This is the first instalment of my new Strange Horizons column. “Kirk Drift” is a long-read essay on Star Trek‘s Captain Kirk, popular memory, gender politics, radical nostalgia and the unicorn dog.
Good parties diverge widely; all bad parties are bad in the same way. I am trapped at a dull dinner following a dull talk: part of a series of dinners and talks that grad students organise, unpaid (though at considerable expense to themselves—experience! exposure!), to provide free content for the dull grad program I will soon leave. The Thai food is good. The man sitting across from me and a little down the way, a bellicose bore of vague continental origin, is execrable. He is somehow attached to a mild woman who is actually supposed to be here: a shy, seemingly blameless new grad student who perpetually smiles apologetically on his behalf, in an attempt to excuse whatever he’s just said. One immediately understands that she spends half her life with that worry in her eyes, that Joker-set to her mouth, and that general air of begging your pardon for offences she hadn’t even had the pleasure of committing. There is always such a woman at bad parties. She has always either found herself entrapped by a clone of this man, or soon will.
We reach the point of no return when the omnijerk (really I suspect there’s just one vast eldritch horror sitting in another dimension that extrudes its thousand tentacles into our own, and that each one of This Guy is merely an insignificant manifestation of the beast: they couldn’t all be so boring in precisely the same way by chance, surely) decides to voice some Dinner Party Opinions on original-series Star Trek. God knows why. It’s not five seconds before he’s on ‘Kirk and the green women’. He’s mocking the retrosexist trope, but smiling a little weirdly while doing it. His own insufficiently private enjoyment is peeking out, like a semi-erection on his face. A sort of Mad Men effect: saying, “isn’t it awful” and going for the low-hanging critical fruit while simultaneously rolling around in that aesthetic and idea of masculinity. Camp, but no homo!
David Copperfield’s idyllic childhood is marked by the absence of dogs. He is brought into the world by Dr. Chillip, “the meekest of his sex, the mildest of little men…he hadn’t a word to throw at a dog. He couldn’t have thrown a word at a mad dog” (Dickens 18; ch. 1). His home explicitly has “a great dog-kennel in a corner, without any dog”, in a garden that is “a very preserve of butterflies” (Dickens 24; ch. 2). This husbandless household is safe, somewhat insulated from class (the servant Peggotty and David’s mother Clara socialise affectionately and co-rule the house), loving and female.
There’s a stack of games in our house we’ve said at some point or another that we’re probably going to sell. But before we do, I force us to play one or two more times to be sure we’re not making a terrible mistake and to try to think through why we didn’t enjoy the experience (if that’s still the case). THESE… are our stories.
Everyone in board gaming goes on about how high-quality X’s of Whatever’s cardboard bits are, but Hive doesn’t fuck around: it has thick, pleasing Bakelite tiles that stack nicely in the (admittedly shoddy) plastic insert. (My edition does, at least: I know there are some wood ones going as well.) The insect-etching colours aren’t my fav, but overall: noice.
I can overlook the accompanying weird, 90s plastic tile-bag that looks like a soccer ball or a Bop-It accessory. It’s a good thing to include though, for portability’s sake. I just wish it wasn’t quite so Toys R Us.
The game mechanic involves simple strategy. This will explain the rules, though you don’t really need to know them to follow along. Suffice it to say, it’s a bit chessy. Not like the expansive, tactical/logistic chess midgame, more like the tight, ‘move in for the kill’ endgame. Which isn’t my favourite part of chess, really? If I sat down and did endgame puzzles I’d get better I guess, but it wouldn’t be *fun*, exactly. It’s this chessy quality that makes my girlfriend, who is very good at all kinds of the trad Euro games Hive doesn’t really feel like–games that certainly involve thinking and some planning–really dislike Hive. She’s not super-practiced at the ‘causal chain’ thinking chess demands (which might be a native leaning or a learned skill, or both). If you don’t enjoy or have a knack for that, if you’re really more a Eurogames person than someone who could really go for a round of checkers when the mood takes them, there’s a chance Hive won’t do it for you.
Neither of us find Hive that fun–and not just because of the win-imbalance. For me, there’s not enough to do in this game. If I wanted this sort of strategy experience I’d play chess (or I would if bloody anyone in the house wanted to play chess with me*), or maybe like, Chinese Checkers? That’s the sort of game this feels like, and it is interesting to see someone developing games along those lines, even if the result isn’t really for me. The rounds are quick, which was both a bonus and a sign that the game wouldn’t hold my interest. If they weren’t quick, it’d probably be due to analysis paralysis. I feel like if I really learned Hive I could potentially develop strategies etc., but I’m not grabbed enough for that. Hive doesn’t have chess’s complexity, glam lore or variants to draw you in.
VERDICT: We traded it on for ‘Hey! That’s my fish!’ I was not involved in this decision. We’ll see, mate. We’ll see.
