The Dickens Carousel

Visited the square today after spending the morning cheering on runners in the Believe 2009 10k/5k,  which, by the way, was a tremendous success.  I heard that they had 1,600 runners compared to approximately 900 last year.   Mitchell Park (what I thought was previously called Gateway Park, the one with the big fountain) was absolutely packed with people at 8:00 in the morning. 

I got a chance to come back down around 10:00 to peruse the shops and take in some of the entertainment.  The carousel, new for 2009, was beautiful and a perfect addition to Dickens.  I hope this will become a permanent fixture at future Dickens celebrations. 

All of  the vendors looked great in their Victorian garb.  Special kudos to the lady at the Cynthia Elliott Boutique who had a beautiful dress and did a fantastic job of making a period hat (good enough to sell and I did suggest it).  Santa was in the Magic Shop and the petting zoo was a hit.   All in all, they did a wonderful job this year. Everyone was full of cheer.

Youth Singers at Dickens

It was virtually standing room only in Plum Creek Primitives, almost too many people to be able to shop. All of the shops were busy but, other than Plum Creek, it wasn’t too many to have fun and have a leisurely look around. Landon Winery was having a wine tasting, six tickets for $10.  The premium wines were two tickets a taste but two of the three tables only required one ticket a taste. The Yellow Rose (a white wine) and a raspberry wine were favorites for our party.  One of a Kind was full of folks taking advantage of the 20% store closing sale.  The big gargoyle I had mentioned on Yelp.com had already found a home.  Reigning Cats and Dogs also seemed to have significantly more stock than the last time I was in although they are supposed to be clearing out.  They have really good sales and the North Texas Cat Rescue has got some kittens inside for adoption. 

Leaving downtown, we ran into a man removing the Goodhues logo from the defunct restaurant and martini lounge.  He said that  The Filmore Pub in Plano will be opening a new location where Goodhues used to be and he was converting the martini bar into 1,000 square feet of retail space. Woohoo!

The Dickens Carousel

Visited the square today after spending the morning cheering on runners in the Believe 2009 10k/5k,  which, by the way, was a tremendous success.  I heard that they had 1,600 runners compared to approximately 900 last year.   Mitchell Park (what I thought was previously called Gateway Park, the one with the big fountain) was absolutely packed with people at 8:00 in the morning. 

I got a chance to come back down around 10:00 to peruse the shops and take in some of the entertainment.  The carousel, new for 2009, was beautiful and a perfect addition to Dickens.  I hope this will become a permanent fixture at future Dickens celebrations. 

All of  the vendors looked great in their Victorian garb.  Special kudos to the lady at the Cynthia Elliott Boutique who had a beautiful dress and did a fantastic job of making a period hat (good enough to sell and I did suggest it).  Santa was in the Magic Shop and the petting zoo was a hit.   All in all, they did a wonderful job this year. Everyone was full of cheer.

Youth Singers at Dickens

It was virtually standing room only in Plum Creek Primitives, almost too many people to be able to shop. All of the shops were busy but, other than Plum Creek, it wasn’t too many to have fun and have a leisurely look around. Landon Winery was having a wine tasting, six tickets for $10.  The premium wines were two tickets a taste but two of the three tables only required one ticket a taste. The Yellow Rose (a white wine) and a raspberry wine were favorites for our party.  One of a Kind was full of folks taking advantage of the 20% store closing sale.  The big gargoyle I had mentioned on Yelp.com had already found a home.  Reigning Cats and Dogs also seemed to have significantly more stock than the last time I was in although they are supposed to be clearing out.  They have really good sales and the North Texas Cat Rescue has got some kittens inside for adoption. 

Leaving downtown, we ran into a man removing the Goodhues logo from the defunct restaurant and martini lounge.  He said that  The Filmore Pub in Plano will be opening a new location where Goodhues used to be and he was converting the martini bar into 1,000 square feet of retail space. Woohoo!

45 cool points to whomever gets the reference in the title.

I have a tree. I put this tree up several days before Thanksgiving and am quite happy with dragging out the winter holidays super early, thank you very much. When I expressed this sentiment in the the form of, “I put up my tree. Shut up.” on my Facebook page, a friend responded that it sounded like K-Tel was putting out a new holiday collection entitled, “Shut Up, It’s Christmas”. I not only found this wildly hilarious, but had to concede that that is pretty much what any Christmas album I could ever release would be called.

So the tree is up, and I couldn’t be more pleased. As all my stuff continues languishing in a storage facility, and I have little extra cash or inclination to purchase lavish new decorations, this holiday is being done shamelessly on the cheap and mostly handmade. The tree itself, including lights, tinsel, and basic ornaments were purchased at a Goodwill store with the remainder being made when I feel like it and stuck on the tree over time. I should finish decorating sometime around December 27th, I reckon.

The ornaments so far are…well, interesting. I have taken ideas I have found from various sources and “added my own touches”, or “cocked them up” quite nicely. I made little candy type hearts with cardboard backed felt and puffy paint, which look pretty cute if you didn’t see the much nicer inspiration pieces made of polyfill stuffed felt and fabric flowers. I also made some gingerbread men out of the same materials, however, I didn’t make them terribly plump. In fact, they are downright scrawny. When my exbesthusbandfriend remarked upon it, I tried to front and say they were just supermodel gingerbread men, but the truth is, these little guys clearly don’t feel ok with themselves. They have gingerbulimia.

I have also made cards, which was a whole new experience for me. I barely keep and fulfill a Christmas list, let alone handcraft cards to send to it. There’s just a mental block against it. Maybe it was using cookie cutter cards and this is the solution. I like the people I know. I know they live out there somewhere. I know they like cards. I like cards. It just always seems so…worklike to send cards out. When I am independently wealthy (aaaany day now) I will keep a card sending wench of some kind on retainer. I will make her answer to Becky like the scullery maid in A Little Princess and pay her in small amounts of money appropriate to buying crusts of bread and Fresca, giving the whole venture a Dickensian feel. You know, for the Christmassiness.

As the month goes on, no doubt all measure of mad things will be going up on the tree in the form of can tops, and bits of magazines and twine and such. It will be glorious. I just hope the gingerbulimics don’t persuade the can top snowmen to go emo and start cutting.

The first shopping day of the Christmas season is upon us, with the usual crowds, the frantic sales and the inevitable parking nightmare. Even the name—Black Friday—suggests that Americans are deeply ambivalent about this strange shopping holiday. But is it, perhaps, the most American day of the year? A spectacle of commerce and crowds, consumerism and credit cards, a day structured like a poll (vote with your pocketbook) on the state of the American economy? Is Black Friday the perfect and most fabulously self-reflective, narcissistic American holiday we’ve invented?

Every December, we regret the increasing commercialization of Christmas, as if we’re slipping further and further from some ideal understanding of the holiday (last seen in a Dickens story or film by Frank Capra?). But let’s be hardheaded and pragmatic about the facts. Christmas isn’t devolving from some Christian fantasy of love and regeneration. That ship has left the harbor. No, it’s evolving into the perfect, five-week spectacle of Americana, with all our best American gadgets and gizmos on display, with all of our basic habits of the heart—desire, acquisitiveness, competition—perfectly exercised. Black Friday is the first day of the American Saturnalia, a festival of capitalism and technology and American self-love all rolled into one.

Turkey Float – photo by lily_bart

A sampling of Triangle theater performances
for the weekend of November 25-29, 2009, and beyond

OPENING:
A Christmas Carol – New adaptation of the Charles Dickens story, with traditional Christmas songs (including the non-period “Carol of the Bells” written in 1916). This weekend: Friday-Saturday 8:00, Sunday 2:00. Continues through December 20. Temple Theatre, Sanford.
www.templeshows.com

The Phantom of the Opera – It’s baaaack! And really, what other show would have the butterballs to open on Thanksgiving Day? This weekend: Thursday-Friday 8:00, Saturday 2:00 and 8:00, Sunday 1:00 and 6:30, Tuesday 7:00. Continues through December 20. Durham Performing Arts Center.
www.dpac.com

CONTINUING:
It’s a Wonderful Life – “Where’s that money, you silly stupid old fool?” The story of George Bailey of Bedford Falls, staged as a 1940’s live radio broadcast. No performances this week. Resumes next week through December 6. NCSU Campus: Titmus Theatre, Frank Thompson Hall, Raleigh.
www.ncsu.edu/theatre

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby – David Edgar’s massive two-part adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel presented in rotating rep. This weekend: Part 1 – Wednesday and Friday 7:30, Saturday 2:00 and 7:30. Part 2: Sunday 2:00, Tuesday 7:30. Part 1 continues through December 19, Part 2 through December 20. Paul Green Theater, UNC campus, Chapel Hill.
www.playmakersrep.org

For a more complete listing of area theater,
we recommend the arts calendar at Indyweek.com.

