Adventures in Oxford and London; Meeting Friends

This is a photo of the Somerville College Library, Oxford, from a southeast angle

Dear friends and readers,

Apart from the wonders of the Women in Trollope conference at Somerville College, Oxford, what did Izzy and I get up to in Oxford and London? It sounds like a lot. And we did tire ourselves, but towards the end while in London when it had become hot, we did stay in more, did less.

Here is a whirlwind tour as I am assuming at least some of my readers may have visited the places or the kinds of places I’ll be mentioning. We left Alexandria around 3:40 EDT in the afternoon and got into our plane around 6:40 EDT; a long flight but not as uncomfortable as it sometimes has been. We did not have a row of seats in front of us: this is called Premium Economy by the way. Arrival at Heathrow on Thursday, August 30th, around 7 am British Summer Time. My friend, Rory had given me a map and instructions on how to get to the National Express bus coach to go to Oxford, but we soon (around 8 am) found ourselves standing in front of a kiosk which included just that bus route, with the next bus due to arrive in half an hour.

As we boarded we were asked what stop we wanted. I had not thought of that. I asked the driver, which was the stop nearest the Old Parsonage Hotel; he had never heard of it; when I asked about a specific college, he said he knew nothing about Oxford. Maybe. Not for the last time Izzy took out her phone and began to navigate using apple and/or google maps and when we get close and then into Oxford we followed the route until near a deep blue spot said to be the Old Parsonage Hotel. It was the penultimate stop in Oxford, and not all that close. So we had an arduous walk following our dark blue line by foot to our dark blue spot. And there was the Old Parsonage Hotel behind a wall. A very pretty older building with restaurant.

Old Parsonage Hotel, at night, from the outside

They did take us in even if we were 5 hours early: it was 10 am and the room would be ready at 3 pm. They said they would do what they could to make it ready a little earlier. We put our bags in their back storing area and went to the dining room where breakfast was still being served. This was the first of two well-made meals — Izzy ate my scrambled eggs; the next day I had porridge! Around 11 or so we felt up to walking about and walk about we did.

Our day included the insides of several colleges, an exhibit at the Weston Library (where they offer tour guides, these guided tours are ubiquitous) and we saw a very interesting exhibit called Alphabits. The town squares were often traffic free so we wandered from square to square, and stumbled into Blackwell’s — still a huge and worthy story with older rare books and the best books in many areas; the Old Bodleian Library (the next day Izzy took a guided tour of that), an ancient church which was a moving experience because a man was sermonizing, and underneath the church was a cafe with very modern very British kinds of lunches (heavy hot savoury food is still being eaten for lunch). We did grow tired and wandered back by 2:20 or so and our room was ready.

One of the three old friends I had hoped to meet, Martin N. then called. He said he would come at 5, we could have drinks and then go to a restaurant called Bella Italia. I had not seen Martin in person for years. I met him three times in Oxford, twice with Jim and once with our daughters when they were teenagers. He has aged, well so have I. What a gentle sweet man. We began to talk — I was the only one drinking but that was okay. Then we found the restaurant and ordered a meal. Unluckily it was a noisy place and the truth is I was not up to it physically (I will spare details) so I fear I didn’t do justice to the occasion and we went back early. But I was so glad to see him and felt that we had established an old congeniality once more. We said we’d keep in touch. We did communicate once by zoom early in the pandemic. He talked of the Ashmolean and the next morning that is just where Izzy and I went.

The Ashmolean is a marvelous museum. Much Pre-Raphaelite art. Impressionism. Other schools. It is just so rich in important and beautiful European pictures. Martin’s advice was to do one room at a time and then go home, but there was no way we could do that and we were not to know if we could come back. So we stayed for 3 hours. I might as well say we had a similar experience in two other museums in London. On Tuesday morning, the Courtlauld Institute in Somerset House in London had a selection reminiscent of the Ashmolean. We visited there on Tuesday in London, and although it was small, its curators and donors had left a group of exquisitely good choices. A museum need not be large to be transformative for the time you are there. On Monday our experience was grim but educational. Since watching Foyle’s War and being told by someone that the Imperial War museum is not only richly about wars, but has a large impressionist collection. If it has the latter, it was hidden Monday morning. It was a long hot walk, and five floors of grim truthful accounts of WW1 and 2, of the holocaust (the most graphic effective I’ve ever seen), the Irish troubles and military heroes too. I did buy a catalogue. I learned newly about these conflicts but we came away in need of refreshment and stressed. More on this just below.

I can refresh us here, change our mood here by saying what we did after we left the Ashmolean. We went back to the Old Parsonage Hotel and directly onto Somerville College, and were met by several very friendly participants who sat down with us and introduced themselves, as we did ourselves. I think all six of us (except Izzy) were people who had participated in the Every-Other-Week online Trollope reading group. I was so glad to meet them and so glad to be there. Some looked like I imagined, and others not so much. I was told (as I often am) that I am smaller than people imagine me. This was the mark of the conference: it turned out to be a celebration of this 3 year silver lining which is on-going still. Now here it is appropriate for me to say something I did not say there. For my talk, I wore a very pretty feminine blouse I had bought the week before, a new lovely purple suit (a woman’s suit, with a skirt), and flat black pumps. I felt I looked right.

Back to the rooms and then out again to a dining room for a brief reception and then supper with all the participants who had arrived. I knew Isobel would not want to go to a pub so felt I should not try to join another group and let her go back alone. Instead we walked about Somerville, went back to our rooms and set up our connectivity. It was a very pretty evening in the college. Calm and quieter than term time I’m sure. I was reading alternatively Barbara Reynold’s life of Dorothy Sayers, and her Nine Tailors, appropriate books for the occasion and place. It had been cool that day, light sweater-weather and the rooms were comfortable.

Saturday Izzy spent in Oxford and she told me when she and I met at Somerville around 5:30 that she had had a good day. She went on guided tours, she took buses around Oxford. Later on she said she thought she liked Oxford better than London. Well Saturday was the big long day of the conference, and I’ve described in papers in that previously-referred to blog. A very satisfying day for me. I got to talk to a lot of people, inbetween times, over lunch, during the sessions. I enjoyed the sessions — they are my favorite parts of a conference. There were people from English-speaking countries almost around the globe — 2 or 3 from Australia, a couple originally from New Zealand, now living in the UK, people from all over the US, California, to NYC and New England, from the south, all over England, 2 people from Ireland, people from Northern England (Leeds), and Scotland. The Trollope community readership — as represented also on the Every-other-Week Zoom reading group.

But it was the dinner that was spectacular. We were so afraid we might be dressed up too much. Foolish us. Though it was just “smart casual” it was a regular several course sit-down dinner with wines, elegant food, candles even. Dominic, the chair, wore a beautiful suit and tie. I noticed several men went back to put on their ties. Susan Cooper, who was responsible for much of the conference (worked so very hard) was in an elegant gown, with her hair beautifully coiffeured. So Izzy’s beautiful cocktail dress (not over fancy) was perfect, with her gold necklace. I could have worn my fancy dress but I was just as comfortable in a lovely new dress that would be considered “smart casual” for an office, something one might war to a conference! I wore the pink jeweled necklace Jim bought me so long ago.

Here is the dining hall during the day — you can see all around are paintings of “famous old girls”

Towards the end we did a really fun thing, It was. People read passages from Trollope. I was one; mine was perhaps a somber moment from Orley Farm just after Mary Lady Mason has been driven to tell Sir Peregrine Orme that she did the crime to stop him from insisting she marry him, and three sentences from a nearby scene. These are deeply moving instances of inner soliloquy and (my theme for the conference) women’s friendship, for they are with Mrs Penelope Orme. Happily the choices were various, some very comic, some prosaic, all showing Trollope at some moment that the reader found especially delightful. Dominic ended the evening by reciting by heart some passages from songs (I believe) from Gilbert and Sullivan (not sure of that) he has recited at the end of dinners at the Literary Alliance Society.

Sunday was much more relaxed in dress. We came down to breakfast a bit later and people were getting to know one another and sitting in different configurations. I’ve described the papers of that morning, and the panel. Lunch. Then it was time to say goodbye. Maybe it ended all too soon, but I usually remember how when an event feels it has ended too soon, that means it has been and will be good in memory. We had a little trouble getting a cab to the train station but it was wiser than dragging those 3 cases. The weather by that time was turning very warm.

London. Then we did begin to have a hard time. I wrote a response to the Travelodge query about what I thought of their Kings Cross Royal Scot Hotel: it was awful. The worst thing was the people at the front desk seem to have been trained to refuse to help you. Seriously. You had to go upstairs and do “it” on the internet online yourself, except the internet was only available for 30 minutes, only for 2 devices and then connectivity was poor. I had made another of my bad mistakes, the result of not being able to be poised and clear in my mind and accept that I am really traveling someplace so I had us staying only until Thursday morning. Although it seemed the last place I wanted to stay, I knew no where else. Luckily one of the helpful managers (there was only one) himself actually phoned and arranged for us to have the room another night. He also directed the people at the desk to help us set up our connectivity in our room, which suddenly they were fully capable of doing.

I admit what seemed intolerable, unendurable at first, after a night’s rest, became a place where I could see the hotel chain was offering the minimum that you need to be comfortable, just, but they did offer it. You must go to manager to get service but then you do. Neighborhood was nice. Kings Cross is well-located and we later discovered we could take a train all the way to Heathrow: since it was not clear until the afternoon before we could get a cab to come to the hotel for us, that was our “insurance” on getting home. Exquisitely good Italian food in nearby restaurant. Then sleep.

Monday was the day we did too much. I made Izzy nervous because I was nervous when I had an episode of immediate memory loss: I blanked out at what was our next step on the Tube. At first it bewildered and overwhelmed me, and I never truly got used to it literally. Theoretically yes. This was the day of Imperial War Museum, and then we had a stressful time getting back to Westminster, and difficulties finding out how to get on a tour boat.

I knew I was pushing her to buy the ticket but I thought it was the right one and if we didn’t, we would not have time to do it. The result was a 2 and 1/2 hour ride to and from Greenwich, with an amusing guide. Unfortunately it had become hot and we had no hats. Alas, we barely had time to get back to our room and out again for the marvel of Dr Semelweiss with Mark Rylance. (This play will form my third blog about this trip.) Izzy was very upset at no supper before, but after it was over, she was reconciled because of the moving brilliance of the piece, the beauty of the theater and having found a Shake Shack, where she bought a hot dog, fries and I got a cup of vanilla cream. Let me admit I don’t care whether I eat or not most of the time. The room when we got back was too hot — there was a strong fan and I used it throughout the 4 days and 5 nights.

From my POV luckily on Sunday night I had persuaded Izzy to buy two tickets to the Victoria and Albert hall to listen to a concert by Rufus Wainright, starting at 10:15 pm. She wasn’t keen on Sunday night. Tuesday morning she would have been adamantinely against this. Further now she would not agree to a play on Wednesday night, which I longed to do: I read rave reviews of Noel Coward’s Private Lives with Patricia Hodges and Nigel Havers; it was said having the older couple gave renewed life to the lines, made a new old play. You might say luckily it was sold out on Wednesday night! I was not that keen on the others I suggested, but I admit were I not worried about my problems with memory and finding places, I might have gone by myself to the Old Vic Wednesday night to see Pygmalion (with a good cast). It was the theaters I wanted to see too.

Tuesday was the day we toured the Courthauld Museum (again very good: unexpected Reynolds, some beautiful and famous impressionists). In Somerset House, and again at mid-day found ourselves stressed in an attempt to figure out how to get on the bus tours. We hopped on and off two until we found the right one stopping at the right place. I did enjoy the two tours because they went all around central places in London and for the first time in my life I saw what was connected to what and how. Who knew 10 Downing Street was not far from Trafalgar Square? I didn’t. We also took a tour ride back to Kings Cross so we covered tourist and not-so-tourist areas. We found an older area of London is now Middle Eastern. Izzy was not that out of it because she listened alertly to the audiotape. I didn’t. Then home again, a meal out — not so good as the first.

Then we had to wait until 9:30 to leave. I almost chickened out. It was so hot and dark. I’m glad I didn’t. Arduous walking from Tube, but when the building itself nove into view, all roundness, all so wonderfully special with its endless columns and overdecorations, and it was crowded, we were both glad we were there. Very hot in the place. But they had a good snack bar, we found out our seats at the back of the orchestrra, and Izzy said Wainright’s first song was spectacular. I didn’t care for him — he is not like his father-in-law, Leonard Cohen after all. But the orchestra played sublimely. People danced in the center.

Jim loved this place and we went once during the proms when it was also very hot

Back to room, hurrying hurrying as we saw not all Tube entrances were opened. We made it! Tumbled into bed.

Wednesday was the special day after the conference. I met face-to-face a long-time LISTSERV and internet friend, Rory O’Farrell. I regret to have to say I forgot to take photos. It is so out of my usual ways, it never entered my mind until after he was gone, and I thought of telling the other people on our listserv and here and maybe the Trollope FB page. He loves, reads Trollope and knows many of the novels well (the listserv in question is my Trollope and his Contemporaries @ groups.io list.) It was he who encouraged me to put in a proposal for this Trollope conference I just attended. We talked for 2 and 1/2 hours in the cafe of the Victoria and Albert museum. Izzy was with us. We rested until 11:30 and then made our way to South Kensington station and the Victoria and Albert cafe where we said we would meet at 12:30 noon.

