Eat you heart out, Charles Dickens...

From: Flickr

"A woman who has been employed by the McDonald's Corporation for over 10 years says she was arrested last week after she confronted the company president at a meeting and told him she couldn't afford to buy shoes or food for her children.

     Nancy Salgado, 26, told The Real News that she felt like she had to speak out during McDonald’s USA President Jeff Stratton's speech at the Union League Club of Chicago on Friday for the sake of her children.
     'It's really hard for me to feed my two kids and struggle day to day,' she shouted as Stratton was speaking. 'Do you think this is fair, that I have to be making $8.25 when I've worked for McDonald's for ten years?'
     'I've been there for forty years,' Stratton replied from the podium.
     'The thing is that I need a raise. But you're not helping your employees. How is this possible?' Salgado asked.
     At that point, someone approached Salgado and informed her that she was going to be arrested."
— Crooks & Liars
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"[…] Chattel slavery has been abolished in most countries, whereas wage slavery still exists across the globe. Regulations and legislation has changed the atmosphere of wage slavery, work conditions have improved, compensation has become regulated, and education affects the status of the slaves. But they are all bound to their employer in some fashion.
     In the early years of the Industrial Revolution, wage slavery was as cruel, demeaning, and difficult as most chattel slaves were used to. As freedmen left their masters in search of the American Dream, they soon realized life wasn't that easy. They became bound to their landlords and shopkeepers through debt peonage. Each year crop prices fell and the cost of running a farm increased. Farmers had to buy materials, equipment, and supplies on credit just to get the planting season going. Credit prices were as much as 60% higher than cash prices, and shops were usually owned and run by the landowners. This kept these freemen in almost the exact same position as they were in during slavery.
     Wage slavery hasn't been limited to southern states. The northern industrialist had their ways as well; especially in the mining, lumber, and factory sectors. There were limited regulations on working conditions, compensation, and working hours. Laborers often worked long hours, 10-15 a day; and regularly involved young children. As Big Business grew, the control workers had over their conditions shrank. They became replaceable."
— Stefany Smith, Yahoo! Voices
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Contact Jeff Stratton here...

"[...] the courtroom spectacle"

"Dickens, who began his career as a court reporter, was ever more partial to emotive portraits than to the art of facticity. Bleak House, for instance, is populated by a judiciary of supreme inefficiency, who run their 'horse-hair warded heads against walls of words.' The reader, implicated in this warped system, has two unlikely tales from which to fathom events: Esther’s guileless, jarring earnestness or the ingenuity of the omniscient narrator. The novel, in general, seems to favor the slippery, unreliable narrator over the ingenuous. Villains, after all, often make for far more compelling characters. In such cases, the reader assumes his or her role of moral adjudicator: the more these infamous characters do protest, the more we discerning readers deem them treacherous.

     To 'narrate' was originally a term of law, used to designate the initial statement of a trial; and much has been made of the parallels between literary and legal detectives, of the court as a spectacle wherein players compete for the juror’s attention; the juror, like the reader, is charged with sifting fact from fancy.
     'The journalistic ‘I’ is an overreliable narrator,' Janet Malcolm writes in her seminal work, The Journalist and the Murderer, 'a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy.'
     It perhaps comes as no surprise that the Greeks, who loved a good chorus, invented trial by (sizable) jury."
— Jess Cotton, Los Angeles Review of Books
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"sentences... pretty in their pettiness"

"At the tender age of 21 Henry James was deeply in love with words. Sometimes he may have been in love with them for the sake of their sound and placement rather than their meaning, at least so when he was a young man...as he grew older, James became one of those few people who never wrote a bad sentence (according to Mr. McMurtry). However, in 1865, he wrote some lovely-sounding sentences that were mechanically semi-pure if not accurate in what they were saying, but certainly sounded pretty in their pettiness.

     It was in The Nation on 21 December 1865 that James wrote what is a very good example of this beautiful nothingness when he brought out his pen and stabbed Charles Dickens in the heart.

From: Entertainment Earth

     He was reviewing Our Mutual Friend, but he managed at the very beginning to say that it was not simply that this novel was not good, but that everything Dickens had written in the previous ten years—back to when James was 11—was 'poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion.'"
— Ptak Science Books
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Buy books by Charles Dickens and Henry James here...