When did I read it? November 17, 2009 to November 24, 2009
Where did I get it? Paperback Swap
Genre: nonfiction
Year Published: 1942
Where Will it go? To my sister in Australia
I just finished One Pair of Feet by Monica Dickens. It’s semi autobiographical of Ms. Dickens’ time as a nurse in England during World War II. I loved this book and give it four and a half hearts. I thought it was a little dated now, but still very good.
      - Be Still my Heart! (Rating 4.5)

Conhecem o tal do Conto de Natal do Dickens? Elegante, não? O miserável Ebenezer Scrooge sofre com as assombrações dos Fantasmas do Natal, do Natal Passado, do Natal Presente e do Natal Futuro… leia o livro, assista os filmes, se vira, malandro.

E Aquateen? Conhecem? Como não? Passava no [adult swim], o bloco de animação adulta do Cartoon Network. Entenda, animação adulta não implica em pornografia, mas sim em conteúdo (talvez, porém nem sempre) inteligente. Infelizmente o [adult swim] não durou muito aqui no BraZil e mal posso explicar o tal desaparecimento para além de meras conjecturas, mas as animações eram realmente boas e já estão deixando saudades entre aquelas pessoas iluminadas e inteligentes.

Logo, um dos nossos presentes de Natal para vocês, um dos mais divertidos! Sugestão do nosso camarada Pizza, segue a melhor explicação para esta data festiva que chamamos de Natal!

Victor Hugo, vulgo Jingle Jones

Ce samedi, de 9h à 13h, plusieurs groupes d’élèves participant au spectacle de Noël répéteront au TJP. Les scènes travaillées séparément devraient s’emboîter en puzzle festif! Des images de la répétitions dans cet article dimanche et plus de surprises… Hi hi! A tantôôôt!!!

Bonjour! Bonjour!

Fêtons l’ouverture du blog de l’École de théâtre du TJP en annonçant avec clochettes et rires joyeux son prochain spectacle… Un Chant de Noël de Charles Dickens!

En travaux et répétitions depuis la rentrée scolaire, ce spectacle aura lieu dans 3 semaines!

Tatatatataaa!!! Voici sa présentation:

Un Chant de Noël de Charles Dickens

Ebenezer Scrooge n’aime pas Noël, il déteste Noël, il hait Noël… Et justement c’est la veille de Noël. Les gens chantent dans les rues, ils courent chercher les derniers cadeaux à glisser sous le sapin, ils s’interpellent joyeusement au coin des rues.

Scrooge quitte son bureau et rentre chez lui…

Cette nuit, il va vivre une aventure qui le mènera loin dans son passé, dans son présent et dans son avenir… Son ancien associé, mort depuis 7 ans, lui rendra visite pour lui annoncer que trois Esprits ont des choses importantes à lui montrer…

Une aventure trépidante, haute en couleurs et qui finit bien car… C’est Noël !… à découvrir en famille !

En première partie : C’est Noël !

Le samedi 12 décembre 2009 à la grande salle de Paudex

Deux représentations : à 14h30 et à 17h

Durée : 1h30

Prix des places : Enfant (jusqu’à 16 ans) : 8.- / Adulte : 15.-

Renseignements et réservations : 021.781.25.11

Par l’école de théâtre du TJP et ses 80 élèves âgés de 5 à 16 ans.

Walk downtown. Enjoy the beautiful Fall weather.

Eat lunch. Walk to local bookstore to browse in a leisurely fashion. Proceed to the library. Check out books on CD for upcoming road trip to Philadelphia. Move on to coffee shop in the Memorial Union. Purchase caramel latte. Sip on latte as you read in a room that looks like this:

Spend the next few hours reading Oliver Twist in comfortable armchair while your spouse alternately reads and dozes in the armchair next to yours. Listen to the faint sounds of Dave Brubeck coming from the coffee shop down the hallway.

Walk home as the sun sets. Spend the rest of your evening reading. Try not to think about going back to work on Monday morning where, unfortunately, you do not get paid to read Oliver Twist.

“An animated retelling of Charles Dickens classic novel about a Victorian-era miser taken on a journey of self-redemption, courtesy of several mysterious Christmas apparitions.”

Mais uma revisitação ao clássico de Charles Dickens.

Um filme que mesmo visto na versão 3D, não apresenta nada de novo.

Trailer 1:

Trailer 2:

Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis, director, 1993

 HOOK: A trip into the romantic comedy Twilight Zone.

 LINE:  She: Do you ever have déjà vu? 

                 He: Didn’t you just ask me that?

SINKER: Seize the day!

SPANKY: Weird how the only guests on TV are plugging movies. Whatever happened to books, plays, magazines, even other TV programs? Then you go to the theater and the seats are empty. My take is that we want it to work. More than any other media movies can make us part of the process. The fact that most don’t or that we are so critical even of those that do, shows we want and need at least some of them to succeed. In a way they are like the story of Groundhog Day, recycling plots of movies that work. And once in a while, through this repetition we grasp something that changes our lives. Let’s face it, we start out not wanting the smarmy Bill Murray character to get the girl (Andie MacDowell, a symbol of some higher plane). We don’t like him because we don’t like ourselves. Given a life free of consequences we would also be reckless, depressed, suicidal, drunken, dishonest, etc., etc. But by the end of the movie we are cheering him on and looking at the missed opportunity of our own rather repetitive lives as well.

 BARK, BARK, BARK, BARK (4 BARKs out of four)

 JOHN: I agree, Spanky, we leave the movie changed. And this is a clever fable about movie-making as well. Actors endure endless retakes of the same scene, trying to keep it fresh. And our lives too, like the weatherman Phil’s are repetitious, with the tiniest variations of pleasures and annoyances. And yet, we can make something out of this. “Today is the first day of the rest of our lives” (Arrrggg, I never thought I would ever say that). Most movies are escapism, this one ends up being just the opposite, like Dickens’ Scrooge or A Wonderful Life. The fact that it does this without making a big deal of it, let’s us assume ownership of our own transformation. Brilliant, quirky, wildly original Groundhog Day says, “Make the most of your time on earth.” And by God, that is what we come away from it determined to do. 

GO GO GO GO (4 GOs out of four) 

With the weather getting colder and the holidays approaching, it’s a good time to read a Dickens novel. For various, boringly cliché reasons, I’ve had a stressful month, and I wanted to read something heartwarming and funny, something to read while I dream of Christmas in England – sipping cocoa, reading by candlelight, roasting chestnuts, and maybe even firing up a yule log. I’ve recently had several conversations with friends  in which we all take pot shots at Dickens, judging his books for being too obvious, too moralistic, and populated with people either wholly good or wholly bad. We like to mock the so-called “minor Dickens” novels, and then compare him to authors like Thomas Hardy and other novelists who had something interesting to say, i.e., other authors whose novels are more depressing and less redemptive.

Nevertheless, I secretly like Dickens better than Hardy and most other 19th-century novelists. I like reading about a world populated with the token comic characters, the token evil characters, and the good-hearted protagonists. It reminds me of my childhood when everything was a little bit simpler, when Christmas really felt like Christmas, and when I was convinced that I could be as morally upright as, say, David Copperfield, or Esther Summerson – and that I certainly couldn’t be as awful, terrible, or malicious as Bill Sikes or Ralph Nickleby (*shudders down the spine*). Also, nothing says “the holidays” like reading about some poor wretch being beaten, starved, and then starved and beaten. Did I mention there are lots of beatings? HO HO HO!

I remember my childhood Christmases nostalgically, but there were blights on my holiday happiness even at a young age. These were due in part to the existence of Santa Claus. When I was four, my class at school had a Christmas party, to which our parents were invited. Father Christmas made a special visit. He is basically like the American Santa Claus except he has a better vocabulary.

We had to go sit on his lap and then he would give us our individual presents. I was very suspicious of this Father Christmas fellow – there was something iffy about a man sneaking into children’s houses at night and eating their cookies – and decided to hide under my chair just to be safe, while my Mom went and picked up my gift. That same year, I made my parents put up a sign outside of our house that said, “Santa, Please Leave All Presents in the Garage,” because the idea of having a stranger in my house continued to be extremely upsetting to me.

I had so many questions and no answers. Why was he so fat? (In retrospect, I see now that it was because of the cookies and his jolly nature.) What did he want from me? How did he know if I was naughty? Who did he work for? To be fair, I had similar questions (minus the one about being fat) about God, my parents, and my brother. I should also mention that at that time I was afraid of snow, water, ballet classes, school, being late, neighbors, and change, so, if I’m being generous, I may have been a little hard on Old St. Nick. Several years after I left Santa the polite note telling him to keep to the garage, we moved to the house on Richmond Road which had no garage! My little timid self was concerned.

