Just Like You – Nick Hornby, 2020

Second Monday selection. I always enjoy Hornby but didn’t find this as good or as believable as his usual standard. Just one word I learned, mandem, and a few short quotes:

  • “Cooking kept the evening away from the afternoon—it was a punctuation mark, stopping the long sentence of the day from tripping over itself and becoming garbled.”
  • On an unpromising blind date, “you could provide uninformed and unasked-for opinion, and you could be as nosy as you wanted.”
  • “He was very interested in feathering caps, and he didn’t mind which bird the feathers had fallen off.”
  • “He’d cross that bridge if the bridge ever got built. There wasn’t even anything for the bridge to go over yet.”
  • What the protagonist learns about the lute watching the movie Heartstrings – “who knew … that, if you listened to the lugubrious sound of the lute for nearly two hours, you wanted to gather up every lute in the country and burn them on a gigantic bonfire?”
  • “maybe there was no future in it, but there was a present, and that’s what life consists of”

Le comte de Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas, 1846

Re-read for Great Books – I had last read the whole thing in 2010. I enjoyed it again, but wow it’s long, and the plot is often very drawn out. I read it in French. Most of the group used the Robin Buss translation and liked it; the few stuck with the Chapman and Hall did not. I attempted my own versions of the quotes in English, and then refined them in collaboration with Jonathan, whose skills in writing, editing, and French helped tremendously.

I perked up when the Count offers Franz and Albert an infallible insomnia remedy, but it’s a ball of opium mixed with hashish… I was hoping for a mental exercise!

Such an adolescent fantasy, even libertarian: “mais je ne m’occupe jamais de mon prochain, mais je n’essaye jamais de protéger la société qui ne me protège pas, et, je dirai même plus, qui généralement ne s’occupe de moi que pour me nuire” and “tout ce qui m’entoure est libre de me quitter, et en me quittant n’aura plus besoin de moi ni de personne; voilà peut-être pourquoi on ne me quitte pas.” [“But I never worry about my neighbor; and I never try to protect society, which doesn’t protect me, and in fact generally takes notice of me only to cause me harm” and “everyone around me is free to leave me, and upon leaving me will have no further need for me or anyone else; perhaps that is why no one leaves me.”]

In this book I learned

I’m on the fence about which words I looked up to record… maybe not food (“clovisse” for example), but more general ones. The Shmoop list of references is pretty good.

Brand names and cultural references

A long paragraph on paintings

Ce salon était tapissé des œuvres des peintres modernes; il y avait des paysages de Dupré, aux longs roseaux, aux arbres élancés, aux vaches beuglantes et aux ciels merveilleux; il y avait des cavaliers arabes de Delacroix, aux longs burnous blancs, aux ceintures brillantes, aux armes damasquinées, dont les chevaux se mordaient avec rage, tandis que les hommes se déchiraient avec des masses de fer, des aquarelles de Boulanger, représentant tout Notre-Dame de Paris avec cette vigueur qui fait du peintre l’émule du poète; il y avait des toiles de Diaz, qui fait les fleurs plus belles que les fleurs, le soleil plus brillant que le soleil; des dessins de Decamps, aussi colorés que ceux de Salvator Rosa, mais plus poétiques; des pastels de Giraud et de Muller, représentant des enfants aux têtes d’ange, des femmes aux traits de vierge; des croquis arrachés à l’album du voyage d’Orient de Dauzats, qui avaient été crayonnés en quelques secondes sur la selle d’un chameau ou sous le dôme d’une mosquée…

[This salon was covered in works by modern painters: there were landscapes by Dupré, with long reeds, tall slender trees, lowing cows, and marvelous skies; there were Arab riders by Delacroix, with long white burnouses, shiny belts, and damascened weapons, whose horses gnashed their teeth in rage while the men tore at each other with iron implements; watercolors by Boulanger, depicting all of Notre-Dame de Paris with the vigor of a painter emulating a poet; there were canvases by Diaz, who makes flowers more beautiful than flowers, the sun more brilliant than the sun; drawings by Decamps, as colorful as Salvator Rosa’s, but more poetic; pastels by Girard and by Muller, showing children with the heads of angels, women with the features of virgins; sketches, ripped from Dauzat’s album of Oriental voyages, that had been scrawled in a few seconds from the saddle of a camel or under the dome of a mosque…]

