ClaryCat some years ago trotting over the tops of bookcases as when I was very young (2nd grade, 7-8) I with cousins once did over the roofs of tenements in the Bronx where we lived
Friends and readers,
It’s said that one Seeley, a much respected British historian at Cambridge, early in the 20th century, said “We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” Well as I look about my house and the garden outside, a great change in many specific things — for the better — have occurred over the last 3 months Laura has been here 3 and more days a week while we weren’t looking. Jim would still have no trouble recognizing the house, but he would find it now if not transformed (still a boook house, still lives as a reading journey), the place and environment gives a brighter more comfortable prosperous impression than that day in January when I was laid low (literally on the floor) by this stroke whose visible effects on me will not wholly disappear.
New and comfortable club chairs (3) in the front room replace the hideously worn sofa in two parts which one day Laura suddenly picked up and walked out with to the sidewalk by the street, and “Alexandria Renewal” almost immediately took away as an eyesore. New Apple or Macbook pro laptop with much of Dell desktop stuff replicated into it. Three pretty new lamps, matching, light blue pottery, on tables where there were none. The hall and vestible are space you can walk in, breathe, with only small bookcases and library carts on one side or the other of the walls to accomodate books. My study has two computer set ups on the library tables, one with 3 screens and equipment to send out videos and podcasts so Laura can work for WETA remotely (it does not feel remotely), a third table at a new angle for books I’m reading, working with right now, more and attractive lamps here too. New office chairs, stable, comfy. My bedroom freed up of books on the floors in baskets. The enclosed porch begins to look like a sunlit room for living, not a storage and exercise area.
A second year of two days hard spring work by Antwon, his uncles, brother and friend and Mr Sotha and his employees mowing, cutting, mulching each week or so, watering twice, and the garden is positively alive with flowering bushes, miniature (magnolia, cherry blossom and maple) trees.
We’ve begun a modest de-accessing books project. It struck Laura as somehow wildly funny (unacceptable) that the house is 1,400 square feet, land around with house in it 8,000, and I own 12,839 books. She had a plan to use library thing to put books back into an order, and to de-access I said maybe a tenth at the same time. We were immediately thwarted as I can’t remember and all my cards have a wrong user name and/or password. The librarything software would not send software to my account to set new password &/or username. So we can get in only through immovable Dell desktop using microsoft windows, older computer which is going. This evening I found an email and post office address to write to. It took 4 long hours for Laura and 2 friends to go through less than a quarter of one bokcase re-ordering, with me designating far less than 10% for discarding (to library, to bookseller — an appraiser has said he’ll come to look) and Izzy adding some few from her library in her room to discard.
6/23 mid-morning: I emailed the owner whose name I remembered; he sent a password reset. I assume two tries will turn up user name; if not I,I’ll email him again. What we were doing doing will not be accurate as it does not record what we eliminate
A catalogue is a key to a library because it is wholly accurate or supposed to be. I will myself go through the plastc gaylt-colored milkcrates and delete what we are discarding. I do have it for life for $20 — he reaffirmed that
He dislikes me because I have so many books. He dislikes intellectual women. Library thing was not conceived w/anything high minded. He respected Jim as a tech man but otherwise seemed to hold him at a distance, almost in contempt. He never had people like us in mind. When Jim suggested he have a mechanism for recording different editions and printings, he scoffed
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So, what about my life that counts since last I wrote
Here’s an oddity — or unexpected. I’m finding I enjoy listening to the recording of Maria Frawley’s lecture/discussion with a class on Austen’s Persuasion even more than did this week when I participated. You need to know how my spirits were uplifted after that session, how much I’ve loved the book since my teens, and hitherto loved Maria’s sessions on other Austen novels & Middlemarch. But I never expected to enjoy the sesssion more. I admit this was since I understood what she was saying much more and didn’t miss anything. I felt more detached, with my ego not involved as I tried to join in the conversation. Politics & Prose is good at these recordings too. Still I enjoyed it more because I was not immediately involved… Anyone else ever had this experience?
