Jane Austen is all over English currency now.

Queen Liz getting the shaft.

July is a big month for famous writers, and this year more than ever. Last week celebrated the 200th birthday of Henry David Thoreau, and this week celebrates (mourns?) the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death.

For a country that arguably has the most famous literary tradition in the western world, England is obsessed with Jane Austen more than any other writer these days. Case in point? The Bank of England has placed Jane Austen on not one, but two different pieces of currency. Even Queen Elizabeth has to be feeling the heat these days. She's getting bumped after all.

Apparently that's Jane Austen's profile. ((shrug))

Today, a £10 note featuring the writer was revealed. It'll go into wide distribution in mid-September. This follows the Bank of England also placing Austen on its £2 coin, which they've already released, but only in Winchester and Basingstoke, which have connections to the author. Like the £10 note, the coin will gain wide distribution in the months to come.

Poor Shakespeare, though. The guy is possibly the world's most famous writer and he can't even get his mug on a five pence coin.

I'm going to go with nutmeg and cumin words myself.

We all have vocal and writing ticks, whether we choose to believe it or not. Listen to your friends talk, those who always say something is amazing or super--two popular words that people rely on like a crutch these days for lack of having any other way to express something is wonderful or surprising.

Famous writers throughout history have had ticks as well, words and phrases they constantly rely on, which data journalist Ben Blatt found out by examining the numbers. Blatt calls them "cinnamon words," a hat tip to Ray Bradbury who once said his favorite word to use in writing was cinnamon.

In his new book, Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing, Blatt says he found the cinnamon words of many famous writers, as he tells PRI in the interview below.





Jane Austen, for example, leans on civility, fancying and imprudence consistently. Dan Brown? Grail, masonic and pyramid. Other quirks were found by Blatt, like how the word she is used only once in the entirety of The Hobbit, or that James Patterson seemingly uses 160 clichés per 100,000 words in his famed Alex Cross detective novels. (Of course, Patterson really doesn't write his books, so much as his collaborator, so I'm not sure who's to blame there.)

160 clichés, though--that's amazing. That takes a super effort.

Jane Austen was tight with cash.

Maybe you're that type that watches CNBC, Fox Business, or Bloomberg all day and can't get enough talk about investments. Maybe you're just an inquisitive, nosy type about other people's finances. Either way, there's good news for you.

Coming up this week on the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death, there are a million different angles being taken to commemorate her. One is the Bank of England of all places, which is putting on a year-long exhibition where you can see Austen's ledger and how she computed interest on her deposits. You can also see how other writers like Charles Dickens and George Eliot invested their money.

I don't know about you, but I'm just fanning myself in excitement to learn about that 4% interest Austen earned on her £15 deposit.

Need a dose of Jane Austen on your phone every day?

Few writers over the years have such a devoted, fanatical fan base as that of Jane Austen. Something about fancy dresses and stilted love panned out over 300 pages does it for people.

So, the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, England, has created an app that will send you a quote from her books every day, and will even schedule to deliver it to you at the time of day you desire. Service with a smile! Unless you're being served by Mr. Darcy, because I'm sure he never smiled.

“People are always interested in her quotes. They’re always witty, lively, succinct and very perceptive - and they do often describe people’s characters really well,” David Baldock, the centre’s director tells London's Guardian newspaper.

A couple of sample quotes the app supplies:

"Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance." — from Pride and Prejudice (1813)

"There are certainly not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them." — from Mansfield Park (1814)

"How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!" — from Persuasion (1817)

Let's be honest here. This app better supply a heavy dose of Mr. Darcy quotes, all frowny and moody, or there will be hell to pay.

The 10 (err, 11?) Greatest Sentences Ever Written [according to The American Scholar].

Let's face facts.

First off, The American Scholar's article about 10 Best Sentences is indecisive. It's actually 11, not 10.

Other issues? The 11 best sentences are written by 7 Americans, 2 Brits, an Irishman, and a Russian. Because if there's anything we can all agree on, it's that England hasn't given a lick to the field of literature. And the rest of the world? Pssh, please.

You might think this is a logical extension of the The American Scholar journal. You might ask, "But The American Scholar is all about America, no?"

No. Their own "About Us" states nothing about star-spangled Americana in literature, or that Jane Austen is an honorary member of the Tea Party.

So how is this top-10/11 made up?

