Emma

Today’s class focused on the work of TV and restaurant critic A.A. Gill, who died a little over a year ago. The assigned book was The Golden Door, about his travels in America. I haven’t read it yet, but the class gave me a taste of what I’m in for. The lecturer read this excerpt from a review he wrote in 1996 of a TV series based on Jane Austen’s Emma:

"Three hundred years after the sack of the Roman Empire, when Europe was well into its dark age, people who lived near Roman ruins imagined that they had been built by an extinct race of giants, super humans. I know how they felt. I feel the same way about the Georgians. I mean, how did they make all that furniture, all those tables and chairs and sideboards and stuff? When they were bored with ordinary furniture they made gear that had no known or conceivable use --davenports, pembrokes, break-fronted side cabinets, secretaries, folding commodes, reading stands with concealed card tables, and whatnots. “What you making, Jude?” “Dunno, it’s just a sort of whatnot.” They ran out of names before they ran out of furniture.

"Where the ancient Egyptians are remembered as being a civilisation obsessed with death -- 60 per cent of the population were employed in sarcophagus- and pyramid-selling -- the Georgians were a people with a furniture fetish. When they weren’t turning out linen presses, they were dancing -- stupid, insipid, childish hop, skip and jump dancing -- or they sat on the chairs they’d just varnished, boring each other rigid. I know all this because I’ve seen it on television.

"This is how the Georgians will be remembered: as tedious, skipping joiners, and Jane Austen’s Emma was the most trippingly tedious Georgian of the lot. Her raison d’être was the most trippingly tedious social woodwork. She was a nuptial joiner, and I desperately -- more desperately than I’ve ever felt anything for a long time -- wanted to screw her into a mahogany coffin with scrolled finials, fluted pilasters, bas-relief acanthus and a fold-out bureau plas. And bury her. In all the fiery, clamourous, pounding, ferrous Industrial Revolution that finally drove a steel spike through the marquetry heart of the awful Georgians there is not a single engine powerful enough to dig a pit deep enough to bury bloody Emma in, for still she stalks the earth.”

Well. This book should be a good read. In his obit, I read one of his punch lines about Starbucks: Asking Americans to make coffee is like asking them to draw a map of the world.” So there.
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