Fraught mornings, or on Renewing our passports, and other people’s taxes; Clarycat struggling on; summer/winter plans

Tazzi — December 2014, probably around 19

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been three weeks since I last wrote, and very slowly, painfully, not clear if at all truly, Clarycat is improving somewhat. The main thing is she is still eating, drinking, using her litter box, cleaning herself, and she is lively within limits. She follows me about, comes to the door when I return from being out, visits me in my chair in my workroom. She is aware something is wrong but not sure what it is, so remains in a kind of stunned state.

Yes my beloved Clarycat is now an elderly disabled cat. From some photos my friend, Martin, sent me, it appears that the way Clary often looks is commmon among cats in this “stage of life.” You see his beloved Tazzi at her best just above this in the last year(s) of life. I have opted (I think without meaning to act this way just not doing more as yet) not to go for x-rays lest the anesthesia kill her, and because I probably would not go to the huge expense and painful procedures in the hope I could prolong her life. The question is for how long? could they prevent another stroke? I remember what excruciating pain and misery Jim knew — after that operation.  How no one helped him once the cancer metastasized into his liver.  We should have cut loose and had one last holiday in England. Could he have had a good time with the idea in his head that now he must certainly die soon?  He would not go to the fantastically expensive expert doctors.  He only said to me near the end, “don’t let them hurt me. I know I may end in hospital and you won’t be able to help this.” In the event he died at home in the bed we had bought for him after the operation.

I am keeping an eye on her a good deal and she stays close to me; that means I pick her up and put her on my lap when she comes by, put her down, I help her steady herself. I did find her in her old spot between the back of my computer and one of the two workroom windows — the old spirit back. But she could topple any moment and topple the computer and wires so I have to take her down. She is slowly retrieving what she can but will never walk right again and never be able to climb much or come down from low heights easily.. She stays close and a new reinforcement of my homebody habits is how she looks forlorn when I go out. I find her cuddled into my side when I wake in the morning. She struggles to walk on her own. My job is to keep her spirits up.

Here is a poem Martin sent me that he wrote about Tazzi when she began to decline:

Our cat is old, she feels the cold
She sleeps beside a heater
Her world is shrunk to just one room
A basket on the kitchen floor
A food bowl, water, litter tray
No need for cat flap any more
She does not pass the kitchen door

A scarecrow, gaunt and deaf, she croaks,
A silent purr between your palms,
Her skin is thin, her backbone
Pricks beneath the fur you stroke
She cannot jump onto a chair,
Enfeebled legs will not permit her,
Who was so graceful, strong and fast.
The table cloth stays clean at last.

Her pleasure used to be to sit
in the front window
and watch the passing street.
But you cannot leave a cat alone
However still she looks
Who cannot get outside in time,
And pees on books.

She came to us some six years old
A rescue cat, is now perhaps nineteen.
She put her paws up on my chest,
And she decided it was us.
Dismissing all the rest.

The former cat, blocked by a door
Would quietly dig the carpet up.
But she will stand at the door and squawk
Requiring service now now now
Unusual cat, to almost talk.

There has been a time when she would wait
While I made breakfast and had sat down
To sit upon my lap
A few minutes before wandering off.

Allowing of affection
You could not pet a person so
Unharmed by petting, unseduced
Indifferent going on her way
The action left the better.

Despite it all, the spark of life
Is still alight, she has a healthy
Appetite for what she likes,
An unexpected turn of speed
When chicken scraps appear.
O sweety puss, O kitty cat,
A dragging leg today,
Not a good sign I fear,
But you just carry on,
There’s no self-pity there.

That’s right: there is no self-pity in Clarycat.

On her blanket a couple of mornings ago

Clarycat is one of my living links with Jim. She grieved for his death, as he lay dying by running back and forth in the hall, caw-cawing. She sat in his chair for two weeks after his body was taken out — she was waiting for him to return. When he didn’t, she slowly became attached to me.

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But yesterday morning fraughtness reached a different kind of height. I finally faced the reality that our passports may be rejected when we try to travel. The UK site says the passport need only be valid for the time we are there, but I phoned at last — the British embassy and British Airways, went to two different post offices, phoned online another person: the answer was airports have no general rule, and British Airways itself might not let us aboard because our passports will expire before the end of six month afterwards. When I heard “you can never tell with security guards,” my heart sunk. These are silent petty tyrants (the worst type of authority figure) I’ve had to deal with three times now – they ignore all you say. You have no civil rights.

When I found the place on line where we were to print out the application, I discovered that Izzy had said nothing because she too was reluctant to mail the passport off — out of fear it would not return in time. I was in the position of having to pressure her to do what was painful for me to do. I needed her help to navigate the damn site. Together we managed it. I knew where to go to get the passport photos — still the local drugstores are doing it. Our ordeal began at 9:30 am when we got online to look; and it ended at 11:45 am when we were driving back home having handed in to our local post office two envelopes with all the appropriate materials in them. Cross your fingers for us. Hope very hard. I have lost nearly $2000 since Jim died in non-refunded airplane fees (twice on Expedia I was egregiously robbed; cancelling a flight because of the pandemic I got nothing back) so if we must buy our airplane tickets ahead and the passports don’t come by late August, what then?

I told (by the way) my congressman would help expedite the passport renewal. Neither of his phones takes messages and it is explicitly written on the website, he can do nothing about passport renewals as the state department will not answer queries. The post office no longer helps you (De Joy strikes again). Ordinary people who know no one like Izzy and I are powerless w/o laws and customs on our side. They used to be, a little bit. No longer.

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Ah, I see I’ve not told you — my friends reading this — why we are traveling. Well around middle to later March my proposal to give a paper at the upcoming Trollope Society conference at Somerville College, in Oxford, September 1-3, on the theme of Trollope and Women was accepted! We are in time to stay in the college too! Izzy will come (I could not do it without her), and we hope to spend three days in London afterwards.

Somerville College, Oxford, very early women’s college (recent photo)

Finally see the Imperial War Museum with its fabulous collections of art (not sure which schools, perhaps many?) and its legendary history exhibits. Go to a play. Walk in the London parks again.

Here is my proposal:

Anna Carteret at Lady Mabel Grex (1974 Pallisers, from The Duke’s Children) — she gazes out the window at Frank Treghear and Lady Mary Palliser

Intriguing Women in Trollope’s Fiction

Using a gendered perspective, I will discuss women characters who act, think, and feel in unexpected ways, whom recent readers find hard to explain, and cause controversy. I’ll focus on lesser known as well as more familiar presences.
My first & central pair will be Clara Amedroz and Mrs. Askerton from The Belton Estate. Most essays have been about how Clara at first prefers the glamorous, guarded, demanding and upper-class Captain Aylmer to the open-hearted, farmer-like, affectionate Will Belton. I will dwell on Clara’s refusal to give up her friendship with Mrs. Askerton, a woman who fled an abusive husband and lived with him before her husband died, thus enabling Mr. Askerton and her to marry. Mrs. Askerton is stunningly unexpected in her generosity of spirit and mix of conventional and unconventional views. The first half of my talk will move from Clara to other young about to, just married or not marriageable women whose lives take them in insightful directions, e.g., Lily Dale, Miss Viner (“Journey to Panama”), Lady Glencora, Emily Lopez.

The second half of my talk will move from Mrs. Askerston to sexually and socially experienced disillusioned women, e.g., Madame Max, Mrs. Hurtle, Lady Mabel Grex, Mrs. Peacocke (Dr Wortle’s School), as well as older mature women who are mothers, and whom Trollope takes seriously, e.g., Lady Lufton, Mrs. Crawley, Lady Mason.

Trollope dramatizes what might seem perversities of behavior these women resort to as contrivances to get round a lack of concrete power (used against them, sometimes by other women, e.g., Lady Aylmer) to try to achieve results they can be happy or live in peace with. The point of the talk is to show how Trollope probes and makes visible psychological and iconoclastic realities in his women characters’ lives.

While I’m about it, I might as well tell why I am reading — and just reveling in Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night. I realize now that I never read it with enough attention, never gave it the respect it deserves as a brilliant account of a woman’s college (it takes place at Somerville where Sayers went! — called Shrewsbury in the novel). I remember who did it so am collecting clues! It’s like reading Austen’s Emma for the second time. My proposal for an online 4 week winter course at OLLI at Mason was accepted too:

Women in and writing Detective-Mystery Stories

We will explore the genre of detective stories of the mystery-thriller type from the angle of the woman writer, detective, victim & murderer: our three books will be Josephine Tey’s (Elizabeth MacKintosh) The Daughter of Time (the story the mystery of Richard III); Dorothy Sayer’s Gaudy Night; and P.D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. We’ll also see (outside class) and discuss two movies: Robert Altman and Jerome Fellowes’s Gosford Park and J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls (as rewritten by Helen Edmunsen and directed by Aisling Walsh). It’s a feminist literary history course, an outgrowth in one direction of the course I taught this past winter: The [archetypal] Heroine’s Journey

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This may be labelled fraught days we have learned to avoid. I’m now following or receiving substack newsletters from Susan Bordo, whose books on feminism, the body, literature, I once admired and read in. She writes vigorously and in the middle of the month described her fraught ordeal making out her and her husband’s taxes. She does them, using Turbo Tax: Turbo Tax Hell.

I was moved to write as follows:

My husband always did the taxes; he had a Ph.d in Math and was good in arithmetic. I have yet to figure out how to do percentages and long division. And he was very impatient, a bad teacher. So he did the taxes until he died — some 10 years ago now. My adventures with Turbo Tax and my older daughter the first year after his death will go undiscussed. For 3 years I was gouged by experts who couldn’t be bothered to understand what was my predicament. I have a portfolio of invested money by Schwabb, a legacy from my parents). I have an autistic (my younger) daughter who lives at home but makes a good income. She comes with me with her forms. Finally through the OLLI at Mason where I teach and a course called How to do your Taxes I learned a little about what all the rectangles meant — I began to realize why my father each year would become enraged at how much he had to pay. But through them I discovered AARP does anyone’s taxes for free if there is an office nearby. The first year took them 4 hours. You might say luckily I have never made any money on my 2 books. The people put notes in explaining everything — We arrive at the library we go to where AARP can found as the door’s open and get out around noon — mine now takes 2 hours + — but we also spend time waiting in a line of chairs too. The whole thing makes me so nervous that this year for the first time I discovered I was writing down wrong information about when my husband died. No one ever caught it.

So there you have what happened to me, to us, to our family group (includes two cats) this month that matters most in practical ways and practical things matter.

