High or Mid-summer

Beloved Clarycat in a sun puddle  — she stays near me, is with me day & night

Voters in Kansas overwhelmingly voted to reject an amendment to their constitution that would have stripped protections for abortion rights: this despite the wording of the question which made yes into no, & absolute lying texts about which vote was which. This in a state where GOP in charge, a so-called Red state

Hurrah!

Dear friends and readers,

We’ve reached August, and it’s ferociously hot outside — 90F and high humidity so it feels like 107F. The heat exhausts me this year; so too my cats. One day they frightened me by not eating for what seemed 24+ hours, but what they wanted was a new brand — and they were hot because I had been gone for hours and put the air-conditioning up so as to save money. It’s also Laura’s 9th anniversary — married 9 years ago, together with him 18.

Laura and Rob — they’ve taken one vacation this summer and are about to take another (the first they went to a beach place for a week)

On my political blog I’ve been keeping track of the news from a general POV, but here as to inflation and the power of uncontrolled monopoly capitalism what is happening is felt directly by all of us now and it hurts. I pay on average every couple of weeks over $300 for food; my cleaning bills are well over $40 when Izzy goes out to work; $200 a month at least for the air-conditioning that makes living endurable. It now costs $25 to fill up my car (small). At the same time I was told by my financial advisor the literal amounts my investments are worth went down 10%; I have to pay Schwab hefty fees for taking care of what in detail I don’t understand. I am wondering if the advisor and consultant are paying as much attention to my portfolio as they once did.

I am among millions of people being squeezed. Corporate profits are soaring because they put prices up; they are doing all they can to stop legislation from helping people and dealing with climate change. Their power goes back to Citizens United where it was decided corporations are people and free speech= money. (The way fetuses are people but women it seems have no rights.)

Izzy and my visit to Thao and Jeff and baby William is next week! we will glimpse something of Toronto for two days. This necessitated filling out forms, and after all there is random testing on top of vaccination required at the airport. Doubtless what should be done but the whole situation — uncertain with virus morphing continually — is again a choice pushed on us by continual inadequate reactions and now cutting funding. If this had been the situation when I broached the idea I would not have gone through with it. And I’m told airports (Toronto-Pearson one of these) are madhouses with long delays. Of course not to worry the airlines are making any less money; the situation is that way because they’ve set it up to make sure they still make large profits while Covid is still scaring people, and others have decided they will not be as exploited as they were before the pandemic and not gone back to work at these terrible airport hangers. I’m always nervous about trips but I do want to go and see this young woman and so does Izzy.

Midsummer — planted hydrangeas doing well — a lovely white and blue flower

More news of this happier sort is my teaching is over and went very well. I had small classes, and it’s becoming obvious that in fact the population of the two OLLIs do not value the social contact as much as I had supposed and prefer online classes for convenience. I could attract a much larger class if I went online or (shudders) did a hybrid. I’ve now watched a hybrid while I was on campus: the teacher sits in front of a desk with a screen behind him or her of him or herself very large; in the room most of the seats were empty and perhaps 5 people literally there; to the side, a whole bunch in the gallery of tiles formation, many of them resolutely in black boxes (unseen). I am told if I’m home in a hybrid class I will no longer see the gallery, but just the teacher across the screen. Yuk. My habit for zooms is always to keep my view gallery view, including when I’ve given a talk.

I admit myself I’m attending two wonderful classes from Politics and Prose online: Elaine Showalter is just so insightful and well-informed on four women writers, and Helen Hooper can conduct a class discussion very well — at Politics and Prose just about everyone turns the camera on (as opposed to OLLI at Mason where just about everyone turns it off — I am an exception to that). I couldn’t come to the one in the evening. And my beloved London Society Trollope group comes from London. I admit my favorite of the novels of the two P&P classes has been Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (not my first time reading it) and I enjoyed mightily the recent movie by Dan Ireland (with Joan Plowright and Rupert Friend and Anna Massey and David Lang, who died during filming — it is a book and film about aging people and dying) even if it sentmentalised the book (which is not over-sad given what it shows about typical old age — loneliness is a central problem)

Anna Massey as Mrs Arbuthnot, what’s left of the usual cruel woman of Taylor’s books is more softened yet to the point we love her …

Nevertheless, as a teacher there is no comparison between teaching online and in person. Going in person is good for my mental health; also I find that when I’m in a zoom I can’t tell if the people are understanding the text; an example of this is I taught Christa Wolf’s Cassandra to a group at OLLI at Mason online and because a few people were talking, and two of them seem to have understood some things better than me I thought as a whole it had gone well. I go in person this summer for the same text, and within minutes I can see over 2/3s (a small class) were lost, so I ignored what I had and began by going over the overall story line of her trip to Greece (part of the book) — which they missed and it made a difference. Eyes lit up. You can get 4 way talk. I don’t use power-point and I show clips from movies only at the end of a course — after we’ve finished a book. Education comes from the talk with one another after reading excellent books. So I’ll hold out another term to remain in person, and only if the Trollope classes truly shrink will I return to online next spring (maybe).

