Louisa Musgrove? I'd Hit That

So, as I mentioned in passing a few weeks ago, I started reading and have now finished Jane Austen's Persuasion. I read the whole thing through, start to finish, stopping only 70 or 80 times to fall asleep. This is less my funny, funny way to say it was boring and more a way to break it to you gently that I'm afflicted with some debilitating condition of which borderline narcolepsy is a side-effect, like mononucleosis or sleep apnea or prescription drug dependency. Sorry to be vague, it's just that the one that's probably true has some very specific statue-of-limitation issues.

In point of very opposite fact, my gay panic is recessive enough to say I enjoyed reading it very much. I've been doing some more challenging reading lately,* so it was nice to settle in with something that reminded me of my loves of language and of contextual immersion in historical period and of the tragic plight of witty spinsters of Ye Olde Onne Persent. The most moving stories are always the ones where the people who have everything also at the end are paired up with impossibly ideal mates. Although to be fair, throughout the course of the stories, they do pay handsomely for their triumph by a trial of harrowing misadventures wherein the heroine is very nearly made to feel acutely embarrassed. Nothing tightens the spincter like a white-knuckle dash through a veritable shite-storm of events wherein someone comes within a hair's breadth of facing the scourges of curtness and/or dancing without conversation in punishment for varying from the strictly enforced list of like four things it was socially acceptable to do in Regency England.**

Ha, I kid Jane Austen. Mostly because I know she's dead.

I did like the book. I actually really liked the 1995 film version as well, the one with Ciaran Hinds and starring... uh... some lady I never saw in anything else. But she was really good in this! I think... you know, I can't even really picture her face. Then again, Anne Elliot is supposed to be kind of forgettable throughout most of it, so all things considered, holy fuck, that was some good acting.

There's also a 2007 version of it, which I never saw but the end of which may or may not be available for free viewing on YouTube and basically consists of a lady running in inappropriate shoes while robbing the original story's denouement of either tenderness or surprise. Although to be fair, I may just be angry at it because nobody in it was Ciaran Hinds. I mean, Aberforth Dumbledore and Mance Rayder and... yeah, OK, he was in John Carter which was not awesome, but I didn't think it was the worst movie that was ever made, not like everyone says.

I was interested in re-seeing the 1995 version, but the only place I can find it is for like $8 on Amazon instant streaming video, which seems a little steep for any 19-year-old made-for-TV movie, Aberforth Dumbledore be damned.

I will note that in trying to find the movie via google, I kept accidentally entering it in as "persuasian" which yielded some very interesting results, mostly--the internet being the internet--ethnic porn.

But then I accidentally found out that even if I hadn't accidentally typed in the wrong thing, I'd have found porn anyway. Jane Austen porn. It turns out there's a frottage industry built up around taking public-domain works of fiction and adding porny sex to them, including Jane Austen novels. And not normal porny sex either, that really gross kind that you can't actually see but is locked into the minds of heterosexual women. Say what you want about dudes: sure, our porn is everywhere, seeping into every corner of popular culture and thought, debasing and coarsening the most basic of human interactions at the essential, biological levels, but at least we have the courtesy to show it to you. In pictures! That thing you ladies do where you just sit there, like in public, and read it in front of everyone? Creeee-py.

I liked Persuasion the way it is. Did I know what was coming? Sure. Was it tame and chaste? Of course. But that was the challenge then, as it is now, evoking passion from subtlety, teasing it out from the tension created in a carefully built structure. You don't need a ball gag. The mark of all great writing is when the ball gag is implied.


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*Palin, Huckabee, O'Reilly, Rand Paul... you know, the giants.

**These are obviously 1. Closely choreographed group dancing, 2. Clever conversation on no topic of consequence, 3. Banging out one of three approved tunes on the ole pianoforte and 4. Disappearing for a month into a Chinaman's opium den in Whitechapel (common) or Limehouse (if you're posh).