Voice Mail Archives

Oh my stars and garters! April is halfway over, and what have I to show for it?

Don't look now (by which I mean LOOK OVER THERE!! NOW!!!) but Melissa and I are hosting a festive little giveaway for our subscribers over on Eggplantia, for this week only!

The New York Times ran a story a few days ago called The Next Big Thing in English, the premise being that, post-modernism having run its course (debatable, but we'll leave it), lit departments across the English-speaking world have been casting about for the next big trend that will magically jolt this course of study back into relevance and prestige, reinstating all the lost funding and cachet that lit departments have suffered since the heyday of the 1970s.

It's amazing to me how easily we convince ourselves that we are the only oddballs on the planet who like the oddball little things we do. For me, it's 19th century literature, history, architecture, manners, dress... but you knew that.

Tonight I spoke at an undergraduate management class at Simmons College. I got my MBA at the Simmons School of Management not that long ago, so I was excited to work with the latest crop of students from the other side of the desk, as it were.

Ladies and gentlemen! It gives me great pleasure to announce a New Thing That You Will Like! Melissa Averinos and I have officialy launched Eggplantia.com, a new online home for our many and wide-ranging joint projects.

Ever since we started in on this whole BronteAlong madness, I've been reminiscing about how I grew up loving Jane Eyre. When I was about 12 years old, I suddenly graduated from obsessively re-reading Little Women (and Little Men, and Jo's Boys, and Rose in Bloom -- I do nothing halfway) to obsessively re-reading Jane Eyre.

So in the 2006 version of Jane Eyre, there is a whole lot of use of the color red.