Short quotes

  • Caderousse: “J’ai toujours eu plus peur d’une plume, d’une bouteille d’encre et d’une feuille de papier que d’une épée ou d’un pistolet.” [I’ve always been more frightened of a quill, a bottle of ink, and a piece of paper than a sword or a pistol.]
  • “l’air satisfait d’un homme qui croit avoir eu une idée lorsqu’il a commenté l’idée d’un autre” [the satisfied air of a man who thinks he’s had an idea when he’s commented on someone else’s]. (The Gutenberg edition I was using had “commencé” which I was confused by but rolled with. When Jonathan was reviewing these translations with me, we puzzled over it and he had the brainwave that it was a one-letter typo. Confirmed with a different French edition!)
  • “‘En effet,’ dit l’inspecteur avec la naïveté de la corruption, ‘s’il eût été réellement riche, il ne serait pas en prison.'” [“Indeed,” said the inspector with the naiveté of the corrupt, “if he had really been rich, he wouldn’t be in prison.”]
  • “ce coin de sa prison où l’ange de la mort pouvait poser son pied silencieux” [the corner of his prison where the angel of death might silently step]
  • “Les plaintes qu’on met en commun sont presque des prières; des prières qu’on fait à deux sont presque des actions de grâces.” [Shared plaints are almost prayers; prayers made with another are almost thanksgivings.]
  • “ce métier patient et sublime du prisonnier, qui de rien sait faire quelque chose” [the patient and magnificent work of the prisoner, who knows how to make something from nothing] Like “making a way out of no way”!
  • The last chapter of the first volume ends with a great sentence that has always stuck with me: “La mer est le cimetière du château d’If.” [The sea is the cemetery of the Château d’If.]
  • “le mistral, l’un des trois fléaux de la Provence; les deux autres, comme on sait ou comme on ne sait pas, étant la Durance et le Parlement.” [the mistral wind, one of the three scourges of Provence; the other two, as you may or may not know, are the Durance [river] and the Parlement [court].]
  • “cette impertinence particulière aux cochers de fiacre retenus et aux aubergistes au complet” [the distinctive impertinence of coachmen whose cabs are spoken for and innkeepers whose rooms are full]
  • “Dans tous les pays où l’indépendance est substituée à la liberté, le premier besoin qu’éprouve tout cœur fort, toute organisation puissante, est celui d’une arme qui assure en même temps l’attaque et la défense, et qui faisant celui qui la porte terrible, le fait souvent redouté.” [In all countries where independence is substituted for freedom, the primary need of any brave soul or powerful organization is for a weapon that can serve for both attack and defense, and which by making its owner redoubtable, can often make them dreaded.]
  • “la cuisine italienne, c’est-à-dire l’une des plus mauvaises cuisines du monde” [Italian cuisine, that is to say one of the worst in the world] – WTF?
  • “Les houppes de votre palais ne sont pas encore faites à la sublimité de la substance qu’elles dégustent. Dites-moi: est-ce que dès la première fois vous avez aimé les huîtres, le thé, le porter, les truffes, toutes choses que vous avez adorées par la suite?” [Your tastebuds are not yet adjusted to the sublimity of the substance they savor. Tell me: did you initially love oysters, tea, porter, truffles, all of which you subsequently adored?]
  • To Danglars: “tout en conservant l’habitude de vous faire appeler baron, vous avez perdu celle d’appeler les autres, comte” [though you’ve kept the habit of being called Baron, you’ve lost that of calling others Count]
  • “Je n’ai que deux adversaires; je ne dirai pas deux vainqueurs, car avec la persistance je les soumets: c’est la distance et le temps.” [I have only two adversaries; I will not say two conquerors, because with persistence I subdue them: they are distance and time.]
  • “[les domestiques] du Théâtre-Français, qui justement parce qu’ils n’ont qu’un mot à dire, viennent toujours le dire sur la rampe.” [The servants in the Théâtre-Français, who precisely because they have only a single word to say, always come downstage to say it.]
  • “mon père avait cela de terrible en lui, qu’il n’a jamais combattu pour les utopies irréalisables, mais pour les choses possibles, et qu’il a appliqué à la réussite de ces choses possibles ces terribles théories de la Montagne, qui ne reculaient devant aucun moyen” [my father has a dreadful trait, in that he has never fought for unrealizable utopias, but only for things that are possible, and to bring them about he has used The Mountain‘s dreadful theories, which stop at nothing]
  • “j’en suis arrivé à n’appeler malheur que les choses irréparables” [I have come to describe as misfortune only that which cannot be altered]
  • Laurence Sterne: “Conscience, que me veux-tu?” [Conscience, what would you have me do?]
  • “la douleur est comme la vie … il y a toujours quelque chose d’inconnu au-delà” [suffering is like life… there is always something unknown beyond it]
  • “le vieux patricien … semblait un seigneur parfait toutes les fois qu’il ne parlait point et ne faisait point d’arithmétique” [the old patrician seemed like a perfect nobleman whenever he refrained from speaking and did no arithmetic]

