Happy Birthday Mr Dickens and Congratulations NSW State Library and the NSW Dickens Society

Today is Charles Dickens’ birthday and the State Library of NSW have celebrated by making a big announcement in conjunction with the NSW Dickens Society. Sydney has won the bid to host the Dickens Fellowship Conference, it’s now in its 112th year. Last year was held in Cararra, Italy and the year prior Aberdeen, Scotland. The 2018 conference will be held during Australia’s glorious springtime from October the 25th through to the 30th in Sydney.

The announcement was made in Centennial Park beneath the life-sized statue of Dickens as part of the birthday celebrations that the NSW Dickens Society have arranged. As it turns out, NSW doesn’t just love Dickens, he loves us too. He reportedly encouraged people to move to NSW and sent his two sons to live here. Consequently Charles Dickens holds a special place in our hearts.

When I spoke to Walter Mason, vice-president of the NSW Dickens Society, he commented,

It makes my heart sing that there are still enough people out there sufficiently excited about 19th century literature to make an even like this happen. As part of the organising committee I can tell you that hosting this conference in Australia is a very big deal indeed – we are a small society and a long way from the rest of the world, so the whole thing has been the enormous undertaking. But worth every minute – and our President Louise Owens has already put in hundreds of hours of work over the past few years to make it work, We have a stellar lineup of speakers covering fascinating topics. And what I love about this conference is that it’s NOT for academics and specialists – it is for everyone who loves books, writing and literature. We are all enthusiastic amateurs, and it is in that spirit we have created this event.

Dickens enthusiast and Booker Prize winner Thomas Keneally is heading up the impressive line-up of speakers. He will be discussing his fascination with Dickens oldest son and exploring his life in Australia. Other conference highlights include exploring the Dickens Museum, a trivia night (wine? Yes please), displays in the NSW State Library, and a banquet at Vaucluse House which sounds incredible.

What fabulously exciting news to celebrate Charles Dickens birthday! I have... great expectations for this event. I’ll leave you with some Charles Dickens quotes to warm the rest of your day.

Be what you wanna be. Do what you wanna do. Read what you wanna read. Yeah!

You know what I am tired of? The need for articles coming out in defense of Women’s Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Genre Fiction in general. Every day my newsfeed has multiple articles on this phenomenon, and sadly, they are still needed. For some reason people just cannot seem to get the point that we do not live in an English classroom where book titles are dictated by necessity so that knowledge and understanding can be tested in a standardized way that the government requires. In real life people can read and enjoy whatever they want… AND WHO THE HELL ARE YOU TO TELL THEM THAT THEY CANNOT!

Sorry guys, I know I went all caps there. It got scary, I was even a bit scared of my own emotions but this book shaming is really starting to get my goat. And if there is one thing regular followers of this blog know, it’s that I don’t like anyone looking at or touching my goat, let alone taking it. Don’t make me go all Liam Neeson on your arse over my goat. I have a terrible Irish accent and nobody will benefit from this scenario. Now let’s get back to the heavy stuff. You’ve had your levity break!

This morning a picture captioned “A call for respectful discussion of Fifty Shades of Grey – It is okay to and welcome to criticize a book. It is not okay to be a terrible person” was on my newsfeed. Yesterday an insightful article by Marian Keyes entitled, “Please can we stop saying ‘chick-lit'” caught my attention. For the former here’s what I have to say, love it or hate it, you have no right to dictate to someone what they enjoy reading. I love reading James Joyce. People often tell me I am a shameless wanker and that Joyce is likewise a wanker and hence we should just die in wankerhood together. It isn’t going to stop me loving James Joyce. His writing just really sits well with me. As does Julian Barnes. It doesn’t matter what you say, I will continue to love them, and read them and reread them. And although I quite happily debate the merits of Barnes and Joyce with people and am fine with people not loving them, when people resort to name calling and put downs it’s a bit much. Those people are poo poo heads, yes I get the irony. Same thing with Fifty Shades, lovers, if it vibes with them, if they enjoy it, if it gives them a moment’s escape from their lives, go for it. Love it, read it. Get inspired, go read more books, yeah! Go ahead, don’t like Fifty Shades, criticize it, but when you start being nasty to people who like it, well you’ve lost the argument, you’ve lost respect, you’ve lost yourself.

