Contents and Discontents

New as I am to blogging, the whole thing is going to take a while for me to figure out.  Thus far, I have spent a lot of time swearing at my laptop, which maddens me by remaining perfectly calm and impervious even to my most inspired flights of imprecation - a state of affairs that ultimately leads to my throwing my hands in the air and sulkily clicking the TDF link on my Favorites bar, in the vain hope that tickets to see Mark Rylance playing Richard III might be available cheap.  Thus far, it hasn't happened, and for all I know the play has ended its run and that's why there aren't any tickets.  It's hard to believe there are enough nerdy New Yorkers to fill up a Broadway theater night after night to see a play about a regicidal hunchback written by Shakespeare, for heaven's sake - especially since TDF was regularly trying to rid itself of tickets to see Ethan Hawke covered in fake blood in the Scottish Play and Orlando Bloom with his shirt off in Romeo & Juliet.

I actually am not entirely sure I belong in this century, and, but for the fact that I am excessively fond of air conditioning and indoor plumbing, I sometimes fancy I could have been quite comfortable in the nineteenth century - the late nineteenth century, that is to say, since the odds of living in a place that had a proper bathroom - the civilized kind, with a sink and a toilet and running water - were better by then. (I wonder whether I'm the only one who ever read Gone With the Wind and tried to visualize Scarlett hoisting up her hoopskirts and petticoats in the outhouse.  Think about it. And while you're at it, think about the fact that they didn't have Marcel toilet tissue back then, either.)

On the other hand, I just finished reading Jack London's The People of the Abyss, which was sort of like Nickled and Dimed, only more so. In 1902, Jack London bought some very ratty and, no doubt, sanitarily compromised clothing in a pawnshop and went to live in the East End of London, posing as a pauper in order to write an expose on the fact that it really, really sucks to be poor.  Poor in turn-of-the-century London didn't sound terribly pleasant, what with the bedbugs and the tiny little flats with numerous family members stuffed into them and the having to sleep standing up in the park while the police told you to "move on" and the overpriced food and the drunks and pickpockets everywhere you looked and - well, now I'm making it sound like certain parts of present day Manhattan. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  So I guess that life in any century is greatly improved by having a trust fund. (I do not have one, and so I am forced to guess.)  And as far as Jack London's books about Alaska in the Gold Rush are concerned - I have long searched in them vain for any trace of that fabled creature, the Klondike Dance Hall Girl.

In conclusion, I would like to remark that if I were writing this in the good old-fashioned way, with a quill and a pot of ink, it would have taken me far less time to put the cidilla and the circumflex where they belonged in that Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr quotation - because I would simply have doodled them myself, under the c in  ça and above the e in même, which is fun and artistic and takes less than a second - than it did to have to look up the quotation on Google, copy it, paste it in, realize I should have chosen "paste as plain text," erase it (yes, I know, it's called deleting now) and then paste it in all over again - all because I can't figure out where to find the foreign punctuation marks on the little tool bar at the top of my page.  Which is seriously going to cramp my style by the time I need an umlaut.