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Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea Brooke hard at work on proposed new cottages which her uncle will never build (1994 Middlemarch, scripted by Andrew Davies)

We have begin Eliot’s Middlemarch on Trollope&Peers and the reading and discussion will take all summer; in a few nights (if not tonight) I shall turn my attention to Elizabeth Gaskell and her Wives and Daughters, as I’ll be reading and teaching it at OLLI at Mason from middle June to late July. Both books have exceptionally superb Andrew Davies film adaptations. The two Italian classes I’m teaching are going well. Would you believe I’m reviewing a book for an 18th century Intelligencer where I’m rereading Richard Steele’s Conscious Lovers: I remember Anne Oldfield. I had no idea he derived some of his early wealth from enslaved people on plantations. I’ve two subscriptions with my friend Betty to see operas and go to plays next year; one with Izzy to go to the Folger once again to see Shakespeare. So I soothe myself.

I lost my one close and true friend of 44 years and all I do is an effort to replace him. I’m listening to Ross Poldark by Winston Graham being read aloud in my car and I realize I loved it so because the couple at the center are to me Jim and me. The attitude towards class and social life mine. I love to escape to these historical fictions and romances and to real historical narratives too — I’ve now added mystery-thrillers of the detective story type descending from Agatha Christie. I have decided Joan Hickman has it closest; it is with her we feel safer. Let’s hear it for spinsters and widows alone.

Miss Marple — I’ve enjoyed four serials thus far and am just mesmerized by PD James’s Dalgliesh (two thus far) on TV; her books have a quiet but persistent melancholic vein that makes them worth while …

So I’ve succumbed after all — how gentle, tender and touching are the Dorothy Sayers mysteries with Edward Petheridge and Harriet Walter — I’m loving him in the book too. Escape from the present into an Arcadia where death still resides, from hard lives to dreams that create an analogous experience to those I imagined and was really in with Jim.

And on the other hand, the way I’m learning to read Elena Ferrante’s books from The Ferrante Letters by Sarah Chihava, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards I find I can do in these women’s mysteries: in the interstices of these — Gaudy Night, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Jessie Childs’s The Siege of Loyalty House (harking me back to DuMaurier’s King’s General only this one so much realer and close to today’s fascism rising) even, is the discovery of myself and aspects of my journey in my mind and feeling I find across The Neapolitan Quartet. Really.

It is very hard to live on without Jim — I spend hours, days, weeks, months alone working here (reading, writing) and playing here (movies and friends’ chat) conflicted because I don’t force myself to go out — where I am sometimes rejuvenated but often come home so stressed and wonder why I went. I now know that what I am driven to do to my feet sometimes is a form of stimming. I keep learning at these autism sessions so much. Our (me, Nina, Bianca) first Women with Autism online zoom group seemed to go so well. Another thing for you to cross your fingers for me. I am so very frightened without him.

Ellen

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Clarycat

Clarycat home from the Vet this past Monday morning

Dear friends and readers,

Last Friday, so six days ago Clarycat began to walk oddly: she was leaning against walls on her left side, her head held tilted to the right, yet stumbling on her left side, look like someone very uncomfortable, possibly in pain. She could no longer jump down from cat beds, only get on my lap after I helped her and with real struggle and effort upon onto our bed. Very worrying. She was eating, drinking, but much less; she looked thinner, her tail down. She looked sad.

I had to wait until Monday morning and brought her in about 10 minutes after the office opened. The vet declared she is 14, born 2008, so in her 80s (human equivalent), very old lady. She has small kidneys. If her blood pressure was high that meant she had had a major stroke, brain damage. We had blood work done, tests for organic disease. $695. The next day the Vet phoned and the news was moderately good: no disease could be found, her blood pressure is normal. So what is wrong. If we had a cat scan, the Vet could tell us more but since the Vet declared an operation out of the question (very expensive — $3000 and more), that Clary would be at risk of dying from anesthesia, we cannot know any more. The Vet had given her an injection of an antibiotic. It could have been the middle ear – an infection. But the Vet seemed inclined to think Clary suffered a minor stroke, a minor heart attack we could say.

During Monday, she looked so limp as she lay on her side, my heart failed. That was the way Llyr lay down in her last days.

She was named after Samuel Richardson’s heroine, Clarissa, but I felt silly calling such a sweet tiny kitten Clarissa, so she soon became Clary (my favorite nickname for Richardson’s character) and then Clarycat. One time I took a photo ofher sitting on Richardson’s book, but I can no longer find it. So here she is in a posture like the one she took when placed upon the book:

2011, Clarycat at 3

Here she and Ian are as kittens when they first arrived:

and here she is fully adult and in good health, watching me:

Mid-week she was getting better (I hoped) very slowly. I thought I saw tiny improvements. She is eating and drinking better. She stopped being hostile to Ian (spitting and hissing at him) — I think she was afraid of his wrestling her. She uses her litter. I saw signs of her climbing a bit here and there, but this morning she attempted the kitchen table and tumbled off. I felt so terrible for her. She scurried off and hid under the bed.  She seemed very upset.  She likes to climb: that’s how she gets into her cat beds by the windows and looks out.

She has not played with her toys for over a week. She often carries them about in her mouth or she puts them in spots where I have been. She will not share them.  She can get pretty fierce with poor Ian.  They now lie ignored in a cab bed.

When I leave the house, I can forget about it, but on my way home I remember and feel so sad.

I should say during this time Laura told me her male cat, Maxx, a sweet cream-colored darling had a urinary tract obstruction. Crystals formed in one of his tubes, something that can happened to a cat that has been neutered. It cost her $3200 to have him catheterized, a tube put in him to drain the urine until the crystals were dissolved. At one point she had an emergency return to the animal hospital. She sent me a photo of him in a crib with a tube coming out of him. She has told me not to get pet insurance as it is very difficult to get the insurers to pay and they charge a lot too!

Here he is one New Year’s Eve, say 2 years ago

Thursday — this morning Clarycat not getting worse; sometimes she also seemed to be better: she is holding her body carefully as she walks along; she carries on eating, drinking, using the litter and today I saw her vigorously cleaning herself and sitting in the sun.  She can climb onto my chair again, from the side, a sort of slithering leap.

She remains stunned. She knows something has happened to her. She can’t say I’ve had a neurological event but she feels it as weakening, strange.

She is the darling of my heart. On my lap as I type,

As I read she sleeps lying by my side. Now when I wake and read between 5 am and 7:15 when I get up, she lies across my chest. I carry her about, put her near the sun, I so want her to be enjoying life insofar as she can.

She loved Jim — was very attached to him. When he lay dying the last two days, she went back and forth in the hall making unhappy noises. After he was taken away, she sat in his chair for couple of weeks.

A few years ago now I translated a poem by Elsa Morante to her cat, Alvaro. Here it is again:

Morante and one of her cats

A song for Alvaro

You regard your nest as within my arms
At once still and tenacious, a genius loci shines out intently
and yet you are all play, vain, selfish, without goal,
beyond the moment, worse than useless creature.
The afternoon shades are your dwelling places:
like a soft dove, alert, you can turn into an owl;
seen in the depths of night, from tombs
your soft breath contains spirit.
When I extinguish the light, your pupils
a candelabrum staring into
my dozing half-sleep half awake eyes;
you crack whatever solemn respite, truce from life,
I know — for there you are again,
fiery light in your eyes, a burning transience;
as baby tigers chase their tails, so you
in my sweet deliriums.
Then you sleep, your show-y light gone,
you who in the morning I find proudly sitting
on the edge of the windowsill,
your beautiful eyes twin flowers
And I am your equal,
your equal, do remember —
aloof, sad, grave. Amid the somber
and dark leaves; we sparkle in a garden
together in the middle of uncivilized people,
a small paradise of two. I remember exile
that you in the room didn’t understand
as far as you were concerned
we were on the same patch of earth
passingly fleetingly, a playful pilgrim.
Oh, why do you condescend to
favor me, savage wild untamed thing.
When your peers, god-like creatures
savor their languid follies, turn to festive games
of fighting before dawn, occasional heartless hunting,
why are you here with me.
Continuously, you who are free, without lies
while I am thrice burdened with
prison, sin and death
Between the moons and the sun, within gleaming hawthornes,
magic herbs, chimeras, fawns immortal leap;
the young galants with the beautiful names: Curly
Atropos, Violent, Passion-flower, Palombra
and during that meticulous storm of naming,
the first day
where were you? did you love me from the start?
You don’t answer me. Jealous of your secrets,
you keep them to yourself, in the prison of self:
they include the sword of Damocles,
stories of gold, velvet zebras, hidden satyrs
who will not speak to women. Close eyes.
The sounds you make cajoling cajoling,
a humming flirting, purring whirr
my bee, thread your honey double up,
twist, bend, fold that string.
I remember ghosts O the cheer
of having you for a friend
is enough for my heart.
And for my stupidities and lies,
for my tearing myself, self-harm,
by your kisses and your sweet plaintiveness
you console me
oh my cat

Trans. Ellen Moody

From Alibi, bilingual edition (French and Italian)

For Italian and French, see my blog, Sylvia II at https://austenreveries.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/elsa-morantes-song-for-my-cat-alvaro/

Heart-breaking. This morning she is laying/sitting in a very lax kind of way that worries me. She would not survive 5 minutes out-of-doors.  She has not eaten this morning either, but then neither did Ian, also 14, a sibling from the same litter.

Ellen

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On finding needed cheerful occupation for a widow like me; In a Different Key

At Stonehenge, Jan 18th: Sunrise 8:01 am; Sunset 4:34 pm

January 18th, Alexandria, Va, area on top of hill not far from Shooter’s Hill:

It’s 20 to 4 and I’m settled back in my chair in my workroom to read. I went out around 3 o’clock (pm) to walk as that would be the “height” of the day. It’s warmest and sunniest. I remembered while walking how I used sit in front of my window when Jim was still working full time and wish he could only come home 2 hours earlier. By 5 the sun and the glory of the day gone. If the weather was not too cold by that time, after supper, we’d walk together, down below, in Old Towne, usually briefly. Now I go out myself and walk alone.

Dear readers and friends,

Perhaps I should explain how I do it, or where some of the rational for my continual reading, writing, watching films, and occasional contact with other people come from:

The OLLIs:

OLLI at Mason has in effect 4 terms:  fall (8 weeks), winter (4), spring (8) and summer (6). I didn’t do winter before they went online because I saw how maddingly frustrating it would be to me to have a class canceled (as it would have to, because it follows the Fairfax County School schedule).  OLLI at Mason has clubs all year round. These clubs can get speakers, often not famous at all and often very poor — you want to know what are popular misconceptions about history, hear anti-communism &c their history club does that.  Clubs are also reading together, playing games together, exercise together, go to the theater together (I joined in here the year before the pandemic), walk together, writing not actually together but you bring what you wrote and share it.