When I first visited the house on the Richmond Road, I found an old bottle of perfume on the floor of one of the bedrooms. I had heard that the house used to be owned by an old lady who had died there alone, and I assumed that the bottle of perfume had been hers. My mother later told me that she left more than a bottle of perfume in the house – in her last years she became increasingly senile and incontinent, and consequently left a few special stains on the carpet of the room that would become my own.  I thought of that little old lady often, and I think she would have been happy to see how we celebrated Christmas in her home. The house was perfect for Christmas – it was old, with high ceilings and a cold tile floor in the entry way that always made me want to put on cozy slippers. My slippers were fuzzy tigers, which were ferociously cute.

The windows of that house were so big that you could easily use them as doors. I once got in big trouble because I stood in the window pane of my opened bedroom window on the second floor as I chatted with a friend who happened to pass by on the street. I once wanted my dad to get in big trouble because he stood in that same window one morning and yelled pleasantries to me as I crossed the street to go to school. “GOODBYE, [SICKLY CHILD]! HAVE A GREAT DAY AT SCHOOL! I LOVE YOU SO MUCH, [SICKLY CHILD]!” It was already mortifying to have American parents, but having American parents who loved me and let all my friends know… this was almost too much to bear! In December, when the days were dark and rainy, I liked to look out of the window and be thankful for how warm and snug I was inside. Although sometimes it was hard to be thankful when my parents insisted on embarrassing me by acting all American all the time.

When we lived on Richmond Road, I attended St. Margaret’s Primary School, which, like many schools in the novels of the Victorian era, was vaguely religious. Unlike schools from novels of  Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, we were not fed gruel, nor were we subjected to the greed and avarice of a depraved headmaster. Our headmaster, Mr. Mills, was disappointingly nice. YAWN.

Every day at St. Margaret’s started with an assembly of the whole school, with the children in class 6 sitting on benches in the back of the gym, while the rest of us sat cross-legged on the floor. We sang innocuous hymns like “Morning Has Broken” and then we recited the Lord’s prayer with our eyes closed and our hands folded in our laps. If we didn’t have our eyes closed and our hands folded, then one of the teachers would glare us into submission. I was embarrassingly old when I finally realized that I wouldn’t die on the spot if I prayed with my eyes open. On Fridays we had longer assemblies in which one class would lead the assembly with songs, readings, and other juvenilia.

It was on one of these Fridays that I gave my first ever public speaking performance to declare that “Class Two is learning about the weather.” I would later cry over another assembly performance about teeth because I didn’t get to be a molar like my friends. Who wants to be a stupid incisor?!

In December we would sing Christmas Carols during assemblies, and my favorite was always “O Come All Ye Faithful” because I liked singing the chorus quietly and then yelling the last line. For some reason this yelling during the song was one of the few things that ever made Mr. Mills get visibly frustrated with us. Of course, it was British frustration, so it was quaint and entirely dignified.

At noon the schoolchildren gathered in the same gym where we had the assemblies and ate wholesome lunches while suffering the tirades of Mrs. Payne for putting our elbows on the table. If she had been a Dickens character her name would have matched her personality, but in reality she really just wanted us to meet certain etiquette requirements and avoid soiling our uniforms. Did I mention that we wore uniforms? Navy-blue jumpers over white, collared shirts, with a striped, yellow and navy tie. The girls wore grey skirts and the boys embarrassingly short shorts with knee-high grey socks. Mrs. Payne wore elasticated skirts or pants, but did have a very Dickens-esque mole on her chin, if that’s any consolation.

During the years when I brought my lunch from home in a Forever Friends teddy bear lunch box, my friends and I would put our elbows on our lunch boxes instead of the table to get around the letter of the law. Needless to say, we were rebels, and probably the bane of Mrs. Payne’s existence. St. Margaret’s provided a special Christmas lunch every year. The “special” parts of the lunch were the addition of brussel sprouts and a dessert of vanilla ice cream. It’s amazing how much that one little scoop of ice cream made everything seem festive.

St. Margaret’s Primary school was affiliated with St. Margaret’s Anglican Church, located just up the road. Before the Christmas holidays, our whole school would attend a special Christmas service at the church and we had to walk by my house to get there. I used to get so excited to show off our Christmas tree to my friends and classmates. However, some of the cooler, edgier ten-year-olds in my class (Ann, I’m talking to you!) had the audacity to mock my family’s tree for being “boring.” I should have known that Ann (not her real name, and definitely spelled without an ‘e’) was a Philistine – much like the Dickensian street-roaming urchins who sought to corrupt innocent little Oliver Twist.

Despite our bickering over who’s tree was better (ours was!), we must have looked like a pretty cute bunch walking in twos up the road to church. St. Margaret’s Church was, like many other Anglican churches, at it’s best during the Christmas holidays. The stained glass windows, the Advent candles, and the choir singing, were all in perfect harmony on dark December days.

My classmates and I would give various Bible readings and musical performances during the service. Sometimes, however, the magic of the holidays was swiftly snuffed out by the butchering of said readings and musical performances. Once, when my friend, Binny (also, not her real name) was scheduled to give a reading, Mr. Mills introduced her by the wrong name, something like Laura or Agnes, and she consequently went into fits of giggles as she read from a Bible bigger than her face, from a pulpit that loomed over the congregation. It was completely inappropriate, totally hilarious ( at least to an eight-year-old), and it’s the only thing I remember from that service.

The church service was usually on the last day before the break. At home, the holidays always started when our friend, Beth, came to stay with us. She was an American living in England, and she spent many Christmases with my family. Every year when she stayed with us she would buy a new, little box of ornaments and we would add them to the tree, along with all the decorations from previous years. Some of our decorations were old, wooden ones from my mother’s childhood (these did double-duty as fun Christmas toys), but my favorite decorations were the glass icicles that sparkled in the white lights of the tree. Of course, like most things in my childhood, I was at least slightly apprehensive, if not completely terrified, of breaking these icicles or accidentally stabbing myself in the neck.

Mom insisted on only using white lights, and because of its correctness, this is a tradition I will pass down to my children and then I will judge them if they don’t follow suit. I loved it when we put the Christmas tree in the front room of the house, nestled in the bay window, because you could see it from the road looking simple and stately. I spent many hours just staring at the tree, wondering about my presents, and listening to Christmas music. One year, my parents threw a Christmas party for our neighbors and all the kids went upstairs to play, but I stole away to sit beside the Christmas tree instead. Of course, all the neighborhood kids were boys, so they may have banished me from their games, but either way, I was happier sitting in the quiet light of the Christmas tree than playing with those jerks who were bigger than me – even with the close proximity to the lethal icicles.

Every Christmas Eve, my parents let my brother and I each open one little gift . Sometimes it was a pair of Christmas pajamas, one year my brother gave me a little figurine that looked like our dog, Runr (pronounced Runner), and on another year I opened up a new fountain pen. I loved that fountain pen so much that I slept with it as if it were a teddy bear that night, which was actually a fairly difficult feat, since the pen was small, pointy, and sharp – much like a glass icicle, and therefore hungry to stab my little neck.

Christmas mornings generally began with my brother waking me up by jumping on my bed or tickling me. It was the one day of the year that he woke up of his own accord, without various threats from my parents. We would run downstairs and open up our stockings together, and then run back upstairs to wake up Mom, Dad, and Beth. They leisurely moseyed on into the kitchen to brew some coffee, leisurely set the table for breakfast, and then leisurely strolled into the living room to open presents. Couldn’t they move any faster?! My dad would read the Christmas story to us from the Bible, say a prayer, and then we would open the presents one by one. I took this ‘one by one’ thing very seriously, and I didn’t like it when anyone took a present out of turn. There were unwritten rules and protocols to be followed!

Some of my favorite presents included a pair of yellow roller skates, a skip-it, a Sega Game Gear that was a joint present to my brother and me, and a sweatshirt that had a rainbow and a Bible verse on it. Invariably, I would use my pocket money to buy my Mom some kind of gift basket with cheap lotions and soaps which was always impossible to wrap and which always ended up back in my room anyway. My Dad was always the lucky recipient of colorful paperclips or similar desk supplies displayed in plastic containers shaped like animals. I think I ended up keeping those, too.

As I reflect on all of these Christmas stories, in a way I’m thankful that my childhood was not Dickensian, but part of me wishes for more excitement. If only I had a drunk uncle who visited us every year, or a dysfunctional but affectionate relationship with my mother, or a memory of reconciling with a previously estranged relative, perhaps my memories would be more colorful. Unfortunately, I don’t have a Scrooge figure in my family who came to learn the true meaning of Christmas with my help. I don’t even have a dramatic story about discovering that Santa Claus didn’t exist.

