Fish and Chips and Math

Just a quick update here before bed. Tomorrow I'm going on a trip to London for a cruise down (up?) the Thames, so there'll be plenty to report on then, I'm sure.

Today was the second and final day of discussion on Our Mutual Friend. There's no final exam in this class, just a paper on a topic of our choosing -- and as I won't be choosing something related to Our Mutual Friend, there's really no practical reason to have read it besides being able to talk about it in class. But more proud of having read it for no good reason than I would be if I'd needed to do a presentation on it or otherwise "use" it in class. I know I go on and on about it, but it went on and on, too, so I feel it's fair. As of now, I'm done with it (in this forum, anyway).

Afterwards, I caught the bus into town for some real food. "Real food" here means "something I didn't make that doesn't require the removal of plastic before it can be eaten." I ran into Charles on the way to the bus and made a pretty convincing show of taking his suggestion to get Indian food seriously, but we all know that I'm not going to go off and find some random Indian place by myself. What do I know? I need guidance. So I went off in search of fish and chips instead. I was still craving good fish and chips after being thwarted in my attempts on the pier and at the cricket match. I found a place called The House that was all patio and no restaurant: wherever the kitchen was, it wasn't anywhere I could see. There was some live music -- two guys on acoustic guitars -- which to me is normally a reason to avoid a place, but they were really laid back and suited the atmosphere well. Mostly Simon & Garfunkel, Eagles, and Don McLean.

Everyone who worked at the place seemed to be from somewhere else. The hostess was French, my waitress had an accent of some kind, another guy was... European -- and there was a French couple seated near me and a French woman with her (presumably) French toddler not far away. It's sad to see that the U.S. isn't the only country with an immigration problem. Of course, in England's case, not even chain-link fencing the beaches will help, what with that damn Chunnel just funneling more and more foreigners in every day. Tsk tsk.

When my bill came, I thought it looked about twice what it should've been, so I gave her a 20 note. When I only got 15p back (instead of nearly £10), I mentioned to her that my meal had't cost as much as I'd been charged, and she went back to the unseen kitchen to investigate. Five minutes later (I guess it's far away) she comes back and shows me the bill, and says she's sorry, but it's £19.85. The individual items on the bill, however, clearly total less than £10, but apparently she skipped that part. It looked to me like the three items had been added, totalled, and then added again to that total.

"I got fish and chips*, peas**, and a lemonade***," I told her. "How could those cost £19.85? There's no way they could. How is that possible?"

So off she went to check it again. I was starting to think this was either a joke or subversive European payback for America's foreign policy. A few minutes later, though, the French hostess came back with all the change I had coming to me and apologized for the error. She didn't argue the point at all. I appreciated that, of course, but boy, those French sure give up easy!

Oh, also. Right "outside" the seating area (we were all "outside," but this was only ten feet away or so) was a street "performer" (I'm big on the quotation marks tonight) dressed as a genie holding a brass lamp. He was dressed pretty much like Aladdin, but with face and body paint. He stood there stock still waiting for someone to drop a coin in his box for quite a while. I figured no one would, and was surprised when about half a dozen passers-by did. I don't get his act, though. He'd lean forward, beckon them closer, have them rub the lamp and close their eyes, and then tell them... something. I couldn't hear what, and I wasn't about to pay any amount of money to find out (my tip went to the musicians). Sometimes a group of young hooligans would come by and give him a hard time, as if he were a guard at Buckingham Palace. I've busked before, but I'd draw the line at dressing like a genie.

Anyway, to bed. More tomorrow.



*The fish and chips were good. Mission accomplished.

**When I ordered, the hostess asked me if I wanted peas with my chips. I felt game for that, even though I wouldn't have ordered a side of peas otherwise. It was a whole cereal bowl full of peas. I guess people are really into peas here. I mean, I ate them, but still. Peas?

***Sprite with a slice of lemon in it.

No Friend of Mine

Tonight I finished Our Mutual Friend.

I've spent some amount of time every day for the past two weeks plugging away at this 800-page monstrosity. The last 40 or so pages were the slowest. I felt so close to the end that it hardly seemed worth pushing myself anymore. I mean, 40 pages out of 800 -- what's the rush? I can do 40 pages standing on my head. Eventually, though, I steeled myself and finished it off.

I complain all the time about just how long this novel is, but it's difficult to express how much longer it feels. It may make me unpopular(er) to say this, but Dickens gets on my nerves. There are some nice moments, sure, when I can genuinely enjoy his prose, and maybe once every 50 pages or so I chuckle to myself, but in general I found this novel to be tiresome and overblown. Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll, called it "genius," so I don't feel completely secure in bashing it, but I'd like to think that the difference between modern and Victorian standards in writing have something to do with it, but not even that fully explains it. I've enjoyed everything else we've read, and that's all been as Victorian as Dickens. By sheer size alone, Our Mutual Friend is worth a Lady Audley's Secret, a What Maisie Knew, and half a Peter Pan, but I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as any of these.

If I were in a novel-writing workshop and someone handed this book to me, I'd have a surfeit of negative comments. Apart from a few exceptions, most of the "characters" are one-dimensional caricatures. They're characterizations, not convincing people. Everyone in this book has seemingly had an identifying phrase -- "I know his tricks and manners," "I earn my living by the sweat of my brow," "A literary man -- with a wooden leg," etc. -- issued to him at birth, which he is contractually obligated to utter upon every appearance. They're fine at first, but after the first three or twenty times, they turn stale. Instead of mannerisms or tics, some characters seem to have obsessive-compulsive behaviors which they are compelled to perform ad nauseum, like Fledgeby and his desperate search for whiskers. I know the purpose of these little quirks, but they occur with such frequency that they quickly stop being quirks and turn into annoyances for the reader ("the reader," here, being me).

Dickens is crazily repetitive, too, sometimes filling an entire paragraph (or the better part of a page) with several iterations of the same long phrase. If there's wit to be had the first time, it's definitely worn out its welcome by the fourth time. In other instances, the phrase in question isn't especially lengthy, but it shows up with a clockwork predictability that soon renders it dull. An example I can think of off the top of my head is the description of a character "disappearing" into her lover's arms. Fine, she disappears. Great. But Dickens hits this word again, and again, and again... it's clever once, maybe, but every single time? This kind of repetition feels forced, or worse, self-consciously witty. Ugh. I hate that.

One or two of the names have the same effect. I know Dickens is known for having unique names for his characters, which is admirable and all, but some of the names in Our Mutual Friend are just... well, dumb. Sloppy, for example. There's a guy named Sloppy. That sounds like something out of Blackadder. By the way, Sloppy's obligatory physical trait is that he opens his mouth very wide when he laughs, and he wears a lot of buttons (which I don't get at all -- does he sew them on or something, and if so, why?).

I found that I was happy whenever a character died and disappointed when he fought off the grim specter of Death to cling to life for several hundred pages more. More than a few of them bite it, which is considerate of the author, but they sure take their sweet time about it. Some are idiotic, but never get called on it for some reason; others get entirely undeserved happy endings. It's a complicated plot, with dozens of characters who hold various relationships with one another (thus the title), but we still get a trite ending: all the good people are happy, and all the bad people (with one exception) are dead. At least Mary Braddon apologizes for her happy ending in Lady Audley's Secret: "I hope no one will take objection to my story because the end of it leaves the good people all happy and at peace." It's not that I object to a happy ending, but in this case, things are less interesting when everything works out in the end.

But don't tell Therie I said any of this. Trying to get a good grade here.

(Speaking of which, I got an A on my first paper, in case you're curious.)