:27:03
- What are you looking at?
- My father's apartment.
:27:08
- Where?
- The fourth floor.
:27:10
- Corner apartment.
- That's Kate Preston's building.
:27:13
Have your parents been divorced long?
:27:16
The actual divorce
was three years ago...
:27:18
but they were separated
for a year before that.
:27:21
- Do you see your father much?
- We have lunch when I'm in town.
:27:24
- That's very little.
- No, actually we have a very good relationship.
:27:28
Probably much better than most people
who see their father all the time.
:27:31
It's just that my stepmother is a writer
and having us around makes her nervous.
:27:36
I read that Lionel Trilling essay
you mentioned.
:27:38
- You really like Trilling?
- Yes.
:27:42
I think he's very strange.
:27:44
He says that nobody could like
the heroine of Mansfield Park.
:27:48
I like her.
:27:50
Then he goes on and on about how we modern
people of today with our modern attitudes...
:27:54
bitterly resent Mansfield Park
because its heroine is virtuous?
:27:58
What's wrong with a novel
having a virtuous heroine?
:28:01
His point is that the novel's premise -
:28:03
that there's something immoral in a group of
young people putting on a play- is simply absurd.
:28:07
You found Fanny Price unlikable?
:28:09
She sounds pretty unbearable.
But I haven't read the book.
:28:11
- What?
- You don't have to have read a book
to have an opinion on it.
:28:15
I haven't read the Bible either.
:28:17
WhatJane Austen novels have you read?
:28:20
None. I don't read novels.
:28:22
I prefer good literary criticism.
:28:24
That way, you get both the novelist's ideas
as well as the critic's thinking.
:28:27
With fiction, I can never forget
that none of it ever really happened...
:28:30
that it's all just made up
by the author.
:28:35
One thing I like about him is
he doesn't say all the expected things.
:28:39
He doesn't just agree with everything
everyone else is saying.
:28:42
That's true. He disagrees
with everything everyone else says.
:28:45
I'm not sure I prefer that.
:28:47
He's quite good-looking though.
I think serious guys tend to be better-looking.
:28:51
Ow!