OLLI at Mason allows me complete access to the online database at Mason from home; I’d pay the $400 for membership just for that.

OLLI at AU has 3 terms: fall (10), spring (10), summer (4).  The summer one is new — began say 5 years ago.  Inbetween in winter they have something called shorts: classes that run for 1 week, 3-5 days a week in the last week of January and first of February; nowadays for 2 weeks (it used to be just for one); 5 years ago they began to repeat this in July.  The new summer terms and shorts were the result of moving into the new building where we had so much more room and access than the churches they had been meeting in. OLLI at AU also runs lecture series where semi-famous people come and talk — in January and again in June.  No special library privileges and no online access from home. I go to the shorts and some of the lectures at OLLI at AU. As for teaching that way, I’d rather take a running jump off a cliff.

I can no longer do two different courses at the same time. It is just too much for me. So I do the same course fall and spring at both OLLIs; I repeat the same course for the 4 week winter and summer at both OLLIs. The one where there is no repeat is the 6 week summer course at OLLI at Mason as there is nothing comparable at OLLI at AU.

Others:

P&P, Politics and Prose Bookstore: I attend classes, literary, and these run for anywhere from 2 to 3, to 4-5, and sometimes 7-8 sessions, one a week. Most nowadays online. Most classes are attached directly to reading some sort of books together or bringing writing you do to a forum. After all it’s a bookstore. It has returned to trying to be a community center with its evening lecture series (by known people) and its trips, but not book clubs in the store spaces.

I’ve quit the Smithsonian as an attendee or student because most classes are at night, and I’ve discovered that if your online access to a class doesn’t work, they won’t help you. They get more than famous people and once in a while (not often enough) a very good lecturer, but the literature courses (reading) have fallen away. Much mainstream thought without the misconceptions you find at (to be fair) both OLLI at AU and mason. This is a loss for me and if more were in person during the day or they changed their stance towards online helping I would.

Then there’s far away. I do attend Cambridge classes, one at a time, usually Sunday, on themes — 19th century authors, or Woolf and Bloomsbury thus far, but they are a bit expensive. Almost uniformly excellent. I attend the every-other-week London Trollope Society group readings: they are of remarkably high quality for such gatherings. It takes some brains and knowledge to read and understand Trollope. Speakers are sometimes very good I’ve done 5 or 6 talks myself. Everyone friendly and kind.

Online life:

I participate in online reading groups on social platforms. One on-going one is at my “own” Trollope&His Contemporaries, a very few active people at a time. By this time (what a relief) no quarrels. On face-book The Way We Read Now, a break-off group from the Trollope face-book page which has moderators who heavily censure people, even kick them off. This is not uncommon. I was kicked off a Poldark Discussion Page: enough of the leaders didn’t like my approach. It’s a loss; it did hurt. I’ve seen people kicked off the Outlander group I’m in; they have stopped group reads partly because they fought too much, and (semi-miraculously) they too when it’s a new season for the serial, rarely fight. What happens is after a while the disruptive or disliked person is kicked off or leaves or falls silent. Very important to me my 2 hours on Saturday evening once-a-month online Autism Friends group who also meet every other week evenings for a one-hour chat.

Travel since Jim died

I’ve managed apart from Road Scholar (3 trips thus far; two wonderful, one to Inverness and environs for a week; another to the Lake District and Northumberland as far as Hadrian’s Wall and an archeaological dig) I’ve been to a large number of conferences for me: two were once in a lifetime (it seems) types for me: a Trollope and a Charlotte Smith one, the first in Belgium, the second Chawton House. Izzy was generous enough to come with me, enabling me to go in this individual way demanded. I’ve gone with her to 4 JASNAs, probably no more: she quit when for a 3rd time we were excluded. I’ve gone to ASECS (probably no more for me, too much to explai) and to EC/ASECS — I will try to continue as I’ve a few real friends there. For all of these I did papers regularly. I did love the sessions, and nowadays I attend virtual conferences and sometimes I am just so inspirited and inspired: Virginia Woolf ones, Renaissance ones, individual favorite authors …

So this is how I fill my time. I develop new veins of thought and areas to teach; I learn a lot socially and intellectually. Why do I need such things: these provide me with companionship and activity others seem to enjoy with me. I feel useful. I make what closer friends with great difficulty; it’s even harder to sustain them. Why is this: among other things, I’m Aspergers syndrome. I’m also (or it’s that I’m a) depressive, suffer anxiety barriers of all sorts I’ll call them. Of course I’ve a lifetime behind me of not building groups until the mid-1990s when I first came onto the ‘Net and found I could make acquaintances and find people like me (in different ways) for the first time.

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The first half of this entry allows me to segue into the second: how rare it is that anyone presents anything to the public in mass media films that shows true understanding of this disability.

In a different Key, a documentary about autism on PBS. The depiction as far as it goes is accurate, fair, balanced. One never knows how a neurotypical audience might react but such a film at least starts means to start with a basis in truth understanding empathy:

https://www.pbs.org/show/different-key/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/new-documentary-in-a-different-key-follows-first-person-ever-diagnosed-with-autism

There is an excellent book: In a Different Key by John Donvan and Caren Zucker — a full history intended to reach an autistic adult audience as well as the average reader. Very smooth style, very chatty friendly Upbeat insofar as you can be when your material is so often devastating (about the treatment of autistic people, their relatives &c). The thing is to ask yourself is, Who is it written for? It’s written in a very simple soothing kind of style, very much telling a story or stories. The book (unlike the film) while it features the story of Donald Triplett does tell a history of autism, from earliest records of (cruel) institutionalization to the first awareness this is a general disorder, recognition, Leo Kanner — up to today. But it does this through individual story-telling in a very easy to read style in a kindly tone — charitable to all.

It did just resonate with me when Lee Kanner remarked that two elements found across the autistic spectrum, no matter what the individual variants are: a pattern of aloneness and a pattern of sameness.  The words aloneness and sameness leapt out at me.   Irrespective of whether you are lonely or not in your aloneness. I know that the difference for the 44 years I was married to my husband, Jim, basically I was alone with him.

The word sameness for me translates into how much I need routines, how routines help enormously and I follow a routine each day.  The word pattern reminds me of how much of an ordeal it is for me to travel.  How in efforts not to get lost I try hard to picture the place I’m going to our of memory and if I can return to where I know the environs and have been there before I can control anxiety attacks.  That’s comfort in sameness. I don’t like change.

But I have to admit the film is wanting. It fails to convey the full reality of autism because the film-makers instinctively, intuitively (they don’t think this out) feel the way to elicit sympathy is to omit the adult reality and worlds of feeling (which can include anger, resentment, indignation, a sense of alienation), the full burden of adulthood from the portraits of autistic people they show. The result is to make the autistic people child-like, too accepting, vulnerable. So it feels like what we are given is once again a framing by adult-parental neurotypicals. The continual return to the older women in rocking chairs is indicative of this. We are not allowed to come truly close to any autistic person. So in a way they are infantilized or sentimentalized. One of the film-makers has also become intensely involved in autism activism because she is a parent and wants to protect her son.

A while back (pre-pandemic) I saw a film about autistic women, maybe made in Iceland or a Scandinavian country where the film-maker was herself autistic and the focus there was getting jobs and living an adult life as a woman (problems in marrying) and it got a lot closer to showing these women as real people (with all our complexities) and situations shorn of “the guides” we had in these scenes, but it too kept a distance. Protest novels often work by making the central figure a victim of society’s blind and cruel prejudices or systems.

The book tells of the fraud Bettelheim so readily perpetrated on people — because there is no hard and fast definition, no scientifically based cure.  Then the deep painfulness of the blaming of the mother and how this tortured women. I’ve personally experienced this latter too (once described on a form in the most hostile way by one of those who had to pass on allowing Izzy to join in the Alexandria School for disabled children, once a full program with 8 professional people, at least a hundred children, which rescued Izzy at age 3-5. I don’t know why but I never thought that one source beyond misogyny and “blaming the mother” as a pattern is that autism is hereditary at least in part and it’s probable that the origins of the “refrigerator” monster-strange mother is that the mother of the child was herself an undiagnosed autistic person. Of course. There is so little public admission that autism is partly hereditary (like all or most human traits however complicated the way genes and chromosomes work). They did not begin to understand me nor think they should.

They never diagnosed Izzy as autistic – this was 1987. I first myself diagnosed her when I went to a Victorian conference (about Victorian history and literature and science) and heard 3 talks where it was demonstrated that the characters in the novels would today be called autistic. No Joshua Crawley was not one of them (Trollope’s Last Chronicles of Barsetshire) but I felt I saw Izzy in the descriptions, and in some ways more mildly myself. So you might say Izzy has her job today because I was by chance altered and went to the Virginia Department of Rehabilitation to have her diagnosed and worked to get Kaiser to endorse the diagnosis — indeed certify it by a psychiatrist

For a winter coda: one of the pleasures of my daily existence is to to to twitter and look at the images put there by favorite photographers or lovers of visual art. One woman photographer daily puts a photo from the Northern most part of the Peak District in England: this is said to be a winter’s morning several mornings ago:

A fresh snowfall seems to wake the landscape from its grey, muddy winter sleep, a sudden pop of icy light on each tree and lane, so bright that it hurts your eyes after the weeks of darkness. For the young beech trees, finally it’s the perfect backdrop for their moment of colour — Peak Lass

Ellen

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

Margaryta Yermolayeva — Witchy Art

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Famous still of Tim Courtney running for life

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

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

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

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

The pig is intensely relieved, feeling a puzzled gratitude

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

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

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

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

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

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

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

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

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

The Taxi

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

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

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

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

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Old-fashioned diary entry

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

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

Here is the obituary I wrote the morning after he died

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

A glade in the Sheep Meadow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m getting myself to drink water.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Autumn from Window — idealized image by Barbara Pommerenke

Ellen

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

Beatrice Potter — Mice at work threading the needle

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

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

So I wrote in reply:

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

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

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

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

They are the only ones
who are free.

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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As summer begins …

Sunning cat

Disappointments, heartaches, things cannot do; things done, things doing, things to look forward to

Dear friends and readers,

Summer unofficially began last weekend, Memorial Day, and it was not exactly a rousing start. We (Izzy and I) failed to get aboard a boat ride, which we were told was planned for our (my) Aspergers nowadays online group, meeting every other Thursday (an hour starting 7 pm) and once a month Saturday (7-9).

