A flip dark chill winter bastard though dry

I so wish I could recall two sentences from Steinbeck's Cannery Row. Not sure about few words, but the man could work miracles with simple words.

Then, there was; It was the best of times, it was the worst of times - from Tale of Two Cities, I believe.

I have no idea what kind of tone I would take from "a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry".

Ah man cool thread!

That's great, Amigo. What book was it from?

















just kidding.

italo calvino goes one step farther and tells you how to read his book

from the first chapter

Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler
(A selection from the first chapter)


You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice--they won't hear you otherwise--"I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell; "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.

Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally.

Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find. In the old days they used to read standing up, at a lectern. People were accustomed to standing on their feet, without moving. They rested like that when they were tired of horseback riding. Nobody ever thought of reading on horseback; and yet now, the idea of sitting in the saddle, the book propped against the horse's mane, or maybe tied to the horse's ear with a special harness, seems attractive to you. With your feet in the stirrups, you should feel quite comfortable for reading; having your feet up is the first condition for enjoying a read.

Well, what are you waiting for? Stretch your legs, go ahead and put yuour feet on a cushion, or two cushions, on the arms of the sofa, on the wings of the chair, on the coffee table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take your shoes off first. If you want to, put your feet up; if not, put them back. Now don't stand there with your shoes in one hand and the book in the other.

Adjust the light so you won't strain your eyes. Do it now, because once you're absorbed in reading there will be no budging you. Make sure the page isn't in shadow, a clotting of black letters on a gray background, uniform as a pack of mice; but be careful that the light cast on it isn't too strong, doesn't glare on the cruel white of the paper gnawing at the shadows of the letters as in a southern noonday. Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

It's not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

So, then, you noticed in a newspaper that If on a winter's night a traveler had appeared, the new book by Italo Calvino, who hadn't published for several years. You went to the bookshop and bought the volume. Good for you.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

the Books You've Been Planning Top Read For Ages,

the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,

the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,

the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,

the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,

the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,

the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified,

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.

With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Books by Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new).

All this simply means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you have turned toward a stack of If on a winter's night a traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established.

You cast another bewildered look at the books around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went.

You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn't only a book you are taking with you but its novelty as well, which could also be merely that of an object fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacket begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the binding becomes dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries. No, you hope always to encounter true newnewss, which, having been new once, will continue to be so. Having read the freshly published book, you will take possession of this newness at the first moment, without having to pursue it, to chase it. Will it happen this time? You never can tell. Let's see how it begins.

Perhaps you started leafing through the book already in the shop. Or were you unable to, because it was wrapped in its cocoon of cellophane? Now you are on the bus, standing in the crowd, hanging from a strap by your arm, and you begin undoing the package with your free hand, making movements something like a monkey, a monkey who wants to peel a banana and at the same time cling to the bough. Watch out, you're elbowing your neighbors; apoligize, at least.

Or perhaps the bookseller didn't wrap the volume; he gave it to you in a bag. This simplifies matters. You are at the wheel of your car, waiting at a traffic light, you take the book out of the bag, rip off the transparent wrapping, start reading the first lines. A storm of honking breaks over you; the light is green, you're blocking traffic.

You are at your desk, you have set the book among your business papers as if by chance; at a certain moment you shift a file and you find the book before your eyes, you open it absently, you rest your elbows on the desk, you rest your temples against your hands, curled into fists, you seem to be concentrating on an examination of the papers and instead you are exploring the first pages of the novel. Gradually you settle back in the chair, you raise the book to the level of your nose, you tilt the chair, poised on its rear legs, you pull out a side drawer of the desk to prop your feet on it; the position of the feet during reading is of maximum importance, you stretch your legs out on the top of the desk, on the files to be expedited.

But doesn't this seem to show a lack of respect? Of respect, that is, for for your job (nobody claims to pass judgment on your professional capacities: we assume that your duties are a normal element in the system of unproductive activities that occupies such a large part of the national and international economy), but for the book. Worse still if you belong--willingly or unwillingly--to the number of those for whom working means really working, performing, whether deliberately or without premeditation, something necessary or at least not useless for others as well as for oneself; then the book you have brough with you to your place of employment like a kind of amulet or talisman exposes you to intermitten temptations, a few seconds at a time subtracted from the principal object of your attention, whether it is the perforations of electronic cards, the burners of a kitchen stove, the controls of a bulldozer, a patient stretched out on the operating table with his guts exposed.

In other words, it's better for you to restrain your impatience and wait to open the book at home. Now. Yes, you are in your room, calm; you open the book to page one, no, to the last page, first you want to see how long it is. It's not too long, fortunately. Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.