We agreed the 1995 BBC Persuasion might be the best of all the Austen films
Ciarhan Hinds as Wentworth and Amanda Root, Anne Elliot walking off to an authentic life in private at film’s end
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Half way through. How much I am enjoying reading it slowly with others. It is one of the novel masterpieces of the century. How several of the TV serial movies made from it are good (1967 BBC, 1987 BBC, 1998 A&E by Andrew Davies ckosest to Thaceray’s intentions, and Amazon and Netflix’s 2018) thoughtful, entertaining, well done. Two very good biographies (I alternate these): Catherine Peters, which I’ve read before but insufficiently appreciated and now learning much slowly, D. J. Taylor’s magnificent one. Also loving exhilarated by 12 session course on Cornish literature from York OLLI. I have a whole new area to be going on with in books and maybe now some workable context for writing a book on Graham’s Poldark and Daphne DuMarier’s novels set in Cornwall,
and the course I’ll attempt teaching at both OLLIs Fall 2025 is going to be on Thackeray and Vanity Fair.
Frontispiece — Thackeray as jester
Here’s what he wrote to Robert Bell who reviewed the book favorably
I want to leave everyone dissatisfied and unhappy at the end of the story – we all ought to be with our on and all other stories. Don’t I see (in that maybe cracked and warped looking glass which I am always looking at) my own weakness wickedness lusts follies shortcomings. We must lift up our voices about these and howl to a congregation of fools; so much at least has been my endeavor.
Everyone who has a cat, and loves his or her pet-companion, no matter what the species, should read Kathryn Hughes’s Catland, “By a whisker,” June 10, 2024, pp 52 according in the New Yorker. Hughes traces and explains how cats have changed from in, say the 1860s, “being” (seen as and thus made into) mangy aloof animals to be shot unless they help you kill other creatures, usually found in alleyways or yards into, say, into the 1950s, beautifully colored rounded creatures with an alluring face, in private loving animals, sensitive, intelligent, alert, usually found in people’s houses resting from the rigours of existence on a couch, near a window, not far from “their” person. She attributes too much to an American male illustrator’s appealing human-like images, though Wain influenced people.
Even now he is introduced wwith question, Was he sane?
What made the change was the invention, commercialization, of litter. The cat is clean, and then exploitation of this potential pet-companion, equivalent of a dog by later artists.
Marge Piercy’s The Cat Song
Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.
My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says
the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing
milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.
Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.
I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,
to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.
Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.
You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends,
says the cat, although I am more equal than you.
Can you leap twenty times the height of your body?
Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs?
Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch.
My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard.
My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings
walking round and round your bed and into your face.
Come I will teach you to dance as naturally
as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long.
I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers.
Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word
of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg
and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.
We read and discussed this in my online poetry reading group afrom OLLI at Mason last month.
The comparable case is that of deaf people before taught sign language imbeciles, poorly dressed, dying young, to after its introduction, and real education and adequate upbringing productive dignified members of human communities.
Juneteenth.6/19/2024, HCR describes the precise history of what occurred in Texas in June 1865. She explains the importance of the emancipation of enslaved people by an order from the federal govt. She say in these earliest days of insisting on enforcement of liberty be executive order from the federal gov’t was met by the assertion a state legislature could override any decision for its own state.
See what is happening since Dobbs: it is now mortally dangerous to become pregnant in the US in a number of states where the state law requires a woman be provably near death before beginning scientific procedures to rescue her
It strikes me as unspeakable it has taken all this time for US to have a nation-wide recognized elebrator holiday for the end of chattel enslavement.
This is where I am where I am. This is me. I have a zoom session tonight with Gillian Dooley, a music librarian, on Jane Austen and Music, 7:30 pm — EST time. She was accurate, sincere about what we can know and what is probable about Jane Austen and music in her online session from York’s July festival: she [Jane Fairfax] played and sang. I bought the book. I long to go to a summer gatherings at either OLLI (they both are organizing these). But I cannot. In-person friends have stopped visiting and phone calls now infrequent. How they seem all to be traveling about. I am also attracted to some new documentaries in movie theaters (Agniezska Holland’s The Green Border: “Impossible Choices,” on refugees trying to flee death all across the Mediterranean area; This Night Will Not End, on genocide acroos Palestie/Israeli, from Al-Jazeera team) some new ctemporary serious staged plays I wish I could go — mostly short runs in London.
Ellen
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 