The ad lied and said you could buy tickets as boarded the boat, but in fact you were supposed to book on-line — in the sense of reserving a seat. (We did not book online partly because until 10 in the morning it was not clear it would not rain.) So all the people with pre-bought tickets got on and then the guy would not let those willing to buy there until on the dot of 3 pm lest any pre-bought tickets came along. His mean face and tone and words assured us they were “really” full up, as probably was the 6 pm boat.

Izzy said she was not playing this game. In other words, she refused to be humiliated. I’m with her. It does seem to me a great deal of US life nowadays demands versions of humiliation.

So, my friends, avoid Capitol Tours. The boats look awful.

We then found a cab to take us home, using lyft. We had a wait because traffic was so heavy. We had paid a red cab (booking it after 10) to get us there as the Washington Harbor area (like all Georgetown) has no Metro stop nearby: you want to know why Biden couldn’t pass his BBB bill: huge numbers of middle class whites don’t want public transportation in their area. Many areas in DC have no Metro stop. Should I repeat this?
As to Washington Harbor, it is hard to buy the simplest bottle of water or non-alcoholic drink; just about all the places require you to sit down and spend a lot for a meal too.

If this sounds ultra-disappointed, it’s not. I went in order to show all the people I’ve enjoyed zooms with for so long how I want to meet in person and for the 40 minutes or so waiting together I met all who came. They met Izzy who I’ve mentioned on and off for so long Myself I’m relieved to be home early, back to comfort (I have the air-conditioning on), my loving cats, my books and movies

We did walk along the water and Izzy took a photo of a sensible water bird family who do not carry guns and do not live in an unmitigated racist capitalist world.

Izzy and I did take a lovely walk in Old Town around 5 in the evening the next day. The whole park front on the Potomac was re-vamped to leave a good portion a people’s park; on one side and in one portion capitalism reigns supreme but even there the number of restaurants are kept more reasonable and people can still walk along the edge of the water without incessant noise. There are areas to sit, to play games, one dance area, much grass and trees. Again ducks along the edge of the shore …

It’s a good walk up and down, for we start not far from the King Street station and go down to the water and back. There’s a new nice used bookstore! we stopped in it and it’s good place with books organized by type. I used to do this walk almost daily with Jim in the afternoons or evenings when he was working and after he retired; when Vivian was alive (that friend I made who died of cancer) I’d walk sometimes with her. I don’t like to walk it alone because it brings memories of Jim and the kind of life I led with him. Izzy won’t come with me regularly but for special occasions and yesterday we did. No cab, no $50. There are two boats you can buy a ride on up and down the Potomac — they are not popular in the way of the DC rides. You don’t “see” as much — no tourist sites to look at, and be told bogus history about, but we have gone on them a couple of times. Jim would never go (he thought it silly) but when he was away in summer Laura, I, and Izzy did the ride a couple of times just the 3 of us.

That night I enjoyed my books very much (among them The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins), and at night was fully absorbed by Indian Summers Season 2 again. Today it’s supposed to be super-hot — 100F with heat index, so we’ll stay in Izzy watches the French open (tennis), and I’ll do my syllabus for the June mini at OLLI at AU.

To conclude the thwarted and ambiguous and heartaches: This past Saturday I met at the hairdresser’s a woman I’ve thinking of as an old friend. Lately her husband of man years died. From the conversation I realize she is actually fine (doing better than I did after Jim died). I had interpreted her non-response to an email as her being still too grief-stricken to be active this way But her words and then a polite email that she doesn’t want to continue the friendship. This is always so hard when I’m rejected especially when I can’t figure out why. It happens repeatedly in my life — I can see she has nothing against me personally. This is the sort of thing Aspergers people have to live with — many years ago my younger daughter, also Aspergers, asked me why do not others reciprocate (after she had gone to a girl scouts meeting several times, tried hard and no one would even be her partner in dancing), and I answered I don’t know, I wish I did.

I’ve exchanged emails with this woman the next day again and have a better idea why she wants to — or has — broken the beginning friendship off, for it was just beginning again. After all she did this 20+ years ago. It’s too particular for me to tell but I do think this has to do with her husband’s death. Partly she is in a fragile state and doesn’t want to be disturbed by any ideas outside her usual ones – not that I would disturb her. But she knows I’m an atheist; indeed why should I hide it. She does not hide her intense religious (Catholic) faith. She said she was doing fine because she “firmly believes” she “will see Roger again.” Maybe just my presence would get in the way.

These things hurt Aspergers people like us because it’s so hard to start a relationship or begin to sustain one and when we lose it, we don’t have a substitute. We don’t just move on to another relationship. It’s like a child with one train as opposed to a child with many.

I learned a new word — or understood a word for the first time. In a previous zoom I said I didn’t understand the new and various ways the verb to gaslight someone is nowadays used. I know the original film and original use but all the recent extrapolations were confusing. So I’d heard the gerund “ghosting” — or, as a verb, someone ghosts you. I thought it was the equivalent of snub, they make you vanish, ignore you, but no, it means the person makes him or herself vanish. It comes from internet experience where the person does not answer an email as if they are not there. I had had people do that to me, yes.

Not traveling anywhere this summer. Cannot drive at night so no Wolf Trap. You must test negative for Covid going and coming on airplanes internationally. Told airports are again these scenes of wretched crowding, cancelled trips. Nothing nothing is worth such experiences. So Ireland put off for another year. Still sorry not to escape this heat but for three days visiting Thao — see below. The beach is too far for day trip. That is the worst of this area in summer. No nearby beaches.

Where I might go if I could: Monet’s Beach at Trouville

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So now positive developments. Events and experiences to look forward to this summer.

My young friend, Daughter No 3, Thao, had her baby! He and mother doing very well. Auntie Izzy and Grandma Ellen had face-time with Thao and Jeff and this tiny baby last night.  Auntie Izzy there too. They said it is now just about procedure to induce a young woman after 39 weeks. The medical establishment has decided why wait? She has endured massive intervention during most of this pregnancy and it was a good deal of it overdone, unnecessary and made her anxious again and again. So this refusal to let her carry the baby to term is part of that — the people were at her since this past Thursday to come in — like she had a ticket for a seat (in this case bed) and was not showing up.

A boy, weighing a about over 5 pounds. It’s clear he can’t see. He was quiet while we talked. They were exhausted and very happy I could see. Izzy and I shall try to come for a 4 day visit in August. They had planned to name him William and call him Will but they seem not to be sure now and have not yet signed the papers. I wish I had a photo. I don’t. The first one I do receive from Thao I’ll put here (until then all I’ve got is this one of Sam loving baby Catherine).

Honeysuckle Weekes as Sam cherishing, joyous over baby Catherine for her father Gabe Kelly (Killing Time, Foyle’s War)

Would you believe Barsetshire in Pictures? I gave this talk, which turned out to be difficult work, and I was stressed about but managed to pull off. The first time since 22 years ago I used (went over) that original research reading and staring in the Library of Congress at the original illustrations for Trollope’s novels over much of his career. I believe at the time I viewed and described some 450 images.

I’ve had the idea for my timeline I’d put my reading aloud copy of Barsetshire in Pictures on academia.edu. The talk went over very well (I trust – people seemed to be laughing in the right places), and I do this in the interim before the talk itself with the pictures comes online on the Trollope Society (London) page — if anyone wants simply to read it. When the video appears, I’ll make a blog and then distribute this in different places.

Lily and Grace sewing together by candlelight — George Housman Thomas’s 32 full page and 32 vignette/letter illustrations for the Last Chronicle of Barset

Today, this afternoon I returned to teaching in person for the first time in 2 years and 5 months. A tiny class as so many at the OLLIs are so wary (rightly), but it went so well. So much better than these zooms after all. People really talking to one another in the class. Everyone seen. No one a black box with white letters. It’s the rejuvenation I felt this afternoon to which you owe this diary entry, gentle reader.

And my schedule for the summer and fall all worked out.

I will be teaching this “Alternative POVs on Traditional History and Myth”; also in person for 6 weeks, once a week “Sensation and Gothic Novels, then and now:” Wilkie Collins, Woman in White and Valerie Martin, Mary Reilly, books and movies.

Online at OLLI at AU: a wonderful class, genuinely learned professor from University of Pennsylvania on SouthAsia, once a week — I learned a lot this past week about the Indian subcontinent, geographically, historically, ethnically, religiously; a course, Beyond Musical Standards, on the music of people like Harold Arlen, also once a week for 4 weeks online, but in person (!), 5 days in a row one week, on “Women’s Suffrage.” OLLI at Mason: again 4 weeks of a movie a week, well chosen, with Russell (from Pennsylvania now) and Stephanie; 6 sessions on a history of basic civil rights in the US, online, and then 2 sessions on W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction (that’s a Library of American book).

Online at Politics and Prose: end of July, early August, online with Elaine Showalter, “Difficult Women Take Two,” Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights (how I loved this decades ago when I read it riveted), Jean Rhys, Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Angela Carter, Bloody Chamber, Nora Ephron, Heartburn; August, online with Helen Hooper, “The Other Elizabeth Taylor,” Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (very good novel), Angel (one of those by her I’ve not read), and New Yorker short stories; September online with Michelle Stimms-Burton, James Baldwin, his later years, from 2 Library of America books)

I vow in August to write that review of the Anne Finch Cambridge volumes, and the short paper on the manuscripts of Finch and Jane Austen for EC/ASECs in October. I will study Italian and return to Anglo-Indian novels and memoirs.

August you see empty. Lots of horror stories about plane delays, weeks spent not being able to get out of a country because of testing positive for COVID, planes cancelled. Oonce again the airplane industry shows itself not concerned in the least about passengers. They follow the “just in time” theory. No preparation whatsoever for sudden surge of people. No re-hiring. What do they care? As long as their CEOs rake in millions in bonuses they give themselves.

So I will sustain my soul by my Anglo-Indian studies, Italian studies — for a future course at the two OLLIs. As when I started my studies of film, I feel like a child with a whole new candy store waiting for me.

Then carrying on for the rest of the year: London Trollope Society online: The Eustace Diamonds and Can You Forgive Her?. I’ll “do” in person in the fall at both OLLIs, “The Two Trollopes:” Last Chronicle of Barset, and Joanna’s Rector’s Wife and The Choir (books & films), once a week, September through November.

So there we are. Too busy to think about how lonely I am, and how hot it is outside. As for movies just now: Indian Summers, Foyle’s War, three Woman in White movies, two Moonstone. I’m finding the biography of Mazzini by Denis Mack Smith very good, so too near the end of Catherine Peter’s biography of Wilkie Collins (probably cannot be bettered), Maria Tatar’s Heroine with 1001 Faces — to say nothing of listening to Davina Porter read aloud Outlander once again in my car (sexually very stimulating for me).

