"[Margot] Robbie’s character, Cathy, had 'extremely hairy armpits' in the 2026 adaptation of the novel..."

"... but 'unfortunately the scene that we see them didn’t make it in there,' said the director. Cathy having unshaven pits 'was so important to me,' she said, adding that she often wonders 'where are the razors that these women are using?' when watching Jane Austen adaptations. 'They’re all kind of hairless like eels. I’m like: "What’s going on? It’s completely mad."'"

From "Wuthering Heights director regrets not showing Margot Robbie’s 'extremely hairy armpits'" (The Guardian).

Do female characters in Jane Austen movies wear sleeveless dresses? If not, and I think not, where are all these hairless eels? The director — Emerald Fennell — sounds half mad.

"If, at any point in your life, you have ever believed that women say they want nice guys but really want bad guys, or that love has to hurt to be real..."

"... or that romance and stalking are basically the same thing, I think we all know which entities are to blame: 

1. The manosphere

2. The patriarchy

3. A young British woman who died in 1848 of tuberculosis at the age of 30, but not before unleashing upon the world the most problematic love story of all time, 'Wuthering Heights.'"

Ha ha. I'm reading "'Wuthering Heights' and the birth of the toxic boyfriend/Heathcliff and Catherine’s trauma-bonded romance is dysfunctional and despicable. But you can’t help but weep" (WaPo).

There's a new movie version of "Wuthering Heights." You've probably noticed. This one stars Margot Robbie — the same actress who played "Barbie" and who is 35 years old, playing a character who, in the book, dies at the age of 18. I've seen some reviews of the new movie, and I was motivated to rewatch the great 1939 version.

Now, I am getting email from the Democratic Party soliciting donations based on Brett Kavanaugh.

Yesterday morning, I blogged about getting an email solicitation from the party, under the name of Cory Booker, that didn't mention Kavanaugh. I speculated about what that might mean. But yesterday evening, I got this email, from the party, with the subject line "Brett Kavanaugh" (signed by Seema Nanda, the CEO of the Democratic National Committee). Since I blogged about the Kavanaugh-free email. I've got to share the text of this:

After watching Republican senators' shameful performance in this week's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, I'm more certain than ever that it is a moral imperative for Democrats to take back control of Congress this November and the White House in 2020.

Shameful? What was shameful?

"How is that a haunting question? Of course they would."

Said Freeman Hunt, reacting to the headline "Neil deGrasse Tyson Has A Haunting Question About Bears,"* blogged here yesterday.

I said, "The word 'haunt' is way overused. I should do a post about that." So this is that post.

The first thing I see is that 14 years ago, in the early months of this blog, I wrote a substantial post about the word "haunted" and the way it is overused.**

Next, I see that the verb "to haunt" did not begin as a powerful, ghost-related word. It simply referred to frequency and habit, such as going to a particular place. The OED has very old quotes — as old as the 13th century — that speak of ships haunting harbors and people haunting taverns.

In the 16th century, there was talk of thoughts, memories, and feelings that frequently occurred and thus "haunted" a person. Shakespeare wrote: "Your beauty which did haunt me in my sleepe: To vndertake the death of all the world" ("Richard III" 1597). And Shakespeare used the word to speak of the habitual visits of ghosts:

1597 Shakespeare Richard II iii. ii. 154 Some haunted by the ghosts they haue deposed.
1600 Shakespeare Midsummer Night's Dream iii. i. 99 O monstrous! O strange! We are haunted. Pray masters: fly masters: helpe.

Reading the OED makes the word feel much weaker to me. A "haunting question" is nothing more than a question that keeps coming back to you, not necessarily anything spooky. Is it no different from a "nagging question"?

But I see ghosts in "haunting." Are there horses in "nagging"? No, "nag" (the verb) comes from Scandinavia — "nagga" — to gnaw, irritate, grumble. "Nag" the horse comes from Dutch — "negge" —  a small horse. Oh! And I see that in this horse lineage, "nag" was once a slang word for "penis":

1598 J. Marston Scourge of Villanie B2 Hence lewd nags away, Goe read each poast,..Then to Priapus gardens.
1655 Mercurius Fumigosus xxxvi. 284 He by his Eloquence Converted her Gleab into pasture, and put his Nagg to grasse in her Coppice.
1707 in H. Playford Wit & Mirth (new ed.) III. 56 What is this so stiff and warm... 'Tis Ball my Nag he will do you no harm.

Goe read each poast... that's what I always say.
__________________

* Freeman Hunt continued, riffing on deGrasse Tyson's tweet, "If Bears were in charge, after they hunted us to near-extinction, I wonder if they’d invent a candy called Gummy Human":

"My mother was very, very critical of my early efforts... She was, like, 'At your age, the Brontës were doing X, Y, and Z.'"

"I was definitely a poser as a little kid.... It was just clear to me that—you know, in ‘Little Women’ they’re reading ‘The Pickwick Papers’ and putting out a newspaper and being unbelievably productive, and I was not like that. So I had this feeling of inferiority to past models with or without my mother’s criticisms."

From "Outside In/Nell Zink turned her back on the publishing world. It found her anyway," by Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker.

