An epidemic of loneliness? w/coda of poems by Elizabeth Alexander and Marcus Amaker

My new profile picture for face-book and twitter — a life apud libros — among books, of reading

I met America at a neighborhood bar last night …. Marcus Amaker

Dear friends and readers,

An “epidemic of loneliness” is the phrase the US Surgeon General leads with when he comes on News shows and other forums to tell us that how bad it is for people to be literally alone (no matter what electronics are around them in their living habitat). but since COVID is over insofar as a control on people’s behavior, all I can see for most of them is endless socializing — except when it comes to asking anyone to travel to a class or place of work when they can do the essential task or have the essential experience (often intangible intellectual) without the waste of time, or taking up of time to get there and back. That’s what’s asserted online — everyone gone out there once again socializing somehow or other, and even I may appear to be that way as I also am guilty of trying to appeal to the norms of my readers.

I do have another explanation for the US Surgeon General’s imbecility: statistically there has been a surge of suicide across the US; it was noticed a few years ago that white women ages 40-55 were killing themselves in greater numbers than ever before, greater than their portion of the population warranted. Why? I think it’s that their partners can now separate from them freely, no social stigma (and find a younger women willing to live with this man of means), and that their jobs pay them so little as well as giving them little respect.

Sometimes watching a popular serial can alert you to trends. So the serial Succession suggests to me a sick society.

Succession S1E1 I started the (in the US) famous serial Succession last night. Laura went to some trouble to transfer Izzy’s HBO Max into my computer and I can now watch it through Izzy’s account (she gets one guest it seems — or two computers somehow or other). Every other word was “fuck”, very foul language to say the simplest kinds of things in a metaphoric kind of way, very unlikeable characters — though with “vulnerability” especially the men. The women in such shows are characteristically harder and meaner than the men — part of the searing misogyny of this new era. There are also a limited group of motivations, ambition, competition to reach “the top” of whatever — and real meanness here and there. Very slick, does no one live an old house — NYC is chock-a-block (literally) with housing built before WW2 and 1 too Helicopter travel for the whole family. So they skip traffic jams. I know helicopters can save people but since Vietnam I loathe them. But I see the serial provides the lead story in the Style section of the Washington Post …

Succession S1E2: I watched the second episode. It is apparently a British show! — all the actors doing American accents. It has a to me odd sense of humor — they are making fun of any kind of kind or humane behavior. The characters are literally obnoxious and mean a good deal of the time — endlessly competitive The idea is the old man might die at any moment (they are in an ICU) and they vye for the money left, who will run the firm. One character is there for us to laugh at as he (and also Matthew MacFayden) are ceaselessly sycophantic. I wanted to know what is written a lot about and what people watch (It seems) a lot. The heterosexual relationships are all under terrific strain. No wonder I can’t get along in this culture: watching such a program if there are many like this has to be be bad for your moral character … I ask myself what do viewers think and feel when they watch such a program. Some people will say they don’t take it seriously, but you must do while watching it. It reminds me of how youngish women today may say that the present predatory heterosexual norms are things they can deal with and don’t matter or shrug.. In one of my classes someone said of that (taking of My Brilliant Friend) they are just refusing to think of feel about what happens to them. Really? I may stop now as I think it is too much for me …

I can’t figure out how Succession is escapist when it is so painful. I do have an explanation: to most people it is not painful. They don’t mind the mockery and cruelty — it amuses them.

I am not as lonely as I would be without the Internet, and all my activities with others coming out of books, talks about books, movies, shared daily experiences. The worst time is 4:30, but I admit that during the day I have often had hours of peaceful reading and writing. Zooms make an enormous difference. It is a central form of social life for me nowadays.

*************************************

Me and Patty at Arlington House

Last weekend was over-full: On Saturday the 13th I went out with two friends, a married couple to Arlington House (mansion built and owned by the Custis family into which both George Washington and Robert E Lee married) and the grounds around it — the whole embedded at the edge of Arlington Cemetery. The most interesting exhibits today are the recreation of enslaved people’s cabins with photographs, family trees insofar as this is possible, whatever letters survived, and modern videos of descendants talking about what they have been told and experienced of US life themselves. My friend’s husband took a photo of her and me in the grounds. After, we enjoyed a long lunch out in good restaurant, Carlyle’s, at Shirlington.

She had made for my cats another beautiful comforter: crocheted it

Keeping each other company once again (since Clarycat’s stroke)

Another small step in improvement: today Clarycat carried another of her toys about, but this time she knew where to put it: right where I sit. She also is moving about with a sense of direction, knows where she’s going Each step in recovery matters and is heartening to see …

This morning I found Clarycat laying down alongside Ian. I hope he has understood that does not mean he can rough play, but it does show she is now willing to lie down with him as long as he is quiet and gentle. But then again he tries to wrestle and play and she has to scream at him, very high decibel to get him to stop. I run over and pick her up and soothe and reassure her. In another part of the house, he is clamoring for comfort.

Clarycat was better yesterday — well a good sign was for the first time in weeks now she was carrying one of her toys in her mouth. She trotted about with it, but she looked as if she was confused. Strangely, too, as if she didn’t know what to do with the toy. Finally she set it down when she sat down. But then today she was not managing getting onto the top of my bed. She tried 3 times, finally I picked her up and held her in my arms as I’ve been doing for weeks now while I read. She can no longer (like Ian) look intently out the window, listening, the way she once did.

But again this morning she kept banging against the wall in our hall. She was trying to trot along in her earlier way, following Ian or he by her side and she could not prevent her body from turning left. Bang bang bang. I hurried to retrieve her and hold her in my arms until her heart beat slower.

But then again or now she has picked up her toy and taken it to the spot she used to — where I sit. She was trotting around with another toy a little later and also knew where to put it — or she set it down where she clearly intended. And now every morning I am eating my cereal she gives me our new signal for her to be taken onto my lap (a kind of soft mew) and she stands against my chest and licks up some of the milk in my cereal bowl.

Then yesterday I met another woman friend at the Kennedy Center. Lunch, lecture before and a moving & ever-so-active (stage filled with vignettes at one point) performance of Puccini’s La Boheme. I relived the anguish I felt when Jim died as they enacted that closing scene. Auditorium was sold out. And audience rapturous. The production was reviewed as boisterous.

Exhaustion also from trip. I now have conquered how to get to Kennedy Center once again by using Arlington Memorial Bridge — 25 minutes at most. Did I say the wicked gremlins of DC reconfigured the route back that way so last time trying it I arrived home shattered after an hour?

This time I took an alternative route using Theodore Roosevelt Bridge (a fancy name for 50 West crossing the Potomac), which I learned during the closing of the Arlington Memorial Bridge: I had trouble getting my cellphone back on, but (before I left) Izzy had programed the Google maps part way, up to “start,” and I had my old print-out of directions from Mapquest (are people aware Mapquest is now destroyed by commercial greed? what is not? you will reply), and my pictorial memory. Then I could not get the voice to work until half-way, but when it kicked in finally, I was able to move over to a better “artery” into Arlington & to Alexandria, so home within 30 minutes. I feel I now know this way home and can begin again to go to Kennedy Center. No pictures beyond the promotional one for La Boheme. The day was lovely.

Recovery from each day’s social experience was collapsing for 3 hour nap in early evening.

Oh yes mother’s day. Izzy wished me well, Laura is coming over with a mug later this afternoon, and I had emails from Thao and a new young woman friend, Bianca.

***************************************************

Among those books being read by me now:

Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister. I keep reading this, almost I cannot put it down, and this is unusual for me nowadays and even more so for a sequel — for this is a kind of traditional sequel. We are going through the Pride and Prejudice story, much as one does in Jo Baker’s Longbourne. Daringly Hadlow quotes more than you realize from Austen verbatim, which shows how her artificial language is up to accommodating 18th century style.

What I like — and this will seem odd – is that the angle Mary’s experience projects turns out to be a real critique of Austen herself. You’d think a Janeite would not like that — think again. From Mary’s POV we see how cruel Austen’s favored characters can be — of course her non-favored characters have long been shown to be outrageous (D. W. Harding was showing that too). Hadlow is revealing Austen herself to be skewed — valuing Elizabeth because much of the misery of life Elizabeth simply shoves off as so much water off a duck’s back. We see the hypocrisy of many social pretenses — so Hadlow goes further than Austen. In this version Mary had worked very hard to play well that night at the assembly, and in fact had played well, but not in the mode that was wanted; she also made the mistake to try to sing. Afterwards — the next day, Mr Bennet tried indirectly to apologize and compensate but we can see how little he does there — better than the callous Mrs Bennet.

It’s like D.W. Harding carried further — I can see what is critiqued in line with Charlotte Smith and so the book w/o overt politics is political — set in the later 18th century of course. Jo Baker’s Longbourne too shows up the Bennets but not inwardly the way Hadlow does. I guess I have “catholic” tastes in my reactions to appropriations on film (for I like the Sanditons) and verbal post-texts.

Hadlow was at the BBC for many years, and her other books are all set in the later 18th into 19th century, some sequels, some historical fiction, some biography.

Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet was never a favorite of mine; I prefer the Elizabeth conjured up by Anna Maxwell Martin in the film adaptations of PDJames’s Death Comes to Pemberley. I also decided I like the PBS/BBC serial Sanditon, mostly won over by Rose Williams as Miss Heywood and Turlough Convery as Arthur.

I am now preparing for my summer courses: reading Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters and Jenny Uglow’s marvelous literary biography of her: A Habit of Stories — she is almost better than reading the Cranford stories themselves when she close reads them so beautifully does she explicate and recreate the experience of the stories; I re-watched the deeply moving film adaptation by Andrew Davies: Michael Gambon and Tom Hollander are unforgettable as Osborne and Squire Hamley (a kind of King Lear grieving over his daughter Cordelia is evoked). I was disappointed by Alba de Cespedes’ Forbidden Notebook: after a book long series of gradual rebellions and re-definitions of herself, her husband, her children, she caves in to re-become grandmother to this family, no longer even working outside the home and destroys her notebook, where she had been seeking a new identity.

For my Internet identity: I wrote a short talk for a coming Trollope Society Every-other-week group: it’s on Phineas Finn and I called it “Words for Sale.” Watched all three Tom Jones films (1966, 1997, 2023) in succession, preparing for a comparative blog alongside Fielding’s novel.

Mishandled an offer for me to review an edition of Dusinger’s work on Richardson: the woman said she wanted it yesterday and I worried I couldn’t do it, and then my “pay” was to be allowed to pick a book from their thousands or hundreds of unappetizing titles. I’m now sorry I missed out. I now think I might have had the time. But perhaps it’s better not to be so pressured. I did better at an offer to do a biography of Isabelle de Montolieu, an entry in a Palgrave encyclopedia. I’ll look at what’s wanted tomorrow morning. I think they were more polite in their first letter.

But am doing two reviews, one for the Intelligencer where the editor is my long-time friend and another for a long-time friend. In both cases there is no problem in having to understand what’s wanted, when, or special social skills.

************************************

And Izzy finished a second puzzle: Caduceus, cleric, of the Wild Mother. Notice how it’s hard to distinguish a male from a female gender, and look at the lovely purples and reds. An old-fashioned radio to the right at the bottom

Ellen

Advertisement

Read Full Post »

October’s end: Samhain (SAH-win), and remembering when we played in Love’s Last Shift

Margaryta Yermolayeva — Witchy Art

Dear friends and readers,

The hard beginning of October has been long over, and we’ve had a couple of beautiful weeks: fall used to be my favorite time of year. I still love the light cool breezes, the whitish color of blue light in the morning and orangey-beige at dusk, the variegated colors of the leaves and trees and bushes, so that when I look out my window and see a receding block going downwards on both sides and in the far distance criss-crossing the street and sky yet more soft melting variety of intermingled trees. It reminds me why I quite like being alive. And I’ve put up a cheering picture: Witchy Art by Margaryta Yermolayeva.

Late last week we had frightening news: Rob, Laura’s husband, has developed a second form of cancer. From last time we knew he has a gene that makes him susceptible to cancer, and that is why he has tests twice a year; it’s been over 9 years since the last. Then Laura said it was skin (Squamous) cancer. No time was wasted and today he had an all-day operation. The cancer was in his face, and it was cut out; they then follow trails of cancer cells; when these gave out, there was said to be no cancer left, and they proceeded to do skin grafts on his face, then a face-lift, and at the close stitches by his nose and moustache. 8 hours. This is called mohs surgery, and has an excellent cure rate. Laura appears to have been in the hospital near him (with laptop to do her work) throughout and brought him home tonight. It seems no radiation will be necessary, but he goes for tests November 9th to make sure. You will appreciate how worrying this has been.

My osteoporosis is not as bad as the doctor feared, and “all” I have to do is take a prescription pill once a week, early morning, drink lots of water for 2 hours while sitting up. I too will have tests, but in 6 months time.

Two of the courses I’m taking (at Politics and Prose bookshop zoom space, on James Baldwin’s writing, on George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda) have come to an end — I’m still reading the latter with a group of friends on FB, and one day spontaneously wrote a defense of Walter Scott’s art (he is so influential on the depiction of the Jewish characters). I was asked to give a brief or short talk on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s stunning book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin in a “The Coming of the Civil War” course at OLLI at AU. It went over very well and now I’ve turned the talk into a brief essay blog explaining why it hit such an emotional nerve at the time and why it continues to elicit strong responses from readers, and I put my paper “Jane Austen and Anne Finch’s work in Manuscript and 21st century Manuscript Culture” on academia.edu and then linked it to an explanatory blog after I found I was not able to go to the EC/ASECS gathering after all. I regretted not being able to to the 40th anniversary party of OLLI at AU yesterday: again it was held into the time range when I’d have to be driving home at dusk into the dark. This is a serious disability now, for it cuts down on the small amount of real or physical social life I have. I am enjoying all the zoom classes I go to and one I teach, but know I am at the same time sadly lonely.  On Twitter.

Sometimes it seems I have such a long time ahead of me without him in the world. It’s been such a long time already. I’ve learned I can survive as long as I have my adequate income, and Izzy with me helps enormously, but still so many years perhaps to go without him.