Longer quote

J’ai obtenu avec un banquier, mon confrère, la concession d’un chemin de fer, seule industrie qui de nos jours présente ces chances fabuleuses de succès immédiat qu’autrefois Law appliqua pour les bons Parisiens, ces éternels badauds de la spéculation, à un Mississippi fantastique. Par mon calcul on doit posséder un millionième de rail comme on possédait autrefois un arpent de terre en friche sur les bords de l’Ohio.

[I’ve obtained, with a fellow banker, the rights to a railroad, the only industry that currently has the fabulous possibility for immediate success that Law, speaking to the good Parisians – always an enthusiastic audience for an investment frenzy – once ascribed to a fantastical Mississippi. By my calculations one should own a thousandth of a railroad in the same way one used to own an acre of fallow land on the shores of the Ohio.]

Flights – Olga Tokaruczuk, 2007 (tr. Jennifer Croft)

An interesting and weird read for the Second Monday book group – I enjoyed the theme of biological specimens.

In this book I learned

  • Makes me want to read some Emil Cioran
  • I’ve heard of the Ghent Altarpiece but didn’t know it’s also called Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, and I hadn’t looked at it closely before
  • Sarira relics

Short quotes

  • The protagonist says she can’t put down roots: “I am the anti-Antaeus. My energy derives from movement – from the shuddering of buses, the rumble of planes, trains’ and ferries’ rocking.”
  • Interesting pity for native English speakers: “How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, all the lyrics of all the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures—even the buttons in the lift!—are in their private language. They may be understood by anyone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths.”
  • “I am certain that we cannot recognize the fate grooved into the other side of life for us by the divine Engravers. They must appear to us only once they’ve taken a form intelligible to mankind, in black and white. God writes with his left hand and in mirror writing.”
  • “The more experienced a biologist you become, the longer and harder you look at the complex structures and connections in the biosystem, the stronger your hunch that all animate things cooperate in this growth and bursting, supporting one another. Living organisms give themselves to one another, permit one another to make use of them. If rivalry exists, it is a localised phenomenon, an upsetting of the balance.”
  • “The books set on the shelves show only their spines to people, and it’s as though, thinks Kunicki, you could only see people in profile. They don’t tempt you with their colourful covers, don’t boast with banners on which every word is a superlative; as though being punished, like recruits, they present only their most basic facts: title and author, nothing more.”
  • Message from Polish students traveling to Ireland, written on a air-sickness bag; the narrator wants to find out how it turned out for them. “But I know that writing on bags is something people do only out of anxiety and uncertainty. Neither defeat nor the greatest success are conducive to writing.”

