Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb, bereaved mother & head cook, Paul Giametti as Paul Hunham, classics teacher, and Dominic Sessa as Angus Tully, student left at the Barton [Deerfield] Academy School
Dear Friends and readers,
We’ve come to the end of another year and again, either unavoidably, or propelled by my own contradictory confused desires, limitations, bereftness I again try to join in with others in getting through this dark season — it is the time of year in the northern hemisphere when our daylight hours are limited. Just one of the many limitations one faces during this ritual time.
As in previous years, I’ll share some experiences. On this past Tuesday I went with a friend to Cinema Arts Theater where we choose Holdovers, a movie which advertisements suggest is a standard sentimental Christmas situation comedy, and found it was much much better than that. I had skim-read one review which I could see gave it strong praise, but did not specify in any particulars what was so valuable in it.
Well I’m going to recommend going because the movie is excellent, and supply a few of these particulars, Mary Lamb is a black woman housekeeper at a super-elite boys academy (high school) who had a son in the school (on sufferance, because she worked there, possibly the only American black boy there) but they didn’t have the money to send him onto a good college and she dreamed through the military he might get there. So he ended up dead. Towards the end of the movie, a box she has in her room and takes with her when she travels is revealed to have his things from babyhood in it. Hunham is a solitary intelligent man who has not fit into the extroverted masculinity, sell thyself norms of American life, and takes it out on the boys he teaches because they do not value the material. We learn over the course of the movie he failed out of prestigious college jobs, and is barely tolerated at this school because he comes so cheaply. He commits an act of courage on behalf of the boy at the end of movie and is punished for this hard. The headmaster loathes him because the headmaster was once one of his pupils. Angus is an unwanted son; his father is in a mental asylum, his mother has remarried a super-successful businessman and she regards him as a misfit nuisance. He too is highly intelligent and his emotional nature has been twisted because no one has tried to respond to it with care or affection.
Christmas Day dinner
It was for me a painful experience to watch; it was not wholly truthful about the inner life of the Christmas experience for many people (perhaps most at some point), yet truthful enough over the course of the intensely strained two weeks where there are some highlights of pleasure or fun that that it brought up sore memories for me. My guess is will do this for many people who can look into themselves and remember back truthfully; each year things bad that happened at Christmas in my life recur in my memory, some of which I did, were my fault — of course some were done to me — it’s a fraught time — and all in a sense irretrievable. The great myth of many of these modern ghost-like (supernatural creature needed) is that your past life is retrievable somehow, you can transform the past, redeem it. Not here. All the more was it to me genuinely moving as we see each of these characters plus a few others who become involved cope with their problems, gradually make the best of their situation, exhibit some charity towards others and themselves too. The men begin to listen to one another and the woman faces her grief.
Invited to an just off-campus party by someone who works in the school and lives in the area, Mary brings some cooked desert, all three go to Boston (“field trip”) where the two men pass by an ice-skating rink
The acting of Paul Giamatti is superb — also Dominic Sessa. This week’s issue of the New Yorker revealed he is someone who was at Deerfield the summer the casting people were looking for an actor — as a somewhat poorer student, but with very good grades who was talented and in the plays of the drama department. My daughter, Isobel, was taken on at Sweet Briar with a scholarship (Jim called it tuition discount) because she’s highly intelligent, well motivated, worked hard and showed real talents — in singing, and music and languages. The black actress, Da-Vine Joy Randolph, is made too much of a stereotype — and there are stereotypes and some cant here and there in the film — but she is very effective. I read the director, Alexander Payne, is much respected; we are not told anything about David Hemingsen in most places — when will popular sites realize how centrally important is the script?
About the several rave reviews: I had not realized until I got home and reread the one I had read before and read a couple of others, how they pussyfoot around its actual content. It goes much further than It’s A Wonderful Life, which originally was a financial flop (“too dark” said the popular reviewers at the time) because it remains more on a kind of mythic level. It has a slightly upbeat ending, all three of our main characters have something to hope for. If Mr Hunham does get a break, is helped by someone somewhere (he has friends to turn to it seems) he might end up better off. Don’t miss it. There are stills of the three in Christmasy scenes — for they do walk about the world — it’s snowing in New England, circa 1971, and they visit Boston, but nowadays it’s very hard to “lift” a picture from the Net and none of these were readily available. The ones I chose are characteristic.
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This past week has been an unusually social one for me — I did make appointments with friends to go to lunch and a museum, or lunch and a movie, or lunch and get-together deep in Fairfax, in fancy restaurants, and in one quiet one with decent food (I go there tomorrow). By today I had had too much although I enjoyed myself very much with two friends, and was anticipating a repeat of Sunday, which I’ll now tell about.
This past Sunday, so five days ago, I went supposedly with a group of people (see just below) to see Molly Newman and Barbar Damashek’s Quilters in a theater space in Fairfax, Va, called First Stage, located in an unprepossessing strip mall (pathetic looking from the outside) not far but too far to walk from the Metro because of the lack of sidewalks and how drivers treat the streets as mini-highways. It had gotten strong reviews. I’ve never seen it but had read about it.
