Upstate News in Brief

First--although mention of personal health is considered ill-bred in some quarters--Regional Coordinator A. Marie Sprayberry will be taking a few weeks off to recover from partial knee replacement. However, she and Co-RC Lisa Brown have endeavoured to put the "Events" listings at right for February and March in such a state as to prevent her being missed. Note particularly the upcoming Lady Day meeting (a joint meeting of JASNA Syracuse and the JABC-CNY at the Colgate Bookstore, although there is already considerable overlap between the two groups) on March 24 at 2:00 p.m., where the topic will be Regency fashions! More details about this meeting will follow in a future post.

Second, loud huzzahs for Miss Brown, who has just been appointed to the Co-RC position for JASNA Rochester as well as JASNA Syracuse! Although Miss Brown's employer transferred her to its Rochester office last year, she maintains a Syracuse mailing address, many relatives and friends in the Syracuse area, and a keen interest in the Syracuse Region, so she will continue to hold this post for both regions for at least the near future. Close cooperation already exists between the two Upstate Regions, and we trust that this new development will make it even closer.

Reminder: Combined Christmas/Candlemas Meeting in Liverpool, Sat., Jan. 14, 2 pm

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the Official Spokescat of JASNA Syracuse, reminds us that our JASNA Syracuse meeting for both Christmas and Candlemas will be Saturday, January 14, at 2 pm, in the Sargent Room of the Liverpool Public Library. The topic will be "Food, Glorious Food!" We'll discuss mealtimes and meal preparation in Jane Austen's era (which were surprisingly different from our foodways today); look over Maggie Black and Deirdre Le Faye’s The Jane Austen Cookbook and some other recipe books; and talk a little about the role of food in JA’s work (feel free to bring favorite food-related quotes!). We'll also try some "rout cakes" (a type of cookie mentioned in Emma), prepared according to the recipe in The JA Cookbook. And we'll raise a belated toast to JA's 236th birthday in December.

The Liverpool Public Library is located at 310 Tulip St., Liverpool, NY 13088. The Sargent Room is the smaller of the library's two meeting rooms (the Carman Community Room is the other). The library is easily reached from both I-81 North (if you're coming from the south) and the NY State Thruway:

From I-81, travel north from the junction with I-690, follow the signs for the Liverpool exits (near Carousel Center), and select the exit for NY Rt. 370 (Onondaga Lake Parkway). Take 370 along Onondaga Lake into the village of Liverpool, and stay on it as it angles slightly to the left and also becomes 2nd St. in the village. The library is on the corner of Tulip St. and 2nd St./370.

From the Thruway (from either direction), take Exit 38 (Liverpool/County Rt. 57). Travel south on 57 into the village, and take a right on Tulip St. (57 curves left at just about this point). Come down Tulip to 2nd St./370.

There is a small underground parking garage (entrance on Tulip), and ample free on-street parking is also available on Tulip and elsewhere. So we trust that your coachmen will be agreeably accommodated--and we hope you'll join us on the 14th for this "winter depression disperser"!

"Austenworld" News: Year-End Roundup

It's been a busy year in "Austenworld" (the universe of JA-related happenings), and another busy year is coming up! Here's a general roundup of recent news:

• First, JASNA's annual present to its members for JA's birthday--the new issue of the electronic journal Persuasions On-Line--is available here. It includes all three of the presentations from the panel "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly of Sense and Sensibility" (see our Oct. 24 post on the Fort Worth AGM), as well as a short piece by Rochester's David Meisel titled "Seeing Stars for Jane's Birthday." Dave was our speaker at JASNA Rochester's birthday lunch on Dec. 3, and his description and photos of three stars whose light began traveling to Earth in JA's birth year are fascinating!
  