So to tell you what has gone on with me outwardly (and inwardly), I look at what are in effect diary entries on face-book (short form entries on twitter), and can that I enjoyed for the first time two great movies: Tony Richardson’s 1960s Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), a new superb serials (I joined Britbox!), e.g., 2022 Sherwood, an insightful serial dramatization of miners in Britain in 1984 and then 20 years later, how Thatcher succeeded in dividing and crushing them politically and personally and now they are bitter at one another and the larger society which has left them to rot — it’s on the long memories of life

Famous still of Tim Courtney running for life

Loneliness stands out as more than a brilliant film artfully, with cast famously a young Tim Courtney but also James Bolan (of Beiderbecke’s Tapes), Michael Redgrave, someone called Topsy Jane (!). I had an instinct that at the end our hero would not win the long run for the prison warden even though conventional mores would dictate this as a triumph. No, he would not be used, no matter what it cost him – partly because he knew winning would get him nothing despite vague promises. The intense depiction of poverty and class in Britain at the time; the music for Jerusalem, and the interlude of joy in sexual love at a beach — all make it fit into Angry Young Men material but also these British Social Conscience films of the 1960s. I can’t recommend this one too highly. Tony Richardson the famous director, but Alan Sillitoe wrote the story where the male lead is not a young sweet adolescent but a somewhat anti-social criminal type, and screenplay. Like Sherwood, it takes place in Nottingham; like Sherwood an ironic use of the Blake song Jerusalem.  I’ll mention Jim went to a public school where he had to play a sport, and he choose long-distance running — it does allow you solitude — escape for the time running.

The Red Bull Theater has returned to online productions (and in person at the same time: they did a dramatic reading of John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse, a witty, hard but good-natured too intelligent sequel, as it were correcting the prurient hypocritical and sentimental Love’s Last Shift by Colley Cibber, reminding me of how when Jim was 24 and I 26 we played a pair of amoral servants, he the gambling male and me the promiscuous female in just that inferior play (a great hit in the later 1690s). Here we are, 1972-73, at the Graduate Center, and I daresay it was the fall of that year:

Decades ago, when we were children — how wrinkle free is his skin, how unknowing is that smile only I know from memory. I had experienced it all right, but had no idea the complex causes, of what politics really is.  This past Monday night I sat with my copy of Vanbrugh’s play and read along. The video had a running transcript at the bottom, I could pause and re-watch, I was close up to their faces and bodies, could hear every word.

I learned that non-human animals can get very sick and die from Covid-19 too. This essay explains which animals are likeliest to get sick, the statistics on this, and which likeliest to transmit the disease to whom and get it from whom, that the supreme court might just act to protect pigs (at long last) from a short caged life. How angry I felt when the Washington Post had an editorial against allowing pigs a little enjoyable life lest it put the price of pork chops up, and someone somewhere lose a profit.

The pig is intensely relieved, feeling a puzzled gratitude

I have added the New Statesmen to my budget of subscriptions, which I hardly keep up with, but it comes in driblets each morning and so I do read it; Jim and I let our subscription lapse when we moved to Virginia as too expensive for us at that time. I am still buying books, doing things remembering that he would have appreciated this, understood that. I really felt an intense detestation of the thug woman, Liz Truss, a Thatcher without brains, enough to make me want to abjure feminism. Luckily I came across over the day Truss was still not giving in, Amia Srinivasan’s review of Andrea Dworkin’s My Name is Andrea in the LRB where both recognize the core of the subjection of woman, is male determination to control woman’s sexuality (be in charge of at least one if not more women), so felt yes, it has been of some use.

I have probably told you my winter offering, The Heroine’s Journey (a 4 week online course with 4 slender books, Atwood’s Penelopiad, Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and other adult tales, Ferrante’s Lost Daughter, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey), and my spring one Contemporary Italian Memoirs and Novels (an 8 week onliner, three Levi’s, Natalia’s Family Lexicon, Carlo’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, Primo’s Periodic Table, and Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend) are accepted a OLLI at Mason so I will be useful for the coming year and have much to do and to enjoy. Cross fingers the second will be accepted at for the spring 10 week online course and the first for the summer 4 week online course at OLLI at AU. I am still hoping to travel with Laura and Izzy in the later spring and July — to Leeds for a Eurovision extravaganza where I don’t have to go to this event, and to San Diego comic.con where again I need not go, but stay at a beach-house. Dreams?

OTOH, my greatest fear is I’ll lose this house (and then everything in it I value). That is partly another reason why I am thinking of curtailing all travel — and won’t go unless I truly feel I’ll have a good time and won’t know the ordeal of anguish I often do for a reward not worth it every time. I sometimes think I would kill myself if I lost this peaceful refuge.

So I conclude this diary entry: Wompo has started up Foremother Postings again, and again it is slackening off, but they have made me remember one of my foremother poets, Amy Lowell and two of her poems intense moods that speak to me:

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

All day long I have been working,
Now I am tired.
I call: “Where are you?”
But there is only the oak-tree rustling in the wind.
The house is very quiet,
The sun shines in on your books,
On your scissors and thimble just put down,
But you are not there.
Suddenly I am lonely:
Where are you?
I go about searching.

Then I see you,
Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,
With a basket of roses on your arm.
You are cool, like silver,
And you smile.
I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes.

You tell me that the peonies need spraying,
That the columbines have overrun all bounds,
That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and
rounded.
You tell me these things.
But I look at you, heart of silver,
White heart-flame of polished silver,
Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur,
And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,
While all about us peal the loud, sweet Te Deums of the
nbsp; Canterbury bells.

[I do work all day and late at night I do feel so desperately tired and look about me for someone, something, a book, feel the silence, long for music — and then I watch The Crown, or Outlander, or Foyle’s war where I find depths of feeling in characters to fill the emptiness of Jim’s having been devoured]

The Taxi

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?

[And why should I ever go away from my memories of him, ravage myself on those knives however hidden]

Ellen about to watch the last episode of the third season of The Crown, where the two sisters, Elizabeth and Margaret confront one another after Margaret’s feeble attempt at suicide, and say they could not live without the other’s support, and must carry on both for the sake of the other …

Izzy, five years ago, at a library conference, with the patron saint of libraries, Benjamin Franklin

Read Full Post »

Old-fashioned diary entry

This is a place in Central Park, NYC, I know well: ancient rocks. I used to sit there. (Izzy put it on twitter from her trip to NYC these 6 days)

Today nine years ago Jim died. The comfort of my existence went, my friend stopped existing literally. I have learned much about people since he is gone. A fourth wall in the house I imagined myself in fell away. I have had to interact and wanted to interact and in some ways have become a better person. I learn a lot by being with kinds of people I never came into contact with all that much, some of whom know a lot more than me on this or that subject. But I’d rather have been happy with him.

Here is the obituary I wrote the morning after he died

To mark this day here’s a diary entry (from a letter I write to a friend daily — usually early morning)

A glade in the Sheep Meadow

Now every Sunday I take one of these fosamax (brand name) pills for the osteoporosis.  I am then supposed to sit or stand up for 2 hours and drink 6-8 oz of water. After which I can eat my breakfast or do whatever I do normally. It’s awkward but this is what the doctor ordered.  The tests this past week showed that I don’t need injections or other supplements than the Caltrate-D and folic acid pill I already take daily. Dr Wiltz said that in another year I’d have the same tests and see where we are.

Izzy happened upon the zoo in Central Park:  she is looking down at a Bear going for a walk

I still get those pains in my chest — and now they come unexpectedly at any time of the day. I don’t take the pills for them (2 different bottles) most of the time because the pain is like a sore pain, and most of the time goes away quickly.   The pills are super strong

This is Izzy’s view from the new Whitney museum — I’ve never been there; it happened after Jim died and the one visit I took to the city since I suffered so trying to go places, including the park, the theater, I had a small heart attack when I got home. So I won’t go again unless I go with a friend. It’s too much for me.

I love to talk about books and love to read or to listen to others talk about them.  It does not at all get in the way of my enjoyment; it enrichens it  I don’t worry that this prejudices me or anyone else: it is probably the basis of English literature study. I have no understanding of spoiler warnings.   Only if it’s a mystery and at the end I am truly supposed to be surprised do I not like to be told what is going to happen  In fact often I’ll read the wikipedia article or something else to see if I want to read it; or if it’s an upsetting tragic or melodrama in some way book that affects me, I like to read what’s coming so as not to suffer too much anxiety.  Those that are too strong, I don’t read — Outlander has a lot of bad things that happen but our hero, heroine and other beloved characters usually win out or are happy for some other reason by the end.

For me to write a long piece I’d have to give up blogging. The trouble here is that I love (I admit) the gratification of readership and people saying they enjoyed what I wrote. I’ve now written about8 or 9 books, and produced editions of 5.  Of these 2 have been published as regular books, and 1 as an edition.  Most of the rest are on my website.  High scholarship, the translations, and some others have a readership but it took a long time for me to accomplish these.  It required really taking myself out of circulation.  I didn’t mind as long as I had Jim. But take these 5 days (Izzy away in NYC) I am alone and lonely but for my company on the Net. So that’s why I say when I can no longer go out and teach I’ll write these longer books again.  It is hard to be autistic, to be snubbed, not to be able to interact with others intuitively, to say things others find embarrassing or unacceptable for reasons I can’t understand. I’ve never made a friend in this neighborhood I’ve been able to sustain — and I have tried.

Although I say I’ll go back to Poldark and now accompany my writing with Outlander — finally or really — I don’t care if these are despised by the established literati.  It’s what I love: Historical romance and historical fiction.  (I cannot write the biography I am capable of because the son will not cooperate, I would need to travel and also socially interact with all sorts of people. I never realized to what extent a biography depends on social and traveling skills as I do now consciously.) Yes because historical romance and fiction are escapist & high literary imaginative achievements.  They come out of other books.  And also because I can identity with the heroines as I cannot with many contemporary heroines.  I could instead write on Trollope or try a sequel or post-text out of Austen or another beloved set of books.

I’m getting myself to drink water.

Izzy is walking in Highline Park and this is what she sees through her cell phone camera

This past Friday I sat next to a woman in the Films Moral, Political, Social, Aesthetic class I’m taking again. Every other term the teacher does it — usually brilliant artful films, that often I’ve never seen — though sometimes I have. When the class was over we had this conversation:

She expressed her displeasure with the hybrid form. She said she may not be there next week, remarking: “there is nothing I’m getting that I would not get at home.” She got to talk to me! What she said interested me because it showed how differently she thinks about these classes than I do. She told me some interesting information about Italy at the time of the film we had discussed in class (The Bicycle Thief). Why not speak up? She seemed to think that would be too much like a “little lecture.” I said you could keep it short. She didn’t have that much, only that she had lived in Italy for 10 years, recognized the neighborhoods the film occurred in and could tell whether class ironies were going on and where. I said when I am a SGL (teacher at OLLI at AU) I love such contributions. She was not convinced — I said she would have informed us. She appeared not to care in the least for my opinion. Did not seem to hear it.

Then I said to her comment that in person is not worth it to her, that in a class I taught in person I know within a few minutes who has not understood the text — remember I’m a literature teacher. That I couldn’t have told that on zoom. Therefore I became so much more effective a teacher because I could respond to that — I meant I see my task as improving understanding of books. Her reply startled me: well, you see why I prefer zoom. In other words, she would not want me to know she didn’t understand. So what does she come to classes for? Not out of any respect for the teacher’s discipline or training.

This woman didn’t value the social experience either.  She said she was getting nothing more from coming to the class than she gets from zoom.  I quite agree that the social space upstairs has few people in it nowadays but that’s because the people seem not to value it. Covid is not going away; they’ve been vaccinated to the hilt and yet they don’t come. I wish someone would explain to me what neurotypicals get out of social experience? Jim used to say much of the social experience we have here in the US is dysfunctional if you thought it was for making friends.

A small mammal, one of the earlier ones from which this human race sprung

I am following and enjoying Izzy’s trip with her by following the pictures she puts on twitter.

Stay for me there, I will not fail
To meet thee in that hollow vale.
And think not much of my delay;
I am already on the way,
And follow thee with all the speed
Desire can make, or sorrows breed.
Each minute is a short degree,
And every hour a step towards thee.
At night when I betake to rest,
Next morn I rise nearer my west …
— Henry King, after the death of his “matchless friend,” his beloved wife

Those who are left are different people trying to lead the same lives … (Winston Graham, Warleggan)

Autumn from Window — idealized image by Barbara Pommerenke

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Summer’s End

Emma Haworth — The Last Day of Summer

Friends and readers,

Of course the intense heat is not over: the last 3-4 days here in Virginia were and the next 3-4 promise to be, intensely hot by noon and remain very warm until later in the night. Humid, sticky. But sunlight is barely peeking over the horizon at 6 am and the sky is darkened by 8:20 pm, fall activities will begin within 2 weeks (public schools and colleges have begun the fall semester), and the feel is of summer coming to an end.

Since I last wrote Laura and Rob went on a vacation they apparently enjoyed spectacularly: DisneyWorld in Florida for 8-9 days and nights, where they stayed in a very nearby resort as Disneyfied as the park inside the gates. They seemed to spend the early days in Star War and other science fiction and recent Disney fantasies, only recording the traditional characters (Mickey Mouse, Snow White, the dwarves &c) at my prompting.  Then Laura’s many photographs in a sense telling about their trip day-by-day began to include the traditional matter: every day a parade, every night fireworks, mouse-ears everywhere. A gilt statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse.  A church like set of gilded windows telling the story of Snow White and the 7 dwarves.   The magic kingdom castle (an icon).  One shop with a wall of EARS. They ate out beautifully, swam, saw beautiful sunsets and sunrises; photographed themselves having fun (including old-fashioned roller coaster rides from the 1970s, ie., through the Dwarves’ Mines). One of my favorites of her photos she subtitled: Rob doing his impression of relaxing, where he did seem to be working at lounging poolside on a chair. Both looked comfortable and happy. Here are two where you can see them very well:

Rob in a space ship

Here they are furthest left — she’s in a grey outfit; it’s part of a cruise ride

Most important the atmosphere and behavior of everyone who works at Disney is impeccably benign, eager to help you have a good time. The place, experience and environs (hotels and inns and pools just outside the gates) offer a continually seductive highly controlled invitation to return to your childhood.  One example:  the garbage is removed via chutes in the dead of night so customers cannot see it being done or who does this work. And you have paid a great deal for this.