The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954

This was an unusual choice for Great Books, prompted by a long-term member who’s read a lot of mythology. It didn’t get high marks! I enjoyed re-reading it, but I had never been able to get through any Tolkien until the Peter Jackson LOTR movies, and I certainly sympathize with the general critiques that it doesn’t rank with actual myth, it’s a bit tedious and sexist, and the poetry is second-rate. But this time around both the beautiful descriptions of nature, and the WWII atmosphere of end-times (which apparently Tolkien denied referencing) really resonated with me.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

‘I am not made for perilous quests. I wish I had never seen the Ring! Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen?’

‘Such questions cannot be answered,’ said Gandalf. ‘You may be sure that it was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for power or wisdom, at any rate. But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.’

I learned

  • glede – a hot coal
  • hythe – landing-place in a river
  • eyot – small island

Example of what makes me roll my eyes

  • “We have now come to the River Hoarwell, that the Elves call Mitheithel. It flows down out of the Ettenmoors, the troll-fells north of Rivendell, and joins the Loudwater away in the South. Some call it the Greyflood after that.”
  • “under them lies Khazad-dûm, the Dwarrowdelf, that is now called the Black Pit, Moria in the Elvish tongue”

Short quotes

  • Gandalf re what Gollum “deserves”: “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
  • “a cup that was filled with a fragrant draught, cool as a clear fountain, golden as a summer afternoon”
  • Goldberry’s response when Frodo asks if the land belongs to Tom Bombadil: “‘That would indeed be a burden,’ she added in a low voice, as if to herself. ‘The trees and the grasses and all things growing or living in the land belong each to themselves.'”
  • “Nothing passes doors or windows save moonlight and starlight and the wind off the hill-top.”
  • “The wind began to blow steadily out of the West and pour the water of the distant seas on the dark heads of the hills in fine drenching rain.”
  • “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
  • “despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt”
  • “You may learn something, and whether what you see be fair or evil, that may be profitable, and yet it may not. Seeing is both good and perilous.”
  • “For the fate of Lothlórien you are not answerable, but only for the doing of your own task.”
  • “[Galadriel] seemed no longer perilous or terrible, nor filled with hidden power. Already she seemed to him, as by men of later days Elves still at times are seen: present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time.”
  • “The weather was still grey and overcast, with wind from the East, but as evening drew into night the sky away westward cleared, and pools of faint light, yellow and pale green, opened under the grey shores of cloud. There the white rind of the new Moon could be seen glimmering in the remote lakes.”
  • “A golden afternoon of late sunshine lay warm and drowsy upon the hidden land between. In the midst of it there wound lazily a dark river of brown water, bordered with ancient willows, arched over with willows, blocked with fallen willows, and flecked with thousands of faded willow-leaves. The air was thick with them, fluttering yellow from the branches; for there was a warm and gentle breeze blowing softly in the valley, and the reeds were rustling, and the willow-boughs were creaking.”

Tom Brown’s Schooldays – Thomas Hughes, 1857

For the Massachusetts Center for the Book challenge, “A book you read years ago that you may feel differently about now.” My brief summing up: “I read this 1857 classic multiple times as a child, absorbing its messages about becoming a stiff-upper-lip cricket-playing British boy despite being a timid American girl. It’s mostly as retrograde as I remember, but with a few flashes of heart and humor.” This time around I looked so many things up!