8 men.
3 women.
7 Americans.
2 Brits.
1 Irishman.
1 Russian.
10 Caucasians.
1 African American.

...and that's it. Toni Morrison does double-duty covering quotas as a black woman, but otherwise there's no diversity, no extension of talent, no breadth of real insight into amazing sentences within the realm of literature. If you're a white American male, odds are you're writing literary gold, baby!

And that's the problem.

So who's included on this list? Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, James Joyce, John Hersey, Jane Austen, Toni Morrison, Tim O'Brien, Charles Dickens, Vladimir Nabokov, and Truman Capote.

It's like a who's who of obviousness until you hit John Hersey. And lord only knows who Tim O'Brien and Joan Didion are blackmailing in the field of literature, because the orgasmic obsession some have for them can only be explained through nefarious means.

Who's needed in this top-10/11? Margaret Atwood, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Anton Chekhov, Wole Soyinka, Doris Lessing, Boris Pasternak, Junot Diaz, Alice Munro, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, Samuel Beckett, Alice Walker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Grenville, Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Albert Camus. Pick a half dozen, swap them out with The American Scholar's list, and you've got something.

But, hey, God forbid.

Jane Austen biographer isn't pleased with the new British £10 note.

Paula Byrne has written about Jane Austen frequently, and now has some thoughts regarding Austen's likeness on the new British £10 note. As she tells London's The Guardian:

"Jane Austen is the funniest writer to walk this planet, and she's been made to look dim-witted."

In the Bank of England's defense, there isn't much to go on regarding Austen's actual appearance. Having died in 1817, Austen really didn't leave a legacy of photographic evidence. The only interpretation of Austen done during her lifetime was the sketch you see above on the left, drawn by her sister Cassandra. The picture on the right is Austen's likeness on the new £10 note, which borrows from a painting done by Austen's nephew 50 years after her death.

This hasn't stopped Byrne's criticism, who is absolute in Cassandra Austen's wistful, pencil-sketch interpretation.

"They've made her look like a doll, with big eyes," Byrne tells The Guardian. "She wasn't smiling in the original and she is in this. It is a Victorian airbrushing of her."

Because Jane Austen was physically incapable of smiling?

Yes, but how do you really feel, Paula?

"I can't believe they have gone for such a saccharine picture [...] but they've chosen a picture that makes her look a cosy, middle-class writer."

No! Not the cosy middle-class!

What else, Paula?

"[I]t's just that it would have been better to show her as much more spiky..."

Because if Jane Austen doesn't look like an 18th-century Sid Vicious, we've clearly gone astray.





photo: The Guardian

Where Dead Writers Reside: Part Three

It's October, and that requires obligatory Halloween-inspired posts. And nothing is more obligatorily macabre than looking at the tombstones of those who have died.

Now through Halloween we'll post collections of tombstones to see where famous writers are hanging out today.

Today: Katherine Mansfield, Charles Chesnutt, Walt Whitman, Jane Austen

Katherine Mansfield

Like many in her day, Mansfield was diagnosed with tuberculosis, in her case at the age of 29. She spent the final five years of her life trying a myriad of ways of battling the disease, none of which held any positive effect.

At the age of 34, Mansfield died from a pulmonary hemorrhage after running up a flight of stairs, further proving why escalators are your friend.

Mansfield is buried at Cimetière d'Avon, Avon
Département de Seine-et-Marne
Île-de-France, France, where she was last at an institute for the treatment of her tuberculosis.




Tombstone Notes:
Bonus points for the wannabe garden party at the foot of the grave. Homey, chic decor can lighten up any cemetery plot!

Charles Chesnutt

There's a great rift among the scholarly set as to Charles Chesnutt's literary merit. He wrote an array of short stories, novels, and essays regarding race in America, about self-identity and social construct and belief structures--and while his message was one that many believe was powerful, others argue it was flimsy and lacked complexity.

All of this is a diversionary tactic so as to avoid saying I don't know how Charles Chesnutt died. No amount of research tells me what the cause of death was. He's dead though--died in Cleveland, OH, in 1932, and is interred at Lake View Cemetery. Because living in Cleveland kills everyone in time.

Tombstone Notes:
In the vein of that humble, modest, "I guess someone is buried under here," subtle sort of way John Steinbeck has as well.

