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NEWS ALERT!!!
JAE BUSTS VEGAS!!
My friend Jae flew into town last Wednesday to help me with my upcoming move. In off hours we have been playing poker, at
the El Cortez and the Fiesta, and Jae has played on his own twice, at the Monte Carlo and the Palms. In three days he's won
$230 from the crafty sharks at these Vegas card rooms. (The results of my own efforts must remain confidential.) Check back
soon for further updates on Jae's extraordinary run . . .
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| Charlotte Bronte |
JANE EYRE
4 September 2005
Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" is over six hundred pages long, but it's a page-turner . . . you just can't put
it down. Thackery said that about it when he first read it in 1847 -- my experience of it in 2005 was no different. Part
melodrama, part Gothic thriller, part love story, "Jane Eye" is, of all the truly great novels, the most shamelessly
entertaining. Wild coincidences, lurid situations, spectacular violence are called upon unselfconsciously to interest and
thrill the reader -- but nothing in the book is more interesting or more thrilling than Jane herself, Jane's fearless voice.
The fierceness of the female soul, the subtlety of the female heart, have rarely been so exposed in fiction, and almost
never from the inside, as it were -- "Wuthering Heights" by Charlotte's sister Emily being one other notable exception.
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| Emily Bronte, painted by her brother Branwell |
In "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights" we eavesdrop on a woman's conversation with herself. We do the
same, at times, with Tolstoy's Natasha and Shakespeare's Cleopatra -- but their creators listen for what men want to know
about them. Jane Eyre tells us what's important to her, what SHE wants us to know.
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| Anne, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, painted by their brother Branwell |
I suppose it's not surprising that these two Bronte sisters, who grew up with their two other siblings in a world of their
own among the desolate moors, a world of imagination and intellect unconstrained by the conventions of the Victorian patriarchy,
should have developed such singular and courageous voices. And not surprising, either, that their eventual experience of
the wider world, where such voices from women were hardly approved, led to a savage indignation -- and a desire to express
it.
The love story in "Jane Eyre", however fantastical its setting, is the most penetrating examination of love
from a woman's perspective ever penned. In Mr. Rochester, Charlotte imagined an ideal man -- ideal not because he was good,
or handsome, or gallant . . . but because he looked at Jane and knew her, recognized at once her power and individuality.
And these things did not frighten Mr. Rochester -- they delighted him.
Byron, writing a bit before Charlotte's time, said of some current flame, "I would, to be beloved by that woman,
build and burn another Troy." But Jane would reply, "Before you set to work on Troy, look at me -- know me."
What was Troy to her? What, for that matter, had it been to Helen?
Mr. Rochester talked to Jane. What is more astonishing, he listened to her. That's what made him her Achilles, her Hector,
her Odysseus.
The uncanny thing about the book is that, in between all the Victorian reticence and circumlocution, Charlotte's voice
sometimes sounds as clearly and directly as an intimate friend whispering in one's ear at a formal ball. The voice is as
alive, as frank, as modern, as the voice of any 21st Century girl. Jane Eyre is our ever present sister, here and now --
and we have to hope that, like Mr. Rochester, we have the wisdom and the humanity to listen to what she has to say, and to
love her for the courage it takes her to say it.
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| The Brontes' cottage in Haworth, on the edge of the moors |
KID VEGAS
Part Seven
3 September 2005
Day eight -- the Luxor and New York New York.
At the Luxor, Nora and Lee checked out the motion rides while Harry and I explored the casino. (Nora is thrill-mad --
Harry and I less so.) We all visited the King Tut exhibition, in which the tomb of the boy king is reconstructed as it was
the day Howard Carter discovered it in the Twenties. He saw it first by torchlight -- it's brightly lit at the Luxor. Informative
if not exactly atmospheric.
Then we took the tram to the Excalibur and the kids got their first look at that medieval fantasy. From there we walked
to New York New York and had dinner at Il Fornaio. The food was o. k., the service barely o. k. -- like a lot of chain restaurants,
this one doesn't come up to the standards of most Vegas eateries. The setting was cool -- on a terrace beside a rippling
brook with a view of the reconstructed indoor New York City that is the prime attraction of this casino.
Harry and Nora rated the Luxor and New York New York at 10 (out of 10) on the cool-fun scale. The Luxor was one of the
places Nora most wanted to revisit before she left town.
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