* I don’t miss chess in a ‘casual game once in a while’ way, though? Either I’m in a period and situation where I’m playing 5 games a day with people around me or I’m not. I don’t really want the online experience or a game once a month. I don’t NEED chess, either. I think that part of my brain gets, for the most part, satisfied by Eurogaming. But it’s odd–I do feel I have a certain quality of itchy, compulsive thinking these hobbies answer in a way my chiefest pursuits (reading, watching, writing, cooking) don’t, really. I sometimes get the vague sense that it’s ‘healthy’ for me personally to do some gaming, that it gives me a feeling of Having Done Something which is not to be dismissed when you have depression and honestly often don’t. Accomplishment breeds accomplishment.** Maybe.
** I have always thought this and then I ran smack into mad, manic-depressive Dickens saying exactly the same thing in a letter and thought ‘oh christ,’ so I’m er, more aware it may be self-justifying bullshit, at this point.
“I swallowed that book whole. Truly in one enchanted gulp. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I fell in love then and there with the author and his work, and especially with the extraordinary inventiveness of his mind, that still gives me endless delight. And with his use of language, and his idiosyncratic construction of sentences. To this day, although I’ve read through all of Dickens several times, I still get great pleasure out of just reading a Dickens sentence.” about 4:30-4:57
This is lovely, and what’s more it’s useful to me.
“…Christmas had become a holiday primarily of the lower classes, and was largely ignored by anyone with a claim to gentility.” circa 5:55-6:05
Dickens’ “father was a naval clerk, and his mother came from a family that was in service to an Earl”. 6:10-6:16
Now that’s just wrong. Correct me please if I’m in error, but she’s gotten his parents’ backgrounds reversed.
The pushcart girl in Covent Garden father Christmas anecdote gets aired. (6:40)
“So he established a tradition of specialised holiday stories all by himself”.
This is misleading in a few ways. Slater points out how important Irving was as a predecessor here, and of course the Household Words/All The Year Round Christmas stories, which really establish the genre, are collaborative. Substantially though, it’s true that he popularises/’invents’ this genre, and that we tend to understate his importance as a generic innovator.
“In fact today’s common greeting of ‘Merry Christmas’ only came into wide circulation after the publication of A Christmas Carol.” 7:00-7:11
To the extent I trust her at this point, that’s interesting.
“The plot of this very long short story draws on the tradition in Britain of telling ghost stories at Christmas time. A Christmas Carol is a ghost story with a fairy tale ending.” 7:12-7:26
Nicely put.
“Dickens was, and still is, often accused of being cloyingly sentimental…”
Honest question: was he, at the time? Is this more of an after-the-fact formation? Who was saying it, contemporarily, and to be honest… to what extent did they pronounce that to rhyme with ‘chav’? Were such accusations of sentimentality coded language about how he was popular, uneducated and not highbrow?
“…especially in indulging a fondness for describing the deaths of children…”
This is often repeated, but it’s simply incorrect. Dickens will hardly ever show you an on-screen death. In the whole of the canon, you find it but rarely. You may–often very quickly–see a body, but the death, especially of a child, you will mostly not be in the room for. David’s being downstairs when Dora dies is, if anything, the model for a Dickens death. It honestly surprises me that specialists, who ought to know better, are so sloppy on this point: it ain’t subtle.
“…Tiny Tim being a case in point.”
Yes. In that you do not fucking see him die. How hard is this?
Perhaps that ‘describing’ is meant simply to allude to the fact that people die in these (at a normal rate for Victorian children, tbh, especially considering the event-centred novelistic context), but I am not inclined to largess on this point. ‘Describing’ means describing, like Brexit means ‘what the shit’. You either see something happen in the narrative or you don’t. People use a word that suggests ‘lavishly dwelt on’ when the reality is that the events in question are ‘only alluded to’. That is so misleading as to be false.
“The fondness caused Oscar Wilde to come up with the witticism that ‘one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Tiny Tim without laughing.” (9:00-9:18)
Look, I know this is a lecture given to a mixed group of non-specialists, some of whom are possibly even barbarians from STEM. But even so, the quote is:
So you’ve got the wrong child there. And it’s too integral to your argument for that to be a voiced typo. And we also don’t see Nell die. People repeat this quote like Wilde wasn’t in active daddy-issues rebellion against the cultural ascendency of Dickens. Chesterton, who is in the same position vis a vis Wilde and is, for this and for personal reasons, inclined to get on better with Dickens, flat tells you this. Why are we repeating this as if it’s not a very specifically contextualised clap-back, as well as not being true? My god, it’s like reading cavalier poetry without knowing about the English civil war or listening to a Drake without knowing who Meek Mill is.
I really admire this woman’s passion and she says some good things, but an abridgement does not need to be active disinfo. I mean this is a shanda fur die goyim, Goldie.
