Category: autism

“At 77, it is time to be in earnest …”


Me and Clarycat, spring 2013, photo taken by Jim

Dear Friends and Readers,

If I’m not mistaken, this was the hardest birthday I’ve had to get through since Jim died, 10 years ago — 2013, when I was 67. I could, of course, have sat all day and cried, and sometimes I was very near tears. For example, when I thanked Norma Reck for organizing the luncheon for the Theater Group at a splendid restaurant tucked away in an older beautiful house, one I’d taken Izzy to several times when she was part of an Adult Aspergers Club. I always drove her there and back; now I got to go for the first time, and it was a yummy meal. I could feel that Norma felt my intense emotion. Why didn’t I? For the same reason as I’ve never sat for hours weeping over Jim. It’s just so useless –besides which it’ll exhaust me.  And such acts won’t bring him back, and nor cannot bring Clarycat back either.  With her passing, though, another of the fundamental presences which I’ve felt for years loves me, and who has been my companion is gone.

Funny, I have less to do: there is less food to put out, the litter box is not as full; going through morning tidying up takes less time: no one to provide a snack for when I get to the enclosed porch. She would sit there waiting for it. When we’d done in the kitchen, she’d come with me to this study for the day’s activity — mostly mental — me sitting reading, writing, her looking out one of the windows mostly, or half-sleeping.  Morning was a thing we did together.

I had a bad night, bad dreams, and took a half a sleeping pill to get through.

I did it by having things to do or places to be with others around. So part of usual routine was posting to the lists, paying a bill (fraught because I have to do most of them online and thus have to have user name and password accepted &c), tidying up (as usual) and then the finding the place. I left way early.

A two hour luncheon where I listened to (and myself spoke sometimes to the people near me) all their plans (Norma’s) for the coming year. When I had left, Ian had stared at me going out — looking astonished and unhappy. I had told him “I won’t be gone long; I’ll be back before 3,” and so I was. He hopped out of the cat-bed with a wall around it, slightly too small for him, which he’s been preferring since Clary died. Meowing at me. It took a while to settle back, and then there was a zoom chat at 4-5 (again from OLLI at Mason), this one about stress.

What a topic. I thought it was supposed to be stress at holiday time, but it seemed it was to be about stress in general just as much. Perhaps I gave away a bit too much of myself, but probably not. The wonders of zoom include how structured it is, how it does distance people so though I told twice of Clary’s death, and at one point the conversation was about what we were to do when very old and if we were preparing for it, and I said, no, as I hadn’t the money for good assisted living, and had no one to turn to who understood me, so I hoped to pop off all at once so as to obviate any need for killing myself. I did say something like that. Others took us in other dire directions, even the slaughter of the Palestinians over the past 6 weeks, and fear (very real) of Trump winning as a Hitler. After all most of them don’t find holiday time especially stressful.

I had hoped that I had a third distraction: a young male friend said he would be singing in a choir, reachable by zoom at 7:30 pm. Izzy obligingly made supper a little earlier, and with cooking, talking, the dishes, I was busy until just then. I waited 7 minutes and then realized it was 9/5, not 11/29. I made this mistake this past Saturday when Izzy and I went half-way to the Folger before I realized our tickets were for 12/9, not 11/25. The Oxford trip I had us coming in a day too early, I had us not having the full 5 nights booked for the week in London that we needed. Last minute arrangements were managed though — at considerable expense. This time we just had to turn round and go home — Izzy took another train to the movies.

So I turned to the real source of quietude and ordered thought amusement that was taking me through the day: Dorothy Sayers’ Clouds of Witness, which I am truly enjoying. I read it on and off. I’ve just finished the fourth episode of the Ian Carmichael serial, Five Red Herrings — the movie much better than the book, from re-arrangement, re-emphasis on the characters, and the alluring scenery of Scotland. In both forms her forms of wittiness are so engaging.