And a few quotes

  • “There isn’t such a reasonable fellow in the world, to hear him talk. He never wants anything but what’s right and fair; only when you come to settle what’s right and fair, it’s everything that he wants, and nothing that you want. And that’s his idea of a compromise.”
  • “if I go and snivel to him, and tell him I’ve really tried to learn it but found it so hard without a translation, or say I’ve had a toothache, or any humbug of that kind, I’m a snob”
  • “bear in mind that majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in the wrong”
  • East: “Now I’ve seen a deal of this sort of religion; I was bred up in it, and I can’t stand it. If nineteen-twentieths of the world are to be left to uncovenanted mercies, and that sort of thing, which means in plain English to go to hell, and the other twentieth are to rejoice at it all, why——” And when he tells his doubts to Arnold, “he didn’t tell me not to follow out my thoughts, and he didn’t give me any cut-and-dried explanation.”
  • Arnold: “Don’t be in a hurry about finding your work in the world for yourself; you are not old enough to judge for yourself yet, but just look about you in the place you find yourself in, and try to make things a little better and honester there. You’ll find plenty to keep your hand in at Oxford, or wherever else you go. And don’t be led away to think this part of the world important, and that unimportant. Every corner of the world is important. No man knows whether this part or that is most so, but every man may do some honest work in his own corner.”

Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest – Suzanne Simard, 2021

Read for Nature and Environment. While the research was fascinating, ultimately I didn’t think it was a great book. We loved how she treated Indigenous knowledge respectfully, and used the tribe names.

In this book I learned about

  • enchytraeids (common name is potworms)
  • pauropods – I think I’ve seen these. Excellent quote by Lord Avebury in Wikipedia: “a bustling, active, neat and cleanly creature. It has, too, a look of cheerful intelligence, which forms a great contrast to the dull stupidity of the Diplopods [millipedes], or the melancholy ferocity of most Chilopods [centipedes].”
  • genet – “one fungal individual …, of singular genetic identity, like an individual person”

Short quotes

  • “My instinct has always been to listen to what living things are saying. We think that most important clues are large, but the world loves to remind us that they can be beautifully small.”
  • One of the clunkiest sentences ever (and it ends a paragraph): “‘Mon chou,’ Wilfred exclaimed while knocking the wedge of sapwood out with the back of his axe-head, leaving a yawning grin that resembled their own mouths, since they’d lost most of their teeth to cavities in their teens, now replaced with dentures.”
  • “I understood the pride of claiming what was grandest, the temptation—green-gold fever. The handsomest trees captured top prices. They meant jobs for the locals, mills staying open. I checked out this one’s immense bole, seeing the cut through Ray’s eyes. Once you start hunting, it’s easy to get addicted. Like always wanting to snag the tallest peaks. After a while, your appetite can never be sated.”
  • “I loved the generous rhythm of the way the land and the forest and the rivers came together to refresh the winds at the close of each day. Helped settle us all down for the night. Air purified by the ancient forests hovered, and I let the downdraft cleanse me.”
  • “The lichens and mosses and algae and fungi were also steady as could be, gradually building up the soil, quietly in tandem. Things—and people—working together so that something noticeable could occur.”
  • “Interactions over resources isn’t a winner-take-all thing; it’s about give-and-take, building more from a little and finding balance over the long term.”
  • Her father tells her to “imagine an audience as a bunch of cabbages,” so throughout the book she references “nodding cabbages” or says “the cabbages tilted forward.”
  • “We emphasize domination and competition in the management of trees in forests. And crops in agricultural fields. And stock animals on farms. We emphasize factions instead of coalitions.”
  • “[I] stopped at a sapling shedding its parka of snow. After I swept the last crust of melded crystals away, its supple stem slowly straightened. We are built for recovery, I thought.”
  • “Maybe the fast-cycling fungi could provide a way for the trees to adjust swiftly to cope with change and uncertainty. Instead of waiting for the next generation of trees to reproduce with more adaptive ways of coping with the soils warming and drying as climate changes, the mycorrhizal fungi with which the trees are in symbiosis could evolve much faster to acquire increasingly tightly bound resources.”
  • “The eagle suddenly lifted, caught an updraft, and vanished past the peaks. There is no moment too small in the world. Nothing should be lost. Everything has a purpose, and everything is in need of care. This is my creed. Let us embrace it. We can watch it rise. Just like that, at any time—all the time—wealth and grace will soar.”