I did a couple more activities I’d been yearning to: I went with MaryLee to Wolf Trap to see EmmyLou Harris and Mary Chapin Carpenter. She emailed me again to say after all let’s meet for coffee, and when I arrived I could see she is still under the strong grip of bereftness (Roger, her husband died less than 4 months ago now), and thought to myself, maybe she would be willing to do something different than her usual as getting outside of herself: I proposed these two folk singers at Wolf Trap. To my surprise and happiness, she got up and went over to a computer, so excited was she at the idea to look at the show because she knew/liked the singers; what held her back was the fear she couldn’t drive us there (as she didn’t know the way) and worse, how would we get back with the enormous crowd in the parking light and the darkness. Were it not for two daughters, we would not have gone. Her daughter Katy, encouraged her to dare and said ML sure could do the driving — so MaryLee phoned me and as Izzy was walking out the door to go to work, I dragged her back and she helped me buy two lawn seats. Later Ellen, another daughter, was encouraging her to have a good time, and it was Izzy who downloaded the confirmation paper which got us the tickets at Will Call, a booth, when we got there.

On the way there I had a print-out from Map-quest which I kept reading aloud and there were my pictorial memories; on the way back MaryLee programmed her google maps but we couldn’t “her” to talk so I interpreted from the map as ML drove and I had my pictorial memories (even in the dark) of leaving Wolf Trap … I could picture both ways as we went. That’s essential for me in finding my way: I must be able to picture as I go.

EmmyLou Harris recently (she is in her 70s if she’s a day)

Mary Chapin Carpenter

The experience at Wolf Trap itself. We very much enjoyed a picnic supper: she made delicious sandwiches, I brought wine, and macaroni salad (I left behind the paper plates I had bought especially for the picnic!); we were on the upper part of the lawn, in our lawn chairs, between two trees against the fence. A learning expedition we said. Then the musical performance. Harris was working hard, meant well, but somehow did not connect with the audience. Her breathy delivery made her lyrics hard to understand but over the hour and 10 minutes she performed she won me over. This morning I heard her on my ipad and think she would have done better to sing more simply to us. Then a duet with Carpenter (good feeling) and, to conclude, the second half, Carpenter’s hour and one-half were just superlative. Carpenter made contact, her talk was piquant and interesting, she and her band made music, the deeply familiar ones I love and new ones — very often very melodic. She saved the most rousing and satiric famous early ones for last.

Out under the skies later at night amid a good-natured crowd (all cooperative, helping one another) just so rejuvenating. We saw two men helping a third disabled man to settle himself: I spied a woman with a young baby coping. We talked of memories. We watched people — central to the experience is the crowd and it was very crowded, and very few masks. The courageous part was coming home, for we had to get out of the parking lot (30 minute wait) and then be sure and take the right turns, with only google maps (and my memory picturing the roads) to guide us in the dark. Got home at midnight. She too said she had not been out so late for a very long time. But we did it.

Remember Joe to Pip in Great Expectations? Wot larks!

So I’ve been to a beach, saw two live plays, Midsummer Night’s Dream (a summer frolic) and Red Velvet, and now a concert at Wolf Trap under the invisible stars.

By no means am I wrong not to trust to myself to find anything by myself — and try to go to the coming EC/ASECS with a friend (Tony his name). If he does not show up, this time I will bow out too (though I will do the paper on studying Anne Finch and Jane Austen through their manuscripts). I spent one hour and 10 minutes of getting lost trying to find a restaurant, with Waze, with map-quest print-out, with memory, all to no avail. Very bad stress. Finally, phoned Lins, NY patient friend who said I was 3-4 minutes away and on phone gave me directions: the restaurant was buried inside a mall. What happened: the updating of Waze has made it impossible for me to use. It corrects the addresses I put in, so it took me to the wrong address. It gives me more choices and I can no longer figure out how to get to go when the button say “go later (save). My friend was generous, kind, waited all that time and we had a lovely (salmon w/salad for me) lunch & good talk. It’s also a lesson on the risk of trying to fly internationally using a package tour — there will be no Izzy there to help me through the rows of computers. People in my Aspergers group advised paying for Global Entry and/or TSA Pre-check but I wonder if they will enable me to bypass the especially puzzling computers …

******************************************************

My new walkable-in (though with bunion cushions) ECCO sandals from Comfort One shoe shop in Old Towne …

If you had ever told me, I would photograph my feet in shoes and put the photo on the Net, I would have thought you mad.

When I returned from Toronto, my feet were in bad shape, bleeding around the toes, bunions very sore, cracking skin. On the advice of my friend, Betty, I bought from Amazon (I tried Walgreens’ but their website is impossible) Tea Tree Oil (Hot Soak), and have been soaking my feet for 20 minutes each night. But I knew it’s time to get shoes I can walk in also if I’m to teach in person, and go out a bit more. She also told me about ECCO sandals: she was wearing a pair. I found them in Comfort Shoes in Old Towne, unfortunately a long walk from my car to near the Potomac. A very nice clerk who helped me order a second pair from their warehouse, and then, since I was so far down, I walked on to Potomac (two short blocks) and stood by the water at long last. Walked all the way back slowly. I am not doing as well in the heat as I once did, and was glad to get to my car, get home, shower and stay in the air-conditioned house for 3 days afterward.

I’ve not neglected museums this summer — due to my friend, Betty. I went with her to see two much advertised & praised (?) exhibits at the National Gallery. Spare yourself the trip. One is supposed to be about the icon of Woman in White as related to Wilkie Collins’s famous novel and Whistler; what it is actually about is Whistler and a model-mistress he painted in white several times; anything that relates (19th century pictures of women in white) are thrown in. The argument (doesn’t hold) is how important the mistress-model was/is. A blow up of Frederick Walker’s well known illustration for Collins’s novel is in one of the rooms.

No where is there any mention of how wearing white was an upper class luxury; how hard it was to clean white garments; nor is there any frankness on the prostitution involved. The other called Doubles consists of the curator having dragged together lots of things he and/or she have imposed the idea of doubles on (similar objects painted by different painters) and makes little sense even of the term.

The cafeteria continues to be very poor (hardly anything there and what is is wretched). A result of curators thinking they are the artists and plucking works out the curators thought exemplified a theme or idea which was jejeune or not so. I dislike a lot of recent art — it seems flat paintings on walls won’t do. The exhibits had a lot of films, interactive kinds of things.

Curators are becoming bolder. Dropping “controls” like setting the works up chronologically or by author provides some measure of distance and lets the artists’ works belong to a really there schematics. If the curator is smart and the theme is really there (or school of painting say), it can be enlightening but they are no longer content for that. Plus for me I don’t like modern abstract art, I like realism.

I am still reading and thinking about Wilkie Collins! (a superb book on Wilkie Collins, Jenny Taylor Bourne’s In the Secret Theater of Home). and have now watched the 5 part 2016 BBC Moonstone and the 1996 singleton: both very good. It is very hard to film this book whose surface is made up of characters who do very little and are supposed to amuse us as satires of types of people, with a new type in the detective Mr Cuff; but whose underlying story is put off until near the end of the novel, with unexplained suicides, angry crippled people, and silent stereotypical Indians (orientalism) along the way. The hero, Mr Franklin Blake disappears early on and is brought back at the very end. Both productions kept him on stage by the use of flashbacks remembered by him and Betteridge, who in 2016 is a close companion-friend. The part is realized very appealingly by Leo Wringer:

Leo Wringer as Gabriel Betteridge

With Lisa Cole as his effective daughter, Penelope (she steals scenes with her vital presence)

The only performances that came near theirs in the 1996 film were Greg Wise as Franklin Blake and Anthony Sher as Cuff.

******************************************
So of course I’ve been reading away too, watching serial and other movies at night, blogging some, a few old friends wrote (Jim Dring who has helped me with Poldark) and new (an Iranian woman now on my listserv with information about Jane Austen in Farsi) and I answered.

I’ve had a provisional acceptance for a course I’ll teaching at OLLI at AU (and a modified shorter one at OLLI at Mason). This tells you what I’ve been reading the last several weeks on and off.

There is apparently a film adaptation

Contemporary Italian Novels & memoirs

In this course we’ll read a group of Italian works with a view to understanding the culture, history and politics of Italy over the last hundred years or so. We’ll begin with a novella by Grazia Deledda (one of a few women to have won the Nobel Prize), Cosima (1937) depicting the early pre-World Wars world of Sicily as we watch a young girl mature. Then a historical novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1957, much respected best seller, filmed to acclaim — Burt Lancaster still remembered for his role), set in Palermo, 1860-1910 depicting the risorgimento from a prince’s POV. Then Natalia Ginzburg’s memoir, The Family Lexicon (1963, also much respected woman writer and book) depicting a Northern family (Turin , Rome) during and after WW2. Primo Levi’s Periodic Table, brilliant memoir drawing on chemistry (1984), autobiography as history too. Last Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2012), first of 4 volume masterpiece Neapolitan Quartet. We’ll do some poetry (Salvatore Quasimodo, also won Nobel, and Elsa Morante in pdf forms)

I’ve not decided which will be the fifth book — or if I should just have four. In the 8 week OLLI at Mason I will drop Deledda and replace The Leopard with Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi (1947), a memoir of his time in exile during WW2 because I’ve discovered The Leopard is fascist, and what I loved so long ago in the Italian in the English is a Scott-like historical novel. Christ Stopped at Eboli is brilliantly philosophic and about the hard lives of peasants in Italy before, then, since by a radical writer. (I am substituting the Lampeda at AU lest the woman who did an Italian-Jewish writing course there a couple of years ago now think I’m imitating her — I’m not as her talk was wholly conservative and non-interpretative. I hesitated over Cosima, but it is short, easy and the woman won the Nobel Prize and it seems a shame to omit it (the AU people said I could have an 11th week).

Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon: 3X she and her children’s lives were in serious danger, rescued at great personal risk by friends. During her time in exile with Leone, she writes 3 pages where she packs the whole of the feel of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli

For those who don’t know it, the poetry of Quasimodo is superb (I have a translation by Allan Mandelbaum), e.g., And suddenly it’s evening

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
Ed e subito sera.

I watched 3 of the 4 part serial with Lindsay Duncan as Anna Bouverie (a rewriting of Trollope’s much put-upon Mary Crawley) and she was so riveted she wanted to see the fourth — in a row (too much for me)

Reading for my course coming up: the Two Trollopes: his Last Chronicle what a masterpiece, for London Society group: CYFH? — how beautiful the description of Swiss tour, and how true the characters feel. This time I see more emphatic that Kate Vavasour is a lesbian. Yesterday finished Joanna Trollope’s Rector’s Wife: a strong intelligent second phase feminist novel– about independence, living your own life (you are a boat in your right). Even in this sequel form. I can’t recommend it too highly. I’m a third into her The Choir and am seeing how astute it is about church politics (and very Trollopian in Anthony’s way).

I am surprising myself by liking her sequel, Sense and Sensibility very much, and also (not quite as much) Catherine The Three Weissmans of Westport (Connecticut): my mood is more tolerant than I once was and I am more able to bear other people’s cheerfulness so can accept such books better. I’ve thought about sequels:

It’s in the interplay between the originating book and this one that the pleasure, insight and compelling interest forward lies. I spent a couple of hours yesterday quite literally seeing how Trollope’s book parallels Austen’s — from acquaintance with three of the other 6 written during that year (see below). Six known and successful authors were asked to rewrite one of Austen’s books, and one can see the influence in choices of book for each from the kind of book the modern author is known for

It’s common to review such books, but most of the time you get either condemnation, praise (usually contentless, too vague), sometimes a literal retelling of a few contents in the new book, not what are the pleasures of sequels, and why it is so hard to please generally. For JT’s book I think she read Austen’s book from the same angle and in the same light I do (as does Schine) — other sequels I’ve detested I now realize did not. For JT the central event of the book occurs when at the end of volume 1 Lucy forces on Elinor the knowledge of Lucy’s long term engagement to Elinor; I still remember how moved I was reading Volume 2, Chapter 1, Elinor’s agon and vigil . JT has the revelation also as the last chapter of Volume 1, and the vigil as powerful and 1st volume of Volume 2. She takes equally seriously the humiliation of Marianne in a London public assembly — makes it occur in a fashionable church wedding.

There is also more than a whiff of memory of some of the film adaptations and I can see the 2008 actors in a number of the roles (JT’s Willoughby is the same arrogant, self-centered crude male as in that movie), hear their voices, with the 1981 Brandon taken for this book, and lingering memories of the Thompson/Ang movie Again my taste is cohering with Trollope’s. Schrine has Greg Wise as Willoughby in mind (boyish) for her Willoughby character.

Yet I placed my files notes under Joanna Trollope, not Austen because this book comes out of her oeuvre, and I see several attitudes of hers in her non-sequel and other sequel (2 Anthony Trollope) books. So you probably also have to like the new author’s presence, vision and style too — I strongly felt Trollope’s Other People’s Children left me with a healthier attitude towards life the way The Rector’s Wife does.

A ferocious hate-filled attempt on Rushdie’s life almost succeeded this month …

Put together another list for another course for Spring 2024: Anglo-Indian Novels, also Take Two. No one can do such books nowadays without Salmon Rushie, and I’ve discovered I don’t care for his novels. I’ve tried them before: it has something to do with his sense of humor, magic realism (not realistic at all), and that his fiction recalls Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which never amused me at all. But I do like his essays; so the list would be J Farrell, The Siege of Krisnapur, Markandaya, The Nowhere Man, Rushdie: Imaginary Homelands (a book of essays, columns, life writing) and Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowlands … Had lovely lunch (pizza) with Sugra at Dupont Circle two Saturdays ago: she was the teacher at the history of India course online I took in June.

And I’ll keep reading my non-fiction outside sources and movie watching. I have two 18th century epistolary novels partly set in India and hope to get to them soon: Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India, ed, introd E. M. Forster (!), and Phebe Gibbes, Hartley House, Calcutta. Both by women. I believe Emily Eden in virago Up Country, about her time in India, early 19th century.

