Nelly, I AM Heathcliff

1. I am teaching Wuthering Heights this semester. I love teaching this novel. I've taught it more frequently than any other text in my career, and even though I've re-read it more often than probably any other novel, I always find something new every time. Man, I love my job! Josh has never read WH, so I have extracted a promise from him to read it so we can talk about it. I've been struck on this re-read by how modern the horror elements seem to me. Much of the violence and abuse and horror in the text is glossed over; the narrators don't call attention to it but rather treat it as a matter of course, as a background element. I'll just be reading along and all of sudden, I'll go, "Wait! He just tried to saw off a ghost kid's hand on a broken window!" or "He just shoved a knife blade. into. her. mouth. OMG." None of these moments are belabored but they slowly add up to create a feeling of terror. It feels analogous to creating a painting a layer at a time with one faint wash of color on top of another until the end product is quite vivid and striking. And what I mean by modern is that this novel seems to treat abuse and abusers much differently than most of the Victorian novels I've read. It is way more concerned with motive and psychology than a lot of books from the era, and it seems to have a much more current take on what constitutes abuse. I know that the frank violence of the novel was pretty shocking when it was published; it was the HBO of the mid-19th century! LOL Anyway, I love this book. That's pretty much the crux of it, I guess.

2. What are the cool things that you want for Christmas that I should also want for Christmas?

3. Did anybody watch NCIS? It seemed to start weird to me. Instead of the usual black and white opener, it started with Abby and McGee talking in the lab about colors. I know the station prob only clipped off like 30 seconds, but what happened in the beginning?