As for Marian Keyes plea – please stop saying Chick Lit, I both agree wholeheartedly yet disagree at the same time. Does Marian Keyes, hate chick lit? No, of course not. Is she saying it sucks? No, of course not. Is she pointing out that the term is used as a put down? Yes. Is it a put down? Yes and no. The term Chick Lit is often used by men and women alike, to put down works that focus on women. Novels in this genre tend to have successful female leads, with professional ambitions and a quirky group of friends, add to this a man often comes along and catches the lead characters eye. Then things of course get complicated, job goes to shit, fall out with friends, love interest goes all skewwhiff, then the strong female leads, pulls herself together, gets her groove back, gets her job back, gets her friends back and then the cherry on the cake, last of all, gets her man. Sounds a lot like real life, professional woman + career goals + crazy friends + a bit of romance. Hardly something that should be put down. I mean people rave about the Bronte sisters. They write about the same stuff. “Oh it is just silly fluff, about love,” you hear people say. Yeah, because love is just so stupid. Having meaningful connections is just ridiculous and would never happen in great literature. Dickens, Shakespeare, Virgil, none of these dudes would ever write about silly love stories. To be honest, typically in Chick Lit the love interest is actually the icing on the cake. Don’t get me wrong, frosting is important, I like me a big chunk of butter cream. If I have the choice between frosted or unfrosted… well let’s just call me Elsa. But the female lead tends to have to sort out her career and friends first. That is the priority, it’s not that the love interest doesn’t get a lot of the word count dedicated to them, but the priority, the first things first, goes to career and bat shit crazy friends. Where would we be without out friends? How could we pay rent without our job? It’s a bit realistic isn’t it? Sure it gets mashed up with wit and humour but there’s a lot of deep stuff in Chick Lit, but there is a lot of truth and tragedy included. So why put it down? The answer is quite simply, because we live in a society that trivializes women and their experiences, and for women to get ahead they almost have to turn on their own kind. The bagging of the term Chick Lit is simply a manifestation of that. So as far as I can see you can call it whatever you like, Commercial Women’s Fiction, Women’s Fiction, Chick Lit, Clit Lit, Vagraphy (okay I made that one up, I just wanted to use vag somewhere for my own amusement), the same issue will arise. People will put it down. People, what a bunch of bastards. Hopefully society progresses, that’s what needs to happen, and we are getting there, but until then, no matter how many terms we throw at stories for and about women, they will get trivialized. They’ll sell, because us bitches be smart and good with the books and the learning and stuff, but it’ll be marginalized.

Whoa. Robin, what just happened? Did you just go all overt feminist on our arses. Yeah, I kind of did. Commercial Women Writers tend to do that. Sorry. We give you plenty of shits and giggles, but we give you a message too. Let’s just take a deep breath and hug it out.

Memoir of a Teacher: Chapter 5, A Tale of Two Cities

Chapter FIVE of my epic “memoir” of “appropriation” inspired by my friend undertaking NaNoWriMo. Read the first  highly original chapter here https://riedstrap.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/memoir-of-a-teacher-a-red-hot-tip-for-nanowrimo/

The Period

It was the best of cakes,
it was the worst of cakes,
it was the age of no carbs,
it was the age of excess,
it was the epoch of knowledge,
it was the epoch of the Web for not just porn and cats,
it was the season of health,
it was the season of sedentary life styles,
it was the spring of improvement
it was the winter of vices,
we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven,
we were all going directly somewhere warmer, where all our friends would be…

In short, the period was so far like the present period, that it was in fact the present period. There was a horse faced queen on the throne of England; there was no monarch occupying the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal that the governments were happy to keep the status quo and slowly watch the gap between rich and poor; and the educated and uneducated,  grow. It was the year of Our Lord two thousand and fourteen.  Spiritual revelations were conceded to the conceited at that favoured period, as at this. As religion and philosophy was considered to be an awful lot of wank and something for drunkards to pontificate over, not something that actually impacted on one’s life. Mrs. Riedstra had recently attained her five-and-thirtieth blessed birthday, on which day nothing prophetic or interesting happened at all. It would seem that the world at larged cared not for her passing of time. Even the Cock-lane ghost couldn’t give a shit and so it’s tapping little hands remained silent.  People had given up communicating in verse and instead relied on emoticons, memes with laughing cats and merps. France, being that little bit different,  tried to cling onto verse but only in French. They of course were a little dour but then again a study had been performed to show they had the bitter gene and the Dutch had the happy,  so their desire to stay with past dialogue and not engage with current trends could only be expected.  Under the guidance of her Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane achievements as no longer sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards. But. despite these advances there were still,  the wary, the hungry, the disenfranchised and the university politician. And so all was not all as smooth and happy as the throne and the not throne thought it to be.  It was the time of the underdog,  the unsung hero, the different and the just plain weird. Thus did the year two thousand and fourteen conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small creatures–the creatures of this chronicle among the rest–along the roads that lay before them.

This chapter from my memoir from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I urge to read the real thing.

For the first chapter of my “memoir” of “appropriation” go to https://riedstrap.wordpress.com/2014/10/31/memoir-of-a-teacher-a-red-hot-tip-for-nanowrimo/