On the other hand, I am extremely thankful I didn’t receive Dickensian beatings, thrashings, clubbings, or starvings. I had a hard enough time dealing with malignant glass icicles and parents who loved me and occasionally said things like, “eraser” instead of “rubber” (although now I understand why ‘eraser’ is the preferred term).

by Charles Dickens

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to.

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Download A Christmas Carol

106 pages, 433 KB (PDF)

Good question from Booking Through Thursday, but awful to answer:

Do you think any current author is of the same caliber as Dickens, Austen, Bronte, or any of the classic authors? If so, who, and why do you think so? If not, why not? What books from this era might be read 100 years from now?

I think I’ll stick with the three authors named, on the grounds of not wishing my head to explode with the complexity of the task.  And to narrow it down further, I’m going to stick my neck out and say that, although I appreciate Austen and the Brontës, I do not believe that they are in the same league as Dickens.

My reformed and simpler question, “is any current author of the same calibre as Dickens?”

The next problem would be that this cannot be a case of comparing like with like.  Dickens is characterised for me by meticulous attention to descriptive detail, particularly in the formation of his characters.  I have not read any other author who does that, and do not really expect to do so, since the modern reader has slightly different expectations of contemporary literature.

My final problem (I trust) is that I just haven’t read enough to answer this question accurately.   Bearing in mind that there are many high-calibre authors whose work I have not read yet, my answer must be incomplete, but one element that marks many of the classics, and accounts for their popularity to some degree, is their ability to define the feel and social mores of a given period.  It would be difficult to make this judgement with respect to a contemporary novel because the reader is too close to the subject.  However, David Foster Wallace comes close with Infinite Jest (and I read it more as a satire of Western capitalism than specifically the USA of the near future.)

Regarding longevity of books, that, I feel, is less clear cut.  Firstly a book has to make enough initial splash to remain in print, and that is not always a reflection of literary merit.  But, it does seem as though literary merit is essential in the long term for a book to pass the test of time.  I don’t recall reading any ‘classics’ which turned out to be just very old pot-boilers…  I think for a book to meet both criteria and be able to hold out long enough to gain the respectable veneer of age…  is quite a tall order.  I hope that merit has more to do with it than luck.

Example?  I’m not optimistic for many of my favourites, but I would confidently predict that JG Ballard will still be going strong in a century’s time.  (Particularly since when the time comes to prove me wrong I shall be decidedly disinterested.)

I don’t think it is unfair to describe Wallace and Ballard as ‘current’ but, for the record, it’s not strictly true.

Full Moon photo by David Haworth

A sampling of Triangle theater performances
for the weekend of November 18-22, 2009, and beyond

OPENING:
Dark of the Moon – A supernatural tale of doomed love in the Southern mountains, presented by Raleigh Ensemble Players. This weekend only: Thursday-Saturday 8:00, Sunday 3:00. Cary Academy.
www.realtheatre.org

Downriver – An 88-year old bluesman rides an inflatable mattress down the Mississippi and into his past. A staged presentation of a screenplay by Dana Coen. Presented by UNC’s Process Series. Free. This weekend only: Friday-Saturday 8:00. Gerrard Hall, UNC campus, Chapel Hill.
eda.unc.edu

It’s a Wonderful Life – “Where’s that money, you silly stupid old fool?” The story of George Bailey of Bedford Falls, staged as a 1940’s live radio broadcast. This weekend: Wednesday-Saturday 8:00, Sunday 3:00. Continues through December 22. NCSU Campus: Titmus Theatre, Frank Thompson Hall, Raleigh.
www.ncsu.edu/theatre

The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Part 2 – David Edgar’s massive two-part adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel presented in rotating rep. (See “Continuing” for Part 1 schedule.) This weekend: Wednesday-Saturday 7:30. Continues through December 20. Paul Green Theater, UNC campus, Chapel Hill.
www.playmakersrep.org

My Patriot Act – An evening-length performance by Rachel Brooker, incorporating dance, text, and video. One weekend only: Friday-Saturday 8:00. Common Ground Theatre, Durham.
www.animadance.org

Scapin – Molière’s comedy about a crafty rascal, adapted by By Bill Irwin And Mark O’Donnell. This weekend only: Wednesday-Saturday 8:00. Leggett Theatre, Peace College, Raleigh.
theatre.peace.edu

CONTINUING:
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, Part 1 – David Edgar’s massive two-part adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel presented in rotating rep. See “Opening” for Part 2 schedule. This weekend: Saturday-Sunday 2:00, Tuesday 7:30. Continues through December 19. Paul Green Theater, UNC campus, Chapel Hill.
www.playmakersrep.org

FINAL WEEKEND:
The Lower D’s – Jay O’Berski directs this adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths. Presented by Duke’s Department of Theater Studies, the production is designed to be carbon-neutral, with no new materials purchased for the play and all play-related energy use off-set by sponsors. This weekend: Thursday-Saturday 8:00, Sunday 2:00. Closes November 21. Sheafer Theater, Bryan Center, Duke West Campus, Durham.
theaterstudies.duke.edu

Snoopy!!! – Musical based on the bipedal comic strip canine. This weekend: Friday 7:30, Saturday and Sunday 1:00, 5:00. Closes November 22. Raleigh Little Theatre.
raleighlittletheatre.org

AUDITIONS:
Should Brandon and Nicole Get Engaged? – Two actors needed for the title characters of an Alternate Reality Game at UNC. Auditions Monday-Tuesday, 209 Manning, UNC Chapel Hill campus. Auditions by appointment.
www.lib.unc.edu/instruct/ShBANGE/

For a more complete listing of area theater,
we recommend the arts calendar at Indyweek.com.

Now reading: The Woman in White.

Wilkie Collins is manipulative.  All novelists are manipulative at some level; with the best of them, you don’t even think about resenting it.  (Others can make you feel creepy and weird.)  Collins seems to me to be a genius of manipulation: he twists the knife in the most delightful ways.

The best example of this is probably the “postscript” Fosco leaves in Marian’s diary.  What I love about this is how the manipulation works on multiple levels: at the level of Collins’ interaction with the reader, the postscript provides a shocking twist at the end of Marian’s narrative, injecting suspense — about Marian’s safety, the secret of Anne Catherick, and Fosco’s plans — into an already suspenseful situation.  As this thesis by Leanne Page suggests, the postscript also puts us in the position of recognizing that we, as well as Fosco, have been reading a private document: his glee at having stolen Marian’s secrets makes our glee at the twists in the story a bit unseemly.

But the real mystery here is why Fosco, a master manipulator himself, leaves his note behind, showing that he’s read the diary.  The reasons for this are unclear to me: is Fosco gloating?  Is he just not as bright as he seems?  Throughout the book, Collins is extremely concerned with maintaining the authenticity of the documents he presents, with the status of the text itself: evidence is presented in a variety of forms — letters, the diary, the statements of those who would have direct knowledge on the case.  Indeed, Marian herself is constantly referring in the diary to the diary, and to the time she’s had to write in it, and to her need to record events accurately.  (As an aside: as someone who works with real diaries all the time, I can tell you that a diary like Marian’s would make my head explode.  Every diary is interesting in its own way, but all diaries are, by and large, records of life being boring, or at least uneventful.)

All of this attention that Collins pays to his diverse texts further complicates Fosco’s postscript for the reader.  It could be that Collins simply fudged here: wanting to show the reader that Fosco had read the diary but having no way to do so inside Marian’s text, he introduces the implausible scenario that Fosco finds it irresistible to prove to Marian that he’s read the diary.  Perhaps we’re to believe that Fosco simply believes his ingenious plot cannot possibly be unraveled, and so it does not matter whether anyone knows that he was scoundrel enough to read the diary.  Or is it a matter of the status of the diary at the time: was the diary stolen by Fosco, and only recovered later, or did he lock it away where he thought no one could retrieve it until the plot could not possibly be unraveled?  (A fascinating possibility, Collins using the placement of his narratives to create tension at a metafictional level!)  Did Fosco believe Marian would not survive her illness — did he intend to use his “vast knowledge of chemistry” to poison her?  Did he leave the message for some other reason that the reader does not yet know, but will later, as more is revealed?