• Enough other "new publications" have come out in the last few months to keep even Persuasion's Lady Russell happy. These include the anthology Jane Austen Made Me Do It, also mentioned in our Oct. 24 post on the Fort Worth AGM (and discussed at the JABC-CNY luncheon at the Colgate Inn on December 10); Lindsay Ashford's The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen, likewise mentioned in the Oct. 24 post, a murder mystery in which JA herself is the victim; P. D. James's Death Comes to Pemberley, a murder mystery thrust upon the Darcy family on the eve of a ball; and Second Impressions, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice by "Ava Farmer" (see the Chawton House Library website for details, and for more information about the Library's excellent work in general).
  

• On her enjoyable blog Jane Austen in Vermont, fellow RC Deb Barnum of JASNA Vermont has recently posted a YouTube link to a segment from a BBC2 program titled "The Many Lovers of Miss Jane Austen," shown in the UK on Dec. 23. (And Jane Austen in Vermont is well worth your attention in general--which is why we're posting this indirect link instead of linking directly to YouTube.) This segment was shot at the Fort Worth AGM and gives some sense of the atmosphere there, although your RC personally wishes that the BBC had paid more attention to our love of JA and less to the commercialization of her!
  

• As we look ahead to 2012, there's an upcoming JASNA event outside NY State but within a day's drive of Syracuse that may intrigue you: the Eastern Pennsylvania Region's "Jane Austen Day" on April 28, to be held at the Society Hill Sheraton in Philadelphia (setting of the 2009 AGM). The topic will be "Elizabeth Bennet: Delightful Creature," and more details are available here. Registration for this will open on Feb. 8, so make your plans now if you're interested.

• Closer to home, don't miss our upcoming JASNA Syracuse meeting on Saturday, Jan. 14, in the Sargent Room of the Liverpool Public Library. The topic will be "Food, Glorious Food!" Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the Official Spokescat of JASNA Syracuse, takes her responsibilities seriously and is already preparing for this meeting, as you can see. We'll give more details about this meeting in a post soon after New Year's.

• And, finally, we're tremendously excited about this year's AGM, "Sex, Money and Power in JA's Fiction," to be held in New York City in October. (Details available to this point about this AGM in general can be accessed here.) Not only will Co-RC Lisa Brown be reprising her "Dressing the Miss Bennets" presentation (which was a great hit in the Big Apple in September when she presented it to JASNA New York Metro), but RC A. Marie Sprayberry will be giving a breakout session titled "Sex, Power, and Other People's Money: The Prince Regent and His Impact on JA's Life and Work." So we're excited both generally and personally!

Wishing you all a very Happy New Year!!

Happy Birthday, Jane Austen!

As all good Janeites know and are celebrating today, JA was born on December 16, 1775. At age 236, she's going stronger than ever!

There has been considerable brouhaha in the British press lately about yet another recently discovered "lost portrait" of JA. (This article in The Guardian is representative.) Your Regional Coordinators, however, remain unconvinced that Dr. Paula Byrne's merely dating a portrait to 1815 and finding "Miss Jane Austin" written on the back of it constitute proof of its authenticity. They also wonder what St. Margaret's, Westminster, is doing in the background; why the lady in the portrait is wearing more jewelry than JA probably owned altogether; and so forth. Answers may or may not be forthcoming on Dr. Byrne's upcoming BBC2 special about the portrait--if we ever get to see it at all on this side of the pond, of course.

Your RCs would also agree with the sentiment several other Austen bloggers have expressed on this auspicious day--namely, that what JA looked like is a lot less important than what she wrote. Nevertheless, in casting about for an illustration for this post, we came across a very helpful collection of images on the Jane Austen Society of Australia website (www.jasa.net.au). These include Cassandra Austen's two portraits (the unfinished sketch of JA's face, and the portrait of JA seated with her back to the viewer) and almost all other images except for Dr. Byrne's recent discovery. Of these, the 2002 painting by Tom Clifford is actually quite pleasing and deserves to be better known, we think. It shows JA reading in the garden at her beloved Chawton home. Here it is:


And we leave you with the epigraph from Rudyard Kipling's story "The Janeites," which has become the traditional JA birthday toast in many JASNA regions:

Jane lies in Winchester--blessed be her shade!
Praise the Lord for making her, and her for all she made!
And while the stones of Winchester, or Milsom Street, remain,
Glory, love, and honour unto England's Jane!

