allinablur:

literature meme — ten prose [7/10]

Persuasion by Jane Austen (1818)

Persuasion is Jane Austen’s last completed novel. She began it soon after she had finished Emma and completed it in August 1816. She died, aged 41, in 1817; Persuasion was published in December of that year (but dated 1818).

More than eight years before the novel opens, Anne Elliot, then a lovely, thoughtful, warm-hearted 19-year old, accepted a proposal of marriage from the handsome young naval officer Frederick Wentworth. He was clever, confident, and ambitious, but poor and with no particular family connections to recommend him. Sir Walter, Anne’s fatuous, snobbish father and her equally self-involved older sister Elizabeth were dissatisfied with her choice, maintaining that he was no match for an Elliot of Kellynch Hall, the family estate. Her older friend and mentor, Lady Russell, acting in place of Anne’s late mother, persuaded her to break the engagement, for she, too, felt it was an imprudent match that was beneath Anne.

Now 27 and still unmarried, Anne re-encounters her former love when his sister and brother-in-law, the Crofts, take out a lease on Kellynch. Wentworth is now a captain and wealthy from maritime victories in the Napoleonic wars. However, he has not forgiven Anne for rejecting him. While publicly declaring that he is ready to marry any suitable young woman who catches his fancy, he privately resolves that he is ready to become attached to any appealing young woman with the exception of Anne Elliot.

The self-interested machinations of Anne’s father, her older sister Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s widowed friend Mrs. Clay, and William Elliot (Anne’s cousin and her father’s heir) constitute important subplots.

 In many respects, Persuasion marks a break with Austen’s previous works, both in the more biting, even irritable satire directed at some of the novel’s characters and in the regretful, resigned outlook of its otherwise admirable heroine, Anne Elliot, in the first part of the story. Against this is set the energy and appeal of the Royal Navy, which symbolises for Anne and the reader the possibility of a more outgoing, engaged, and fulfilling life, and it is this worldview which triumphs for the most part at the end of the novel. [x]

Reposted from http://ift.tt/2wCvZ2D.

“This is the second and final appearance of the eleven-foot model Enterprise, which orbits from right-to-left in the teaser. When the transposition to the parallel universe occurs, the ISS version is orbiting in the opposite direction. Although the episode was produced in 1967, the footage of the ship was filmed for “Where No Man Has Gone Before” in 1965, indicated by the heightened bridge dome, the oversized deflector dish, and the unlit Bussard collectors (complete with spires). However, in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, there were no rounded “nodes” at the rear of the nacelles, which appear in this episode. The first time the ship orbited in this direction, (TOS: “Shore Leave”), scenes of the revamped production model were simply reversed as can be seen by the backward registration. In this episode, though, the model was shot with reversed nomenclature as the port side was unfinished. It is unknown why so little of this footage was used during the series. Despite the effort expended to highlight the opposite nature of the mirror universe, the Enterprise is seen orbiting from left-to-right in all of the scenes after the main title.”

– http://ift.tt/1T6jSyn(episode)

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1pyIXpB.

The wizardly way to deal with this is to chat with spiders until they no longer frighten you. :)

They are not the world’s most voluble conversationalists. Mostly what they have to say is “Hungry”, “gotta make a web”, “gotta hang out in the web”, “OH WOW I CAUGHT SOMETHING YAY!”, “Sorry, can’t talk, gotta wrap up what I caught”, “Mmmmm” (at dinnertime), “gotta take the web down and conserve my resources”, and (seasonally) “HEY PRETTY LADY / PRETTY GUY, LET’S DANCE / FUCK”.

But if you can get them past that — usually by persistence: wizards who specialize in insects learn persistence pretty early on — you will also hear “Whoops, sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, you looked kinda like a tree from that angle”, “Oh come on, the wind blew me into your hair, do you think I wanted to be here? You are not remotely edible”, “You wouldn’t have a caterpillar on you, would you? I missed lunch”, “How do you get by with so few legs? I am so sorry for you”, “I am so not ready for sex yet”, and “Would you turn off that damn light?”, or alternately “Thank you for leaving the porch light on last night, best meal I’ve had in ages, I asked all my mates round and everybody made out like bandits.”

…Wizards aside, I once had a conversation rather like this with a driveway full of tarantulas (they would come out and bask on cool mornings because the driveway would store the sun’s heat overnight). The brown tarantula, early in the morning before things warm up enough for them to get active, is the most docile and sociable of creatures. They sit there and look at you with all their little eyes. You look at them with your two. Peaceful coexistence, until they start quietly creeping away to hide in the bushes.

(I also had a long talk some years ago with the giant Malaysian hissing cockroach up at the Museum of Natural History in NY, but I can’t discuss that because it was mostly about sex.)

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1kYqITJ.