At any rate, I hope this shows what a complicated and delightful thing it can be to manipulate.  Collins is quite good, I think, at moving his characters in consistent, intelligent ways, which is what makes me question the status of Fosco’s postscript — Dickens, frankly, is often worse at this, especially in his early books, making his characters do dumb or inconsistent things and dropping little gods into the narrative just because he needs to make something happen.  If this were an early Dickens novel, I’d probably not bat an eye at Fosco’s postscript as a simple marker of irrepressible, monomaniacal evil; it may be such here too, but Collins at least makes me question it.  He’s also fantastic at concluding his episodes, one of the key spaces for manipulating the reader: the last page of the Second Epoch seems to me one of the masterpieces of suspense writing, in its pacing (the masterful use of paragraphs of a single word or sentence, and the staccato fragments set off with dashes), its scene-setting, and its “surprise” ending that seems, as you read it, both astonishing and inevitable.  If this is manipulation, who needs free will?

Which resulted in the book Howards End is on the Landing.

Here is Susan on Dickens:

…Yes, he is sentimental, yes, he has purple passages, yes, his plots sometimes have dropped stitches, yes, some of his characters are quite tiresome. But his literary imagination was the greatest ever, his world of teeming life is as real as has ever been invented, his conscience, his passion for the underdog, the poor, the cheated, the humiliated are god-like. He created an array of varied, vibrant, living, breathing men and women and children that is breathtaking in its scope. His scenes are painted like those of an Old Master, in vivid colour and richness on huge canvases. His prose is spacious, symphonic, infinitely flexible. He can portray evil and create a menacing atmosphere of malevolence better than any other writer – read Little Dorritt, read Our Mutual Friend, read Bleak House if you don’t believe me.

normblog

I’m still plugging my way through Little Dorrit; it’s been ages that I’ve been reading the book, cramming in chapters here and there, between all my other reading duties and responsibilities. I like the sentimentality, I like the goodness of Little Dorrit and I delight in “his world of teeming life,” I really do. Although, inevitably, after I spend time with the Victorians I want to read simpler and more slender volumes, contemporary things that are smooth with modernity.

Basescu sedea in scaunul sau de la birou cand Boc, servitor la casa presedintelui, veni sa-l roage, cuviincios, acordarea unui spor de sarbatori, caci familia sa, din departatul Cluj, nu avea nici macar suficienti bani pentru a cumpara un brad, fie el at de mic si rar iar copiii isi doreau si ei cadouri, masiunute ori papusi. Basescu se ridica din scaun si lovi cu pumnul biroul: “Porcule, te-au dat astia jos din functie si tu vii la mine sa-mi cer bani, jogodie! Iesi afara, iesi afara pitic nerusinat, am sa revin eu la partid si ai sa vezi pedeapsa, sa fii bucuros ca inca mai ai unde locui, porcule! gaozarule!” Poftindu-l afara o primi pe Domnita Udrea, ceea prea de frumusete plina cerandu-i presedintelui ca in schimbul unei partide de sex oral sa-i garanteze semnarea unui contract pentru sotul sau. Dupa ce Udrea isi facu cu devotare treaba, Basescu o pofti afara din birou fara macar a-i multumi,ori macar a o ajuta in vre-un fel in ceea ce ea il rugase iar ea, loiala ca de obicei, parasi in lacrimi incaperea, totusi mandra ca isi facea datoria asa cum se cuvine. Si altii venira si plecara tristi de la palat, taranii cu promisunea unor bani care insa nu aveau sa vina nicioata, profesorii cu un 50% doar pe hartie, Stolojan isi dorea si el un post, cat de mic si fu refuzat pe motiv ca ar fii senil, Vantu il ruga pe Basescu sa ii acorde mai multa incredere, ca doar il ajutase la greu, dar presedintele ii tranti usa in nas.

Si astfel se trezi Traian al nostru singur in noaptea de craciun, sotia ii plangea intr-un colt, ignorata, cele doua fice plecasera cu banii pe care tatal lor ii oferise pentru a scapa de ele, chiar si cainele, “Felix”, tremura de frig si de foame in lantul sau iar cei de la SPP se incalzeau la un tomberon in flacari undeva in incinta palatului. In toiul noptii aparu stafia trecutului plesnindu-l pe domnul Basescu, care ra deja beat peste capu-i chel. Fantoma avea aspectul lui Ceausescu si cu vocea fostului ditator grai:

“Tovarase haide cu mine, nu te speria, vino sa iti arat trecutul, vino sa vezi cine esti si de ce esti asa cum esti, haide intr-o calatorie si te vei schimba”

Basescu il lua pe Ceausescu de mana si amandoi se pornira plutind deaspura a ceea ce a fost. Vazura vaporul capitanului in furtuna, vazura cum echipajul se zbate in timp ce capitanul redacta rapoarte pentru securitate descriind lasitatea anti-comunista supusilor sai, vazura porturi straine, pline de bogatii si de curve pe care presedintele le patrunse gemand, vazura sediul partidului si pe basescu cum semna rapoarte, vazura clipele revolutiei, cu basescu trist de moartea marelui tovaras Nicolae Ceausescu, vazura anii 90 cu un basescu ce sprijinea minerii si dispretuia tineretul, vazura un basescu distrugand dosare, vazura un basescu ce in closetul sediului guvernului ii sugea matraluga lui Iliescu si cum fu penetrat pe la spate de Hrebenciuc, doar pentru a-si pastra privilegiile,un basescu e il injunghie pe la spate pe Roman, vazura un basescu ce spunea a romania nu are nevoie de autostrazi, vazura un basescu primar si muuuulte, muuulte lesuri de caini si contracte dubioase si cladiri hidoase, vazura apoi un basescu candidand la presedentie, un basescu promitand, un basescu mesianic, un basescu schimbat, un basescu bun si drept si demn dar in acelasi timp un basescu care stia ca se minte pe sine si ca tradeaza ,un basescu gol de continut,si vazura cum incetul cu incetul se apropie prezentul deasupra unui mandat care nu are poveste care spune doar o condamnare a comunismului facuta de un comunist.

Ajuns inapoi in biroul sa, debusolat, presedintele isi  mai turna un pahar pe whiskan chemand-o pe Udrea la el caci ii se facuse pofta sa dea muie, pe usa nu intra insa udrea ci un urias vagin purtand in loc de clitoris o sticla de Jack: “Sunt spiritul prezentului, intra in mine si ai sa vezi ce se intampla, ai sa te intelegi pe tine, ai sa te schimbi”. Basescu intra si vazu vrajba intre oameni si pe el bucurandu-se si se vazu pe sine injurand mafia si mogulii ca mai apoi sa dea mana cu Videanu si Berceanu, vazu guvernul Boc ucis si cum el se decise sa-l mai ucida de inca cateva ori, vazu tarani infometati si profesuri fara bani de creta, vazu promisiuni stiind ca ele sunt inghitite doar de cei platiti sa inghita, isi vazu sotia trista si pe el nepasandu-i, se vazu injurand din nou vechiul sistem stiind ce el e parte din el, ca el l-a sustinut si inca il sustine tacit, vazu cum il injura pe Hrebenciuc si isi amintii cum i-a slujit atatia ani in diverse moduri, se vazu cum nu ii pasa de oameni, oameni care exista doar pentru a-l sprijini pe el,  se vazu incercand sa se catere deasupra sferei politice uitand ca e vorba de o sfera si ca a sta in varful unei sfere e imposibil, din moment ce nu ai de ce te sprijini, se vazu injurand presa uitand ca presa crezuse candva in el si in ajutase sa devina el insusi un mogul.

Iesind din vagin se trezi iarasi in birou, isi mai turna un pahar cand pe fereastra intra el insusi din viitor: “haide cu mine sa iti vezi viitorul, se te intelegi pe tine si sa te schimbi”

Basescu cu Basescu pornira in calatorie, vazura cum presedintele pierdea alegerile in fata lui Geoana si Basescu cel din prezent injura furios:”Gaozarul!!!”, vazura apoi cum o intreaga tara se prabuseste ca urmare a mostenirii sal, vazura cum vrajba creste, cum pe el toti il scuipau pe chelie (fiind astfel nevoit sa isi lase din nou suvita sa creasca), vazura cum taranii isi lasa vitele sa moara si cum renunta sa mai cultive plante, vazura cum scoliile se inchid, una cate una, vazura cum mogulii pe care el doar i-a injurat dar tacit i-a sprijinit ajung sa administreze bugetul statului, vazura cum fondul monetar international ne cere banii, bani pe care insa nu ii avem si cum astfel fondul ajunge sa traga sforile in politica romaneasca, vazura un parlament mic si unicameral ce nu mai poate garanta constitutia, vazura un Basescu slab si futut din nou in cur si care din nou, pentru a creste suge pula in stanga si in dreapta, vazura o tara trista, gri si din ce in ce mai goala, vazura cum prostia pe care el a sprijinit-o a devnit virtute, cum toata tara merge la universitate dar nimeni nu mai stie sa citeasca si cum whiskanu’ a inlocuit apa la robinet iar femeile usoare adevarata dragoste. Atunci Basescu cel din prezent ii spuse celui din viitor: “Vai de mine!” iar cel din viitor raspunse intre doua sughituri si o dusca: “Vezi ma, daca nu ajungi tot tu la putere o sa sugi iar pula lu’ unu sau altu’ si tara tot prost o sa mearga, ca asa am lasat-o noi, asa ca lasa prostiile morale si fraudeaza alegerile sa avem si noi o paine ca prostii astia oricum nu se prind!”