Listening to Eliot’s Daniel Deronda read by Nadia May in my car: I am finding how much I dislike the heroine (!) and that her egoistic traits and coldness remind me of Grandcourt (so marriage to him is a kind of poetic justice), but am so moved by narrator’s continually enlarging commentary. This for 3 different groups, all of them “doing DD” this fall (FB group, OLLI at AU and best of all Maria Frawley’s class at Politics and Prose).

***********************************************

Do you want an image of a picture I’ve liked in the last 24 hours? On twitter: evening in the countryside ~ a young woman muses quietly as she sits modestly in the train, pet dog at her side. She holds a ribboned gift; maybe it’s for a meeting with the person in the car which we can see through the large window (Andrea Kowch, ‘Reunion’). Pensive and melancholy as if she’s remembering something fondly and sadly. The gift is what she is going to give someone. The person may be in the car & car catching up to the train as it comes into the station. I am very touched by details of the sweater, a print dress, her hat, dog, the seat covers, car in glimmering countryside. Early 20th century:

So there you are summer’s end. The last of the flowering bushes finally bloomed

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Why is it so much harder to be alone in summertime?

Beatrice Potter — Mice at work threading the needle

This morning I was thinking I find it much harder to be alone during the summer or hot months than the cold. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe the hot weather signals to one you are supposed to be outside with others having a good time?

Then Robert Reich whose warm compassionate deeply humane and political newsletters I get each day wrote about how a third grade teacher named Alice Camp made a big difference in his life

So I wrote in reply:

I was never lucky enough to have a teacher truly helping me at a young age. But twice when a bit older, a teacher took an interest and made a difference in my life. At age 15 I was intensely miserable and alone, and an English teacher quietly took pity on me: she got me a school job in the library (something you were told you were supposed to get and I had no idea how), and as one of the students monitoring people late to school so I sat with a group of other students every morning for a year. Both helped against the crying jags. She never openly admitted this. I don’t know why I know this but she was said to be a spinster.

Then age 18 the first English class I had in college a Black man who was very elegant, upper class (from one of the West Indian islands) openly was friendly to me in class, and once asked me to come to his office where he encouraged me to be an English major and told me I was very talented in writing and reading. Because of this meeting I did that — so it was not just reading a passage in Wordsworth that gave me the courage. I remember ever after how he was Black and was probably the only Black teacher I ever had in school — I went to all NYC public schools, Queens College, CUNY and a year at Leeds University (UK). One day someone bought in lollipops and gave to one to everyone but me.  I did look different: I was anorexic and very thin, dressed differently, sat apart.  Prof Oliver went over to the guy and asked for 2 lollipops and then came over to me and gave me one and went to the front of the class and unwrapped and sucked on his.

Oh I don’t remember the woman’s name but I can see her kind face even now. She had soft silvery blonde hair. The man’s name was Clinton F. Oliver, and his scholarly specialty was Henry James.

A very long time friend on the Internet who lives in Iran, Farideh Hassanzadeh, wrote this poem the other day and sent it to me:

They are the only ones
who are free.

They stay
on that dark side of the cities
where the most remote stones
rest on their bodies,
covered with dust.

When news is broadcast at regular time
by beautiful international women,
wearing colorful clothing and gaudy smiles,
the dead hear nothing but deep silence
as if all the international languages
are without sound.

Even when the bombs start to rain
on far and near cities
they are safe in their eternal shelters
while their souls are suffering
from the long-lost dreams.

The only voice that reaches them
to shake their bones
is the torture screams
from the solitary confinement
just like the graves
where the freedom is condemned to survival.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Oft in danger, yet alive/We are come to seventy five; Sondheim, the man, is gone; Barchester the cathedral, & Belfast, the movie

I have learnt since Jim died, always knew, I would be very lonely were I to have to live alone. Not only do I have Izzy with me but during the day I maintain contact with lots of people on the Net — through the listservs I moderate, on the FB pages I join in on, even twitter I have a few acquaintances now. Then there are nowadays these zooms. People respond to my blogs; sometimes even now to my website. So I’m rarely w/o company.  Hardly ever, if you include Clarycat, ever by my side.

Dear friends and readers,

A sort of milestone. If 3/4s of a century is not a milestone, where are milestones to be found.? I am amazed I’ve reached this age, but here I am. Above you see the silly present I bought for myself. This must be my third doll of this type:  Colin, my penguin; a doll I bought at the Native American museum who I was also charmed by; and a silver Christmas squirrel.

Saturday, November 27th, I bought sweet Rudolph while wandering around the local CVS pharmacy waiting for Izzy to get her third booster: process includes presenting an identity card, her vaccination card, 5 minute wait, and then the vaccination jab, then fifteen minutes more. We decided not to wait until Kaiser called her (they had said soon, but no appts offered) when we read of Omicron Covid. The name is ominous. While there, I counted 7 people arriving, waiting for, getting jabs, waiting 15 minutes again. There was one who had just left. As we left, I saw another person coming up. A steady stream for this pharmacist.

November the 29th was a cold and short day, but pretty. I managed to be happy a good deal of the day — it was a kind of work but I did it. Many wishes for a happy birthday to me on FB and a few on twitter. some with real warmth. I put on FB this poem by Johnson to Mrs Thrale which Jim once wrote out to me:

Oft in danger yet still alive
We are come to seventy-five!

Remembering when Jim copied out Johnson’s poem to Hester Thrale ….

Ladies, stock and tend your hive,
Trifle not at seventy-five;
For, howe’er we boast and strive,
Life declines from seventy-five …

Mrs Thrale had been pregnant by that time 10 times. By age 40 I had had three hemorrhages, two as a result of miscarriage or childbirth. In the evening Laura came and drove us to Il Porto Ristorante. Laura is now mature and she showed us a good evening. We had good talk, my central dish lobster in creamy sauce with pasta (I didn’t eat enough of it), and then a walk by the Potomac. Since I can no longer drive, I go out at night very rarely. Thus it was a treat. I remembered the last time I had been in Old Towne late at night: one summer night with Vivian where I had had to park the car in a difficult space. Vivian is gone now. Here is Izzy’s photo that morning.

Getting ready for work — she is looking more like a traditional librarian every day.

In the mid-afternoon I attended the Barchester Cathedral Trollope Society zoom: John Christopher Briscoe has imagined a history of Barchester Cathedral from Anglo-Saxon era through the Roman into the English gothic and then 19th century. He’s an architect and historian, used picturesque drawings of cathedrals (with cats) from the Anglo-Saxon to the 19th century eras. The charm is also Mr Briscoe is a fan of Trollope’s and has done this out of love for the books.

An original illustration of M.R. James’s story, “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”

Clive Swift playing the central role of curate

Afterwards much talk of (among other things) other writers who have written up cathedrals. I mentioned Joanna Trollope as someone who might have — under another pseudonym, Caroline Harvey, she has written stories that are take-offs from Trollope — she uses Trollope characters’ names. They are sort of sequels — sequels come in many varieties; she updates, but then also uses the clerical milieu for similar sorts of psychological-social stories and uses names of Trollope’s characters transposed — there’s a Mr Harding and an Eleanor &c&c. One person said there is a cathedral in her The Choir and it’s based on several cathedrals in England (especially Rochester); that’s written under her own name of Joanna Trollope, and is an original fiction.

I also remembered that M.R. James, a writer of uncanny unnerving ghost stories — truly finely written, subtle – has one set in a Barchester Cathedral — “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral” it’s called; it was adapted by the BBC for an hour’s film and starred Clive Swift who played Mr Proudie in the 1983 BBC Barchester Chronicles. Some of M.R. James’s books are beautifully produced — lovely paper, illustrations, introductions, the lot. Jim enjoyed them mightily and bought the beautiful books. He read aloud a couple of the stories to me.

I have Joanna Trollope’s The Choir and will read it next: there is an audiobook still available on CDs, & there was a film adaptation. I started it last night Very readable in her usual way. You can recognize her too. Hers are stories that deal with the social-psychological traumas of the 20th century, which are also political issues too, using the troubles and contradictions of middle class family life in milieus that recall Anthony Trollope’s.

Trollope’s Orley Farm is the next “big read” for the zoom group; it will start mid-January, and I did volunteer to do a talk on Millais’s illustrations — I wrote about the original illustrations to Trollope’s novels in my book, the chapter I’m most proud of, which was praised by Mark Turner (a respected Trollope scholar). Dominic Edwards promised he’s do the necessary for the share screens.

As I described above, evening Laura came and we went out and we did have a good time. She is now grown up at last. She is leading a happy life for her, but she knows she is not developing her talent for real. She says there will be no great book — and no children. So she lives with her choices. She has a full social life with Rob. She tells me some of their friends have died and it is NOT unusual in the US for adults to die in their 40s or 50s — overwork, despair, sickness not treated or badly treated. The US a cruel society to its ordinary people — unqualified uncontrolled capitalism (now in danger of creeping into dictatorship of a religious-based fascism).

Another reminder of Jim that day: Stephen Sondheim died. How Jim loved the music, the lyrics, the books, the full-blown musicals. We went to so many; one summer the Kennedy Center became a temple to Sondheim, and the last night there was spontaneous singing groups around the building. For two Christmases in a row I bought Jim Sondheim’s memoir as edition of his musical scripts, photos, writing all about them. Here’s the blog I wrote about 2 months after Jim died: I begin with Into the Woods.

And then a clever parody:

This is unfair but funny. It is true this is the kind of Sondheim song that gets to be very popular and that people try to belt out or listen to Elaine Stritch belt out (or Bernadette Peters croon), but he is far more varied than that. Still Alan Chapman has caught something; on Sunday Lin Manuel Miranda led a group of singers and actors from Broadway to have a songfest on Times Square.

The Chapman seems to me hostile. “On an Ordinary Sunday” made me choke up because it is about what a New Yorker walking in Central Park might see on an ordinary Sunday. I remember the first time Jim, I & the girls saw the musical — at the Arena, the astonishment at the picture, and the beauty, harmony and hope of it all … the poignancy of not appreciating the little joy we have in life.

**********************************************
Not done yet. Yesterday I had another rare treat: went out with a friend to lunch, to a restaurant of the day time type which caters to “ladies who lunch,” and the food was a wonderful half sandwich and cream of tomato basil soup. Afterwards we went to see Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. I admit I wanted to see my heroine-actress Caitriona Balfe, and knew Ciarhan Hinds might steal the show. He did, but Judi Dench was given the central moments for her speeches. My review:

Alas, it is not a great film — Branagh just never seems to reach that point of direction, conceptions, work a writer  where the film transcends. And it is also over-produced in the way of most movies that turn up in movie-theaters. The movie must jump out at you viscerally; the audience must feel there’s nothing too subtle for you here, not to worry. It’s being over-rated but it does have power.

The problem is what’s interesting; Branagh pretends to be doing a 1950s movie in part. It’s not only in black-and-white, but done on built sets. This reminds me of Hitchcock, but it’s not to have total control — it’s to convey something about the 1950s. I’m not sure it convinces because of the modern over-producing — despite heroic efforts to make a period film, to recreate  the 1950s visually, by sets. The acting by Balfe, Hinds and Dench (she is given less but what she is given is central) terrific — I almost didn’t recognize Balfe as her voice is so different from Outlander. Maybe she over-does the working class Irish accent.

Caitriona Balfe as Branagh’s mother and Jamie Dornan as his father — enjoying dancing on an old-fashioned rock ‘n roll dance floor

Critics have said it’s too distanced but I am not sure they said why or how. One example, throughout the movie we see famous 1950s kinds of movie (maybe 40s) on the TV set. Several against violence but I suspect they are Branagh’s favorites. He is there as a little boy and we see how smart he is (there are literary allusions) but the how much movies meant to him is kept detached from him. The movies are just part of what is watched. Well at one high point of violence, we hear strains of High Noon (which we’ve already glimpsed on TV); this breaks the suspension of belief, and I think destroys the scene which is not over-the-top in emotion. We needed to be left in the scene to made to care.

It is also somehow upbeat with the opening in color of modern Belfast and the closing. And the fable itself which has the most purchase on our emotions through Balfe’s irrational attachment to Belfast – she should want to get out. The theme is a contrast between those who leave (and all they gain, including the child Branagh who grows up to be an actor, director, movie-producer) and those who stay (the grandparents who must).  Branagh’s father, the husband of the film has a job in London and he’s been offered help to transfer. Only because he is in danger of his life if he doesn’t join the Ulsters and his sons too does his mother agree to go. All her roots are in Belfast, Northern Ireland.  I remembered how I hated coming to Virginia and understood why even if NYC at the time was a terrible existence for us I found myself so isolated alone an outsider here, and still am.

But then cannot have a downer or it won’t sell. So we return to the tourist and rich part of Belfast at the end and Dench’s stoic endurance as she stays,  now a widow. The film is dedicated to those who left, those who stayed and those whose lives were suffering and ruin. A charitable way to see this is Branagh thanking his parents.

It has an archetype:  Cinema Paradiso, where a similarly appealing boy-child finds comfort and meaning in movies and grows up to make it big in the industry ….  Will we never stop focusing on the troubled background of white successful males … ?

**************************************************

I have been reading away, wonderful deep fulfilling books by Iris Origo, Christa Wolf, and on them: my winter course will be a continuation of last spring: 20th century women’s political writing. Both trace the rise of fascism, and the thwarting of women, the limited roles allowed them – much more. Latest iteration:

Retelling Traditional History from an Alternative Point of View

We will read two books which retell stories and history from perhaps unexpected and often unvoiced points of views. In War in Val D’Orcia, An Italian War Diary, 1943-44, Iris Origo (British-Italian, a biographer, and memoir-writer, a literary OBE) retells the story of World War Two from the point of view of a woman taking coping with war as experienced by civilians as the chatelaine of a large Tuscan estate. Then Cassandra & Four Essays by Christa Wolf (a respected East German author, won numerous German literary-political prizes) the story of Troy from Cassandra’s POV, no longer a nutcase but an insightful prophet written after the war was over, with four essays on a trip the author took to Greece and her thinking behind her book. The immediate context for both books is World War Two: they are anti-war, and tell history from a woman’s standpoint, one mythic, the other granular life-writing. I will also recommend people see an acclaimed film about the GDR’s Stasi, The Lives of Others (available on Amazon prime): the heroine’s story is partly based on the life of Christa Wolf.