[U]ntil last year, all of Zink’s work was written for a tiny audience—generally as tiny as one or zero.... Burck, her first husband, attributes the clandestine nature and short half-life of Zink’s writing to the Brontë-or-bust standard of her childhood. “The thought that she might write something that wasn’t good was terrifying,” he said, “so it’s safer to not write or not show anybody what you write.” Zink... recognizes that directing her work to one heterosexual man who wasn’t her partner was a way of protecting herself: her writing could be interpreted as flirting, rather than as writing in earnest. “It’s nice to have the excuse of heteronormativity,” she says. “You can explain it away, you can say, ‘Well, she has a crush on him.’ It lowers the risks for me.”

"Heh, great stuff, Althouse. Cf. Derrida on Nietzsche's umbrella."

Says Yashu, in the comments on "The word 'umbrella' appears exactly once in Obama's 'Dreams From My Father.'" And that was after I'd read rhhardin, commenting on "Sigmund Freud on the meaning of the umbrella": "Derrida in Spurs on the umbrella that Nietzsche wrote he had forgotten."

I'm spurred to read "Spurs," but "Spurs" is not an ebook, so I'm off the hook. Still, here's some text visible in Google books. Derrida is playing with the the possible meaning(s) of "I have forgotten my umbrella," found (in quotation marks) in Nietzche's unpublished manuscripts. Excerpt:

The umbrella's symbolic figure is well-known, or supposedly so. Take, for example, the hermaphroditic spur of a phallus which is modestly enfolded in its veils, an organ which is at once aggressive and apotropaic, threatening and/or threatened. One doesn't just happen onto an unwonted object of this sort in a sewing-machine on a castration table. 

"Unwonted" is not a typo. Unlike "unwanted," it's not commonly heard/seen. It means: "not commonly heard, seen, practised." So says the OED, which tells us that Charlotte Brontë used "unwonted" in "Jane Eyre": "Difficulties in habituating myself to new rules and unwonted tasks." Are there umbrellas in "Jane Eyre"?

I jumped up, took my muff and umbrella, and hastened into the inn-passage: a man was standing by the open door, and in the lamp-lit street I dimly saw a one-horse conveyance....

The Freudian symbolism is too blatant to need pointing out. The umbrella, the man, and the horse. And the muff, the inn-passage, and the open door. That's more than dimly seen.

"Apotropaic" is also unusual. The OED says it's "Having or reputed to have the power of averting evil influence or ill luck" and gives this earliest example from the 1883 Encyclopedia Brittanica:

The sacrifice of the ‘October horse’ in the Campus Martius..had also a naturalistic and apotropaic character.

Wikipedia says the "October horse was an animal sacrifice to Mars carried out on October 15, coinciding with the end of the agricultural and military campaigning season." There were chariot races and "the right-hand horse of the winning team was transfixed by a spear, then sacrificed." So did the ancient Romans have umbrellas? Yes. They were used by women and "effeminate men." Used against the sun, of course. How much Latin do you need to see the "umbra" in "umbrella" and to know we're talking about shade.

We law folk know "umbra" from the "penumbras" in "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights [that] have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance," a very glaring phrase written by Justice William O. Douglas, trying to explain how in the lamp-lit street he dimly saw the right of privacy.

But it was really Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. who got that word started in its U.S. law usage, the OED tells us: "The use of the penumbra metaphor in American jurisprudence appears to date from the late 19th cent. and is associated with Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935), legal scholar and Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court."

1873   O. W. Holmes in Amer. Law. Rev. 7 654   It is better to have a line drawn somewhere in the penumbra between darkness and light, than to remain in uncertainty.

I suspect no one will ever Heh-great-stuff-Althouse-Cf. me again. Here I am, writing expectantly, hoping for the circle to finally close, as it did for young Obama, crying over his father's grave, when he realized that the masculine needed to be leavened with femininity and that who he was, what he cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words, and then it started to rain and suddenly his brother Bernard was squatting beside him, sheltering him with a bent-up old umbrella. 

"Are you ready for me to read it?" Meade asks, and I say, "It needs one more thing, and I don't know what it is."

"How To Deal With An 'Unruly Passenger' On A Cross Country Flight."

"An independent film producer on a flight from New York to L.A. shares his conversation with a man who was so unstable that the plane had to land early in Denver."

I want to write this all down before I forget it even though its 3.45am. I just got home.

Some one please tell me -- WTF did he write all of this down 'after the fact' and use multiple Twitter posts to do so?

The Twitter approach gave it a feeling of immediacy, even if it was fictional. Like the old "epistolary" novels.

Using the iPhone as an eBook with the app Stanza.

I'm a sucker for eBooks. I bought a Rocket Book years ago and, in the last year, a Kindle. (Here's a vlog I did comparing the 2 quasi-rectangular objects). And I haven't much liked either of them. I complained about the Kindle here, and I haven't touched it in months. I have to remember not to throw away hundreds of dollars on eBooks!

But now, here's an app -- Stanza -- that makes the iPhone work as an eBook. It's free, so if I don't like it and don't use it, I won't have to feel like a chump. Anyway, it works nicely. I've set my font size. The print is, of course, bright and clear. And you don't turn pages, you "cover flow" to the next page with a finger swipe.