Managing to keep Internet friendships on FB, TWWRN, my one alive listserv, Trollope & Peers, my online Zoom Aspergers group (every other Thursday and Saturday evening once a month). Here is my beautiful boy who does love me and Izzy

Have I accounted for myself enough? The ninth summer without Jim — carrying on our way of life insofar as I can without him, here, by myself.

Ellen

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I sit mesmerized and collapse twice; A. N. Wilson’s Stray, Us with Tom Hollander, Saskia Reeves; Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet & Colonialist Writing

Myself and my cousin, Pat, both age 8, Crotona Park, the Bronx

Me at a waterfall park in Maryland, age 72

Gentle readers and friends,

Above you see a photo of me from long ago, one I think I dimly remembered when my cousin, Pat sent it to me last week: I am 8 years old and so is Pat, we are in Crotona Park, in the Southeast Bronx, at a point where it intersects with Charlotte Street, on which I lived some 3 blocks down. My aunt, her mother, took the photo, behind us is her older brother (by one year), teasing us. The other is of me, age 72, spring, Maryland, at a waterfalls in a park.  What is remarkable to me is not only has my facial structure remained the same (allowing for my present fallen cheekbones, toothless state, wrinkled skin), the angle at which I hold my head when faced by a camera, my resort to nervous hand gestures has changed little. I couldn’t skate for the same reasons I was not able to bike ride about 20 years ago, and I now can’t do power point or share screens (or do any more beyond be there and talk) on zooms — too nervous, can’t let go, too unsure of myself, nowadays fear of embarrassment and making people impatient, allowing them to see (while I feel can be seen) aspects of my personality that make me very vulnerable. By contrast, there is Pat, looking out confident, smiling, the only barrier before her, the sun in her eyes, which she fends off.

This evening I sat mesmerized as I watched the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala adaptation (with a little help from Harold Pinter, i.e., most of the script) of The Remains of the Day for an umpteenth time. Ishiguro says he means us to take the butler as standing in for all of us: he gets to do a small job, but cannot control how his labor is used. He has little individual say in many major social and political and economic decisions affecting his life. He is also a man afraid of emotions, a man who failed to let his emotional life have any fulfillment. I do identify — and also with Miss Kenton — I’m a profound failure. It’s not that I threw it away, wasted it with no emotional satisfactions (I had my 45 years with Jim, have two daughters, have had a few friends, and continue to make one or two now and again, but barely sustain them), not that I didn’t get to make my own mistakes (which Mr Stevens laments he did not), enacted my own bad judgements. It’s that the disabilities which manifest themselves so clearly to my eyes so in the old photo have prevented me from doing the writing, achieving the book(s), having a social life that I have longed for, never had, never will. Why I am here all alone this evening and will be so for most until I die. Why I go few places.

The first time I watched this I burst into hysterical crying and it took something like 10 minutes for me to calm down. Jim was sleeping so I went into the bathroom in order to muffle the sounds.

I’ve been watching it again as part of re-teaching this course I called Two Novels of Longing etc. , and it is going very well for a second time. I love the books, and the second time through I am handling what I did well the first time even better.

I’ve thought over these couple of weeks since I last wrote how I have still not learned how to refer to saying something without saying it, still often cannot tell what is hinted at in general terms unless someone drops down a notch into something more concrete, that this middle class or level way of talking is beyond me. Each time I bump up against these ever-so-tactful ways of talk, I ask myself, now is this as Aspergers trait or is it rather than I’m not middle class, and a foundational (so to speak) working class identity that I have fled from in numerous ways (and am sitting her at peace because that I did succeed in with Jim’s help) cannot be eradicated. The pain this lack causes me, the mortification I know I’d feel if I had to watch myself teach on a video (my classes are now recorded), I have to hold in check. When I told someone I have not watched myself teaching, she sent me a written description.  I thanked her. Sometimes I think to myself so much has to be held in check. To get along with others pleasantly.

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Summer is definitely here, and in some ways we are post-pandemic, Izzy and I. We went out to a movie the other day, and I discovered that people are behaving very badly on the highways. At high speeds (65-70 mph) they dart in an out of the traffic lanes, move in front, around, speeding up to the side of other people in cars. I came home exhausted that day and another when I visited a friend. Calmed myself down, pulled my emotional temperature, excitement down by a glass of wine, but taking it too quickly, I found after supper I had to go to bed and sleep — for several in one case for a couple of hours in the other. So another response to the dissolution of quarantine, is collapsing, twice, from the effort I have not been called upon to give for quite some time. My first time out I got lost.  In some ways the pandemic is not gone. Both of us still working remotely from home, me still on zooms for teaching, courses, lectures, friends’ sessions. Still over 50% of Americans not vaccinated (what great fools), across the world in poor countries, only a tiny number of people vaccinated and this Delta variant (high contagious and the vaccines are not a total barrier against it) spreading across the globe.

Five of the nine shops that used to be next to the movie-house are now emptied of their businesses. Vanished. Went bankrupt. Who says we don’t need another giant stimulus bill?

The cleaning ladies have now been here three times and done a marvelous job each time – the first for well over 2 hours, which included washing from the inside all 14 windows. (One of them, a Black woman in her later 30s looks very well, all of her four children survived without getting sick.)

Ian the ginger tabby reacted with strong upset. He stayed in hiding under Izzy’s bed from 10:30 when he seemed to vanish until 8 or 9 pm. Then he came out steathily, standing there so still. Since then he has kept making these poignant dismal sounds, wandering about. Last night he wanted to go back under Izzy’s bed but she wanted to go to sleep and she doesn’t like to have the cats in the room with her when sleeping. She does let them in the times I’ve been away, but she prefers strongly to sleep alone. He sat at her door and kept up that mewing sound for quite a while, scratching on the door, and the next morning he was back to that mewing again. Not so frequent. It’s this insistent demanding sound or weak and so desolate And wandering about. I gave him tuna the day after. Two days and nights have gone by and he is now returned to his quiet routine patterns.

So cats have to re-adjust too. Clarycat has spent 15 months as my nearly perpetual companion and I find she does not like when I go out for a whole afternoon.

Clary my perpetual companion

I spent far too much money to have my front patches of flowers and yard once again weeded, mulched, cleaned up, new flower bed put in — I can’t keep this up I think to myself. The man a mean ignorant Trumpite not vaccinated at all, but his wife I’m discovering is a decent person.

Roses and daisies

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I have a book to tell you of, A. N. Wilson’s Stray; a new serial, Us, a four part BBC serial, based on a book by David Nicholls, which reviewers denigrated as a comfort book about divorce; a couple more thoughts on listening (once again) to a four book roman fleuve in translation: Elena Ferrante’s L’amica geniale (aka My Brilliant Friend, translated by Ann Goldstein who I’ve now seen often enough to know she is dumb when it comes to having ideas about literature) — and the opening spiel for the the course I’ll be teaching the next five weeks, now called more adequately called Writings about Colonial Experiences.

A.N. Wilson’s Stray is a gem in the animal story for adult kind, one which deserves a blog in its own right, together with another moving animal study I read before the pandemic, as thorough in the prose way, as sensitive, Roger A Caras, A Cat is Watching: how cats see us. But I’ve not the ambition so you’ll have to settle for this:

Pufftail has an outlook an outlook and experiences matched by Paul Auster in his book on Timbuktoo, a dog we first meet as “owned” by a mentally ill homeless man in Baltimore. The frame is this is a tale told by our narrator late in life to a grandkitten. This helps me as I know our narrator survived until old age Timbuktoo did not or several times it would have been too painful. The novel proper begins with this novel Puftail as a kitten with his brother taken far far too young from their mother –- the first tragic wrench. The animal store manager is a man interested in animals only insofar as he can make money. They soon are fed as minimally as possible and left in a cage. They realize – because he says so (how they understand English is not explained) – he will drown them. An elderly woman, Granny Harris, comes by and tries to negotiate for one by lying; offers too little, lies about why, and almost takes just one — the brother says goodbye to our hero so plaintively, but the owner throws in the other kitten for a pound. We see the old lady knows almost nothing of kittens for real.

They become indoor-outdoor cats – he and his brother who are named by her Fluffie (that’s our narrator because he has a very fluffy tail – -maybe he’s a middle haired cat) and his brother, Bootsie because his feet and ears are white. He dislikes these names. What is riveting is he tells of how he and his brother kill birds. In a very violent scene we see them stalk and kill a thrush, but not before they “tease” the poor bird a bit, and then we get a description of how they devour the bird. It’s upsetting yet we are distanced because our narrator stops to argue with us — why should we be put off when we eat animals every night. We have someone else do the killing for us. He said he thought Granny would be pleased if they presented the thrush to her. She was horrified – that’s when we get this argument about the hypocrisy of people. She even buried the bird – – and scolded both cats.

What happens is the kind of old lady dies and the cats have to learn about, confront death but the two younger adults are nowhere as responsible and they don’t remember to do things for the cats, yet lock them in. Her adult children come to visit and our narrator and his brother learn to stay away. They are not kind people, have no feel for animals for real, no imagination. Then a truly terrifying moment. I know from all previous cat literature of all kinds I’ve read it’s okay among human beings to kill cats for fun; they were persecuted for some centuries; in the 18th century there is recorded a great cat massacre; torture for entertainment of all sorts was common. Well, the male of the younger couple wants to get rid of these cats as a nuisance — outright kill them. We get this whole sequence as Bootsie, our narrator’s unfortunately named brother, dithers over plans to leave and then it’s too late; they are caught after a fierce struggle and put in bags and throw out of a moving car crazily. Bootsie is almost killed instantly and then run over by a bus.

It is at the same time intermittently very funny. Wilson keeps up a satire on human beings: he describes us as ridiculous from the POV of a cat: how we dress, our sports, out TVs, radios, cars (engines of murder); this undercuts the central story. We are only one-third through. For the rest see the comments. I’ll reread it and perhaps write another blog on compassionate animal books soon.

