Reading Rambo

I've talked a lot this year about how Dickens was kind of an asshole but I still love him, only not so much him the person as the words, THE WORDS that flow from his blessèd pen.

Bleak House is his best book. No, I haven't read David Copperfield. Or Tale of Two Cities. Or Little Dorrit. Or...others. But it's still his best book. The way I came to Dickens is in high school I made myself read Oliver Twist, because I loved the character Nancy in the musical Oliver ridiculous amounts (she sings a song called 'Oom-Pah-Pah,' people) and thought the book would flesh her out more. Ehhhhhh! Wrong! Oliver Twist isn't just Dickens: it's EARLY Dickens, which means black and white portrayals of people and EXTRA flat female characters.


I wrote a paper on Nancy using an idea I stole from a Nabokov novel, saying that because characters in the Oliver Twist world exist on the good or bad side, and she is an in-between, she has to die. IT WAS A GOOD STOLEN CONCEPT, OKAY? But …

Do you think the Victorians were so overrun with sentimentality that nothing really meant anything?

"My dearest darling, for so you have been thought of by me from the dark reaches of the past and shall be to the ever distant future — may my heartfelt greetings light upon your soul soft as the brush of the wings of those that serve Him on high."

"Oh, Mavis says hello."

I finished The Invisible Woman, which is Claire Tomalin's 1990 biography of Nell Ternan, Dickens's mistress. I've been working on it since January. It is not a long book.




Claire Tomalin's so respectable. I don't even know if that's true, but she writes like she is.The reason Ellen Ternan is the Invisible Woman is GOOD LORD THERE'S SO LITTLE INFO ABOUT HER. This is mainly because back in the day, what did you do if you wanted to erase someone? You just -- burned their letters. Poof. Gone. We have no letters from Dickens to Nell, and only a few references, mostly coded. Using pr…

Back in December, I saw a show. You might have heard of it, it's called THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD. This caused me to descend into a spiral of Dickensianity, which involved reading about him, Nell Ternan, and LGBT subtext in Victorian literature, because I was 92% positive the Drood characters Helena Landless and Rosa Bud were doin' it.

In February, I mailed my very marked-up copy of Edwin Drood to the Broadway theatre where the show was playing (along with a return envelope, because I'm not an ANIMAL), and more specifically, I mailed it to the actress playing Helena Landless, whom for the purpose of hiding from Google searches we will call "Bessie Bueller."

I asked her to sign it and write her favorite quote, and to please if possible get the actress playing Rosa Bud ("Wetsy Bolfe") to do the same. Because then my copy would be LEGIT AWESOME.


So I sent it. And I waited. And I waited some more. And then the show closed. And I went 'Hm. Ok. Well. She ca…

I was alerted by Amanda via twitter that today...is Dickens's birthday. No, I wasn't aware. I had zero idea, in fact. Was not expecting it. BUT HERE IS HIS HASTILY COBBLED TOGETHER BIRTHDAY POST.


Yes, Dickens, shining light of the Victorian age, second only to Shakespeare in the English canon, general misogynist but getting-better-at-the-end-of-your-life, consider yourself saluted this day of days. You who gave us Bleak House but also Great Expectations, Pickwick Papers but also Barnaby Rudge, the best parts of Our Mutual Friend but also the worst parts of Our Mutual Friend, has anyone come close to you in the last hundred and forty years? Well, maybe J.K. Rowling. BUT NO ONE ELSE.

People are going to celebrate this different ways, but I'm going to name some characters of his I love with an irrational love that would make me punch people who disagree with me:

Lady Dedlock, Bleak House. I hated Dickens when I was 18, and when I found out I had to read a giant book of his call…

This weekend I frolicked in the rain with my roommate. Yeah, it was freezing rain, and by frolic I mean 'ran pell-mell through the streets of Chicago with one arm covering my library books while yelling 'AHHHHH!' and grabbing onto his hand so I didn't fall on my ass on the ice-covered sidewalk,' but I'm gonna call that 'fun and whimsical' in my head.


I'm still on my Edwin Drood bender. The only time I get seriously serious about academic research is when my subject is something along the lines of "DOES THE TEXT PROVE THAT THESE TWO CHARACTERS WANT TO MAKE OUT?" 

I did this for the opera Carmen (I have a theory using textual proof that Carmen totally does love Don Jose, despite what her outward actions might indicate), Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors (ANTIPHOLUS AND ADRIANA FOREVS), and now Drood with Helena/Rosa. It's the only kind of subject that gets me jazzed enough to put real effort into it. I blame growing up with soap operas a…

Like many people, I have a tendency to simplify things in my world through generalizations. Generalizations are awesome. If I were younger and more crass, I might even say they were the shit. If we didn’t have generalizations, every single topic would take hours to go through in our minds because there are so very, very many exceptions to absolutely everything. With this in mind, I’m going to talk about Dickens. I’m going to be writing about him soon for the Austen vs. Dickens thrown-down that is currently sweeping the interwebs, but for right now I’d like to discuss his douchiness. My one thing I’d like those touchy people out there to bear in mind is that I am well aware that I’ve never met Mr. Dickens, and I do not know the exact circumstances of his mid-19th century situation. Could there have been mitigating circumstances to alleviate his douchiness? Yeah, probably. But I’m still going to be pissed off about it. For those who have not read an excessive amount of his works (read: ma…