What’cha Reading?

[Sancho]

Yep. I’m no expert, but I did watch a Netflix miniseries on the opioid epidemic… I think it’s just one example of how profit motive and patient advocacy in the American healthcare system are at odds with each other, another being HMOs.

And yep, right up near the top of the list of debts of gratitude I owe my mother is a healthy skepticism of medicine and doctors. Numero uno is of course her having me in the first place. Sadly (and ironically) prescribed medication is largely what took her. She was put on prednisone (a steroid) for a relatively minor problem and it wound up wasting her bones. My five-foot-nothing mother was about four and a half feet tall when she died. Now I give doctors and hospitals a wide berth. Dentists, not so much.

That said, I haven’t gone down the rabbit hole of internet conspiracy theories where medicine is concerned. I trust science rather than some podcasting blow-hard. I didn’t take a horse wormer (ivermectin) for Covid-19. I got vaccinated. And boosted. In fact, it seems to me vaccines are good medicine. I get all the vaccines I can. The occasional side effect is nothing compared to disease they’re protecting against. They’re good for me and good for the “herd”.

Speaking of herds, I wonder how many wormy horses there are out there because so many internet experts scarfed up all the ivermectin.

[Sancho]

David Copperfield is going swimmingly. The words in my head are coming in with a London accent.

[Danik 2016]

Well, the world of Dickens looks rather innocent in comparison of today.

[Sancho]

Ya know, it seems quaint to us now, but back in the day I’ll bet it seemed anything but.

Also it’s got me wondering if it’s worse to be born in the rabble, or to be born to pretty good circumstances and then descend into the hoi polloi.

[bounty]

am glad you are liking Copperfield so far.

as to your question---and your recent revelation of liking Seinfeld:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2JKXbVGq7A

[Sancho]

Haha! There it is. You can’t go back to coach after you’ve been in First.

Here’s a Seinfeld moment in Dickens:

Tell ‘er Backis is willin’

It’d be funnier if my own early attempts to woo women weren’t about as equally sophisticated.

[bounty]

Well. I'll tell you what," said Mr. Barkis. "P'raps you might be writin' to her?"
"I shall certainly write to her," I rejoined.
"Ah!" he said, slowly turning his eyes toward me. "Well! If
you was writin' to her, p'raps you'd recollect to say that Barkis
was willin'; would you?"
"That Barkis was willing," I replied. "Is that all the message?"
"Ye–es," he said, considering. "Ye–es; Barkis is willin'."


are you half thinking that's kinda like the menage a trois proposition where jerry ironically finds out "she's into it!"

I just found out jane siberry has a song entitled "barkis is willing" how about that.

[Sancho]

Dickens certainly creates vivid characters. With just a few of his words I can picture Barkis sitting there on the driver’s seat, staring at the space between the horse’s ears, thinking about Clara Peggotty. Evidently I’m not the only one who found Barkis vivid. I mean all these years later people are writing songs about him, eh?

As for a ménage á trios, well, Leon weighs in on that subject…

I remember a scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm with Larry David, Tracy Ullman, and Leon Black. Leon wants to eat his breakfast at a table where Tracy is working on a jigsaw puzzle. Things get heated and Tracy tries to get rid of him.

She says something like - I don’t know if you’ve heard, Leon, but two’s company and three’s a crowd.

Leon comes back with - No. The saying goes Three’s company. You know with two girls and one guy.

But my all time favorite Leon scene is when Susie meets Leon for the first time. Two strong personalities collide:

https://youtu.be/2f6ZelaWyC8?si=KlmiKCK3ZFYHZ9kS

I was depressed when Seinfeld ended, but then Curb Your Enthusiasm came along — Woo Hoo.

[bounty]

have never seen an episode of that, but I remember it being popular.

I think that's a good point Sancho, so many of dickens characters have endured in our literary mind, moved to the cinematic one, and then even off into other areas.

who doesn't know "bah humbug!" or "please sir, may I have some more?" or even "it is' a far far better thing I do than I have ever done before"

or tiny tim!

im reading and enjoying a collection of short stories that rod serling bought and turned into the original episodes of the twilight zone.

