Posts by Joe Wylie
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BURN HIM AT THE STAKE! TAKE HIM TO THE DUCKING STOOL!
Interesting take. I'd read Sacha's comment as more of a Hunter S. Thompsonesque 'step on his face to put him out of his misery'.
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:sigh: One post, 15 responses. Two not inane. None willing to address any issues.t
You could try starting your own blog. With the kind of material you post you'll never be troubled by a single comment, vexing, inane, or otherwise.
Guaranteed. -
. . . listen to talkback.
Right - while ignorance is a common excuse, it is possible to be both "incredibly badly informed" and an asshole.
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Heh, ok, that is a lovely quite Joe. Even for a Dickens Doubter like myself.t
Hey thanks, tho I'd class myself as being something of a "Dickens doubter" too. Like Shakespeare, it's counterproductive to ram his work down the throats of bored schoolchildren. I remember rankling at being forced to read "Twisted Oliver" in primary school.
For me, Dickens is one of those interesting artists who transcended his limitations while leaving his faults in plain view.
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Yet another slab from Hard Times - an argument we're still having after more than a century-and-a-half:
Surely there never was such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were made. Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before. They were ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery; they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. Besides Mr. Bounderby's gold spoon which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was very popular there. It took the form of a threat. Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used - that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences of any of his acts - he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he would 'sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.' This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.
However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they
never had pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the
contrary, had been kind enough to take mighty good care of it. So
there it was, in the haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied. -
<quote>I'd rather any daughter of mine emulate Scarlett O'Hara than any of Dickens' insipid drips./quote>
This is what comes of spending too much time jelly-wrestling with the likes of Dad4justice.
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Your cheap shot was equating Mitchell's escapist historical romance with Dickens's genuine engagement with the social ills of his own time. Now you go on to compound that by implying that anyone who sees some value in Dickens's social concerns is blinkered by a narrow view of literature "as little more than a didactic tool for social reform".
Dickens was first mentioned in this thread as an example of how art has influenced social change. It's a concept that you appear to find 'icky' (khrist you can be twee). With all due respect to your sensitivities it seems that you're taking further cheap shots by suggesting that those who don't share your views are guilty of wishing to "whitewash" certain depictions of the past. In my case that's rubbish - I didn't even imply such a viewpoint.
Play at straw peiople to your heart's content, it has nothing to do with me.
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. . . the glorious Turgenev, whose spare, unsentimental descriptions of Russia's serfs in A Sportsman's Notebook moved Peter the Great to emancipate the serfs. That's some pretty effective fiction.
Eh????? Peter the Great had been dead for over 90 years when Turgenev was born. Surely you're thinking of Alexander II (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861). Right about Turgenev's influence, wrong Tsar.
Though I wish I knew I was poking the PAS Charles Dickens Appreciation Society before putting my hand in that particular blender. Would have gotten off more lightly if I'd muttered "pretentious Mills and Boon" in a stadium full of Janeites. :)t
Oh FFS - there are plot-coincidences in pretty much all of Dickens's novels that are downright laughable, and apart from Joe Gargery of Great Expectations, Charlie was hard pressed to create a 'good' character who wasn't at least a little risibly mawkish. You're welcome to kid yourself that you've offended a bunch of effete 'Janeites' by your bold and forthright opinions, but equating Dickens's social conscience with that of Margaret Mitchell was an uncharacteristically cheap shot.
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Dickens took the novel-reading middle-classes of his time into worlds that they'd never experience first-hand. He deliberately set out to create an awareness of the vast social inequities of his time, and there's no denying that he succeeded. If he'd never moved beyond the gentle satire of Pickwick Papers it might be fair to equate the social impact of his work with a reactionary historical romance such as Gone With the Wind, but I find that a bit of a stretch.
If he'd spent his talents strutting his Fine Mind or spilling his guts about his personal life on some 19th Century equivalent of the interwebz he'd most likely be forgotten today.
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. . . an opposing opinion is just as valid . . .
If you accept that there're few things more useless than an opinion, that'd be more or less right (yawn).