Salon.com > Pauls Toutonghi

Charles Dickens and the Facebook generation

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 21:00:00 +0000

On Feb. 7, 1812, Portsmouth, England, received Charles John Huffam Dickens — a pomegranate-colored, squealing, slick-haired baby boy. Portsmouth is (and was) a teeming small city. In 1812 it was a major port for the British Royal Navy. Today, it has a higher population density than London.

Dickens was born at No. 13 Mile End Terrace, Landport. His mother, of course, had no anesthetic. He was named, in part, for Christopher Huffam, an oar-maker in London — now perhaps the most famous oar-maker of all time.

- - - - - -

I love Dickens. Few writers have equaled his assessment of the human condition — somewhere between tragedy and comedy, with a poetic attention to beauty, and an investigation of man-made ugliness.

His characters have entered the popular imagination of even 21stcentury America — Scrooge becoming synonymous with miserliness, Miss Havisham with disappointed love, Wilkins Micawber with hopeful (if improvident) expectation. When Holden Caulfield refuses to set down his life story in the first sentence of "The Catcher in the Rye"...

Are these the next stars of American fiction?

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 19:01:00 +0000

One hundred percent of the bats in Iowa have rabies. Or so claimed the nurse at Iowa City's Mercy Hospital.

"If you wake up and the bat is in the room," she said, echoing the words of the Centers for Disease Control's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, "you've got to get in here, immediately. There's no way to tell for certain if you've been bit."

But the writer Jen Percy wasn't so sure. Admittedly, she'd awakened to a fluttering of wings in the darkness -- to a small furry body landing on her neck at 4 a.m. And sure -- she'd screamed and turned on the light and found the creature, bewildered and shaking and brown, huddled on top of the covers at the foot of her bed. Yes, the house was overrun with bats; just the day before she'd discovered one in her half-eaten bowl of Cocoa Puffs (bats like Cocoa Puffs?). To make matters worse, there was that whole business with the exorcism at the Bear Creek Ranch in rural Georgia, the exorcism that she'd described for "Demon Camp," her forthcoming, book-length work of creative-nonfiction from Scribner. In that particular exorcism, a woman who called herself "The Son of Jesus" had said that Jen was being followed -- day and night -- by a demon in the shape of a bat. So, if anyone should worry about contracting rabies from a flying mammal in the order Chiroptera, it might be Jen Percy.

“Solace” by Pauls Toutonghi

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 01:10:00 +0000

Do you know when the phoenix comes to Misrata?

Every 500 years. That's twice a millennium. Twice a millennium, the phoenix builds its nest of sticks and leaves and sun-baked mud, and then it burns itself -- a terrible immolation. Five centuries. Six thousand moons. From flame, a new generation.

Golden, soot-streaked feathers; its wings twitch. The new bird rises up and in its talons, it carries the ashes of its father, sealed in an egg of myrrh -- carries them to Heliopolis, the Egyptian City of the Sun, for burial. Every phoenix is buried in Heliopolis, that city of the sun in the desert -- like every city in this part of the world is a city of the sun in the desert.

We're not far from Heliopolis, in Misrata. We're only several hundred kilometers. The acrid scent of gasoline hangs over the highway that stretches between us. So if you're lucky enough to be alive on that night, twice a millennium, when the phoenix appears, having just buried its father -- stand outside, look toward the horizon. Do not be afraid. It will be a massive bird. A beautiful, wide-winged creature. It will reflect the sun as it sweeps in a great circle, sweeps out across Al Butnan and then the Gulf of Sidra and then, disappears.