Reading at the Gardens

Drug Craig to Chanticleer Gardens today.  It's free for us with our Radnor Library cards!

 So we copped a spot under some lovely pines, overlooking the main garden, and I read:


What the Best Teachers Do (a book assigned by work) and finished (well, got what I could out of!) the article:


Kenneth L. Brewer's "Colonial Discourse and William Makepeace Thackeray's Irish Sketchbook."

Like McAuliffe, he recognizes the danger of simply reading it "Thackeray's a crazy bigot," but instead of focusing in on the narrator, he takes a more postcolonial approach (sprinkling Said and Bhaba throughout), nothing how  we "must look at how stereotype functions in colonial discourse, following a method which is not evaluative but descriptive" (264), asserting that we can learn just as much from British perceptions as we can from his interpretations and commentary on the Irish.  Furthermore, he notes that both Thackeray's personal letters and the Sketchbook note that three months of travel cannot provide one with a full understanding of a culture.

Also finished his novella, The Great Hoggarty Diamond.  Never realized the narrator is Samuel Titmarsh, supposedly his typical pseudonym's, Michelangelo Titmarsh's, cousin!  Also, Mr. Dueceace pops up, as he does in most novels.  I realize such reappearances of minor characters adds to Thackeray's panoramic fictional world. 

Left Barry Lyndon a work and had to order a THIRD copy of the Sketchbook as my wonderfully marked up copy, published around 1900 is falling apart and I left my newer copy at the uninhabited family cottage. Grrr.... Looks like another article for tonight...