Charles Dickens at 200!

Some people love his work, some people could leave it. In fact, people usually are familiar with one or two of three things about Charles Dickens:

• A Christmas Carol with Scrooge, Tiny Tim and Marley's Ghosts;
• The quote: "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." (which is the first line of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, used incessantly by pundits to describe all times); and/or
• Oliver Twist as lead character in Oliver! the Musical from which we get such memorable tunes as "Food, Glorious Food," "Consider Yourself," "You've Got to Pick a Pocket or Two" and "Where Is Love?" (or even, "I'm Reviewing the Situation").

Actually, A Christmas Carol by far is the most well-known of Dickens's work, but the story of Pip in Great Expectations has been known to be .  There's a great NPR item on Dickens jumping off from an exhibit at the Morgan Library in NYC (a wonderful little museum), with little known facts with which to dazzle one's friends.  He managed to save his reputation as well as his mistress and his manuscript from a train wreck?  Pshaw!  I can't see that everyone didn't know (in contemporaneous times) that heady with celebrity, he also did things outside propriety.  Only through the lens of history and forced high school reading has the reputation of Dickens as a proper, hard-working and boring person come.  And, now, there is a novel by Gaynor Arnold, Girl in a Blue Dress, based on his letters and other British Museum documents which tells a fictionalized heartbreaking story of his abandoned wife Catherine.

Who among our writers today has such celebrity?  And, one wonders in 200 (or 150 or so) years from now, who among our popular writers will be so honored.  James Patterson?  Nicholas Sparks?  Nora Roberts?  That one doubts any of these or anyone else would be so popular today and read tomorrow must be the real indicator of the decline of published writers and books as a society's source for enlightenment and entertainment.

Food Glorious Food

I have discovered that today is Blog Action Day on which bloggers throughout the world write about a topic of global concern.  This year's topic is "Food."  Well, that narrows the range.  Or does it?

Along with air to breathe and some temperature control to keep a human body from freezing or melting down, food is a vital part of our existence.  It also has a wide-ranging definition.  Yesterday, I was eating brunch with an especially intelligent and sophisticated group of people -- Vassarites, and we discussed restaurants, good meals, and at one point, molecular gastronomy.  A trained cook among us gave an example of molecular gastronomy at work -- the breakdown of an apple to its core (pun intended?) elements -- fiber and flavour.  So, can we take those elements and present them to the diner differently, like as a piece of paper made of apply fiber which tastes (one expects) like apple?  This might come in the form of an edible menu.  The objection one person made which is the objection most of us have is, why not enjoy the fruits (another pun?) of Nature's labor and eat an apple in its pure form?  Another person articulated the objection more forcefully:  it is akin to playing with our food; with all the starving people in the world, we are expending exorbitant amounts of resources to play with food.

There may be an argument that molecular gastronomy makes eating out more of an experience, an adventure, and not merely in the 21st century to socialize.  This would then be like the adoption of cooking meat 1.5 million years ago which enabled hominids not simply to stay alive, but to thrive (as demonstrated in Robin Brande's Fat Cat, a young adult story which uses the question, "What would happen if we eat like hominids did?" as the beginning basis for a science fair project).

This would be the antithesis of what a farmer once called, "Better living through chemicals."  High yields of grains and other crops through use of fertilizers, weedkillers and insecticides, refrigeration, preservatives and don't forget, refined fuels for the production, transport and cooking of food are all progress and have undeniably made life better for a significant amount of people in the world.

Because we in the Western World can take food for granted, we can take it further.  We can have a reaction to the inefficient packaging of regularly fried potato chips by creating pre-formed, orderly stacked chips made from potatoes (we could have had that for fish, too, if we listened to Professor Mazzocchi of Hoboken), and we can have a counter-reaction to that over-processing by eating only organic potatoes freshly fried in fresh pressed peanut oil.  We can have an evolved sub-species of humans called "foodies," who are basically food snobs, continuously looking for the next trend.  The foodies are eating locally grown organic purple potatoes freshly fried in duck fat, unless they are enthusiasts of molecular gastronomy, admiring and inhaling the essence of the slice of potato frozen with liquid nitrogen and then, transformed into vapor.  One wonders what kind of science fair project can come studying the eating habits 21st Century Homo Sapiens Americanus.

All I Want For Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa... Is (Are?)

Peace, Love, Good Health and Good Cheer!

However, I hope that everyone else wants a printed bound book, or perhaps an audio for the drive to Grandma's.  The poem -- "Over the River and Through the Woods," which I had learned as a schoolchild in song form, is actually about Thanksgiving (more on that wonderful holiday in a different post).

Hanukkah this year begins early, right at the same time as Advent, and right before Downtown Dixon's 22nd Annual Christmas Walk, always on the first Friday of December.  In recent years there has been a split of opinion on whether Friday night or Saturday morning is the better time for celebrating Christmas, with Santa and chestnuts roasting on the open Weber grill.  It was traditionally a time for shopkeepers in Downtown Dixon to showcase wares for sale: gift-giving, decorating and partying ideas for the holidays.  Besides being a wonderful evening out (especially when the weather was lovely), it became a time for tweenies to let loose.  Their behaviour became a little difficult to deal with, especially with the proliferation of the aerosol string that seems so fun and so funny to that age group -- too old for sitting on Santa's lap or even following the parents around while they oooh and ahhh at decorations and previously mentioned wares, yet too young to wander too far away on their own.  So, the event in the last couple or so years has been a great compromise -- an 18- or 30-hour affair.  Books on First really gears up for the Friday night event, in which we sell a tremendous amount of hot chocolate.

Of what we don't sell a tremendous number are holiday titles, traditional like Over the River and Through the Woods or newer ones, like Lemony Snicket's The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming which bridges the Jewish/Christian/secular divide.  We do have an incredible selection, including Doctor Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas (which actually started life as a television special before becoming a book), Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol as a pop-up "paper engineered" by Bruce Fischer and In the Dark Streets Shineth, A 1941 Christmas Eve Story as told by David McCullough.

And to mention a favored audio: NPR's Holiday Favorites, a CD featuring David Sedaris's "Santaland Diaries" and other humorous and heartwarming pieces for the holidays (including Hanukkah and Kwanzaa).  This audio, however, does not have the formerly perennial holiday airing recorded by John Henry Faulks.  I would have liked to see a revival of the now politically incorrect rendering of “the wonderfulest Christmas in the United States of America.”  This is the opposite of "Over the River and Through the Woods," in that I have talked with someone who thought the story was told at Thanksgiving time, because she remembered the black and white families sharing dinner together.  I recalled (correctly this time) that this was a Christmas story, because I remembered the boy getting an orange from Santa and "stripey" candy.  I have not heard this aired in years, while she recalled hearing it just last year.  While not "PC," the story not only represents a tradition, but reflects America at a different time in our history, when we honestly talked about racial discrimination (government Christmas gifting maybe not available for colored folks) and poverty (maybe this was a family who doesn't have Christmas) and the glories of FDR's New Deal for which we Americans could be proud.  In this age of Tea Party ranting about "runaway government," but no one willing to share the hurt, all of this frankness certainly is no longer Politically Correct.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood Solved?

I am convinced that most traditional Fantasy/Science Fiction genre writers have so many convoluted ideas spawned from fascinating but trivial information they want to share that they either have to write one 1000-page mass market paperback with 1/4" margins and appendices and a glossary of terms or a whole series of such mass market paperbacks.  What fascinating but trivial information?  Exhibit A is Simon R Green's "Secret Histories" series.  The hero's alter ego's name is "Bond, Shaman Bond."  So, let's start with the titles of the books in the series, coined to delight James Bond fans.

Believe me, except for these catchy plays on Ian Fleming's titles, the books are not anything like those classic 007 novels. For one thing, when Fleming left the realm of possibilities, he did not do it tongue in cheek, but rather, gave us the impression that he really wanted the reader to take seriously any premise of science ,history, politics or spycraft he threw out there.