He recognized me first — though he said he thought I had brown hair. It’s a mix of light blonde, white, grey (does not look dyed). Like many , he said I’m smaller and thinner than he imagined. He’s 78; I really had no picture of him in my mind, never having seen a close clear photo. But when I saw a thinnish white-haired older man sitting there alone in a 4 people table looking expectant I knew it was him. We shook hands. This will help push me to go to Ireland next summer at long last with Road Scholar (put off for 4 years). It’s the 9-10 days called Enchanted Ireland. I shall make a real effort to remember to take photos. He and I have been writing each other daily (me first thing in the morning ET) for more than 10 years. We started when Jim became sick, carried on through the pandemic, and are still doing it. Many days just a short note, many our plans for today or what happened yesterday, what we are writing, or reading, all sorts of topics. I look forward to going home so Saturday we can start again.

The Victoria and Albert Museum pool

Again the time was all too short. I kissed him goodbye and he hugged me. Izzy demurred. As with the Somerset House, we discovered the central area was turned into a perpetual fountain for children. There were families there cavorting and having picnics. I was just not in the mood to find anything in the museum but did bring home a lovely engagement calendar — tasteful art work. Wednesday night we did not go out. I concede the BBC is not bad for programming (what passes for news is ludicrous) and over the 4 nights I saw Mary Beard, David Attenborough for an hour each, a program on St Paul’s, and one good one on early Ireland. We did that night experience fine dining at an expensive restaurant in St Pancras station and saw very expensive rooms, bars, and upper class men in suits.

I was sorry not to go out to a play again I admit. I am like a child. I am having trouble with immediate memory, cannot navigate around, so literally could not do what we’ve been doing w/o Izzy and her google and Apple Maps on her cellphone. The blog where I write of Rylance and the Harold Pinter Theater I will tell of my memories of going to the Old Vic with Jim (once to see The Wind in the Willows as a play by Alan Bennet).

Last day, Thursday. One more longed-for thing to do. The hottest day in the UK thus far this year, 32.6C at its height. Carrying on with our idea to see things we can’t replicate anywhere in the US, we went to Westminster Abbey. We were way too late for the central tour, but this did not matter. We walked with audio mobiles where Jeremy Irons among others explained what we were seeing. I found the early Modern dead royals especially hypocritical, much too much gilt &c but of course it’s the building itself, the windows, ornate iron, sculptures on the church one comes for. In Poet’s Corner we found Trollope’s memorial slab, a carving from his beautiful peroration in Autobiography. And took our only photo of it. The queen in 2012 added a huge chapel way high, and there were sculptures of moral men cut off (MLK, Ghandi, Bonhoeffer). You see London from a great height through carved windows.

Now I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I did adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words I have written … From the last paragraph of Trollope’s posthumously published Autobiography

Nice cafe, beautiful gardens, and back to hotel for trying time. We cannot get past an absurd glitch in our information in the British Air website (they won’t accept our home address as our destination; Izzy herself on the phone could not get past “they’ll do it at the airport). So we’ll go off early to be able to check in the earliest we can this way. I ordered a cab, no thanks to hotel staff reluctant even to do that.

This might be the room we had tea in — there was a bar at one end: this photograph is made to look glamorous or grand by the coloration; it’s much plainer in experience

Do another building: the Reform Club at 104 Pall Mall. We worked to find the block with its palaces. And there we found Dominic waiting for us in what looked like a morning room (it might have been at the Oxford-Cambridge). We had been able to make this appt during breakfast on Sunday! We had high afternoon tea with Dominic–a chance to talk to one another, Izzy there and animated. Alas, neither Izzy or I are cake eaters, but we did our best.

Dominic took us around the magnificent building. The elegant front rooms for AGMs to meet, library, dining place, computer room tucked away, more comfortable, less pretentious rooms upstairs (behind a sort of curtain). Good conversation. Izzy remembered being there for my speech on Trollope’s storytelling art, partly told in letters. I told Dominic of how I’d been there for lunch with Letts, with the publisher at Hambledon Press and Jim so the dining room I knew. I saw the AGM room and surmise it was there I gave that talk. A copy of my book is now in its library. There are 5000 members supporting it. We bid adieu outside on the steps.

And so our journey and the adventures that mattered ended. We went back to hotel, packed as far as we can, ready to leave for airport early tomorrow. I’m with Fanny Price who in Cowper’s poetic lines yearned for home.

Having packed, eaten what we could of the breakfast downstairs we waited 15 tense minutes more in this hottish (already) room. I was shaking slightly: these kinds of moments in travel are the worse. So I’m writing away. Izzy writes in diaries frequently when we are away. Small notebooks bought for the purpose. Then the cab did come — Euston Station service, and took us to the airport for a reasonable price. At long last I got to spend some cash, English pounds. At the airport after staring suspiciously at our home address, she found it elsewhere (passport papers) and we were given a boarding pass and seats. There was a stressful search (full scale at Heathrow, because they made me nervous and I couldn’t answer their question, in which bag were my toiletries?). Izzy losing patience waiting for the gate announcement. But finally boarded in a familiar corner and the plane took off.

Home again home again, jiggedy-jig And now we are sick: we appear to both have the same horrendous respiratory infection: from crowds, from stress. She is perpetually coughing but her fever has gone down; we have been to the doctor; it’s not Covid. He says no sign of pneumonia for me but if I’m not better by next week (!) go in for an X-ray.

Re-transplanting back to our routines, activities, reorganizing for the coming fall for the last couple of days nbetween intermittent bouts of sick misery. Our cats did miss us: Ian pissed all over one floor, over another book; Clarycat just looked lonely and stayed in my bed where I sleep a good deal of the time.

So here we are — wish for us we get well soon. It was really our first time since the pandemic to be with a lot of people in crowds.  I hope it is not my fault we have gotten so sick from doing too much.

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

We are now looking forward to our trip to the UK

Izzy on a San Diego beach, at the ComicCon, San Diego, a week ago or so

Dear Friends and readers,

It was lonely hard week for me when Izzy was away because the stress over the seemingly stalled passport kept mounting, to the point I felt some kind of chemical coursing through my body night and day, my limbs felt weak at times, a pit of anxiety in my stomach. But I was much cheered to watch Izzy from afar. Since there was a strike, there were far fewer people at the conference, and Laura got to stay with Izzy in her double room, and Izzy got to get into far more panels and an extra long day at the conference itself. She attended both Critical Choice sessions: she was thrilled. They ate out with ease, toured a little. They took a ferry over to an island, which is a separate city; there’s a hotel there she and Izzy and I could stay at and go to the beach — as they did, a la Sanditon I thought and dreamed.

She was home late Monday night but got up very early on Tuesday and looked at the place on the Passport agency site for “cases” and lo and behalf hers was labelled “shipped” and “in transit.” Oh the relief. From then on it was looking every 12 hours to be told things like “Arizona Distribution Center” and then “in transit” to “Dulles Airport;” once there “shipped” to Alexandria Post office.” Then Thursday morning around 10 another cardboard envelope such as I got my passport — it has privacy warnings, a number, “official gov’t documents.” I broke out with Jabberwocky, O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! She chortled in her Joy!”
and then scanned it in and put it next to mine. Per Laura’s advice, both passports, vaccination cards, TSA documents are in handy folders. I’ve now scanned in our social security cards and my medicare card.

My vision of Mrs Askerton — Olivia Williams playing Jane Austen looking at copies of books in the Prince Regents’ Library

So I began serious work on the coming paper. I finished the delightful short Belton Estate, and turned to The Way We Live Now as my second of three books: it has a wealth of intriguing (interesting and transgressive) women. I will also be teaching it this fall so this cuts down work by half. My third text will be The Duke’s Children where my focus will be Lady Mabel Grex, a sort of Jamesian character who rejected Silverbridge condescendingly and then was desperate to marry him because she wanted someone. It’s her affair with Francis Tregear that interests me. In each case it’s the marginalized back story of each of these women, or their friendships with one another I’ll be delving into.

Anna Carteret as Lady Mabel Grex

Miranda Otto as Mrs Hurtle

I love the two film adaptations of these novels and will bring to bear upon Trollope’s story matter interpretations I find in Andrew Davies and Simon Raven (less so). Having seen Oppenheimer, I will be paying more attention to Cillian Murphy as Paul Montague …

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It’s been a successful if genuinely superhot and stressful summer thus far. I said The Heroine’s Journey went over spectacularly well at OLLI at AU; if possible Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters pleased yet more and the class itself was so enjoyable for all. I am looking forward to a similarly beautifully busy and consoling fall — for its consolation as the loss of Jim stays with me more vividly and strongly than ever.

I’ve gone out with a few friends to lunch, movies, plays, a concert and repeatedly museum shows.

I’ve joined a couple of these clubs at OLLI at Mason: a poetry reading group (online, every other Monday morning), a Wednesday after chat group; if I lived further in Fairfax I’ll join an in person one but the places met are deep in Fairfax, hard for me to find, time-consuming to get there. I’ll still be teaching online myself this fall; it’s next spring I shall venture forth once again, at OLLI at AU in person (it’ll be recorded) and at OLLI at Mason, a hybrid (so as to try to keep all those friends and newcomers who live outside the catchment area).

A small but significant (for me) and continual irritant just now is this nightmare farce of a Barbie movie hailed as feminist, or in contemporary terms, whatever you want it to be. The doll is toxic for women: an impossible body as part of the pressures that lead to anorexia, bulimia, self-hatred; I note the latest ones no longer have that look of joyful compliance on their faces, but their glamor clothes and whole stance tells of the erasure of the original goals of liberation and socialist feminism — sexed up power and capitalism. I wish I had a picture of a young woman endlessly vomiting from bulimia over the Barbie paraphernalia, but this old New Yorker cartoon will have to do for me:

A few very good essays on this: Becca Rothfield; Leslie Jamieson on Barbie as a self-punishing icon; Katha Pollit, the message you can do anything you want as long as you’re gorgeous while doing it. I recall that Trump’s daughter Ivanka had heavy painful surgery on her face (jaw broke, nose redone), breast surgery to remake herself into a Trump Barbie doll (all his women look like this doll); from the Guardian, obsessive Barbie behavior; Greta Gertwig’s Art of Selling Out. I bought for my daughters, the American girl dolls; Laura had a Molly, and Isobel a Samantha, complete with books about the eras they are set in, clothes, toys.

Molly McIntire supposed a girl of the 1940s (an Irish rose)

Samantha Parkington (as in the early 20th century child’s classic Booth Parkington) supposed a girl of the turn of the 19th into early 20th century

I realized these dolls were equally obsessive over image and now status (snobbery — the dolls were expensive and from upper class environments, the first ones all white) — they were a substitute which I hoped gave my daughters a healthy age- and body-appropriate imaginative presence to befriend.

We had a bad power outage tonight: all lights were off from 5 pm until 2 am after a super-hot day, but as you can see electricity is back and I’m re-grounding and calming myself. I hope to go out with women friends to a few more movies or museum shows and lunch over August. I’ll end on this favorite poem for me, Marge Piercy’s poem to a friendship

Morning Athletes

For Gloria Nardin Watts [a friend of Piercy’s]

Most mornings we go running side by side
two women in mid-lives jogging, awkward
in our baggy improvisations, two
bundles of rejects from the thrift shop.
Men in their zippy outfits run in packs
on the road where we park, meet
like lovers on the wood’s edge and walk
sedately around the corner out of sight
to our own hardened clay road, High Toss.

Slowly we shuffle, serious, panting
but talking as we trot, our old honorable
wounds in knee and back and ankle paining
us, short, fleshy, dark haired, Italian
and Jew, with our full breasts carefully
confined. We are rich earthy cooks
both of us and the flesh we are working
off was put on with grave pleasure. We
appreciate each other’s cooking, each
other’s art, photographer and poet, jogging
in the chill and wet and green, in the blaze
of young sun, talking over our work,
our plans, our men, our ideas, watching
each other like a pot that might boil dry
for that sign of too harsh fatigue.

It is not the running I love, thump
thump with my leaden feet that only
infrequently are winged and prancing,
but the light that glints off the cattails
as the wind furrows them, the rum cherries
reddening leaf and fruit, the way the pines
blacken the sunlight on their bristles,
the hawk flapping three times, then floating
low over beige grasses,
and your company
as we trot, two friendly dogs leaving
tracks in the sand. The geese call
on the river wandering lost in sedges
and we talk and pant, pant and talk
in the morning early and busy together

Izzy is working on this Gorey Puzzle: Pomegranate (can you discern the various cats?) — all pastels

Ellen

Autumn: Early October days are hard for me

I don’t know who painted the painting this is an image from

“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love – that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”
―George Eliot in a letter (Oct. 1, 1841)

The reality is it poured heavily and intensely last night but not enough to cause floods massive enough to wash away the neighborhood (as a hurricane has just done in Cuba and then in Florida), and today the air was filled with wet moisture and it rained lightly and then a bit heavier on and off all day, and tomorrow we are promised pouring rain once again, but nowhere near hurricane strength …. Oct 1, 2022

Dear friends,

Once again I must live through October 3rd (it would have been Jim’s birthday, now it’s his birthdate, 1948), October 6th (the day we met, 1967, and the day we married precisely a year later, 1968), and October 9th (the day or evening he died, between 9:05 and 9:10, me with my arms around him, 2013). He stopped talking to us on October 8th. Since that last grim October day, some years I have been at a conference, for early October is academic conference time across the US; not this year, but

I will no longer go to any JASNA conferences after the way they rejected us transparently (having registered almost immediately it took the organizers several weeks to drop us to the lowest rung of who might get in) during registration four years ago now, causing Izzy to cancel her membership for good (I wrote about this elsewhere, useless to repeat it); and now this year I’m not having any luck reaching the virtual forms of the sessions (live-streaming) so the money paid is the last dime the AGMs will have from me.