Douglas (Tom Hollander) and Connie (Saskia Reeves)

Us is not really serious work as Wilson’s is (it’s made for money, finally all about celebrity, success, and glamour somehow), but it is interesting to watch. What resonated with me was the POV of the husband, Douglas Peterson. He has spent more than 20 years of love and marriage working as a serious scientist and has meant very well by his family. Connie offers no reason to leave him but that now the son is leaving home, she feels she need no longer stay — no other reason is cited (Saskia Reeves as an actress is given the most superficial of roles): it appears she is bored; he irritates her with his earnestness and conventional morality when for example (she says) he should be siding with his son (it seems no matter what, how badly behaved he is to an admittedly thuggish bunch.  He should, do more than tolerate the son’s equally outrageous sudden girlfriend (openly indifferent to everything but what suits her today), even like her because the son is attracted to her. So I don’t see the interesting element in the story as about how a man tries to win his wife back (with the implication he deserves to lose her, though I realize many a cold-hearted neurotypical coarse person would respond this way), but (as The Guardian reviewer says)

Us worked best as a study of a middle-aged man who has the rug of familiarity pulled out from underneath him … Hollander is superb as a man baffled by the need for change. His family want to eat adventurous meals, while he would like to stick with steak. He sees great works of art and can’t help but say that they’d be “a nightmare to frame”. He is everydad, just trying to get by. For all the joviality, though, it makes serious points about the damage that an inability to communicate can cause …

And the indifference of his family (how tiresome he is) to such a person. They wish they could drop him, but are conscious of how bad they look, and they do feel guilty.

It is curious how the focus is on the older husband and then the husband and son, and how thin the depiction of the husband when younger is (a different actor); all three actresses (wife and mother when old; Connie played by a different actress when she is young, and the obnoxious son’s girlfriend) are really dismissed or treated as so many troubles or soothing machines in life. I do wonder if the book is much better ….

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Elena (Margherita Mazzucco) (as to a third season?)

I’m more than half-way through Ferrante’s third book (Those who Leave and Those who Stay) for a second time. I find I underestimated the deep bonding of Elena and Lila – because Elena destroyed Lila’s notebooks and herself literally moved to live elsewhere, but Elena is repeatedly going back; she’s there at crucial moments for Lila and they are a doppelganger of sorts with Elena the Elinor Dashwood and Lila the Marianne. Both are sensibility figures. I feel Ferrante saw this — as she suggested in her introduction to an edition of Austen’s S&S. Sometimes I stop to compare the Italian to the English and often the Italian is not only much better but gives different slant, more political, more socialist, more desperate against the fascism and patronage society of Italy in the later 1960s.

Gilbert (David Oyelowo) and Queenie (Ruth Wilson) — from Small Island (which I’m not doing as too long but hope some to) — they cannot escape their identities

And as for the Literature of Colonialism, from my lecture notes:

But until a couple of months ago my reading was very narrowly focused. I did not realize what a large and varied picture if you start to read stories and essays about colonialism comprises. Hitherto I defined colonialism as usually one group of people traveling to a country say owned or lived on by another group to take over their land, control where they live, live upon it – settler colonialism. Or one group of people traveling to another country and taking over, controlling the reigns of government, and setting up let’s call a layer of powerful functionaries with armies to back them – often using a minority population in the country as their front, with the aim of extracting natural resources and selling them elsewhere or forcing the people there to form a marketplace to buy their goods, also trading with them.

It’s must much wider and concerns many kinds of experiences for many different reasons. I added to our blurb on the syllabus: What is it like to invent a new country? to live in a country that is being invented and excluding or exploiting you? Or a curiously isolated upper class who don’t belong to the country and yet are supposed to be in governing positions? Or to live in an old country where you are not allowed to belong?

But that just covers our books & movies. I will also try to bring out over the next sessions these other characteristics which are so important – repeating characteristics

migrancy (people moving about, and changing their home to another world, refugees, war) – the dangers of this as you don’t know the people you are landing among at all, unless you’re coming to a relative,

liminality (crossing all sorts of crucial and trivial thresholds from going on a trip to getting married to someone or going to live with someone or along) – opening new opportunities you couldn’t have where you were – what does this mean? How does it affect people

hybridity (several cultures and sometimes a new emerging one)

and last, multiculturalism (different groups of people originally separated geographically and now also by ethnicity, race, religion &c)

People do go for all sorts of reasons and a major one is simply war – to escape violence and death and poverty.

And last prejudice, this somehow deeply seated fear of the other – now you are the other or those coming in are the other. There’s an argument we should be doing as we did until 1900 – just let people come in – it would expand our economy, make for new kinds of businesses, new ideas – only controlling for the criminal types who I fear we now let in because they know how to appear rich

The literature also includes this intense yearning for something other, for landscape – yet roots are tremendously important – Simon Weil’s Needs for Roots, existentialism says a lot of what is at the heart of a modern malaise is a lack of meaning from a lack of belonging – but who do you want to belong to? Capitalism recognizes no obligation to anyone but the contract.

Later in the afternoon I was exhausted in the good way, not a collapse. The odd thing is that with all the intense anti-immigrant (because racist) talk, the way I’ve presented the material elicited lots of friendly responses. Of the 30 or so people there I’d say VERY FEW had ancestors who went back beyond their grandparents. Now they are grandparents (many) but their grandparents would be say 120 years old or so – and like me many came from places in Europe, but there were two hispanic people. Also the US has 800 bases around the world (Russia has 4); a huge diplomatic core and is incessantly itself imperialist whether aggressive and nasty and lying like Trump or friendly and let’s cooperate like Biden. All the reading I’ve done has made me expand my understanding and if I were to name the course today it’d be Writing about Colonialist Experiences and the literature since the 1970s is continually pouring out. I’ll include my lecture notes — look at the first three pages and you’ll see what I said — I left out religious persecution as a reason for migrancy, professional reasons (that’s someone else’s words — I’d call it your job). Not in there are spontaneous comments — I told of myself in the south east Bronx for example, Jim from England.

The real paradox is the US is still a nation of immigrants and the people among the US population who go back in time with the families the longest are Black people and a core of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Biden is Irish, Trump Scottish — Clinton represented a family here longer. If I had it to do all over again I might choose different books; but I’ll manage. I do think though a true present-day GOP person might well hate it — they don’t want the truth discussed at all, and the site assistant I know does not like me; she smiles at me with narrow eyes and a hard face — she was offended by me in one of the two previous courses I did where she was site assistant — maybe the Trollope but she could have been there for Bloomsbury. This is my fourth zoom at OLLI at Mason. But if there are (and there are) Republicans in the group they are of the old style “liberal” “moderate” type and no longer represented by the present GOP. Here and there a justification kind of comment or someone saying why this topic …

On my appts book calendar for July: Prendergast’s watercolor, Excursionists (1896)

To conclude: even if through the Internet I have a good deal of companionship when I think of the years ahead w/o Jim, all the daily happinesses I would have, the things we would do together, and now how empty in comparison — also that he’s gone (his own loss) – I’m very saddened. Life was actually easier for me as a widow, staying in. (Among the many comments I have to hear are tactless remarks about how it was our fault he died … ) And the reverse idea were he here I’d have far more to want to go out for, know the surprise joys again.

Ellen

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On my being a widow — from the COVID perspective; Izzy’s song — Louise Gluck’s Landscape

Izzy singing It’s the End of the World as We Know It — by R.E.M.

Dear friends and readers,

Izzy’s latest song puts before us the idea this pandemic has heralded the end of the world as we know it. It is said to be the result of transmission of a virus from non-human animals to us, the event the result of climate change (break-up), which may well be bringing many of us on earth to the end of our worlds as we have known them. Seemingly silly fleeting experiences will change: many a conference will from here on in be held via zoom, or partly via zoom (or some improvement thereof – I hope not), so too work jobs, universities, schools. These too will occasion deeper changes.

My yearly endurance trial across early October is over, and I’m into my 8th year of widowhood. I have changed a lot since Jim was alive, or had many new kinds of thoughts and experiences. Unexpectedly (yes) I had a lot to learn, mostly about social life, but also myself. I have enjoyed some of these new experiences, wish in fact Jim could have had them with me, especially some of the activities that go on in the Oscher Institutes of Lifelong Learning, come with me to Scotland, to the Lake District, Northern England; with our daughters to Milan, Calais. The experience of widowhood is so various: some women don’t want to be called a widow (they feel the term as a stigma), but that is part of what defines who I am.

It depends on whether you loved your husband (partner) or he (she) loved you; whether you are left with money enough to retire in comfort, of course your age; do you have children, are you parts of circles of friends, have relatives who are close to you; where you are; what you like to do, and what you can do without him (her). I was shielded, still am (by enough money through my widow’s annuity, social security, and my parents’ savings — which they could not pull off today), but for now mostly physically alone with Izzy and our two beloved cats.

I know, banal.

And Laura not far away. Ten minutes by car when she flies low. Here is her delightful imagining of Biden’s Field Office in her Animal Crossing series:

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With such thoughts embodied in particulars I have been feeling and thinking what do I want to do in the near and further off future. I will not be publishing that review on the Austen, Art and Artifacts book, for a while. I find I cannot bear what Austen studies and Austen fandom has turned into. I’ve decided to wait until the 2nd volume of the new standard edition of Anne Finch’s poetry has been published; to write an evaluation of the first, I need the second, which explains the first and exemplifies more of what principles and attitudes are actuating the first.

Marie de France, found in an early medieval manuscript

The question then — for when I have time left over from teaching or taking courses (or blogging, posting &c) — is, What do I want to study now? These past days I’ve been rationalizing and downsizing my TBR and TBW piles, ordering and labelling and have discovered all my piles of books and individual endeavors (like reading and blogging on Harriet Walter since I found and am reading her book on acting Shakespeare’s heroines) devolves into two areas: women’s literature, which devolves into historical romance (Diana Wallace’s Women’s Historical Novel, 1900-2000) and poetry (Alice Ostriker’s Stealing Our Language — history of 20th century American women’s poetry); the lives and work experience of lifelong single women (which may include widows, spinsters, divorced, separated women, not just Virginia Nicolson’s Singled Out).

Not everything I do fits into these two trajectories; Trollope, for a start, E. M. Forster, some novels, memoirs (travel and other) by men that I do enjoy so, most recently David Downie’s Paris to the Pyrenees (see Colleen’s Paris, I demur on the smirk, I never smirked), studying Italian, reading French, watching good movie series.

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Frederick Morris (1889-1982), Vase with flowers, dried plants, berries …

The COVID perspective. Jim’s death now impersonally considered. It’s known, understood that the calamitous death rate in the US (still rising) now past 217,000 is the result of a lack of a decent public health system, stubborn ignorance, brought on (in schools too) by a greed so gargantuan it will chose openly choose profits over thousands of fellow citizens lives and wreck the lives of those surviving. I read of experiences daily that remind me of Jim and my own when he was dying of cancer:

I am convinced his early death, the miserable way he died (the gross mistakes, excruciating suffering from a brutal useless, as it turned out probably cutting out of his esophagus and forcing his other organs to be reconfigured, the one he almost bled to death because three different “providers” had to give permission for medicine and had to be paid separately or he was threatened with the horrors of the US emergency room) are in analogous terms just what’s killing thousands of people in the US (needlessly) today. All the respect and grief Judy Woodruff(every Friday night on PBS) pays to the dead cover up what was the experience each person had of US medical capitalism unchecked.

