Crispin and Dickens and Memory

Crispin has been a trooper at dental appointments for a couple of small cavities, and spent a couple of hours creating a spaceship for a tiny alien with parachute he received as a prize from the dentist:



The door opens, and his alien can go inside. On the lower right is bamboo; before the stick broke, he could move the ship as a puppeteer might.

The boys and I have enjoyed Daniel Pinkwater's novel, The Adventures of the Cat-Whiskered Girl, tremendously, and Crispin spent a good deal of time creating this collage of a haunted castle that is visited by feline spaceships.



Daniel Pinkwater is (was) a regular visitor to NPR's Saturday Weekend Edition to talk children's books with Scott Simon. He was also, I believe, a frequent caller on Car Talk, and Click and Clack created something like a Pinkwater index to indicate whether a certain type of car could accommodate drivers with a wide berth. Although I know of Pinkwater for years, I had not read any of his many children's books until a few months ago. He is a joy to read. He writes books of varying lengths. At present, we are enjoying his longer novels such as Cat Whiskered Girl, the Neddiad, and The Artsy-Smartsy Club. His prose is tasty and vivid, he inserts many overt and covert references to classical literature and makes it cool and fun to love the great books of the past, and like a funny Magical Realist, his plots, with strong inner consistency, get really weird and wonderful really quickly. He is able to bring together aliens, ancient gods who want to destroy the world, ghosts, and the more while maintaining a Dickensian optimism and buoyancy in his books. You know everything will be surprising, and all will be well.

I had the pleasure of listening to A Tale of Two Cities. Although this book is famous, I have read it only once before, 26 years ago or so in 10th grade with Joe Ball (a poet who told me that the nice thing about getting old and reading books was that you didn't have to keep reading a book you didn't like). I can still remember composing folk songs based on the novel and singing "I'm a Tigress when I walk. . ." in my Madame Defarge song. It was a pleasure to observe myself to see how much I remembered (the spilled wine portending blood in the French revolution, Madame Defarge knitting, Sidney Carton's final lines and generous sacrifice) and how much I had forgotten or never really attended to 26 years ago (Dr. Manet's condemnation while in the Bastille; how Madame Defarge was related to the abuses of the aristocracy).

Two Cities is a much shorter novel than Bleak House, David Copperfield, Little Dorritt, Nicholas Nickelby, all of which I've enjoyed these past 18 months. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps Dickens really wanted to intensify the images of revolution of and the guillotine, Two Cities is not peppered with a motley assortment of eccentric and silly characters--people who prove to be both endearing and, through narrative persistence and intuition, essential to the plot some 500 pages or 24 hours of listening later. After Dombey, I plan to listen to the 57 hour Les Miserables; then I'll be able to tell Crispin and Liam what occurs in the 54 hours cut out of the 3 hour blockbuster musical we enjoy so much.