Apparently the “Queen of Norway famously said that no one can be really bad who can cry over the death of Tiny Tim.” (9:50-9:59)
But you know, how much can I believe Morgentaler now, etc. It looks to be quoted in a 1906 newspaper from my home state, but now I am a facts nihilist who believes in nothing, and Bevier’s just in Macon county, what do they know about Norway or indeed about anything? I drive through that town and don’t notice.
Decently funny Tiny Tim does not die joke delivery.
“Dickens actually lost money on [the Carol]”.
Well, yes, though not in the long term, Callow tells us. (Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World) That’s fine, it’s true as far as it goes.
“they represent the underbelly of Victorian society: the desperate poverty lying hidden beneath the outer robes of respectable middle-class Victorian prosperity.”
That is REALLY nicely put.
“To Dickens’ credit, he resists the temptation to prettify these children.” (13:55-14:04)
Why are you so embarrassed to like him? ‘To Dickens’ credit’, like he doesn’t know what he’s doing here. It’s that very common casual condescension where he’s concerned, like you’re surprised he managed to get his shoes on in the morning. It’s his book. This is his point about child poverty. Of course he didn’t sentimentalise them here, the analytic object you are working in is his argumentative conception.
“We know that the inspiration for the Carol had grown out of Dickens’ visit a few months earlier to a ragged school, which is what the Victorians called charity schools for poor children.”
This is what I mean? It suggests that Dickens made such a visit once, rather than being intimately familiar with such institutions in his own country and every one he visited and being mired in the minutiae of his city, as well as extensively researching and working actively on school reform circa Nicholas Nickleby. It makes him into the Sultan of Agrabah: in the animated Aladdin series Jasmine, at the close of one episode, says they need to do something about the poor people in Agrabah. Her father blinks and says, with wonder, poor people? In Agrabah? Dickens isn’t a shocked, sweet but clueless micro-reformer.
I’d forgive these little isolated incidents, but as the lecture goes on they coalesce into something much more substantial and weirder.
Callow also specifically cites the Children’s Employment Commission Reports (pages 105, 138, 142) as the impetus for Carol, quoting letters to that effect. You see the difference between seeing how the other half lives (the implication being ‘for the first time’) and being shocked by an extensive, in-depth report in a field you work on that is also a popular longread in the sector, right? So I’m reasonably confident saying Morgentaler’s wrong here, or at least that her statement is fairly misleading (and misleading in an increasingly clear direction…).
“…he was obliged to do this work in front of a large window, so that the people passing on the street could look in and witness his humiliation.” (16:45-16:51)
Welllllll, not the whole time. Only when the premises moved. But that’s largely true.
I wonder a little whether Dickens suppressed the blacking factory origin story not just because he associated the time with pain and humiliation, but because he had some suspicion of what it might do to the idea of him? Biographers wheel out this period as a major incident in the standard hagiography, and it’s used to turn him into a narrow Personal Interest Crusader. He’s Explained by this. His interest in social justice is somehow excused by this.
Morgentaler suggests the blacking factory period was only a few months. (17:12) Callow (pgs. 19-28) suggests it was something over two years. I trust him much more.
“…he worked with other boys whom he considered his social inferiors.”
That’s… something you could possibly pull out in a reading of that letter, but it’s doesn’t seem that fair, and it’s such an ungenerous reading of him, his general thought and a period of trauma. Why do people who claim to like Dickens so often hate Dickens, or at least engage in some massive performative disavowal? What is going on with that?
“…mention of Warren’s Blacking Factory occurs in almost every one of his novels.” (18:30-18:35)
What? In what sense is that true? How does she mean that? Her explanation doesn’t really clear it up.
Scrooge’s “increasing avariciousness as he grows older can therefore be seen as a psychological defence against the fear of loss: an impulse to horde money because unlike humans, money can never abandon or harm him emotionally. By having the ghost of christmas past take Scrooge back to revisit his childhood, Dickens is anticipating Freud’s perception that one way to lay to rest the ghosts of the past (and I use the word ‘ghosts’ advisedly) is to revisit them, and so try to come to terms with them.” (19:30-20:20)
That’s a good point, though I’d clarify that Freud strongly draws from Dickens, and pretty much tells us that. It’s interesting in light of the weird period where Dickens tries to develop the talking cure early, but Catherine gets annoyed and puts a damper on it.
“the celebration of joyous, unlimited human reproduction” (circa 23:00)
This is a nice argument about reproduction, class, Malthus and an aesthetic of fecundity. Also a good reminder that sex-segregated workhouses imposed abstinence on the indigent, even those who were married.
On this note: “Dickens was writing against the grain of contemporary ideology that blamed the poor for their poverty and defined them as profligate in their sexual indulgence.” (25:50-26:00)
There’s a degree of radicalism in that we don’t fully appreciate as contemporary lay-readers.
At about 24:20 she mentions that Fred’s wife is supposed to be pregnant! I NEVER SAW THIS!