Morala: Basescu a fraudat alegerile si a iesit din nou presedinte. Dupa nici cinci luni a dizolvat permanent parlamentul decretand starea de urgenta, tara a ajuns condusa de guvernul Udrea si sa  dezintegrat in totalitate, lasand pe harta lumii doar o mica pata gri, candva Romania. Apoi a convocat toti sugacii la el si le-a spus: “Acum sugeti gaozarilor, daca vreti sa ajugeti ca mine, sugeti!”

A Christmas Carol (2009) es otro filme en el que su director Robert Zemeckis (Chicago, 1951) explora las posibilidades visuales que ofrece el capture motion conocido en forma abreviada como mo cap. Esta técnica de animación consiste en usar actores teniendo como fondo una pantalla azulada. La captura de movimiento es facial y corporal. Esto se logra con sensores esparcidos por el rostro y el cuerpo. Este proceso permite grabar en forma digital la interpretación de los actores con cámaras operadas por computador. El resultado: una cobertura total de 360 grados, permitiendo que la película sea presentada en formato 3D.

Esta técnica del mo cap ha sido desarrollada y perfeccionada por Zemeckis en filmes como el navideño El expreso polar (2004) y la épica medieval Beowulf (2007). Al igual que su predecesora navideña del 2004, A Christmas Carol o Los fantasmas de Scrooge (como es su título comercial) basa su éxito en delegarle múltiples voces y personajes a un solo actor. En El expreso polar fue Tom Hanks –ganador del primer Óscar de su carrera a órdenes de Zemeckis por Forrest Gump (2004) – y ahora es Jim Carrey el que intenta repetir la versatilidad actoral de Hanks. Carrey realiza seis voces: dos fantasmas (el del presente y del pasado) y cuatro Scrooge: de niño, adolescente, adulto y Scrooge viejo. Si comparamos con el actor principal de El expreso polar sale perdiendo el estrambótico Jim Carrey. Hanks hace seis voces también pero más diferenciables: la de Santa Claus, la de Scrooge (sí, Scrooge aparece en El expreso polar), el niño protagonista, el padre del niño, el conductor y Hobo, el acomodador del tren.

Desde que filmó su trilogía (mezcla de Borges y H. G. Wells) de Volver al futuro (1985, 1989 y 1990), Zemeckis siempre se promocionó a sí mismo como un devoto de los adelantos tecnológicos. Nunca dejó de estar a la vanguardia. Lo confirmó con Forrest Gump que es un alarde de efectos, más que nada en las escenas en las que el protagonista homónimo se entrevista con personajes históricos y el célebre vuelo de la pluma en el aire. Nada mal para un director cuyo debut fue una teenage movie sin ningún F/X. Estamos aludiendo a I want to hold your hand (1978) sobre un grupo de jóvenes fanáticos persigue a los Beatles en su primera visita a Norteamérica. Hilarante comedia más auténtica que cualquiera de sus posteriores blockbusters.

Otros de sus filmes memorables (por sus efectos más que por su calidad discutible) son Death becomes her (1992) en el que Bruce Willis encarna a un cirujano estético que encuentra la pócima de la eterna juventud para Meryl Streep y Goldie Hawn; Contact (1997), un canto de amor a la posible vida en otros planetas, historia cortesía de Carl Sagan con Jodie Foster en el protagónico; y Cast away (2000), vehículo de lucimiento para un solo actor, Tom Hanks, cuyo monólogo se ve opacado por las realistas escenas de naufragio previa caída de un avión en las aguas océanicas.

¿Qué aporta el nuevo filme de Zemeckis en relación con sus anteriores animaciones? Los diseñadores gráficos no hicieron todo por computadora. Trabajaron a mano, a la vieja usanza, como si fueran los primitivos dibujantes de Walt Disney, compañía que por cierto produce el filme. Sin embargo, respetaron el material filmado en soporte digital de los actores y los movimientos faciales y corporales siempre fueron referencia. Cabe señalar que es la segunda alianza entre Zemeckis y la mítica compañía de dibujos animados. En 1988 trabajaron en ¿Quién mató a Roger Rabbit? una de las primeras películas en aunar de manera perfecta a personajes de carne y hueso con caracteres animados.

 ¿Qué aporta la versión de Zemeckis con respecto de las anteriores adaptaciones de la novela corta de Charles Dickens? La respuesta tiene que apuntar a lo visual. Es realmente memorable el diseño del personaje del espectro de Marley (voz que pertenece al gran actor inglés Gary Oldman). Sus pesadas cadenas, los baúles metálicos que debe arrastrar, el momento en el que su boca se desencaja y habla de manera hilarante…

El mejor momento (dentro de lo atractivo del planteamiento visual) es el sobrevuelo de Scrooge sobre Londres (gran aporte de Zemeckis porque Dickens no lo usa como recurso). Por más que existan anacronismos, como la aparición del Puente Millenium (abierto en el 2000), el Globe Theatre (restaurado y reabierto en 1997) y el Puente Southwark (hecho en 1921), la secuencia resulta un derroche de ingenio y es un verdadero goce de vértigo en formato 3D. Todo ese viaje que uno de los fantasmas le permite al protagonista resulta visualmente ingenioso. Pero nada más. No llega a lo genial.

Aspectos encomiables del filme: la dirección de arte (decorados interiores), el diseño de producción (impecable la ciudad de Londres del siglo XIX) y la música. Alan Silvestri sabe que el título original de la obra de Dickens es Un villancico de navidad. El premiado compositor de Forrest Gump ha trabajado con un villancico tradicional y se ha permitido interpolar variaciones del mismo en cada trecho del filme.

El guión merece un párrafo aparte. El director Zemeckis que también oficia de guionista ha respetado la estructura original de 5 episodios del cuento largo de Dickens. Entre paréntesis: el libro original publicado en 1843 titulaba a cada capítulo como pentagrama, de tal forma que uno leía Stave one: Marley´s ghost. Esta forma de rotular cada bloque estaba en concomitancia con la intención musical del autor. Zemeckis, repetimos, ha seguido la estructura cronológica de Dickens, pero no todos los diálogos. No están tal cual en el libro como se puede apreciar en algunas escenas del filme. Esto es un mérito porque implica adaptar el lenguaje teatral de los parlamentos originales a una lengua más coloquial. Claro que se respetan modismos como el famoso humbug de Scrooge que se traduce como pamplinas. Entre los hallazgos de Zemeckis hay uno al final: la forma en que remata la historia. Lo hace usando a Gary Oldman quien en la última escena se despoja de su personaje de Bob Cratchit y se convierte en un narrador diferido. Prácticamente recita los dos últimos párrafos del texto original de Dickens y concluye la historia dándole un toque de colorín colorado, este cuento se ha acabado.

Otro párrafo se lo gana Jim Carrey. Su Scrooge tiene un humor ácido que tiene obviamente su sello personal pero su gran aporte es el del fantasma del pasado. La voz cálida y dulce que le imprime a ese amigable poltergeist es de antología. La escena en la que el espectro danza de izquierda a derecha de manera juguetona (dándole a entender a Scrooge que no debe tenerle miedo) es una de las más graciosas del filme. Después de la impresionante aparición del espíritu verdoso de Marley era necesario que el fantasma del pasado fuera  vivaracho y travieso.

Otros actores que dan vida vocal a los personajes animados: Robin Wright (Belle, el único amor en la vida Scrooge), Gary Oldman (quien aparte de Bob Cratchit, hace las voces de Tiny Tim y del fantasma de Marley), Colin Firth (Fred, el sobrino de Scrooge), Bo Hoskins (Mr. Fezzwig y Old Joe) y hasta Leslie Zemeckis, esposa del director (esposa de Fred).

Como conclusión cabe anotar que si el cine de animación pretende crear la ilusión total de estar frente a seres humanos todavía estamos lejos. Es un paso más. No el definitivo. En el cine de Zemeckis es notable esa ilusión pero es parcial. En escenas como las del baile –en el que el joven Scrooge conoce a Bella– el espectador sabe que está frente a un espejismo animado.

