Author Archives: Veronica
The Old Curiosity Shop
It’simpossible to read The Old Curiosity Shop the way it’s original audience did, without knowledge of the what was going to happen to Nell. As of chapter 9, Nell is perfectly healthy, although she is being threatened by her brother, who wants her to marry the wonderfully named Dick Swiveller, and an evil dwarf, who also wants to marry her even though she is "not yet fourteen." Since I know Nell will not become someone’s child bride, it takes some of the urgency from the narrative.
from Dickens’s Popularity
When The Old Curiosity Shop was approaching its emotional climax — the death of Little Nell — Dickens was inundated with letters imploring him to spare her, and felt, as he said, "the anguish unspeakable," but proceeded with the artistically necessary event. Readers were desolated. The famous actor William Macready wrote in his diary that "I have never read printed words that gave me so much pain. . . . I could not weep for some time. Sensations, sufferings have returned to me, that are terrible to awaken." Daniel O’Connell, the great Irish member of Parliament, read the account of Nell’s death while he was riding on a train, burst into tears, cried "He should not have killed her," and threw the novel out of the window in despair. Even Carlyle, who had not previously succumbed to Dickens’s emotional manipulation, was overcome with grief, and crowds in New York awaited a vessel newly arriving from England with shouts of "Is Little Nell dead?"
the 19th century is NSFW
Beautiful, Aesthetic, Erotic
Because I’m at work, I can’t enlarge the pictures accompanying this article to see if they really do include shadowy genitalia. Would the New York Review of Books lie about something like that?
(What else can’t I do at work? I think the filters block pages with "post" in the title, meaning that I can read, but not comment. I’m sure there are many ways around filtering, but I’m ok with the limits, especially amazon. It’s really good for my bank account that there are 8 hours every day during which I can’t shop online.)
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
Edward Burne-Jones isn’t concealing anything in this picture. I feel like I now know too much about his personal tastes and standards of hygiene.
this should be something you can google
I’ve spent too much of my free time yesterday and today staring at the Charles Dickens google doodle and trying to figure out who the characters are. The "behind the scenes" isn’t much help: We see Nell and her grandfather in the The Old Curiosity Shop, many characters from Little Dorrit, Oliver and his friends from Oliver Twist and Estella and Pip from Great Expectations. Even a certain French aristocrat graces the doodle, sitting inside the uppercase “G” — a reference to his near death by guillotine. And no tribute to Dickens would be complete without Ebenezer Scrooge and a vivid depiction of London in the background.
Those are the one it’s easy to identify! Or is it saying the one in the uppercase G is Charles Darnay? I thought the Tale of Two Cities reference was only in the background of the G. If that is supposed to be Charles Darnay, then who is the sidekick? So confused. It looks like the woman in the bonnet is supposed to be Amy Dorrit, but I’ve decided that it’s Esther Summerson because I love her and I haven’t read Little Dorrit yet, so I don’t know if she deserves such a prominent placement.
I did finish Nicholas Nickleby before coming to work today – my first impression is that if Kate Nickleby was the main character, it would be an awesome, proto-feminist novel, but unfortunately she is not the main character.
Why read Charles Dickens?
Children can’t read Charles Dickens, yet they do, at least when forced to by their teachers. So much dismay over modern attention spans, but given the literacy rate during the time period when he was writing, I would say that people are more equipped to read Dickens now than in the Victorian era. It’s nice to imagine some bygone era of common reading, but people back then had many distractions, only their distractions were things like dying of consumption or getting stuck in chimneys, not Skyrim and Twitter. The proposed cures sound worse than the disease, and I am really becoming suspicious of teachers whose answer to everything is iPad. The answer to distraction isn’t more distraction, and the kind of attention an iPad requires is different from a book and uses different skills.
Also, Oliver Twist with zombies is a stupid idea. Fagin’s gang are clearly vampires.
