Jim and I in 1985/86 in this house — sent me by a kind Iranian Internet poet-friend — how happy we were
Dear friends and readers,
I’ve been thinking about how now into my tenth year living without Jim how little I actually go out — and that I don’t because it does not make me happy. It distracts me but I am not happy going to plays &c by myself. Indeed I have had my worst moments of grief standing on a sidewalk trying to hail a cab. Izzy doesn’t want to go with me any more except on special occasions or for some very special play or movie any more. I had rather see the 10 films the New Yorker critic said were truly the ten best of the year than most advertised plays. I don’t want to drive to the gym any more either — at least 40 minutes each way, for 50 minutes of mild exercise among people too unlike me for a relationship beyond parallel exercising.
This brings to mind how I have a hard time sometimes fitting into these OLLI classes as a student in person — that happens to other SGLs (many do not go to classes or much more rarely than I’ve been doing) and the truth is that true social life for many of these people is something quite apart from taking courses. This was prompted by a bad time I had last Wednesday at the OLLI at AU where the teacher in the room refused to call on me, and when I overtly protested, he became all the more adamant. I had handled criticizing him badly. When I got home I finally filled out one of their feedback forms:
The class is so poor I must say something. The SGL refuses to provide context or content: when someone suggested we would understand Shakespeare’s plays better were we to have some historical background, he replied by exaggerating the amount required into something impossible; asked to define his terms, the reply is this is to make us think. He never once went over the texts assigned thus far. The conversation is self-deprecating semi-mockery, a kind of rebarbative challenging, he snubs people pointedly or gives out “gold stars” (or half a gold star) when he approves of an answer. If this is a political theory class, it is wholly lacking in clarity of discourse.
This week he sent the first decent serious set of questions on the plays he’d sent. But I can no longer go back and half-regret it.
It must be I stay in love with Jim insofar as men are concerned — I don’t want a lover and don’t want anyone to displace my books. I also don’t want to lose Isobel which I would do were I to enter into some kind of real relationship. I am not sure any of the men wanted to because I don’t truly attract them as too old and too ugly from age (I see this in their semi-reluctant eyes). I’ve made a acquaintances and friends by attending these classes (though zoom just as much) but I’ve been able to hold onto hardly any to see them outside the OLLI.
I haven’t even learned to travel except as an ordeal — though I’ll do it in September because Izzy has consented to come with me. I like to see far away people I’ve communicated with on the Net and share real interests with but beyond that I worry I’ll get lost (because I do). I never will adjust to leaving home and coping with liminality. Trollope has come to mean so much because of all the zooms I’ve experienced now.
Widowhood is a very sad condition for an Aspergers woman who has lived her life the way I did — an invisbile adjunct with her husband the center of her life — but I have all Jim and my things around me and love to read and to write and to teach and have my daughters, my cats and the friends here on the Net to the couple I’ve made —
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Exactly the same cover as the Little Women and Good Wives book I read and reread at age 11
Rewinding more than 65 years. My reading life before, into and just after puberty
My father took me to the library for “good” children’s books — often they were not series books; one library level series was the Mary Poppins one. He often chose British books for those were the ones he knew from childhood (1930s) because they were the ones in the library he went to as a child or he found in his school plus very classic American ones: Booth Tarkington comes to mind — now I realize racist (Sambo is the name of the little black boy), Uncle Remus tales (Aesop in a black accent). I remember the Lamb’s rendition of Shakespeare; all Louisa May Alcott, and very quickly (because I could read well from about age 8-9) it was books like The Secret Garden, Peter Pan. His sets of books in our house were also part of his sets sold cheaply by Left Book clubs for children at the time. All of a Kind Family (about a Jewish family) was in the library.
Only when I could myself go places by myself (age 10, walking, taking a bus) did I begin Nancy Drew and other more famous popular series — girls’ books and some boys’ books (my father made fun of these mostly gently but not always — I remember he made fun of Five Little Peppers): I would buy them from used book stores. then my mother belonged to a book-of-the-month club (that’s where I encountered Gone with the Wind) and there were the rows of classics my father had in a bookcase (see above). Two long rows of Walter Scott were part of this. Just about all British classics except Mark Twain.