Genre: "a flimsy irrelevence"

From: Retronaut

"This week, the chair of this year's Man Booker prize, Robert Macfarlane, published an introduction to a new edition of M John Harrison's Climbers. In it, he says 'let me try to express a little of the amazement I feel when standing in front of the work of Harrison, who is best known as one of the restless fathers of modern SF but who is to my mind among the most brilliant novelists writing today, and with regard to whom the question of genre is a flimsy irrelevance.' Are we witnessing the end of the genre wars? Macfarlane has written introductions as enthusiastically to the (genre) work of John Christopher and the (literary) work Edward Thomas and Charles Dickens. Before starting on this year's submissions for the Man Booker (I am also a judge), I was among those who selected the Granta Best of Young British Novelists, a list which featured a number of genre-inflected writers (Steven Hall, Naomi Alderman, Joanna Kavenna, Ned Beauman, Xiaolu Guo, Helen Oyeyemi, Jenni Fagan and Sarah Hall). Is genre, as Macfarlane says 'a flimsy irrelevance?'"

— The Guardian Book Blog
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Paper Romance

From: Logie Books

"Why have Japanese consumers not fallen in love with digital reading? 'So far the Japanese have failed to be moved by e-readers from home or abroad, mostly owing to a paucity of content,' says editor and publisher of Japan's E-book 2.0 magazine Hiroki Kamata. Sony (SNE), for instance, has been in the market for more than seven years but has sold only 500,000 e-readers in Japan. Other manufacturers' tablets have begun to sell here, but overall the category is still way behind e-reader take-up in the U.S. or Europe. Tablet sales have tripled since 2011, with market research firm IDC estimating tablet sales in Japan to be 3.6 million units.

     Japanese consumers still seem dead set against adopting e-books, showing less interest in them than even the print-worshipping French. According to an R.R. Bowker study, 72% of Japanese consumers said they had not tried e-books and did not want to try them. That compares with 66% of French respondents polled. Overall adoption rates in Japan remain the lowest in the developed world. Only 8% of Japanese readers have downloaded and paid for an e-book compared with 20% in the U.S."
— Michael Fitzpatrick, CNNMoney
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The best-selling Japanese novel of all time has been Norwegian Wood (ノルウェイの森 Noruwei no Mori?) by Haruki Murakami, published in 1987. It has sold approximately 12 million copies. A similar English language best seller of the same period: The Pillars of Earth, by Ken Follett, has sold approximately 15 million copies since 1989.
     Neither compares to the all-time best-selling novel, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Its sales to date — granted, it was published in 1859, but the numbers are still impressive — are approximately 200 million. (data and details from Wikipedia)

"The novel [Norwegian Wood] is set in Tokyo during the late 1960s, a time when Japanese students, like those of many other nations, were protesting against the established order. While it serves as the backdrop against which the events of the novel unfold, Murakami (through the eyes of Toru and Midori) portrays the student movement as largely weak-willed and hypocritical. […]
     Norwegian Wood was hugely popular with Japanese youth and made Murakami something of a superstar in his native country [...]. A film based on this novel and with the same name was released in Japan on 11 December 2010 […]."
— Wikipedia
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Block/Flow/Flood

"Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase, while others, hunched over a notepad or keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing? In The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (Houghton Mifflin, January), neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the hows and whys of writing, revealing the science behind hypergraphia — the overwhelming urge to write — and its dreaded opposite, writer's block. The result is an innovative contribution to our understanding of creative drive, one that throws new light on the work of some of our greatest writers."

— Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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"Isaac Asimov, who wrote nearly 500 books, is a classic example. He would sit down and compose 90 words a minute on his typewriter and reportedly never suffered a blocked moment. Everyone thinks of Proust as hypergraphic because he wrote such a long novel over such an extended time. Other writers often described as hypergraphic include Stephen King, Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, Agatha Christie, Anthony Trollope, John Updike, Herman Melville, and Joyce Carol Oates. [...]
     Certain brain conditions can trigger it [hypergraphia], and they all seem to involve the temporal lobes. It was Norman Geschwind [’51] and colleagues who first showed an association between temporal lobe epilepsy and hypergraphia. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s temporal lobe epilepsy almost certainly caused his prolific writing. Just before his seizures, he would enter a state of religious ecstasy in which his world was flooded with meaning. Between seizures, he wrote hypergraphically, often about his struggle with the fact that the periods in which he seemed to experience the highest truths were also the product of a disease."
— Alice Flaherty, in conversation with Paula Byron (Harvard Medical Alumni Journal)
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Happy Birthday, Charles John Huffam Dickens...

