When not at work, or t-ball, or swimming lessons, or watching Twins baseball (brutal four-game series this weekend for the local nine in the Bronx), I've been happily sunk in Bleak House. It's a joy to think that, considering the length of these later, dark novels--Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, in addition to Bleak House--I have months of acute reading pleasure ahead of me. Preliminary judgment: it's the sprawl, the great tumble of words and action, the creation of a textured and detailed world, that are the source of my enjoyment. Some of the things that are often mentioned in paeans to the greatness of Dickens are actually kind of a bore. I'm not really very interested in criticism of the chancery courts, for instance. What does it even mean, chancery?
Moreover, some of the characters--Mrs. Jellyby, I'm thinking of you--are too cartoonish to be enjoyed, except perhaps inasmuch as it is enjoyable to mark the parts that don't measure up. The unevenness, however, probably contributes to the grand total effect.
Dick Cheney has penetrated the fog raised by my many enjoyable activities. I see that torture is permissible because it works and that Rush Limbaugh, not Colin Powell, is the kind of quarterback around whom a retooled Republican party must huddle. The answer to the first is that terrorism works as well as torture. I guess law is in abeyance and anything is allowed, so long as it can be said to work. It seems a strange doctrine for conservatives.
Regarding the second, there is really no answer, only the observation that he is plainly divorced from reality.
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