The Snow Is Snowing, The Wind Is Blowing, But I Can (NOT) Weather the Storm

Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" will not be making one more venture off the bookshelf this year.  Your humble reader lives in West Seattle and can't get out.  Snow, it seems, does not like me, my tiny car, or Truman Capote.  So the scheduled reading, in Mill Creek, Thursday, December 18th, at 7 PM, won't be happening.

To anyone planning to attend Thursday, I can only offer my sincere apologies and my hope that you might find time, this busy Holiday Season, to read Capote's little masterpiece amongst yourselves.  You don't need me to make the story magical.

Maybe next year, we can try again.  Meanwhile, a Merry Christmas and sincere regrets to all our friends in Mill Creek who might have planned to come out and hear "A Christmas Memory" Thursday night.

Taking Truman Capote on the Road

So, tonight, Thursday, December 11th, at 7PM, I take A Christmas Memory on the road for the first time, to our Bellevue branch.  The question is: will anyone follow?  Never done a reading in Bellevue.  Have no idea if there will be an audience or not.  Hope so.

It's not Capote's little masterpiece I doubt.  And it's not the good people of Bellevue.  The Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer newspaper listed the event in last Sunday's entertainment section -- but didn't say that this reading was at the Bellevue store!  So no one may know to go there.  So...

If you haven't heard me read this story before, and if you're at all curious, do please join me. If you don't, whoever you are, I plan to read aloud to any poor soul who happens by; booksellers, babies, random customers.  Imagine the reaction: some perfectly nice customer, looking to pick up a calendar for his grandmother (all our calendars are 20% off, by the way,) or pick up a copy of The Uniform Plumbing Code (we carry that in Bellevue too,) suddenly accosted by a strange little bearded figure, loudly imitating an elderly Southern lady, talking about "fruitcake weather!"  

I have no shame.  I'll do it, if need be.  I'll make some unsuspecting person cry, I can do it with this story, believe me, even if I have to hold said random person down, or follow them down into the parking garage (parking's free at the Bellevue store, by the way.)

Oh dear.

So spare the unsuspecting patrons of the UBS Bellevue, and come hear me read.

'Twas the Night Before Dickens

The world of Charles Dickens, in the popular imagination of our day, is little more than a Victorian Christmas card; plump ladies in funny caps, fat gentlemen in side-whiskers, all gathered 'round the Christmas table, chubby tykes gamboling about, and a toast in punch about to be drunk to the joys of the Season, perhaps to be followed by another to the dear little Queen. And then, what? Carols perhaps? How jolly. But look again at the card reproduced above. It is the very first commercially produced Christmas card, from 1843. There's more to it, isn't there?

Nowadays, there are whole collections for sale on EBay of just such happy scenes in miniature; whole happy villages reproduced in neat plastic, snow white plastic on tidy plastic streets full of clean little plastic Victorians and everybody, again, seems to be forever on the verge of singing. And this cheery vulgarity, for whom is it named? Why, Charles Dickens, of course.

It is entirely understandable that some might find this vision of the sanitized,

sentimentalized past more than a little noisome. Dickens would.

And there's worse. In Kent, England there's now an amusement park, brazenly called "Dickens' World," where costumed characters parade around the tidy reproduction of London, including, if you can believe it, the quaint slums, and drop off the little ones for daycare in "Fagin's Den."

Because what's missing in the miniatures and the amusement park -- other than taste -- and present, at least peripherally, in the actual Victorian scene on the card, are the poor. The model Victoriana is all about nostalgia, a phenomenon Charles Dickens found ridiculous and distasteful, if not infuriating, because nostalgia precludes even the possibility of progress. If they were in fact, such "good old times," then what was all that fuss about the Poor Laws, about child labor, about exploitation, and poverty, "ignorance and want?"

Dickens was no killjoy. Don't think that. As the title of Les Standiford's new book points out, Dickens is, after all, The Man Who Invented Christmas. But Christmas, as Dickens understood it, was as much or more about what we do to one another the rest of the year, as it is about what we do for one another, or at least intend to do, come December 25th.

So, enjoy the Festive Season, as those jolly folks in the middle of the first Christmas card seem to be doing. Dickens would heartily approve. He'd join in the fun, if he still could. (And maybe he does, depending on one's point of view.) But note what's just to either side of the good time. And remember, as Charles Dickens, in his "generous anger," wrote, and spoke, and read aloud and fought to remind us: that the spirit of Christmas need not come but once a year.