From: Mr. Rennaissance

The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall will be lead celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens.
     Events to be held across the country include a wreath-laying ceremony at Dickens's grave in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey and at the novelist's birthplace in Portsmouth, Hampshire.
     The congregation at Westminster Abbey will include the largest ever gathering of descendants of the Victorian novelist as well as representatives from the worlds of literature, film, theatre and the media. [...]
     Simon Callow, author of Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, will read from David Copperfield at a service being held at St Mary's Church, Portsmouth.
He said: "It's going to be a dangerously moving occasion. I really made the strong decision to come to the place where he was born rather than to Westminster Cathedral where he never wanted to be."
—Martin Chilton, The Telegraph
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"A couple of years ago, I played Charles Dickens in an episode of the British sci-fi series Doctor Who. As the doctor takes his leave of Earth, Dickens asks whether his books will still be read in the future. 'Yes,' the doctor replies. 'For how long?' Dickens wants to know. 'Forever,' says the doctor, disappearing into cyberspace. [...]

"Surprisingly, considering that Dickens is that unusual thing, a writer whose life was as riveting as his work, there has been no film biography. If there were one, a large part of it would surely center on his early years, and especially on one year of shame, humiliation and degradation, the memory of which was so painful to him that he hid it from view completely, allowing it to be revealed only after his death.
     Victorian England was profoundly shocked to discover that Dickens’s compassion for the poor and the disadvantaged sprang, not simply from Christian kindness, but from the bitter personal experience of toiling 10 hours a day, for 6 shillings a week, in a rat-infested shoe polish warehouse off the Strand from the ages of 12 to 13.
    It is of course this experience that placed children at the center of so much of his work, and inevitably and rightly it looms very large in the excellent crop of books for young people being released on the crest of the Dickens publishing tsunami which next year’s bicentenary has provoked."
— Simon Callow, The New York Times (December 16, 2011)
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Charles Dickens Helps Himself

Source images: RealBeauty and Netherlands Wikipedia

As February 7 fast approaches, Charles Dickens himself has been called in to lend a hand (or two) at copyediting his own work. The 30,000 digitized pages of his weekly magazine Household Words (later changed to All Year Round) need to be cleaned up in time for the bicentenary of his birth.

Go here to help with the project; or make a donation here...

Go to a related article here...

"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." — Thomas Mann

Illustration: Michael Hale

"[...] what's the best time of day to write? and its corollary: how many hours are necessary?
     Some writers (Dickens among them) are larks. Others – more nocturnal – are owls. Robert Frost, whose remote Vermont cabin I visited recently in company with his biographer Jay Parini, never started work till the afternoon, and often stayed up till two or three in the morning, not rising until midday, or even later. Proust, famously, worked night and day in a cork-lined room. I remember reading somewhere that Raymond Chandler observed that it was impossible to write well for more than four hours a day. What do you do in the afternoon?
     There's also the question of how long it might take to complete a novel. Here, you encounter literary legends. Faulkner claimed to have completed As I Lay Dying in six weeks. In the mid-1930s, PG Wodehouse, who wrote fast once he had the mechanics of his plots straight, polished off the last 10,000 words of Very Good, Jeeves! in a single day. In his autobiography, A Sort of Life, Graham Greene describes writing Stamboul Train on benzedrine, to pay the bills, working against the clock. Further back, Samuel Johnson wrote Rasselas, which is short, in a fortnight to defray the expenses of his mother's funeral. Or so it's said.
     More usually, a 60-70,000 word novel seems to take at least a year to complete, allowing for two or three drafts, although often the first, rough outline can get written in a matter of weeks. The strange truth about a lot of fiction is that the dominant moments that animate an entire novel can occur to the writer in a matter of minutes. After that, in the words of one New Zealand writer I recall with affection, 'it's just typing.' " — Robert McCrum, Guardian
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Author: 50% Reader: 60%