“Abbey strategically places Fred in front of his wife so that the viewer cannot see that she is pregnant, a fact which Dickens only obliquely conveys by Scrooge’s embarrassment at having “started her” and about her having to keep her feet up (“Scrooge had forgotten, for the moment, about her sitting in the corner with the footstool,” 39). Indeed, Abbey has omitted the footstool, and thereby one of the strongest connections to Scrooge’s visit in company with the Spirit of Christmas Present in Stave Three, when she “was made comfortable with a large chair and a footstool, in a snug corner, where the Ghost and Scrooge were close behind her” (31). Fred in welcome holds out both hands, his arms fully extended as he leans forward on his left leg. Mrs. Fred (no Christian name supplied: she is simply “Scrooge’s niece, by marriage,” 29-30) seems dubious as to how best to receive her curmudgeonly uncle, rather than startled or surprised, although she does momentarily support herself by holding onto the dining chair (left). This interior, like the Cratchits’ in the previous illustration, is decorated with Christmas greenery, particularly around paintings and mirrors; as befits their better economic condition, however, Fred and his wife have decanters and deserts laid out on their table. While Mrs. Fred’s dress is a nondescript white, Abbey has carefully attired Scrooge’s nephew in the fashions of the 1840s, with tailcoat, fob, stirrup-trousers, and high collar. Significantly, Abbey has made Fred resemble Scrooge in height, figure, and facial features.”
Victorians really were euphemistic about pregnancy, hell.
“when he was younger and his children were few, fatherhood seemed to him a rather pleasant state. But as time went on, and his wife was continually pregnant […] Dickens found himself forced to provide for an ever-increasing brood, and his appreciation of the supposed joys of limitless fatherhood underwent a sea change.”
No it didn’t? He was always a good dad? Like you could have a complicated opinion of he and Catherine’s marriage and of his fiscal relationships with the children as (often profligate and dependent) adults, but this is such a reductive, catty framing, and again, god, those descriptions of how much work he put into fatherhood, of how good he made the kids’ holidays, are difficult to imagine bettering. Why invent flaws to dispute with, when the material is complicated enough? I’m sure you could string a few quotes into some kind of support for this, but that wouldn’t make it better than a sad Alternative Facts kinda reading.
She then smugly comments on his having ‘sent the kids off to the corners of the globe’, but to be honest I have some news for you about the British Empire. You know how in Holmes stories literally every other case someone’s going off to make their fortune in the colonies? Yeah. I mean this is seen at the time as securing a post for one’s adult children, and providing for them, especially if they’re struggling to find work and keep themselves out of trouble domestically? It’s like being shocked at the cruelty of people fostering out their children under feudalism. The logistics and ethics of child-rearing change with the period.
At 29:00ish she mentions Dickens’ great description of an onion. It’s so good I’m going to pop it in:
“There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe.”
Good spot on her part.
At about 30:00 she starts talking about the Christmas pudding “the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm” and saying she’s not sure she wants to eat something firm and shaped like a cannon-ball. It becomes clear that this woman does not know much about how one makes a pudding, especially in the 1840s. This becomes inescapable when she says puddings were good food for poor people because they required very little fat. What? What? Suet. Come on.
I don’t think you have to be a great cook or an expert in historical cuisine to write about this, but if you’re going to make analytic points about food in a text, I do think you probably need to understand that food to say something particularly valuable, yes. I remember being 20 and American and thinking a ‘cream tea’ was tea with whole cream poured in instead of milk. (Oy.) This was very, very stupid, but to still make that kind of mistake as a professional specialist is perhaps less excusable.
To really round it off, she comments that in Victorian England even the food you wat for holidays was a matter of class distinction. This is when my notes become a series of furious underlined scrawls. It still is. In modern England. And everywhere. That is how food works. That is how class works.
I wonder to what extent the ‘extraordinary inventiveness’ of Dickens, praised by Dr. Morgentaler and others, is a function of temporal and geographic distance between them and the text?
At 35:30 she makes a fun, good argument about dance as a social equaliser, but it is too late. At 36:55 I lose it completely. This is what alllllll the little sniping de-politicisations have been working towards and building up to. I cannot believe this woman, with her weaksauce liberal Donald Trump quotes and her failure to reckon with class as an active force in the world today, is offering up such a childish, wilful misreading of this text and Dickens’ activist projects, all the while exuding a strong sense of ‘of course we know better now’ that is synonymous with ‘of course I know better’. Y’ain’t a better socialist than Dickens, and I am so done.
