Hard Times....

While my provider access was off, I found that my notebook has little in the way of amusing myself, almost no programs, or things that I like to do with a pc.

But I did find a bunch of audio files and a cribbage game.  I had downloaded some audio e-books, as my increasing and developing cataract makes reading troublesome of late.  And since my old files of all of  Dickens' works had been locked in my old pc without a chance of recovery, had been downloading audio versions on slow news days. 

So I went back to one in the hiatus, the only one that I had hated when I first read it, and had never gone back to.  His novel Hard Times.    I had a professor who used to hammer one fact into us.  There are some things that should be read later in life, in order to be really appreciated, and that novel seems to be the proof of his theory. 

So I turned it on in the background and honed my cribbage skills on the surface while listening.  And soon became engrossed in that short but brittle novel. It is divided into two parts---  'Sowing' and 'Reaping'. 

I only remembered it being dark and almost suffocating, and very depressing.  Imagine my surprise at having to laugh out loud over some of it.  And being amazed at some of the themes in the first part which would be considered daring even today. 

I'm only a bit more than half-way through listening, but can say it is a masterful depiction of corporation towns and how they tick.  And in actuality, it's lost nothing in the way of being timely. 

It takes place in a fictitious town called 'Coketown'.  Which makes me grin every time I hear it.  Change it to 'Kochtown', and it's what some global vultures would love to have the world look like.

The story is going to end in tragedy, that much I can see already.  But it is the descriptions of Coketown that blew me away.  I grew up there. 

I found the books at this site you can browse through it here.  Type in Hard Times in the search window, and download the first chapter of book two, and take a listen.  The descriptions are every factory town anyone ever experienced.  Disconcerting, how many things never change.

The site has hundreds of classics for free.  Seemingly, there is a site where volunteers record their readings of chapters and register them, and so they get all the book parts together, and you can download and listen to them.

It's sort of a place for the reading impaired, and you can catch up on things you always thought you should have read, but never got around to.

The only drawback is that some of the books get read by alternate people, and some are better than others.  I especially enjoy it when someone from England is doing the reading, because it 'fits'.  Some of them make the prose sing. It sort of grates when you go from one such chapter, and the next is from someone in Carolina.  Or Minnesota.  Although some of those are exceptions to the rule.  I suppose it is a matter of taste, but the Brits have more talent when it comes to Dickens, and that is hardly surprising.  They are the ones who make me laugh outright.  Or give me a spine tingle.

Hard Times was always near the bottom of my list of Dickens' novels, but after hearing it...  well it has gone up several notches in my estimation.  Just for the descriptions of Coketown.

And apropos nothing, and referring to the post below...  I spoke with Peter Sunday night, and well, he doesn't remember what happened last week, let alone what probably happened that morning, but can still carry a conversation, somewhat.  And he can still laugh, and how I miss that.  I was telling him about John Sununu, and he lost it.  Just the name.  Of course, I was being satirical in describing that racist lout. but the name alone set him off.  Will wonders never cease, hey.

Just an Afterthought...

As you can surmise, I really love Dickens' novels.  And how I came to find him was sorta funny and odd.  My grandmother had a 'giftschrank'.  (poison cupboard, I don't know of an english equivalent for that...).  Actually, it was a curtained-off shelf where the books were in her living room.  And I was warned, the books behind the curtain were off limits.  Adult stuff

Well tell a kid verboten, and you know he's gonna go looking.  And I did.  My first find was Oliver Twist.  I assume it was the opening scene that got him assigned to the giftschrank.  Born out of wedlock, and it was clear what that was.  'Ah, no wedding ring, I see.'  That was enough in the 50's to merit giftschrank status, I guess.  So I read it on the sly.  Wow.  Fagin and the Artful dodger, and multiple kidnappings, and oh yeah Nancy...  I didn't catch the fact she was a prostitute.  I was only eight.  I thought she just stole stuff.

When Peyton Place came out, it too was relegated to the giftschrank.  And my father, 'the Venerable' had worked with Grace Metallious in a factory before she got published and became a success, so there was a lot of whispering, and shocked sotto voce discussions, because everyone knew who the characters in the book really were, and it was....  ahem...  a scandal.  Of course I got my hands on that one too, rifling through it trying to find 'the good stuff', but it seemed rather boring.  And promptly got caught and the hand of wrath met my backside in three strikes.  Which didn't bother me.  I just couldn't figure what the fuss was about.  Boring.
I didn't even see the film until the late 70's in an art movie house in Austria, and was disappointed to find it wasn't that big a deal after all.

Sorry for the digression, but it sort of made me smile.  Middle of the night reminiscences don'tcha know...

