Miss Fit Toys.

From the Jill Schwartz Memorial Library here in the wild of Connecticut,

this is obscure.

The podcast in which I read Judely obscure out loud and comment on it as I go.

I am your host, your friend, your comrade in literature, your ear lover, your companion through the Victorian era, and you are my Christmas

buddy because Christmas has come here to the wilds of Connecticut.

I record this on the weekend

before Christmas.

And as a Jew, I have never particularly, I shouldn't say that, when I was a kid I liked Christmas because I like getting things.

And even though we were Jewish Jewish we weren't good Jews and so you know I think just cult there was cultural pressure to give presents on Christmas and we we got presents.

But as an adult I have come to loathe this holiday. Because it's just an

orgy of consumerism and I have no problem with consumption either the act of

consuming or the disease but there is this intense weight on everybody's shoulders to get everybody the perfect gift.

And there is no perfect gift.

The perfect gift is you hang out, you eat cookies, maybe there's a ham, that's the perfect gift, hanging out and a Tesla.

But this Christmas, I guess I have much to celebrate and be thankful for I have a family I have my health

I have this podcast which I love doing for you guys with you guys I should say because let's face it we're doing it together except for the fact that I'm doing everything.

And the thing about Christmas of course that ties directly to our book, Jude the Obscure, and directly to the moment we find ourselves

in within Jude the Obscure, is that when last we left Jude and Sue were kind of having a

conversation, a fraught tense conversation about what Sue calls the negation of civilization in describing

herself. And what she meant, I think, is that she believes that she doesn't fit in to whatever passes in her mind as civilization.

And so she has rejected it it and she has rejected religion

...