You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thurst toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book.

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don't recongize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself. Here, however, he seems to have absolutely no connection with all the rest he has written, at least as far as you can recall. Are you disappointed? Let's see. Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost, as when a person appears who, from the name, you identified with a certain face, and you try to make the features you are seeing tally with those you had in mind, and it won't work. But then you go on and realize that the book is readable nevertheless, independently of what you expected of the author. It's the book in itself that arouses your curiosity; in fact, on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.

End Excerpt

Wow. That is the other end of the spectrum, djjd!



To me it is because the first part of the description "a flip dark chill winter bastard" is so malicious but the "though dry" is so mundane, so normal.

The book kind of rocks you back on your heels at first, none of it makes sense, then you get to the "though dry" and it's like every conversation you've ever had about the weather. Someone comments on the bad and someone counters with the good.

Hi there, Amigo!

People often hate Dickens, because it is forced on them in school, in an era when we don't appreciate the skills of the wordsmith, and at an age when we don't understand the adult themes (Dickens never wrote for children) and in an ignorance which makes the Victorian age opaque to us.

But there have been few writers who have had a better ability to write ironic and often powerful lines in simple English. David Copperfield is almost my least favorite Dickens novel, yet . . .

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

Roger has already pointed out the opening of A Tale of Two Cities, and i thought it worth expanding upon, because in no other novel does Dickens sustain his word play so well. I detest the concept of "compare and contrast" because the students upon whom the onus rests typically lack the literary experience to do the task. But with A Tale of Two Cities, one can "compare and contrast" without reference to any other work. The entire point of the novel is to compare and contrast. The two cities are London and Paris, but the theme of similarity and contrast is woven throughout the novel. Not simply comparing London and Paris, but comparing characters: Sidney Carton and Charles Darnay could pass for identical twins, and that striking resemblance is exploited in the final scene of Carton's heroism, when he takes Darnay's place in the tumbril headed for the guillotine so that he (Darnay) may be saved for Lucie Manette, the woman they both love; in comparing the character of characters: Jeremy Cruncher is the dog's body for Tellson's banks, which handles the estate of Dr. Manette and his daughter Lucie, and at night, he is a grave robber--but he rises above his personal moral terpitude to help Darnay and the Manettes to escape Paris; the character of the Miss Pross, once Lucie's nurse and now her housekeeper is compared to the intrinsic evil of the great heavy of the novel, Madame Defarge, whom Miss Pross kills with Defarge's own pistol as they struggle in the Paris house of the Manettes, after which she and Cruncher spirit Dr. Manette, Lucie and Charles Darnay from Paris. Dickens sets the tone from the opening, as Roger has pointed out.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

The theme is maintained to the very end, when Carton, a brilliant legal mind and a drunkard who has never cared for anyone or anything until he falls in love with Lucie, takes Darnay's place, and goes to the scaffold. His last words, and the final sentence of the novel, are:

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

Dickens was a serial writer, literally. He wrote his novels, chapter by chapter, for publication in literary magazines, and thus got his daily bread. As he became better known, this had the effect of attracting the public interest, earning him more money for his serialized stories, and leading to great sales of his novels when they were published in their complete form. He was good at the techniques of the serial writer, and grabbed the reader's interest from the beginning. Great Expectations introduces the central character thus:

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

George Bernard Shaw considered Hard Times to be his best novel (don't know that i agree, but it is damned good), and it begins with the same type of "grabber":

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!

Oliver Twist is, arguably, his most enduringly popular novel. It begins with what would have been a grabber for the literary lady or gentleman at the dawn of the Victorian era, even if it sounds rather stilted to our ears:

Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.

For a long time after it was ushered into this world of sorrow and trouble, by the parish surgeon, it remained a matter of considerable doubt whether the child could survive to bear any name at all; in which case it is somewhat more than probable that these memoirs would never have appeared; or, if they had, that being comprised within a couple of pages, they would have possessed the inestimable merit of being the most concise and faithful specimen of biography, extant in the literature of any age or country.

Little Dorrit is one of his most caustic condemnations of human nature and the nature (or character) of governments. It begins by introducing a character who will not be seen again until the end of novel, although his part in the tale looms larger and larger as the tale progresses. It is a "grabber" in anyone's terms:

Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.

A blazing sun upon a fierce August day was no greater rarity in southern France then, than at any other time, before or since. Everything in Marseilles, and about Marseilles, had stared at the fervid sky, and been stared at in return, until a staring habit had become universal there. Strangers were stared out of countenance by staring white houses, staring white walls, staring white streets, staring tracts of arid road, staring hills from which verdure was burnt away. The only things to be seen not fixedly staring and glaring were the vines drooping under their load of grapes. These did occasionally wink a little, as the hot air barely moved their faint leaves.

