luka

Well-known member
when im in this mood another thing ive noticed is i want to bring everyone down to the same level.
if theyre enjoying something, ruin their enjoyment. if they're earnestly trying to better themselves,
trash their efforts. ruin everything, kick down their sandcastle, trample the flowers.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
hard times is the first one i read. what its got going for it is that really good thing about the horse, and its very short compared to most of his ones.
i got distracted half way through little dorrit last year and never went back to it. i was enjoying it but these things really are insanely long.
its punishing. you read a novels worth and youre only about a third of the way in at best.
To state the tediously obvious, these novels weren't really meant to be read in one go, were they...

I read somewhere that Dickens was annoyed when writing Hard Times because he had less parts to finish it in than usual – or something like that. But that's seen as the reason why it's much more compact/tight than some of his other novels.

Also I think I read that he wrote Great Expectations with the goal of writing something as tightly plotted as something by Thackeray, as he'd been criticised for how loose and meandering his plots were.

Two things I sort of know there.
 

luka

Well-known member
do you also notice that if someone is determinedly nice you want to make them lose their temper? wind them up till the facade drops
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
Fuck aye

There’s polite and then there’s saccharine

Polite is respectable, saccharine niceness is just another form of passive aggression which, by its very nature, has to be confronted and eradicated. Eg bombing knitting stores
 

WashYourHands

Cat Malogen
It’s a useful tool to deploy too, conviviality x I know you’re a cunt = all smiles

A mate has a deflecting tool where, if a random is getting on his tits either through excessive saccharinity or rude bluster, he’ll walk up to them and ask in slightly gravelly throated hues (with an air of menace) “are you ok? is everything alright?”. 6’3” and about 18 stones shuts most fools up
 

jenks

thread death
Was reading a bit of the Hard Times before bed last night and got to the introduction of Mr Bounderby.

It's pleasantly surprising to find something written so long ago so funny – and I suppose this might have been what inspired the Monty Python sketch where the self-made men are competing over who had the most tragic childhood.

So far as I've read (not far at all), Hard Times reads like a fairy tale for adults (although perhaps he also expected children to read it?) or Roald Dahl meets social realism, or some such tortured comparison.
I finished a re-read of Hard Times yesterday and enjoyed it much more than I had previously. There’s a obviously great fun in satirising the utilitarian views and the usual array of well made characters but I think because it’s short he’s focusing on just one main plot rather than the plate spinning of Bleak House.
 

luka

Well-known member
i had some teachers on a school trip write them a poem called Colin is a twat and it was all about their headmaster
who came from Carlisle and was very Gradgrinian so it was nice to be able to draw on that utimate sourcebook.
 

you

Well-known member
@jenks have you read David Seabrook's All the Devils are Here? The first part concerns Margate and moves from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land to the periods fascination with Egypt to Richard Dadd, a painter that travelled the East and returned with a form of sunstroke instigated psychosis and or schizophrenia. Dadd committed parricide and was caught in France and returned to be held in an asylum. He argues that the crime occurred precisely when the disappearance of Edwin Drood occurred. He tells of Dickens' interest in the crime and traces a number of similarities in place and event between the crime and the book.

I expect you have read it. If not you should. It is excellent.
 

jenks

thread death
@jenks have you read David Seabrook's All the Devils are Here? The first part concerns Margate and moves from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land to the periods fascination with Egypt to Richard Dadd, a painter that travelled the East and returned with a form of sunstroke instigated psychosis and or schizophrenia. Dadd committed parricide and was caught in France and returned to be held in an asylum. He argues that the crime occurred precisely when the disappearance of Edwin Drood occurred. He tells of Dickens' interest in the crime and traces a number of similarities in place and event between the crime and the book.

I expect you have read it. If not you should. It is excellent.
I love that book. Never look at Charles Hawtry the same way again.
 
Top