Walt Whitman

Whitman's final years are as familiar as any elderly person's. In 1873, he suffered a paralytic stroke and moved into the home of his brother in Camden, NJ. Later, when the brother and sister-in-law moved for business reasons, Whitman bought a house across town in Camden, where he would spend the rest of his days.

In 1892, in failing health, Whitman spent $4,000 on a mausoleum for his body. By March 26, Whitman was dead. A who's-who of lung ailments killed him. An autopsy (performed in his home) declared Whitman died from "pleurisy of the left side (lung), consumption of the right lung, general miliary tuberculosis, and paranchymatous nephritis." His left lung had collapsed, his right lung was at 1/8th capacity, and an egg-sized abscess had eroded one of his ribs.

That trouble breathing you're feeling right now? Yeah, that's totally psychosomatic, I swear.

Whitman was buried in his $4,000 mausoleum in Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, NJ. Later, the bodies of his parents, two brothers, and their families would be moved in as well.

Tombstone Notes:
Only a miniature house could do for the cocky Whitman.

Jane Austen

God only knows what killed Jane Austen.

A 1964 "retrospective diagnosis" (where doctors look at symptoms of long dead famous people and guess what killed them) says Austen died of Addison's Disease, an adrenal disease where the body doesn't produce enough steroids.

Other experts suggest Austen died of Hodgkin's Lymphoma, bovine tuberculosis, or Brill-Zensser disease. Austen, during her life, described her symptoms as rheumatism.

Her main symptom? Death. She was 41.

Austen's brother, Henry, hooked her up to a plot in the floor of Winchester Cathedral of Winshester, Hampshire, England. Nothing in the epitaph--written by her brother James--describes her skill as a writer.

Sigh.

Tombstone Notes:
A little bit wordy and over the top. Clearly James wasn't the writer in the family.

Morrissey's 'Autobiography' is a classic.

Morrissey is like a poor man's John Lennon, if John Lennon had a froggier voice and better hair. He was the lead singer of The Smiths, a British band hugely popular in their homeland, but D.O.A. in America outside of indie band aficionados and practitioners of crying in the bathroom.

Morrissey's fan base is intense and obsessive, enough that Morrissey can pull some strings with the production of his autobiography, entitled--appropriately enough--Autobiography. Pull what strings, you say? Like having his book published through Penguin Books' Classics imprint, heretofore only known for releasing books known to humanity for generations. Also known as classics.

Penguin created the division nearly 70-years ago when they first published Homer's The Odyssey. In the decades since, every book by Penguin's Classics imprint has been the stuff you read in high school and college, the stuff that win awards and places on book shelves, the stuff by the likes of Francis Bacon, Jane Austen, John Steinbeck... Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Wollstonecraft...Julius Caesar, Ovid, and Charles Darwin.

And now, because he demanded, it's also the stuff of Morrissey.

Colin Firth's famous 'Pride & Prejudice' lake scene was meant to be played naked.

The 1995 British miniseries, one of the more famous television/movie adaptations of the book, is well-known for Colin Firth emerging from a lake fully-clothed.

Yet, according to the show's screenwriter, Andrew Davies, Mr. Darcy was supposed to be in his birthday suit.

As he told London's The Mirror, "He would have had a few hours in which he could be blissfully alone. It's a hot day, he arrives at this lake--so I thought he would strip completely off and dive down and just become a creature, an animal, just for once." Or, as Davies more bluntly put it, "The wet shirt scene was intended to be a total full-frontal nudity scene."

To the dismay of wannabe voyeurs and nudists everywhere, the powers that be decided to film Firth clothed, as seen here:

Now you, too, can be Mr. Darcy.

U Star Novels now has a collection of classic novels in which all famous characters are swapped out and replaced with your sad excuse of a exciting life! You supply the names and important facts, and U Star Novels replaces all the pertinent information inside the famous texts.

Some available stories include...

Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet: Now you, too, can be involved in a double-suicide!

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: All the fun of split personality disorders and indiscriminate murder!

Pride and Prejudice: Mr. Darcy's black hole of a personality can be yours!

And not one, not two...but four Charles Dickens novels: Because you're a horrible, horrible masochist!

In case you've got $325 to burn on something to hold your pack of gum.

Kate Spade makes bags and stuff. Stuff my Y chromosome doesn't appreciate fully.

But she makes some stuff that looks like this:

Or like this:

And this...

And...

The real irony here is that the only people who've read those books are too poor to afford those purses. But that's why bankruptcy exists. The commercial on the radio with the official sounding lawyer told me so.