Closing moments of Five Red Herrings — Lord Peter fishing, Bunter painting (Glyn Houston rightly got second billing) — what fun they might have taken it to drive all around that part of Scotland in 1920s luxury cars

I then watched DemocracyNow. org and learned of another massacre of civilians (just going from house to house, killing all the men, raping women first) going on in Darfur: the open genocidal slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza has set a dreadful precedent. And I read a wonderful essay on Protest Literature in American — a volume called A Political Companion to John Steinbeck, online book — a real lucky find because since he was a true protester, he has been utterly sidelined in publishing and curricula assignments in schools throughout the US. I have to get myself to try Of Mice and Men; I suspect I won’t like the depiction of the disabled man; and I don’t like Steinbeck’s way of depicting women.

But it was Sayers who kept me cheered. Laura wrote more than once, sending me photos of her cats; maybe over 50 people wished me a happy birthday on FB and my listserv. Again it’s so easy from afar; when I told anyone in person today, they rushed past that information.

10 years and now I’ve lost my second beloved. Ian is a different sort of cat: he is attached but he shows it far more distantly. For example, he sleeps elsewhere in the house, not in the bed near me.


An old photo of Rosalind Carter — my guess is she knew what it was herself

I also learned (from Amy Goodman) of how Rosalind Carter worked hard and effectively to make real help for people with mental health problems. She was very concerned that the stigma associated with this should be wiped away. I doubt it has because people fear mental distress, depression, sadness, anxiety, panic (and yes stress too). But she has made it less acceptable to reject and ignore people needing mental help. A stubborn woman who lucked into a good marriage with a man who acquired a lot of power and respect and shared it with her. She could not know but perhaps suspected how many people have such problems who don’t begin to bear true witness to it.

I’ve always been in earnest in life — I do hope when it’s time to go, I go quickly. I see now that I did the kindness thing I could for Clarycat. I gave her as much precious life as she could enjoy and then endure.

The local vet practice sent me a card where the two vets, the one I saw twice for Clary, and the one who sat with me and kept me company and basically did the euthanasia, wrote a paragraph each. In long hand. Kind, assuring me I’d done the right thing, spared Clarycat much suffering. This is better more humane treatment than Kaiser ever provided.


Posy Simmons’ image of Mrs Scrooge and her cat on Christmas eve — I shall have to dream of Clary that night

Ellen

Izzy finishes Gorey’s Pomegranates; Clara Tornvall, The Autists: Women on the Spectrum; and Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter, Bunter & Harriet


Gorey’s Pomegranates:  I know it’s blurry and dark, but still invite all to find all the cats you can — there are many unexpected ones

A Going Away Blog

Dear friends and readers,

As you can see, Izzy finished her puzzle, and she is thinking that she will return to one of the game stores that have filled a new place in the Springfield Mall, to find a new and third one. This is the kind of picture one feels one could do for hours, and yet feel time collapse into nothingness so absorbed can one become making this picture. In these pictures is the pleasure of re-making a wonderful picture in a new medium — see Margaret Drabble’s wonderful memoir with Jigsaws.

Drabble does relaxed research on jigsaws and we learn a lot about them and children’s games. Are they a game? I think so: you are working against the puzzle maker. You achieve something when all the pieces are in place. I do have a method: first you make the frame and then you work on different portions of the picture. Of course the puzzle maker makes this second step hard. Since the competition is at a distance, it’s relaxed and you have aesthetic pleasure putting the puzzle together.

This leads her to childhood, its history because puzzles begin as learning tools: that’s how rich and middle class children learned their geography: maps were dissected puzzles. Drabble finds the history begins in the Renaissance but spreads in the later 18th century, when childhood became something to create for a child.

A woman was a modern researcher into and collector of puzzles, Linda Hannas. Who invented them? Apparently it was a later 17th century French novelist whose main subject is education: Anne Louise Elie de Beaumont.