The real reason I didn’t “do” American literature in graduate school is that it is too close. I still can’t stand the underlying religiosity of just about all American texts (false optimism) or it’s an irritant in the way it’s done (this is Marilyn Robinson — only she is an adult overt version). My experience of American life has been so very terrible; I’ve been reading Joyce Carol Oates in a Politics and Prose course with Elaine Showalter and what she shows me resonates as real and horrible. I am, nevertheless, thinking of doing an American literature course next spring: I’ll call it “Everybody’s Protest Novel” — James Baldwin’s scathing phrase it will be all protest books; I am amused to discover almost or every one of my choices either the book or author is now banned in Florida! except maybe Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but someone has said it was not newly banned because in most southern states it has been banned from just before the civil war. I did not do this consciously deliberately.
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How to close?
Burt Lancaster as the melancholy Fabrizio from Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo
My own course (the one I am teaching just now: 20th Century Italian Memoirs and Novels) appears to be going over well once again, and my online groups thrive with me in them (especially the Trollopes).
I was happy last night when I re-watched (it is a sitting through as the movie moves slowly) Lucino Visconti’s The Leopard. Three weeks I was bored and in turns irritated; this time I was fully involved and discovered the movie to be (for 2 hours and 40 minutes) mostly a light comedy with melancholy undertones, with a simple story, focusing on the central male, the Prince played by Lancaster. He dominates the film and carries it — not an easy thing to do.
The difference: I watched what’s called The American version rather than the Italian one I did last time: the Italian is 3 hours and 20 minutes while the American is 2 hours and 40. The American is also re-arranged and Visconti didn’t like the re-arrangement nor cuts. I would not be surprised if what was cut was anything of Visconti’s left-socialist POV. What made the difference for me is the American version is dubbed in English almost throughout and the Italian in Italian with subtitles. So what happens (my view) is you are cut off from Lancaster altogether. He is a rather still passive figure on a screen.
Lancaster delivers a remarkable performance – he is convincing as this melancholy disillusioned Sicilian aristocrat (he said he made Visconti his model). The film still has problems. The second star cast was Alain Delon and he speaks French so in neither version can you hear him. The one street battle scene (Garibaldi invades Sicily) is very well done, but at a distance and not long enough for the burden of meaning it’s asked to bear. The outlook is very anti-risorgimento from the reactionary idea that the peasant world does not want to change (as in enslaved people are satisfied); since we hardly see any we are not in a position to judge. The other idea that you have to permit change in order to keep things the same is acted out in an election presented in the film as useless. As in Lampedusa’s book, the class snobbery as in the book is not contradicted; there is no downstairs. The scenes between the prince and a sort of hunting comrade and the middle mayor whose daughter the Prince’s nephew marries are among the best for understanding people and the films views. Beyond that the filming of the places is remarkable and the last quarter a ball which reminded me very much of balls in Gone With the Wind — we do glimpse that the nephew’s marriage is one of convenience, but the inner life of his coming wife is downplayed — as are all the women).
But I think it’s really worth seeing as in intelligent serious attempt to make a costume drama about important issues and history limited by nature of the poetic masterpiece (for Il Gattopardo by Lampedusa is that) it’s adapting. Its central topic is time, personal time, body time, the time of a nation of people and how history somehow exists and is ever shaping our lives.
Yesterday too I came across Richard Brody’s choice of the 10 best films of 2022. I think not one appears in the Oscars best pictures. He argues that all of the Oscar films were money-makers to some extent; that despite the true excellence of so many films, audiences didn’t come enough: a rare big seller was Everything Everywhere &c. Two male action-adventure (Top Gun) and something else were the only 2 movies which saw audiences come the size of pre-pandemics. Of those he mentioned, I hardly heard of them; I am not sure they came to my small semi-art theater but he made them sound very interesting and I’ll see if I can locate any streaming. I agree with all he says; the Oscars have fallen to a new level of junk.
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What time does to us too. Two nights ago I watched the last hour of Andrew Davies’s marvelous rendition of Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right. Something about the aged tightly squeezed wrinkled face of Mr Crump, the curve of his chin, as he faced the enraged desperate Camilla knife at the ready, alerted me to the idea I’d seen that face before. I looked up the cast and lo and behold it was John Bolam. Who was or is John Bolam: he was the male lead in the 1987 Beiderbecke Tapes, of which I am a fan. Sidekick to Tim Courtney in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. And who was the female lead? why it was none other than Barbara Flynn, and I’ve know all along that there she, so very heavily with a worn face in that big dress playing Mrs French trying to cope with the contemptible Mr Gibson. Barbara Flynn has been in many beloved movies (by me) from Mary Bold in Barchester Chronicles to the Aunt in the Durrells and a very funny series by Davies: Something like Peculiar Practices of Education, a broad satire by Andrew Davies. She was in Cranford
Jill and Trevor (Yorkshire TV)
Their Yellow Van
Ellen
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
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