because it’s spring

I’ve been steadily buying chrysanthemums each week they are here

daffodils/that come before the swallow dares/and take the winds of March with beauty … TheWinter’s Tale

Dear readers and friends,

So I begin this blog with e.e. cummings and Shakespeare, and I am cheerful for myself just now. The new spring term at OLLI at AU begins this week, and I have a couple of courses I’m looking forward to at Politics in Prose, just loving the books and movies I’ve been reading and watching for my own (Anglo-Indian Novels). The usual anxieties are appeased: Izzy and I have already gone to the AARP people at Sherwood Library and our taxes are paid (!), I’m not going this year to the ASECS (much relieved), and the course I gave in winter (Retelling Traditional History & Tales from an Alternative POV) went over very well at OLLI at Mason this 4 week winter semester so that I’ll repeat it at OLLI at AU for the 4 week June course. Best of all for this time, I’ve written my first full draft of a talk I promised to do for the London Society Zoom group on Millais and Trollope (centering on Orley Farm) and now need only revise (writing is rewriting).
The easier frame of mind I described in Facing February continues.

The natural world is indeed waking up around me.

Ian sniffing the warmth and breezes

Clarycat alert to the twittering swallows re-building their nests in the awnings above my study window

I saw two daffodils in my garden today, and a row of the little white bell-like tiny flower. Lots of green shoots sprouting in each flower bed. I’ve five now and may ask the man and wife team I pay to garden for me to make a sixth under the windows on the right side of the back part of my house.

Shall I confess I got a Valentine’s present — presents (!): a sturdy book of goods essays on 18th century topics of interest to me, a Nature calendar (lots of flowers, landscapes, animals) and a card from a now longtime male friend. Thoughtful and kind. Without my having to prompt him at all.

I’ve invented a new 4 week course for next winter, OLLI at Mason!

The Heroines’ Journeys

Many courses in myth take as Bible, Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (a reduction of Frazer’s Golden Bough) so for this one we’ll take Maureen Murdoch’s The Heroine’s Journey (distillation of many books on “Archetypal Patterns in women’s fiction“) and read two mythic short novels from an alternative POV, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (no she did not sit for 20 years knitting and unknitting the same shawl), and Christa Wolf’s Medea (no she did not hack her brother’s skeleton to piece, nor kill those children); then two ordinary realistic ironic short novels, Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter (Leda is the lost daughter) and Austen’s Northanger Abbey (Catherine had it right). We’ll see Outlander, S1E1 (Claire transported) & Prime Suspect S1E1 (Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison).

Two pairs of short novels. What fun this would be.

I have thought of another one for such a time span (maybe 6 weeks?): Animal Tales for Adults, together with articles on animal rights and present day animal abuse for a 6-8 week course. Begin with Woolf’s Flush and Frances Power Cobbe’s The confessions of a Lost Dog; go on to Paul Austin’s Timbuctoo and A.N. Wilson’s Stray; switch gears slightly to David Garnett’s Lady into Fox and Goodall’s Ten Years with Chimpanzees or end on Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation and Sy Montgomery’s Walking with Great Apes

I could show or advise Frederick Wisemen’s Primates (only a bit of this as it’s horrifying what academics do to animals — or show the film adaptation of J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip.

I now try to take seriously What do We Owe our Fellow Animals (Martha Nussbaum): what are they capable of doing? what do they enjoy that’s healthy? and how can we enable them? All day long nowadays Clarycat is by my side somewhere close. Just now on my lap. Sometimes she truly forgets I’m not a cat and tries to play-bite with me. No, say I. Too far.

End of February on Washington’s birthday, when the weather was very pretty Izzy attended the President’s Day parade in Old Town — there’s a long tradition of fake and erased history. Alexandria was a market for selling enslaved people because of the harbor; it has banks. So the history has been and yesterday still was it was a Scots place. The usual Scots band (all white males) marched with bagpipes and in traditional kilts. Izzy said hardly anyone with a mask anywhere. There was quite a crowd and no masks — I’m not sure I like that. She watched for a bit and then found a place she could cross to get to the Potomac and watch the birds.

In lieu of the violence and celebrity posturing of the annual Superbowl event, I watched 6th episode of 2nd season of All Creatures great and small (Home truths); shamelessly sentimental and ratcheting up lots of angst, yet nothing but good happens. Why? I’ve decided it’s a show with women in charge — for real. Mrs Herriot gives up James to Helen, Mrs Hall and the woman with the perpetually nearly mortal cows. Mrs Pumphrey is the local central goddess, and Tricky woo, her animal. A new woman came in, an aging gypsy who lives with stray dogs. Parallel to Mrs Pumphrey. I love it.

I re-watched The portrait of a Lady on Fire, (with French subtitles). Blogged about it, together with Deux (Two of Us) and Capernaum on my blog tonight. Women’s films. True Valentine. Also Gwendolyn Brooks.