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As part of going off on our trip to England, I’ve been reading and rereading strong book on autism: Clara Tornall’s The Autists: women on the Spectrum.


Clara Tornvall

It’s hard to recapture or convey the experience of the book, because it treats of autism from a highly varied and often quick-moving POV, appears to move from topic to topic by association, and only gradually do you see (or invent) a structure or pattern for the part of the book one has just read and how it relates to the previous. Tornvall begins with how invisible most autistic people are unless over-pointed to, from there on, “The Invisibles,” to too much faith in mere words and categories. Early on she tackles the subject of females and says there has been little diagnosis because the criteria used come from studying men. Now she’s part of the effort to retrieve women. Her portraits of earlier or modern famous women nd gay people, she pronounces autistic (Lewis Carroll, Simone Weil, Emily Dickinson are among the literati) are useful because then she has a idiosyncratic (as we all are) concrete person to describe. She weaves her own story in — of a failed marriage (how hard they tried).

What makes it such a relief and filled with so many accurate truths is Tornvall’s lack of hypocrisy. She really shows how these gov’t agencies supposedly set up to help an autistic person get a job, let alone a good one, can do nothing but send you on a round of form filling out; she shows the frustration autistic people experience when they are confronted by the interviewer’s (professional’s) false faith in this or that nostrum. I could read it over and over; it makes me feel better because it validates my own experience and I recognize so much. The reviews of Tornvall’s book that I’ve read praise it highly but like so many reviews use general evasive words with an optimistic tone — not she.

Travel is one experience autistic people find hard to do — and it’s left-out of Tornvall’s book as also doing vacations, being a tourist. so here’s my contribution to this gap (which I put on a face-book page mentioned below for late diagnosis, self-identification autism):

I am all alone — husband dead and no friends to go with me. My daughter who lives with me will not come with me to rent a beach house or place in a hotel. I also have trouble finding places; it is an anxiety-ordeal for me to travel and I need her to come with me to navigate and do the technology. I may say staying put is what I want, But, like many other people, I like to go to interesting and beautiful places, meet old and make new friends, participate in activities other members of my “tribe” love — like reading and talking about a favorite author I’ve read so much. I like to get away to relax and the beach, admittedly in a more cool place, has its allure. Admittedly I have a hard time relaxing.

I miss my house, my books, my sense of deep security, which I need for peace of mind. I worry about this place and my cats.  I could travel with my husband because I trusted him so implicitly. I asked on a face-book page dedicated to later diagnosed, and self-identifying autistic people — so mostly older — how they feel about travel and got very similar responses to my own.https://tinyurl.com/4u42fnur

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Edward Petheridge and Harriet Walter in an exaggerated dance scene

One person who was not autistic was Dorothy Sayers (read Barbara Reynolds’s delightful recreation from intimate letters and actual knowledge of one another), and I’ve been reading the best of her books this summer (Gaudy Night, Nine Tailors, Five Red Herrings), and in the late evening whiling away my time watching first the newer series with Edward Petheridge and Harriet Walter (who as a couple just charmed me), and now the older one, which don’t under-rate is truly fine once you adjust yourself to the older dramaturgy. Carmichael’s is a subtler performance of a man in masks than is realized until he’s watched for real as presented differently in the different books — underneath the Bertie Wooster exterior for disguise, a hard angry Lord Peter in Murder Must Advertise; mellow and genial in Five Red Herrings, somehow interwoven into the religious sublimity and immersion in English landscape, history, church architecture and an idealization of class hierarchies that is Nine Tailors. It’s in the earlier series that the allusions and themes that hark back to Sayers’s serious literary efforts (medieval English poetry, Dante translations) are found.


Glyn Houston and Ian Carmichael as man and master, one painting, the other fishing — in the later and eariier series the servants are seen to eat the same exquisite viands as the aristocrats ….

