Jane Austen Kicked my Ass - a fragment

Jane Austen Kicked My Ass – a fragment.

(But first: a couple words of explanation. This rose out of an idea I had while commenting on Sheila's remark about Jane Austen being described primarily as a 'spinster'. I said she should come back as a ghost and kick those people in the tuchis. And Kate P. egged me on. And I realized, I HAD to do it, it was too fun not to. So here it is. Conrad is a character who rattles around in my head and inhabits a lot of the little stories I write. He's one of my favorite characters. I picture him as being a little bit short and looking a little pale and weedy - perhaps a bit like Niles Crane on "Frasier." But he's a great intellect and a man of humor and I often like setting him up a bit as the voice of reason in my stories. So he appears here...)

So, we were all sitting around the big table. Discussing the “special issue” of the magazine that was to be devoted to Jane Austen. Reza was there; she was doing a feature on what she was tentatively calling “The ‘Clueless’ Phenomenon” – namely, modern interpretations. (I figured Reza would probably hit a wall after digging up one or two examples, but I didn’t say anything to her about it; she was touchy that way.) And Millie and Bob were doing the “Austen-ite” fashion angle, people who liked to dress in Regency clothes, women who did needlework like had been done at that time, that kind of thing. Our Midwestern readers ate that crap up, even if they didn’t always get the heavy ironic tone. Hampton was planning on doing his usual post-modern mash-up critical look at the “revered author.” I think the only one in our crowd at that time who felt anything like respect for the poor old biddy was Conrad. And he was kind of an odd duck anyway. He actually LIKED literature; he openly confessed to having thousands of books in his house. And he wrote – I mean, he wrote “literature” – poetry and short stories and stuff. Had some of it published, mostly in small literary journals. I had read some of it and I realize I’m not, like, smart or anything about that kind of thing, but I thought some of it was pretty deep.

So anyway, Bob and Millie and Reza and Hampton and I were all sitting around the table talking – Conrad was off somewhere; he frequently was “off somewhere” but he always came through with the necessary articles (and even then some; more than once he would save our tails by shyly presenting us with something from what he called his “personal slush pile” – stuff he had written but either never tried to publish or got rejected from the “real” publishers. We all knew that the job at Oh-Snap! was mostly a paycheck to him, that his real goal in life was to be what Hampton would call a “stherious” writer – with a roll of his eyes – but Conrad was generally pretty nice about it. He never acted like he was better than the rest of us, even though all of us really knew it – even Hampton.)

So, like I said, we were sitting down around the table, we exalted souls of the Oh-Snap! “editorial board.” We were planning the layout of the Austen issue and discussion about what we could add in.

Millie was looking at some of the background on Austen she had printed out from Wikipedia and places. She looked kind of sadly at the pages and said, softly, “And she never ever married. She spent her whole life writing in her father’s house…”

Hampton remarked, “Well, yeah…if she was anything like the way she wrote…”

“I didn’t realize you ever read her,” said Reza. “I didn’t think she’d really be your cup of tea…”

“Oh, they MADE me read her in college. You know, the “affirmative action get-the-women-in-the-canon thing. But like I said – if she was anything like the way she wrote, she was probably such a bitch that no man with half a brain would want her. And look at her picture – I mean, bow-wo….OW!”

And suddenly, Hampton leaped up out of his chair and started rubbing his backside.

“Damn – that was just like somebody kicked me in the ass!”

“Must have been a spring,” said Bob. “Stupid cheap chairs. We should have taken out a loan and gotten the Hermann Millers.”

“Yeah…” said Hampton, a little suspiciously. He sat back down.

I tried to pull things back to order. “Okay…so we’ve got Reza’s piece on Clueless…and we’ve got the Austen-era needlepoint piece…”

”I’m nearly done, I promise!” exclaimed Millie.

”…And the Austen-reenactor bit.”

”And that’s going to be just crazy awesome,” said Bob, who tended to be given to hyperbole. “I found all these nutso people who like to run around in tight breeches and muttonchop whiskers and those little funny jackets the women wore, and they talk like she talked, and they argue about what she would and would not have said and eaten and read and all that. And they have conferences and everything! It’s like, totally the Woodstock of the crazy romance-novel set. It’s going to be my ‘Confederates in the Attic’!” Bob exclaimed, hugging himself.

And then Bob launched from his chair with an oath. “Hey – who the hell is playing jokes around here? That wasn’t funny! That was like getting kicked in the ass!”

“You too? I thought you were the one who played the big practical jokes!” Hampton was still eyeing Bob suspiciously, as if he thought Bob wasn’t above hurting himself to make a joke go farther.

“Guys, shut the hell up, we still need to figure out a couple more things. We’ve not sold as many advertising sections for this thing so we’ve still got a bunch of blank pages. Even with” I said, forestalling what Reza was going to say “the letters-to-the-editor frothing about our ‘food’ issue, and even with the couple of usual opinion columns. We can surely tap Conrad for something, but not even I would presume to ask him to prepare four separate stories – which is what we need at this point.”

“Well….” said Reza hesitantly, “You know, there’s a lot of people out there who write stuff about Jane Austen – or rather about her characters. Like the stuff the crazy addled sci-fi people do…writing stories about Spock or the Star Wars people…”

(Hampton snorted at the phrase “Star Wars people”)

“You mean like fan fiction?” asked Millie “I bet there’s hundreds of women out there who’d go nuts to have their crap published…”

“Yeah, and then they’d sue us when they found out our hundreds of subscribers were laughing at it because it was ‘crap.’” I said. “I don’t have any interest in dealing with some grandma from British Columbia who made up a story about Emma’s cat who gets all bent out of shape when she finds out people are laughing at her.”

“We could look around, anyway,” said Reza, somewhat deflated. “I mean, maybe there are some people who are doing it ironically. Or who don’t know or care that it’s crap. You know, kind of the American Idol thing – they think they’re totally great and when someone tells them they suck, they can laugh it off because they’re so deluded about how good they are…”

Bob was frantically scrolling on his laptop. “Guys, this is absolutely insane. This is like some alternate dimension. Did you know that people have written ‘slash fiction’ about these books?”

“Ugh!” said Millie, who was kind of a Puritan, after all. “About whom?”

“Mr. Darcy and…”And then Bob exclaimed, “Shitty computer! It dropped the connection…the screen’s gone totally blank!” He started frantically working over the computer.

“Damn thing’s fried! I don’t know what happened!”

”Probably a power surge?” said Reza “The wiring in this building always was for crap.”

We clustered around Bob and his dead computer, everyone offering the sort of useless suggestions that people tend to offer in situations like this. As we were arguing over whether it was better to unplug the computer and restart it or immediately call a “doc” for it, Conrad sauntered in. He stopped midway between the door and the table and gazed at us in the vague way he had. It always reminded me strangely of a llama I had seen at the zoo once.

“What’s going on?”

“We were trying to crank out the Austen issue and Bob’s computer died” I said by way of explanation.

“Hrm.” responded Conrad. He wandered over to the computer and hung over Millie’s back to gaze at the blank screen. “What was he doing right before it crashed?”

“Nothing,” said Millie. “That’s the weird thing.”

”Was he just writing, or was it on idle, or was he looking stuff up?”

“He was…looking stuff up,” Millie said, her voice getting small as she realized she was probably going to have to explain to Conrad about the slash fiction. She knew that he wouldn’t take kindly to that; in many ways he was more naïve and more bluenosed than even Millie.

“Bad stuff.” Conrad responded, matter-of-factly. “Look…this Austen thing. There’s something kind of weird about it. I was doing some research, talking to people? And there was this guy who was an indie filmmaker – sick guy, but there you are. He wanted to make some kind of movie that was like this alternate history thing – saying that Jane was having some kind of…affair with her sister.” Conrad shuddered at the mental image.

“I’ve heard such things…” drawled Hampton. And immediately he vaulted from his chair again, cursing this time, and immediately turned the chair over to inspect it. “This damn thing has been happening all day,” he moaned. “We get talking about this Austen bitch and then stuff starts happening.”

Conrad nodded gravely. “Exactly the same thing.”

“Exactly what thing?”

“This kind of stuff was happening to Trent…the filmmaker guy. He’d get some kind of idea, something crazy, and he said it was like an electrical shock would hit him – like someone was kicking him in the backside. And his iPod got fried, and his car stolen. Crazy stuff. Stuff that seemed coincidental, but wasn’t.”

“And what did he do then?” Millie was getting sucked in, as always, by one of Conrad’s nutjob stories.

“He hired a psychic. Big, fat West Indian woman with long dreadlocks…some of them bleached and dyed fuchsia. I’ve met her actually, she’s a total hoot…but anyway, he hired Salinda, and she came to his office, and did a reading. “ He paused, overdramatically, as was his way. I found myself even getting a little spooked.

“She said, ‘there’s a presence here,’” (Only he said it mimicking PERFECTLY the West Indian accent of the psychic) “’A ghost. A woman. A little woman…from a long, long time ago. And…hoo! Is she ever angry. You done something to piss her off bad, man, and she be kickin’ your ass!’”

Conrad rocked back on his heels, pursed his lips, and regarded us archly.

“So Trent, he dropped the project like a hot rock. He figured, this angry ghost was none other than the shade of Jane Austen.”

“Oh, that’s bullshit,” began Hampton

“Oh, really?” said Conrad, “You lot popping out of chairs like you’ve been stung whenever you say something against her. Bob’s computer dying JUST AS he is looking up nasty, nasty stories written using her characters? You say that’s coincidence?”

”Well, what do we do?” I asked. I was pretty spooked. I started thinking of all the bad crap that could happen.

“Oh, we do the issue. But we change the focus. We make nice with Jane…We print articles about her fans, about the history of her time…Millie? Anything bad happen to you while working on that needlework article?”

“No…” said Millie. “If anything…good stuff happened. Mike called me up and said he wanted to try again.”

“Article one,” said Conrad. “And Reza – you have any mysterious whacks to the bum while looking at how “Emma” was updated for a modern audience, while basically keeping the ethos of Austen intact?”

“No…” said Reza, and I could see she was beginning to believe.

”Article two,” said Conrad. “My conclusion is: we change the focus of the issue. We make it celebratory, perhaps even hagiographic.”

“Aw, man!” exclaimed Hampton.

“You want to deal with HER? You want to put up with her wrath? Look, you can doubt as much as you want but I’ve been doing a bit of research – you don’t screw with the canonical authors, my friend. You’re just lucky it was Jane Austen you were playing with. I’ve heard that Dickens is even worse…And Victor Hugo, man, you do not want to mess with Victor Hugo.”