A Change for JASSYL; CNY Janeite Holiday Plans

First, here’s a piece of news about Jane Austen Singing School for Young Ladies (JASSYL) director Dr. Joanna Manring to warm any Janeite’s heart: She is following the call of romance! Unfortunately for her numerous Syracuse-area friends and admirers, however, she is following it all the way to Lexington, Kentucky, where her young man resides (he is an old schoolmate who recently reconnected with her via social networking). She assures us that this is not “goodbye forever” by any means; indeed, she hopes to return to Skaneateles for a “JASSYL summer camp” in the summer of 2012. We fervently hope so too--and we certainly wish Joanna all the best.

One short-term effect of Joanna’s departure, however, is that there will be no JASSYL Christmas concert in Skaneateles this year. Your RCs have done some mulling over this and several other facts:

(1) JASNA Rochester’s traditional Christmas/JA birthday lunch at the Chatterbox Club, 25 N. Goodman St., Rochester, will be Saturday, December 3, at 11:00 a.m. The speaker will be SUNY Geneseo Professor David Meisel, who will talk about science in the Regency era. As usual, there will be a fee for this luncheon, and advance registration is required. Your RCs are both planning to attend this and hope that as many JASNA Syracuse members as possible will do likewise. We’ll provide a link to the registration form as soon as we receive it ourselves. (P.S.: Click here for the link. We'll also put it in the "Events" listing at right. The cost is $25 per person.)

(2) JA Book Club-CNY coordinator Heather Elia is working on organizing an “each-pays-for-herself luncheon,” JA birthday toast, and discussion of the new anthology Jane Austen Made Me Do It (edited by Austenprose blogger Laurel Ann Nattress) in Hamilton, probably on Saturday, December 10, around noon (but now perhaps on Saturday, December 17, depending on what the membership decides). Again, we’ll provide more details about this event as soon as we receive them. (P.P.S.: The luncheon will be on Saturday, December 10, at noon, at the Colgate Inn, 1 Payne St., Hamilton. Again, see the "Events" listing at right for further details.)

(3) As (1) and (2) illustrate, the pre-Christmas social calendar can get complicated very quickly. In addition, we couldn’t book the Sargent Room at the Liverpool Public Library for December 10, and December 17 doesn’t work for a couple of regular Liverpool attendees.


So we’ve decided to combine the JASNA Syracuse Christmas meeting with the Candlemas (February 2) meeting, and hold one winter meeting on Saturday, January 14, at 2:00 p.m. at the Liverpool Public Library. The topic of this meeting will be “Food, Glorious Food!” We’ll talk about meal timing and planning during JA’s era in general; look over Maggie Black and Deirdre Le Faye’s The Jane Austen Cookbook, which includes several recipes compiled by JA’s lifelong friend and Chawton housemate Martha Lloyd; discuss the role of food in JA’s work (feel free to bring favorite food-related quotes); and say at least a few words about the Rev. James Woodforde, 18th-century country clergyman, diarist, and food lover.

In addition, the Liverpool Library folks have said that they have no objections to a few light refreshments in the Sargent Room, so we’ll lift a glass of something nonalcoholically pleasant for a late toast to JA’s birthday, and try a few “rout cakes” (a type of cookie) prepared according to The JA Cookbook’s recipe. We trust that this meeting will be an antidote to the post-holiday blues, and we hope you’ll join us for this “winter depression disperser”!

Reminder: All Hallows Meeting in Binghamton, Sat., Nov. 5, 2 pm

Here’s a reminder about our upcoming All Hallows meeting next Saturday, November 5, at 2:00 pm, at RiverRead Books, 5 Court Street, Binghamton. The meeting will focus, in two different ways, on Sense and Sensibility. First, I’ll be describing the JASNA Annual General Meeting in Fort Worth, TX, where Sense and Sensibility was the topic. (See the October 24 post.) Then, JASNA member and Binghamton University professor Marilyn Gaddis-Rose has agreed to tell us something of her work on Isabelle de Montolieu's 1815 Raison et Sensibilite, the very first French translation of S&S--although, according to Marilyn, R&S may be not so much a translation as a re-imagining. Come prepared for some surprises!

