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Dickens In The Dust or Brick 'Ouse

Yesterday, as I was rereading the chapter about Dickens and the expanding London, a tuckpointing crew began to scour the outside of our building. Cinnamon-colored dust swirled against out windows, discolored our screens, and, even though we had taped everything, clouded our living room and shortened our breathing. A man, so caked in dust and so insectoid-looking in his gas mask that he looked like a sculpture, hung in the air outside our window. The sounds were disquietingly dental–the ascending, relentless, triumphant sound of a hard surface being abraded by an even harder surface. 

Ethan Canin, at a reading E and I attended in the fall of 1991*: the great secret inspiration for books is other books.  By this I think he meant two things: the first is that reading a good book makes you want to write a good book. The second is that a great book sensitizes you to a part of life that you might otherwise miss and once you see the world this new way you want to record it. You read Dickens; you start to see Dickensian things.

* I remember it because it was the only Twins-Braves series game I didn’t see.  I think: can you fact-check, E or Kootch?

Maps: The Sequel

The responses to the mapping reading post were awesome. I'm maybe even creating a little visual aid. (Odd to use the word "maybe" about something that I either am or am not doing.) I am doing it; I may not complete it.

And here is the link Amy provided:  mrbellersneighborhood.com

Totally Mental Maps

Mo's comment that he'd started thinking about the settings and locales of the books he'd recently read got me to thinking: wouldn't it be cool to map one's reading.

A query: where was the last fiction you read set?  Extra credit: the last five works of fiction you read? You can leave a comment or  send an email to unprintable@mac.com.

I say fiction because it's so clearly an alternative reality that we seek.

Drowning In Dickens

My favorite paragraph from Alter's many Dickens' quotes:

As they glided slowly on, keeping under the shore, and sneaking in and out among the shipping, by back-alleys of water, in a pilfering way that seemed to be their boatman’s normal manner of progression, all the objects among which they crept were so huge in contrast to their wretched boat as to threaten to crush it. Not a ship’s hull, with its rusty iron links of cable run out of hawse holes long discolored with the iron’s rusty tears, but seemed to be there with a fell intention. Not a figurehead but had the menacing look of bursting forward to run them down. Not a  sluice-gate, or a painted scale upon a wall, showing the depth of water, but seemed to hint, like that dreadfully facetious Wolf in bed in Grandmamma’s cottage, “That’s to drown you in, my dears.” Not a lumbering black barge, with its cracked and blistering side impending over them, but seemed to suck at the river with a thirst for sucking them under. And everything so vaunted the spoiling influences of water–discolored copper, rotten wood, honey-combed stone, dank green deposit–that the after-consequences of being crushed, sucked under and drawn down, looked as ugly to the imagination as to the main event.   

Our Mutual Friend, quoted in Alter p. 51

Yes, Dickens wrote on deadline so enshrining his every word is misquided. Reading as a copy editor, I’d note several cuts, some fundamental, some fashionable:  Don’t “rusty” and “iron” imply each other? “Suck” is repeated three times. Would cutting one be a good idea or just over-fastidious? Doesn’t the Big Bad Wolf reference, ironically,  break the spell of the story? But Alter points out that this makes one empathize with the scared children in fairy tales. Couldn’t one be snarky and argue that all consequences are “after-consequences?” Yes, but you would miss the sense of being totally screwed.  In that last sentence, is “to the imagination” needed?  Yes, because it connects the “after-consequences” back to the childlike part of the mind, where it swirls and grows.

But look at how amazing this paragraph is: look at those details of hawse holes, scales, copper, wood, stone, and deposit. Notice how the adjective “pilfering” suggests something both small and guilty and how the very sound of the word moves in a darting way. Or how the word “wretched” contains the verb “wretch.”  Notice how the repeating “nots” bounce like waves and the way those repeated sentence structures allow a great deal of information to be introduced. The effect of the passage as a whole is to reinforce the feeling of drowning.

Altered Cities

Reading Robert Alter’s Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel, my first impression is: man, there’s a lot of great writing I still have to read: Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education, Dicken’s Our Mutual Friend, anything by Balzac or Zola.  And there's one writer who I–to my great embarassment– had never even heard of: Bely, anyone? 

Dickens appears to have more fun than any writer, ever.

Glib half-thought of the century: Flaubert is the high priest of “why?” Dickens, of “why not?”

FYI: Imagined Cities studies how writers sought to write the city in the 1800s, after the first great urban migrations and industrial transformations. Alter teaches at Berkeley, and is published by Yale, but he avoids the jargon, abstraction, and niche-seeking triviality of most academic writing. While the book's not something to read while watching a Twins game, Alter uses generous quotes from his favorite writers and, because he knows what of he writes, the quotes are really useful chunks of prose to examine, so you can ponder along with him on the use of perspective and person and metaphor. 

Rock the Votive

Spelled out, in about fifty of those little metal-cup candles, on the sidewalk in front of a house on Virginia: PROM? 

I convinced Al not to eat it, kick it or pee on it.

Interrupted Sleep

A compliment to the art of Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum: I finished Madeleine Is Sleeping after a long break and the book suffered from the time off. Her novel was a complex spell. 

Still Cool

Happy blog birthday to E. This is just one of the ways she inspires me.

C.S. Lewis, Not Anticipating The Two Thumbs Up "The Chronicles of Narnia" Would Receive . . .

Lately, Slate has offered some nice insights, one borrowed, into critical writing.  Ben Yagoda quotes the advice C.S. Lewis gave to Kenneth Tynan, when Tynan was a student at Oxford:  "Keep a strict eye on eulogistic & dyslogistic adjectives—They shd diagnose (not merely blame) & distinguish (not merely praise.)"

At the bottom of the article, there's a link to Meghan O'Rourke's 2003 piece praising the New York Times  Book Review of the early Seventies, edited by John Leonard. The most interesting quote:   

"Leonard's achievement lay in recognizing that the majority of books published in any given year are most interesting as an expression of their culture—not as things to be assessed in and of themselves."

Viewing books as zeitgeist flotsam seems dangerous, but also energizing and broadening.