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Detours in Derbyshire
When I was eleven, I visited Glastonbury Abbey, one of the top contenders for the title of “final resting place of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere.” At the time, my main sources of King Arthur knowledge were a high-school theatre production of Camelot, and First Knight, a film starring Richard Gere as Lancelot and Sean…
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My Spirit Hath Rejoiced
I was raised with the barest trappings of religion. My mother is a ‘reformed’ reformed Jew while my father is a lapsed Anglican who made the leap from agnosticism to atheism at some point during my early teenage years. I had candles in my menorah and lights on my Christmas tree but that was about…
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Of Cows, Jane Austen, and Nettles
I was terrified, certain of my imminent and undignified demise – death by stampeding cows – which got me thinking about how I came to be standing atop the scenic, grassy slope that was once the site of Jane Austen’s childhood home and would now play host my unfortunate end. I had come to England…
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Down and Out in South Kensington and Fort Tryon
I have an unusual number of early childhood memories that involve being dragged to museums by my art-loving mother. She would usually resign herself to the inevitable outcome: me sulkily plunking myself down on one of those 360 degree couches favored by museums and usually populated by old people and fat, fanny-pack wearing tourists. Eventually…
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A Fictitious Love
I have always had a penchant for falling in love with fictional men. Usually they were from books, sometimes from movies and, occasionally, they captured my affections in cartoon form (much could be said for the Beast from Beauty and the Beast, whom I always preferred to his disturbingly Aryan-looking human counterpart). Looking back, I…
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A Change Would Do You Good
Let’s play some free association. I say “Viv.” You say…“coffee.” Wrong. I say “Viv.” You say…“Sheryl Crow.” Right! About a week ago, I ventured to Café Viv for the first time in quite a while, softly singing “Soak Up the Sun” to myself on the walk over. Never mind the fact that it was cold…
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Another Lonely Day
Wonderland Salvage is the first Intime production I’ve seen that boasts a “This show may not be appropriate for children under 16” sign by the box-office. As I discovered, this warning is not without reason. The show is dark and deals with a number of depressing and serious issues one doesn’t usually expect to find…
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Pride and Prejudice
Like its preternaturally attractive star Keira Knightley, the new adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” is very beautiful. Unfortunately, good looks are about all that Ms. Knightley and the film have going for them. This movie, the most recent addition to the long list of Jane Austen screen and television adaptations, marks the feature-film debut of…
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What’s in a Name: Signifiers, Sabotage and Synthesis
Knowing virtually nothing about linguistics or etymology, we nonetheless claim the authority, by virtue of fact that we are writing this article and you are reading it, to wax philosophical on the origin of naming.
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Springtime for Princeton
Until a couple weeks ago, I had been greeted every morning by a pair of men’s gray boxer shorts that had been hanging for several months from the bare branches of the tree outside my third-floor dorm-room window.
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Marry, Murder, or Fuck?
It was when we looked over at each other and discovered that we were both checking out our split ends, that we decided it was the start of a beautiful friendship. Oh yeah, and we were sitting in our Humanities Sequence lecture, more worried about the state of our hair than we were about the…
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CATFIGHT!
When we hear “Jane Austen,” we tend to think of country manners, happy endings and Colin Firth in a wet shirt. So, when posters announcing the third lecture in the Princeton University President’s Lecture Series went up several weeks ago-“Jane Austen and War” given by Claudia Johnson, the Murray Professor of English and Department Chair-people…