I was going to go to the annual EC/ASECS, where the sessions are to be held at Winterthur museum, the hotel is a drive away (Wilmington, Delaware), and two night time things also a drive — I can no longer drive at night. I remembered that Jim said the one time before the EC/ASECS held the conference there, the drive is hellish and twisting so we took an AMTRAC and then he rented a car. I was foolish enough to try to go with an untrustworthy (I half knew this) friend, a man who turned out also to be cunningly false, and without telling you the uncomfortable several week’s details, I finally told him to go by himself directly there, cancelled the hotel reservation, too embarrassed to be there while he would be (it being a small group you see), and not wanting any scenes, having told him never email, text or phone me again. I will hope to go next year, if they have it in a place where the sessions and hotel are the same building, and in a readily accessible place.

So here I am alone at night remembering. The Facebook software not knowing what was the content I wrote on FB on this day 2015, reminded me (they do this) of what I sent that day, and invited me “to share” this on my timeline. I did; the material contained a link to a blog I wrote that night: this was written before Trump campaigned and then won the election to the US through gerrymandering and the peculiar injustice of the electoral college (he did not win the popular vote) at which I turned the Sylvia I blog over to politics wholly: you will see how Jim and I resolved issues over the years together, with me admitting that most of the time one might say he won, but he got me to accede to what he wanted with terms set up I could endure. You will also see what he looked like the year before his body developed esophageal cancer.

And what he looked like the month we met, October 1967, in front of the Leeds terraced house we were living in together that first week: above is a mature man, below is a boy:

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Before I tell my readers here, how & something of why I am for this term and probably the foreseeable future online for all but three classes, and living most of my life online still, when I was hoping to go out regularly to teach in both places, lest you think I am more cheerless than I am. My mood (though near tears somehow) resembles Austen’s when she wrote

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

Over the past few days I’ve had some lovely letters from real friends, today I was on the phone twice (!) with two girlfriends who live in DC and we made plans to meet soon, a third friend I had happy time with lunching at a Greek restaurant at Dupont Circle has proposed a zoom together, tomorrow at 6 pm Izzy and I will have our monthly face-time with Thao (electricity holding up — fingers crossed). Tonight I enjoyed (not sure that is the correct word) — was fully absorbed watching Ingmar Bergmann’s The Seventh Seal, the first time I’ve seen it in decades, as part of an excellent course in “Movies, political, moral, aesthetic,” where I am one of those attending in person at OLLI at AU.

I’m as thorough going an atheist as anyone is likely to meet, and I do not think I’d find life easier were I to believe in any god or supernatural. It would have to be a hideously malevolent as the burning of that woman in the film — and that did happen and horrible tortures and deaths are happening in many countries. The film shows how much worse religious beliefs and practices make life for many. It’s so allegorical – I was interested to watch how consistent the allegory is with medieval art and texts as the austere noble knight (Chaucer), his earthy squire, the young wife and husband as circus performers (Renaissance theater). For the first time I understood what the famous image of Death and the Knight playing chess is about: it’s the story of the film, a kind of bet. If the knight wins, death takes no one on the spot; the duration of the game gives him time to go on a last journey; if he loses, he dies immediately, and those around him

The next morning the day dawns brightly and we see our young couple and baby hasten off before anything untoward could happen.

This season I’m finally reveling in Outlander, the sixth season, re-watching The Crown (for the sake of the queen’s story, I tell myself). I watch and re-watch Foyle’s War, each time more deeply moved, feel good at the ending as our “friends,” Foyle, Sam, sometimes with Milner or Foyle’s son, drive away … I have all three as DVDs with lots of features (which I sometimes enjoy as much as the episodes).

I am so chuffed my review-essay of the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Poems of Anne Finch has just been published in the Intelligencer. Soon I will write a blog about it, and put it online at academia.edu.

And I read away, these past weeks the profound brilliant James Baldwin (for an excellent and yes online Politics & Prose class) one of the greatest voices in American literature in the 20th century and of the African diaspora itself. I have said the last two years now I feel my outward character has changed to be more able to understand and even feel some ordinary sense of peace, security, and be able to read affirmative books and learn from them (I’m on my fourth Joanna Trollope — I come away having learnt a healthy lesson or outlook from her books), while drawing sustenance from the quietly bleak ambivalent — even in a Jane Austen sequel, Catherine Schine’s The Three Weissmans of Westport, a true updating of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

This enraptured review must be by a friend of Schine’s: The humor is the grimace and witticisms and irony (as in Austen’s book); the daughters are step-daughters who don’t love nor forgive the unforgivable stepfather who utterly betrays his wife (the Mrs Dashwood character) and left them for a character who shares a Lucy Steele personality with another character who pretends to be pregnant to get the Edward character to marry her. Like other sequels, she has in mind actors and actresses from different movies; Gemma Jones for Mrs Weissman-Dashwood, Hattie Morahan for Annie-Elinor, Robert Swann for Brandon (he keeps that name), Gregg Wise (though unlike his usual persona and the Willoughby of Emma Thompson’s S&S, the utterly untrustworthy and cad-like Willoughby (he too keeps the name) of Schine’s novel. Her novel ends with Annie-Elinor and Brandon character forming a quiet supportive friendship. I loved that.

The 2008 version of that journey from Sussex to Devonshire: I never tire it seems of Austen

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So what happened with my I’m beginning to think misguided attempts to teach in person. Only 9 registered for the course at OLLI at AU; hitherto all my Trollope courses regularly began with over 30 and ended with about 22. I went online, lost one person that way but added 4, 3 of whom come from further away and had told me they would have taken the course had it been online. I was shooting myself in the foot. 13 registered for the OLLI at Mason Barsetshire Then & Now or the Two Trollopes (Joanna and Tony), but only 6 showed up. I was devastated and saw the summer disaster that occurred in OLLI at AU when I tried Christa Wolf (she is too difficult for most readers I now know — as hard as George Eliot without the reputation to bring people in for self-improvement and self-esteem) this summer — it’s not enough to sustain a class over a number of weeks. I’m told this is the average number who show up in person (6); 4 came from the spectacularly enjoyable good class I did in person on The Woman in White and Mary Reilly for the 6 week summer course at OLLI at Mason. I’m also told that the over-riding factor is convenience.

So I must accept that what compels me to enjoy in person contact so much (truly perceiving what’s happening within students vis-a-vis a book) cannot motivate people in the class. Who among them is widowed in my way? For many what they got in person that they valued they feel they get via zoom. I have again misunderstood the nature of a social experience and the attitude of the people towards it. As I age, I admit also that driving even during the day is not as easy, and I myself as a member of the class find online delightful when the teachers and level of class are wonderful.

It’s not inappropriate to write of this on this first night of the coming week of remembering Jim since I turned to the OLLIs as a way of building an acceptable life for myself without him literally with me. So now I have had to change again: the pandemic itself has transformed the public world. I used to wish more people understood that life can be full and rewarding online; so here’s another instance of that fable, careful what you wish for, for you may get it.

My two cats and I have grown closer still. I find it so touching when as I prepare to go out (I do go out), whatever it be, getting dressed (shoes), putting stuff in my handbag, getting together stuff to take out with me, and especially when I either turn off my computer or put on a face mask, they both get up from wherever they are in my room and start heading for the door. It’s the awareness of me, and the desire to cooperate with me that moves me. Cats are sensitive, affectionate, communicative animals and they and I understand one another in all sorts of ways. At this point too Ian has bonded with Izzy, and stays a lot with her in her room: this is the result of the pandemic and her working from home remotely 2 days a week.

Ian sitting up for Laura

Clarycat on Jim’s lap — both photos taken before Jim died, say 2012 (like the photo of Jim above), the two cats are are about 2-3 years old

I close tonight with the lines Jim wrote for the top of the urn in which his ashes remain, which urn sits on my mantelpiece along side a photo of him, his reading glasses & ancient Anglican Book of Common Prayer; the DVD the funeral company made of photos across his life; a toy sheep Laura bought from the shop at Stonehenge that summer the 4 of us spent 3 weeks together in England, and a small stuffed Penguin Izzy added to the collection from her and my visit one summer to Sussex to go to a Charlotte Smith conference together (I could not have gotten there w/o her).

Jim’s play on Rupert Brooke’s famous lines: If I should die,/think only this of me:/That there’s a corner of a foreign mantelpiece that is for a while England.

Ellen, still his faithful wife

Winter Solstice: I just cried, and cried, and cried, my face suffused with tears

Alistair Sim as Scrooge dancing with his nephew’s wife at the close of the 1951 film of A Christmas Carol

“A Poem for winter Solstice”

The dead are always with us
The dead never cease to be with us
We need not imagine they have consciousness
No they are literally gone
But our minds and memories are strong
And take them with us everywhere
We want to bring back the past
Make it alive again
Let it wash over you, wash into you, become you
But we need not
We may turn to
The sublimity of historical romance
the ghosts of time-traveling

— by me, written in 2017

A parable looked coolly at improbable. Language today won’t do. Lonely old man finally sees the mess he’s made of life, but so needed, harmless, forgiven, taken in I teared up from longing for lights, gaiety, kindness, company — the 1951 Scrooge.

Dear friends and readers,

I truly meant to lead off my near Christmas diary blog with pictures of this year’s tree, of Colin, my beloved glittering penguin once again, which pictures should include our new presence or Christmas stuffed or pottery animal, Rudolph, but before blogging tonight, I decided I would give in to the time of year and watch the first of a series of Christmas movies I own. Where to begin? my oldest favorite, one that used to terrify me when I was not yet adolescent, the 1951 Scrooge (only recently have I realized it’s not titled A Christmas Carol).  Not totally to my surprise I found that as soon as the ghosts began the going back in the past, I began to cry, and then on and off I just cried, and cried, and cried, and when I was not crying, my face became suffused with tears.

I have so many favorite moments; to echo Amanda Price in Lost in Austen about Pride and Prejudice, this movie contains for me places I know intimately, that I recognize so many now still, the words and pictures are old friends. It’s like, with Scrooge, I’ve walked in, feeling there with Alistair  Sim. I watched other movies on Channel 9, Metromedia, in NYC in the 1950s, over and over (The Hunchback of Notre Dame, with Charles Laughton and Maureen O’Hara, Yankee Doodle Dandy and Public Enemy No 1, with James Cagney, Talk of the Town, with Jean Arthur, Ronald Colman, and Cary Grant, and at least 10 more) but this one has stayed more in my mind, perhaps because it was repeated year after year. It is a refuge movie because Christmas time is for me so hard to get through.

In then looking for a few stills online to share, I discovered the ones I wanted to show were those of Scrooge delirious with joy, suddenly released and half-hysterical from years of self-flagellation turned against others — with his char-woman, with the boy sent to buy a big turkey, most of all with Cratchit and Tiny Tim, who “lived” … I had to many. I also begin to cry when I remember Jim reciting the final lines one Christmas Eve when my parents were here, with a drink in his hand, “God bless us everyone.”

And yet those moments of trembling with fear and joy don’t make any sense unless you’ve seen the embittering ones in the first sequence (the last part of “the past”), the harrowing and scathing ones in the second (this boy is ignorance, this girl want), and the fearful scenes of Death in the last — of which my favorite is Alice grown up and old, oblivious of Scrooge, serving people in a workhouse. What has her life been?  So here is the whole on YouTube, which I urge you to watch if you’ve never seen it, or re-watch if you haven’t watched it in a long time:

The poem serving as epigraph is one that face-book sent me as a memory from 2017. At first I could not recall who wrote it, and it took a bit of time for me to realize it was by me. I don’t recall writing it — and the use of the verb “wash” is not satisfying. I should have a stronger verb there. But the sentiment is mine. I am explaining why I am so addicted to historical romance, historical fiction films, film adaptations of older books or books set in the past, and still at this time, Outlander:

I see Gabaldon’s books and Roger Moore’s serial (I name him as the central guiding presence, the “showrunner”) as at their deepest when they touch upon how Claire is beating death by going back and forth from the 20th to the 18th century. She is living among ghosts become real when she time-travels and then choses to remain among those people and places our daytime reality would look for in graveyards and find out about in old books. I’m told Gabaldon has yet to explain the appearance of the Scotsman Highlander in the first episode of the first season (and early in the first book):

is it Jamie come to claim Claire? in some mix of non-parallel years (the series use the conceit of near precise 200 odd years apart for the two time zones we experience)? for if it’s years after marrying her, it would be say in the mid-1770s in the UK and US while it is 1947 in Scotland.

Jamie (?) (Sam Heughan?) glimpsed in the darkness, a dark shade

Frank (Tobias Menzies) under an umbrella in the rainy night, unnerved

I was much moved today when I came to the end of Iris Origo’s deeply felt autobiography, Images and Shadows, a book vivid with viscerally experienced life, precise as reality gets, but born out of memory, and about herself as a descendent of two families of people, product of several different worlds, groups of friends, the history thrust upon her of the early to later middle 20th century, mostly in England and Italy. She ends also saying that her dead are with her, that

“I have never lost them. They have been to me, at all times, as real as the people I see every day … “

Maybe that’s why she excels at biographies of people who lived in the past. She quotes Edmund Burke to assert that “society” or “life itself” is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

So here is this year’s tree decorated: our eighth since Jim died — or entered his deathtime, kept with us in our memories, and as long as this house exists in its present embodiment with me living the rest of my life out in it.

