I post here a link to an article
published today about yours truly, Samuel Richardson. The title of the article,
is “(Don't) Finish What You Started: In Defense of Not Reading Cover to Cover,”
from the Huffington Post.
In his article, Mr.
Gottlieb says that he suspects that “had our new technologies been available to
them, Samuel Johnson and Jane Austen would have embraced iPads, e-readers, and
blogs as complements, if not substitutes, to more traditional literary vehicles.” This set me thinking.
Maybe they would have embraced them as substitutes. I can only imagine, had they been born today, how those writers might spend their time.
Perhaps instead of
writing novels, Austen might have kept an account on blogspot, called “Worm-tonguing,”
posting snappy sketches of her life in the dorms. Here are my rewritings of the
first sentences of Austen’s novels had they been written in 21st
century United States.----
Persuasion, first sentence---“Lauren Jensen, of Shaker Heights, Ohio, was a biatch who, for her own amusement, never took up any reading material but PopSalad.com; there she found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation when she was spazzin out.”
Emma, first sentence---“Kayla Anderson, handsome, clever, and
loaded, with a comfortable home and an Adderall prescription seemed to unite
some of the best blessing of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years
in the world with very little to distress or vex her. But tonight she was
getting shitfaced.”
Northanger Abbey, first sentence---“No one who had ever seen Amber
Harris in her infancy would have supposed her born to be such a classy hoochie.”
Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas might have been related in a
single tweet, “No one more dangerous than a nigga with a library card!”
It’s rather disturbing that Gottlieb brought up my novel Clarissa
in his article without at all suggesting that it in addition to being the
longest English novel, it also happens to be one of the greatest novels. I can’t
think of a more relevant and effective antidote to our contemporary culture than
a reading of my Clarissa.
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