Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens, 1838)


This classic, while it is by far the poorest book by Dickens I have read, nevertheless somehow endures as one of the author’s most visible and popular works. Perhaps if it were not the first Dickens people were often tasked with reading, they would not develop a dislike towards the man. All its qualities are inferior, and all its flaws deeper, than every other work of his I’ve encountered.

Oliver, to begin with, is a cypher. His only qualities seem to be politeness and naiveté, neither of which seems likely to have emerged naturally in a child raised in the orphanage described. He fails to make any meaningful decision the entire book, acting only as a plot device and nullifying him as something anyone reading should care about — since as a plot device he is more or less immune to harm or influence. The idea of inherent honesty and goodness, always strained in Dickens (and allied to class), reaches the level of nonsensical here.

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He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant

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Houndmouth – “Penitentiary”
From the Hills Beneath the City

This folk-orchestra item impressed me in the car with its resonant chorus harmonies and authentic sounding insertions of “oh mama” and “oh lord.” Not my usual wheelhouse, but a great song is a great song. (insound)

Who can tell how scenes of peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close and noisy places, and carry their own freshness, deep into their jaded hearts! Men who have lived in crowded, pent-up streets, through lives of toil, and who have never wished for change; men, to whom custom has indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks; even they, with the hand of death upon them, have been known to yearn at last for one short glimpse of Nature’s face; and, carried far from the scenes of their old pains and pleasures, have seemed to pass at once into a new state of being. Crawling forth, from day to day, to some green sunny spot, they have had such memories wakened up within them by the sight of the sky, and hill and plain, and glistening water, that a foretaste of heaven itself has soothed their quick decline, and they have sunk into their tombs, as peacefully as the sun whose setting they watched from their lonely chamber window but a few hours before, faded from their dim and feeble sight!

Dickens, Oliver Twist

Miscellaneous heading crests, source obscure

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Lotus Plaza – “Monoliths”
Spooky Action at a Distance

It’s hard to pin down the sound exactly – Jesus & Mary Chain crossed with Women? However you define it, this Deerhunter side project makes solid, fuzzy psych-rock and “Monoliths” is an ebullient nugget of just that. (insound)

Pages from DMT 42 and Duke City Realty, by Galina Golikova, illustrated by Gerald Laing

I only know two sorts of boys. Mealy boys, and beef-faced boys.”

“And which is Oliver?”

“Mealy. I know a friend who has a beef-faced boy; a fine boy, they call him; with a round head, and red cheeks, and glaring eyes; a horrid boy; with a body and limbs that appear to be swelling out of the seams of his blue clothes; with the voice of a pilot, and the appetite of a wolf. I know him! The wretch!

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist