Category: words

Dickens’s characters are cardboard cutouts, even in their names: Inspector Bucket, the Brothers Cheeryble, Jerry Cruncher. They are mechanicals. His prose is turgid and, less forgivable, tortured. Here’s his rendition, in “Dombey and Son,” of a sea-captain’s dialect: “It’s an almighty element. There’s wonders in the deep, my pretty. Think on it when the winds is roaring and the waves is rowling.” What a load of bosh.

It’s because of what Austen left out, and other women (and men) addressed in their own fiction from the time. “As I’ve realized the scope of 19th-century texts that took up the question of transatlantic slavery and the movements to abolish it, I haven’t read Austen the same way. I can appreciate her skill but feel an urgent need to teach and write about these other stories. With Austen as, often, the primary literary lens into her time period, it can be all too easy to forget how deeply invested English culture was not only in curtailing women’s choices, but also in enslaving millions of people.”

Hmmmm. “Much fiction and drama will dizzyingly mislead poor robots about the world in which they have to make their decisions. Our favourite stories abound in ghosts, demons, wizards, monsters and every kind of talking animal. Human beings travel through time and fly through the air and get into or out of trouble by the use of magic.”

It was pretty direct (Miró timed Hemingway’s boxing matches, by the way): “Miró models a visual clarity that the writer, for whom the sun was a central symbol, used in the descriptive passages with which so many of his works begin. With Hemingway’s writing, this is not a passive record of the scene, but the probing vigilance of the hunter, fisherman, and combat veteran.”

Hint: If Jane Austen had Caroline Bingsley say something, probably you shouldn’t quote it for gentle surface meaning. “In short, Austen wrote the line as a satirical comment on how we perform certain admirable qualities to win approval.”

“That Big Publishing remains conservative and homogeneous — and viewed with increasing ambivalence and disdain by the larger population — should not be surprising or contentious; axiomatic in antitrust law is the idea that a reduction in market participants, whether a result of competition, attrition, or consolidation, correlates with a reduction in consumer choice. We’ve seen this across any number of industries in our society, including airlines, automobiles, banks, pharmaceuticals, newspapers, and commercial publishing, where somehow Penguin Random House isn’t the punchline to a joke. Then there’s Amazon.”

“Despite the immeasurable good work independent bookstores and their staff do—from promoting children’s literacy to hosting readings and book clubs to being a vital part of local economies, and more—I’d hazard that the primary goal is always going to be customer satisfaction. So what can you do when a customer wants a book that you not only find objectionable but also believe actually dangerous in the lessons it portends amidst such a politically precarious time?”

“So what’s the deal? Where did this seemingly dumb idea come from and why does it persist? Today’s Tedium points out why it was once valuable, and why it no longer is.”

The goal of the Dollywood Foundation’s Imagination Library project is to send one free book a month to every child under 5 who wants one. “Five percent of the U.S. population younger than 5 years old receives a book through the program. The goal is to reach 10 percent by 2024.”