The poster for this production
Sad to say it was not that well done, though all 7 actress-singers worked very hard (not all could sing). Irony of ironies or worse yet a mostly female aging audience did not appreciate the musical (I saw a pro-Trump MAGA sign on one of the doors next to First Stage). The woman next to me fell asleep. The applause afterwards tepid and polite. I am glad I saw it and was riveted by some of it: one segment showed a woman who’d had 9 children begging a doctor to give her an abortion (of course nothing like the word used) and being refused indignantly. It rightly has a reputation for value and interest: all women, a group of stories woven together with songs about what life was like for women in the west — pioneers. Rough and hard, only the script was clearly determined to be upbeat and endlessly making all the women religious (though I doubt the writers would even believe in God) — these are pastiche stereotypes not gone from Willa Cather …
The photographs from different productions show many of the directors had Little Women movies in mind
Still I can see if well done, insightful and relevant to women (and men as after all they live with women, don’t they?) Endless children, stories of courting where women exploited, dugout living. I said to two people, “an alternative to Oklahoma” which they said, surprised, “you’re right.” But another said, “I like Oklahoma” — despite it’s suddenly having been revealed (I suggested) as so many male songs and a male POV throughout. I looked it up when I got home: it got all sorts of awards but played onto 2 weeks on Broadway so it was a financial flop. It is very hard to persuade even women to respond to a female/feminine or feminist (based on the former) aesthetic. Their taste often as vitiated as that of men. Turn on Fox entertainment or Starz … Izzy tells me it was done at Sweet Briars.
As to my experiment — to begin to go out with groups though I can no longer drive easily and have the real problem of getting lost, it was probably a semi-failure. It cost me $56 by cab to get to 1st stage. Too much. Then I discover the group had lunch first; “oh, did you miss the email?” It seemed innocent they left me out but whether or not, it was part of the whole lack of groupness. They sat in little cliques. I did talk to a couple of people, went over to the organizer who when I left thanked me for coming over and said they always had the meal before during short win. Then I had to remind the woman who had said she would take me to the restaurant that she had said she’d take me to the Metro. She assured me yes but as if I might not want this that she and her husband were not staying for talk about the show afterward. I discovered the walk was not only too far but across streets where there were no sidewalks and the cars moved as if they were on highways. I had had to stay alert to go back with her. Her husband apparently thought it very funny to say that he couldn’t be bothered to go all the way to the station and would leave me off nearby where it was convenient for them to turn onto the actual highway.
When they neared the sidewalk at what I recognized was the station, I opened the car door quickly. A tesla! I was glad to get out; she had treated me to how she never buys books any more, just buys ebooks. Any books she gets she sells or gives away. Why did she tell me this? Upon reaching the platform high up over an escalator, I elicited information from a black Metro person how to go back to Rosslyn on the silver (a new) line, then change to the blue line going into Virginia, to King Street Station. Then I had to get another cab — Lyft — home.
So I hope you can see why it was no wonder I backed out of today’s excursion. I was invited to by group very like the one that supposedly was organized to go to Quilters this past Sunday. I was supposed to go to a house, which I looked up on the Net and was very intimidating to me — super-expensive mansion set in a wide expanse of grass and driveway – by 11 am. The woman who lives there had never contacted me to let me know she knows I’m coming. How do I drive up into her driveway? A third woman is supposed to pick us up and then to take us to Lake Anne in Reston — to a restaurant that is probably expensive, and to me is in the middle of nowhere — vast highways and malls. I would have no way of getting back unless this third woman took me back to the car or I got a cab. I would be putting myself in the same sort of situation. I don’t need to made intensely anxious this way. If they want to meet in a place to be in person together why do they go to all this trouble? No they want more than that — the OLLI at Mason holiday party is in a Country Club — I went once years ago, never again.
A book upon which a film adaptation I watched was based: Free State of Jones: the author contacted me after I wrote about the experience on a blog — not telling it emerged from the zoom course below
By staying in I was able to participate in a zoom meeting of a superb course done by a brilliant retired labor lawyer (once clerked for Thurgood Marshall) on the Civil War and abolition of slavery. It began at 11:45 and he went on until 2. The group talked intelligently and it was just so enjoyable — and instructive.
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I’ve omitted Izzy and my time last Saturday to see The Winter’s Tale, our first time at the Folger in 4 years. Well the inside of the building where we used to go — hall, theater — are not much changed. And I could see the older reading room is left in its beautiful wooden state. What has happened is the building is twice the size, and we have yet to see an exhibition area, community center, and cannot see the increase in size for the library collection. It was once my favorite building in all the DC/Maryland/Virginia area. Here’s my brief review:
Leontes and Hermione in anguish
The Spring dancing
They are doing it very well: I’d say the ensemble effect is very strong with now and then a particular performance outstanding where it needed to be (Leontes, Hermione in the courtroom — like a black person coming out of a prison and allowed to speak); Autolycus and the man who played Antigonus when he became the shepherd. It would be churlish and uncharitable to complain about where they couldn’t reach the mark. The one mistake was to have a child do the Time speech. That is seriously intended and you really need someone who understand the purport of the words to speak the speech. For those who live in the area and can reach the Folger, it’s been extended. You will leave having come into contact with Shakespeare in some of his profoundest and fun-loving moments Here are the actors and directors’ names.
