Dickens World

Did you know about Dickens World? If not, allow Sam Anderson's excellent piece in the New York Times to be your introduction. Take, for example, his passage on the Great Expectations boat ride:

"Halfway up a dark tunnel, the chemical smell-pots engulfed us in a powerful cloud of sour mildew. It was genuinely unpleasant, and in the midst of that cloud of stench I felt something suddenly slip inside of me: two centuries of literary touristic tradition, the pressure of Dickens reverence, the absurdity of this commodified experience — all of it broke, like a fever, and what poured out of me was hysterical laughter. I laughed, in a high-pitched cackle that sounded like someone else’s voice, for most of the ride. At some point the boat swiveled and shot backward down a ramp, splashing us and soaking our winter coats, and an automated camera took our picture. It caught us looking like a perfectly Dickensian pair: me in a mania of wild-eyed laughter, my friend resigned and unhappy — comedy and tragedy side by side, “in as regular alternation,” as Dickens put it in “Oliver Twist,” “as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.” Afterward, in the gift shop, I bought a copy of the picture, as well as a 59-page version of “Great Expectations” published by a company called Snapshot Classics. “In the time it takes to read the original,” promised the book’s cover, which was designed to look soiled and creased, “you can read this Snapshot Classic up to 20 times and know the story and characters off by heart.”"
 
The World of Charles Dickens, Complete With Pizza Hut , The New York Times.

Let Mencken Choose Your Major:

H.L. Mencken

Classical Studies
"No rational man can go through the endless volumes of the Loeb library without concluding that the Romans were an essentially dull and practical people, without much more fancy in them than a Congressman or cow doctor. They had their high virtues, of course, but a lush and charming imagination was certainly not one. They were not poets, but policeman and lawyers."

"Classical Learning" from the New York American, January 1936.

Education
"The aim seems to be to reduce the whole teaching process to a sort of automatic reaction, to discover some master formula that will not only take the place of competence and resourcefulness in the teacher but that will also create an artificial receptivity in the child. Teaching becomes a thing in itself, separable from and superior to the thing taught. Its mastery is a special business, a sort of transcendental high jumping." 

"The Educational Process" from Education, Prejudices: Third Series, 1922, pp. 238-65.

Religious Studies
"No, there is nothing notably dignified about religious ideas. They run, rather, to a peculiarly puerile and tedious kind of nonsense. At their best, they are borrowed from metaphysicians, which is to say, from men who devote their lives to proving that twice two is not always or necessarily four. At their worst, they smell of spiritualism and fortune-telling. Nor is there any visible virtue in the men who merchant them professionally. Few theologians know anything that is worth knowing, even about theology, and not many of them are honest."

"Immune" from the American Mercury, March 1930, p. 289.

All selections taken from A Mencken Chrestomathy.

Can't sleep, books will eat me.

"Time Enough At Last" The Twilight Zone

The stack of books I've put aside to be read sits to my right at the store. While it's a tidy pile (the smallest it's ever been), I think monitoring its progress is important. Making a historical record, taking a pulse:

Orlando, Virginia Woolf
A  Time To Be Born, Dawn Powell
The Locusts Have No King, Dawn Powell
Seven Soldiers of Victory, Grant Morrison

I have also cleaned house and decided against reading a book as my time for it came close. It's such a tricky business, figuring out not only what to read but when to read it. What's waiting for you?

For a richer, fuller life.

Holiday, April 1961 (Source: Literary Flack)

Ellroy on Chandler and Hammett

Source: The Paris Review: James Ellroy, The Art of Fiction No. 201

World Book Night

Model No. P114S

Obviously, there's loads of function built into the mechanical scale with handle. But when I move it around the store? I only pretend it's the briefcase I carry to my job at the Office of Weights and Measures.

Don't even pretend it's just me.

Pictured: The Pelouze® P114S 250 lb. / 114 Kg Mechanical Shipping Scale