a grocery list.

True Love, Wasps, and Bodice-rippers

I just have to say that it aggravates the heck out of me when I buy a book and find out it's full of trash.

I bought a book for my birthday last month by an author who I have enjoyed reading in the past: Marion Zimmer Bradley. I enjoy her world-building and her characters sparkle. The problem, I believe, is that she has been dead, now, for some time. Other people are using her name and worlds onto which to build their own junk.

These authors who build bad things onto good structures are like the wasps in our atrium, which appropriate my birdhouses, causing the birds to nest elsewhere. They move in and daub their trash onto the walls of the birdhouse, so that I'm constantly having to clean them back out again. The effect is disheartening.

So I went back to the bookstore and returned the book. It had serious garbage of a kind with which I just can't fill my mind. I looked around and found what I thought was another good book. Usually one can't go horribly wrong with a Jane Austen spin-off. One would think.

This one, however, was chock full of sex. I can't imagine how an author can get Jane
Austen so wrong. Her books were so completely the opposite of bodice-rippers. Her characters got to know the real person instead of feeding the forest fire of sexual voraciousness. The main characters actually fell in love, not lust (I'm not counting Willoughby or the Wickhams here). We knew that those who strayed off the path were very much in the wrong.

This new book could not be more different. The scenes were engineered to raise the blood in increments to the boiling point and then leave off, just like a bodice-ripper. The characters knew they were doing something illicit, but they continuously slapped themselves on the wrist and called it done.

No!

That is exactly the opposite of what Jane Austen stood for. It was probably as bad as net or phone sex, I'm guessing (not having partaken in said activities). I won't say, here, what I think this book would be in aid of, but you get the picture. It was engineered to perform a certain service--which is NOT an evening's light entertainment. This book would not be one which I would read in the company of my two-time missionary mother.

This book left me feeling completely robbed. I wanted more insights into Elizabeth and Darcy after the wedding. I haven't really found a book which does that justice. People can't seem to write great love stories about people who are married to each other. I've read many spin-offs from Austen's books and none of them really feature the same people. Why is that?

Why can't a person still be learning how to love their spouse after the wedding? It's not as if life suddenly becomes boring and stodgy the second one gets the ring on. They often have the same struggles they had before the wedding. I'm sure Elizabeth had to struggle all her life with a man who could, at times, be prideful and arrogant. I'm sure she misunderstood him regularly. He hadn't had a mother for the better part of his growing up years. Of course he'd have difficulties. I want to read about how they work through those difficulties. I want to see their love blossom into something full-blown, enduring, and real.

I want it to still be about them, though, and not just hop forward to their children. It's a cop-out (if you bill it as their continuing story) and it's been done. In fact, I and my sister have a fairly decent library of Austen spin-offs and continuations. Don't get me wrong, many of them are pleasant--just not about Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam.

So now I have to take another book back to the bookstore? I suppose if I did that enough times, they might get the hint about the kinds of books they sell. Or not. I'm certain that for every cruddy book I bring back, there are a load of others going out to other people.

Maybe I'll have to be the one to write this story, sometime when I actually learn the secrets of life.