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RonPrice
RonPrice


A SECULAR AND NARROW WORLD: Jane Austen's and Ours
Related to country: Australia

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

My mother-in-law, a woman in her late eighties, finds watching movies adapted from Jane Austen’s novels boring. The students in my English classes always preferred to study other authors when given the choice. Their attitude, my students and my mother-in-law’s, mirrors, somewhat, the reaction of novelist Henry James who saw the characters in Austen’s novels as having “small and second-rate minds,” Philistines one and all. Emerson found Austen to be imprisoned in a wretched and smothering conventionality with an excessive concern for “marriageableness.”1

Not everyone has reacted this way to Austen, not now nor in the nearly two centuries since her death in 1817. Some saw her writing as “a prose Shakespeare,”2 a writer who exposed with her mildly acidic, satirical solution of words the brittle, indeed, empty foundations of social and personal morality in a violent and repressive age in English society. It was this world that sought violent release in the next century and found that release when it was blown apart in WW1. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Lee Siegel, “A Writer Who Is Good For You,” The Atlantic Online, January 1998; and 2William B. MacAuley in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, Vol. 2, B.C. Southam, editor, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1987.

There is nothing to equal
your smallness in a small
town---the commonplace
has never found a master
finer than your divine chit-
chat some have said, Jane.

Petty inconsistencies, parochial
vanities, familiar everydayisms,
vulgarity and pride, delineated
as entertainment and amusement,
tissues of character in speech,
gently undulating life-surface,
triviality laid on intense relations,
satire’s world without bitterness,
hermetically sealed with supreme
moments quite inarticulate giving
you: coolness, patience, poise and
leisure obtained so you could write
and me too, Jane!----and me too!

Your wholly secular and narrow
world with people you disliked,
tolerated but accepted in the only
society you knew where nothing
was too little for your little world
and happiness=simple pleasures.1

Balance, moderation, courtesy:
recipe for survival in two worlds—
yours and ours—inner landscapes—
the triumph of the ordinarily ordinary
and the inherited order over change:2
but we can’t triumph with that recipe
and order can we Jane? Can we Jane?
Nor could you---would you, Jane?3

1 Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, editor, Ian Watt, Prentice-Hall Inc., Inglewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963, p. 172.
2 Adena Rosmarin, “Misreading Emma: The Powers and Perfidies of Interpretive History, English Literary History, Vol. 51, pp. 315-42.
3 What would Austen have written, if she had lived beyond the age of 41?

Ron Price
4 June 2008


June 13, 2008 | 8:19 AM Comments  0 comments

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A Recent Summer Activity: A Workshop on 'Using the Internet'
Related to country: Australia

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

One of my recent summer activities was organizing the following workshop at THE TASMANIAN BAHA'I SUMMER CAMP on the theme: “ENJOYING YOUR CREATIVITY: PASSING ON SKILLS.” The TOPIC was--“THE ART OF USING THE INTERNET.” Here is my WORKSHOP OUTLINE:

A. Brief Story of My Internet Experience**
B. The Art of Using The Internet: What It’s All About
Time: A,B and C to take 15 minutes approx..
C. Questions and Answers
D. Participants Examine Files of Internet Sites and Postings
This is an interactive exercise in which participants:
(i) come to see how they can go to a site,
(ii) how they can begin to participate/post items on the site; and
(iii) can get some idea of the range of sites & the value in the teaching work.
Time: D,E and F to take 45 minutes approx.
E. Categories of internet sites at which I post reviews, poems, essays, emails, Baha’i quotations, et cetera.
F. Sample Postings
G. Concluding Remarks**
**---only these two sections marked(**) have any comments below_______________________
A. Brief Story of My Internet Experience: 1991-2005
-------------------------------
1. Preamble:

By January 1st 2005 the process of searching out sites, mostly forums for posting and publishing various items of my writing, responding to issues raised on the sites and engaging with specific individuals at these sites, had developed far more than I had anticipated in May 2001, at the start of this site and internet searching process nearly four years ago. In the embryonic years of my internet life, 1991 to 2001 and in the first four years of operating my own website, 1997-2001, I had no idea of the potential for placing the name of the Baha'i Faith and my writings on this world wide web. In those years the internet was essentially a source of information.
--------readers wanting to have more material from this workshop can contact me at my email address on: ronprice9@gmail.com
-----------------------------------------
G. Concluding Statement:

I hope you enjoy the exercise of your creativity in “The Art of Using The Internet”in the months and years ahead. If I have helped a little in getting you air-born, off the ground, so to speak, I feel I have done my job. Your way of using the internet is, as I’ve said, unique to your interests and idiosyncrasies. You may, on the other hand, prefer to exercise your creativity & skills in ways that do not involve using the internet. It is not an activity for everyone. We each have to find our own way of expressing our creativity in life and in service to the Baha'i Faith. In the one hour available for this subject I have tried to pass on my skill as best I know how and now I leave it to you and those mysterious dispensations of a watchful Providence.
-----------------------
Thus endeth a small part of a recent summer activitiy.-Ron Price Tasmania
------------------------------------

June 13, 2008 | 7:37 AM Comments  0 comments



The Film: The Passion of Christ: A Final Look
Related to country: Australia


The dust of reviews has settled on this film and so: the time has come, perhaps, for a more dispassionate, a more considered, a more reflective, commentary on a film that precipitated a great deal of public reaction in the last few months. Review is not quite the right word for what follows. What I have written here is just a comment, but it is no less provocative than the most provocative you’ve read thusfar and I think you will find here some refreshing and intelligent insights into Gibson’s film, its social context and the way it was perceived.

THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: A Comment by Ron Price

This film is not intended to be a masterful historical documentary as, say, Ken Burns' work on the Civil War or one of many others done in the first century of the existence of the cinema. Gibson's work is far from possessing what some might call an intellectual poverty in its pretensions at historical documentary. Shawn Rosenheim says all TV documentaries possess an intellectual poverty. If Rosenheim is right the visual media are simply incapable of producing historical documentary.1 And if Rosenheim is wrong, as I tend to think he is, historical documentary of an event 2000 years ago is not impossible. It is, rather, a recreation. We simply do not know enough about the event Gibson is recreating to claim that what we are seeing is a documentary.

We all know that Gibson did not take his camera crew to downtown Jerusalem or into the little hamlet of Nazereth in some kind of time-warp to produce an anti-Jewish, anti Roman clip for the evening news. Even if he had and he then produced for us all an evening two hour special, spectacle, called "the crucifixion," there would still be questions about visual manipulation and the program's service in the name of directing popular thought toward a new religious movement. New religious movements have always had trouble getting popular exposure unless they can be associated with conflict and violence, eccentricity and the bizarre, indeed, anything visually stimulating and distracting.

No one would claim that Gibson's is a neutral recording of objective events. It is a construct operating from a certain point of view. It is a rhetorical argument achieved through the selection and combination of elements that both reflect and project a world, a world view, a cosmology if you like. It is achieved by certain cinematic conventions that try to erase any signs of cinematic artificiality. An ideology is promoted by linking the effect of reality to social values and institutions in such a way that these values seem natural and self-evident. In the case of Mel Gibson's work, a work that I found quite stimulating in its own way, the ideology is simply and strongly: fundamentalist Christianity.

I've never been attracted to Christianity in any of its fundamentalist forms. But I liked this film. Film can often get to people in ways that words, ideas and simple beliefs cannot. It was not because of its historical accuracy that I liked it. I liked All the Presidents Men and a number of other films based on and rooted in some historical theme. Rarely are historical films accurate; the main reason they seem so is that the people watching them know so little about the theme, the event, that it seems plausible to them. Sadly, but truly, we know so little about the events of the life of Jesus of Nazereth that a good script writer, a good cinematographer and a big band of men and women can bring something to life that may never have happened at all.

Bertrand Russell wrote in his Why I'm Not a Christian that, in a court of law, there is little evidence for even the existence of Jesus let alone his manner of death. Historicity simply does not exist when it comes to the events in the life of a man who has had a profound affect, I believe, on history. Of course, Russell says he does believe Jesus existed; he just wanted to make a point about the paucity of historical evidence. What we believe in life and what we know usually exist in two separate worlds, although hopefully their assumptions are not totally blind. What people who are believers and what they are as knowers, so to speak, about Jesus are radically separate. The distance between the pulpit and the academic chair of religion has been widening for at least two centuries. In fact for millions of men and women these days historicity is irrelevant to their beliefs. History has become, for those millions, what it was for Henry Ford: bunk or was it bunkum? Mel, you've given us a thriller. To hell with history! 4 out of 5:optimistic muse; 2 out of 5 pessimistic muse.

As a sort of epilogue to this brief comment on the film: one of the main reasons many people are turning to new religions and new religious

March 16, 2006 | 4:21 AM Comments  0 comments





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