Here is Colin once again waving to passersby (a present bought for me by my neighbor, Michelle, now, sad to say, gone from the neighborhood, having separated herself from her long-time partner):

He stands on a ladder I place in front of a window facing our front yard so he can be level with the window and be seen

And here is a beautiful Christmas card sent me by my long-time friend, Martin, from England, picture by Annie Soudain, called “Winter Glow: in the photo it’s sitting on my woodblock kitchen table whose true color is a dark honey brown (not yellow) in front of the above tree:

Because of this gift, I was in the post office (now, as you will recall, run by a criminal-type businessman determined to destroy it as a public service, and fire most of the workers who are not white) by 9 am this morning and sent it off and bought 5 sheets of ordinary stamps and 10 stamps said to be good for anywhere “overseas” (so Europe if I get any more paper cards from friends there). I had intended to send electronic cards to everyone but those few relatives and friends I have who are not on the Net, but have found that I have more than a few, and some of the Net friends are still sending paper cards. All placed around the piano (first my father’s, then Jim’s, now Izzy’s). I reciprocate Christmas cards.

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So what have I been doing and thinking since my birthday? I have been reading away towards my course on Christa Wolf’s Cassandra and Four Essays and Iris Origo’s War in Val D’Orcia by reading other books by and about them, immersing myself once more in the later 17th and early 18th century worlds of Anne Finch for my review (and myself), and Hugo’s Les Miserables (stunning masterpiece but enormous) in a superb translation by Christine Donougher.

I’m reading towards a revision, a Victorianization so more thoughtful and thought-out and widened version of that paper, A Woman and her Boxes (Jane Austen).  It’ll also be about how much a woman could claim for real she owned personal property, how much personal property meant to women, and space.  These are issues in George Eliot and Henry James.

They are enacting people posing for a picture: Michael Kitchen, Honeysuckle Weeks, Anthony Howell

I am mesmerized and in love with Foyle’s War (actors, scripts, programs, everything about them — I bought the 8 sets in a box, with lovely pamphlets as accompaniment beyond the features on the DVDs) – I love it for the ethical POV that shapes it, Michael Kitchen is my new hero, and I am drawn into learning about World War Two yet more. I read as a Trollope sequel, Joanna Trollope’s The Choir, which now I have the DVD set of, and will soon be watching at night.

I’ve gone to two museums with my new OLLI at AU friend, Betty. I attended two fine zooms, one from the Smithsonian on Dylan Thomas’s life and poetry, and one from OLLI at AU on Frederick Law Olmstead, the author, Dennis Drabelle, of a new good book on him, The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of National Parks, the kind of book one can buy for a Christmas present. I told in the comments about how Jim and I had been to the Olmsted park in Montreal; they spoke of Olmstead’s fat acccurate book on the cultural realities of life in the south in a slave society (very bad for most people), which I own and know Jim read.

Two wonderful zoom lectures from Cambridge: one on Virginia Woolf’s diaries, and the other on her first novel (one I love), The Voyage Out, as a result of which I bought two more books on Woolf that I hope to read before I die — years before that I hope. And a new image by Beatrix Potter, one I never saw before: a mouse at work threading a needle, which I am told comes from The Tailor of Gloucester. Is it not exquisitely because and full of love for animals and art:

Did I say I got excellent reviews from the people in my class on The Prime Minister for this past spring? well, I did. The best I’ve ever had. The class predominantly men. I got myself to write the blog I knew I should comparing PM to The American Senator.

Some troubles: paying bills online, fake emails from cheats trying to lure me into giving away financial data; now my ipad won’t recharge, and alas it looks like my multi-regional DVD player has died (I shall try to find someone to come and to fix or to replace it). A few zooms with Aspergers friends have helped me endure the aloneness more readily (sharing our experiences, talking and getting some intelligent advice). Worrying about Omicron covid: should I go teach in person in the spring after all? I have two serious co-morbidities.

So what does one write diary entries for? be they on face-book and what came into my mind that morning or I did the day before presented succinctly, or be they this kind of wider survey. A need to testify? A need to make my life more real to myself, to write it down so as to make sense of it, to remember (Jane Austen’s birthday) and record and thus be able to look back?

An interesting talk in London Trollope Society zoom last Monday. Out of a site called Reading Like a Victorian, an American professor, Robyn Warhol, showed how it was possible for 19th century readers (with time & money on their hands) to read synchronically several Victorian masterpieces at a time. I doubt many ever did that, and from experience know it’s hard to get a college student to read in an installment pattern.

For me for today the way she opened her talk was intriguing: what has happened to TV serial watching since people no longer have to watch a series week-by-week but can receive all episodes at once. She suggested something is lost. I know when I taught Phineas Finn (and also Winston Graham’s Poldark) we talked a lot about instalment watching. In watching Foyle’s War for the first time, I make myself wait 4 nights before watching another episode. They are not meant to be watched night after night or back-to-back (shover-dosing it used to be called). Through instalment reading, the diurnal happenings of one’s life get involved with the serial.

Izzy tells me recently DisneyPlus has been putting one episode a week on of its new serials, and then the viewer can see them in a row or however. I think people appreciate the series, remember it better and more by doing it apart in time, in patterns. How many people here when a new series “comes out,” watch the episodes over a couple of nights or stretch it out to feel like instalments? How many when you are reading, find yourself putting the books in dialogue? I am doing that with Christa Wolf and Iris Origo and Elena Ferrante. Ferrante is Anita Raja, the translator of Christa Wolf into Italian, and to read The Quest for Christa T is to read one of the sources of the main transgressive character, angry and hurt, Raffaelle Cercullo, aka Lila, in the Neapolitan Quartet.

A cat bewildered by snow

Also to learn what I am thinking and feeling. To reach out to others? Why do I want to do this? why explore my consciousness insofar as I can bear to tell truths about myself to myself — and others (thus self-censoring or judicious veiled language required). Why did Woolf, Burney, Wolf (One Day a Year, 1960-2000), Origo, and many male writers do this? Henry James and Virginia Woolf were getting up material for their novels. I am getting up material for essays. To invent a life you are not quite living (Burney fictionalizing away) or put it together in what seems an attractive experience ….

Enough. I hope for my readers they will have a cheerful and good winter holiday over the next few days, not too fraught if you are with relatives, don’t ask too much of yourself, stick to routines or a series of habits you’ve invented for yourself over the years, keep to low expectations, and oh yes remember not to blame yourself and that whatever happens is not to be taken as a punishment (however religions have set up & supposedly made sense of reality that way).

Scrooge on Christmas morning, delighted to find he’s in time

Ellen

A virtual ASECS: I finally delivery my talk on “Vases, wheelchairs, pictures and manuscript …. “

Full Bloom last week of our young Cherry Blossom tree (photo taken by Izzy, close up)

Friends and readers,

A year and seven months after I described my plan and the paper I meant to write for a panel for a ASECS conference to be held in St Louis, 2020, I finally wrote and spoke aloud, and now published via academia.edu this past Thursday and weekend. Among other things, a pandemic intervened, one not yet over, so the conference was held virtually between April 7th and 11th, a phenomenal 193 panels in all (950 people attending!).

While staying home meant things at home kept intervening, and I did not take off from teaching, classes, and my usual life — which this past week included cooperating with the AARP to do our taxes and file them at the library, and driving Izzy to the Apple store to get a physically broken iphone fixed and to the Kaiser Permanente Tysons Corner facility to get her first dose of Pfizer — it also meant I didn’t have the ordeal or cost of a plane trip, hotel stay, tedious expensive (and mostly unedible) meals, cabs &c. I did miss the occasional companionship I’ve experienced at these conferences (in the form of sitting down with someone who is a genuine friend or closer acquaintance — something that doesn’t happen very often), but very little of the other socializing as it’s called.

Consequently, what I managed to join in on, I enjoyed very much. It came at so much less stress, loneliness, and as a retired adjunct, repressed alienation.

What I mean to do is write a series of reports — brief accounts of what I heard and saw — on my 18th century or Austen reveries blog. For now I’m publishing the paper itself digitally on academia.edu; it belongs among the conference papers, as it represents a 9 minute slice out of the 25 minute paper I had prepared. Full title: Vases, Wheelchairs, Pictures and Manuscripts: Inspiring, Authenticating, and Fulfilling the Ends of Historical Fiction and Romance. The session went well and we discussed how absence is central to the project of historical fiction and romance. You want to make present what is not there at all except in the form of relics, remains, left over objects, manuscripts, the buildings that survive, the pictures, the vases ….

Claire Randall looking longingly at a vase in a shop window (Outlander S1, E1)

The paper itself belongs here in my diary entries as it’s not a fully argued paper — its value is the human experience it inscribes. I wish I could link in the video of me talking it as permanently as a cyberspace blog allows; I’m not sure you can reach it even temporarily; but if you can, here is the URL. As you will see though I am again sitting too low, flurried, my voice too high pitched and nervous, the content of my paper was heard clearly, it was coherent and appreciated.

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A comical rendition of what you see when you view a webinar from your chair in front of your computer (with cats)

I have now told of four triumphs since I last wrote — Izzy’s iphone fixed, our taxes done and filed; we are now part of the US effort to vaccinating ourselves out of the dangerous and isolated mess an incompetent, corrupt and cruel POTUS got us into, and I did pretty well at a conference, was seen and saw others. For the next two weeks or as long as the videos stay online, I’ll be adding to those I saw and heard in the evenings. From FB on Izzy being vaccinated:

My or our very good news is that today my daughter, Izzy, received her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine!! I wonder if my bitter complaints about the stopping of Kaiser’s vaccination program helped bring her forward . They resumed yesterday and today mid-afternoon at Kaiser at Tysons Corner, Fairfax, Va I saw more cars in their parking garage than I’d ever seen before. Around my neighborhood people are telling me they are getting vaccinated so I need feel no guilt at least locally (local being my corner of the globe and the sort of society I find myself part of) and broadly from news broadcasts: at this point in those places where people have some sanity and decent local gov’t people are being vaccinated in large numbers.

I feel personally vindicated not only because Izzy in the first group but my calling attention to her autism, meant the nurses there had her medical record. Kaiser was originally set up as a group of doctors insofar as they could imitating an NIH — if they have not kept to that (and they have not), it’s because they exist in a world of ruthless capitalist money-driven medicine and they are forced into competition for funds and against those who loathe HMOs. So they had Izzy’s medical records, and knew Izzy has had panic attacks over vaccinations in the past.

The line while full was kept in order of appt, but she was given individual attention when she was asked to sit in a different area from others (much quieter), and to wait for 30 minutes afterwards, and (I gather) had a nurse sitting with her chatting away about boutiques in Old Towne and going to the movies once again. Izzy told me she felt herself getting very nervous as she waited for the vaccination — she did need this little extra to get through.

We get to repeat this 3 weeks from now, same time, same place. It is the Pfizer vaccine. Two weeks from then she is planning to go to a movie, and I am planning to go to my hairdresser and take her with me to have our hair professionally cut and mine dyed.

Have I said except for some important aspects of foreign policy, Biden has become a hero in the Moody household book?

Ian, not atypically, when we arrive home …

Two sad things happened. One very sad: a longtime friend here on the Internet whom I met and had a good breakfast with in lower New York City, Robert Lapides, died. I commemorated him in a blog. I probably lost another close friendship I had tried to sustain and half succeeded at for something like three years.

I wrote about it on two Aspergers areas, seeking some comfort and support; I did manage to have my trip to Ireland with Road Scholar pushed back a year again, so I will now go alone in August 2022. I do look forward to going to Ireland now: I was worried that we would not get along: differences in attitudes towards money is part of the problem. I say more about this painful experience in the comments.

I experienced one relief.

For months really I’ve been worried that I must make a very bad (egoistic) impression in the every-other-week Trollope society group reading zoom meetings I attend (and most of the time am stimulated by, enjoy) and other zooms as to my eyes my “tile” always turns up on the top row, right near the host, often to the right. People must think how aggressive I am, calling attention to myself. Well no such thing. I’ve been told “everyone sees a different view of the attendees at a zoom meeting with themselves and the host prominent.” Who knew? I could not myself find where to change the place I keep popping up in — because there is no place. Izzy said this was to make your presence easy for you to see, to reassure you you are there. So these experiences are now free of the burden of self-consciousness.

Nicola Paget as Anna Karenina (1977, a forgotten presence: in the snow, distraught)

On the Trollope Society Zooms from London, we are now into Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, which I’m having a slightly different response to. Not much. I am still with Trollope in finding Sir Roger Carbury — along with Hetta and Marie Melmotte — rare characters in the story I can like and admire.

At the one OLLI (at Mason) where I am reading a book with others as a student in the class, I’m just loving Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina for the real depth of characterization and inimitable realism of the book. In both cases watching the BBC serials: 1977 AK (with Nicola Paget, Stuart Wilson, Robert Swan, among others) and 2004 TWWLN by Andrew Davies, just brilliant.

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I have it in the English translation by Jan Van Heurk

Life goes on. Last entry I told of what I was planning to teach in the fall 2021 for both OLLIs (Trollope’s The Prime Minister, with The Fixed Period at the AU OLLI, and with a wonderful anthology of women’s writing for both OLLIs). I’ve now had the reassurance that if I want to I can teach via zoom for the winter 2022 term, and I’ve thought of two books I’d love to re-read, to study along with other works by these authors for a four week session:

Christa Wolf’s Cassandra and Four Essays and Eva Figes’s The Seven Ages. The first is a magnificent retelling of the Trojan War from the POV of Cassandra, with four short non-fiction pieces explicating, embedding (a travel narrative) and situating (it’s a post World War II book) then novel. I read it long ago with a group of friends on WomenWriters@groups.io (we were then probably on Yahoo).

The second is also a partial feminist retelling of legendary and real history, beginning with Anglo-Saxon & Celtic times, taking us up to the present (see this review by Angeline Goreau); the book itself was a gift to me from a grateful student when I taught for one term for the University of Virginia at night (so it has an inscription I cherish), and I remember just loving Figes’s recreation of Lady Brilliana Harley, who ran a siege during the 17th century English civil war.