He begins Nicholas Nickleby with is favorite ironic tone:

There once lived, in a sequestered part of the county of Devonshire, one Mr Godfrey Nickleby: a worthy gentleman, who, taking it into his head rather late in life that he must get married, and not being young enough or rich enough to aspire to the hand of a lady of fortune, had wedded an old flame out of mere attachment, who in her turn had taken him for the same reason. Thus two people who cannot afford to play cards for money, sometimes sit down to a quiet game for love.

He uses his favorite tone of ironic amusement to begin Martin Chuzzlewit:

As no lady or gentleman, with any claims to polite breeding, can possibly sympathise with the Chuzzlewit Family without being first assured of the extreme antiquity of the race, it is a great satisfaction to know that it undoubtedly descended in a direct line from Adam and Eve; and was, in the very earliest times, closely connected with the agricultural interest. If it should ever be urged by grudging and malicious persons, that a Chuzzlewit, in any period of the family history, displayed an overweening amount of family pride, surely the weakness will be considered not only pardonable but laudable, when the immense superiority of the house to the rest of mankind, in respect of this its ancient origin, is taken into account.

I will quote a much longer passage for the opening of Bleak House, because it inundates the reader with "bleakness" at the outset:



As you might imagine, i'm rather fond of Mr. Dickens' work.

I confess that I haven't read "A Tale of Two Cities" so thanks for the exposition. That is exactly what I mean by "convey the intent of" -- they don't tell you WHAT the story is but rather HOW the story will be told - he let's you know right away that you're going to be looking at two sides of something.

That's what Burgess did for me by adding "though dry". You know it's going to be a horror story but that it's about humans, monstorous humans, no doubt but humans nontheless.

I've already mentioned "Lolita" in passing but you know right away when Humbert says "My sin. My soul. Lolita" that this girl is going to be his downfall. You get all that in five words.

Sometimes authors choose titles which show a great choice of words.

Ray Bradbury: "Something Wicked This Way Comes"

Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell): "A Dark-Adapted Eye"

Yeah but Bradbury cribbed that line from Shakespeare! It is a beautiful and evocative turn of phrase though.

Re: A flip dark chill winter bastard though dry


My favorite thing about some poetry is the ecomomy of words. Yet you see such a large picture...definitely not my talent - though I strive for it.

There are some I like better than this but can't think of them now - but I like this a lot...

Emily Dickinson
1788

Fame is a bee.
It has a song.
It has a sting.
Ah, too, it has a wing.

Oops, tried to edit but mismi snuck in.

"A Dark-Adapted Eye" sounds like something I'd pick up based solely on the title. It appeals to the photographer in me. A good phrase.

I like the economy of poetry too. I'm a bit too dense for most of it though and usually don't "get" it.

When it comes to similie or metaphor Paul Simon is always the person who gets my attention:

Old friends sat on the park bench like bookends.

The Misissippi delta was shining like a National guitar.

I could probably come up with hundreds of his that I like... but I digress.

Oh! You've reminded me -- right now I'm reading "An Arsonist Guide to Writer's Homes in New England" about a guy who burns down Emily Dickenson's house. There was a great line in there that I meant to write down, it's what got me started thinking about such things which led to me posting this thread. Now I'll have to go find it......

Yes. The title refers to the scientific term describing the ability to distinguish objects in total darkness. The heroine in the story is haunted by the stigma of a family member convicted of murder. BBC produced an adaptation of the novel starring Helena Bonham-Carter. It was shown on PBS in the nineties.

The opening lines of A Dark-Adapted Eye

Dandelion wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered.

RAY BRADBURY, Dandelion Wine

Re: A flip dark chill winter bastard though dry


Don't get me started on Emily . . . with reference to the death of her parents, she wrote:

My life closed twice
Before its close
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me
So huge, so hopeless to conceive

Parting is all we know of Heaven
And all we need of Hell.

That's one of them Set...love it.

Yeah, but i screwed it up . . . i realized that and tried to edit, but you beat me there . . . here it is with the omitted line put in:

My life closed twice
Before its close
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell

Parting is all we know of Heaven
And all we need of Hell.

Here we go, before Boom comes down on me like a ton of bricks for trompin' around in her thread:

CHARTLESS

I never saw a moor
I never saw the sea
Yet know i how the heather looks
And what a wave must be

I never spoke with God
Nor visited in Heaven
Yet certain am i of the spot
As if the chart were given