In a letter to Forster, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “The terrible news from England fills us all with inexpressible sadness. Dickens was so full of life that it did not seem possible he could die, and yet he has gone before us, and we are sorrowing for him.”
Even Queen Victoria weighed in, sending “her deepest regret at the sad news of Charles Dickens’s death” via telegraph from Balmoral Castle.
But beyond the initial shock of sadness, what avid Dickens fans were really wondering—were really praying for—was the answer to one question: did Dickens finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood before he kicked it?
My father’s e-mail didn’t make much sense, but he seemed to be saying that pirates had boarded his boat. “Being kidnappedby filmcompany Deep south blackcult took over steering,” it read. “Ship disabled.”
He sent this to my mother, Martha Carr, at 4:30 a.m. Pacific time on May 28, 2017, a Sunday. She was at home in Los Angeles, asleep, and she wouldn’t see the message—and a couple more like it—until 8:30 a.m. For several hours, my dad, 71-year-old Richard Carr, must have thought they weren’t getting through.
Equating sex and food is a logical connection (we are all creatures of appetite), but at the time it seemed a revelation. Upon watching the film again, different things revealed themselves, namely that food is the vehicle through which we tend to each other. We feed the ones we love — tenderness, care, and compassion — all carried in a bowl of warm broth. This idea, marinated in humour and shot through with slivers of bittersweet pain, feels new all over again. The other thing I’d forgotten about the film was the plain old notion of human goodness. It ain’t fancy; it’s basic, humble and unassuming, but also resplendent in unexpected ways.
It is tempting to draw an immediate analogy between the film and ramen — the noodles, the broth, three slices of pork, and scallions for added piquancy. Tampopo is constructed in a similar fashion, with fatty chunks of story and a tangle of narrative noodles, all enlivened by bright spots of spice. One especially spicy bit concerns that sexy gangster and his girl. This is where Tampopo begins, with a posse of criminal types sauntering into a movie theatre in their white finery, ready to enjoy a champagne picnic. The man in the white suit and snappy fedora eyeballs us, the audience, and says, “You’re at the movies too, huh? Whatcha eating?” Before the fourth wall falls, you’re knee deep into the story, one scene folded inside another, like layers of mille-feuille pastry.
I’m here in Chicago, 7,000 miles and 15 years away from Jalalabad, a desolate town in southwestern Afghanistan. Yet sometimes it seems to me as if it were yesterday, or even tomorrow, and anything but thousands of miles distant.
There are moments when it feels like I never left -- or maybe I mean, when it feels like it left with me, like Afghanistan and my once-upon-a-time life as a U.S. Army Ranger are all right here, right now, in my unheated garage workshop. Right here, right now, in fact, the sawdust is swirling as I run a two-inch slab of walnut through my lousy Ryobi table saw. The dust and the noise from that saw instantly bring to mind an image of an American helicopter landing in the Afghan countryside, not too far from Jalalabad. It all seems suddenly to flash before my eyes—only the dust in Afghanistan was chalkier and finer than the dust from this walnut slab, which is old, but not Afghanistan old.
What a tonic this book is for anyone who feels the world is too much with us these days! Maliciously witty, erudite and ingeniously constructed A Ladder to the Sky explores the cold outer limits of ambition.
It also raises a question about intellectual property rights: Namely, who do stories belong to? The people who live them and sometimes write them, or the people who need them the most? The answer here isn't as straightforward as you'd think.