At least they did the play; a number of weeks ago now I went with Betty to a travesty at one of the two Shakespeare theaters around Gallery place: instead of Macbeth we had Macbeth In Stride 80 minutes of crude, tasteless hooting making Shakespeare’s hero-protaganist into a white male idiot. Lady Macbeth is a black woman bully seething with amoral ambition — and this is presented as admirable. Some of this comes out of a profound angry resentment at Shakespeare’s play. 3 minutes of Judi Dench reciting one of Shakespeare’s sonnets on a clip video on twitter is worth far more than the wasted time getting, sitting there and getting home.
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At home with Ian: I keep a lonely anxious cat, Ian, company — or he stays near me, quietly at more of a distance than Clarycat used to — coming onto my lap for bouts of close association now and again.
Ian now plays with Clary’s mice: she would never share ….
Zooms: this past Monday was wonderful: a zoom at 3 o’clock (to 4 pm) with the online Trollope group hosted by the London Trollope Society on Trollope and Christmas stories; another at 6 pm going on to 8:30 on Henry James’s ghost stories with the brilliant Nicole Miller — who had worked so hard again this week (as last week on Dickens).
A Laslo Kubinyi illustration for Wharton’s Kerfol: story of 16th century woman destroyed by her husband — they are often female gothics
I am reading a superb novel by a black woman author, Nella Larsen, Passing, and came near the end, and am more than half way through a brilliant collection of ghost stories by Edith Wharton — the key to the successful ghost story is an intense control of words, of style, of nuance, you need just the precise instance of power to evoke the supernatural presence. I hope to tell you of my studies of Frederick Douglas (especially the second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, far franker, far deeper in reach than the first carefully edited distant book) — a profound writer; of how John Steinbeck takes some getting used to. I will talk about these and other reading I am enjoying over this winter solstice time in another blog (see John Wood Sweet’s Sewing Girl’s Tale, my nomination for best book of the year) — some of it towards my wonderful coming course on Women in and Writing Detective Fiction. I am just loving Sayers’s Wimsey novels and the old Ian Carmichael serials; and learning to love P.D. James’s Dalgliesh novels and the recent serial with Roy Marsden. My Bronte course for the summer 6 week session at OLLI at Mason was accepted today too.
The Bronte Sisters
In this course we’ll explore the Bronte corpus. We’ll read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Emily Bronte’s poetry. We’ll also discuss their other novels and poetry, and their brother, Branwell, and father, Patrick Bronte’s poetry, as well as the long legacy beginning with Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte to modern sequels, e.g Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child. Class members will be asked to watch 2 movie adaptations and/or bio/pics out of a pre-selection of movies. The genius, influence and importance of the Bronte corpus is indisputable; the sisters’ works are also rivetting and relevant to us today.
Don’t get me wrong: I felt very fulfilled on Tuesday with my friend, Adele, at lunch, and ditto with my new friend, Pamela, yesterday also at lunch. Both are displaced British women, women brought up by or in English families who now live in the US. Tomorrow I look forward to a third friend, Linda, her name, whom I’ve been out with several times, and Saturday with Betty once again to see As You Like It.
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So what to conclude on? I had an invite to speak at Maplewood Park, a retirement assisted living home for the truly wealthy by a fool of a man whom I admit I had no idea how to respond to but appeared to think the people in the facility whom he spoke of with the highest terms of respect were not up to hearing a talk with any serious ideas about literature or on any but fashionable second-rate books. Apparently the rich stupid man had jumped onto a mention of me as a fine teacher by a woman at OLLI at AU without knowing what she was talking about. He succeeded in withering my soul, as I was made to feel contempt for myself for having said yes the second time.
A final facing up to where I cannot belong — I left the TWWRN FB group reading of E.H. Young’s Chatterton Square: I could just not endure their obtuse misunderstanding of this book, as they berated the male in the happy complacency they are being anti-patriarchal when Young was giving us a more in-depth portrait of a Mrs Ramsay type woman unable to escape the draining of herself. A courageous Woolf knock-off. I was offending the others once again and dropped out, promising myself to join in no more.
The autistic women’s group is failing: the other two “founders:” the tech woman repeatedly says how its existence causes her great stress; her reminders avoid saying anything about it; the eager woman prefers in person and there is now a woman running an in person Spectrum Friends just on the third Sunday of each month (the day we are doing this, and she knew it), which this eager (she is older, lives alone) woman much prefers. I have suggested altering the day and time not to conflict with in person Meet-ups. Say a Tuesday at 8 pm? A couple of the participants seemed to like the suggestion last Sunday.
Aloneness and living upon a more silent authentic self is what I must accept.
Clarycat once upon a time — see the strength of her lithe body some 8 years ago
I am still missing my Clarycat very much — most of all in the mornings when she accompanied me on all my chores, and late at night when she’d hop onto the bed and snuggle next to me as I turned out the light. I am grieving very much this year for Jim once again through my loss of her and her loss of her life. I could not save her.
Ellen
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 