The heroine of Quest for Christa T is Christa Wolf, and also the Lila of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, which I have at long last finished reading, but by no means finished writing about or reading her (next The Lying Life of Adults). Ferrante’s rage ignored by the muddled critical Ferrante Letters. Of course it’s all by a woman. Deep alikeness and despair extends to Hannah Arendt, Bachmann’s Malina, Anna Segher’s The Seventh Cross. Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 the male equivalent of War in Val D’Orcia.

Alas, omnicron-covid is making the spring look more problematic at OLLI at Mason, where I have been surprised to discover the people are not eager to get back in person, so I said if my spring Anglo-Indian novels gets less than 10 registering in person, I’ll switch to wholly online, and learn about hybrids by attending one in the spring. It looks like at OLLI at AU, doing it in person is what’s wanted. The two places differ: unlike OLLI at AU, OLLI at Mason cannot get academics enough to truly teach a literature course for 8 weeks. My zoom chat tonight with kindly Aspergers friends we all talked of the uncertainties to come, worries about omicron …

How did I get here? I never expected to but I do understand more now.  I am 75.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Post-Halloween: Izzy’s new song, plus ça change …

I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life … And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookstore [not so much that latter as the days of vast caverns of books, floors of them, you were left to explore on your own, i.e., the Argosy in NYC, 2nd Hand Bookstor in Alexandria, Va are gone forever, or so it seems mostly …] — Julian Barnes, A Life with Books

Friends,

I thought I’d begin with an autumnal poem, W.B. Yeats’s “When You are Old” as read by Tobias Menzies:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Equally moving for me is Izzy’s latest song, “All I want” by Toad the Wet Sprocket:

******************************

Last night was Halloween, and from my hour-long zoom chat with Aspergers friends, to the few people I talk and email with, I was wished a happy Halloween. We did try: Izzy thought she was invited to go to a party on Saturday night by a man in her Wednesday in-person Dungeons and Dragons group, but when the time came close it seemed the party was to be an hour long or so, after which it would break up into people doing different things together, among these, bar-hopping. This is not for her, especially as getting there was an Uber (and back). So she thought the better of it – she is now getting older than many of the late 20s people who would show up, several gay (as the man was gay), what she had to wear was the regency dress she wore for JASNA (not appropriate for this, too naive). Instead she recorded her song.

I had hoped to join in on giving out candy for the first time in years as I still have the battery-operated candles I had found for Biden’s night-before-inauguration so I could light up my pottery pumpkin, put the stoop light on and be all welcoming. Well I got three groups and one lone girl in a clown’s outfit. Next door and across the street from me are older women too, who also had welcoming light and symbolic objects — they seem to have gotten the same groups. And then it was over.

As has happened to me before, I discovered that there is little to join in on if you are trying simply to be part of a neighborhood community. Halloween you must go to a party, some 15 years ago, for two years running at the Torpedo Factory museum in old town, a Halloween dance was held, for the public & Jim and I went; one year we traveled to NYC to go to a Halloween dance at the Princeton club (as members of the Williams — old-fashioned rock for people mostly in their 50s too).  Thirty-five, say 1980s when we still had a (what I called) Welfare project down the hill, endless children and adolescents came, many Black. Thirty years ago in this neighborhood (all private houses, as we say in NYC) there were several floods of children coming through this neighborhood, and I’d give out candy, chocolates, cookies, pretzels with Izzy.  Twenty I went myself with Laura and Izzy (age 15 say and 9) with them in costume trick-or-treating. I’d stay back on the sidewalk and there were really lots of people. But this neighborhood changes every 7 years, and about twenty years ago, the welfare project was knocked down, super-expensive houses and condos with what’s called a few row of “scatter-site housing” for people getting subsidized rents, built in its place. Ten years ago or more a scheme in my neighborhood not to let most of their children trick-or-treat but make a party. Immediately it’s exclusionary of course. Excuses like strangers put razors in children’s candy. Tonight I wondered if the upper class mostly whites here did not like the children from elsewhere

A photo Izzy took that lovely afternoon as she stood by the Potomac in Old Town

I was advised to watch movies, told by others that’s what they did — horror ones — so I told myself I’d watch movies too and my choice was Shades of Darkness, a 1980s series of hour long adaptations of ghost stories, all but one by women, done with great delicacy, insight, mood creation. I bought it sometime after 2000 as a DVD — I watched one I’d seen before and one I probably hadn’t. Elizabeth Bowen’s “Demon Lover,” very well done, as much about WW2 in England, the Blitz as about this ghost that seems a distilled eruption of senseless indifferent harm I’d seen it before but have forgotten how well done. Dorothy Tutin, the central figure. This is a traditional ghost tale where the ghost is malign and we are made nervous because the whole experience is regarded as fearful, hostile — popular Kafka stuff in a way.

Dorothy Tutin as our Every ordinary women profoundly disquieted as she sees him across the room …

The other May Sinclair’s “The Intercessor” (first time seen), to me a strange ghost stories to me because the ghost is simply accepted as part of universe and the theme is we are supposed to understand the revenants, accept them — not pitiless mischief, but the ghost a redemptive pitiful ghost. The human story is dreadful — people can be dreadful and have very bad luck, but the ghost, unprepossessing as she is, brings renewal. John Duttine, the hero, often played deeply sensitive men in the 1970s-80s BBC dramas. I’ve read other Sinclairs of this type. This set includes two superb hard gothic Whartons, “Lady’s Maid’s Bell” and “Afterward” (stunning). This was an era of fine dramas from the BBC — and there are other series of this type — all June Wyndham Davis produced.

***********************************************

Lucy Worsley getting to sit behind Austen’s writing desk with some paraphernalia Austen would have used

So my teaching and scholarly life went on. Some successes: my two classes on The Prime Minister are going very well. My paper, “A Woman and her Boxes: Space and Personal Identity in Jane Austen,” went over very well and I much enjoyed the virtual EC/ASECS. I’ve not yet returned to Anne Finch, though the term is winding down, because I changed one of my books for my coming 4 week winter course teaching at OLLI at Mason, and am very much engaged by the books:

Retelling Traditional Tales from an Alternative Point of View

We will read two books which retell stories and history from perhaps unexpected and often unvoiced points of views. In War in Val D’Orcia, An Italian War Diary, 1943-44, Iris Origo (British-Italian, a biographer, and memoir-writer, a literary OBE) retells the story of World War Two from the point of view of a woman taking charge of her Tuscan estates during the war. Then Cassandra & Four Essays by Christa Wolf (a respected East German author, won numerous German literary-political prizes) the story of Troy from Cassandra’s POV, no longer a nutcase but an insightful prophet written after the war was over, with four essays on a trip the author took to Greece and her thinking behind her book. The immediate context for both books is World War Two: they are anti-war, and tell history from a woman’s standpoint, one mythic, the other granular life-writing.

I’d get a crowd if I were doing Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, but no one needs me to teach these. I’ve learnt that Florence Nightingale wrote a novella turned into polemic essay, Cassandra, only published recently: beyond protesting the restrictive life of an upper class Victorian young woman, exploring her own depression, it’s an exposure of the Crimean war. Finally an excuse to read away books on and by these two brilliant serious women.

A modern Cassandra: Wolf has Aeschylus’s proud victim in mind

I got involved in a wonderful thread on Victoria when I told of my coming Anglo-Indian Novels: Raj, Aftermath and Diaspora (I’ve told you of this one before), this spring at both OLLIs and in person. I told of books and they told of books, and we all dreamed in imagined company. My thanking people included this:

I did send away for the Metcalfs’ Concise History of India, and Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India (2016 in the UK). I have the Dalrymple volume on the East India Company and am grateful to the pointed to the specific chapters. There’s nothing I like better than articles when I’m looking for concision and I have access to the George Mason University database and their interlibrary loan.

My course itself is not on the Victorian period as all three books were written in the 20th century: the first is Forster’s Passage to India, and I have got hold of his Hills of Devi, and a book of essays published in India about the relationship of his time there and books to India. One book I have read and is about 19th century colonialism through 19th into 20th century books (novels and memoirs) is Nancy Paxton’s superb Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947

Not for this course but about the 19th century and colonialism through another and classic 19th century novel is the Dutch Max Havelaar; or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company by Eduard Douwes Dekker (1859), using the pseudonym he often used Multatuli . Now this is a superb book where you will learn that not only the British were stunningly brutal to native populations when they took over, but also how the colonialists did it. It’s a novel that is heavily true history (disguised only somewhat) – a peculiar imitation of Scott as if through a lens like that of Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Dekker risked his life while a resident manager in Indonesia (and other places) and came home to write this novel.

I strongly recommend it – and it’s available in a beautiful new edition by New York Review of Books, paperback, good translation. I just so happen to have written a blog last night half of which is on this novel – the other half a film adaptation which descends (in a way) from it, Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (by way of an intermediary 1964 novel). Arguably MH is most important one volume 19th historical novel about the Dutch in Indonesia. The volume includes an interesting introduction by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an important writer and political activist (spent too much time in prisons).

The other two for my course are Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown, the 1st volume of his Raj Quartet (a historical novel, familiar to many people through the superb BBC TV serial in the later 1980s); and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake (a book showing the diaspora). The movie I’ll assign is Merchant-Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah, which I also cannot praise too highly

Outlander begins in Scotland, Inverness, at Samhain or Halloween — it is also a ghost story

I’ve splurged on two beautifully made copies of the first two books of Outlander (Outlander & DragonFly in Amber) for my birthday and am back reading these books at midnight after realizing I’d been dreaming for sometime of myself in an Outlander adventure. By the time I was fully awake, I had forgotten the particulars and wonder what was the prompting: it’s been weeks and weeks since I last watched an Outlander TV episode and months since I read in one of the books. Maybe it bothers me that I don’t have Starz so will have to wait to see Season 6 until the season comes out as a DVD.

**********************************************

The cat meowed — the first voice of the series

I do most days need some cheering up, so often so sad that right now my movie-watching includes this year’s All Creatures Great and Small, the set of DVDs sent me by my friend Rory. They still my heart with the strong projection of love, understanding, kindness between one another. I am especially fond of the direct emphasis on the animals the Vets and everyone else too are caring so tenderly for. The first episode opened with an temporarily ill cat being taken care of by James (Herriot, Nicholas Ralph). As my daughter Laura (Anibundel) wrote: “Snuggling down in the Yorkshire Dales to save a few cows turned out to be just what the doctor ordered last winter.”. I regret only that there are only six for this year, so I’m re-watching last year’s seven. Re-watching beloved series is what I do a lot.

Izzy and I did vote early, this past Saturday at our local library. We got there early and found a reasonably long line. We were told turnout is high. Everything was done peacefully and democratically. No one there to intimidate anyone. My neighborhood is showing signs for Youngren and I’ve encountered the seething racism in many of these rich whites — they will vote GOP because they are most of all about their status (and feel it’s threatened by not having whites in charge), see Black people as dangerous and inferior, and yes the campaign against Toni Morrison’s Beloved has traction. The GOP even has a mother-type inveighing against the book in a campaign commercial.

One reason for this is it’s not a good choice for a high school class. It’s too hard (not linear at all); its content is problematic: the use of the ghost is part of a skein of irrationality and violence justified in ways that most high school students will not understand. But she won the Nobel, and this is the most famous one: much better, more appropriate are Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (varied, sane, also about economic structuring to keep people poor), Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Lorraine Hansbury’s A Raisin in the Sun, August Wilson’s Piano (Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is rightly assigned in junior (3rd year high) years. But this is an argument for people teaching literature to think about. Youngren is insinuating profound resentment, implying this book teaches white children to hate themselves and their parents. The reality is it’s a book too hard for students to take in, with some of the same problems of vindicating violence you see in popular US movies. I never assigned Twain’s Huckleberry Finn after seeing a Black young man get up and do a talk about how painful it was for him to read such a book and hearing white boys in the class snicker at him. The choice of Beloved tells about the conformity and non-thinking of US high school curricula than anything else.  And now it’s weaponized against Democrats and liberal gov’t.

If I could bring Jim back, I’d give up all I do — for I wouldn’t be doing much of this probably, wouldn’t have known of the OLLIs, of the Smithsonians, become part of these zooms, but I admit it does make me feel good that I prove to myself and do cope with so much nowadays. Today I resolved two bill problems from goofs I made in using websites to pay my bills — I now get e-bills for seven of my bills (post office becomes worse each week). I’m not as afraid as I used to be — though still frightened some (terrified at what could be done if the GOP cabal does take over), at least I know so much more about all that I need and do related directly to my life, who to go to (AARP, EJO-solutions for my computer, Schwabb guys for money). It is good to feel capable and useful and appreciated – though I began with the Yeats poem because Jim was and will be the one person in the world who loved the pilgrim soul in me. And every day, every night I feel his lack. So much I could do were he here, so much I miss out on (the new Met Meistersinger 6 hours!) how he would have reveled in it.

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Nearly 8 years a widow

Sophie Thomson as Miss Bates: in the 1996 Emma: I dislike most of the movie, but her performance as Miss Bates and the way she is filmed is the best Miss Bates of all I’ve seen

My day’s journey has been pleasanter in every respect than I expected. I have been very little crowded and by no means unhappy. — Jane Austen, Letters (24 Oct 1798)

Friends,

On October 9th of this year, Jim will have been dead 8 years. I have learned many things since he died (because I had to or die myself), and much has seemed to change or alter in the world over these years (not fundamentally but surface changes make a lot of difference to individual ordinary relatively powerless lives). I wish sometimes I had behaved differently when Jim was alive but I do not believe that anything I refused to do or was lacking in fundamentally hurt or deprived him of anything he wanted.

For myself I am again not not sleeping well. I have periods where I sleep fine (5 hours and a bit more on average) and periods where I don’t (waking in the night, up after 3-4 hours). Just now it is the stress of returning to these classes via zoom, worry the two classes I teach won’t go well, the new relationships, and seeing out in the world that the present peaceful seeming settlement in the US is at risk.

