Archives for November 25, 2003

How ironic that Hugh Kenner’s obituaries should be appearing on the same day that I published a piece
about Warner Bros. cartoons that made mention of his elegant little monograph
about Chuck Jones, creator of the Road Runner. He was a distinguished critic and a great gentleman, and will be greatly missed.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s New York Times obituary, incidentally, ends with the following paragraph:

Nor, surprisingly, did he deplore the decline of print as our main medium. “We forget that most of what people read when everybody read all the time was junk — competent junk,” he told U.S. News & World Report. “Now they get it from television. The casual entertainment people get in the evening from the box was what they used to get from the short fiction in The Saturday Evening Post. That magazine and others like it were the situation comedies and cop shows of their era. It is not a cultural loss that this particular use of literacy has been transferred from one medium to another.”

A very smart man.

One of the most interesting aspects of Jane Austen’s novels is that she always makes sure you know how much money the characters have–only how much is it, really? I recently caught up with a posting on the Web site of an economist that poses, and answers, this question in one celebrated case:

So how rich is Fitzwilliam Darcy, anyway? What does ten thousand (pounds) a year in the aftermath of the Napoleonic War mean, really?

I have two answers, the first of which is $300,000 a year, and the second of which is $6,000,000 a year….

Read the whole thing here.

While I’m at it, kindly allow me to plug one of my favorite Web sites, Inflation Calculator, an on-line form which (in the words of its inventor) “adjusts any given amount of money for inflation, according to the Consumer Price Index, from 1800 to 2002.” That may sound dry as dust, but spend just 30 seconds playing with Inflation Calculator and I bet you’ll have it bookmarked in 35. I used it frequently in writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, and I commend it wholeheartedly to any writer–novelist, journalist, whatever–who ever has occasion to compare what things cost in 1865, or 1925, or five years ago, to what they cost now.