The on-line libraries are fun to browse. For example, I can see a list of the most commonly assigned high school books. The top 5:

1. "Pride and Prejudice," by Jane Austen
2. "Jane Eyre," by Charlotte Bronte
3. "Wuthering Heights," by Emily Bronte
4. "Death Comes to the Archbishop," by Willa Cather
5. "The Awakening," by Kate Chopin

Notice anything? Has high school become Women's Studies? Well, to be fair, the next 20+ are by men: "Heart of Darkness," "The Divine Comedy," "Don Quixote," "A Tale of Two Cities," "Crime and Punishment," etc.

It's also interesting to see what books are most popular among those who download free digital books. From the Freebooks list, #1 is "The Art of War." Hmmm. The top 6 are by men, and #7 is good old "Pride and Prejudice." (When did that get to be the greatest novel ever written?) But generally, this list is pretty masculine, and I'm glad to see it's not all novels. Charles Darwin ranks high. So do Freud and Nietzsche. From the Project Gutenberg list, Albert Einstein is #1, followed by Confucius, "The Art of War" again, and Plato's "Republic." The Gutenberg crowd is really ambitious. What's the top novel for these folks? "Siddhartha"!

Anyway, highly recommended, if only for the fun of browsing lists of what other people read. But I've downloaded a few things to read in full.

Flea at USC.

He's a freshman, studying music:

The Chili Peppers [created tension] in our song structures but all based on emotion and intuition as opposed to knowing the math and academics of it. Knowing the structure is really fun.

He's also working on a solo album:

I’ve been making a record at home and it’s nearly done. It’s mostly instrumental stuff but I have Patti Smith singing on it and the choir from the school but mostly it’s an instrumental record. I’m not sure how to describe it but a lot of people have described it as cinematic, like soundtrack music. It’s not really a commercial enterprise, it’s not going to be on rock radio or anything. The record is based on the character Helen Burns from "Jane Eyre." I love Charlotte Bronte and all of the Bronte sisters.

That "Jane Eyre" stuff sound really nerdy, but if you've ever seen the Orson Welles movie version, you know that Helen Burns is the most stunning beautiful child ever seen in a film:



But no, Flea (Michael Balzary) says he's mad about the Brontes, and he's going to college, so I'll assume it's about the books, not how insanely beautiful Elizabeth Taylor is in that movie.

Here's Flea playing the bass:



He's studying trumpet (and music theory and composition) at USC.

AND: No, a men in shorts tag is not called for!

"Haunted."

I read some of the reader opinions at the link for the novel in the previous post. You always have to wonder, reading those things, whether they are written by friends or relatives of the author (though the book really did sound good as described on the radio).

Ever notice how often a book is called "haunting"? Two out of eight customer reviews at that link called the book "haunting." It seems any time people actually like a book, they are haunted by it. That's rather disturbing. You wouldn't read the book at all if you knew you weren't going to like it. But then you like it and it dogs you in some eerie, scary way.

"Haunt" ought to be a strong word. My favorite use of the word is in the movie Wuthering Heights, when Laurence Olivier says "Haunt me, Cathy!" He doesn't mean he'd like a poignant memory of her to linger. He really means he wants her ghost to haunt him.

...I know that ghosts have wandered on the Earth. Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this dark alone where I cannot find you. I cannot live without my life. I cannot die without my soul.

That's haunt. I love that movie scene, but let me give you the original Emily Bronte text too:

"Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you - haunt me, then! The murdered DO haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!"

The screenplay stayed pretty close to the original. Replacing "Oh, God! it is unutterable!" was the sheer presence of Laurence Olivier. "Dark alone" replaced "abyss," which they couldn't trust people to understand. "I can not live without my life!"--that's great movie-talk, straight out of the original. The second "I cannot live" in the original became "I cannot die" in the screenplay. Interesting! Instead of parallelism and repetition, the movie has Cathy's death create a dilemma: "I cannot live" and "I cannot die." That's quite good. (Quality screenwriting by Charles MacArthur, Ben Hecht, and (uncredited) John Huston.)

But I know it's futile to inform the world that they ought to preserve the strength of the word "haunt." The sad thing about taking a strong word and using it as an ordinary word is that as an ordinary word it becomes a cliché, so it really has lost its entire reason for being. A whole category of words that have had their strong meaning sucked out of them by overuse consists of words that express approval: grand, great, magnificent, marvelous, awesome. A subcategory consists of words that originally suggested unreality: fantastic, incredible, unreal, fabulous. Fortunately, there are so many of these words of praise in English, that we can fend off the cliché problem by periodically switching to a new one. I remember when no one used "awesome," then it got started, then it got overused, and then it became generally recognized that it was idiotic to say it, even as a joke. So maybe it will lie fallow for a long time and become reusable. There's no chance of "haunting" going through that process though, because though it is overused, it's certainly not overused the way "awesome" was. It's got to be quite conspicuous before people become embarrassed. On the other hand, since "haunting" is overused by people who seem to want to appear elegant and educated, maybe there is some hope that embarrassment will set in more easily.