The lack of a close relationship such as I had with Jim is, though, what is very wearing to me. I am not made to be alone I need someone to confide in, to turn to for advice, support. I’ve now tried several friendships and friendship is not a substitute for a partner/loving spouse. I have had a hard time even sustaining these, most have broken up, attenuated, the person moved away or died. No man I’ve met or briefly gone out with (3?) or known more at a distance comes near him for compatibility, intelligent understanding and of course love for me. Nor will there ever be.

I’ll mention this:

For the last few days I’ve had a persistent pain in my chest; for a few days before that side (right) arm has been too painful to lift
sometimes. I did take a weaker pill, one I’m told to take twice a day at 12 hour intervals, and while it helped, the pain did not go away. I don’t feel the pain when I’m standing or sitting up most of the time, some movement brings it out. So I couldn’t do my full set of exercises yesterday. And do them but one a day, trying to walk (earlier) in later afternoon or evening. I should phone the doctor and go. I have said I’m told I have a aneuryism in my aorta.

I suppose you (those who read this frankly autobiographical blog) know that writing itself cheers me up. Writing helps buoy my spirits after I wake and as the day begins. I don’t need the helps visualized in this film adaptation of Mansfield Park (1983), with Sylvestre Le Touzel as Fanny but I know why the picture of her beloved’s ship as drawn by him, the transparencies, and other meaningful objects are set around her on her desk near a window

I am feeling slightly overwhelmed just now. Take this past Monday:

I had 4 zooms. I was dizzy by the end but I will stay with all 4. One, mine (I taught, The Prime Minister at OLLI at AU online), went well, but too many men. I don’t do that well with men. And my anthology is all women and my desire for truer representation on behalf of women, so I may have a small class eventually. 3 people were already not there. They emailed to say they had a conflict and they would watch the recording later in the day. 3 people for the repeat tomorrow later afternoon at OLLI at Mason online have already sent messages to this effect. So recording has a down side in a sense — the classroom experience must be redefined.

I had suspected the teacher for the Theban Plays would be very good — that she is very intelligent and, alone (not with the usual partner) a good teacher whatever she does – and she was — though she did not handle the zoom aspects of calling on people or any of it at all, which did make her presence less felt, less effective (she seems to erect barriers between herself and others). There was the London Trollope Society Zoom at 3 (BST 8 pm) on The American Senator (with two talkers) and then at 6:30 pm EDT another fine teacher (from Politics & Prose) on Wilkie Collins’s No Name. I was probably too tired by that time to take it all in coherently.

No London Trollope Society zoom next Monday and the No Name class is only 4 more. So it will be only 3 more Mondays this 4 zoom line-up will happen.

Meanwhile last night I was reading the book by Fagles (translator, editor, introducer) the Theban Plays teacher had suggested. Wonderfully naturalistically translated. I thought of Philoctetes and how Sophocles made marginalized powerless people his central figures: a woman (all 15,000 spectators men, all actors men) and a cripple. I loved it and wrote my one paper on an ancient classical work on it (with a little bit of help from my father): the teache, a long=timed tenured person hated it and gave me a B. “How could you talk about heroes in this vein?” I am fascinated by Collins’s power of description of the 19th century cityscapes (walking on a wall) and charged feminism of No Name (two heroines completely cut off from any money because their parents married after the father made out his will), and am reading a new edition of Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, early feminist masterpiece, by Stevie Davies (Unbridled Spirits, effective half fictionalized accounting of 17th century women involved in the civil war; Impassioned Clay, with its insight into how historical fiction is ghostly, about the now dead and vanished bought back (one feels that in Gabaldon’s Outlander serials).

I napped twice to do it that day. Just fell asleep around 4:20 (I did lay down on the bed telling myself I was just laying down) and then woke at 5. Again around 8:30 and woke at 9 pm — watching PBS, Judy Woodruff had put me to sleep.

I also “visited” the National Book Festival and for a while listened to & watched Ishiguro manage to make intelligent talk. On a JASNA channel of some sort for about a third of a session, listened to Janet Todd, some of whose books as a scholar I admire, who has written a new novel on Jane Austen (and Shelley I thought but not quite) and whose fantasy I thought might be like Christa Wolf’s No Place on Earth, where early 19th century Germany romantic figures who never met meet. Alas, not so; it’s a re-hash of a biography she did of the Shelley women (Fanny Godwin who killed herself, Mary Shelley).

Tuesday so much easier. I re-make lecture notes for tomorrow’s class at OLLI at Mason on PM, and I’ve a later afternoon class at OLLI at Mason on Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall (I’ll be writing a blog on this book & the Brontes, Gaskell & Scott later next week).

Egon Schiele, Four Trees (1917)

So Anne Finch has been put to the side again, and I’m struggling to do the reading for a paper centered on Austen I’ve promised for October 16th: A Woman and her Box: space and personal identity. Luckily the book I agreed to review for Peter Lang was on Jane Austen, Non-Portable Property and Possessions (not the exact title). (They have not acknowledged receipt of my report nor paid me in the books they said they would. I love getting back to Austen (as you can see from the stills I’m using for this blog), and the books I’ve read for it (Barbara Harding, A Reading of JA; Amanda Vickery on what Katherine Shackleton bought, lived in, made a life out of; Lucy Worseley on JA’s life through her houses once again. I’ve learned about traveling libraries: books put in boxes that are bookcases! A sudden spurt:

Which of us is not familiar with the much-attested to story of Jane Austen hard at work on one of her novels, toiling over tiny squares of paper held together by pins, crossing out, putting carrots and arrows into the lines, second thoughts or words over the lines, on one of her novels in draft. Where?  on that tiny round table, sometimes referred to as her desk, a relic now found in the Jane Austen House museum. We are told that she did not want a creak in the door to the room fixed because it functioned as a warning. Upon hearing the door open she would of course stash these papers away – perhaps in that writing desk, which, another famous story tells us, was filled with many such manuscripts and was almost lost forever on a trip where it landed in the wrong coach? The writing desk is another relic to be found in the Chawton Jane Austen House museum.

The inferences I take from these are that Jane Austen was a woman who had no control over her space and no control over her portable seeming property. She had not been able to place the writing desk on her lap in the coach.  Remember Fanny Price seated in her unheated attic room amid her nest of comforts, not one of which she actually owned, not even the row of workboxes abandoned by the Mansfield Park heir when someone was trying to instuct him using them as a device for organization and storage.

Still it won’t do to say I don’t believe in the first story because I cannot conceive how anyone could produce the artful and controlled four novels.  The first two, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, to some extant flawed, when studied carefully, now and then revealing curious gaps which can be explained by too many revisions, but on the whole extraordinary.  Much less all six famous books, including the posthumous, to some extent, not finished or truncated, named by Austen’s brother and sister, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. For these she must have had far more consistent hours of time free of anxious worry lest someone coming with the right to interrupt create an embarrassed moment to find this woman writing. Is not Emma virtuoso perfection in its use of ironic perspective and voice? Despite what some today might feel to be a narrow rigidity of moral judgment actuating aspects of Mansfield Park, it is arguably as strong a protest and radically questioning as well as aesthetically exquisite book as any of the 19th century novel masterpieces produced in Victorian England.

But there is the table, there the desk and document describing the second incident refuting me.

Such a warm comfortable scene by Joe Wright from P&P — filled with food and things for the table, in a relaxed comfortable aging home:

Brenda Blethyn, Rosamund Pike, Keira Knightley and Jena Malone as Mrs Bennet, Jane, Elizabeth and Lydia in Pride and Prejudice (2006, Joe Wright)

I am pushing myself every minute I have extra around my other commitments to get this done. I don’t know if I’ll make it as I feel I must go through her letters once more — skimming but taking them in. E. M. Forster wrote one problem he had in reading Austen was he tended to be like someone in a beloved church; I’m like someone scrambling in a coach with her by my side, me holding onto to that writing desk and those papers.

So now I’ll subside into a movie:

I’ve understood that Simon Raven in his 1975 26 part serial of The Pallisers tried to turn the secondary story of The Prime Minister (Lopez, Sexty Parker, Emily Wharton, her foolish brother and strong wise father) into a sort of Washington Square, Lopez into a sort of lion-feline gay and violent macho male cad, Emily a Catherine Sloper who is loved by her father, and was sexually entranced and excited by Lopez, but does not succeed in understanding him, or growing up so at the end she does not set her face to the wall (a la Catherine Sloper) but turned from the world to her father’s arms. Olivia de Haviland would have done justice to this as she could not to the 1940s Washington Square movie (The Heiress) she was inserted into. So you see I’ve been keeping up with watching The Pallisers for this course I’m teaching too — for insights into the novels. For lovely pictures go to: syllabus for reading The Prime Minister together. Here we see both the Duke and the Duchess miserable from the social life they have kept up: it’s from the political story:

Her hands are shaking with tiredness (Susan Hampshire as the Duchess, Philip Latham as the Duke)

All this is the usual screen to what I let you see in my opening paragraphs today as I approach the 8th anniversary of my widowhood. Deep loneliness with a wish I could do the sort of things I could with him. I like the teaching and classes very much  but they are no substitute for the fulfilled reality I had with him, and the sense of security and peace and understanding his presence provided.

Izzy has been without him too. Tonight we watched on her ipad as we ate together a soothing episode of Critical Choice as lovely cartoon, Mighty Vibes: two siblings sitting close, she reading, he working on the computer, keeping us and themselves company. She’s got a new bed coming in early November, and Mr Christbel will take apart her present one (Jim and mine from 1983 to 2000) and put it in the attic with the beautiful crib (first Laura’s and then Izzy’s) no one will ever use again …

Laura’s Charlotte, in a chair, making a mighty mew — one of my grandchildren with 4 paws

Maxx as snugglicious — another

Saturday night our monthly Aspergers meeting online. The topic “personal safety and emergency preparedness.”

Ellen

Read Full Post »

Anticipations of Autumn & Continuities

A duck on the Potomac — photo taken by Izzy

Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever — how else shall David Nicholl’s One Day end?

Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, the movie does not manage the depth of truth or more occasional fun of the book

Dear friends and readers,

I would not have believed I could ever say of a day where it was 97F at 5 pm, the air literally hot on my skin, that I was at long last recognizing autumn on its way, but after 33 years in this southern city, I can: it’s dark by 8:15 at night, and dawn does not come until well after 6 am. Some late summer events I’ve had and to come:

I have had three very enjoyable lunch dates, with two more to come. With an ex-student, grown older man. We had been meeting once a year; well we renewed our date three weeks ago — an wonderful two hours of talk at Copperwood Tavern. I experienced intense distress getting there but once there all was well. Shirlington where parking is a nightmare. Then twice to a lovely local cafe, Fontaine here in Alexandria, first with my old friend, Mary Lee, whose idea this place was; second with a new friend, Betty, from OLLI at AU, whom I took there. Yummy quiche, lovely light salad vinegar dressing both times, camomile tea. I will meet her at Pain Quotidian this Friday across the street from OLLI at AU. Would you believe I had to look up the instructions to get there to re-visualize. This is a place I’ve gone to for years on end. Maria Frawley, the teacher of Middlemarch I believe I’ve not spoken about an inspiriting inspiring 8 sessions at Politics & Prose with her as teacher; how they lit up my June and July each Thursday evening for an hour and a half. I have signed up for an in-person meeting with 29 other OLLI at AU people, a pizza and Italian food place, also across the street from OLLI at AU. For this I’ll wear one of my two cloth masks with drawings of cats all over them.

Copperwood Tavern with Lloyd

La Fontaine in Old Towne

And one precious evening out at Wolf Trap, where with a friend I saw and heard Renee Fleming singing inimitably with the National Symphony Orchestra. Alas all too short — just one hour and about 10 minutes. Mozart, Haydyn, Gershwin, a perfect Carousel Overture, and her songs were exquisitely beautiful — from Puccini, favorites and also lesser known, then popular, one about never leaving

About 50% of the audience in masks (which were optional).  It was marred by a tiresome, ridiculous and dangerous trip there: the person I was with was determined to avoid the toll ($3!), and drove round and round (her GPS actually programmed not to make the correct turn) and coming back in the dark streets unknown with no lights, and then speeding crazily on the highway. I do have to give up Wolf Trap if I can’t drive myself safely so this may have been my farewell time.

I grieved at another profounder loss: Nanci Griffith has died at the relatively young age of 68; so did Izzy find herself crying. We replayed our favorite songs that night we learned of her death as we prepared supper and ate together.

Otherwise the days and nights go by. I do manage most days 20 minutes of exercise on bike and cathesthenics around 9:00 am, then 5:00 pm, then 20 minutes walk by myself around the neighborhood at dusk

Unexpected flowers: I water my outside plants (in garden in ground) twice a day, and some have bloomed twice

******************************************************

It’s not as fiercely breathlessly hot as it was few weeks ago, and of course I’m now engaged in reading towards my course for this fall, have signed up for various fall classes and events, all online for me still – and how grateful and relieved I am that much of what I enjoyed these 17 months online will still be so. Beyond the London Society every-other-week zooms, I’ve found there is nowadays a once-a-month-and-more schedule for talks from Elizabeth Gaskell’s house in Manchester. Would you believe I’m just about reading three Trollope novels at once, and truly enjoying them all?: The Prime Minister, The Vicar of Bullhampton and soon The American Senator. I am seeing so much more than I ever did in PM (the exploitative colonialism Ferdinand Lopez is trying to leap upon I had not noticed) and the darkness of V of B: the strong critique of the Vicar and his friends over their class as well as prejudiced blind injustice.

At this week’s Trollope zoom we were asked when, how, did you discover Trollope and come to read him avidly? why do you enjoy his books so much? This was the question — or something like it — posed and about 14 or so people volunteered to answer for about 3-5 minutes each. I was one of them. I typed out the first paragraph below and read it so as to be concise and keep it to under 3 minutes. The second paragraph was not written out, just spoken. So although that is the quotation I used (Dominic Edwards, the chair, had asked in a letter could we quote from Trollope), the last couple of sentences I said were not so clear. I saw that most of the people wanted to say why they loved Trollope as much as how they came to him and also uttered various truths that they liked best, told stories they liked so much from the novels — many also liked how Trollope seems to break the novel conventions suddenly and talk directly to the reader — like tell the reader some secret of the novel well ahead of time (so, do they in fact love spoilers?) So I added the second paragraph. I admit I did leave out a couple of intermediary reads between the cited dates & books For example, In 1994 I went to Rome with my family and it was The Last Chronicle of Barset that got me through that partly ordeal of an experience. I found an old copy in a marketplace which I still cherish.