And then 5th episode of 4th season of Outlander (Savages). The men are: the crazed German settler who thinks the Native Americans are stealing “his water” so when his daughter-in-law and grandchild die of measles, he murders the beautiful healer of the tribe — they retaliate by murdering him and his wife and burning down his house. Claire had been there to help bring the baby into the world. The coming problem that most counts is measles. Jamie and Ian discover they can’t get settlers while the Governor and his tax collectors are taking all the profits from settlers and using it to live in luxury, and Murtagh is re-discovered. Very moving reunion with Jamie and Claire — keeping the estates, feeding animals. She is Mrs Hall.  I love how in the next season Marsali is growing up to be a medical apprentice.

Finished Christa Wolf’s Cassandra on how all rules, genres, simple truths of literature and myth, the way science conducted the result of the dense war-like oppression of males. Aristotle especially ridiculous and Goethe’s final stance a version of Voltaire-Candide cultivating his garden. Some know better, like Schiller For Valentine’s Day, this cartoon (I don’t know the name of the illustrator, sorry) is also a day to remember as Against Violence inflicted on Women.

I’ll recommend a charmingly written (full of ordinary details) book by Margaret Macmillan, a Canadian writer called Women of the Raj What was life like for the hundreds and more of English women who traveled to stay, or were born in the Raj, with references to women who left diaries and son. How real is the missionary in The Jewel in the Crown? Were all Raj English women as awful as they seem in some TV adaptations. If some were, we might try to understand why.

Claire and Adewehi

Anne Maddeley as Mrs Hall

Matilde, Heloise, Marianne

Not that all is well with the world. Oh no. Especially with the worst men in charge. Putin invaded Ukraine and is actually threatening nuclear war if anyone directly intervenes to save that country from death and devastation and (upon defeat) tyrannical dictatorship combined with kleptocracy (what the GOP longs to mete out to the majority of liberal Americans insofar as they can pull it off).  Horrifying.  Russian soldiers are simply killing people.  Destroying their houses.  Took over a nuclear power plant.  I’ve sent $160 altogether to different places on the Net. It seems such a helpless act. Biden cannot (it seems) pass a voting rights act, nor a Build Back Better bill. I was made very sad by a email from a friend — her husband died suddenly two weeks ago. She had expected that he would have an heart operation, and be at risk from that but not just go. I found myself crying for her, in a way re-living what I felt when Jim was gone. Part of the funeral was held in the same place we held Jim’s – very differently. I didn’t sleep well for three nights — she is experiencing heartbreak.

I nowadays follow the actor, Samuel West, on twitter. He’s rare for not incessantly promoting himself. He had a photo of himself, a son, and his father, Timothy West (so aging now — wonderfully read so many Trollopes for Books-on-Tape) and mother, Prunella Scales, playing a board game. His response to nationalisms:

No attribution but it might be by him

For myself I am going slower, stiffer in body. It takes me much longer and it is much harder than it used to be to do my calisthenics each morning and I’m even tempted to stop. Thao advised me to keep it up — and I’ve read the only way to prevent atrophy is to steadily keep up what exercise I can. My chest has a soft pain now and again but I discovered (as when I was in my 30s and 40s and had these, two ibuprofens makes the pain go away.  I have stopped adding sugar to my coffee and morning cereal.  I’m walking in the afternoon around 4 for half an hour or so. I still can’t resist coping with swallowing glue all afternoon by a couple of glasses of wine. There are few people who understand the nature of addiction and self-harm practices. I take so much longer to heal. I sometimes end up wasting evening hours recovering, especially when I’ve gone out to be with a friend.

I’m in two minds about how the world is going back to being in person — for myself as problematic as ever even if I long for whatever real companionship once again. It turns out the majority of courses at OLLI at AU this spring are online. I regret not going in and yet I have no desire to go to in person conferences — it was better when I could participate online. Yet I’ve been encountering a congenial Englishman who lives not far from me in my walks – he is out playing with his dog. I know I go out at a time he might be there and he does the same. We share an Anglophilic taste in PBS and BBC — and books too. That I enjoy these brief conversations shows what I’m still doing without.

To end on a better note: Not uncommonly when I go to museums with other people (women friends) I find they are not as interested in the pictures as I am but I do get to see more and one favorite painting in the National Gallery for many years I re-found: Redfield’s Mill in Winter, 1922. Well when I got home I found a relatively inexpensive study of his art, very good, by Constance Kimmerle. Out of fashion but fine and beautiful and accurate ….. and meaningful too. Reveling in it

I do think life is good and want to stay here as long as possible with my daughters. Carve out a small place to have some comfort and pleasure the way Voltaire advises. And vote to help and enable others.

Monet, Ice thawing on Vétheuil (1880)

Ellen

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