From Louise Gluck’s Landscape:

1. The sun is setting behind the mountains,
the earth is cooling.
A stranger has tied his horse to a bare chestnut tree.
The horse is quiet — he turns his head suddenly,
hearing, in the distance, the sound of the sea.

I make my bed for the night here,
spreading my heaviest quilt over the damp earth.

The sound of the sea —
when the horse turns its head, I can hear it.

On a path through the bare chestnut trees,
a little dog trails its master.

The little dog — didn’t he used to rush ahead,
straining the leash, as though to show his master
what he sees there, there in the future —

the future, the path, call it what you will.

Behind the trees, at sunset, it is as though a great fire
is burning between two mountains
so that the snow on the highest precipice
seems, for a moment, to be burning also.

Listen: at the path’s end the man is calling out.
His voice has become very strange now,
the voice of a person calling to what he can’t see.

Over and over he calls out among the dark chestnut trees.
Until the animal responds
faintly, from a great distance,
as though this thing we fear
were not so terrible.

From Averno

Gentle reader, you need to know the concrete reality such a poem refers to. Amy Coney Barrett is a fanatical heartless monster, read her view on a 19 year old female prisoner continually raped by a guardsman, after she gave birth forced to suck his penis; she lied continually during those hearings. How did Trump find her — and the thug-rapist pseudo-virgin Kavanaugh? why the Federalist Society. Listen to Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Ellen

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An autumn of zooms: the pandemic continues

Camille Pissarro, Quai Malaquais, morning sun in autumn (1903)

The first of this type, a diary, sort of, in more than a month — they become harder to write as the pandemic proceeds without let — and now climate break with climate caused horrifying fires and orange unbreathable air (California, Oregon) — and nothing is done (only militia sent to turn peaceful protests into murder & then mayhem), as there is no EPA any more for real, no leadership on the people’s behalf. Trapped in a pandemic cycle …

Dear friends and readers,

I begin with a happy story or temporarily good ending (most stories can be given a happy ending by shutting down the curtain at a given moment where there is contentment) and I trust this to continually to turn out well (well hope very hard): about my young African-American friend, Monica, just Izzy’s age, whom I’ve spoken of here has quit her job at the Safeway. I congratulated her two weeks ago now — and rejoiced with and for her.

She told me I was the only person besides her mother to congratulate her. She has been for several years now working 7 days a week: 5 full ones in an office for the DC Corrections Department (or Bureau), and 2 2/3s day in the local Giant. Everyone else seems to have been puzzled: why would anyone give up any job? The idea she might want real time to herself is not found among the people she is surrounded by: she told me she plans to use some of it to add further credits to her degree so she may promoted again (she has a BA) and now that her daughter (in Fairfax country schools) will be learning remotely 4 days a week, coming in for a 5th only every other week, she can now have time and energy to help the daughter on weekends. She won’t be too drained. She did tell me that day she had not yet told her husband, but yesterday in an email (we have now turned to emails to stay in contact), she said he accepted it, and now two weekends have gone by says he likes this very much. She keeps her good weekday job that has not been eliminated at all, and worked in the office at first 5 days and now 2 one week and 3 the other during this whole time of the pandemic thus far — with masks, a shield, washing her hands. Her department registered a complaint and threatened to go to court to get their conditions improved in June. And she bought a house for herself and family this past June too.

It does take considerable courage for her to have done this. Thus far she is relaxing and reading books.

I miss seeing her on weekends. I looked forward to our precious 5-7 minutes each Saturday or Sunday morning. But as when I used not to see her there on a Saturday and would tell myself, good she has the day off (though during this pandemic worried a bit), I know how much better this is. She should be doing something else with her weekend time. So many other things better to do. I have pictures of her but feel uncomfortable sharing them – I have just sent one of Thao on line here (if anyone has noticed or remembers).
But I thought I would tell this one story of a 36 year old African-American young woman. She was a student in two of my classes and used to come to my office to talk over papers. She has the one child by her husband, a girl. Very good in math she tells me. Her mother and brother live together and not far away from her. I talk of her in Fraught Times (scroll down)

Pierre Bonnard — Girl Writing

And a comic: even my old stand-by prune juice has been spoilt. This is not the pandemic, but the stretch of monopolies. Amazon does not truly believe in this product and wants to make more money, to bring more customers, and destroys what was there for the steady customer. It is about preposterous amounts of money allowed to mount in the hands of single individuals; ultimately a product of a failed state that has been brought about, and that has brought us this continuing mass death pandemic. Herd immunity == death. No individual should ever be permitted to control the vast sums Bezos does now.

For some 60 years every morning I could I drank a glass of Sunsweet Prune Juice. Amazon bought the product and now there are three versions. A very thick with pulp, undrinkable; a thin version, much less calories, sickening and doesn’t do the trick; the one I drank is not manufactured to the same consistency throughout. So I have had to switch to a gourmet product, R. W Knudsen, but like the version I once drank, it is inconsistent in texture towards the bottom of the bottle. Yuk.

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Into the Beautiful —
As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away —
Too imperceptible at last
To seem like Perfidy —
A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon —
The Dusk drew earlier in —
The Morning foreign shone —
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone —
And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
— saith Emily Dickinson

But the way in which I experience autumn for some years now has been a change of routines far more than a change in the weather. And this year there was for me very little experience of summer — indoors away from the fierce heat of the suburbs. I regretted not going to Ireland for 14 days (soft weather), not getting to the beach the way we did last autumn, Izzy, Laura and I, at Calais. I noted changes in my garden, changes in my schedules — teaching one place then the other, the Bloomsbury group, courses in one place (White American art in 19th century Italy, contemporaries documentary movies). Mornings are now dark until near 7, evenings are dark by 8, the fierce heat retreats so that only by later morning until later afternoon is the air truly hot, more rain, softer-colored skies, red berries on the bushes in my garden.

One of my two magnolia trees bloomed very late indeed; the other remained bare, withered sort of ….

The felt changes start next week: I’ll have a schedule of teaching two times, and following/taking no less than three other classes during many of the weeks, not to omit virtual conferences, meetings with friends who belong to the same groups I do (not all organized around reading). I’ve got to get at least one of my two reviews written and on the editor’s desktop. It was this way before Jim died — not since I lived in New York City as a girl was it the cool weather, leaves turning colors and hurricanes that announced autumn. The difference: now I’m experiencing all this through zoom technology in cyberspace.

The course I teach: Phineas Redux (Palliser 4); the ones I take at the two OLLIs: Kipling, and post-colonialist writing (Naipaul, Conrad); Sondheim’s music and lyrics; Emily Dickinso and women poets she influenced; the ones at Politics & Prose: New Suns — fantastical and science fiction stories by people of color round the globe; A Literary Tour of France (I’ll mention specifically one of the four books, Final Transgression by Harriet Welty Rochefort (set in occupied France); the early novels of Toni Morrison. Conferences: JASNA (on the juvenilia, no need to exclude anyone, no absurd spending with nothing to do as sessions take less than a quarter of their usual meeting times0, EC/ASECS, NEMLA (very sophisticated MLA modern sessions). Friends on zooms: an Aspergers group; for poetry by women, Washington Area Print Group. Listservs, e.g., on Trollope & his Contemporaries (just now Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale and then Trollope’s Three Clerks); the London Trollope Society for reading Trollope’s novels, just now The Macdermots of Ballycloran (an astounding first book for Trollope; I’m to give the first summary-evalation-synopsis the first week

Fitting in nowhere but my work on Anne Finch, I’m half-way through a marvelously interesting well-written book by Claudia Thomas, Alexander Pope and His Eighteenth Century Women Readers; I honestly hope to write a blog. Mary Lou Kohfeldt’s Lady Gregory: The Woman Behind the Irish Renaissance, as an offshoot of reading Trollope’s Anglo-Irish Macdermots. Lamorna Ash’s Dark, Salt, Clear, of life in a Cornish Fishing town. Just wonderful evocation of the place (I’ve not given up entirely on Poldark and historical romance/fiction). Getting towards the end: Nina Auerbach’s Haunted Heiress on DuMaurier. I cannot be reading too many good books by women.

Izzy is also still (pray she continues with her salary) working as a librarian at the Pentagon by remote — via two computers and nowadays zooms too (she has a webcam, mic) and phoning in. The pandemic is by no means going away any time soon by which I mean thousands of people are still sickening and many dying or left maimed from COVID19. Sensible truthful public doctors (Fauci) suggest not until at least 2021 (late in 2021) will these new patterns of behavior come to something of an end. I doubt we’ll change back wholly: theaters, museums and libraries as places to visit, sports events may thrive truly and have the impact meant only in person, but much office work, shopping can be done cheaply and efficiently via interconnected computers.

I now read TLS regularly. This past week an article about fascism in the US by Sarah Churchwell, partly in response to filming of Roth’s Plot Against America. This details our history with large groups of people apparently who want to make or keep the US a fascist white supremacist society. From the way Churchwell describes people as interpreting all these “dog whistles” shows I have no idea how Trump’s lies truly play with the people determined to vote for him and see him win.

See also an article about a new “official” book of UK history that lies, omits and distorts what happened imperialistically, from the standpoint of wars, social and economic injustices: by Frank Trentmann. It is mandatory text to study to become a UK citizen. Alas behind a paywall.

I have been reading Masha Gessen’s Surviving Autocracy, which I strongly recommend. She is teaching me much, tearing away the veil through which I was seeing events, and tellings me many events in literal detail, which I either did not know or had not put together of what has been going on in the Trump administration.

A vote for Trump is a vote for a fascist (corporations in charge, militarist in all its doings, far right in all values) white supremacist dictatorship (Gessen’s term of autocracy in the US context functions as a euphemism), and a vote for Biden is a vote for a representative oligarchy with democratic and pro-social ameliorations. The glue of the first (Trump dictatorship) is money galore for those who join and punishment/elimination of all who are people of color, all women who want any rights, hatred & resentment. The glue of the second (what Biden hopes to head) is an egalitarian ideal social & economic protection & self-interest, peace, order, law, justice and happiness prime goals. His use of language, the barrage of continual lies; the use of utterly absurd ridiculous statements presented as what we must engage in, the hyperbole of hatefulness combined with bullying is what newspapers have not learnt to deal with – nor other politicians. You cannot not engage but there is nothing to engage with that makes sense and is not burlesquing previously seemingly democratic ethical behaviors.

Of course the above all shaped by the reality: thousands of US people continue to die each week the miserable death of COVID19.