Cover of 1970s edition of Penguin English library paperbacks

From Pallisers Episode 1: the young Lady Glen, with Burgo, her infatuation, encounters the young Mr Palliser, with Lady Griselda, his

I’ve told how as an undergraduate in a class on the Victorian novel I read Dr Thorne for the first time and fell in love with it (say 1965). But I didn’t go on to read more. The Professor had discouraged me from doing a paper on the novel. Then about 10 years later (1975) I watched the Pallisers on PBS TV (in black-and-white) and fell in love with that, and with my husband we read all six novels. But we were busy doing Ph.Ds on something else and I didn’t go any further than The Duke’s Children. Then 1989 I was in a fearful car accident in NYC and landed in Metropolitan Hospital on the upper East Side. I spent a week in that place: it has one man to do all x-rays; Jim promptly labelled him the bottleneck of the hospital. My father brought me a Dover copy of The Vicar of Bullhampton saying Trollope was very wise. It helped me get through that week. Finally in 1993 Jim and I got onto the Net through a phone line and he said he would find something called a listserv for me: he found one on Trollope, and I started leading groups reading Trollope. First up was Macdermots of Ballycloran. I loved it and have not stopped reading Trollope since. Partly I was invited to write a book, then an essay. Note, each and every time there was an outside prompt. Immersion in Trollope did not come from within in any of these cases.

Dominic asked us for a quotation, an utterance: mine is “Great and terrible is the power of money” from An Eye for an Eye. What I love about Trollope is the accuracy with which he sees the world and people, how people interact with one another and in themselves – truly – and he remains calm! What’s more he offers advice, explains things well. I love the characters too, but I keep in mind they are not him and it’s from his narrator/implied author these startling truths come.

I can add here that Trollope’s utterance seems to me to provide a central explanation for what happened in Afghanistan over the past 20 years. Trollope is also an astoundingly perceptive political novelist. How much meaning he can pour into a few words if you listening hard or for real

Have I told you about the talk I gave on Malachi’s Cove?

********************************************************

My header refers to continuities deep and longer than the continuation of a zoom group. I find after all I don’t or can’t change my taste. I like best earlier serious literature — for example,for a fourth time, Eliot’s Middlemarch (thus the above coming lunch with Maria Frawley — see above), which I also re-saw — the 1994 Andrew Davies’s film adaptation. I just love the BBC dramatic serials of the 1970s (which begin, illogically, with the 1967-68 Forsyte Saga (I read 6 of the 9 novels years ago), which I’m watching avidly, an hour each night just now), to early 2000s, and those few nowadays which keep up the tradition of long thoughtful scenes, complicated dialogues, true novelization on film; I prefer Anglo literature and European art, realism, melodic classical music, modern only until say pre-rap, mid-20th century country. And my way of interacting with people, however inadequate, is grounded in polite manners.

Kenneth Moore, inimitable as narrator and Jolyon Forsyte (he’d never get the part today as too old and ugly)

Eric Porter as the aging softened affectionate Soames with his beloved daughter, Fleur aka Susan Hampshire once again

A zoom on Walter Scott:

Who produced more fine and influential work than Walter Scott? think of so many English, French, German, Italian, Russian historical novelists for a start.

I attended a 2 and 1/2 hour session on Scott: it’s part of the Scottish celebration of Scott’s 250 year anniversary (though I’m not sure of what — he was born August 15, 1771)
It was not as good as it could have been — three remarkable Scotts scholars and people involved in the U of Aberdeen exhibition and all sorts of events around Scotland and elsewhere — for example, in Italy, because of the number of operas (93) that have been adapted from Scott’s novels. I think to enjoy it, you have to have been a reader of Scott at some point, read a number of his novels and about him. I have so like the Gaskell session from Gaskell House, Manchester, last week I very much enjoyed what they presented. They had first editions and illustrations and talked of how prolific he was — how much he wrote, and how his position wealth prestige enabled him to do important things still not unimportant — like saving the ability of Scotland to print its own currency. One scholar outlined what are central to Scott’s novels: processes of historical change, political arrangements, people on the edges of society for different reasons (very high up and thrown out, marginalized, disabled, lawless rogues). She brought out Scott’s interest in his characters’ mental health (as we’d call it). Then a lovely film from Italy about two productions; one from the Lady of the Lake, by Rossetti, Donna del Lago, and the other by Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor — one must keep an open mind. I’ve seen good movies — one scholar said her love for Scott began as a girl watching the BBC serial Ivanhoe with Anthony Andrews. They insisted Scott’s work is politically very involved, aware, that underneath “it all” souls of people drive economic and political arrangements.

They did recommend the Future Learn 3 week lecture course: Scott, the man behind the Monument. I saw that and it included wonderful clips. I don’t know if you can find it there any more as the site has gone distressingly commercialized. Andrew Marr’s 3 episode series on Scots writers devotes one hour to an exhilarating somehow ironic hour on Scott. I regret to say the videos I linked in to a blog on Marr which includes good descriptions of the hours on Scots literature have been removed — I shall have to delete the URLs and substitute pictures — but the content by me is still there and what is central to the blog

They omitted what a reactionary Tory he was; how he was vindictive to any family members who didn’t marry for aggrandizement; was behind the worst political attacks of literary journalism.

John Brett — Mount Etna from Taormina, Sicily (1870), another edge place; in lieu of Northern Scotland, the south, the Mediterranean — put on twitter

This new material but now aware of colonialism:  Jane Mander’s The Story of a New Zealand River (with two accompanying movies).  About her too.

******************************************

I have had a renewal of a worry: my cat, Ian, again has a heavy discharge from his right eye. Last time I took him to the local Vet I’ve been going to since we adopted the cats, I was charged $350+, told how serious this was and that he needed a series of heart tests (a couple of thousand dollars), and then if the tests warranted this, give him a pill every day of his life ever after. It is impossible for me to force pills down either of my cats.

To say I don’t trust these (or any) vets is an understatement: previously I was told to clean his teeth, we needed to anesthetize him (a $500 bill and dangerous), did I want to install a sort of tag in his neck which will help if he gets lost (surgical insertion of course). When I tried to buy a local gel recommended online and in a book I have on cats, I found local pharmacies refused to sell it except with a prescription from a Vet. I was told it’s “against the law” for pharmacists in drug stories as well as vets working for the ASPCA to give a pet owner advice on an eye discharge: that sort of thing forbidden.

I call round today to three different vet places, and was greeted with indifference, appts a long time away and oh yes this is an emergency, so clinics I could go and wait at. Petsmart a store seemed more sensible but no appts until later September. Vets are kept to small numbers but vet lobbyists seem to be very busy. And we hear about the corruption of the Afghanistan govt. What are lobbyists but allowed bribers? We have whole organizations dedicating to bribing politicians in office. As for today’s Vets as a group far more important is the money they can wrench from pet owners than safe harmless care which reaches all pets.

It’s how they frighten me that angers me. It makes me angry to be told I have to do this to Ian’s heart and give him this preparation every day for the rest of his life; or to clean his teeth risk his life (he must sedated by an anesthesiologist — the vet said she had lost only one cat – i.e., she killed a cat). They could tell me Ian could go blind or something — and I no longer trust them. Only if the condition really seems threatening do I want to go. I will try Petsmart next month.

In the US the climate is money-driven medicine. Just imagine outlawing, forbidding by law a pharmacist to advise a customer on which prescription to use. Jim said to me as he lay dying, protect me from these people. It was by then too late because he had agreed to that godawful operation which removed his esophagus (I didn’t understand that that would not stop the metatasis), but I kept clear of all in-hospital, in clinic and anything else that seemed to me we could avoid. So I’ll wait for this ointment and if it helps, spare the cat and myself any visits to Vets I don’t trust. But meanwhile I feel bad for the cat and wish I had someone I could turn to — that there was a Kaiser Permanente type organization for animals.

Ian close-up, sleeping peacefully on cat blanket given me by another friend

I wonder why people are so naive not to see how these Vets take advantage of social norms for human beings to push painful procedures (and sometimes an early death) on pets.

I’ve semi-adopted another third cat, also grey like the first who has now vanished. This one also comes from the very rich mansion across the road from me where they are deep reactionaries (snide comments on neighborhood listserv); also semi-abused. I am also calling this new one Fiona, and she also behaves in ways that show a craving for affection but when you respond she quickly spits at you, hisses — I think they mean-tease her and she does not know how to carry on a relationship with a person. She is very thin. Poignant when she is crying out there – not kept in during rain; sometimes I daresay the owners of that collar go away for weeks or days. I can do so little for her — I inquired into this last time. I feed her whenever I feed my two and talk to and pet her when I pass her by — she stays in a near hedge or my porch — as you see her peeping out.

How to close? My own naivetes of course. An important story in the New Yorker. Sam Knight hints at the hideous things, heinous crimes owners and builders of these idyllic country estate houses which so dominate these costume dramas I’ve loved — did for decades, nay full centuries in the subject colonies to support these “wondrous” places, where some of the art was stolen from too. Famines inflicted on people forced to grow crops to sell elsewhere so they have nothing themselves to eat; forced to pay taxes they cannot afford. Removed outright. Enslaved. This does not include the conditions under which the servants in such houses worked, their pittance wage. What is happening is the National Trust has been at long last trying to tell the truth, and the UK gov’t and present descendants of the owners of such places, and those who just want to carry on these delusions (as patriotism) are being successful in stopping them or getting them to mute or qualify their knowledge. I will be sure to assign this story to my class in Anglo-Indian novels in the spring. Where did the money for Dryham Park where The Remains of the Day was filmed come from: what were the politics of its owner. How about the dream houses of Howards End in reality?

At Dryham Park:

On the second floor is the Balcony Room, which affords fine views of the gardens. … Facing into the room, with their backs to the wall, are two statues of kneeling Black men with rings around their necks. …

The slave figures hold scallop shells over their heads. These were probably filled with rosewater, so guests could wash their hands. …

They were probably made in London, inspired by Venetian “blackamoor” art, but they are unquestionably depictions of enslaved men, in idealized page’s costumes, with gilt chains tumbling from their right ankles. … They have knelt in the same place for more than three hundred years. …

When Sobers [a Black professor] and his group entered the Balcony Room, they came face to face with the slave stands and stood there, listening politely. “I couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t believe it was happening,” Sobers told me. “And the tour guide talked about every single thing in that room, you know, talked about everything for a good ten, fifteen minutes and not once mentioned it.” A rope cordons off most of the Balcony Room, so visitors stand on a narrow walkway, facing the stands. There is nowhere else to look. “There wasn’t even a kind of a, you know, ‘Yeah, we don’t know what those are. . . .’ There wasn’t even an explaining it away,” Sobers said. “They just acted as if they just weren’t there at all.”

The strained tragic existences of the butler (Hopkins) and housekeeper (Thompson) at Darlington Hall (Dyrham Park)

Ellen

Read Full Post »

How to tell if it’s summer? my life taking a slightly new turn ….

For the sake of the cafetiere by Mark Hall who specializes in tables by windows with a view

“Mi chiamo Isabella,” said Izzy to a group of 8-9 year olds like herself on the beach at Ischia, summer 1994

Friends and readers,

How to tell if it’s summer? In Virginia not by an intense heat as that may happen from anytime in April on; even if I find myself longing to be at a quiet beach or doing some out-of-doors activity (walking in the park, once upon a time a concert) signaling Memorial Day weekend, truth to tell that was not common in my life.

I can tell because summer school starts, and after 3 quiet weeks of reading towards my teaching and starting some reading for the courses I’m taking, OLLI at AU starts this coming week, as does one of my Politics and Prose courses (Middlemarch!), and I’ve a few sessions coming up from the English summer Hays Festival and nowadays the Yorkshire Festival (on Elena Ferrante) too. What a treat I never thought to participate in in any way — I’d love to be there, to be back in England each time has roused my spirit so as here I met and married Jim.

Tonight I began Mary McCarthy’s Stones of Florence, a book I read years ago, and again (I can see from my marginalia) marvel at how well she captures the atmosphere and feel of the city where I once spent 9 days too, and have seen so many photos and movies and read other books of.

I’ve a story behind this one, which I tell for the sake of reminiscing and also giving a more candid sense of these courses I take than maybe I usually do:

It may be that the course on Florence I signed up for at OLLI at AU is going to be very poor. Sometimes courses at both places are. The teacher is a journalist and claims to have taught and sent an offhand set of paragraphs on books on Florence as a substitute for a syllabus, using the words “required reading” between scare quotes as I just did. Apparently someone else in the course asked if there would a syllabus and he produces four paragraphs which seemed to have divisions that made sense but not really.

So I replied I hoped he was ironic or semi-ironic, to which he replied how this shows how difficult irony on the Internet.

So here is my TMI reply: Well I’m glad you were ironic — semi-ironic I thought. I read the Mary McCarthy (Stones of Florence was one of the books cited) years ago and was about to re-read it. In a previous existence I was a Renaissance literary scholar and read a lot about Florence — have a few books just on Renaissance Florence. I read Italian haltingly but used to be able to read more fluently and loved to read Italian books from the later 19th and then the two sets of war years and inbetween time too and right after (WW 2) Elsa Morante’s extraordinary La Storia. I know a couple of the authors and read one of the books you mentioned (the poignant Galileo’s Daughter). But all my real or serious knowledge of Florence is of the medieval through 17th century era so I was hoping you would give equal weight to all that has happened since.

Another Mark Hall, this one redolent of sunny Italy

I was once in Florence, again a long time ago, 1969, for about 9 days and I remember some of what I experienced. I also spent 2 days and nights on a nearby island I was told Byron stayed. I managed Venice for an inadequate 3 days as my next stop. I did stay in Rome in 1994 or so with my husband and children for some 5 weeks and we traveled about from Rome to other places as well as we could. We drove to Pompeii, to Naples, to Ischia. We took a train to the Colonna lair at Marina in the campagna. Very recently to Milan one spring with my two now grown daughters (4 years ago in my way of looking at time is very recently). I do love the “high” art of all the cities. Now it’s just books in English translation Once upon a time it was Norman Douglas’s South Wind I read (I loved his book on what was it “Old Calabria” with photos), more recently I read Elena Ferrante. Two very good books on Italy I’ve read are by Sean O’Faolain — I still own these — I’d say recommend them but they are probably hard to get nowadays.

