Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson" appeared in The Secret Self collection of short stories I read during the blizzard. These were mostly really good, with one, "Raymond's Run," particularly striking for its lovingness. I confess that I read most of this yesterday in the sun and today in Vito the Reading Chair, indulging in whatever nappitude happened by. So if I didn't follow "The Survivor," that's probably not Bambara's fault. "Maggie of the Green Bottles" and "The Johnson Girls" were also memorable.
By the end of this collection, I had got the point. The point, I must say, had eluded me through the first few installments. Neil Gaiman himself said in his afterword that he didn't find his voice until later on. As the characters, or single character of Dream, developed, I found the narrative more compelling.
I still don't think much of the artwork except for the covers, and for me the difference between a novel and a graphic novel is the, uh, graphics, so if they suck, I'm perfectly comfortable calling the whole shebang a comic book.
I might read more volumes of it.
Last night I watched the Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine cinematization of "Jane Eyre." Orson Welles was Citizen Rochester, all kinds of dark and brooding, and I wonder that he wasn't cast as Heathcliff in 1939 instead of Laurence Olivier. This was made four years after "Citizen Kane," which certainly made its influence felt. The set was Xanadus Lowood and Thornfield, and Mother Citizen played Mrs. Reed. (That was Endora in "Bewitched"!) Orson Welles cannot have been all that mad at "How Green Was My Valley" (which won "Citizen Kane's" Oscar) because Mrs. Morgan played Bessie. I do not understand why Joan Fontaine was considered so Plain and Unremarkable as to be the second Mrs. DeWinter and Jane Eyre both, plus the wife in "Suspicion." Her characters just didn't have good luck with their husbands' first wives, did they? But she was quite pretty, and her sister certainly held up well, given this year's Oscar appearance.
The movie was a hatchet job, adaptation-wise. What really cracked me up was that at every huge departure from the given plot, Joan Fontaine would narrate a paragraph highlighted in a book, strongly implying she was reading straight from the book. The paragraphs above and below the highlighted ones were also not Charlotte Brontë's. I don't require a book to be faithful, ya ya ya, except that Jane does not live up to her childhood pride and self-respect, even as given in the movie: she accepts gifts of dressmaking fabrics (that aren't black or grey) from Mr. Rochester during their engagement; she returns to Gateshead as she vowed, at 10, never to do; she writes a humble letter to Mr. Brocklehurst--though, upon leaving Lowood, she declared herself forever free of him as well. The absence of the Riverses is one thing; the absence of Jane's strength of character quite another.
I wonder if that wonderful harlequin Great Dane was cast in the recent "Pride and Prejudice" because Mr. Rochester's Pilot in this "Jane Eyre" was such a dog?