A favorite repost of mine from ASSME, now MediaElites.com.

Jeff’s Notes, in Which We Cover the Classics for You.

Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, in which a shitcanned writer tries to reform civilization.

Today’s recap: pp. 5-29.

The night before up-and-coming poet and single man about town Miles Coverdale’s departure for Blithedale, he’s gone to a taping of Lisa Williams’ Life Among the Dead show for Lifetime, known in Miles’ day as The Veiled Lady, at the local lyceum. It’s an act in which a young woman completely covered in a sheet stands offering cryptic answers to questions from the audience; you know, the kinds of answers that are intentionally so oblique as to be interpretable a thousand different ways. Miles, always up for a lark, asks her how things are going to turn out for him at Blithedale.? She gives him a typically Sibylline response along the lines of,  “I see a man…and another man…and a woman…no, several women…manure…rolling hills…there will be a war in the Middle East…an angry horse…stay out of the barn!”

Mildly amused and strolling home a creepier kind of foreshadowing happens to Miles… continued here, http://mediaelites.com/2009/05/08/the-simple-life-1/