Entre todas las adaptaciones de Scrooge esta es, sin duda, una de las mejores. No sólo por su género (la animación) sino por captar el espíritu de la obra original de Dickens, por respetar el contexto cronológico y geográfico. Además, Zemeckis se ha acercado a la obra literaria porque trata de uno de sus temas favoritos: el viaje en el tiempo. Por todas las razones aquí esgrimidas A Christmas Carol o Los fantasmas de Scrooge constituye un regalo adelantado de navidad para los cinéfilos. Sobre todo para los seguidores de Zemeckis.

Leggevo sabato un articolo interessante sul Corriere della Sera, firmato Chiara Maffioletti.

Si parla della paura. Di film che “aprono la porta della paura” ai bambini.

Esempi? A parte quel simpaticone di Lord Voldemort e i mostracchioni di Nel Paese delle Creature selvagge, la Maffioletti cita due cartoonfilms: Coraline e la porta magica (uscito a giugno) e A Christmas Carol (uscirà il 3 dicembre).

Di Coraline e delle sue avventure dark mi sono già occupato

http://ilbibliofilo.wordpress.com/2009/06/26/coraline-e-una-notte-da-leoni/

e ribadisco: è una storia per adulti, travestita da cartone animato.

Salvo prova contraria, i minori di anni 10 non riescono a capire che il mondo affascinante e multicolore del consumismo, dove tutti sorridono e c’è tanto da mangiare, diventa progressivamente un INCUBO.

Lo capiranno col tempo…

Anche la storia dell’avaraccio Ebenezer Scrooge, scritta da Dickens nel 1843, è destinata agli adulti. Si parla della morte e soprattutto si parla della miseria della plebe londinese, di bambini che muoiono di stenti e del cinismo di chi (come lo stesso Scrooge) afferma che la loro morte “abbassa il surplus della popolazione”.

I bambini piccoli non capiranno il significato di queste tragedie, a meno che i genitori (prima di portarli al cinema) non facciano loro un discorso serio: “guarda che i poveri non sono una favola natalizia, esistono tutto l’anno, e solo la generosità di tutti, dico TUTTI, li farà uscire dallo stato in cui si trovano…”

Discorsi non facili, certamente. Fanno fatti al momento opportuno, tenendo conto della maturità, della sensibilità ecc ecc

Infine, una considerazione generale.

Non è detto che tutti i cartoni animati piacciano a tutti i bambini. Spesso li sconcertano.

Meglio film con attori in carne ed ossa. Magari ET, capolavoro di Steven Spielberg.

O magari AUGUST RUSH, un altro film natalizio (uscì in Italia nel dicembre del 2007). Mi occuperò di entrambi, il mese prossimo.

A singular storyteller whose life informed an epic writing career

It has been said that Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” created the holiday as we know it. Even the latest Hollywood iteration, a big-budget computer-animated extravaganza, is substantially faithful to the early-Victorian original. A celebration once banned by Puritans in America and England became the very symbol of Victorian domesticity, and Dickens set the tone with his vision of miserliness overthrown in favor of family, forgiveness and large game birds.

As Michael Slater’s captivating biography makes clear, it can also be said that “A Christmas Carol” created Charles Dickens as we know him today. Written in what Mr. Slater calls “a white heat of excitement” in the fall of 1843, the short book was Dickens’s most direct address yet to members of a reading public who, upon his death a quarter-century later, would feel themselves “to be on terms of personal friendship with the man.”

“A Christmas Carol” was the first extended work of fiction that made its debut in the marketplace under the name Charles Dickens. Previously readers knew him as Boz, a pseudonym he’d begun using as a jobbing journalist. His novels to that point—including “The Pickwick Papers,” “The Adventures of Oliver Twist” and “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby”—had been serialized in cheap periodicals before appearing in book form. “A Christmas Carol” was published for the first time in a handsomely bound volume, an object to be treasured. And it was an immediate hit.

Dickens had already proved his ability to entertain his audiences with comedy (“Pickwick” and “Nickleby”) and to tug on their heartstrings with drama (“Oliver Twist” and “The Old Curiosity Shop”). “A Christmas Carol” added a crusading tone, concerning the suffering of the poor and the foolish indifference of the rich, previously most prominent in his journalism. Thus a line runs forward from the “A Christmas Carol” to novels of the 1850s and 1860s such as “Little Dorrit,” “Bleak House” and “Our Mutual Friend.”

But Mr. Slater makes a convincing case that “A Christmas Carol” marked an even more important phase in Dickens’s writing, one in which he began to draw self-consciously on his own biography for his fiction. Dickens’s Christmas story “actually turns on memory,” Mr. Slater writes, “specifically on the deleterious consequences of blanking out one’s past, as he himself had perhaps often fantasized about doing.” In particular, Dickens might have wished to blank out his childhood. An early idyll was shattered, around the age of 12, when his father was consigned to debtors prison.

The convivial Regency Christmas celebrations that Scrooge recalls in “A Christmas Carol” certainly seem to be based on Dickens’s own experience, but they were among his few happy memories. Young Charles was pulled out of school—permanently—and for a brief, ignominious period sent to work in a grim shoe-blacking factory. Dickens kept this traumatic past—his own hardships and his father’s imprisonment—secret until his death. Yet he mined these events for the material with which he filled “Little Dorrit,” “Great Expectations” and (most autobiographical of all) “David Copperfield.”

An entire book on the “Carol”-era Dickens alone could be created from the material that Mr. Slater includes in this compendious and fascinating biography. He seems to have consulted every scrap—and there were tens of thousands—that Dickens scribbled on in his 58 years, to produce exactly what the book’s subtitle promises: “a life defined by writing.”

“Charles Dickens” traces the author’s career more or less chronologically across 700 pages, often charting his movements from day to day. Mr. Slater begins with an invitation card penned by the young Dickens, age 8 or 9, and goes on to track the young writer’s rise from an anonymous producer of parliamentary reports to an up-and-coming man of letters. Down the years, Mr. Slater describes the furious composition of the novels—the writing often running only weeks ahead of serial publication. He also cites Dickens’s professional and personal correspondence, the speeches he gave, and the hundreds of articles he wrote for the periodicals he edited. Dickens was known to contemporaries as The Inimitable. Mr. Slater might be called The Indefatigable.

Yet Mr. Slater’s dogged scholarship is surprisingly readable, in part because he often lets his subject speak for himself. Thus when the biographical narrative requires a description of a ruined castle in Rochester in southeast England, near one of Dickens’s childhood homes, he finds it in the staccato phrasings of Mr. Jingle from “The Pickwick Papers.” (“Glorious pile—frowning walls—tottering arches—dark nooks— crumbling staircases—old cathedral too.”) When Mr. Slater wishes to describe the Marshalsea debtors prison, he points us to “Little Dorrit.” When he comes to Dickens’s time in the blacking factory, he cites a maxim from “David Copperfield”: “In the little world in which children have their existence . . . there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as an injustice.”

Often the reader can follow precisely how Dickens transmuted fact into fiction. He felt a compulsion, for instance, to capture individuals he met as “characters” on the page. Some were people he encountered during his peregrinations through London’s streets—for Dickens, his long walks were a kind of reconnaissance. (Miss Havisham’s habit in “Great Expectations” of never removing her wedding dress was based on a real figure.) Some he met during his travels. (The provincial original of the dwarfish Miss Mowcher in “David Copperfield” quickly recognized herself—and wrote to complain.) Others he found closer to home.

The hapless Mr. Micawber in “David Copperfield” was a version of his father, while the callow dilettante Harold Skimpole in “Bleak House,” Mr. Slater says, was a bitingly accurate portrait of the poet Leigh Hunt. When friends charged Dickens with callousness, he brushed aside the criticism. As Mr. Slater makes clear, Dickens could be massively selfish when he felt he was in the right—which was always.

Yet while Mr. Slater admits his subject’s minor faults, he seems hesitant to delve into the possibility of a larger one—the case of Dickens’s wife, Catherine. Dickens’s actions leading to their separation in 1858 are only sketchily outlined, and then Catherine essentially disappears from the book. “A page in my life which once had writing on it, has become absolutely blank,” Dickens later wrote—a rather Scrooge-like sentiment to express toward the mother of their 10 children.

Indeed, little is known about the break-up, and Mr. Slater is scrupulous about not going beyond what the evidence tells him. He is similarly circumspect about the long friendship between Dickens and the actress Ellen Ternan, who was 27 years his junior. Dickens wrote about “Nelly” only to his closest friends, and then only vaguely. Mr. Slater leaves it to others to speculate about what went on.

Given Mr. Slater’s insistence on the work, he might have mounted a fresh case for its excellence. Instead, he takes the reader’s admiration of the novels for granted and often seems disinclined to sound a skeptical note. George Orwell could praise Dickens’s social crusading while complaining that he offered no solutions. Even G.K. Chesterton, who celebrated the humane comedy of Dickens’s happy domestic scenes, admitted that the novelist could make “his reader so comfortable that his reader goes to sleep.”