[Sancho]

No doubt about it, a lot of Dickens has worked its way into our everyday lingo. In that respect it’s like Shakespeare. Someone who reads Shakespeare for the first time will be shocked at the shoddiness of the writing. I mean it’s rife with clichés. (Of course they weren’t clichés when he wrote them.)

One expression that jumped out at me in David Copperfield is “cut and run.” We use it all the time nowadays, particularly in political discourse, but in his time it was mostly a nautical term. It meant a ship was in a tight spot and needed to cut the anchor line and run free, or sail away immediately.

Daniel Peggotty, brother of Clara, has an odd domestic situation. He lives in a converted boat with his orphaned niece and nephew (Em’ly and Ham) and Mrs Grummidge, the widow of his deceased, “drowndead”, fishing partner. This is to say Daniel Peggotty is an immensely generous and good-natured man. Here’s Clara Peggotty describing her brother to Davy:

The only subject, she informed me, on which he ever showed a violent temper or swore an oath, was this generosity of his; and if it were ever referred to, by any one of them, he struck the table a heavy blow with his right hand (had split it on one such occasion), and swore a dreadful oath that he would be ‘Gormed’ if he didn’t cut and run for good, if it was ever mentioned again.

“Gormed” didn’t make it, but we “cut and run” all the time.

[bounty]

i find so much of Shakespeare undecipherable. wish i still had my 10th English teacher around so maybe id feel okay reading another one and he can tell me what the hecks being said.

I see from a wiki page on the idiom that dickens also used it in great expectations. the page concurs with your mentioning political usage, but heck if I had to guess, i would say its gets used often in reference to the ending of romantic entanglements too. kinda close to what peggotty is suggesting.

i cant remember if one of the Copperfield books i have has illustrations, but your mentioning of the converted boat refreshes my mind of a drawing i once saw of it.

this isn't the one i was thinking of, but still kinda neat:

https://victorianweb.org/art/illustr...z/dc/boat.html

[Sancho]

Good picture. I may have breezed past the description of Daniel Peggotty’s cottage, but I didn’t picture it with the hull flipped over. I pictured an old style fishing boat, with a wheelhouse, its keel sunken into sand a bit, supported by a few sturdy stanchions, maybe with a picket fence around it, a front door cut into the hull amidship, and maybe a couple of chairs out front with a tub for shucking oysters.

Anyway.

I liked the picture by Frank Reynolds on the wiki page of Daniel Peggotty and Ham walking along the shore. In fact I liked all of Reynolds’s illustrations, particularly the one of Betsy Trotwood. It’s almost exactly how I pictured her in Dickens and in Kingsolver.

I wish St Luke’s Guild still visited this site. That guy had a tremendous knowledge of visual art, and I learned a ton about it from him.

https://charonbackup.wordpress.com/new-page-20/

[Danik 2016]

Under the several contemporaneous ilustrators of David Copperfield, there is at least one from US, Sol Eytinge Jr. I like his character studies,though Frank Raymond's are more expressive still.
https://victorianweb.org/art/illustr...ytinge/dc.html

[bounty]

those were all fun to look at, although I have to take a little umbrage with the illustrations of agnes. she's one of my favorite characters and im sorry, but she just has to be lots prettier!

[Sancho]

Good link, Danik. I like seeing how other people interpret a literary character. Nice job with Uriah Heep, he actually has some depth in the illustration. He’s not simply a conniving villain as in Reynolds’ picture. Swing-and-a-miss with Little Em’ly, though. She looks vacant in the picture. The Em’ly I know lives her life with purpose (it doesn’t always work out, but hey, she has a plan). Reynolds’ picture of her and Davy running on the beach gets at her personality well, I think.

I agree, bounty, Agnes looks a little frumpy in the Reynolds illustration. I think he’s trying to convey a sense of the Victorian ideal of womanhood. I like how she is demurely looking away. Betsey by contrast is staring us right in the eye. She looks like somebody who could do some serious damage without her ever even laying a hand on you. Edward Murdstone is also looking right at us, but his stare is dark and malevolent, and slightly condescending. He’s looking down his nose at us, and what a schnoz it is, eh? I wonder if there isn’t a little subconscious antisemitism going on there.