And while you're at it remind me to be more careful what buttons I push on my iPod next time. I left for work this morning without my wristwatch and when I noticed I was too lazy to go back upstairs to get it; I figured hey if there's no clock in the room I can use the clock on my iPod. Right. Well, it's not that the clock doesn't work just fine (there was none in the room) but somehow in the process of using it I clicked an extra button and ran three hours off my novel before I discovered what I'd done. Nice work. Now I have to find my place again. Woe is me.
The novel, by the way, is Charles Dickens' "Hard Times," and if you're a Dickens fan and haven't read it yet I recommend it highly. It is, as I recall, his last and also, as I recall, the only novel he wrote in the 20th Century. It's his gloomy (or is that redundant?) and prescient take on the foibles of the Industrial Revolution and on the whole facts-are-facts no-nonsense (read "standardized testing") school of educational theory as exemplified by the tyrannical tutoring of one Thomas ("I shall have the satisfaction of causing you to be strictly educated") Gradgrind and a host of supporting pedagogical demagogues (wow!) and manifested in the lives of the children they instruct.
Also it's a just plain good read. It's Dickens. Did I mention that?
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4 comments:
um. but he died in 1870.
Then I recall incorrectly. Very incorrectly, it turns out:
"In his 1854 novel, "Hard Times," Dickens puts the poverty-ridden factory towns of 19th century England on trial. The excerpt included here begins the novel, using the town's school to recreate the dehumanizing industrial world in microcosm. In the process, we see a scathingly satirical -- and all too accurate -- portrait of the factory-like charity schools common in U.S. and English urban centers in the first half of the 19th century."
well, tday it says 13 there, so that should count for something.
i bet you were thinking twain. he's ours.
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