I'll be away for the next week. I may pop in to check comments (please may I not find fifty pieces of spam), but I won't be posting any new entries until next Tuesday or Wednesday.
I leave you to contemplate the following:
In response to the question "How rich was Darcy?" the blogosphere has determined that he was, in the words of Belle Waring, "rich as a mother****er." Quite right. Brad DeLong has the specifics.
But how repulsive was Mr. Collins? Or to put it another way, since this is a question that does not lend itself to quantitative calculation, Mr. Collins was repulsive how?
My answer next week.
Posted by Invisible Adjunct at February 24, 2004 08:23 PMI think David Bamber's acting gave us the definitive Mr Collins in the BBC's version of P&P. Absolutely repulsive. I therefore propose instaurating the Bamber scale of sliminess.
Posted by: anna at February 25, 2004 01:45 PMGood idea -- although in my book, he's less repulsive than slap-able! Buffy wouls certainly want to slap him!
Trollope on Jane Austen:
"The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly I know no novelist who has beaten her. The letters of Mr. Collins, a clergyman in Pride and Prejudice, would move laughter in a low-church archbishop."
The letter from Mr. Collins to Mr. Bennett on the occassion of Lydia's elopement is pure comic genius - I've never read anything so delightfully and unintentionally offensive, before or since.
David Bamber was brilliant, I thought, as Mr. Collins. That movie was extrodinarily well-cast, all-round.
Got a call from an old law partner of mine, before I moved to Dallas while my wife finished her masters (CRNA).
The law school he expected his son to go to didn't take him, so he gave them a call. The director of admissions told him that in a usual year they get a thousand or so applications. This year they got almost five times as many, about a third of them people with their master's degrees.
Seems that for this year, PhD candidates are bailing out with their masters in record numbers and hitting the law schools.
Should be interesting. If it keeps up, a masters degree will become the defacto standard of preparation for law school, which would make for an interesting improvement (I think).
He couldn't make sense of it until I mentioned the adjunctification of higher ed. That hit home. A department he has some involvement in where he lives went from ten profs to two profs and twenty-five adjuncts. It all made sense for him.
Anyway, thought I'd mention that for what it is worth.
Posted by: Steve at February 28, 2004 01:17 AM