And, speaking of surprises, I’ve got some freebies from the AGM to distribute (the traditional AGM “goodie bag” was extremely well filled this year). So do come and “have your share of the conversation”--and the fun!

To those of you who have just joined JASNA or have renewed your JASNA memberships for the coming year, many, many thanks. And for those of you who haven’t yet joined or renewed, please do--and take advantage of what’s still one of the best bargains in “Austenland”! (See "How to Join JASNA" in the top right corner for details.)

Finally, I know that most of you who live in the Binghamton area are regular shoppers at RiverRead already--but if you're planning to attend the meeting, please also plan on making a purchase from our kind hosts at RiverRead. They, and other owners of small businesses in downtown Binghamton, need our continuing support after the September flooding.

2011 AGM Report

Your Regional Coordinator writes:

This year’s JASNA Annual General Meeting, “Jane Austen: 200 Years of Sense and Sensibility,” is now history--and it was a blast from start to finish. Texans know how to have a king-sized good time, and our JASNA North Texas Region hosts certainly showed us how it’s done!

The Sundance Square area of downtown Fort Worth, where the Renaissance Worthington Hotel (our headquarters) is located, is full of interestingly repurposed older buildings and astonishing new ones. Here’s the view from my hotel window. Note especially the former Knights of Pythias Hall (the one resembling a church) in the middle distance, and the new white limestone Bass Performance Hall with its enormous angels behind it. (As usual, you can enlarge any photo by clicking on it.)


I arrived in Fort Worth on Wednesday afternoon, October 12, and spent the rest of Wednesday and the first part of Thursday registering, greeting friends, doing justice to this year’s AGM quiz (which this year came as a two-parter, the “Fun Quiz” and the “Challenge Quiz”), shopping in the three-room Emporium, greeting more friends, and doing more shopping. Geez, it was an awful burden, but someone had to do it! The t-shirt depicted below was purchased from Jane Austen Books.


The special events started Thursday afternoon with two much-anticipated presentations. First, British crime writer Lindsay Ashford gave us an introduction to her new novel, The Mysterious Death of Miss Austen--told from JA’s friend Anne Sharp’s point of view, solidly grounded in research conducted at Chawton House Library, and offering a most unusual “take” on JA’s untimely demise.

Then Fort Worth’s one and only Baronda Bradley gave us her views on “Managing Muslins in the Modern Millennium.” Baronda’s Regency wardrobe is deservedly famous in JASNA, and her advice on doing your research, knowing your fabrics, taking the necessary classes, and reusing/restoring old materials should be invaluable for anyone with an interest in creating or wearing Regency-style fashions. She was ably assisted by her son Austen and her daughter Leah. Here, Austen shows off his waistcoat.


I must admit that I missed both of the Thursday evening presentations, because I went out to dinner with friends, and we never stopped talking till well after the end of the second presentation! However, I was on board for Friday morning’s tour of the Fort Worth Japanese Garden and Botanical Gardens, where “every disposition of the ground was good” (as Elizabeth notes of Pemberley in P&P), and where Kim Wilson, author of In the Garden with Jane Austen, gave us an enjoyable talk and several handouts on Regency gardening. Here’s a shot of the long cascade in the Botanical Gardens’ rose garden, which reminds me somewhat of a scene from the 1980 BBC version of P&P.



The AGM officially got under way Friday afternoon, with Joan Klingel Ray’s plenary address on “Sense and Sensibility as Austen’s Problem Novel.” Ray acknowledged the various reasons why many present-day readers are uncomfortable with S&S (mainly the facts that Colonel Brandon is “underwritten” and Edward Ferrars is unsatisfactory on several counts), and addressed these with her characteristic humor.

