Scott: Do you get LinkedIn spam?
Me: Not that I’ve noticed. You?
Scott: Yeah. ‘Lint Lizard. Decrease your drying time by half.’
Me: That’s your spam?
Scott: I know, right? It’s more like my soulmate.
Comments are off
To celebrate the birthday of Charles Dickens, here’s part of a post I wrote in December 2005: Snuggling Up to Genius.
…All this Dickens talk brought to mind something I read long ago in the introduction to Kate Douglas Wiggins’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
An excerpt:
There on the platform stood the Adored One. His hands were plunged deep in his pockets (a favorite posture), but presently one was removed to wave away laughingly a piece of the famous Berwick sponge-cake offered him by Mr. Osgood, of Boston, his traveling companion and friend.
I knew him at once: the smiling, genial, mobile face, rather highly colored, the brilliant eyes, the watch-chain, the red carnation in the buttonhole, and the expressive hands, much given to gesture. It was only a momentary view, for the train started, and Dickens vanished, to resume his place in the car next to ours, where he had been, had I known it, ever since we left Portland.
Shortly thereafter, the intrepid Kate slips into Dickens’s car, where she finds him alone and launches into a discussion of his “stories”:
“Well, upon my word!” he said. “You do not mean to say that you have read them!”
“Of course I have,” I replied. “Every one of them but the two that we are going to buy in Boston, and some of them six times.”
“Bless my soul!” he ejaculated again. “Those long, thick books, and you such a slip of a thing!”
“Of course,” I explained, conscientiously, “I do skip some of the very dull parts once in a while; not the short dull parts, but the long ones.”
He laughed heartily. “Now, that is something that I hear very little about,” he said. “I distinctly want to learn more about those very dull parts,” and, whether to amuse himself or to amuse me, I do not know, he took out a note-book and pencil from his pocket and proceeded to give me an exhausting and exhaustive examination on this subject—the books in which the dull parts predominated, and the characters and subjects which principally produced them. He chuckled so constantly during this operation that I could hardly help believing myself extraordinarily agreeable; so I continued dealing these infant blows under the delusion that I was flinging him bouquets.
You can read the article in its entirety here.
Image via Wikipedia.
Somehow I wound up doing two full semesters on the Romantic poets in college—an undergrad seminar junior year with a sweet but painfully dull professor, whose dry, monotone delivery drained all blood and passion from those intense and emotional writers we’ve dubbed the Romantics; and a graduate-level seminar to meet part of the lit requirement for my MFA. That course was taught by a first-year professor, a woman as intense and earnest as the poets she alternately lauded and scorned. She didn’t like one of my papers; it seemed to annoy her that I preferred Keats’s letters over his poems. But those letters! Crackling with energy and personality, unbridled, sometimes incoherent. His poems felt stilted to me, after I got a taste of Keats Unplugged in the correspondence.
I also liked (like) Coleridge better than Wordsworth—which is not to say I don’t appreciate William; no one beats him for musings-while-hiking—but, well, this was a professor who dedicated nearly a month to the Prelude. This could only be accomplished by whisking past Blake, ignoring poor auld Robby Burns entirely (heresy in my book), and running out of semester before Byron’s brow could get well and truly fevered.
Come to think of it, perhaps the course wanted to be a seminar in Wordsworth, with other fellows thrown in for context. I don’t know if I’d have signed up, in that case—again, no slight meant against earnest William; but I must have my “Frost at Midnight”—and I’m glad I did sign up, because one thing this professor accomplished was to reimbue the Romantics with the vitality my first prof had siphoned away. Prof #2 had Opinions; it seemed almost to hurt her when you disagreed. Today she would be a blogger, banging away at the keyboard late into the night because Someone Is Wrong on the Internet.
I crash-coursed my older daughters in the Romantics this morning. A small victory for Prof #2: we began with Wordsworth. But I must confess that he didn’t really come alive for me (apart from certain heavily underscored and annotated passages in my copy of the Prelude, which, after all, did resonate stirringly for the young poet-in-training I was) until years later when I read his sister Dorothy’s journal of a tour of Scotland she made with brother William and friend Coleridge. Dorothy’s travelogue was an important resource for me in the writing of my Martha books: she spent a lot of time describing the scenery and residents of the neighborhood in which I planted Martha’s fictional village. She had wry things to say about her brother as a traveling companion; he sometimes irritated her, as I expect brothers will do, but she was exceedingly fond of him. Coleridge, as I recall, was the difficult party: he liked to sleep late, and Dorothy preferred to be up-and-out early.
