Still talking about POTC 3....
Jun. 6th, 2007 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ink_n_impSo, I'm trying to explain to a friend of mine why I dislike Elizabeth Swann as a character...which brought up Keira Knightly the actress...which lead to a discussion of "Pride and Prejudice"...which lead to me noting my firm displeasure at all that is Jane Austen (aside from the bits where she is so witty she even wins me over)...which lead to me pulling up this MARVELOUS quote of Mark Twain's:
"I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
*sheds tear*
A truer word n'er spoken.
EDIT: And cause once I get started on Mark Twain, I am loathe to stop:
From Mark Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
"Cooper's gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such
as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and
indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of
stage properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices
for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with,
and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things
and seeing them go...[a] stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently
was his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his
effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book
of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds
and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is
in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure
to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on,
but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and
find a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the
Leather Stocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series."
"I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone."
*sheds tear*
A truer word n'er spoken.
EDIT: And cause once I get started on Mark Twain, I am loathe to stop:
From Mark Twain's Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences
"Cooper's gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment; but such
as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and
indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of
stage properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices
for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with,
and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things
and seeing them go...[a] stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently
was his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his
effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book
of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds
and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is
in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure
to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on,
but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and
find a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the
Leather Stocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series."
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-07 03:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-12 03:57 am (UTC)Wow
Date: 2007-06-10 07:10 pm (UTC)That first Twain quote about Austen is amazing...and will probably be making it on to my facebook quotes. -yoink- and thanks.