At some point I start to ask myself how many flat mistakes are normal and excusable in a prepared lecture by a specialist. I’m not trying to be pedantic and nasty here: the problem’s not just Morgentaler. I could make a case at length, and may yet do, though it’s hardly liable to win friends and influence people. Dickens scholarship is often casual with plots, with readings, with period details. Some of this shit comes in from non-specialist academics using Dickens (though they also ought to know better), but some of it is specialists. Catch Shakespearians being so lazy, they’d be buried and left for dead like Aaron in Titus. It’s a parable of the heap (insert DC pun here) situation: how wrong do we have to be before what we’re doing is unreliable, and without worth? Perhaps more importantly, why is this happening? What about the canon and the biographical personage and the development of academia and this subset thereof creates these conditions?
While this documentary comes from a good place and has some fun elements, I can’t in good conscience recommend it because it’s really not to be trusted. It’d take someone who already knows and likes the subject, who essentially doesn’t need this documentary, to identify what’s ‘misleading to outright untrue’ and what isn’t.
Paul Kincaid suggests that now the BBC is liable to buy an out of house, pre-made documentary that’s literally never seen a fact-checker. Forgive me, but the fuck? You’re going to let something go out with your official stamp, as a sort of matter of record, and you have no real idea the goods you paid for are genuine? I don’t really know why this happens: grad students aren’t expensive? All you have to do is let them watch a cut/read your material/vet it on the BBC end? If they did have someone doing this, m’colleague was asleep at the wheel. Too many awkwardnesses to lay before you. Gchat squawked to a friend the way through, making irate goose noises.
There’s pretty good commentary on Mr Dick, and some of the comedians Iannucci speaks to are fun. But ‘core unreliability’ is my bette noir right now.
Also, popular history lays a ghoulish emphasis on Ellen Ternan’s being 18 when she and Dickens met. Not the period between their meeting and their romantic entanglement, and then the period between that and the consummation. Not the professional, artistic and class similarities between Ternan and Dickens (greater than those of he and Catherine), not his relationship with her family as a whole (he knows her sister and mother very well, and in a professional capacity–the sister especially, as she’s a writer married into another famous writer’s family who occasionally does pieces for Dickens’ magazine), not how he’s with ‘the young actress’ for years, so of course after a while she isn’t so 18 anymore. Even Katey Dickens, who hated Ellen and stanned hard for her mom (though that rather ill-conceived early marriage (she was nice but basic, a bit Victorian pumpkin spice latte, and for better and worse he was Dickens) had been breaking down for years due to incompatibility, sexual issues, then-unmerited jealous and the stressful death of a baby), admitted Ellen was really clever.
In all these depictions Ellen becomes a fixed figure of scandal. She’s so young!! Well… she’s been out working as an adult for years by the time they meet, she’s not young for a Victorian woman entering a relationship (age isn’t fully a fixed thing, it’s socially constructed, and to be 18 in the 1850s is in many ways different than being 18 today)–Dickens himself had been out in the workforce for several years by that age, and she doesn’t stay the same age for the 12 years (from 1858) they’re actually together in any form? There’s also thing where we’re at once more Victorian than the Victorians about Dickens, sneering at his marital breakdown (imagine freaking out like this about a modern divorce, it’s laughable), and simultaneously a smug sort of modern, expecting sex and gender norms to work like they do right now in 1857. Why do we fudge Austen’s age differences in adaptations and give them a cheerful pass in books but then turn around and find this significant age difference especially remarkable? You’re either okay with that aspect of Colonel Brandon/Marianne or you aren’t.
Male biographers and fans seem to want Their Dickens to be a sort of conquering Lothario, and are content to make him one out of very little evidence. The guy’s married once, separates from his wife with a big fat settlement, has another LTR that lasts until his death and very probably sleeps with these two people ever. I don’t know what to tell you. So why do they want or need that? What’s it doing? Like… how absolutely pathetic, on the face of it.
Howard Jacobson does a wonderful reading of this documentary, an awful-sounding Sue Perkins Dickens special, some of the issues mentioned above and Great Expectations. A solid premise well-argued. Very very worth reading.
“Ariel is referred to in the play as a mostly gender-neutral character (the pronoun “he” is used only a handful of times) and, up until the twentieth century, Ariel was typically played by female actresses. Perhaps this gender relationship can be best understood with comparison to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Although Peter is born a human boy, he does possess fairy-like qualities including his ability to be non-gender specific. Thus, Peter has always been played onstage and in film by females, most famously by Mary Martin. As we see, gender constraints do not apply to those in the fairy world, like Peter and Ariel, who are free to change gender forms, or even be gender neutral.”
I think this would work better for me if Bell specified when Ariel started being played by a woman rather than saying ‘up until the twentieth century’. Obviously initially this was not the case (as you almost certainly know, actresses weren’t allowed to perform on stage in Shakespeare’s day). Plus I’m just interested in the answer to this.
“On 26 October 1838, Dickens penned a poem “To Ariel” in honour of Horton’s depiction of Ariel. One can conjecture that Dickens must have been very taken with Horton’s performance to have penned such an impromptu poem for her.”
Hm. Not to nitpick, but is that necessarily true? I’d want to know the context. Is this a done thing? “This work appears in Horton’s autograph book”. Is, for example, her autograph book teeming with such tributes? Is one obliged to do it, really? We know Dickens wrote a similarly-contextualised poem for his first fiancé, in a commonplace book. I’d want to know more about the social etiquette surrounding the visit and the autograph or commonplace book.
This is a lively, well-written article, but I’m not sure it’s terribly trustworthy.
Take, for example:
“Dickens, meanwhile, was so self-conscious about his weak chin, especially now that he was besieged by requests to sit for photographic portraits, that he grew his trademark door knocker as a kind of prosthesis (a full beard was beyond him).”
Again, to what extent can I trust this when Callow, who I trust more (who has accumulated his authority with my by extensively showing his work and demonstrating his enthusiasm for the subject), describes the beard-growing as more of a boys’ adventure?
“The walking trip, which started in Switzerland, was on an epic scale; neither Collins nor Egg were ever in the best of health, and the pace must have been severely daunting to them. Dickens, needless to say, was renewed and exhilarated by the challenge. At the beginning of the tour, they all grew beards, or tried to, as if to indicate that they were rugged men of nature; but the outcrop of hair was disappointingly exiguous, so Dickens shaved his off, pour encourager les autres.” p. 225, Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World
This was in 1853. In 1856, while both were acting in The Frozen Deep, Dickens and Collins again grew beards for their characters. Dickens then kept his.
“He and Collins (who was to play Aldersley, the man whose life Wardour refrains from taking) both grew beards: Dickens finally began to look like Dickens.” p. 253, ibid.
Besides, fashion was changing to favour beards anyway. Surely the choice was bound-up in that? Dickens used to be something of a dandy (he once punched a guy in the street for an insult along these lines): he did like flash clothes and keeping himself neat. He can’t have been immune to the great beard craze.
Was Dickens self-conscious? He was always very insistent on his own worth, though self-confidence and a lack thereof can of course co-exist, and one’s valuation of oneself isn’t terribly stable or universal. He was, however, always thought very pretty. Callow cites contemporaries’ enthusiastic praise of him in this regard, and this Frank Stone painting of him when young (the brunette, the blonde’s Tennyson), which is pretty consistent with other depictions, doesn’t really suggest much cause for self-consciousness about his chin (or indeed about portraiture). (Incidentally, the ridiculous dog is also his.)
If anything, he might share his semi-autobiographical character David’s slight concern about appearing adult and masculine. Dickens was always slight, short, and preserved his almost oddly youthful appearance until suddenly, in late middle age, due to stress and illness, starting to look like the bank-note version of himself. I could see him getting older and being self-conscious about this change (which startled friends), or earlier about still looking somewhat effeminate or boyish, but that’s not quite the same as ‘oh horrors, my weak chin!!’ If she’s working off a specific quote, even (which she doesn’t nod to), there’s a lot of evidence to suggest it was a bit more complex than that (also we shouldn’t necessarily take sources at face value as to why they did things).
This seems a small thing, and the article is but an abridgement of the book, but it is the author’s own document. If I cannot trust her to be sufficiently precise about her subject matter here, on the aspect of her topic I happen to be aware of, how should I trust her where I am less informed?
And a small point from the article: ‘Or, to put it another way, what we are looking at is the first sighting of artistic modernism.’
oh god, don’t let me interrupt the majestic progress to that illustrious end-point, which seems to have its Clear Origin in every action undertaken by man previous to 1920.
There’s a stack of games in our house we’ve said at some point or another that we’re probably going to sell. But before we do, I force us to play one or two more times to be sure we’re not making a terrible mistake and to try to think through why we didn’t enjoy the experience (if that’s still the case). THESE… are our stories.
NUMBERS NUMBERS NUMBERS!!!!
Hey, kids! Do you like NUMBERS??? Just pulling them from a deck and putting ’em down like it’s 1850 and good games haven’t been invented yet?? Well you’re in LUCK!!
Okay, that’s not really fair, but it’s also: why we’re ditching the highly-rated Battle Line.
“Two opponents face off across a ‘battle line’ and attempt to win the battle by taking 5 of 9 flags or 3 adjacent flags. Flags are decided by placing cards into 3 card poker-type hands on either side of the flag (similar to straight flush, 3 of a kind, straight, flush, etc). The side with the highest ‘formation’ of cards wins the flag.”
There’s definitely strategy and calculation in this game. You’re making plans, you’re paying attention to what your opponent is doing and what’s on the board, etc. It’s a fairly cognitive game in these respects. But for all that, at its core, I would say Battle Line is about luck: whether you’re going to happen to draw the cards you need, and in time, or whether your opponent will.