In her introduction to Gaudy Night, Harriet Walter (a fine writer in her own right, see her Brutus and Other Heroines: Playing Shakespeare’s role for women, about her time in an all-woman cast) suggests that gradually Lord Peter became the ideal man of Sayers’s dreams, and that she married him off to her alter ego. Why is it not cloying? because they are characterized so wittily, she is so evasive and stand-offish, he so achingly in love and yet more than a little homosexual. One of the little noticed themes in the books, which does come out in the earlier series, comes from the presence of pairs of lesbians and homoerotic relationships between men (Bunter and Peter). Everything continually undercut. And at the same time, humane escape.

They are deeply pleasurable books and deeply pleasurable serial adaptations. No need to travel anywhere at all but in your imagination — you do need a DVD player because to see them properly you need the re-digitalized versions (which in the case of the older series comes with a very intelligent interview of Carmichael), and it is so much more enjoyable if you have a beautiful real book.

Ellen

I on myself must try to live


My daughter, Laura, at the National Building Museum, earlier this week

for there is no help for it. This is my 11th summer without him, the 5th since I can no longer drive at night. I can’t go far by myself — and have no stomach for it any more. It’s true that Jim having been cut off from fulfillments of older age, so am I. Tonight it rained and thundered and there is still lightning, I went out, walked round the block as in a circle, all the houses are lit, more people home than usual (it said on the news how crowded roads and airports are) or seeming so. I left my teeth off, counting on meeting no one, my shawl over my old clothes, my bedroom ballet slippers … an old woman walking alone I’ve become one of those women I used to see walking on the streets of NYC when I was young.

Dear friends and readers,

Remember my proposal to give a paper on Intriguing Women in Trollope at Somerville College, Oxford, between Sept 1-3 this year, and plan to go to London afterwards, all with Izzy, and visit the International War Museum, take in a play. Well I’ve been rereading Jane Nardin’s excellent (clearly written) He Knew She Was Right. The book is about Trollope breaking away from conventional and patriarchal views of women and in the latter part of his career depicting unconventional women sympathetically. Nardin writes is insightful in the intricacies of her arguments. This past week too I learned there is an overt homosexual man in Trollope’s oeuvre: Archie Clavering, and he is treated so obnoxiously by the other characters, and made a butt by Trollope so shamefully, it’s distressing. I have in my readings in archives come across real homosexual men in diaries and they are hidden in plain sight by their families so as to make them marriageable and safe — not boasted about but not ridiculed. Important sources for The Claverings include the 18th century iconoclastic sexually candid plays by Van Brugh, The Provok’d wife and The Provok’d Husband I’ve a chapter on this in my book, Trollope on the Net.

Well we are in a pickle (sometimes to me it’s a nightmare) and our trip to Oxford and then London in early September now uncertain. Izzy goofed on that application we sent in for her. She made it out in blue ink; we got back an email telling us she must make it out again in black ink but they did not send the old passport back or previous application. We did not think to scan in that old one with all the information so she can’t make out the new form since she doesn’t know the number of the book or its issue date. I’ve been on the phone three times and was told the congressman’s aides can do nothing until either 3 months after we first applied (April 29th) or 2 weeks before we are set to leave. People wouldn’t listen to me on the phone. I wanted advice: should we send the form without it being wholly made out and with a letter explain they have this information we don’t and either fill it out themselves or send back the old passport. No one will answer. Finally someone answered an email of Izzy’s who is in this congressman’s office (Don Beyer) and said he is now working on this and has begun the process with the agency but he can guarantee nothing. I tried to reach him on the phone but did not. I told our story to another aide emphasizing Izzy’s autism, and how nervous and tense we were that morning doing these applications. This is causing me great agony of mind.

Can you imagine what federal gov’t would be if Trump had had a 3rd term, or if he were re-elected. Nothing functioning; everything up for bribes after you “know” someone.