The course will function as an excuse for me to read other of her books I’ve longed to read (Light, Waking) but could never get anyone on any listserv to do it with me. I have read a number of Figes’s books already. Wolf was translated into Italian by Elena Ferrante so I feel I have not been that far from her during this time of slowly listening to the Neapolitan Quartet in my car, and we did read on WomenWriters@groups.io her wondrous historical romance novella, No Place on Earth.

More general political news: thinking about Cassandra’s full meaning: people may actually beginning to get fed up with the police tyrannizing over us and killing us — it’s spreading to killing whites (!) and that won’t do. Disabled people killed by cops don’t matter (it seems). The problem is the idiocy and norms/values of US people on juries. Northern Ireland has erupted again.

Still spring is here.

My comforts in Jim’s absence-presence

Ellen

The pandemic’s second spring: deeply satisfying reading and watching of some extraordinarily good movies

This year’s daffodils

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ Age of Phillis: Jeffers has written what we wish Phillis [Wheatley] had, a book length verse autobiography. The opening sequence very moving: imagined to be by Phillis’s mother when she realizes her baby has been stolen from her. Remembering the birth. Then the narrator on behalf of Phillis remembering the terror the child must have felt, the filth, vermin, disease,chains — unimaginable except by just citing facts that are known — of the middle passage. How she survived our narrator cannot say — she was purchased in the US not in Africa … [I read this a couple of poems at a time each night]

Dear friends,

It’s been a month since I last wrote. I haven’t had much to report about myself new or striking, anything different from what you might read elsewhere; I’ve been writing about the movies I’ve seen, books I’ve read, online activities with others (discussing books mostly) on my other two wordpress blogs; politics I’ve been circulating Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletters and occasional insightful essays that might be overlooked on my livejournal blog or facebook/twitter. We passed the anniversary of the day we consciously began to self-isolate (March 13th). It was that week that the class I was to teach that spring, “The Novels of E.M. Forster” was cancelled. I had no idea if I could manage a zoom class and it was not until the end of the spring or that summer after I had attended a couple of classes regularly, that I agreed to teach remotely. It was that week Izzy began to work from home remotely as a Pentagon librarian. The gov’t laptop arrived around then.

I’ve now taught five and soon to begin my 6th zoom class, taken many and joined in countless zoom social experiences, conferences, lectures. I enjoy them — when not too many a day. This week the teachers at OLLI at AU gathered to discuss the possibility of hybrid teaching in the fall. Many did admit how lovely it is not to spend such time in traffic, not to have to find parking, to beat time and distance. Izzy has joined a dungeon and dragons group, has her identity and spent her first two and one half jours in this fantasy with others Saturday night.

Very unhappily, though, Izzy has not yet been vaccinated. It appears that Kaiser will not start up again as a vaccination center. There is no reasonable excuse for this: supplies are in. I truly suppose that medical groups who loathe HMOS and have since their start-up done everything to bad-mouth and hurt them succeeded in stopping their fair, orderly efficient vaccinating. This is similar to what happened to another similar group in Philadelphia. Kaiser is shamelessly cheerful in sending out messages about workshops. I have complained bitterly in some encrypted area, asking a representative what is the point of Kaiser’s existence if the organization is not going to operate as a bunch of doctors offering preventive health care.

This, along with the continuing sabotage of the post office, is probably my worst news, & I am still hopeful, believing in Biden’s promises and seeing more and more people getting vaccinated. She has pre-registered where she can. Hope for us we will not have to behave in debased ways chasing anyone by phone or email for an appointment. That she is not yet vaccinated is one of the reasons our lives have not changed much. We did get an appointment at the AARP for the people to make out our taxes; I gather we will bring the forms we have that we have made out as best we can and sit on one of a door, and the tax forms be done on the other.

Two weeks after Izzy is vaccinated, I will go to a hairdresser and have my hair cut and dyed. Then perhaps she and I can have some plan to go out, have a lunch outside with Laura. We will exercise care, still wear masks, socially distance, no museums as yet, and I will be cancelling my trip to Ireland once more, hoping for late summer 2022. But we will be a little freer — she to go look at the Cherry Blossom trees, me to visit a couple of friends more often (Mary Lee, Panorea)

Tom Hollander as Doctor Thorne in Julian Fellowes’s adaptation (I am growing quite fond of a number of the scenes)

My happy satisfying news is all from my participation in reading groups connected back to my love of Trollope and from my teaching at the two OLLIs. First, I did another online live talk, this one on Doctor Thorne. The Chairman of the Society, Dominic Edwardes graciously put the video on the Trollope website, and as well as the text of my talk. He does this so beautifully, especially the video with a photo of me, blurb about me and chosen quote, I urge those who come here regularly to go over and see what I look like and the bit of autobiography that is placed there.

I put the video her too, to have it on my blog, and if a reader would prefer to read it more conveniently here.

I did tell about my upcoming summer courses at both OLLIs: I’ll repeat Two Novels of Longing, which I did very successfully at the Mason OLLI in the winter, at the AU OLLI June 4 week summer study group; I’ll do Post-Colonialism and the Novel at the Mason OLLI 6 week summer course June/July (scroll down for description). This second is a new one, I’ll be teaching books and authors I’ve never taught before. And my proposal for fall at OLLI at AU has also been accepted:

Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister (Palliser 5)

The 5th Palliser refocuses us on Plantagenet & Lady Glen, now Duke & Duchess of Omnium, Phineas & Marie (Madame Max) Finn are characters in the story of the Duke & Duchess’s political education as he takes office and she becomes a political hostess. We delve practical politics & philosophies asking what is political power, patronage, elections, how can you use these realities/events. A new group of characters provide a story of corrupt stockbroking, familial, marital and sexual conflicts & violence. And what power have women? We’ll also read Trollope’s short colonialist Orwellian The Fixed Period, & short online writing by Victorian women (Caroline Norton, Harriet Martineau, Francis Power Cobb, Margaret Oliphant).

I just hope I will enjoy all three as much as I’ve been enjoying reading and teaching the four women writers I’m doing in this 20th Century Women’s Political Novels. I have not enjoyed reading books so much in a long time, I just am loving Bowen, Manning, Hellman, and all the books about them and other 20th century women writers, mostly of the left, living through both world wars, traveling about — not just the novels and memoirs for the course but their essays, life-writing, and the movies adapted from these and about their lives. If you read what might seem a dry-as-dust supplementary reading list, you are grazing over profound treasures of thought, feeling, eloquence, activity. I think this is what spurred me on to write again.

How marvelous are women writers writing about politics in novels of the 20th century. I honestly can’t say which of the texts I’ve been reading I love more: Manning’s Balkan trilogy, Bowen’s Collected Impressions, Lillian Hellman‘s Unfinished Memoir and Pentimento, Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Bowen or Hermione Lee’s several books on the women I’m reading (Lee is a brilliant literary critic, no one close reads the way she does so entertainingly and profoundly), Eve Patten and Phyllis Lassner on these British and American women. I’ve read more of the poets of Alexandria at the time, including a few Greek women. I never tire of Fortunes of War. I hope to write a wondrous blog on Bowen, her prose is weighty with a world of feeling and precise intelligent thought, her style just brilliant, Shakespearean to me. I’ve bought myself several volumes of biographies of these women too — when I can make time for these I don’t know: I have to hope to live a long time after I can no longer teach.

I very much profited from and enjoyed watching the 2015 Suffragettes this week too (script writer, director, producers all women, my favorite actresses, including Carey Mulligan, Ann-Marie Duffy, Sally Hawkins, Helena Bonham Carter, Romola Garai &c)

On twitter the question was asked, which actor resonates in your heart and body the most: for me it’s still Ralph Fiennes (a non-sequitor)

From the Dig, see my blog on Luxor, Oliver Sacks his life, and Dig: Et in Arcadia Ego

I was relieved that I could not give the paper I tried to write a year ago on historical romance (I would have had to do it this coming week), sometimes called “Trespassers in Time,” sometimes “Wheelchairs, Vases, and Neolithic Stones” because unless I could record myselfgiving it, the ASECS group would not have it, so I find my CFP for last year’s cancelled EC/ASECS is good again:

The function of material and still extant objects & places in historical fiction

Martha Bowden in her Descendents of Waverley argues that really there, or still extant recognizable and famous objects in a historical romance function to provide both authenticity and familiarity. I suggest such objects also function inspirationally for authors as well as enabling readers also to become trespassers in time, a phrase DuMaurier uses for her time- and place-traveling in her fiction. I call for papers which focus on material objects and places in historical fiction set in the 18th century and novels which time-travel to and from the 18th century. I also welcome treatments of books written in the 18th century where the focus is on past history as well as any encounters any of us have had with material objects (it’s fine to use manuscripts, paintings, and movies which set us off on our journeys into the 18th century or particular projects we’ve written essays or books or set up exhibits about).

I can use the paper now put aside,  and for the first time ever I’ve thought of people to ask to join the panel (myself! asking others): I shall email the guy who ran this panel this and last and the year before (each time with me giving a paper on it, once a very good one on the Poldark books) and ask him if he would give a paper. It will be virtual conference so it doesn’t matter if he lives and teaches in Montana, which he does. And I’ll ask him for names of the other people. Now he may say no. I even expect it, but that I have someone to ask is a sort of progress for someone like me. I am keeping up my reading on women’s historical romance and Outlander every word each night. I’ve finished the first volume and begun the second, Dragonfly in Amber.

There’s strength in this Cressid as there is strength in Harriet Pringle (who was originally to get the part), with Clarence Dawson’s selfish languid self perfect for Troilus

Anything else happen of note: I told the whole of the Trojan matter story from its opening in the Iliad, through material added in the Aeneid, to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, to Shakespeare’s — I told it in a half-mocking way when I discovered over half the class didn’t know this story matter well enough or at all to get the meaning of Oliva Manning having her British characters put this astonishingly disillusioned, bitter anti-war play on in The Great Fortune: and watching the 1981 BBC version directed by Jonathan Miller I decided here too Loraine Fletcher is right: Shakespeare shows us how Cressida never had a chance to remain inviolate or once “had” by Troilus faithful to him. Some extraordinary performances: a young Benjamin Whitlow as Ulysses, Charles Gray as Pandarus (many in the class did not know the origin of the term), Suzanne Burden as Cressida, Anton Lesser as Troilus – and many others.

Shcherbakova wins the “short” women’s dance — as in opera in Gorey the performers are known by last names ….

Izzy is home this week watching World’s — a championship ice-skating tournament in Sweden — and seems content. The zoom chat she had with a young man her age has not gone anywhere. I did tell you about the proposal of marriage I received, a half-serious one (?), well he was relieved that we would not be going literally to the EC/ASECS together after all. A little there of the feeling explored in Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, which I’ve come to some very different conclusions about in reading slowly with a group: like Trollope’s Miss Dunstable’s way of coping with her foolish self-involved suitors (Doctor Thorne), Brookner in Hotel du Lac has taught me something about older mistaken potentially harmful conventional goals using the allurement of marriage (companionship) too. I read to discover myself and take heed like my heroines. I hope Izzy has wisdom to feel good about what life has brought her this year too. She does yearn to go back to the office; she misses the casual continual contact and felt relationships. Old lady that I am I am so grateful to Jim and chance — and my own hard work for years (though I made so little money, I helped us a lot during harder times) for my comfortable home. I am happy among my books and with my computers working and my daughter and my cats ….

But we are not yet out of the pandemic nor had Biden truly been able to rescue us from the GOP fascist dictatorship threats (for example, stopping huge numbers of people from voting through the use of this filibuster). But we must trust as yet to keeping hope alive.

Clarycat appreciating spring too – what a noisy cat Ian has become! obstreperous, demanding, intensely affectionate bodily ….

Ellen

I wear my mask with a headscarf & am part of the seemingly sane in zooms seeking an illusive safety

Statue of Julian of Norwich by David Holgate, west front, Norwich Cathedral

Friends and readers,

When I saw the above photo I felt nothing in visual art came so close to expressing the emotions appropriate to what has happened in those countries where over the past couple of months the coronavirus has been allowed to spread, sicken and kill thousands upon thousands of people. Where 1 in 4 in the US who previously had a job, income, is now unemployed, countless millions not knowing where their next payment for rent is coming from, as another countless line up for bags of food.

She caught my eye because on Trollope&Peers we have been reading Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, and I had just finished the long chapter describing in detail the 15th century cathedral, with all its figures and characteristic elements and ornaments as yet semi-intact. It accompanies a story in the Times Literary Supplement (May 15 2020, pp 24-25) where the essayist, Stephanie Sy-Quia, tells the story of Nana, her grandmother’s life, which included a period as a nun, and another studying for an advanced degree where Nana wrote on Julian of Norwich; Sy-Quia is helping her mother to move the grandmother into a retirement home, and they are conveying a bookcase full of her favorite books to be re-read and re-read (see TLS, “Books to End a Life with“). The grandmother is fragile, not far from death is the feel, and there is a meaningful conversation before Sy-Quia must leave her there, the essay ending with these words: “That’s how I like to think of her: on her balcony in the sun, book in hand, intermittently sleeping.”