There are several reasons why I decided to read all of the novels of Charles Dickens this year. Every now and then I go through reading slumps, where everything I read is unsatisfying and fails to provide either escapist entertainment, inspiration for my own writing, or a new perspective on life. That’s not much to ask from a book, is it? Usually, books only provide the first, escapism. As long as the prose isn’t too awful and the characters are plausible, reading a book is like watching TV, something to relax with at the end of the day. Dickens is notorious for "writing too much" and "getting paid by the word," so I thought reading his novels, with their detailed descriptions of clothes and houses, would be an immersive experience. Also, I wanted to read something that wouldn’t make me feel bad about writing. When I read writers who are really good, I feel like I can’t write at all, but when I read ones that are mediocre/awful, I feel unhappy about my mostly unpublished state and wonder if there are just too many words in the world.
Pickwick Papers – finished
Oliver Twist – finished
Nicholas Nickleby – 6 chapters left, the moneylenders still have to be punished and everyone has to get married
letter writing and Berlin
notable authors give snail mail a boost
Yes, another article about the great letter writing revival. For most people, letter writing is a charmingly retro hobby, like buying records or making vintage owls for etsy. I would love for letter writing to be a thing, but for most people, posting updates on facebook is all the communication they need. I’m not anti-twitter* or anti-tumblr, but it’s not the same kind of communication. They’re designed for quick messages, and in the case of tumblr, they’re more visual than verbal. If I had a better phone, I would probably be more enamoured of twitter/tumblr since they are perfect for tiny screens. I have selfish reasons for wanting a general revival of letter writing. Letter writing is private. I work in an open plan office with my back to the door and anyone who walks by can see what I’m doing. When I write on paper, I can think about what I’m writing without worrying that in an unlucky break, someone who can read English will pop up behind me. It’s easier to concentrate when I’m not trying to discreetly keep on eye on the room. I like to have two projects on my desk so I can switch between them, but that doesn’t leave me very aware of what’s going on around me. For example, I’m writing this, and I have a lesson plan I’m working on open in another window, but if you were to ask me how many people are in the room with me right now, I wouldn’t know.
(Just looked around. Four people are in the office right now.)
I am very much in love with the excerpts from Berlin Stories that the New York Review of Books has been running:
A city like Berlin is an ill-mannered, impertinent, intelligent scoundrel, constantly affirming the things that suit him and tossing aside everything he tires of. Here in the big city you can definitely feel the waves of intellect washing over the life of Berlin society like a sort of bath. An artist here has no choice but to pay attention. Elsewhere he is permitted to stop up his ears and sink into willful ignorance. Here this is not allowed. Rather, he must constantly pull himself together as a human being, and this compulsion encircling him redounds to his advantage. But there are yet other things as well.
In the Electric Tram is the most joyful piece I’ve read about public transportation is a long time. Yes, it’s really true: the human brain involuntarily starts composing songs in the electric tram, songs that in their involuntary nature and their rhythmic regularity are so very striking that it’s hard to resist thinking oneself a second Mozart.
Any large city can be like that when you’re young. But some cities are more welcoming than others. I went to London right after I graduated from college, and it was huge mistake. It was cold, both the people and the weather, and very, very expensive. At that time, I was more in love with the idea of being a writer than I was with writing. Is that still true? I still want the life of the urban writer – mornings spent writing and afternoons spent pretending to be Mozart on the bus.
*Am definitely anti-facebook
still reading Nicholas Nickleby
Nicholas Nickleby was supposed to be finished by the end of January, but it’s going to take an extra day or two because my ambitious reading and writing plans for the weekend were derailed by procrastination (Saturday) and illness (Sunday and Monday). And, once again, I have failed to learn a lesson about procrastination.
I stayed home yesterday because I was too exhausted and dizzy to walk to work in the snow. Today, even though I feel much stronger, I still managed to slip on the ice and arrived at work with my legs bleeding. I wish I was the kind of person who could handle such situations gracefully, but I’m not, so I sniffled with pain during the morning meeting, and then limped off to be bandaged.