BBC: Trollope to rework Austen's Sense and Sensibility.

Now, that's no way to talk about a writer!

Ahhhh, wait, Trollope--my mistake. It seems the Trollope in this case is Joanna Trollope, writer of "upmarket family dramas and romances" (per Wikipedia). In essence, she makes the book equivalent of a Mercedes SUV.

Trollope is part of a movement by HarperFiction to create a series of modernizations of Austen's books. If that sounds like a bad idea, well, it is. Remember when Gus Van Sant remade Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in 1998? No?

Neither does anyone else.

"When it's time to thrown down, Jane is ready to destroy you."

So says some video game developer about a Jane Austen video game. Yeah, that Jane Austen, who is always the first person I imagine with Ivan Drago tendencies.

The game will be like the illegitimate lovechild of Scrabble and Street Fighter, with you living vicariously through a variety of literary individuals--like Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe--as they spell and fight their way to supremacy.

According to the developer, "Simply put, Jane is a princess who doesn't need saving. She's beautiful, and she can also kick your ass."

Pssh, obviously. And don't even ask what Agatha Christie might be capable of. It probably involves brass knuckles and the ability to kill a man just by throwing a verb at him.

Jane Austen is still making serious coin.

It has to feel good, as a writer, to know there's a solid chance you'll reach the height of fame and success once you're dead.

Good news for Jane Austen then! An unfinished manuscript from early in her career, titled The Watsons, just sold for $1.6 million at a Sotheby's auction.

So you know all those unfinished haikus you have from high school? They're seriously going to reap in some major cash for your great-great-great-great-great grandchildren. Unless you die childless.

But don't let that get you down. Jane Austen died childless, too. And she's doing okay these days.

Male Nobel Prize winner says no woman is his equal.

Nobel Prize winner, V.S. Naipaul--known popularly in suburban books clubs as "Who's V.S. Naipaul?"--is famous among the literary set.

But it might be safe to say his fan base among women has dwindled slightly.

According to Salon, Naipaul was interviewed recently, and suggests that he can detect a woman writer whenever he reads. This might be because of psychic premonitions he's always kept on the down-low (how mysterious!)--or, possibly, he's just a misogynist. But it's more fun to pretend a Nobel Prize winner in literature has psychic abilities. It spices things up.

Anyway, Naipaul kept the misogyny bandwagon rolling in the interview, saying that no woman writer, alive or dead, was his equal, mainly because of "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world." It's funny when he talks about narrow views of the world because he's misogynistic. See how that works? Naipaul is a comedian! It's open-mic night at The Chuckle Hut!

His views on no woman equal includes Jane Austen--who he backhandedly comments that he couldn't "share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world."

At least Austen had sense. I'm going to go on a limb and say Naipaul long lost his.

Jane Austen could never have worked on Wheel of Fortune.

People mock Vanna White as just television window dressing. But Vanna White doesn't flub spelling out words, now does she? Sure, the letters light up for her--but has she ever failed to touch those letters correctly and give us a properly spelled word? No. That means tens of bajillion of words (rough estimate) have single-handedly been spelled flawlessly at the hands of Vanna White.

Is she the world's greatest speller? I don't know, but it's possible she's a super computer from which all spellchecks evolve.

The same can't be said for Jane Austen.

Oxford University professor Kathryn Sutherland researched 1,100 pages of hand-written letters by Austen and found that...ehhh...spelling is overrated when you're writing about Mr. Darcy. And don't ask Austen about semi-colons. Her grammar skills were apparently pretty bad, too.

There are various explanations. It was a different era. Rules were different. Maybe she was being casual in her letters. Or, you know, spelling and apostrophes just weren't her thing.

This just reinforces the argument that college students should be allowed to misspell and have pathetic grammar skills. First Shakespeare can't make up his mind on how to spell his own name. Now, Jane Austen doesn't know how to use a comma.

Cormac McCarthy needs to step it up. Just saying.

Hemingway always felt like a bit of a drama queen.

In the world of famous writers, Jane Austen always had the vibe of someone who might get involved in underground fight clubs--right after Truman Capote or Seamus Heaney. The gentry of Jane's time was wound so tightly that swinging brass knuckles would be an obvious outlet for stress relief.

A video--a mock trailer for a non-existent movie--has come out the past few days and gone viral. It blends together Jane Austen and the film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club.

If only.