Hugo finds in the chronicles and figures of stone that make up a centuries-old building meant to be a haven the meaning Nana finds in re-reading (among Nana’s listed favorites) Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. This week I turned back to the beauty of Roger Fry’s philosophy of art and found some humor in the divagations of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights‘ satire on airplane flight: from Godzone:

I prefer the French title

Tokarczuk works at not to write a book that can be labelled woman’s novel (horrors!) but in some of the many interwoven stories (the book is the closest 20th century book I’ve seen to Orlando Furioso), we are back to a female narrator who is a version of the authoress. First some funny vignettes depicting the “safety rituals” in airplane terminals (“they confiscate her nail clippers, and she laments the loss, because she’d liked them and had been using them for years” — I lost a favorite barret that way) as well as the “plastic airplane food,” but soon we are into her email – which she can still reach: “if you are not on the Internet, you don’t exist” (tonight the Burney Society opened a page on FB and a page on twitter and asked us all to click “like” and become followers. And we get a story of a love affair. We learn it was 3 decades ago at the time she was involved in “taking part in a massive program aimed at eliminating pests” (weasels opposums), anything that makes human beings sick. See that. Prophetic. Written before this present pandemic: she goes to the doctor and they do everything they can which appears to be “scanning everything they could” (in her body), diagnosing it all and sending her home.

She has a gift for light lucid prose and her translator, Jennifer Croft conveys how extraordinary it is such a massive machine with so many people can behave like a bird. She does make a mistake: she seems no to be aware of how noisy, crowded, overlit are airplanes; she is in the middle seat of a long row of small seats and all we are told is she is “uncomfortable.” That’s all. How about the skin of the next person near yours? She falls asleep, watches her screen with complacency.

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Lindsay Duncan as Anna Bouverie

These last two weeks I finished the spring courses I was attending on-line, carried on reading for my review of the new standard edition of the poetry of Anne Finch, and towards the course I hope I get to teach “on-screen” so to speak starting this Monday. I was beginning to feel some courage about it after a group training session two weeks ago and then a one-on-two 101 session with a generous-hearted person who will be co-host with me, until today I was among 5 people who were not sent the promised codes to open the meeting as host. I emailed several times and got no answer by phone either. People in the class told me they got the class invite so the course will go on, and I assume they do mean me to teach it this Monday starting 1:45 pm. As my co-host told me, “It’s on them, their responsibility to ensure that we are up and running no later than 1:40.”

I’ve been reading Framley Parsonage with an on-line Trollope Society book, as well as mesmerized by Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife, at the core of which is a modern re-write of the Rev Josiah and Mrs Mary Crawley story, and have been asked and delighted to say yes to give a twenty-minute talk on the Crawley pair. I’ll do him as Trollope’s Jean Valjean, and end on Joanna’s updating of the abject woman. does justice to the inner workings, modern style, of a rector humiliated, not promoted &c&c while at the same time showing us the Mrs Crawley figure, an Anna Bouverie (the Madame Bovary allusion is there as contrast) trying to build a life for herself of some liberty and finding out how hard that is.

I realized today that the Lucy Robartes’s journey-ordeal where she risks her life to nurse the ailing unto death Mrs Crawley (from the endemic typhoid is as relevant today as the Crawley one. Lucu’s story is not carried over except perhaps as part of Anna’s perpetual working hard for everyone else, high good-humored intelligence, and wry scepticism towards self-destructive self-immolating choices

I also hope to join in on three courses online at this OLLI at AU, which sound very appealing: four sessions on good or classic American films (last night I watched City Lights, the first, Charlie Chaplin’s masterpiece, and was absorbed and enjoyed it far more than I thought I would); on American artists in Italy from the mid-18th century to World War One (I’ve long read about this topic and have two sets of marvelous picture and essays books on this English-speaking ambivalent art scene in Naples and Rome); the last on modern American poetry, 1940-2020.

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A new French law requires masks be worn in certain public spaces, but it is still illegal to wear religious attire that covers the face

None of this pushes away from my mind the bleak world not far from my neighborhood, seeping into it in fact. I chose David Holgate’s figure because she is also wearing a scarf. In this now literally sick world I abide in objects take on symbolic value that is as pernicious and counter-productive as the groups of people in this country who support the criminal con-man Trump. I am speaking of course of masks, surgical face masks, which all medical authorities and people who know anything about these coronavirus say, together with washing one’s hands, can go a long way to stopping the spread of this virus. I wear a mask over my face, wrap a scarf around my head. From a young child I have had ear-aches if I go out when it’s at all cold or windy without a hat or scarf around my ears. But I also like to wear a scarf, a head kerchief. Jim used to worry my more Muslim-like ones (two presents from students long ago) would attract hostility.

Well, now Trump has managed to politicize masks as well as scarves so not wearing a mask becomes a political statement showing your strong support of Trump and all his policies and attitudes (among them hatred for all people of color, including people of Asian descent), your disdain of fear of the virus and behavior shaped by concern not to spread it to others or catch it yourself. This intersects with attitudes towards the police, towards law, towards violence, towards women. The result is a witches’ brew ready to explode into mobs of armed thugs (these include military style police) destroying non-white people, democrats (yes), gay people, Jews, women seeking liberty for their bodies. Not to wear a mask, or wear one made to look like a flat cut up and you are marked as Maga — something to be proud of, especially if you don’t get sick; you want to work as opposed to these sniveling non-person immigrants whose deaths don’t matter.

This is in the autobiographical mode so here’s what happened to me this morning as I walked to the post box to return a DVD in order to get a DVD of Temple Grandin (for a zoom meeting this coming month with a serious-minded aspergers group). I went with my mask firmly in place and a kerchief on (have I said I wear a kerchief to protect an inner ear which hurts if I go out without a hat or kerchief until it’s very hot). A woman who lives in one of super expensive houses dotted all over my neighborhood (this one the result of a ridiculous renovation which made it into a one will walls of glass, appropriate to standing on a cliff — seeing its absurd transparency, they put curtains everywhere and filled their yard thick with greenery) was across the street with her daughter, both w/o masks. They are the Greenwich, Connecticut type republicans, part of the wide swathe of seeming reasonable people are callously cynically supporting Trump to keep their taxes low and make an American which serves them (hand and foot). I stopped and looked at them sort of pointedly. The girl went back in the house. I then carried on (of course no talk; we’ve never been introduced that I can remember – this place is filled with snobs), put my DVD in the post box, turned round to walk back and the woman was just putting her mask on as if she had not seen me

Fuck these people. They voted for this man. He has now attacked free speech, what he threatened to do before he became president. Before he won he said he would change the libel laws insofar as he could in an effort to end free speech. So twitter rightly at long last marking his lies and incitements to violence are his excuse, and he has a sycophant lawless Attorney General behind him. Net neutrality went when he took office. Read what is happening in Iowa, Texas, meat-packing factories where workers were forced back into lethal situations. People sickening every where and the death rate goes up. 40% of deaths are still whites

Governor Northam has not sent police out to enforce much of the closing of shops and I’ve discovered many did remain open — especially those run by people who dress like the Trumpite-base types. There was an incident where police were sent to stop a large party in a white neighborhood and it was stopped, the people were indignant and it made the papers. I think the purpose of the masks is twofold: they do stop the virus and if you wash your hands a lot that helps. But it’s that Northam wants to make a point life out there is dangerous and you must do all you can to avoid sickness. He is a physician and democrat. Trump by carrying on not wearing a mask does politicize it and the South Dakota governor can cry all he wants, and plead with his state citizens to wear masks to protect others, but Trump wins. Not wearing a mask says this is silly or it’s courageous or there is nothing else to do (nonsense – we could support all workers and businesses all summer with the money now given in billions to corporations with democratic consent). That woman didn’t want to wear a mask. It’s a bother – and she allows her daughter not to wear one. Like (my guess about her) she couldn’t give a shit what Trump is – she wants all the money and privilege she can have, she banks on being white to make her less likely to get sick because of how and whom she lives with.

A friend (white) told me someone in her community (or on the Net in a group she’s in talked about this) called the police when someone was not wearing a mask. Someone else defended this person for calling the police. The person defending was then subject to loads of abusive emails calling her a Nazi and threatening her. Now it’s been shown by numbers since masks started in this pandemic that far far more black people are stopped by police and their mask demanded. I would myself only call a cop if I felt my life so directly in danger that I was in less danger from the cop — I’ve tried to teach this formula to Izzy who twice has been badly bullied by police since they don’t understand disabled (autistic) people, and once it seems almost came near arrest for jay-walking. I would approve of the person calling the police on principle but in reality myself never call a cop for such a purpose. Once in my neighborhood Izzy was bullied on a bike by two black children; one of the women in one of the houses looking on called the cops: I was told later they visited the black people in the next impoverished neighborhood and those children will never be back her. How peculiar I felt to have had Izzy’s disability turned into a weapon against black people. Look what happened to George Floyd. I grew up in the Southeast Bronx and know police there were utterly involved in the drug trade. Yes as a white woman, especially now I’m older white cops have identified me as “like my grandmother,” and not that long ago I had an encounter with one where he became hysterical because I did not obey his every utterance and got out of my car. I was at risk for my very life. So police in the US are not simply instruments of peace, law and order because they have been given license by Trump to kill and by the society to imprison vulnerable people for a long time with impunity.

Temple Grandin

Here is where the US now is, and I live in this edge toppling us into a fascist (goes without saying I suppose) dictatorship. A calamity of such a magnitude that it has driven people into their houses — it’s a kind of paranoia turned into a way of life. The EC/ASECS group met in a zoom and while we are determined to have some sort of conference, it seems that in October the wisest and most possible thing is to do it virtually. I enjoy my Aspergers group which meets more frequently; in two weeks we will discuss the excellent movie, Temple Grandin, and whatever of her books and essays we have read. For me it’s Animals in Translation and one on how women experience autism.

More of the way the virus affects just me and Izzy:

In this conversation Fauci talked about reasonably efficient and continual testing before letting students back on campus this coming fall, with intervals of 2 weeks and then tracing and when someone falls sick, isolating them.

We had heard that over this week Alexandria and other Northern Va places would be testing for coronavirus for everyone. We were told places to go but they were all only for one day at a given place and for a limited number of hours (start at 10; I forget when ending. We were unable even to get in. The one nearest to us was disorganized, far too many people, far too few officers and people doing the work.
The fuller story (for those into details): I tried to drive Izzy and I to a testing place, worried lest we catch the virus going for testing (we washed our hands, wore masks), worried about waiting for hours and so on (I brought 2 books, she had her cell phone), but none of this happened because I failed completely in finding the entrance that the police wanted cars to come in from. In all the years I’ve lived in Alexandria, Va I always came in from the front entrance or a back street near the front entrance (Duke Street), never came to the Landmark Shopping through a Van Dorn entrance. I could not picture it; Van Dorn as far as I can picture it is a very busy 3 lanes on either side highway type street. I had no idea how to find this entrance. They just shooed us on and there was no sign anywhere for how to get to the Van Dorn entrance. I discovered I had forgotten my cell phone, could only picture and mass transit junction where the other entrance was said to be (and a different shopping plaza right off it). Well I drove home, located cell phone (whew) but then found that for Landmark Mall (where the testing on my side of Alexandria was said to be) there is only one address. The one I tried to come in at. When I tried to google other entrance, the name Van Dor landed me with instructions to to the plaza. So we had to give up. There was no way someone like me could find it. Izzy was disappointed.

Not near enough money, thought, organization put into this testing. Then what about tracing? Of course what is needed in time appointed encounters and this is available only through your doctor. We are told soon state-wide testing will be offered to people past 60 and people beneath a certain income (to try to reach hispanic and African-Americans). Tomorrow we will see our friend, Monica, who works 7 days a week, 2 in a supermarket, but now gets off every other day during the week.

We spent the rest of our Memorial day our usual way. She wrote, drew (she has taken courses in drawing and art now), practiced and sang her latest musical composition, watched TV, participated on the Internet. I read, studied, posted, wrote. Both of us our usual routs on just about all the days of the years (except when she goes out to work, I out to teaching, courses, museums, together to plays &c). Also we exercised, & separately walked in the neighborhood. At night I watched half way through the excellent 1990s BBC series, The Rector’s Wife (featuring a favorite actress of mine, Lindsay Duncan, when young) and all of Carrington (Jonathan Pryce, Emma Thompson). Our cats did their things too. Had Jim been with us, our day would have been similar — only with his witty presence to inject gaiety into our hearts.

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

Matisse, A Young Girl Reading (1905)

The news is not all bad as some large percentage of the US population — a majority in fact, though their votes are nullified, they are disenfranchised, gerrymandered out of counting, are against this kind of fierce overt capitalist militarist state. I am not alone in calling for a boycott of all airlines. Now! I don’t understand why people are getting on these airplanes where, far from social distancing, people are packed in as closely as ever. If all Americans refused to get onto these planes until the seating arrangements were changed to at least allow some separation, the airplane people would change their planes. Boycott these bastards who got billions from the gov’t to tide them over ….

Some are still leading decent lives in their solitude attached to the world through zooms. My older daughter, Laura, and her husband, Rob, have adopted (bought) two kittens. This past year they lost two beloved cats to death and the cat that is left to them (they began with five) has been as lonely as they. Here they are, sweet tiny baby cats: at first very frightened upon coming into their new home:

The vanilla ginger tabby, Max, the greyish tortie, Charlotte, clinging to one another

Here they are the next day in Laura’s workroom, her office mates. It didn’t take them that long to decide that they belong where Laura is.

My grandchildren have four paws.  And in their honor, last Caturday (a couple of days before Laura and Rob went to pick them up) I wrote this on face-book:

From ‘Penguin Handbook of Cats. The care and training of kittens:’

“Talking is, I think, particularly important. Talking from the very beginning of your acquaintance helps throughout the cat’s life … I have always made a great point of talking to my cats from kittenhood onward, and very soon they have come to know the different tones of my voice. All my cats have talked back to me, and most of them have started to do so almost at once. This initial conversation does make a great different in a cat’s life … ” Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald.