And despite the (thin) theming and the possibly-disruptive tactics cards, it remains an essentially dry game, far more concerned with math and logic than with Alexander the Great. This review has it right. I’m beginning to think I need to check whether Reiner Knizia was involved with titles before we commit to them. His name seems almost a sure-fire harbinger of gamed I’ll dislike for variable yet somehow math-and-theming related reasons.
A final word on the formations element:
I kept checking back with the thin paper rule sheet to determine the relative value of the various tactical arrangements of cards. I think I’d have enjoyed this game significantly better (and learned it markedly faster) if the box had included two of those little rule-reminder tiles.
I briefly mentioned tactics cards above. There’s a secondary deck you can draw from each turn instead of the ‘numbers’ deck. This consists of tactics cards that may totally destroy your opponent on a given flag or may not help you much. The incentive to fuck with tactics cards, however, is low. Your opponent can only lay down one more than you do, and if you take but don’t play these cards they just clog up your hand. Taking them slightly diminishes your chances of getting regular cards you really need, while playing them potentially enables your opponent to pull weird unforeseeable bullshit. There’s an arms race mechanic here, and the Cold War has never been my favourite historical era.
I like the idea of a random element in this tightly corseted game, and I suppose more confident or risk-taking players might want to employ tactics more. All in all, though, playing tactics feels like a bad gamble. This mechanic seemed insufficiently supported by the structure of the rest of the game.
Some game mechanics are kind of counter-intuitive and have a way of making you feel like a total moron. I could not wrap my head around the way flags are decided and closed off in Battle Line for the longest time. My girlfriend is typically great at explaining rules and mechanics to me, yet we had little luck here. It made initial rounds of play really frustrating for me (and a bit embarrassing). I only really got the game after maybe five plays, and by the subsequent and final plays, one or two of which I won, we already knew we were trading the game on. I still don’t love Battle Line, but I finally knew saw what was up, could play competently and competitively, and enjoyed the game, like, at all.
VERDICT:
I liked Battle Line better by the end and could see its virtues as a mechanical system, but I’m still not sorry to see it go in favour of: Hive.
There’s a stack of games in our house we’ve said at some point or another that we’re probably going to sell. But before we do, I force us to play one or two more times to be sure we’re not making a terrible mistake and to try to think through why we didn’t enjoy the experience (if that’s still the case). THESE… are our stories.
The Grizzled is a war game like no other. Instead of the colourful abstractions of area-control mechanisms and the imperial grammar of exploration, civilisation building, races and conquest (or alternatively, Risk-ish or Twilight Struggle-esque military-political power-play), here you have a focus on cooperative survival. A small group of friends, French soldiers, attempts to get through a variety of ‘missions’. To do this they must deplete their hands without then encountering too many of the same elements either on cards laid down in the centre or on personal trauma cards, while also contending with a variety of other personal ‘hard knocks’.
Essentially the point is not to ‘win the war’ but to endure it as best you can as a small collective. You survive or don’t together. Your characters don’t have much in the way of pre-set personalities, but they have names. More even than the survival focus, this trauma mechanic fundamentally challenges the morality of war-based gameplay, highlighting the weirdness of what we do when we play at combat by shifting the terms of engagement from the machinations of kings and ministers to the effects of conflict on people. The Grizzled is almost a tight survival horror game.
Yet for all that, it is a game. I’d argue that The Grizzled makes more of an effort to be thoughtful about its premise than many conflict-based entertainments, but I’m not sure whether it’s ultimately more or less respectful to gamify trauma. I’m fairly uncomfortable with the premise of The Grizzled, but unsure whether it’s good or bad that I’m more comfortable playing more ‘abstracted’ conflict games, even ones about real events. The game also teaches you to be less uncomfortable with its set up via repetitive play.
Speaking of actual play, thematics aside, Grizzled is rather awkward. Whether you make the attempt with two players or five, it’s murderous if you take a lot of cards in a round in an attempt to rush through the deck and achieve the win condition. However if you play with two people and take the minimum allowable number of cards each turn, it is, if anything, too winnable: the game feels broken, here. It’s just a matter of going through the motions. Three people playing conservatively can also expect to win pretty easily. This strategy will not avail you with a large group: the difficulty ramps back up to ‘incredibly slaughterous, with no obvious way of alleviating that’.
It’s an odd play length. At thirty minutes, in its small box and with its simplistic mechanism, The Grizzled ought to be a filler game. But its difficulty makes it unsuitable for group play with newbies (and if we have a group over, it’s usually at least part newbie), who want wooed into Eurogaming and don’t exactly relish a collaborative ass-whooping. Experienced players will also find themselves unduly frustrated with newbies’ poor play in this collaborative, tense situation. Due to the difficulty and the subject, The Grizzled can make for high-strung gameplay.
