The Inimitable

At the LRB, Tim Parks on Dickens' children. (That link should work now; the initial version I had was through a Columbia proxy. Thanks, Dave!)

Made it to Cayman safely today, though on only a couple hours of sleep. Am intending to sleep long and hard tomorrow morning!

Blocked

Minna Proctor on an encounter with Muriel Spark.

Also: Dickens' best novel?

"Eyes too like the lobster's"

At the TLS, Claire Harman on Jenny Hartley's new one-volume selection of Dickens' letters:

He is often killingly funny, more so even than in the novels, as in his description of taking his son and friends out on a picnic from Eton; “What I suffered for fear those boys should get drunk – the struggles I underwent in a contest of feeling between hospitality and prudence – must ever remain untold . . . . They were very good, however. The speech of one became thick, and his eyes too like the lobster’s to be comfortable, but only temporarily”.

"Old biographers have got something extra"

I desperately want to read Claire Tomalin's new Dickens biography!

This piece is a profile of Tomalin by Rachel Cooke, and it's got one of those amazing and awful glimpses of the life of women in London in the 1950s:

In a review of Janet Malcolm's book, The Silent Woman, about Sylvia Plath, Tomalin wrote: "... one of my most vivid memories of the 1950s is of crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes – there were no washing machines – while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier. I had wanted to do something with my life – I thought I had some capacities and here they were going down the plughole with the soapsuds."

Books not bombs

Great Expectations; Hard Times...

Triffid-like co-tenants

At the Guardian Review, Iain Sinclair on J. G. Ballard.

Out late tonight for a pair of literary things: first of all, a tour by the curators of the quite amazing Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan Library. Then I met up with G. to see the Pearl Theatre Company's adaptation of Hard Times. It is not at all bad, acting and adaptation both quite good (it is far from being my favorite Dickens novel, it is overly schematic), only the whole thing feels undermotivated - especially in comparison with the really imaginative and fresh integration of third-person narration and dialogue by Tarell Alvin McCraney, which is still very much in my mind. Even with a 7:30 curtain time, it wasn't over till 11 - my stomach was terribly rumbling!

We then had a truly lavish meal at Milos. Our initial order was kindly but summarily rejected by the waiter ("Of course, the money is not an issue - but if one person orders the whole fish by the pound, it will cost $70, $80 for a single portion - you must order the prix fixe!"), and so we both signed on for the prix fixe dinner: I had grilled octopus, tomato salad, grilled loup de mer and a very nice dessert of walnut cake with lavender-vanilla ice-cream. Delicious...

Changes rung upon dots

A wonderful 2008 LRB piece by Leah Price on the nineteenth-century rise and fall of shorthand writing (via Jennifer Schuessler):

Like Esperanto a generation later, shorthand spread through a counter-culture of early adopters – spirit-rappers, teetotallers, vegetarians, pacifists, anti-vivisectionists, anti-tobacconists. Pitman himself associated shorthand with ‘the dawn of religious freedom’ and ‘the dawn of political freedom’ (verbatim transcription, he claimed, prevented parliamentary reporters from privileging favourites). His empire grew with the British postal system. In 1840, he condensed his method into a ‘Penny Plate’ the right size for sending through the new penny post. A network of ‘gratuitous correctors’ (Pitman’s language veered between pedantry and hucksterism) encouraged autodidacts in the provinces to send one another their shorthand exercises to be marked; later, chain letters called ‘ever-circulators’, composed in shorthand, were sent through the imperial mail. When correspondence was conducted in shorthand, Pitman claimed, ‘friendships grow six times as fast as under the withering blighting influence of the moon of longhand.’ Those exchanges tended to link men to other men, with the notable exception of a girl called Martha Watts, who practised her shorthand by sending Pitman love letters. When the suspicious Mrs Pitman finally broke into her husband’s desk, she had to persuade a student to transcribe them for her: Pitman had been too busy spreading shorthand across the world to teach it to his wife.

"It is only an evening"

"The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a day away."

See also Jenny Diski:

Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days' time? I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.