See you on-screen, the new salutation …

Ellen

They are not long, the days of wine and roses — first daffodils to The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Keeley Hawes as Mrs Durrell reading aloud — her family and household listening (Durrells S2E4)

THEY are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

— Season 2, Episode 4 of The Durrells explores the nature of a widow’s loneliness & grief (not well understood) through Louisa Durrell’s case, and the story includes a fradulent spiritual medium, Louisa’s relationship with three men (by this time), her children, theirs with her and one another, not to omit Aunt Hermione (Barbara Flynn) come for a visit). Towards the close Keeley Hawes reads aloud the above poem by Edward Dowson

Dear friends,

The quiet winter time is coming to an end, and for a couple of months I will be busy with teaching and going to (mostly) literary classes at the two OLLIs (AU & Mason), the Politics & Prose bookstore, with the (to me) frightening trip to an ASECS conference at St Louis (where I am to give a short paper). I have been enjoying the preparation (reading & writing and movie-watching) as well as my online life on FB, twitter (I now go over there more regularly), the listservs (Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset is an extraordinary masterpiece, and I’m thinking Morrison’s Beloved is going to be painful one). Last night I became immersed in Atonement, Ian McEwan’s book and the Wright/Hampton film, yet once again, and today find myself eager to read more Louisa May Alcott, her books for adults and about herself. I was much moved by reading in Italian Natalia Ginzburg’s Inverno in Albruzzo (English found in a book which ought to be translated Small Virtues).

Snow in Abruzzo

I practiced twice going to OLLI at AU from this house, and then the P&P places from the OLLI, and I did explore parking in these neighborhoods just a bit (for the first time). Very stressful: some days since becoming a widow, it’s demoralizing to be forced to learn to be independent at age 73.

I told one of my letter friends here on the Net that I have ended living the life of what might be called an independent scholar. Truly I have made efforts for what I thought/think is a social life but have not managed it. It’s too late. I on myself must live.  ( I rephrase and think differently but analogously with Anne Finch’s I on my self can live.) I invent goals for myself, and the teaching schedules for reading on listservs, papers reviews give me a structure. Then I have to take care of this house, my car, pay the bills. The resulting daily structure and its patterns I call my “routs” (the term is Daphne DuMaurier’s). They stretch from around 7 am or when I get up to around 1 pm or when I put out the nightlight and go to sleep. I revise them every few days. Through these I fend off depression, and keep sane. When people respond that gives me meaning — so it means a lot when people write back about these various books or movies. Or appreciate my teaching. There are my daughters and my cats too. Tomorrow Izzy and I go to an HD screening of Handel’s Agrippina from the Metropolitan opera; we talked of the story matter over dinner; she is enthusiastic and looking forward to this one. Me too.

I told of how on Trollope&Peers a few of us told of our first memory from political life; yesterday after reading Caroline Moorehead’s review of Elena Ferrante’s La vita bugiarda delgi adulti (The Lie-Filled Life of Adults) Moorehead says Ferrante has her heroine feeling she is growing up, remembering a moment that woke her up from the “innocence” of childhood, its unawareness into adulthood — seeing the world in a disenchanted more abstract or in terms of larger wider adult perspectives. For Ferrante’s heroine it was when she overheard her father calling her fat; a similar devastation overcame Simone de Beauvoir in The Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter: Ferrante’s heroine feared she was ugly; Beauvoir says she was found unmarriageable; Morrisons’ heroine is disturbed out of complacency when the abused orphaned child her family takes into their home longs for the bluest eye, and declares African genetic features ugly. I remember my father mocking me for being “too plump” when I was 15, too late for waking up, but in time to help trigger my anorexia. Girls are made to experience trauma over their face and body as seen by men.

But adult awareness happened earlier than that: when I was 9 into 10 during the time I and my parents moved from the Bronx to Queens. It was moving from an area called a slum, where most people would regard living as awful (bad schools, violence, no greenery in the streets anywhere, tenement houses) to an area most people might long to live in. I know my mother did. Kew Gardens, where we had a three room apartment in a tall building. I was suddenly in a neighborhood of trees, parks, one family fancy homes, apartment buildings kept looking well. I found myself in a neighborhood of (to me at the time) super-rich houses, great snobbery (the desire for prestigious possessions, creditable surroundings, people eating out the heart of every community), constant class slights, no playdates with other children through their mothers for me — and became very unhappy. Also in the schools prayers were enforced — I was startled and at first just didn’t cooperate. After a while I was forced to put my head down while the teacher read from the Bible and everyone was said to be praying. The southeast Bronx was majority black by that time, large minority of hispanic – what whites were there were mostly Irish. It had been an Irish neighborhood in the 1940s. Kew Gardens was all white, heavily Jewish, with a nearby Richmond Hill heavily Italian American, and Forest Hills said to be upper-middle. Yes no violence, the streets utterly quiet. No one on them. Very hard to meet anyone at all. Moving was the great shock, the clash of values, the kinds of people I saw, the way they behaved to one another. My father took to returning to the Bronx and old friends regularly. I didn’t have that option. I found a library I could get to myself — which was an improvement. In the Bronx my father had to take me – it was said to be too far to go on my own (a subway ride on the Bronx El). Now I had just to walk 10 blocks and I was there.

What else shall I tell you of? I have found three choral societies Izzy could try out for (audition), attached to NOVA, attached to Mason, part of the Fairfax county volunteer arts organizations, but she demurred, showed strong reluctance, she would have to work very hard, they demanded she sell tickets (!), rehearsals at night. It only took seven years. But at least I have found these exist.

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

Late Winter afternoon & evening thoughts. Wind makes for fiercely felt cold outside and in. I sit in my chair blanket hours ahead of my usual time, Clarycat in my lap, electric radiator just by us (with tissues on top for my cold), Ian across the way. Outside GreyMalkin freezes but I give him/her a dish of food, some milk, and stroke and talk to him/her.

Clarycat and Ian

Grey Malkin I call this cat — a lonely cat who visits me a couple of times a day — for food and affection …

I read as how “democratic establishment leaders” (who are these mostly unnamed people the NYTimes continually cites) are determined if Sanders does not win on the first ballot to stop him. I don’t see why if they choose Bloomberg who has bribed so many of them with money in so many ways shouldn’t send me $500 too. Why should I be expected to vote for him for free? The question is, Should I write him when the time comes? And is that too small a percentage of the take (i.e., otherwise known as the American dream). His “girlfriend,” Diana Taylor, says of women suing men for sexually harassing, raping, assaulting them, “get over it.” I.e., we as women do not have the right to pursue a career or job without enduring harassment, attempted rape or assault. If we are traumatized by such experiences of sex, that just shows how weak and ridiculous we are. She did (get over it), look how successful she is. Well, I can’t get over it, never will, my experience shattered my teenage years and crippled my ability to be pro-active for myself ever after. Trump says the coronavirus spreading about the world is not happening; it’s a hoax by the democrats seeking to discredit him. There is something wrong with what passes for a brain in his head.

Meanwhile there are daffodils which come before the swallow dares & take the winds of March with beauty …

I am reading Nina Auerbach’s brilliant Haunted Heiress (about DuMaurier), to teach myself how to write about material that compels me but I recognize is repulsive (i.e., Winston Graham’s whole oeuvre); and David Constantine’s wonderful biography, Fields of Fire, on Sir Wm Hamilton and his wife Catherine Barlow — they are an attractive couple and much kinder to their adopted monkey-child, Jack, than Sontag lets on … then very funny on Sir Wm, Emma and her mother (rather like a Dickensian novel the three of them).

Zadie Smith on Kara Walker in NYRB It’s actually open to the public: It’s in the February 27, 2020 issue

Zadie Smith asks what we want history to do to us? that seems to me an odd way to put it. I have asked myself in the last couple of days why do I like historical fiction truly — from a personal standpoint. Books about people long dead — or who wrote about people long dead from their time. So the question is, What do I want it to do for me? either writing it or reading it. We can define Last Chronicle of Barset as a historical novel and other older classic books since for us in a way it is — it teaches us history, it is set in the past as well as written in the past.

But there is a difference. The book self-consciously put in the past is different and for the 21st century readers (which is what we are) we have to approach history from today and also remembering who invents our past and says this is our past controls and shapes our future. (That’s Orwell.)

One reason is I often like the heroine at the center of such books — or the heroines. I can bond with them easier than heroines in really contemporary tales (say written in the 21st century). I can identify more, often they are realer to me, I feel less inadequate than I do before contemporary heroines — who seem to me not quite real — given agency that women in the worlds I’ve lived in never had and still don’t have — unless the book is by a woman writer who is giving a true account of ordinary life (not mystery or any of the other popular genres). I can relax with Demelza Poldark. I can escape with Claire Randall at the same time as nothing is asked that is beyond me that I find asked in say a Margaret Drabble book about a woman having a career or a Mary MacCarthy about a woman who thrives in social life in upper class New York City in the 1940s. They are also not as badly off, constrained as heroines of books written in earlier centuries. I am loving the Durrells, Keeley Hawes as Louisa and Barbara Flynn as Aunt Hermione because they ask less of me too — suffer as I do (especially in Gerald Durrell’s trilogy). I bond with Catherine Barlow, and Emma Hart, the two Ladies Hamilton

Sir William Hamilton and Catherine Barlow, the first Lady Hamilton, listening to, playing music (by David Allen)

Zadie Smith’s article is about what is erased and also how much pain and truth can a reader stand — especially black readers. I agree with her in her opening that was I taught in school was an utter white-wash and most of it utterly unreal – I was never told about what really counted maybe until college and graduate school.

We will be reading Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris on Trollope&Peers this coming summer. It was over 40 years ago now I read it in the original French. Hugo’s birthday was two days ago. I end on Hugo’s entry into his now severely disabled character, Quasimodo’s consciousness:

This justice must, however be rendered to him. Malevolence was not, perhaps, innate in him. From his very first steps among men, he had felt himself, later on he had seen himself, spewed out, blasted, rejected. Human words were, for him, always a raillery or a malediction. As he grew up, he had found nothing but hatred around him. He had caught the general malevolence. He had picked up the weapon with which he had been wounded.
After all, he turned his face towards men only with reluctance; his cathedral was sufficient for him. It was peopled with marble figures,–kings, saints, bishops,–who at least did not burst out laughing in his face, and who gazed upon him only with tranquillity and kindliness. The other statues, those of the monsters and demons, cherished no hatred for him, Quasimodo. He resembled them too much for that. They seemed rather, to be scoffing at other men. The saints were his friends, and blessed him; the monsters were his friends and guarded him. So he held long communion with them. He sometimes passed whole hours crouching before one of these statues, in solitary conversation with it. If any one came, he fled like a lover surprised in his serenade.
And the cathedral was not only society for him, but the universe, and all nature beside. He dreamed of no other hedgerows than the painted windows, always in flower; no other shade than that of the foliage of stone which spread out, loaded with birds, in the tufts of the Saxon capitals; of no other mountains than the colossal towers of the church; of no other ocean than Paris, roaring at their bases.
What he loved above all else in the maternal edifice, that which aroused his soul, and made it open its poor wings, which it kept so miserably folded in its cavern, that which sometimes rendered him even happy, was the bells. He loved them, fondled them, talked to them, understood them. From the chime in the spire, over the intersection of the aisles and nave, to the great bell of the front, he cherished a tenderness for them all. The central spire and the two towers were to him as three great cages, whose birds, reared by himself, sang for him alone. Yet it was these very bells which had made him deaf; but mothers often love best that child which has caused them the most suffering

I read Hugo’s Last Day in the Life of a Condemned Man more than 2 decades ago: its radical condemnation of all capital punishment, all murdering by a state has as yet not been sufficiently listened to.

Laughton as Quasimodo (the final scene in the rightly famous movie, Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1939)

The hardest thing about widowhood for me is being so alone for long periods of time, hours, days, weeks. Going out is an interruption in a sense. I remind myself that the way our society has been structured and has been reinforced in the last quarter of a century many people live or are in effect as alone — or not. For my loving cats are always near me or aware of my presence somehow, and they are real presences too as are & were the people in my books and on the screen.

Ellen

Modes of social life: real life bewilderment, a hard take in Bong Jong-ho’s The Parasite

One morning over the past two weeks, photo taken from sun-porch/room window

A poem I came across, which I like:

Reading Greeting Cards Before and After

His photo in the hallway greets me each day
Being in my life was an extraordinary gift
He left my world leaving a huge vacuum

Still I feel his ever presence in my life
Triggering a burst of smiles and tears
Looking at the gardens he built for me
Coming across a book we read together
Hearing the evening news and imagining his comments
Knowing he would re-load the dishwasher if he were around

An accomplished writer of research papers but not love letters
He’d spend hours searching for my perfect greeting card
Now assembled in a large basket I select one daily
Before I used to read them quickly and thank him with a kiss

Now I read them slowly, sometimes over and over again
Savoring each written word and signed “Love, Charles”
Yet to me his actions spoke more softly
Than the words on any card

—- By Ruth Perry

Dear friends and readers,

This winter I have become more intently aware than I’d been in a few years (since Jim died) of the fragile fleeting character of social life as I experience it. How easily people drop you, are glad of an excuse to ostracize or exclude someone.

One dark morning as I lay in bed waiting for the sunlight to come into my room (with my two cats beside me), I tried to think of all the places or organizations I belong to that now provide me with what social experience I have: above and beyond all in frequency, intimacy (yes) and closeness as well as a spectrum of socializing from acquaintance-polite to friendly to friends where I know something of the person for real and the person me, plus experiences of exclusion, discomfort, hurt, on the Internet as much face-book nowadays as list-servs, blogs, websites, Future Learn courses, twitter.