Longer quote

Ecosystems are so similar to human societies—they’re built on relationships. The stronger those are, the more resilient the system. And since our world’s systems are composed of individual organisms, they have the capacity to change. We creatures adapt, our genes evolve, and we can learn from experience. A system is ever changing because its parts—the trees and fungi and people—are constantly responding to one another and to the environment. Our success in coevolution—our success as a productive society—is only as good as the strength of these bonds with other individuals and species. Out of the resulting adaptation and evolution emerge behaviors that help us survive, grow, and thrive.

We can think of an ecosystem of wolves, caribou, trees, and fungi creating biodiversity just as an orchestra of woodwind, brass, percussion, and string musicians assemble into a symphony. Or our brains, composed of neurons, axons, and neurotransmitters, produce thought and compassion. Or the way brothers and sisters join to overcome a trauma like illness or death, the whole greater than the sum of the parts. The cohesion of biodiversity in a forest, the musicians in an orchestra, the members of a family growing through conversation and feedback, through memories and learning from the past, even if chaotic and unpredictable, leveraging scarce resources to thrive. Through this cohesion, our systems develop into something whole and resilient. They are complex. Self-organizing. They have the hallmarks of intelligence. Recognizing that forest ecosystems, like societies, have these elements of intelligence helps us leave behind old notions that they are inert, simple, linear, and predictable. Notions that have helped fuel the justification for rapid exploitation that has risked the future existence of creatures in the forest systems.

Nabokov’s Butterfly: And Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books – Rick Gekoski, 2004

I picked this up browsing the “books about books” shelves (000s in Dewey, Zs at Forbes which uses the rare Cutter classification system) and it looked entertaining. It was, and Gekoski‘s early days as a “book runner” gave me the term for what I also used to do: pick up books at low prices that my instincts told me would sell for more (although I was hitting yard sales and thrift stores, and he was dealing with much fancier stock). I was surprised that the introduction kept referring to Tolkien’s Gown – turns out it’s the same book (UK title), so presumably an oversight.

The best anecdote may be that Edward O’Brien, editor of a series of “Best Short Stories,” featured Hemingway in the 1923 collection, and went so far as to dedicate the volume… to “Ernest Hemenway.”

  • “Tolkien maintained that he never wrote ‘for children,’ as if that were in itself patronizing. ‘Children are not a class or kind, they are a heterogenous collection of immature persons,’ he wrote, which presumably was not intended to sound patronizing.”
  • “The further that [D.H.] Lawrence moves from the particularities of his subject, the less successful he is likely to be, and the more likely an undergraduate is to underline the passage.”
  • “[J.D. Salinger] refused to allow proofs to go out to reviewers, and objected violently to having a picture of himself on the back of the dustwrapper. Dismayed, his editor inquired, glacially, whether he wanted the book published, or merely printed?”
  • “[The problem with children’s books is that] children handle them, with grubby little hands. They love the rhythm and repetition of the same story, read over and over until they know it by heart. Rereading is one of the delights of childhood. It makes the world safe and predictable, but it’s murder on the books.”
  • “I often wonder if Hemingway wasn’t simply an adept who found the right prose style both to enact, and to conceal, the limited range of his vision, and the crimped range of his sympathies.”

What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses – Daniel Chamovitz, 2012, updated 2017

Nature and Environment selection. Most of us liked it but didn’t love it.

Things I learned about

  • There is tremendous genetic similarity between plants and animals, which is effectively concealed because the genes are misleadingly named for their human effects (“deaf” genes, BRCA “breast cancer”)
  • I enjoyed the references to dodder (Cuscuta), a parasitic plant (and a recent friend of mine), and loved the recommended video
  • If their leaves are being chewed by beetles, wild lima bean flowers “produce a nectar that attracts beetle-eating arthropods”
  • “Mechanical stimulation of a plant cell, like mechanical stimulation of a nerve, initiates a cellular change in ionic conditions that results in an electric signal… [that] can propagate from cell to cell”
  • Research indicates that roots are attracted to the sound of water running in underground pipes, not just leaks
  • Great John Muir quote used for an epigraph (it’s from A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf): “I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do. They go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!”
  • Statoliths, equivalent to otoliths in our ears, let root caps sense gravity and know which way to grow
  • Apical dominance
  • Auxin – people in our group who had studied botany remembered this
  • Glutamate receptors in plants are used for cell-to-cell signaling “in a way that’s very similar to how human neurons communicate with each other”

