I swear I read this book before.
A Tale of Two Cities is intermittently strikingly odd throughout. There is the chasing casket scene. I do not remember reading that previously and that scene would stick in one's head, it would. It has certainly stuck in my noggin since (re?)-reading it a couple of days ago. Had to re-re-read it to get the full horror. Can't even re-type it here, not at this hour of night (might give me nightmares). A Dickens horror story? I swear I read this book before. A Tale is, in significant patches, a horror story. It is absolutely unique in Dickens' oeuvre. In other places it is just weird, just plain scratch-your-head, what-is-he-writing-about WEIRD. Take this passage. Part of chapter 23 in Book The Second (sic), in a section described by Richard Maxwell as "this extraordinary passage," "apocalyptic," Dickens writes of the appearance in the post-Apocalyptic French countryside of marauding "barbarians," and instantiates them with "a shaggy-haired man" whose appearance he describes to purpose. A suitably horrifying appearance but amidst that account of the shaggy-haired man's mien Dickens, unaccountably, adds this:
"He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and steel, pulled at it until it was a bright glow: then, suddenly held it from him and dropped something into it from between his finger and thumb, that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke."
:)
What the fuck is he talking about there? Richard, why fore art thou not elucidating on this bit of black magic in your long end note? In a book--which I've read before!--filled with the bizarre, this is the most bizarre. So far.
Good nite.
A Tale of Two Cities is intermittently strikingly odd throughout. There is the chasing casket scene. I do not remember reading that previously and that scene would stick in one's head, it would. It has certainly stuck in my noggin since (re?)-reading it a couple of days ago. Had to re-re-read it to get the full horror. Can't even re-type it here, not at this hour of night (might give me nightmares). A Dickens horror story? I swear I read this book before. A Tale is, in significant patches, a horror story. It is absolutely unique in Dickens' oeuvre. In other places it is just weird, just plain scratch-your-head, what-is-he-writing-about WEIRD. Take this passage. Part of chapter 23 in Book The Second (sic), in a section described by Richard Maxwell as "this extraordinary passage," "apocalyptic," Dickens writes of the appearance in the post-Apocalyptic French countryside of marauding "barbarians," and instantiates them with "a shaggy-haired man" whose appearance he describes to purpose. A suitably horrifying appearance but amidst that account of the shaggy-haired man's mien Dickens, unaccountably, adds this:
"He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and steel, pulled at it until it was a bright glow: then, suddenly held it from him and dropped something into it from between his finger and thumb, that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke."
:)
What the fuck is he talking about there? Richard, why fore art thou not elucidating on this bit of black magic in your long end note? In a book--which I've read before!--filled with the bizarre, this is the most bizarre. So far.
Good nite.