But after that, what physically in the face-to-face bodies and places-in-the-world included? the two Oscher Institutes of Life-long Learning (at AU and at Mason), classes at Politics and Prose (Northwest Washington Bookstore-as-community center), the Smithsonian (more impersonal) lectures, twice a year conferences (ASECS), the WAPG, an Aspergers group in Washington DC (I rarely go but I keep in touch by email), a summer film club at Cinema Art theater (once a month for 5 months). I live with one daughter, Izzy, and occasionally the other, Laura, visits or we go out with her. I’ve joined on three and this summer I’m going on a fourth Road Scholar trip. That’s it. I’ve counted 22.

Two of the experiences over the last two weeks have been especially fun — or felicitous.

Covers of audio recordings

In a dramatic reading class I listened to people read aloud passages from Dickens and we discussed Dickens, reading aloud, listening to another read, in a group, by a CD audio in a car, or reading silently (how they differ) and one I read aloud (very well if I do say so myself), the opening chapter from Pride and Prejudice (“It is a truth universally acknowledged” — with that bitter caustic yet very amusing dialogue of Mr and Mrs Bennet), the closing dialogue in Volume I where Mr Bennet tells Mrs Bennet she should not worry about Charlotte Lucas replacing her in Longbourne for perhaps she will predecease him (she finds little consolation there), and then the explosive proposal of Darcy to Elizabeth where he unknowingly insults her deeply and she refuses him. On another I read the scene from Emma where Emma deeply hurts Miss Bates in front of a group of people (Box Hill), Frank wounds Jane by in front of others saying how easy it is to make a mistake at a watering place and engage oneself to someone you don’t want, and Mr Knightley lights into Emma so damningly — all the while we hear the pain of Miss Bates, of Jane, the swelled complaints of the obtuse Mrs Elton. The others read from Dickens and I was astonished to realize that Dickens wrote a near-rape scene at the end of Dombey and Son, where a much abused wife excoriates marriage as then practised — who knew Dickens could be so subversive? Now I wish we had talked more about the spreading popularity of dramatic readings in audoibooks

Just Mercy: Bryan Stevenson (Michael Jordan) and Walter MacMillan (Jamie Foxx)

On two Thursdays at the Mason OLLI I participated in class discussions of movies where the teacher is very good at teaching (he spent decades doing it before retirement) — they were lively, intelligent, fun, one on Just Mercy and the other The Parasite (see further down below).

On Just Mercy: a powerful film done in direct simply ways. I was struck after a while at how little filmic “tricks” of the trade; no flashbacks, not subtle in juxtaposition or dialogue at all. It moves forward,and the language is direct, simple. The movie is nerve-wracking to watch because I didn’t know it ended. The young African American lawyer, Bryan Stevenson (played by Michael Jordan) is almost throughout the film at risk for his life — he patiently endures set-back after set-back and finally gets the case on Frontline from which he gets to go to the Alabama supreme court to ask that the charges against his client, Johnny McMillan (James Foxx), simply be dropped immediately as the original trial was gross miscarriage of justice. It is an anti-capital punishment film. We see a black man who should have been put in a hospital for PTSD and was left to stew and put off a bomb in front of a house and killed a woman, now lamenting and so sorry, a one incident actually killed by an electric chair. They were still killing people that way in Alabama in the 1980s and early 90s? we the full barbarism of it — how there is this pretense of humanity on the day the man is murdered.

As with When They See Us, Dark Waters, and Chernobyl, at the end of the film we see photographs of the real people the actors played. It is very effective to do this. The African-American actor, Michael Jordan, playing the lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, has been snubbed: his performance is as good as James Foxx (nominated for best supporting actor, partly because played Ray Charles in another film)

A third was enjoyable in the class (at Politics and Prose) but it was the books we read and movie I watched that mattered: Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy and Alan Pater and Cellan Jones’s 1987 Fortunes of War. There is so much time to be alone.

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

Sometimes it is so hard to get to and from these places. This to introduce a distressing — frightening in implications — experience I had this past Friday early afternoon.

As I was driving from Northwest Washington DC to get to Northern Virginia and took my usual turn to get onto some feeder road which takes me to South 110 and that to South 395, I found the whole roadway blocked. There was no way I could get onto that feeder road. I was quickly hopelessly lost. I became bewildered as I usually do in streets I am not accustomed to even if some of them were familiar to me from previous excursions. My garmin showed itself to be dead and I couldn’t get the cell phone even to connect to the network. I kept making wrong turns and feared in my bewildered state I would get into an accident. Finally I remembered I had put the phone on airplane mode so that it would not disturb a class I had been in. Luckily I was able to find a sidewalk I could park by. I put the setting back and voila the Waze program began to work.

But alas I have never been able to make the Waze program or app talk — or to be truthfully only intermittently. In fact what has happened is once it starts talking and I get home I can’t figure out how to shut it up. I don’t always get an “exit” box.

Another problem I have is I never knew where I want to go west or east — say on 66. I can’t tell what is north, south, east or west. I can with thought say to myself this is left and this right. Is there a long word for this for an autistic person? So that’s my first question. I would feel better if my condition — this has happened before – had a name. Getting lost. Not being able to tell where I am — have a big picture of coordinates unless I’ve lived in an area for a very long. A good pictorial memory but it has to be real buildings or streets I recognize.

So what I had was a map with lines and arrows. I managed to put it on the seat next to me and very slowly attempted to follow all the turns and arrows. It was difficult because Arlington around Rosslyn (I live in Alexandria) is no fun. The ironic paradox is what I knew to be true; I was at most 5 minutes away from some highway if I could figure out how to get to it. What happens is the lines and arrows began to show this way to South 110. I recognized that was one of the highways and going in the right direction. I drove very slow and kept adjusting the cell phone to face me.

Anyway I swung onto the highway from another exit but I could recognize pictorially where I was, and could calm down and saw this way to Exit 27, South 395 and knew where I was and then got home. Whew!

I am like a blind person when it comes to understanding directions or what I am on a map. Utter bewilderment is awful. I have tried buying a new garmin twice. But I cannot program it. All of them require some programming and I have no one to do that for me. Everyone says it’s so easy, nothing to do. I have no idea what to do and twice I have had to take back an expensive Garmin or GPS. The one I have now was programmed for me by a kind IT guy who was in my house shortly after my husband died — and helped me install a computer.

Intensely relieved to be back home. My younger daughter, Isobel, cannot help me because she is autistic and asking her to help, this kind of experience makes her intensely nervous.

My older daughter came the next day and — what happened? — within no time she had no problem.

At first the Waze was silent. Her response was to say “Waze stinks” and download google maps. She tried to look at the settings and could find nothing wrong. She did fiddle with them. Then she tried both Waze and google maps and both talked! We get in the car and both talk. But the problem is she never figured out what I had been doing wrong or what I needed to do to make the thing talk because it was talking. I did see that I often put my own address into location and she said don’t do that, just type where you want to go in the next rectangle below.

The problem is Laura (her name) really had no problem. She clicks away and after a while the Waze program talked. She finishes, somehow an exit box is there, and she clicks on it. Calm as the proverbial cucumber. I did sit with her in my car and I clicked and it talked. She could not fix for me what was working.

So a week and a half from now I have two new places to go. I worry the thing won’t talk for me. Has anyone had this problem of the cell phone Waze not talking — My cell phone is an Apple iphone 8 — I think.

To me it’s a wonder I go anywhere at all. If I were black, I would fear a cop might kill me. Laura installed for me Uber — I have Lyft. This is for my coming trip to St Louis. If I want to find a restaurant I am to go to on Friday night, and then a play on Saturday the only way is to hail one of these cab services there and back.

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The destitute-desperate family in The Parasite

Bong Jong-ho’s Parasite is part of my theme tonight: it seems to be a study of social modes of interaction exposing gross class inequities among three families. I’ve now watched it twice and people you should not miss it. It will absorb and entertain and then maybe horrify you. I am still not sure what I think about it.

First thing to be said about the film is how hard it is to talk about it, part of this Is the story line is unpredictable – that’s why you keep watching (even if it’s not assigned). You get drawn in because you are not sure what is going to happen next at all

Second it seems to me most of the thematic descriptions don’t apply generally. It’s not a thriller. We see a class war only at the very end when the destitute family driven to desperation because there’s another desperate destitute pair of people hidden deep in a many level basement of the super-rich people’s many layered – crack up and out comes from them terror, hatred, an urge to destroy these people who are exploiting them utterly – smiling all the while as if it’s perfectly okay to the destitute to be so exploited. The super-rich husband-father drops his mask for a moment when the destitute father playing a chauffeur for the first balks at an order – and threatens to fire him.

For a horror film (another designation) it’s constantly witty and funny – we laugh very uncomfortably at these desperate people – up to their chins in sewer water when it rains – yet they are endlessly ingenious, crackerjack it seems at surviving – they are all kept at a social and psychological distance from one another.

Realism is besides the point: the mother-wife is unbelievably naïve, believes anything – I saw misogyny in the way she was treated as someone who has nothing to do with her life but make expensive parties – we are better not knowing what happened to the employees the destitute family replaces – the housekeeper come back is living nightmare with her husband fleeing creditors

So I looked up Korean films and could find only a history which offered no interpretation, but I did find an essay on films called “periphery” films. Idea is developed countries, run by white people are at the center, and countries like Korea, Palestinine, Saudi Arabia – countries colonized – Australian are periphery. So I’ll conclude on 4 characteristics such films are said to have and this one has these:

1) An intense focus on place and setting. You never forget this is Korea and the two different houses are centrally photographed to stay in your mind as character in the drama – the people in the semi-basement stealing wifi in such appalling conditions – and the rich with all space hardly enough furniture, gadgets everywhere – I suppose it’s order if order is soulless.

2) A use of folk or story telling traditions – at the beginning of the film a brief fairy tale looking picture seems to suggest that the family is going to get their dearest wish using some stone – and this stone appears in the opening and closing sequences of the film. The son carries it around – it is dangerous and bad things happen around this stone. The talk is in European tradition — the fisherman and his wife, with its moral of watch out what you wish for ….

3) Looking at everything from the point of view of the excluded – no matter what it is or how – you might say those colonized whose everything is taken from them or are not allowed anything – cannot accumulate – so destitute cannot go to college — along with this these excluded people feel they can’t belong anywhere. They don’t fit in. The son says this at one point. It ends on the father in the deep basement obviously doesn’t belong anywhere. Even the super-rich don’t belong anywhere – their home is not a home, it’s an place for the real estate sellers furniture makers gadget makers, party makers to supply and sell stuff to — to make money on

4) Money and bullying. Any time a rich or powerful person is denied anything he or she resorts to bullying. But the predators all of them prey on other predators – -like the destitute family on the original employees – everyone searching for an identity – I saw an Israeli film (art film) where the characters are all seeking an identity – queasy comedy and sudden stark tragedy happen over money and bullying ow or what – at any moment a mask drops and you are facing the faceless

At any time the mask drops and you are facing the faceless

So I thought about movies made from the center as a control mechanism –- say The Durrells of Corfu, which I wrote about in my previous diary entry.

The exact place does not at all matter – they can make a home of anything.
No one bullies others and minimal money does – you need some but not a helluva lot.
The know who they are – they really do.
Point of view is that of the privileged those who assume courts are on their side – no masks – and those who have to wear masks very poignant, like Sven the homosexual man – everyone feels for him.

Last night I re-watched The Parasite, having read about cinema at the periphery (movies made by film-makers who don’t come from powerful countries run by white people, countries not colonized i recent history) and it struck me the destitute desperate family’s behavior is like that of us — when it comes to airplane travel. That is one place middle and upper middle white people come across the treatment poorer people across the globe do all the time. Similarly it appears on the surface and maybe is true that these white people accept this treatment from the airlines. They don’t go to war or paroxyms of rage, the candidates for office don’t use as one of their promises to regulate the airlines and stop their outrageous behavior to everyone but those who can afford to be deeply gouged.

OTOH, the movie makes this analogy hard to see because it calls itself Parasite and in Korean parasitic worm and seems to refer the to the destitute desperate family – a squalid word, and it also means blotches on your skin from such worms. I am not sure that the film is not problematic — partly because in the class I was in many of the people in the room defended the super-rich family: they were paying the others, they were “decent to them;” okay they were tactless and unaware of the horrible conditions of life of the others. But that’s not their fault.

If you can reach it, Michael Wood of the London Review of Books for January 2020 is very worth reading

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How to end this entry? We are today surrounded by creeping and overwhelming fascism in our public media and art — that is the mindset actuating not only the Trump administration. Every day another evil deed, yet more ugly hateful ideas and feelings spewed out. Yesterday the Trump regime rescinded decades of work to change attitudes to protect birds from wanton killing — now you may kill them as you please (and you can have as many and what kinds of guns you want. Public schools? why these are low-class government schools which debased people attend — a sign of their inferiority is no one is excluded.

Human beings need to think more about the nature of our social lives today in the year 2020. What are we seeking? What do these activities of ours depend upon? how or on what basis are we setting up our relationships with one another? Is it to escape from a default setting (to use the ubiquitous Internet jargon) of alienation, a world of cruelty and indifference as seen in Parasite and Last Chronicle of Barset and Curate in Charge? (David Copperfield ends in a wish fulfillment fantasy and the emphasis is — to be fair to the book — more about the richness of a life of solitude, of inner development of self and strength and also about death and sheer vulnerability.) These questions are urgent as we find ourselves more and more without the solid social support systems our daily lives and attitudes (beliefs in our togetherness) used to provide, more and more turning to the Internet worlds, to voluntary organizations unsupported by anything but human need.

Ellen