The Annotated Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens (1843), edited by Michael Patrick Hearn, 2004

I had already done my annual reading of this in November, but then the Amherst Book Group talked about it as a one-off (just one discussion since it’s short) between The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Half of a Yellow Sun. So once again I took the opportunity to read the annotated edition, and the extra content is mostly what I recorded.

In this book I learned

  • The long list of adaptations led me to probably the strangest, Rich Little’s Christmas Carol (1963) – basically an excuse for Little to trot out all his impressions. The “casting” is a little random!
    • W.C. Fields/Scrooge
    • Paul Lynde/Bob Crachit
    • Johnny Carson/nephew Fred
    • Laurel and Hardy/the two gentlemen collecting donations
    • Nixon/Marley
    • Humphrey Bogart/Ghost of Christmas Past
    • Groucho/Fezziwig, Columbo/Ghost of Christmas Present
    • Edith Bunker/Mrs. Cratchit
    • Truman Capote/Tiny Tim
    • Inspector Clouseau/Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
    • George Burns, John Wayne, & ? somebody with a cane and top hat?/rag and boneman scene
    • Jack Benny/kid in the street who fetches the turkey
  • An Orwell quote, “It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change in spirit rather than a change of structure, ” led me first to Orwell’s “Can Socialists be Happy?” before finding the origin in “Charles Dickens.”
  • Dickens’ the Life of Our Lord – “No one ever lived who was so good, so kind, so gentle, and so sorry for all people who did wrong, or were in any way ill or miserable”
  • In his library at Gad’s Hill, Dickens had a set of fake books in the set The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: Ignorance, Superstition, The Block, The Stake, The Rack, Dirt, and Disease.
  • Welsh wig
  • James T. Fields observed that Dickens “liked to dilate in imagination over the brewing of a bowl of punch, but I always noticed that when the punch was ready, he drank less of it than any one who might be present. It was the sentiment of the thing, and not the thing itself, that engaged his attention.”
  • Scalpers and people camping out in line the night before to get tickets to Dickens’ public readings
  • Dickens was criticized for “the rising inflection” (upspeak?)
  • Dickens reading Bob Crachit’s speech “brought out so many pocket handerchiefs that it looked as if a snowstorm had somehow got into the hall without tickets”

Quotes from the annotations

  • Re Doré’s illustrations: “Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Present look remarkably like Dante and Virgil exploring the rings of Hell in Dante’s Inferno, which Doré was also illustrating in 1961.”
  • “Utilitarians have never been fond of A Christmas Carol.“
  • “Remarkably, no scene in this Christmas story takes place in a church, no clergyman plays a role in the drama.”
  • Ruskin in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton: “His Christmas meant mistletoe and pudding — neither resurrection from dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds.”
  • In the manuscript, Dickens included a digression on what Hamlet would be like as a relative: “He would be a most impracticable fellow to deal with; and however creditable he might be to the family after his decease, he would prove a special encumbrance in his lifetime, trust me.”

Every night I read I am described (mostly by people who have not the faintest notion of observing) from the sole of my boot to where the topmost hair of my head ought to be, but is not. Sometimes I am described as being “evidently nervous;” sometimes it is rather taken ill that “Mr. Dickens is so extraordinarily composed.” My eyes are blue, red, grey, white, green, brown, black, hazel, violet, and rainbow-coloured. I am like “a well-to-do American gentleman,” and the Emperor of the French, with an occasional touch of the Emperor of China, and a deterioration from the attributes of our famous townsman, Rufus W. B. D. Dodge Grumsher Pickville. I say all sorts of things that I never said, go to all sorts of places that I never saw or heard of, and have done all manner of things (in some previous state of existence I suppose) that have quite escaped my memory.