If you want a short game as part of a session of short games, or if you’re looking for a filler game to warm you up, The Grizzled is too glum and low-energy for your purposes, really. It’s not that short, at thirty minutes, but neither would I think of it as a medium-length game. It’s got too simple a mechanic to support being treated as one, too. The game can be a desperate grind–even very conservative play is rigid, not admitting errors. The hard knocks can be fierce, and bad luck there could easily destroy your team. Sure that’s an accurate reflection of the horrors of war, but is it the stuff of a good filler game?
I do really like the rallying speech and sympathy mechanisms: they’re effectual, conceptually pleasing, and add a sweet note of camaraderie and support. However the Christmas Truce card throws me right back into my welter of questions about the ethics of the game, and reminds me unpleasantly of Sainsbury’s dubious recent attempt to use the Christmas Truce (a historical event I’ve always found ridiculously affecting) to sell biscuits. I’m not sure whether The Grizzled is unethical, or so ethical that it reveals a moral issue inherent in a lot of gaming that’s more serious than I customarily want to credit it with being, or both. I am sure it doesn’t quite work for its intended market-niche, or as a game generally.
VERDICT:
We traded it for Mr. Jack Pocket. Vive le trash.
There’s a stack of games in our house we’ve said at some point or another that we’re probably going to sell. But before we do, I force us to play one or two more times to be sure we’re not making a terrible mistake and to try to think through why we didn’t enjoy the experience (if that’s still the case). THESE… are our stories.
O a previous episode, we traded the Le Havre spin-off game Inland Port for Eight-Minute Empire. 8ME’s not a bad little game, though thoroughly in the ‘filler’ class. Our family uses filler games in a few ways:
as a warm up for a session of playing longer games (I sometimes feel I want a run-up),
as something that’s easy to teach and play with people who don’t Eurogame (who are often a bit stuffy about learning new rules, complexity, unfamiliarity, etc.),
as part of a session of gameplay entirely made up of light to medium games (like going out for tapas rather than ordering an entree), and
when the time in which we want to play just won’t support a more substantial game: the ‘one for the road’ situation.
Eight-Minute Empire, which despite the cute name takes about fifteen minutes to play (with three people, at least), is well-made. No complaints on that front, but no excessive praise either. It’s not gorgeous or exceptionally good, it’s just solid. The theme is present, but not hugely developed, innovative in its presentation or particularly appealing in and of itself.
It’s interesting to see a sort of baby version of a larger civilisation-builder game. The first time we played, due to the way the glyphs are written on the card some of us got a bit confused about whether carrots were incredibly valuable (turns out the reverse), but other than that the rules are straightforward. 8ME has a simple, double-barrel mechanic involving set acquisition and area control. You’re just deciding how to spend your limited resources in buying things that will facilitate your empire’s expansion and bulk up your set collection. The cards are part of sets, but in nabbing them at various prices you’re also choosing whether to travel by land or by sea, whether to increase the number of your troops on the board and where to do that from. The game also provides you with tokens to play a slightly different version.
We’ve decided to trade 8ME on for reasons that have a lot to do with how we use filler games as a household. I never really want 8ME for my warm up session: it’s not as easy-clean and energetic as our card-based games. If you want a filler to whet your appetite, to serve as a good hype-man/MC for a session of gaming, you want it to fall out of the box, build your energy/get you in the mood and scoop back into the box after.
There’s both the emotional work to consider (filler games as amuse-bouche or foreplay) and the pragmatic ‘how easily can you play and pack, when you know the game well’ question. Ideally a quick game should have almost no set up and clean up time. 8ME is light and comes in a tidy little box: I commend its portability. But with its many bits, I don’t grab it and go to play on the train like I do a game that’s essentially a deck of cards.
8ME is fairly competitive with other little games in terms of play length and ease of explanation for game-shy newcomers, but it lacks appeal there. No one yearns to go again when we’re done, or wants it first in a session of short games. The concept and play experience aren’t engrossing, high energy and fun enough to really grab newbies. Oddly everyone we play the much more complex Discworld: Ankh Morpork with bloody loves it, which leads me to suspect that theme and energy are even more important than ease for non-gamers. This may be that common user experience thing where people often don’t know what they want or how to get it. Ask non-gamers if they prefer simplicity and they’ll say yes, but I swear they like D:AM better, and for reasons not unconnected to its comparative complexity!
For me, 8ME is enough like the bulkier civilisation-builders I’m fond of to make me miss them, and insufficiently sprightly as filler. Not bad by any means, but neither would I call it great? To bolt on mechanics and make a longer or more complex game out of it would feel wrong and against the purpose of 8ME, yet as is something about the balance of it is strangely off.
I wouldn’t rule out the ‘filler civilisation builder’ concept, though. It’s too intrinsically intriguing and appealing for me to believe that another game couldn’t achieve a balance I like better. (Perhaps if there were less of an emphasis on area control? I don’t know that I love that mechanism.)
RULING:
Someone wanted to trade this for Small World and its extension, Fear No Evil. Surprising, but true! We took the trade–it’s good value, to be honest.