If I am recalling correctly. It’s been a long time.
Today we read a chapter from H.E. Marshall’s English Literature for Boys and Girls:
But of one of the great treasures of old Irish literature we will talk. This is the Leabhar Na h-Uidhre, or Book of the Dun Cow. It is called so because the stories in it were first written down by St. Ciaran in a book made from the skin of a favorite cow of a dun color. That book has long been lost, and this copy of it was made in the eleventh century…
In the Book of the Dun Cow, and in another old book called the Book of Leinster, there is written the great Irish legend called the Tain Bo Chuailgne or the Cattle Raid of Cooley.
This is a very old tale of the time soon after the birth of Christ. In the book we are told how this story had been written down long, long ago in a book called the Great Book Written on Skins.
That last bit cracked us up and we had to spend a while proclaiming the title in sonorous tones.
We enjoyed the story of the Book of the Dun Cow even more than the story in the Book of the Dun Cow, if you see what I mean. Marshall drops in intriguing details and doesn’t explain them: “But a learned man carried away that book to the East.” Who? Why? Where?
We’d have liked to hear more of Mary A. Hutton’s poem, “The Tain,” of which only a snippet was included—the Brown Bull’s death:
“He lay down
Against the hill, and his great heart broke there,
And sent a stream of blood down all the slope;
And thus, when all the war and Tain had ended,
In his own land, ‘midst his own hills, he died.”
Later we decided it was time for Rilla to meet The King of Ireland’s Son, and Padraic Colum’s rollicking, lilting prose swept us off on a grand adventure. Oh, such chills when the Eagle looks at the King’s Son with the “black films of death” covering her eyes!
Hmm, this is all sounding rather gruesome, but I guess I’m just calling out the gruesome bits. We were laughing ourselves silly at certain parts of the morning’s reading. And Colum weaves in such irresistible poetry:
His hound at his heel,
His hawk on his wrist;
A brave steed to carry him whither he list,
And the green ground under him,
and
I put the fastenings on my boat
For a year and for a day,
And I went where the rowans grow,
And where the moorhens lay;And I went over the stepping-stones
And dipped my feet in the ford,
And came at last to the Swineherd’s house,–
The Youth without a Sword.A swallow sang upon his porch
“Glu-ee, glu-ee, glu-ee,”
“The wonder of all wandering,
The wonder of the sea;”
A swallow soon to leave ground sang
“Glu-ee, glu-ee, glu-ee.”
I’m using Pinterest to create a little scrapbook of our Ireland rabbit trail—it suddenly made sense to me last night how that’s a perfect platform for collecting all the books, pictures, and websites we tend to explore in the pursuit of a particular interest.
Here’s a clip of some Irish musicians performing a version of the Tain—I’ll share this with my brood tomorrow.
an tain project from lorcan mac mathuna on Vimeo.
I love the surprising places our wandering brings us…full of wonder, indeed.
Okay. Well. Our last four days included a vicious bout of possible food poisoning (me), a tummy bug (one of the kids), and an ER visit (another one of the kids). Cut to the good part: everyone seems to be back to good health now. I’ll just add those experiences to the seemingly never-ending list of chapters in That Book I Really Should Write One of These Days about My Family’s Medical Dramas.
Today, I think I’ll just focus on today. Because today was home, and home is good. Home is especially nice when you’ve spent a couple of days away from home at, say, a hospital or two.
Today was our morning walk, and morning smoothie (Scott’s been adding strawberry kefir to mine which makes it sooo yummy), and piano lessons, and reading The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse to Rilla and then spending the longest time talking about Eric Carle’s art—the textures he squiggles into the paint, the shapes that make his collages, the way the horse looks blue at first and then you look closer and see the purple and green and turquoise and navy. After that book, Rilla needed to paint; it was primal, cellular. I don’t remember why we leapt suddenly to sponge-prints, but I realized she’d never tried them before, and I rummaged under the sink hoping to find a new sponge. Such luck: three of them. Never mind they were the really good kind with a scrubby side. If I don’t jump on a project immediately it probably won’t get done. I cut one of the sponges into a heart and she spent a happy hour making Valentines.
A very good morning.
In the afternoon there was a very earnest little boy digging through every pocket for a “green flower” he’d picked for me—a bit of clover. And a bee in the living room, the shooing-out of which somehow led, mouse-cookie fashion, to my washing the windows and scrubbing the sills while Rose told me stories and helped with the screens.
Jane is catching up on Downton Abbey so she can finish out the season with us.
The most taxing thing I’ve had to do all day is think about what book to read next.
A very good afternoon.