Dickens in a letter – see https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25853/25853-h/25853-h.htm

Quotes from the text

  • “when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”
  • “a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again”
  • ‘“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived.’
  • ‘“Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.”‘
  • “No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!”
  • “He went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk—that anything—could give him so much happiness.” (like Wally in My Dinner with André talking about his cold coffee)

“Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “not to know, that ages of incessant labour by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused!”

The Annotated Alice: 150th Anniversary Deluxe Edition: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) by Lewis Carroll, edited by Martin Gardner, expanded and updated by Mark Burstein, 2015

The Great Books group wanted to read a children’s book and this was the vote. I was surprised how many people had never read it, but of course everyone was familiar with the characters. I’ve read both Alice books many times, so it was fun to have the extra material. I believe this is what started the craze for annotated editions – Gardner’s original version came out in 1960, and the Annotated Sherlock Holmes may have been the next one (1967). It’s notable how many poems that Carroll parodied would otherwise be completely forgotten.

In this book I learned:

  • Gardner’s note: “We know that Cheshire cheese was once sold in the shape of a grinning cat. One would tend to slice off the cheese at the cat’s tail end until finally only the grinning head would remain on the plate.” But this story seems to be apocryphal. Gardner says the source is Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Wikipedia gives this very book as the citation, twice, but also references Brewer’s. But the 1898 edition, which is online, has nothing like this, so it was presumably added later and might be a back-formation. And that doesn’t seem like a very practical shape for a cheese!
  • “borogoves” doesn’t have an r after the g! Gardner says it’s a common mispronunciation and misspelling, even on the Alice statue in Central Park. We played there many times as children; I didn’t even remember there was text.
  • Roger Lancelyn Green theorized that “Jabberwocky” was possibly a parody of “The Shepherd of the Giant Mountains.” I found the partial text and I can sort of see it! (Full text here on pp. 298-300 and 326-328 but much harder to read.) For example “The prince cried, stooping from his balcony,/In gratulating tones,/’Come to my heart, my true and gallant son!'”
  • Tweedledum and Tweedledee are references to a poem about the rivalry between Handel and Bonocini
  • Added to my TBR pile:
    • No Name by Wilkie Collins, because Carroll said “Mrs. Wragg and the White Queen might have been twin-sisters”
    • The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse (which contains a portion of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,” parodied in “Sitting on a Gate”)
  • Added to my plants-to-look-for list: scented rushes, i.e. Acorus calamus
  • Brewer’s elaborates the cut (to ignore someone on purpose) as having four types:
    • The cut direct is to stare an acquaintance in the face and pretend not to know him.
    • The cut indirect, to look another way, and pretend not to see him.
    • The cut sublime, to admire the top of some tall edifice or the clouds of heaven till the person cut has passed by.
    • The cut infernal, to stoop and adjust your boots till the party has gone past.

Quotes

  • Drink Me “a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast”
  • “She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)”
  • After Alice says “till we meet again”: ‘“I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet,” Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake; “you’re so exactly like other people.”’

Mathematical physicists are quite fond of Carrollian nomenclature. A non-orientable wormhole that appears to reverse the chirality (handedness) of anything passed through it is referred to as an Alice handle, and a (hypothetical) universe that includes one is an Alice universe. A charge with magnitude but no persistently identifiable polarity is referred to as a Cheshire charge. An Alice string is a half-quantum vortex in a vector Bose-Einstein condensate. Scientists at the Institut Laue-Langevin, in Grenoble, France, recently for the first time separated a particle from one of its physical properties, creating what they called a quantum Cheshire Cat, in this case by taking a beam of neutrons and separating them from their magnetic moment. In the physics of superfluidity, a boojum is a geometric pattern on the surface of one of the phases of superfluid helium-3. In theoretical physics, the Carroll particle is a relativistic particle model in the limit of which the velocity of light becomes zero. Such a particle cannot move and was named after the Red Queen’s remark, “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”