ATDTDA: "Pretty Bleak, Pretty Bleak" [SPAR]

[Monte Davis]

Ya Sam:
> Got-damn it! If it hadn't been for the attribution I would 
> have thought it 
> is straight outta Pynchon.
> 
> >
> >"When the house was out of sight, I sat, with my bird-cage in the  
> >straw at
> >my feet, forward on the low seat to look out of the high  
> window, watching 
> >the frosty trees, that were like beautiful pieces of  spar, 
> and the fields 
> >all smooth and white with last night's snow, and  the sun, 
> so red but 
> >yielding so little heat, and the ice, dark like  metal where 
> the skaters 
> >and sliders had brushed the snow away."
> >
> >         --Charles Dickens (_Bleak House_, Ch. 3)

Tim S and I have been ringing the Bleak House bell since Thanksgiving;
there's *no* novelist before 1900 who strikes as many of the same notes with
the same timbre as Pynchon. Many of the London streets in GR lead to
Chancery.

A few months ago I watched the 2001 ITV adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby,
which I'd read long long before. It really delivered on Wackford Squeers and
on Arthur Gride, a lecherous old miser who's after Nicholas' intended
Madeline Bray -- both melodramatic viillains who make Scarsdale Vibe look
like a Presbyterian elder. It was so wonderfully over the top that my reflex
response was that the director had pumped it up [grumble cheesy TV mutter
pandering grumble...] Then I went back to the novel, and if anything the
director had toned it down .