More than one critic, rightly or wrongly, has faulted Dickens for an excess of sentimentality and a certain cartoon tendency that reduces otherwise compelling characters to caricature. His satire of those he dislikes may seem too strenuous for today’s tastes, his sentimentality about those he admires too obvious. Yet just as often Dickens begins from caricature and builds an individual who seems to walk right off the page. His shrewd grasp of his characters’ very core—whether absurd, over-feeling, pathetic, pompous, tender, conniving or greedy—gives his novels the compass of greatness, as if all of social life is contained in them.

If Mr. Slater’s insights into the novels themselves are fleeting, he triumphantly achieves his stated goal of placing Dickens’s novels in the context “of the truly prodigious amount of other writing that he was constantly producing alongside.” Throughout his life, Dickens’s public regarded him as more than a mere novelist. By its end, he had become nearly as prominent a figure in England as Victoria herself.

Thus when December rolled around, circa 1860, readers could expect a special “Christmas Number” of the Dickens-edited periodical All the Year Round, as well as a tour by the author giving readings from his most beloved Christmas writings. A new Everyman’s Library volume, which brings together “A Christmas Carol” with four other Christmas tales, gives us a hint of what his contemporaries’ expectations of him were—and how those expectations differ from our own.

The early Victorian sentiment of “The Battle of Life” and “The Cricket on the Hearth,” for instance—tales of near-tragic misunderstandings that threaten loving homes—seems far too heavily sugared. Dickens does homey bliss better than anyone, but cozy visions are best deployed in lively contrast with the evil outside. Happily (so to speak), such juxtapositions do creep into the two other novellas in this volume.

Like “A Christmas Carol,” both “The Chimes” and “The Haunted Man” feature at their heart a sort of nightmare. In “The Chimes,” a poor man called Trotty is convinced by one of his “betters,” a haughty alderman, that the poor are an ungrateful, “vicious” burden on society. Trotty comes to agree that it would be preferable if he did not exist (cue: “It’s a Wonderful Life”)—but then is shown a wrenching vision of his family after his death, how they strive and fall into squalor. Desperate to save his suicidal daughter, and filled with a newfound love of life, Trotty is suddenly restored to the world and is plunged into a joyous reunion. Rarely have the upper classes in Dickens been made to look more cruel and trifling, or the lower classes more deserving of our sympathy.

“The Haunted Man,” by contrast, is a creepy ghost story in the mold of “A Christmas Carol.” A spirit appears to a man plagued by past betrayals and agrees to remove the bad memories—but curses him to similarly “blank” the memory of any person he encounters. Even with their memories erased, though, these people soon burn with a nameless rage, still haunted by a cruel past they cannot now recall. It turns out that only forgiveness, and not forgetting, is the cure for the hard feelings of the wronged. Like “A Christmas Carol,” the tale captures both the joy and the poignant pain of the Christmas season—a time when the past always seems particularly present.

Dickens expressed the lesson of “The Haunted Man” this way: “To have all the best of it, you must have the worst also.” If that’s true of memory, it’s true of men—and of books. Despite the occasional shortcomings of Dickens, and of Mr. Slater’s biography, anyone who receives this work come Christmas can expect to spend the holiday in convivial company.

Mr. Propson is an editor at The Week.

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574525530962034704.html

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See also:

‘Charles Dickens’

Chapter 9

The Turning-Point of His Career

Shortly after Dickens and his family returned from Broadstairs he travelled to Manchester to speak at the ‘First Annual Soirée’ of the Athenaeum on 5 October. The Manchester Athenaeum, founded in 1835 to provide educational and recreational facilities, including a library, for the working classes, was in financial difficulties as a result of the trade depression of the early 1840s and Fanny Burnett had persuaded her famous brother to come and support the institution by speaking at the Soirée. He shared the platform with two notable M.P.s, Benjamin Disraeli and the doughty anti-Corn Law campaigner Richard Cobden. In his well-crafted address Dickens spoke of how his heart ‘died within him’ when he saw in jails and night-refuges ‘thousands of immortal creatures condemned . . . to tread, not what our great poet calls, “the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire” but one of jagged flints and stones, laid down by brutal ignorance’, and he warmly praised the Manchester Athenaeum for its strong commitment to popular education.

The idea of the State as a bad or neglectful parent to the children of the poor was central to his social thinking at this time and, shortly after his return from Manchester, the two concerns about childhood and children, the personal and the social, seem to have come together in his mind to create A Christmas Carol. The basic notion for this ‘Ghost Story of Christmas’, as he sub-titled it, derived, as has long been recognised, from a Christmas tale he wrote for Pickwick seven years earlier, describing the misanthropic sexton Gabriel Grub’s overnight conversion to benevolence as a result of goblin intervention. Once Dickens had conceived of the more elaborate supernatural machinery of Marley’s Ghost and the Christmas Spirits, and also of the definitive mean old skinflint, Ebenezer Scrooge, he had his story, to be presented as ‘A Christmas Carol in Prose’, divided into five staves like a real carol. The result was the first and greatest of his five ‘Christmas Books’, written in a white heat of excitement during the month or so following the completion of Chuzzlewit XII. Dickens told Felton he had ‘wept, and laughed, and wept again, and excited himself in a most extraordinary manner, in the composition’, walking about ‘the black streets of London, fifteen and twenty miles, many a night when all the sober folks had gone to bed’. The result more than justified his having deferred until the end of the year his projected ‘Appeal to the People of England on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’. No pamphlet, no matter how fierily written, could have had half the impact of the pathetic figure of Tiny Tim, or of those wolf-children with whom the Ghost of Christmas Present confronts Scrooge. As to its relationship with the full-length novel Dickens was in the midst of writing, the Carol becomes, as Peter Ackroyd has pointed out, ‘almost a dream reworking of Martin Chuzzlewit in which the themes of “Selfishness”, money, greed and the commercialised society which results from them, are conveyed in condensed and fantastic form’. He might have added, too, the theme of moral conversion, or change of heart, and, indeed, it is in Chuzzlewit XIII (chs 33–35), written immediately after the Carol, that Dickens describes Young Martin’s sudden conversion, in the dismal swamp of Eden, from the careless selfishness that has hitherto been his dominant characteristic.

The Carol also shows a notable development in the consciously autobiographical element in Dickens’s writing. The story actually turns on memory, specifically on the deleterious consequences of blanking out one’s past, as he himself had perhaps often fantasised about doing. Scrooge, made literally to revisit his past, weeps to see his ‘poor forgotten self as he had used to be’. In a passage that looks forward to Copperfield, the abandoned child Scrooge in his bleak schoolroom derives comfort and companionship from the marvellous figures his fancy conjures up from his reading of The Arabian Nights and Robinson Crusoe. As a writer Dickens cannot yet, it seems, directly confront the blacking factory itself but he nevertheless comes closer here to the factual truth of his boyhood sufferings than ever before. The schoolroom setting adds, moreover, a layer of irony, conscious or unconscious, because it was to a school that the boy in the blacking-factory had so yearned to be sent. To complicate matters still further, the young Scrooge’s desolate and decaying schoolhouse, ‘a mansion of dull red brick, with a little weather-cock-surmounted cupola, on the roof ‘, recalls Gad’s Hill Place as seen from outside. The forsaken-child image of the young Dickens sits, deprived of hope but comforted by imaginative literature, in the ruins of his own dream home.

Michael Slater

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Full article and photo: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703683804574531862251355496.html

The new adaptation of A Christmas Carol is, simply put, astonishing.

Zemeckis has done his magic (again), picturing a London that never was, but lively exists in our minds. The ‘Victorian age’ of the movie is not the historic age we know, nor Dickens’, nor Wilkie Collins’. It is a Victorian London made of dreams and half-forgotten memories, made of images and imagination. It is a mythical London – and, exactly for this reason, it is a real London, as real as one can get.

This is the fascination of London: its (her?) imaginery, the mythic world created by writers, comic books artists, poets, filmmakers, game designers, tourists, photographer, copywriter. People.

There are two London. One is made of flesh and concrete, of steel and tarmac. It is a beautiful London, full of vibes and lives, but not as beautiful as the other one. This is the London of the mind, the London of the soul. A London in which the Victorian Age has never past, in which Jack the Ripper kills again and again, Sherlock Holmes has a real home in Baker Street, and in which steam computers are built underground by mad geniuses. Both the cities are full of secrets and joys, but only together they are Wonder. And yes, this city is able to keep together its two halves, its two dimensions.

Go see A Christmas Carol – and dream of a London that never was, but will always be.