How would a Dickens heroine have handled such a morning? Unless she was very cute, probably without tears. Kate Nickleby only cries when she has a really good reason, like when her uncle tries to pimp her out. Otherwise, she handles all of the drama at her job and all of her mother’s crazytalk* with fortitude. Fortitude, even the word sounds properly Victorian.
I want to write more about Kate Nickleby, but I don’t have my paperback of Nicholas Nickleby with me and looking at my kindle notes, I realize that I haven’t marked very many lines about her. Although Jonathan Franzen is a dick, he is a little bit, only a little bit, right when he laments the advent of the ebook. It’s easier to read long books on the kindle, and I’m much more likely to mark things, but it is not good when you’re in the mood for random inspiration. If I had to drag the paperbacks around town with me, I wouldn’t be reading Dickens this year, I’d be reading a pithier author, maybe Muriel Spark. Page numbers are another weakness of the kindle. Free books, like the ones from Project Gutenberg, don’t have page numbers like the ones from publishers do. It seems weird to say I’ve read 80% of Nicholas Nickleby, how many pages is that? It’s Dickens – I could have hundreds of pages left!
*"accustomed to give ready utterance to whatever came uppermost in her mind"
cold coffee in winter
"The scourge of pour over coffee" was a hit of nostalgia – I’ve had coffee made like that so many times, and although it is sometimes nice (Intelligentsia in Los Angeles, Ritual Roasters in San Francisco) the place where I’ve had the most pour-over coffee is here in Japan and it is usually terrible. If I wanted dark roasted blends, I would stick with Starbucks. Drinking coffee black seems to be rarer in Japan than in the US, so what is the point of the extra prep time when it’s just going to be diluted with milk and sugar? High quality milk and sugar are the real keys to success. People who fetishize Japanese pour-over coffee should all be sent cases of canned coffee so they can taste the competition.
I spent a ridiculous amount of time today reading about how to make cold-brewed iced coffee. Why ridiculous? Because all you do to make cold-brewed coffee is pour water over coffee and let it sit for a minimum of 12 hours. But, there’s always the hope that there is some magical method of making coffee that will deliver both caffeine and a magical rainbow of taste at the same time. But, no, even America’s Test Kitchen fails to come up with a fancy method of making cold-brewed iced coffee. They try, saying to start by roasting the beans, but their basic directions are the same: cold water over coffee.
It’s snowing outside, really snowing for once, so why am I thinking about drinking cold coffee? My kitchen is so cold in the morning that it turns the simple act of turning on the coffee maker into a frightening prospect. However, if I knew that coffee was already waiting for me and all I would have to do is pour, that makes weekend coffee so much easier. "Weekend" coffee because during the week I drink the coffee at school. Some days, like today, when I really need caffeine to get me out of bed, I’ll use my electric kettle to make tea.
The Hunting of the Snark
Lewis Carroll* was born on January 27th, and I celebrated by ordering The Hunting of the Snark. It’s available on Project Gutenberg, but this edition looks fantastic.
*Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was born, presumably, "Lewis Carroll" was born much later.
cooking for one
Confessions of a Restaurant Addict
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to cook dinner at home at least 3 times a week. So far, I’ve used my kitchen, I want to say once, but I think the number is closer to zero – I have not used my kitchen at all in 2012. I find cooking for one dreary and would rather eat out or eat peanut butter and crackers. Eating crackers for dinner feels less lonely than going to the trouble of chopping vegetables, sautéing them, and then doing all the washing up. It’s like more than 45 minutes of work for less than 15 minutes of pleasure, and since I don’t usually like the taste of my own cooking, it’s not even that. The taste issue could probably be solved by adding more salt and sprinkling on some MSG, but that would defeat the supposed health benefits of eating at home.
Tonight, I will go home and make red beans and rice. It won’t be very good, all of the ingredients have been living in the freezer for quite a while now, but it will be edible. I can always go out for curry tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that.
How did I waste my online time today? N+1 on Pitchfork (metafilter post w/ links to disappeared reviews)