I also finished my review of the Cambridge Complete Works of Anne Finch, and after three revisions, it’s accepted! What a relief. I feel relatively free. As I’ve said I am going to give a paper on the difference of studying an author through manuscripts than in printed books, with my two examples Jane Austen and Anne Finch, but for this I’ve done all the reading and thinking now and can draw on many blogs and reviews of editions of Austen’s manuscripts (also new Cambridge editions).

Elena (Lenu) and Raffaelle (Lila) don’t want to be lost to one another

So pleasing myself without regard for any commitments: tonight I watched the last episode of the second season of the film adaptation of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (The Story of a New Name). It’s superb. Tomorrow night I’ll go on to the third season (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay) and begin summarizing them towards a good blog: here is a fine review talking of why the series is so brilliant — the minute-by-minute intricate intimate kind of tracing of the girls’ experiences over a lifetime. I spent the last week and a half mesmerized by the five extant Persuasion movies and wrote a good blog (it includes a review of the latest 2022 adaptation). I’ve turned to new beloved books: Italian in William Weaver’s excellent translation, Bassanio’s The Heron, with Ferrante in the Italian as I go through the film episodes is a new one I’ve not mentioned. I devoured Joanna Trollope’s Other People’s Children; Angela Carter’s strange The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales (for Showalter’s course I admit).

I subscribed to the online edition of the New Statesman. Jim and I used to love it; it was our first subscription. Then during the 1980s we dropped it as costing us too much then, but here I am going to get it again as a digital edition. It is wonderfully intelligent and genuinely pro-labor.

I will remember Jim this way too

As to online (delightful commitments) my Trollope&Peers list we really talked in detail and openly, usefully about The Small House at Allingham; I am learning why The Eustace Diamonds is so popular (it is vigorous entertainment, very funny in its sardonic uses of dramatic irony over Wilkie Collins kinds of stories except Trollope tells you up front who did what so it’s more fun), and we return to E.M. Forster next week. The FB TWWRN book just now is Bowen’s remarkably evasive The House in Paris, and for once for a little while friendly and revealing talk with one another on Janeites discussing what we learn from Austen’s characters in her books. (Next up for me is Joanna Trollpe’s Sense and Sensibility – her method is the same as her ancestor and Austen, only less ironic).

Shall I confide here that Elaine Showalter said she’d like to take my course this fall at OLLI at AU (the two Trollopes) if she can get transportation — well I was that chuffed …

No summer should go by without at least one strong dose of Shakespeare and happily I saw an absorbing and enjoyable Midsummer Night’s Dream performed by the Folger Shakespeare Company at the National Building Museum (A Summer Frolic and Community Event)

One afternoon I spent with two OLLI girlfriends in a sumptuous (truly beautiful, therapeutic gardens all around) terrace room talking. Twice I’ve gone out with Betty from OLLI at AU to plays and lunch in DC (actually the food pretty bad in the famous place but good in an unknown one in Chinatown); twice out to a movie and lunch and twice home here for a movie I play on my TV with Panorea. So much for social life. Panorea and I have begun to dream of a trip next summer using Road Scholar to go island hopping in the Mediterranean or to Greece (Athens, then Crete — like Christa Wolf did in her Cassandra book).

On the theme of long-term worries, the weather itself — the fires I watched start up spontaneously in London when they had several days of 104F weather made me begin to cry — I am that attached; but also the fires here in the US destroying vast acres of houses, flooding Kentucky where everything one has is lost terrify me. This too could happen to my house and its irreplaceable treasures.

Kentucky flooding — lives lost too

London on fire — you’d think it was California

This is summer too nowadays —

and it is the saddest one I’ve known since the first summer Jim died. I don’t know why but maybe it is settling in he’s never coming back … and all that means. I like my new life insofar as the teaching is concerned, the friends I now have, my sense of self-dependence but all pales besides how bereft I really am

That concludes this evening, gentle reader, all might want to hear (and that decorum in public allows me to tell you), so I end on a summer image from a beautiful painting, early 20th century, Russian woman painter where I didn’t manage to take down her name

Ellen

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