At this OLLI twice Judith Plotz gave a splendid course In Jewish Italian authors — mostly from Turin (implying not like his). I took once of them’

So I was looking forward to being reminded but also to learning about Florence somewhat seriously. Forgive this letter which is me reminiscing. Of course he did not reply. Perhaps after this I should take it that any class where the content is learning about a place may well be touristic. There is still time to add on another, and to change the OLLI at Mason too. What I most dislike is misinformation presented as truth; the kind of thing where the person half-knows something but not enough about it to avoid giving a wrong impression. When that happens, I drop right away. Some of the teachers think we are ignorant mainstream conventional fools, glad to waste away time frivolously. Alas, some of the people at the OLLIs and P&P are

The major part of my DVD collection, all gifts sent by a friend who lives in Ireland – what purports the reprinting of this picture on my blog?

Adventures in the parts of the US gov’t still maimed and sabotaged by the Trump seeping poison legacy.

I wanted to send a gift, a book (cost under $20) to an Irish friend who has sent me countless copies of DVDs over the past year and one half filling three woven baskets, two shelf like containers, and bunches more on my DVD and book shelves according to their title or the author of the book or director of a bunch, or writer, e.g., Andrew Davies). All superb movies or serials, many of them of the older or classic type. His parents worked for the BBC a long time ago. I thought to go to Parcel Post because they usually don’t have much of a line — being a bit more expensive.

What do I find? It costs $200 (that’s right, two hundred dollars) to send a small package internationally. The word “international” is now intoned as if this was a leprous procedure. When I admitted that was too much , I was semi-jeered at — the American way. I did notice that the previous older white man who was owner is not there any more.

So today because the post office nowadays has a very long line I arrived at 8:45 am. It used to open at 8 am; now it opens at 9 (used to shut at 5 pm, now 4 pm).
The way it’s done is only one person is supposed to go in at a time. This is spiteful of Louis DeJoy — as the governor of Virginia has allowed full capacity as long as people are 6 feet apart for gov’t places & everyone wears masks. This post office area (an old one) accommodates at least 6 or 7 in the waiting area.
But when I came up to the counter (I was first on line) I discovered more shenanigans, now I must fill out a form which just repeats the information on the envelope, so I was told to go outside. People repeat the word “international” as if it had some leprous quality (they did that at the Parcel Post office). Of course nowadays there is no place to write in the lobby (all removed) so I squatted on the floor and dumped my stuff next to me. The form is tiny (of course) and I’m struggling because my handwriting is bad; in a couple of minutes someone came over and said I could come inside where there is a counter. It seems I was embarrassing the others. I look old? He had a courteous look on his face. The atmosphere in the place nowadays is usually awful, hard angry faces — not their fault but makes the experience not one I am eager to repeat.

I could not do the whole form. I didn’t have my friend’s phone number. There is no need for a phone number and they waived that. Good of them. They kept repeating the word “international” in this special conjuring tone. They also wanted his email but I had that in my purse. I bought two books of stamps, but after this I will buy stamps online.

I succeeded in sending my friend a small gift, a token of my appreciation for all his DVDs and letters over this period of more solitude than usual — with a card.
Fascism is not only a form of gov’t which is racist and cruel; it exists to serve corporations and gouge the average person so outrageous (as in US hospitals) are everyday and if you can’t perform a everyday task because someone’s profit motive counts more, tough luck. There are no public schools in Louisiana any more.
Below are just some of the DVDs he’s sent me. I have small gatherings in rubber bands next to the books or authors the films adapt (a bunch for Little Women alone; a big bunch for Anna Karenina; for Hardy’s novels ….)

Alice and Asia Roland (mother and daughter) have become Ada and Flora McGrath — the mother and daughter relationship is central to the novel, with the daughter by the end becoming very like Jo March as she is towards the end of Good Wives

For the courses I teach I read far more than the set books and I watch movies. I have mentioned how fine, interesting, rich I have found Jane Mander’s story of early colonialist experience in The Story of a New Zealand River.

Well several nights ago I re-watched Jane Campion’s The Piano — for the first time in more than 15 years. And for the first time I realized how shocking it might be to conventional people and students.

I once enraged a student by showing it in class. I remember that I understood it was outside the range of many people and told them before hand told quite literally all the sex that was there and invited them to skip the class. But when one of the male characters’ penis was seen, this student (it was a he) was horrified and told me he was a “Christian” as if that was some special sect and hardly anyone in the US was Christian. He was forever “polluted” (that was the word he used) because he had seen this movie. I had not realized how the overall effect of what they saw might hit the mind of a fanatically religious male — concerned with the “holiness of his body” (as he put it). He had a girlfriend with him and they agreed that she was not polluted. I never asked why she was not also forever “ruined.” I had never met this type of person before — he is probably today a Trumpite — paradoxically religious fanatics vote for Trump who is utterly amoral sexually and in all other ways too.

Since Jim died, and as the years have gone by on the Net and through the Internet, I’ve met so many people I never would have any other way that I see how shocking it must be to others now. It still is not to me (nor professional reviewers) — it’s what a lot of people (much less theatrically) do. It is a wild extrapolation from Campion’s imagination of what the inner repressed life’s imaginings of the heroine of Jane Mander’s River story might feel married to one man she does not love, living side-by-side in love with another, a close associate of her husband’s whom she does love and loves her.

Here is an insightful review in The Guardian: the reviewer are like me: don’t find it shocking. I also see why it was called Brontesque — she seems a refugee from a Wuthering Heights movie gotten lost at a strange beach; or the feeling like Jane Eyre. But it is also a modern fantastical development out of an idea about the inner life of the woman settler colonialist at the center of a classic 1920 novel.

I was shaken today when I came to the end of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I began it as the best way to enlarge my understanding of Ishiguro as he has not published any non-fiction, life-writing or literary criticism, and there are as yet few books on him. Well, I had a hard time putting the book down. My intensity and its irresistibility for me reminded me of when I first read The Remains of the Day or read When We Were Orphans for the first time (as a page-turner! to see if our hero-detective can find his parents). I call these compulsive reading books. It’s not that common with me that this happens.

Carey Mulligan again, this time as Kathy H.

I keep wanting to go on and it’s not because I don’t know what’s to come as I saw the movie.

It is nowhere as chilling or terrifying as the movie was to me: the story gradually unfolds as a science fiction of the kind Michel Faber wrote in Under the Skin — not obvious at first and then devastating: our beloved characters turn out to be clones invented so their organs can be harvested for the human race with each one of them dying as their “donations” deplete them literally. As in The Remains of the Day (and When we were Orphans) the “person” of the novel is a “you” — the narrator, Kathy H., addresses herself in this case to the reader whose “right” to be in the book is questionable. I become involved with type of character and mood Ishiguro is so successful at creating (as far as I am concerned: I’d call it harrowing haunted without knowing quite why. I am not anguished; I identify and find that the narrator is having good and deep experiences growing up (the book is about adolescence in a generous school environment) but somehow I’m unnerved by these hints of what’s to come, the way the book swerves back and forth on intangible incidents of a kind I recognize are almost everyday. There are also so many beautiful landscapes (as in Remains of the Day) that we are invited to revel in. Ishiguro’s are symbolic books with what Judith Wilt said were “ghosts of the gothic.”

So I came to the end later this afternoon. At the close Ruth has “completed” (died), Kathy’s best friend, and she and Tommy, who has become her lover, desperately try for a “deferral” — to be allowed to live together for three extra years because they truly love. They are turned down inexorably. It’s like being rejected without recourse, and punished without having done anything wrong: they and all other “students” (clones) stand for the powerless in our world as did he butler, Mr Stevens and housekeeper, Miss Kenton, Remains. The allegory had so many applications (petty but important ones, as I cannot get into my Washington Gas website and the company inexorably will not answer a phone, offers no help by email, insists you do whatever it is online &c) as did many social psychological talk incidents and so many thoughts were familiar (like George Eliot’s Dorothea at times). An allegory of life itself. In the end Kathy and Tommy were Jim and of course I’ll never let him go. I found I could not sit still; I could not turn to another book. I needed to calm down, needed to come into contact with something more cheering. So I went for a walk.

Then emailed the friend from OLLI at Mason who in a zoom class spoken so highly of the book, saying don’t let the (quietly) horror genre film turn you off. She responded beautifully:

I’m happy to be your sounding post anytime! I’m glad you also found this novel compelling- and we all have persons who are no longer a physical presence. What a rich literary background you possess to be able to make those connections! And we have come through those stages of adolescence and shared the development of our own two daughters, so that adds its own poignancy.

She connected Ishiguro to Susan Hill’s detective Simon Serailler books, saying rightly these books are literate, detailed, and full of drama – standing head and shoulders above the majority of crime novels. I’ve read the first, The Various Haunts of Men (almost compulsively, certainly consecutively on the train, anywhere as I did the first four Poldarks), and it so unnerved me, that I became frightened at the thought of someone stalking me. I’ve read and taught her purer gothic and grief-striken books, The Woman in Black, In the Springtime of the Year (a young woman’s young husband dies unexpectedly and suddenly) and The Bird of Night. She once irritated me by telling one of my students (who wrote her!) that her books are not gothic (don’t listen to silly English teachers), thus undermining his respect for me, and there is a certain repetitiveness about her work; but she does have power and insight to evoke the uncanny.

****************************************************

A highpoint in movie-watching this week I’d like to share is the one hour and one half documentary about Eric Hobsbawm: his four history books tell us all we need to know and understand about our world today politically, socially, economically and give far deeper sense of the dangers we face from authoritarian fascism:

I have all four books. Jim read them and respected the man so. He comes across as so good — how lucky his wife was to live alongside him. I stayed up to nearly 2 am watching it. Never fell asleep, not once.

I’ve provided too many descriptions of what are these courses I’m teaching and taking and talks attending.  So just particularize one I’m stumped over (as I am over Ruth Prawer Jhabvala recent neutral amoral stories)): Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts, in which I discovered show she is like her young characters in her Namesake, trying to make an identity for herself out of her sheer language and place study. A friend wrote to me: “She wrote the book in Italian and translated it herself. It consists of vignettes from the life of a single woman/academic. The narrator is an outsider living in an unnamed Italian city. Her writing has a pellucid simplicity, very little happens, yet some of the chapters have a haunting quality …” I replied:

Is it not a very strange text? I am very puzzled by it. Here we have this woman who appears to be living totally alone, and each time she explains something about her background it is devastating: husband an absolute continual cheat (did he have another family or mistress, yes), mother continually berating her. Children dullards. How is she living? We are told she is a teacher and marks papers

But as to real explanation half-way through there is none. Is she depressed? would you say this is a natural life style for many people today? I know that Elena Ferrante’s short novel ( but it is a full real novel in a way this is not) La Figlia oscura translated as The Lost Daughter presents a similarly isolated woman who is driven to steal the doll belonging to a near by family on the beach to which our narrator goes very day on a holiday. But we are told what happened to her marriage. She is still connected to her daughters. This time of isolation is not permanent. It is a similar text but not utterly unexplained — as yet. All tiny chapters, with titles recording a moment.

Vanessa Bell’s Bird in Cage, my new header picture on FB and twitter

Reading also Caryl Phillips’s deeply compassionate tales of women, of the enslaved, with Elizabeth Bowen as my cheerer (she has a deep congenial sanity, a laughter and reaching out for life that does me good — I read well into her A Time in Rome, companion volume for McCarthy’s — only somehow far deeper into or from the soul responding). I’ve told you also I’ve promised a talk for a video for the Trollope London Society zoom reading group on Trollope’s “Malachi’s Cove” and its brilliant film adaptation.

I segue here into a new sense of my end of life that is making me curiously both emptier and sadder and yet so less harassed and self-induced hectic and allowing me to read more freely more books — as I please for my courses, and just like this — I returned to the female detective this week (The Lady Investigates by Patricia Craig), partly the result of watching Miss Scarlet and the Duke, two weeks ago it was four Olivia Manning novels in a row (ending for now on The Rain Forest, a coda to her brilliant trilogies). Last diary entry (or the one before) I said I foresaw time to return to my book project on Winston Graham and the one on life-long unmarried women. I do, but only if I push myself, work intensely and then don’t follow through on reading that comes up from my teaching studies and other group activities. I have it seems decided I don’t want to push myself for nothing, to no sensible end. I didn’t decide, but (like Trollope says) I found that this is the way I’m acting.

I have this extra time for books, movies, YouTube also — because I find myself at long last giving up book projects. Looking at them. In the case of Graham, his son is dead against it; in the case of the women, there is little sympathy for the angle I want which includes belief in innate qualities in women and l’ecriture-femme (a strong gender faultline in writing as naturally emerging). No more of these will I dream of, plan, attempt to do. Face reality. Face my age. Face where I live. It’s over for me: I don’t have the wherewithal of connections, of ability to know how to draw people to help me, to attract a publisher, fear travel, strange or new places so. I’m taking real and what pleasure I can from what is available to me. Not forcing myself to do what is so painful, stressful, difficult.

After all all these writers need readers, people to write about them, ditto the movie-makers need watchers and critics, do they not?

And oddly I find I’m turning more to Jim, to memories of him, a sense that I am living out a life as his wife with his absent presence all around me, doing what I wish as if he were here with me. I have also made a home-life for Izzy and I, which we are both aware we are sharing. We both remember him; we both reciprocate with the cats.

Jim with Ian on his lap in July 2014 (the cancer had not yet metastasized)

I am living out his lifetime for him and with him in memory as best I can. This is partly what I would have done had he lived. The good thing that has come from all this (by which I refer to his death and now this pandemic solitude) is my finding the OLLIs and as yet fitting in, and finding other institutions and venues in my area where I enjoy the intellectual and social life.

A lovely idealization of a square in Bath Jim & I & Izzy walked together many a time for a week (there is the assembly room to the right) — it was spring 2002

Ellen

Read Full Post »