"What is the art of immersion? The focus of the book is on how the internet is changing storytelling; and the idea is really that every time a new medium comes along, it takes people 20 or 30 years to figure out what to do with it, to figure out the grammar of that medium.
      The motion picture camera was invented around 1890 and it was really about 1915 before the grammar of cinema--all the things we take for granted now, like cuts and point-of-view shots and fades and pans--were consolidated into first what we would recognize as feature films. Birth of a Nation being the real landmark. It wasn't the first film that had these characteristics but it was the first film to use all of them and that people settled on that really made a difference.
       I think we are not quite there yet with the internet but we can see the outlines of what is happening, what is starting to emerge; and it's very different from the mass media that we've been used to for the past 150 years. How so? Essentially, mass media is broadcasting, whether it's in print or over the air or whatever. It's one to many. [...] it was essentially one-way communication. There was very little way for people to write back. [...]
      But one of the things your book does is it makes you realize how pervasive storytelling is and how fundamentally human an act it is. We like telling stories, we like listening to stories [...] When we retell them, we retell them with our own additions, subtractions; we retell jokes all the time, the most primitive form of it. The audience communication among each other is one of the things your book brings out.[...] You give a marvelous example of 19th century participation with the serial novel. [...]
      Dickens as a young novelist was very influenced by the technology of the day, and so were his publishers. The situation was, in England in the 1830s, you had large numbers of people who had recently migrated to cities. Increasing numbers of them were literate, far more than had been the case even 50 years before. At the same time you had fairly rapid advances in transportation with the railroads, which guaranteed a distribution system, and printing presses, and the manufacture of paper. At the same time this sort of newly literate potential audience did not have a lot of money, so it wasn't very easy for them to go out and actually buy a book. But they could afford a small portion of a book. So, novelists like Dickens published their books in monthly installments, occasionally even in weekly installments. This meant that the writing of the novel was very much an iterative process. It was ongoing as the novel was being published. So, this made it possible for readers to make their feelings known.
     And Dickens was, I think, perhaps even more than other writers at the time, very responsive to what his readers said. He didn't always follow their suggestions. With Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, as it became increasingly apparent that she was going to meet an untimely demise, there was a great hue and cry."
— Russ Roberts, host of EconTalk in discussion with Frank Rose, author of The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way we Tell Stories
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Get The Art of Immersion here...

Charles Needs Your Help

From: Dictionary.com

"Modern academics hope the populist appeal of the journal – called Household Words when it began in 1850, then changed to All the Year Round in 1859 when Dickens dropped his publisher and went it alone – can be rekindled. [...]
     The bicentenary of the birth of Dickens is on 7 February 2012. The tiny team at the University of Buckingham hope to have the journals online by then but, while the pages have been scanned, they now need to have the inevitable computer-made errors edited out – and for that only the human eye will do.[...]
     The sheer number of pages –30,000 – poses a problem when it comes to meeting the target date. So a call to the keyboard has gone out to all amateur copy editors with access to a computer." —Tracy McVeigh, Guardian
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"80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year." — Erma Bombeck

From: Wikipedia

"The Xinhua Dictionary [1953], a Chinese-character dictionary well-known to most Chinese people, saw its 400-millionth copy roll off the press when its tenth edition was published [51 years later] at the beginning of 2004." — People's Daily Online
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Next on the list of all-time best sellers is A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859); it took 145 years to reach the 200 million mark.

"Religious books, especially the Bible and the Qur'an, are probably the most-printed books, but it is nearly impossible to find reliable figures about them. Many copies of the Bible and the Qur'an are printed and given away free, instead of being sold. The same goes for some political books, like the works of Mao Zedong or Adolf Hitler." — Wikipedia
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Designers: Sha De'an (啥德安); Li Yang (李阳)
 1984

"To love the country one must first know its history - the deeper the knowledge, the more eager the love."
Aiguo shouxian yao zhiguo - zhi zhi yu shen, ai zhi yu qie (爱国首先要知国 - 知之愈深, 爱之愈切)

Publisher: Zhejiang renmin meishu chubanshe (浙江人民美术出版社)
(from: Chineseposters.net)