Reading for Reading(s) Sake -- Orwell & Dickens

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              As part of my big "Employee Shopping Days" splurge, as I mentioned in an earlier post, I bought two handsome volumes of reissued George Orwell essays.  Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays and All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays.  In the latter, the very first essay is "Charles Dickens," originally published, in book form anyway, in a collection called Inside the Whale & Other Essays, in 1940.  

The last time I bought a collection of Orwell's essays, just a few years back, it was in an Everyman's Library edition, in one volume, nearly three inches thick!  I still own it, for reference I suppose, but it is a 

ridiculous object; cumbersome, impossible to carry on the bus, heavy on the chest when reading in bed.  (Now there's a good subject for an essay: American-made books and their resemblance to American-made cars, i.e. the SUVs of classic literature.  Another day perhaps.)

Despite already having done one Dickens reading at the store, on his birthday in February, this year, and having done a good deal of research for that, for whatever reason, I never read the Orwell essay on Dickens.  I know I started it, but I never read it.  With the more attractive and  practical volume from Harcourt, Inc., now on my nightstand, and a reading of Dickens' "The Chimes" coming up on December 9th, I have done at last.  I'm ashamed I never did before now.  I can recommend it as one of the best things I've ever read about Dickens.

By 1940, Orwell had already seen the grim effect of orthodoxy on the socialism he uses to critique Dickens' liberalism, and Orwell's critique is no less justified or interesting because of the failure of certain premises still assumed in the essay.  And just when I'd grown impatient with Orwell and his jabs at Dickens for failing, among other things, to write realistically about agricultural workers (!), Orwell starts the fifth section of his essay with the following line:

"By this time anyone who is a lover of Dickens, and who has read as far as this, will probably be angry with me."

Now what is not to like about a critic capable of that line?  Moreover, Orwell goes on to write one of the best appreciations of Dickens' genius I've ever read; cogent, concise, and very cleverly written.

If for no other reason, I will be always grateful to Orwell for providing me with the perfect phrase summarizing the true nature of Dickens personality.   Particularly, though without specific mention of it in the essay, the Dickens of 1844, when he wrote the story that I will be reading at the store: the Great Man was, as Orwell says, "generously angry."  Perfectly said.  Perfectly true.

I will NOT buy another book about Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, or Scrooge... okay, I did.

In the long list of Things I Intend Never to Do Again -- updated almost weekly nowadays -- there are some activities precluded by encroaching middle-age; such as dancing to fast songs, keeping up with current slang, and wearing tight shoes. I could go on, but won't. Other tasks, I've come to admit, are simply beyond me; like reading Joyce, doing algebra, and learning to appreciate the finer points of modern opera. There are tasks I undertook convinced I would do well, and yet failed to master; and here cooking Chinese food at home, baking my own bread and learning Latin come most quickly to mind. I remain resolved, regarding the above.

In perhaps no other subset of my list have I so regularly failed, as under the heading of Books I Will Not Buy. I said I'd never read another

book on Lincoln, and that even if I did, I'd never buy another, and then one of my favorite American historians, William Lee Miller, heretofore reliably not a Lincoln man, published, in 2002, Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography, and I bought it. And I read it. And it was, predictably, fascinating. Since then, I've allowed myself no more than three or four other books on the subject, but still, you see the danger of the slippery slope here, don't you? And with

Lincoln's Bicentennial coming...

And now, I've let myself go again and bought yet another new book on a subject I ought not to need or want to ever read about again: The 

Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits, by one Les Standiford.

I do not need to read this story again. I do not need to own another book about Charles Dickens. I do not know Mr. Standiford or his works. But the book was pretty. The introduction, read o

ver lunch, was well written and charming. At $19.95, the book was not outrageously priced. And, for all I knew, this book might have information I might find helpful when writing my introduction for my new Christmas reading this year at the store -- December 9th, at 7PM, tell your friends,-- of one of Dickens's other Christmas Books, The Chimes, so...

Well, damn. I bought it. I read it. I recommend it.

If all you know of the "Carol" is a movie or television version, you really ought to read the novel. It is a perfect book. If you want to read a fascinating story not only of Dickens, but of Christmas and how it came to be Christmas as we imagine it now, then read this new book.

And if, like me, you intend to go on making lists, resolutions and the like, be prepared to acknowledge, as I've had to yet again, just what irresolute, weak, self-indulgent creatures we humans really are. I speak here, of course, primarily, though not exclusively I'm sure, for myself.

God bless us, every one.