Finally we got some material from the state department (with a special envelope and case number) but again they do not return the old passport or application. So she filled it out as far as she could in black ink, and added a letter explaining why we don’t have the old passport book number or date issued, asking them to finish filling it out (as they do) or send all back again with needed information. All this takes time.

I did goof on the airplane too. I was unclear and now we land a day ahead. I have us to stay until September 8th, but if she cannot come with me I shall not go alone. I cannot face it. I did get my new passport and scanned it and her and my drivers’ licenses. So I may bow out of this conference which I did want to give a paper at. It is all too much for me. Loss of $4800 for the non-refundable tickets. This is the biggest haul the airlines have had from me since Jim died, and if I don’t get to go, it will be the last plane tickets I ever buy.

Each day on the Internet I read of this conference or that here and there (ISECS just now in Rome!), where people are going, and I remember how Jim and I for a couple of summers in NYC would drive on Tues/Thurs mornings at 9:30 to Jones Beach with our dog LLyr, bring coffee, croissants, a corner where dogs were allowed and stay for an hour and one half. The drive each way 40 minutes. Llyr would rush into the water and I would go in with her and play longer. Jim sat under an umbrella; he’d swim too.

There is no public beach near here closer than 3-4 hours. Here in Virginia all lakes are exclusive and membership price very high — so too do they have these in DC; I’ve learned of them since teaching at OLLI at AU.

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Hydrangeas (I’m told is the name) and ferns — one pink!

I bit the bullet and hired (for not that much less than the plane tickets) two black guys, tree people, and they came with a crew, and did a lot of work in my front yard and along the sides of the house. Among other things they injected the buses and flowers with some mighty compounds, mulched, fertilized, added ferns, but best of all I now realize they cut back the trees that overhang my property all along the right side. Asocial utterly selfish neighbors I’ve had over the years plant their trees at the edge of my property and then don’t cut them back. This is the second or third time I’ve let a group of guys cut back severely in a kind of line. What I didn’t realize was not only more sun would come in during the day, but in evening a plot that seemed to be only shady except the very earliest dawn is now in early evening. So here is the right side of my house — one half the plot they worked on; the other half is ferns and hydrangeas with the bouquets of white flowers at the end.

My teaching has gone very well this summer: people seemed really to enjoy The Heroine’s Journey with me (23 people), and a similar experience is emerging in the Gaskell Wives and Daughters class (25, though 40 registered). I am just loving her books; I’ve just re-watched the first part of Andrew Davies’s beautiful serial adaptation, for an umpteenth time. I’m rereading her Life of Bronte for the first time in decades. How powerful it is. It is made up heavily of Charlotte’s letters once she grows older; as I read of the deaths of Emily and Anne I thought of Jim’s death and how I watched over him in his agony of mind when not deeply drugged against the pain.

Thus far I’ve attended one class in person this summer. I’m told that those that are in person are again having trouble getting more than 6 to attend. I do miss the pizza parties they used to have at OLLI at AU.

After I wrote two blogs on Jane Austen sequels and Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister a distant (by space) friend sent me Charlie Lovett’s First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love and Jane Austen (I may have his Bookman’s Tale somewhere in the house) and will soon start it.

You see I finished the beautifully titled Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill. I have a love-hate relationship with her: I’ve loved a number of her books (not just The Woman in Black, but also In the Springtime of the Year, her Various Haunts of Men made me intensely anxious) but every time I read something she says in her own voice, I dislike her. So too here: I found myself bonding, learning from, interested in her love of certain books, why she’d reread this and not that, as a book about book reading so satisfying, but depart from this and she begin to offer her reasons for her values (not the values themselves) and I was turned off. but individual sections are worth consulting: for example, on book titles, how important, they must be appealing; how: an inner pattern, rhythms, capturing a theme or place; with a list of these (p 10), her own chapter headings exemplifying what she writes.