I was fortunate in all three of my choices for the breakout sessions that followed. Sheryl Craig’s “Wealth Has Much to Do with It” was an excellent discussion of the economics of the mid-1790s (when JA wrote the first version of S&S), which in particular put the John Dashwoods’ “improvements” at Norland into damning perspective. Linda Slothouber’s “Decorating Your Own Barton Cottage” was an enjoyable guide not only to acquiring small Regency-era antiques (such as china, glass, silver, and wooden boxes), but to using them “to pursue questions we might not have pursued otherwise.” And William Phillips’s “Meaner than a Texas Polecat:...Austen’s Largest Cast of ‘Nasties’” was a highly entertaining and somewhat controversial examination of the various “skunky” characters in S&S. Here’s William’s ranking of the “nasties” from least to most odiferous: (7) Lady Middleton; (6) Robert Ferrars; (5) Willoughby (“only fifth?”, but William made a plausible case for this); (4) Fanny Dashwood; (3) Mrs. Ferrars; (2) John Dashwood; and (1) Lucy Steele. Would you agree?

[Skunk photo credit: Ervin C. Nielsen/Painet Inc., Illinois Department of Natural Resources.]

Some of us went by bus Friday evening to the Stolen Shakespeare Guild’s production of S&S in an adaptation by Jon Jory, while others watched an S&S movie marathon at the hotel. The SSG evidently decided to solve the problem of what to do with Edward Ferrars by playing him for laughs (the actor in this role wore an oversized pair of spectacles and a coat two sizes too large), and the actor playing Willoughby lacked the necessary passion--but the over-the-top Mrs. Jennings was excellent!

The Saturday sessions began with “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of S&S,” featuring the all-Canadian plenary panel of Elaine Bander, Peter Sabor, and Juliet McMaster. Below, Elaine (at left) and Juliet engage in a brisk pre-plenary warmup. (That blur in Juliet’s hand is her trusty smallsword, by the way; she needed a special letter from the AGM organizers to get it through U.S. customs!) Elaine discussed the “good” and the “bad” as ethical judgments versus the “ugly” as aesthetic judgments in S&S; Peter examined the “good, bad, and ugly” letters in the novel; and Juliet discussed the novel’s various duels (the actual duel fought by Willoughby and Colonel Brandon, of course, plus the “duels in words” fought by Elinor and Lucy).


My good fortune in breakout choices continued with Pat Michaelson’s “How to Talk like Mrs. Palmer (and Other Silly People)” and Juliette Wells’s “S&S Will Change Your Life.” Pat began by noting the major characteristics of “silly” speech in Austen (notably “a lot of words for not very much content,” and a reliance on “empty exaggerators” such as “vastly” and “amazingly”). She then put us into small groups to practice our silly talk, and by far the best job was done by Ellen Fuller (at left below) and Moorea Corrigan!


Juliette, for her part, examined several present-day Austen-based “conduct texts” (JA’s Guide to Dating, The Tarot of JA, A Walk with JA, etc.) for their interpretations of what S&S has to teach us, and then opened the floor for personal accounts of what audience members have learned from the novel.

Perhaps the most eagerly anticipated plenary of this AGM was screenwriter Andrew Davies’s “Mr. Darcy’s Wet Shirt and Other Embarrassments: Some Pleasures and Pitfalls in Austen Adaptations.” A video prepared by the organizers and titled “16 Reasons Why We Love Andrew Davies” began the session. Once the standing ovation that greeted him had died down, Davies pretended to quaver: “Be gentle with me. I’m only a little old man!” He then, of course, demonstrated in his account of writing the screenplays for the BBC P&P, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and S&S that he’s not exactly a geriatric case yet. (In the photo below, however, he does seem somewhat dismayed at the length of the line waiting to ask him questions after the presentation!)


