Not to be the autocrat at the kitchen table but I hope at least some of you will watch the PBS production of Northanger Abbey this Sunday night. I’ll be on the couch, in my cardigan with the Kleenex-stuffed sleeves, and it’d be nice to think there are others out there doing the same, like a thousand points of cat ladies. If they managed to make something so interestingly loopy out of a source as quiet and bittersweet as Persuasion I can’t wait to see what gets done with Northanger Abbey, which is already a little schizophrenic as novels go.
Also on the decree front: Last night I was rattling around the house looking for a vampire novel. (We raged a little hard for Mr. Tingle’s birthday on Wednesday night and I spent most of yesterday feeling like Charles Bukowski. Like, my kingdom for a fried-egg sandwich.) No hidden caches of vampire novels revealed itself, so I picked up To The North by Elizabeth Bowen instead. I’m not all that far in but I already want to order everyone in the world to read it too. I had some misguided idea that I wouldn’t like Bowen’s novels, that they’d be too glassy or formal. But they’re not, or at least this one isn’t. Just beautiful.

My big holiday present this year was a subscription to the Times Literary Supplement. I’ve asked for one for several years, and this year someone finally believed me. I was (and am) over the moon about it, and my first issue arrived in the mail yesterday.
Two other excellent things that recently came in the mail:
• A galley of James Wood’s How Fiction Works. You can read a tantalizing bit of it here.
• The Oxford University Press edition of Goethe’s Faustus, translated by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I probably shouldn’t admit this to the world wide interweb but the arrival of this made me weep a little, I was so happy (what can I say? It’s been a hard winter). As you may remember, I mentioned pining for this book a while back; a couple lux little birds took notice, and OUP was kind enough to send one.
The book is very scholarly and beautiful, with many engravings and an interesting “stylometric analysis” in the back to support the editors’ claim that Coleridge was indeed the author of this mysterious 1821 translation (a hypothesis first floated in 1971). A stylometric analysis!
More on both of these books to come. For now just a couple observations:
1. I worry that a stylometric analysis of the contents of my mailbox would show a tiny old don lived at this address.
2. This tiny old don wonders about creating a Venn diagram displaying circles for “people who refer to Oxford University Press as ‘OUP'” and “people who after referring to Oxford University Press as ‘OUP’ have an irresistible urge to follow it up with ‘Yeah, you know me.'”

Today is Mr. Tingle’s birthday. The photograph shown here is one he took this past weekend that I like a whole lot. If you’d like to see others, he keeps a photo blog, which he’s lately resumed updating (after leaving a graveyard snap up for the holiday season).
When he started Serial Photo he would leave many of the photos unnamed. I said, “It’s going to be hard for people to tell you which photographs they like when they’re all called ‘Untitled’.” He responded with this title.
Photo: “Backyard Buick” by Lowell Allen

PBS’s presentation of Persuasion was a strange piece of television, wasn’t it? In the promos it looked like a typical costume drama. And bits of it were: The costumes, the locations. The actors, the script. However, the camera clearly wanted nothing to do with so expected and static a project, and it roamed and reared about, with an extreme close-up here and a showoff-y long take there. All in all, a surprising way for a camera to act when bonnets and broughams are present.
Since watching it, I’ve been wondering off and on how that filming style was decided on. Generally, the camera seems to have been charged with acting out everything the stifled heroine Anne Elliot cannot. To be not just an observer, but a confidante and proxy. It’s an interesting method for getting around a restrained and introverted heroine, to have the camera compensate for her.
(That, or someone wanted to show off all the tricks he or she learned in film school.)
The end result was distracting at times, nicely moody in others, and not entirely unsuccessful (how’s that for a British construction?). I liked actress Sally Hawkin’s toothiness and her full Duchess of Cleves face. Besides, the more Jane Austen adaptations I see, the more I admire how durable Austen’s novels are in their DNA. They can hold up to all sorts of knocks and indignities.
PBS’s Jane Austen series continues through April. Next Sunday is Northanger Abbey.

• Timothy Wu makes a convincing case for why J.K. Rowling should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon.
• It’s always difficult to resist a scandal in the romance world. It’s even harder when said scandal centers on (possibly) purloined phrases relating to the habits and hard times of “black-footed ferrets.” (Via.)

For your afternoon viewing pleasure, two troves of author videos:
• The Exhibit X archives features recordings of former guests of the series, including Samuel R. Delany (!), Rikki Ducornet, Lydia Davis, Kathryn Davis and several other great authors.
• Along with word of a possible new DFW novel in the offing, The Millions points the way to video of Wallace at Capri’s Le Conversazioni festival in 2006. Pay attention when the camera pans through the crowd, you can see Lindsay Lohan making out with some Italian dude in the back row. Also on the Conversazioni site are readings and conversations with Zadie Smith, Nathan Englander, Martin Amis, and many others with flourishing royalty statements.
As no doubt you’ve noticed, literary festivals are getting very glamorous these days, with locations like Capri, a glass cave underneath a volcano in Mexico… Brooklyn. Still, none of these has caught my fancy as much as a literary getaway idea Maud floated a couple years back: Fishing trips with James Hynes. She was speaking lightheartedly but I think it’s a lovely idea. $250 bucks and you get to spend the afternoon on Town Lake in Austin, shooting the breeze with Hynes and drinking Pearl from a cooler. Get anything published in the next year and the whole afternoon’s tax-deductible. (Hynes may be alarmed at the prospect but he should bear in mind: a) no prepared remarks would be expected, and b) he could probably fit up to eight people in the boat.)

On this week’s Savage Lovecast, Dan fields a call from the befuddled boyfriend of a grammar nerd who likes to play out the usage wars in the bedroom (call begins at 31:50). NSFW, but enjoyable for anyone who’s ever loved a copy editor.

• Jorge Luis Borges foretold the Internet.
• The marvelous James Hynes on what to read after Season 5 of The Wire. Nice to see some love for Denise Mina’s great Paddy Meehan books. (Via Pinky’s Paperhaus.)
• The Surreal Life: A fur lifejacket, “not intended for wear, but it would function perfectly in any capsize or other drowning emergency.” So, stylish and practical. (Via Lux Lotus.)