Back to Dickens.  My father remarried, we had our own place, and it had an attic room, and I loved spending hours up there on rainy days.  There were books from his childhood, and back then, they weren't very warm and fuzzy, they were more like unexpurgated Grimm.  Scary, sort of.  One of them creeped me out so much I read it several times. Kids like scary stuff.  It was called Red Feather and had something to do with changelings.  Then there was the Webster's Dictionary from the early 40's I think, and I would pore over it for hours.  Words, meanings, adjectives, it was fascinating.  And in that, I discovered the fact that Dickens had written a lot of other novels, and the characters had gone into the language of the time as late as the 1940's.  Pecksniff, pecksniffian, for instance.  Denoting hypocrisy.  Fascinated me.

So I began collecting his novels wherever I could find them.  Many were out of print, but I persevered.  (Nowadays you can download them in a flash from the internet, but hey, we didn't have that back then.  So there was the thrill of the hunt.)

All of the ones available had one thing in common.  Scholarly introductions.  And the snobs who wrote them were supposed to explain and praise what was to come, but it was the school of thought that he certainly wasn't of a caliber as Dostoyevski, say, but there were certain benefits to reading that particular novel. 

And to a professorial man, they always carped about the same things:  the caricature, they maintained the  coincidences that moved the plot were heavy-handed and improbable, and of course, disparaged his messed up view of his female characters.  On the latter point they were mostly right.  The women are either impossibly good and angelic, or the rest are very true to life, so that grates, I'll concede  that.  It's the unhappy ones who ring true, and are entertaining.  And Victorian conventions were also mostly ignored by the scholarly egg-heads who wrote their oh-so-scholarly intros. 

What they failed to achieve was putting it in the context of the historic times he was writing them.  Most people were illiterate.  And instead of tee-vee, when the books came out in serial form, usually four chapters at once, those who could would read them in a pub or inn to those who couldn't.  And there were so many characters in them, using a catch-phrase made them immediately recognisable to the listeners.  As to coincidences...  well have had some of the weirdest happen in my life where one would say, 'impossible'.  Such as getting off a subway one evening in Munich and directly in front of me was a person I worked with in the cinema who had decided to come visit.  I'd had no idea.  'Oh, I was looking for you.'  Coincidence?  Impossible?  Happened...

So yes, one might see some things in the novels as 'drawbacks'...  but actually the themes are universal and as true today as they were during his time.

Sometimes a trip back in time is instructive.

And btw...  the BBC films do very nicely in toning down the quirks that were so abrasive to a modern reader.  Although they did have a field day letting Smallweed in Bleak House do all the tag-lines.  'Oh my bones!  You brimstone beasts!  I'm all crunched!  Shake me up, Judy!'  That. was delightful.  Peter fell apart laughing over him, and Smallweed is a villain in the piece. 

Yeah, you had to be there, you know???

Nothing Really Ever Changes... How Discouraging

In the last several weeks, in between pounding my head on the keyboard trying to access my old account, I had the dvd fired up because my sat connection to the tv needs revamping and I can't afford the dew-hickey that needs to be installed to get the high def signal needed.

Luckily, I collected loads of dvds, so I can go for a year without any repeats.  And decided to have a Dickens film festival, which covers many hours, as there are lots.  Most of them are very close to the novels, all of which I've read more than once, but it is fun to watch them come alive, and I usually find something new in the material every time I do my yearly viewing. 

What really jumped out at me this time around were things that had bored me originally when I read them as a young man, but could be part of any news broadcast today.  In many of those novels, so-called pyramid schemes are the catalyst that serve to bankrupt many of the characters and propel the plot.  Scams involving life insurance policies, and then there is a bubble, and it bursts, driving unwitting investors bankrupt and into ruin.  Speculation in goods, where a major investor pulls out once the gain has been at its' peak is a key factor in the novel Nicholas Nickleby, for instance, his third novel, back in the 1830's if I remember the date correctly.  And people are ruined, as is the father of the main character before he is born. 

Those themes run through many of them, in other words, and even in David Copperfield, you find embezzlement on a grand scale. 

Land speculation scams are a large part of Martin Chuzzlewit, for instance.  All of these things cause a lot of misery and ruin for the unsuspecting and gullible, and the greedy.

And now, nearly 200 years later?  You find the very same things still going on, no one has learned anything, no one has fixed anything, no one has created effective protective regulatory laws, and some really bad characters prey on society and mostly get away with it.  In fact, nowadays, no one even gets your proverbial slap on the wrist.

Seemingly, it goes in cycles, but nothing ever changes.  I think that is what makes the work timeless.  In his later years, according to his biography, Dickens was very disillusioned.  His novels had caused laws to be changed, but the conditions he abhorred were still never really corrected.  Some new way of getting around them always came up.

So watching this time around, all in one stretch over several days, I reflected on how little mankind has actually changed or even gotten better in any way. 

And THAT...  is discouraging.  Hope and Change?  Ya think???