As of yesterday, 9/11/2020, over 193,000 people in the US have died of coronavirus since March. It is said this is an under-estimated number. As of yesterday, 9/11/2020 a new book estimates from the wars the US instigated, sustained, keeps going ever since 37 million people have been displaced (are refugees). Millions are now unemployed, on the verge of eviction and the US congress, strangled by the Republicans who do not want to give a cent of taxpayers’ money to them votes no help at all. Trump beginning his termination of social security, medicare and yes the public post office. Every week the police murder more black people egregiously as if to let all US people know this is within their right and they are determined to continue murdering black people. This is where we are at.

Trump is still forcing people to send their children to schools through his tyrant Republican governors. A story in the Washington Post tells of how the governor has forced people to send their children to school, then succeeded in pressuring local authorities to hide the statistics on how many children are getting sick. Is this what people want: a party that is for sickness and death and silencing.

Nonetheless I asserted and put on FB for Labor Day: Emma Lazarus, the whole poem:

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightening, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

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Doran Goodwin as Emma after she has managed to quit Mr Elton in the mortifying scene in the carriage, Christmas time (1972, BBC, scripted Denis Constantduros)

For the now long late evenings I’ve re-embarked on the Austen movie canon, with the aim of watching them all across the next months. I started with the 1972 BBC Emma, which I recalled as so good (if costumes are dated, and some decorums are long gone), because of its rare consistent use of ironic comedy; then the 1971 BBC Sense & Sensibility (also scripted by Denis Constantduros and I’m into the 1971 BBC Persuasion (Julian Michell). I did not start with the 1939/40 MGM Pride and Prejudice (as the unsubtle screwball comedy treatment Austen so often gets in cinema, the next the 1996 Clueless, and then 2002 Bride and Prejudice). I’m surprised how well these three hold up and vow to write blogs on these movies on Austen Reveries. An Autumnal resolution.

Joanna David as Elinor writing her mother from London, they need to return (1971, BBC, scripted Denis Constantduros)

They do have the depth of emotion that are required and also the comedy — in the 1971 S&S, Patricia Rutledge is the most brilliant Mrs Jenkins I’ve ever seen and Fiona Walk the same for Mrs Elton. What unites them is a real faithfulness to the literal as well as the true thematic emphases of Austen’s books — when in the 1971 Persuasion Wentworth (Bryan Marshall (who now I think of it played Rochester in a similarly early and very good Jane Eyre) arrives and the two actors silently interact — they are very strong presence and then the film opens out — so to speak. Out in the landscapes and gardens of some southern parts of England. The script is enough to convey the original tone and feel of the book, and it even gets better when they go perhaps to Lyme itself (they seem to on the cobb), lots of filming of the waters, the sky …

Or Anne Elliot holding on, exhausting herself with the strain of keeping up the old self-control, immersed in beautiful landscape (1971 BBC Persuasion, Roger Michell)

Or maybe I should do it by type: watch all the Persuasions in a row, all the NAS — the problem would be there have been so many P&Ps, S&Ss, and now Emmas (with the last cinema travesty returning to screwball burlesque, with a coda of absurdly sexualized soppy romance). I could, you know.

Very much belatedly, two nights ago now (into older movies and all that) I finally watched Four Weddings and A Funeral (a famous super-popular movie, said to have made Hugh Grant’s career). It is enjoyable, entertaining, enough is told about each character to involve us — though not much. The characters consequently seemed a very privileged set of people — no jobs in sight.

I could see that it anticipates Love Actually, which may nowadays be a Christmas classic (a movie people watch Christmas time). Wikipedia showed it was replicated in Notting Hill – overdone I’d say (I watched another night) with shameless fawning over a celebrity — Julia Roberts. I am reading Anne Enright’s Actress, in part an ironic study of what is meant by celebrity: a non-existent hollow private life (if one at all), and you hold your audience by astute holding slowing down of your letting go (such is acting) at intuitive archetypal moments for the character type the audience takes you to represent. Richard Curtis the author of all of them.

The movie is really just made up of 4 weddings and a funeral. As the new one begins, or just before the interim time is conjured up (only very occasionally a flashback). I felt disappointed at the ending. I expected something more unusual — it was just a love story after all, with all the couples who had not had weddings as yet shown married. The most unusual thing – the most worthwhile moment — was the death of Simon Callow’s character, gay man and his Scottish partner’s relationship to him. The most moving moment that reading of Auden’s poem — the way it was read by the Scots actor made me wish I had known it when Jim died.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
— W H Auden

Jim liked Auden’s poetry and his criticism very much — I have a complete poems, a travel book, the translated Norse (Icelandic) sagas, books of criticism. But this morning looking the poem up on the Internet I find it’s claimed the poem began life as a burlesque, as mockery. So that evening I took down or out from the crowded shelf space where “Auden” resides and looked into this. And found the poem to be an inexplicable passionate outburst.

Callow is said to have come out at the time of the distribution of the film; he has a major role in a number of Merchant-Ivory productions, the first two seasons of Outlander. A versatile man he often also writes for the LRB, wonderful essays.

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A quilt Laura’s best friend made for her (during pandemic, natch): to commemorate her present large patient brother cat, Drake, with one of the two new kittens, Maxx, and the cats who have passed on (Kira, Mitzi, Andromeda – i.e., Ani)

The pandemic has affected my faithful feline friends — and other people’s pets too, where they are all staying home together: nowadays if Ian has gotten into the habit of crying for me in another room. I am working away in my study/workroom (whatever you want to call my nest of comforts and lair) and I hear: Meow! In a howling like tone, or plaintive. I cannot resist getting up and walking about finding him (of course it’s him) standing there waiting for me. He turns and trots away expecting me to follow. I do, pick him, cuddle and bring him back to said lair while telling him he has nothing whatever to cry about. I have noticed if I go out for a time – am seen to be planning to, the cats begin to look anxious. They are not eager for this. They get out of said room and watch me to the door. They are in short no longer accustomed to long hours of my absence (much less Izzy’s, she has become a fixture)

Well Malcolm Brabant on PBS Reports had a delightful but ambivalent segment on PBS last night where he tells of how the pandemic is affecting British dogs. It seems they are coming (according to one vet) “emotionally disordered.” (See how a medical definition tells us more about the definer than the subject). They are openly experiencing (in large numbers it seems) “separation anxiety” when their “best friends” go out even briefly.

Worse yet they want to sleep in the bed with said friends and they are persistent. People give in. Worser to buy a dog now costs a helluva lot. Even rescue dogs. Then worser and worser: dognappers. In the 19th century kidnapping a dog and holding the wealthy person’s pet for ransom was even common. It happened (famously to those who read) to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Flush. Francis Power Cobbe wrote a dog story told by the dog where he was kidnapped and ransomed. The argument then and was is of course: “don’t pay it, it only spreads the crime.” But what if it is your dog. Brabant showed us only elderly lady with her beloved dog back on her lap.

A cat is not just an autistic dog. I am more loathe to leave my two than I used to be and as to boarding them somewhere, it hurts me to remember I would do that to them — they took that large cage by a strange window as fearful liminality.

A poem by Stevie Smith, a fable with a cat at the center:

The Galloping Cat:

Oh I am a cat that likes to
Gallop about doing good
So
One day when I was
Galloping about doing good, I saw
A Figure in the path; I said
Get off! (Be-
cause
I am a cat that likes to
Gallop about doing good)
But he did not move, instead
He raised his hand as if
To land me a cuff
So I made to dodge so as to
Prevent him bringing it orf,
Un-for-tune-ately I slid
On a banana skin
Some Ass had left instead
Of putting it in the bin. So
His hand caught me on the cheek
I tried
To lay his arm open from wrist to elbow
With my sharp teeth
Because I am
A cat that likes to gallop about doing good.
Would you believe it?
He wasn’t there
My teeth met nothing but air,
But a Voice said: Poor Cat
(Meaning me) and a soft stroke
Came on me head
Since when
I have been bald
I regard myself as
A martyr to doing good.
Also I heard a swoosh,
As of wings, and saw
A halo shining at the height of
Mrs Gubbins’s backyard fence,
So I thought: What’s the good
Of galloping about doing good
When angels stand in the path
And do not do as they should
Such as having an arm to be bitten off
All the same I
Intend to go on being
A cat that likes to
Gallop about doing good
So
Now with my bald head I go,
Chopping the untidy flowers down, to and fro,
An’ scooping up the grass to show
Underneath
The cinder path of wrath
Ha ha ha ha, ho,
Angels aren’t the only ones who do not know
What’s what and that
Galloping about doing good
Is a full-time job
That needs
An experienced eye of earthly
Sharpness, worth I dare say
(if you’ll forgive a personal note)
A good deal more
Than all that skyey stuff
Of angels that make so bold as
To pity a cat like me that
Gallops about doing good.

Clarycat on my lap

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And I watched another pandemic shaped Metropolitan Opera concert yesterday afternoon: Joyce DiDonato, a mezzo soprano, her reportoire far more older Baroque than I realized, and I admit I did not enjoy the songs the way I did Jonas Kaufmann and Renee Fleming (traditional tenor and soprano), until she moved into more popular songs, but then I woke up (as it were) elevated suddenly by her Shenandoah (“I love to see you), the corny, yet irresistible “When you Walk through a storm.” I like the simple black dress with wide pants, no jewels, no shoes even, the small orchestra with harpsichord and piano. She lives in Barcelona, but the concert came from an industrial center in Germany, as the only safe place just now with an appropriate hall and not a hot spot for this virus. They had had to move the venue three times to find it.

So tonight I end on her is her cabaret song (you must first listen to the end of a German art song). Jim loved to listen to French cabaret — this from Piaf, La Vie en Rose, which I had not realized, taken in somehow is about a kind of experience of absolute love I knew, here her version finding life so beautiful while you are in the arms of your beloved. As I listened I thought of all the years with him, how I would lift my arms to him when he came to bed

This was a second concert that counseled hope and courage (like Renee Fleming’s).

People talk of going to live in another country, in Europe, in Central America (which one would you trust to?), flee somehow, but rare is the person who becomes refugee except when there is no alternative but death and destruction; they will stay and endure and eek out an existence. Or would Jim try to flee, try to de-accession and move the books once more, this time back back to the UK, see if he could get for me (and daughters) a right of residence? I don’t know. He was deterred after retirement when he realized we would have to pay 40% more taxes from our income. But were he here I would not be as frightened. I do believe we need a landslide win for Biden to get rid of Trumpism. I donate money; I tried to join in on a phone bank campaign but no one would show me to do this digitally, which is what is required — to show faces?  I don’t know.  But how can it be that millions will vote for tyranny, continued lies, destitution all around. I wonder if Masha Gessen will tell me. Gentle reader, can you?

Ellen

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