On DuoLingo, Only Murders in the Building, Northanger Abbey, and some nervous feelings about publication
Bonjour mes amis!
Yes, I’m speaking French at you, my friends, because I am a sophisticated woman of the world who has a 699 day streak on her DuoLingo French course. People diss DuoLingo as an inefficient tool for language learning, but I don’t know, I’ve been using it for six years now and my written French is pretty good thanks to the aggressive little owl - I can even understand spoken French as long as it is carefully enunciated, one word at a time, at the speed of a person who has recently had a severe head injury and is only just recovering the power of speech. Sure, most of the French people I’ve tried speaking French to just give me scathing looks before answering in perfect English, but I’m coming along, and in another six years I definitely think my French will be good enough to watch TV shows in French, or at least TV shows in English featuring characters with strong French accents. I find it’s good to have goals.
So my novel is coming out next week (NEXT WEEK!) and I’m feeling a bit all over the place. One minute I am excited to be realising this dream I have had since I first learned that novels existed, and the next minute I am despondent about the fact that most books, once released, just float off unnoticed into the big book graveyard in the sky, never to be seen or heard from ever again. My aspirations for this book are very moderate and it won’t take much for me to feel like a success—all I want is for people to enjoy reading it, to write nice things about it on the internet, to hold it in their hands gently, to consider recommending it to their friends, to hire a small plane to spell out their favourite passages from it in the sky above the MCG on grand final day, to name one of their children after its characters, to make a shrine to it in their living room, to leave a small offering before it every morning, nothing fancy, like just a pomegranate or a bouquet of tulips would do, to surgically alter their appearance so that they look like the woman on the cover, to write songs about it, to turn it into a TV series, a stage musical, a feature length film and perhaps a theme park, to implant the entire text of it into their brains using Elon Musk’s weird new brain chip technology, and to publicly shame and possibly imprison anyone who criticises it. Is that really too much to ask???
Baby, I was born ready
Just a reminder for anyone who would like to come to the launch, it’s on at 6.30pm next Thursday 5 October at Readings Carlton (booking link here). I will also be having some post-launch drinks & snacks in the undercover beer garden at the Clyde - all welcome! Hope some of you can make it.
Television
Well, we finally finished Vanderpump Rules and, my god, it was worth it—the ending of season 10 was some of the most gripping television I have ever seen. If anyone wants to help me arrange a five day Vanderpump Rules retreat/conference featuring guest speakers, powerpoint presentations, networking opportunities and daily group screaming therapy so we can all work through our feelings about Scandoval together, please drop me a line.
The worst person alive, and also me when I realised I had run out of new VDPR episodes
We’re now watching season three of Only Murders in the Building, a camp murder-mystery show featuring one of the best TV-trios in history: Steve Martin, Martin Short and Short Steve (Selena Gomez). The list of guest stars is always impressive, but this season they have bumped it up a notch and snagged Meryl Streep, Paul Rudd and Matthew Broderick, the latter of whom was looking eerily familiar:
The silver foxes
There’s even a cameo from a 97 year old Mel Brooks! I can only think that the show must be immensely fun to make? Or that Steve Martin knows everybody in the business? Possibly both!
I loved Steve Martin as a kid and it is nice to be able to still love him without embarrassment, which is not necessarily true of some other things I was most passionate about as a child…by which I mean the Police Academy movies 1-9. in my defence, it was the 1980s, I lived in country Victoria, and my access to quality art-house cinema was limited.
A traditional night out in my home town
Only Murders for me achieves a rare level of comfort television perfection—it is funny, playful, brilliantly written and acted, it has gorgeous sets and costumes, and, best of all, it inflicts not a single shred of psychic pain upon me. Even though the whole show is about murder, it’s a pretty wholesome kind of murder, the kind of PG rated murder where nobody minds that much, probably not even the murder victim. Altogether, I would highly recommend.
(PS Look, I know I keep going on about how I prefer my TV frothy, and I’m worried you all might be [accurately] perceiving me as a complete lightweight. But I don’t want you to think I am just a good-time Charlie who can’t handle the hard stuff! I swear I am a serious person! One time I watched every season of The Wire and ENJOYED IT A LOT! Have I told you how obsessed I was with Breaking Bad? Did I mention that one time I watched FOUR CORNERS???)
Books
I have been listening to the audiobook of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey this week—the only Austen novel I have never previously read. I didn’t love it quite as much as some of her other work—it’s smart and funny but, for me, less moving than something like Persuasion—but there are some great passages in it. I particularly enjoyed this bit, where she goes in hard in defence of the novel as an artform (it’s a bit long but it contains some excellent snarky material):
Although [novels] have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried…And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England…are eulogized by a thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them. “I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss——?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame…in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
Austen’s heroine, Catherine, is passionate about reading novels and is made to feel ashamed of it by people around her. It’s interesting that although Northanger Abbey itself is a satire on gothic novels, Austen clearly appreciates them, and respects the love that people have for them. In this passage, she seems to me to be calling out a practice that continues to this day—the tendency to treat the passions of women (and particularly young women) as trivial and silly, while the interests of men are treated as weighty and of universal significance.
It is a bit grim that this attitude that Austen was critiquing back in the late 18th/early 19th century remains so dominant today. A somewhat bizarre version of it showed up recently in this piece in the New Statesman, a polemic which rails against ‘cool girl novels’—a category which apparently covers every literary novel written by a young woman in the last five years. The essay has been rightly criticised as ‘silly, lazy essay’ where ‘the take precedes the analysis’—it lumps a highly diverse range of books into the same bag and dismisses that bag as foolish, preachy and pretentious, in a way that is, I think, reflective of the broader cultural reflex to disparage the interests, and the suffering, of women. Although it’s not precisely the same thing Austen was writing about, it’s at the very least its great-great-great-grandchild.
Me, eloquently expressing my feelings about the ongoing problem of the patriarchy
Anyway, I was, as always, astounded by Austen’s prescience and ongoing relevance after two-hundred years. It made me think maybe it is time for a Clueless-style retelling of Northanger Abbey, which I think is the only Austen novel still waiting for its big modern adaptation? Surely somebody is on to that already…
Other things
Things I have enjoyed lately include:
this dream review of my book by Lian Hingee of Readings - I might have wobbled with excitement so much as I read it that I fell right out of my chair.
drinking margaritas, which have an effect on me that is not dissimilar to the effect martinis have on Dorothy Parker, and which have also occasionally caused me to fall out of chairs
the LitBowl facebook page, which keeps posting remarkable poetry, and through which I found this wondrous poem by Ellen Bass and these utterly devastating ones by Claire Wahmanholm.
That’s all for now! Can you believe that when you next hear from me my book will be out in the world and I will be walking around with the haggard face/defeated droop/anxious tremor/shining aura of a Published Author? I’m not sure I can.
See you on the other side!
xx Eleanor
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