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So I made notes when I read Pride and Prejudice because I had so many spoilers for this book thanks mostly to tumblr, and yet here are some things that took me quite off guard:

The narration just dips into anybody’s head whenever it feels like to give us a summary of who they are as a person and what they care about. Very straightforward. Very effective. Very much not the modern approach.

This extends to telling us straight out, like half a chapter after the iconic Darcy-snubbing-Elizabeth scene, that he had now developed a massive crush. This comes as a great shock to Elizabeth quite a bit later, but the audience spends much of the book enjoying the layers and/or dramatic irony. Who knew!

Elizabeth on the other hand had a crush on Wickham.

Wickham is genuinely good at being likeable not an obvious sleaze and the fact that he’s a bad guy was an actual plot twist, though I’m sure plenty of people saw it coming even when the book was new.

As much as the book attends to women’s concerns, being as it is a book very much about a woman, the greatest explicit thematic force of the novel is the question of class.

Specifically, that great and renowned engine of Anglophone egalitarianism, the conviction of the upper middle class that they are every bit as good as the true upper class, or that if they aren’t it’s only a question of opportunity.

Seriously, the fact that the ultimate symbol of emotional resolution the story closes out on is that the new Darcy family has over for Christmas Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle the Gardiners, who are in trade and don’t even live in the nice part of London but are nice and sensible and not at all people it is mortifying to be related to, even though Darcy assumed as much without having met them, while avoiding both her tawdry shallow mother and his awful smug aunt, who are very similar people for all one is a wretched social climber and the other a minor aristocrat obsessed with her own consequence…that’s it, that’s the book.

Additionally the fact that this novel is from the end of the 18th century , when in England the Industrial Revolution was gaining momentum but no one knew what it meant yet, including I’m pretty darn certain Jane Austen.

(Though since she waited 16 years to publish it she may have had a better sense by then, and even made amendments to that effect.)

So everyone’s sense of what is real wealth and security and thus valid social status is still vested in land ownership and income specifically from agricultural rent, and yet you can feel the change coming, because the desire to write this book in this way arises from the cultural forces that were at that time in play, particularly the question of upward mobility.

Elizabeth’s grandsons will have to get into trade in some sort of way, or their children in turn may not be able to keep Pemberly in adequate repair.

 By loosening the stubborn Darcy/Fitzwilliam pride in this particular regard Elizabeth may in fact have saved the house from dissolution.

Btw the thematic import of Mr. Darcy having his mother’s maiden name as his first name, in part because she actually ranked his father, as wealthy and respectable as the Darcys may be. His family legacy is literally his whole identity and part of what Elizabeth brings to the marriage is having helped him understand that it doesn’t have to be.

Seriously how did I not hear about any of this.

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💚

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I am a huge fan of retiring to my quarters

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Just want everyone to know I’m being SO BRAVE about the roaches that crawled out of my drains this weekend in my new apartment. I didn’t immediately burn down the building with everything and everyone in it and run away like I wanted to and I feel like I need to be congratulated for that. I DID spend almost 100 dollars on bug spray and traps and shit but compared to the alternative seems fair to me.

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Today we say goodbye to Loretta Swit, our one-and-only Major Margaret Houlihan. She took the character that started out as "Hot Lips" and turned her into Margaret, elevating her from a bawdy sex joke into a woman all her own: strong, capable, self-assured and self-reliant, a character whose whole identity no longer relied on a man or the men around her, those she had pursued romantically or otherwise. A woman dedicated to her work, to being an Army nurse, an Army major, and a woman who refused to let herself be outclassed or outnumbered by the men who surrounded her. In a sense, Margaret Houlihan was Katharine Hepburn in Army fatigues. Only one of four people to last from season 1 to season 11 - the others being Alan Alda, Jamie Farr, and William Christopher - Loretta Swit brought great depth to the role of Margaret Houlihan, not to mention passion and love, and for her work, she won two Emmy's for portraying Margaret (for the episodes "Are You Now, Margaret?" and "The Birthday Girls"). No doubt Margaret played a large role in the lives of many as the show aired, and no doubt she played a large role in countless others during reruns, and a large role in our own, here. To see the love an actor has for the role they play, the character they breathe life into, it will always leave an indelible impression, and there is again no doubt Loretta Swit left behind an incredible legacy during her 11-year tenure as Major Margaret Houlihan. To Loretta, to Margaret, we salute you, and we thank you, for everything. May you rest in peace.

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the skull did what no skull ever should

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It cleared its throat

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BLUE AND BLACK FROM EDGE TO EDGE- The Narcissist Cookbook

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This is my favorite Andre the Giant quote ever and it felt wrong to see a post talking about how much people love him without this quote on it

From imdb: ”During the filming of some scenes for The Princess Bride, the weather became markedly cold for Robin Wright Penn. Andre the Giant helped her by placing one of his hands over her head; his hands were so large that one would entirely cover the top of her head, keeping her warm.”

comic by Box Brown :: via flickr.com

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I know I’ve featured this scene on the Nazi Punch of the Day, but this version seemed particularly timely given the ongoing attacks on education.

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“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

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dont take bird noises for granted

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our father, who art in chicago,

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this is so cool and also rosencrantz and guildenstern's sign names are killing me lol

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oh yes it's that time of year again

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Okay, this is pretty incredible. A 3D artist, consulting scholars and archaeologists, worked for a year and a half in Blender to create a reconstruction of pre-Columbian Tenochtitlán, complete with the surrounding landscape. It’s staggeringly beautiful, and—at least to me—gives a wonderful impression of the city as a place where people worked and lived and worshiped

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“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more” is such a beautiful, profound, and real quote that you’d think it came from 1970s spirk fanfiction but it was actually written by Jane Austen

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mentally at the mamma mia wrap party