Although some of us were beginning to droop by the sixth and final breakout session, Persuasions editor Susan Allen Ford was well worth hearing as always in “Mrs. Dashwood’s Insight: Reading Edward Ferrars in Columella.” Susan showed that, like Volume 1 of The Mirror in NA (see the 11/8/10 entry on this blog) and Fordyce’s Sermons in P&P (see the 5/24/11 entry), Richard Graves’s 1779 comic novel Columella, or The Distressed Anchoret isn’t just mentioned in S&S, but seems to have exerted a considerable influence on it as well. Edward’s fate may have been a little happier than that of either the title character of Columella or its author: Both Columella and Richard Graves himself actually married their “Lucy Steele” figures, and both paid a price for it.

None of us, however, were so tired that we couldn’t enjoy the banquet, the promenade around Sundance Square, and the ball! As usual, the JASNA members in attendance turned out in their finest threads (both Regency-style and modern), and as usual, an excellent time was had by all. (Personally, I have more fun on the Saturday night of the AGM than I do any other night of the year these days.) The photo below shows 60% of NY State’s Regional Coordinators. From left to right: your humble servant; Celia Easton of Rochester; and Meg Levin of New York Metro. (Meg’s New York Metro co-RC, Linda Dennery, was elsewhere in the hotel at the time, and Syracuse co-RC Lisa Brown unfortunately couldn’t make the trip to Texas. Next year in Brooklyn, however, Lisa will be reprising her “Dressing the Miss Bennets” presentation at the “Sex, Money and Power” New York City AGM!)


It's never too early to introduce the littlest Janeites to the pleasures of the AGM promenade. (That's an elegant "baby barouche" they're riding in, too!)


And dancemistress Beverly Francis and the "Ladies at Play" enabled dancers of all skill levels to enjoy themselves thoroughly at the ball.


Next morning, after we Regional Coordinators had shaken ourselves awake for an 8 a.m. business meeting, we all enjoyed the delights of brunch. First, the winners of the two quizzes and the J. David Grey Young Writers’ Workshop were announced. I must confess I was too rattled to get the other winners' names (I'll add these as soon as I can), since from the two of us tying for first place on the “Challenge Quiz,” your humble servant’s name was drawn as the winner. I received a bag containing several prizes, chief among which was a Sense and Sensibility bangle bracelet in a cloth carrying case.


An unusual feature of brunch was the presence of the “Wedding Party at Delaford,” including three of the four newly married couples at the end of S&S. Not only was Willoughby unaccountably present without the “smart, stilish, but not handsome” former Miss Sophia Grey, but an altercation broke out between Willoughby and Colonel Brandon, and the gentlemen had to withdraw from the banquet hall so as not to disrupt the brunch’s main event--a video presentation titled “The Green Apple,” by independent Austen scholar and living legend Deirdre Le Faye.

A self-described “rambling chat,” the Le Faye presentation centered on her view of S&S as an “unripe” effort (hence the video’s title), but it also extended to her views on the “afterlives” of S&S and the other novels. Most interestingly, she may be almost alone in seeing possible problems for Captain and Mrs. Wentworth after the end of Persuasion: The Captain “has never had a home life,” and Anne “may have been a spinster too long” and may not make as capable a sailor’s wife as Mrs. Croft. Even those of us who were inclined to dispute this prediction, however, were delighted with her ultimate solution for General Tilney in NA: marrying him off to the title character of Lady Susan!

For me, the afternoon tour to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Nasher Sculpture Center, followed by the group dinner at the famous Joe T. Garcia’s Mexican restaurant, concluded this AGM. And hearty thanks to the AGM organizers, Dr. Cheryl Kinney and Rosalie Sternberg, for everything they and their volunteers did to make this AGM Texas-sized fun!

P.S. I unaccountably forgot to mention that a launch party for the Jane Austen Made Me Do It anthology (edited by Laurel Ann Nattress of Austenprose) and two other Austenite books was held at the Sundance Square Barnes and Noble on Friday night. If I hadn't already been committed to the play, I would have been at the launch.

P.P.S. The winners of the Young Writers' Workshop prizes were Fort Worth-area high school students Allison Garcia, Amanda Miller, and Catherine Miller. I haven't yet been able to find out the name of the "Fun Quiz" winner (who was chosen from among 49 perfect scorers on that quiz).