What else shall I say? Izzy has just risen from her early evening nap. My Clarycat is slowly getting better: she is lively all day, sits near me, trots round my chair, sits on my lap leaning against my chest while I eat; she can climb up on the desk and kitchen table once again, and jump down lightly to chair and floor. She eats a lot though so thin, drinks, uses her litter box and cleans herself though her coat is not smooth any more. She must be careful and still has problems going where she wants (her body pushes left when she wants to go right), bangs against walls. It is good I scarcely ever leave her.


Said to be Virginia Woolf’s Sappho (1947), of course it’s not — look how the birds are unafraid

How shall I end? I’ve this two weeks read a brilliantly witty, suggestive literary biography of a once famous 18th century writer, Richard Steele; it’s by Calhoun Winton (now 96): no one writes books this way in academia any more. He made me understand Steele to some extent, taught me about the milieu deeply, brought out how Steele lived, what were his finest works (the periodical essays). I ended respecting the man. All this because I’m reviewing a badly written (the jargon sentences make me blink) on captivity as everywhere in the 18th century (there’s legal as well as physical) and the author wants me to read The Conscious Lovers as about colonialism: it does have a heroine who I now realize might be a mulatto, an Indiana (played by Anne Oldfield at the time — who also played the leading roles in the Van Brugh plays I cited above). Steele owned slaves in the West Indies — from marrying as his first wife a very wealthy woman. Who knew? One source of his wealth.


A modern sexed-up conception of the 18th century play as played by 18th century actors …

Well I’m watching and re-watching Sanditon, getting to know it, getting to like it more and more and realize how in several ways what we are told about Austen’s Miss Lambe in those 12 chapters when we first meet her makes parallels to Steele’s heroine. I don’t think Andrew Davies began by reading this play, but he is probably much more steeped in 18th century literature then he gives away (he adapted Cleveland’s book, Defore’s Moll Flanders), but it’s fascinating to how some the peculiarities of Sidney’s relationship with Miss Lambe when we first meet them are analogous or similar.

The Conscious Lovers was first staged in 1722, it was the most popular play across the century, lasting well into the 1790s. In the play she is being (idealistically) kept by the hero of the play, Bevil Junior, who is having sex with her, who wants to marry her first. Maybe Austen had in mind that Sidney Parker would be involved with Miss Lambe, Sidney’s “virtue” or goodness that slowly emerges is seen in how she is boarded with a school of girls: he is protecting her reputation. The attempt to claw away her inheritance in the third season has parallels with this and other colonialist literature of the 18th century.


Solly McLeod mesmerized, Sophie Wilde eager, unsure as Tom and Sophie

Should Davies have worked the story so that the pair we were at first going to end up with were Theo James and Crystal Clarke. Imagine it …


The way Nikki Amuka-Bird was dressed as Lady Russell (Persuasion 2022) would be appropriate for Indiana

Indiana was always played by a white woman and usually the big star of the year: Anne Oldfield first played the part, but like the heroine of the recent Tom Jones, where just a few changes in Sophia’s background turned her into a mulatto, daughter of a white man and enslaved black woman. As a side comment, whether Austen ever mentioned The conscious Lovers or not, it’s improbable she didn’t know it. A number of the values underlying “true love” (respect, esteem, knowledge of the other party) are part of the discourse in CL. So there you learned something about the 18th century without having to travel to Rome.

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Oh hope very hard for Izzy and I she gets her passport back in time — or just back, we’ll settle for just back. To tell the truth I don’t know if I’m up to getting proper lodgings for Izzy and I — the way we have made a mess of what we’ve done thus far, how we’ve felt about it, shows me it’s time perhaps to concede to the realities of autism. In my Women with Autism monthly zoom I’ve now met a number of women who find travel the same ordeal I do (and Izzy at times seems to)

Last book ordered and on its way: Clara Tornvall, The Autists: How Autism is expressed in Women or Women on the Spectrum.


A generic picture that appeals to me

Ellen

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.

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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

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

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

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 …

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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.

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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).

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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

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

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.

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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 … ?

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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