Winter Solstice — Limitations

Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb, bereaved mother & head cook, Paul Giametti as Paul Hunham, classics teacher, and Dominic Sessa as Angus Tully, student left at the Barton [Deerfield] Academy School

Dear Friends and readers,

We’ve come to the end of another year and again, either unavoidably, or propelled by my own contradictory confused desires, limitations, bereftness I again try to join in with others in getting through this dark season — it is the time of year in the northern hemisphere when our daylight hours are limited. Just one of the many limitations one faces during this ritual time.

As in previous years, I’ll share some experiences. On this past Tuesday I went with a friend to Cinema Arts Theater where we choose Holdovers, a movie which advertisements suggest is a standard sentimental Christmas situation comedy, and found it was much much better than that. I had skim-read one review which I could see gave it strong praise, but did not specify in any particulars what was so valuable in it.

Well I’m going to recommend going because the movie is excellent, and supply a few of these particulars, Mary Lamb is a black woman housekeeper at a super-elite boys academy (high school) who had a son in the school (on sufferance, because she worked there, possibly the only American black boy there) but they didn’t have the money to send him onto a good college and she dreamed through the military he might get there. So he ended up dead. Towards the end of the movie, a box she has in her room and takes with her when she travels is revealed to have his things from babyhood in it. Hunham is a solitary intelligent man who has not fit into the extroverted masculinity, sell thyself norms of American life, and takes it out on the boys he teaches because they do not value the material. We learn over the course of the movie he failed out of prestigious college jobs, and is barely tolerated at this school because he comes so cheaply. He commits an act of courage on behalf of the boy at the end of movie and is punished for this hard. The headmaster loathes him because the headmaster was once one of his pupils. Angus is an unwanted son; his father is in a mental asylum, his mother has remarried a super-successful businessman and she regards him as a misfit nuisance. He too is highly intelligent and his emotional nature has been twisted because no one has tried to respond to it with care or affection.

Christmas Day dinner

It was for me a painful experience to watch; it was not wholly truthful about the inner life of the Christmas experience for many people (perhaps most at some point), yet truthful enough over the course of the intensely strained two weeks where there are some highlights of pleasure or fun that that it brought up sore memories for me.  My guess is will do this for many people who can look into themselves and remember back truthfully; each year things bad that happened at Christmas in my life recur in my memory, some of which I did, were my fault — of course some were done to me — it’s a fraught time — and all in a sense irretrievable. The great myth of many of these modern ghost-like (supernatural creature needed) is that your past life is retrievable somehow, you can transform the past, redeem it. Not here. All the more was it to me genuinely moving as we see each of these characters plus a few others who become involved cope with their problems, gradually make the best of their situation, exhibit some charity towards others and themselves too. The men begin to listen to one another and the woman faces her grief.

Invited to an just off-campus party by someone who works in the school and lives in the area, Mary brings some cooked desert, all three go to Boston (“field trip”) where the two men pass by an ice-skating rink

The acting of Paul Giamatti is superb — also Dominic Sessa. This week’s issue of the New Yorker revealed he is someone who was at Deerfield the summer the casting people were looking for an actor — as a somewhat poorer student, but with very good grades who was talented and in the plays of the drama department. My daughter, Isobel, was taken on at Sweet Briar with a scholarship (Jim called it tuition discount) because she’s highly intelligent, well motivated, worked hard and showed real talents — in singing, and music and languages. The black actress, Da-Vine Joy Randolph, is made too much of a stereotype — and there are stereotypes and some cant here and there in the film — but she is very effective. I read the director, Alexander Payne, is much respected; we are not told anything about David Hemingsen in most places — when will popular sites realize how centrally important is the script?

About the several rave reviews: I had not realized until I got home and reread the one I had read before and read a couple of others, how they pussyfoot around its actual content. It goes much further than It’s A Wonderful Life, which originally was a financial flop (“too dark” said the popular reviewers at the time) because it remains more on a kind of mythic level. It has a slightly upbeat ending, all three of our main characters have something to hope for. If Mr Hunham does get a break, is helped by someone somewhere (he has friends to turn to it seems) he might end up better off. Don’t miss it. There are stills of the three in Christmasy scenes — for they do walk about the world — it’s snowing in New England, circa 1971, and they visit Boston, but nowadays it’s very hard to “lift” a picture from the Net and none of these were readily available. The ones I chose are characteristic.

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This past week has been an unusually social one for me — I did make appointments with friends to go to lunch and a museum, or lunch and a movie, or lunch and get-together deep in Fairfax, in fancy restaurants, and in one quiet one with decent food (I go there tomorrow). By today I had had too much although I enjoyed myself very much with two friends, and was anticipating a repeat of Sunday, which I’ll now tell about.

This past Sunday, so five days ago, I went supposedly with a group of people (see just below) to see Molly Newman and Barbar Damashek’s Quilters in a theater space in Fairfax, Va, called First Stage, located in an unprepossessing strip mall (pathetic looking from the outside) not far but too far to walk from the Metro because of the lack of sidewalks and how drivers treat the streets as mini-highways. It had gotten strong reviews. I’ve never seen it but had read about it.

The poster for this production

Sad to say it was not that well done, though all 7 actress-singers worked very hard (not all could sing). Irony of ironies or worse yet a mostly female aging audience did not appreciate the musical (I saw a pro-Trump MAGA sign on one of the doors next to First Stage). The woman next to me fell asleep. The applause afterwards tepid and polite. I am glad I saw it and was riveted by some of it: one segment showed a woman who’d had 9 children begging a doctor to give her an abortion (of course nothing like the word used) and being refused indignantly. It rightly has a reputation for value and interest: all women, a group of stories woven together with songs about what life was like for women in the west — pioneers. Rough and hard, only the script was clearly determined to be upbeat and endlessly making all the women religious (though I doubt the writers would even believe in God) — these are pastiche stereotypes not gone from Willa Cather …

The photographs from different productions show many of the directors had Little Women movies in mind

Still I can see if well done, insightful and relevant to women (and men as after all they live with women, don’t they?) Endless children, stories of courting where women exploited, dugout living. I said to two people, “an alternative to Oklahoma” which they said, surprised, “you’re right.” But another said, “I like Oklahoma” — despite it’s suddenly having been revealed (I suggested) as so many male songs and a male POV throughout. I looked it up when I got home: it got all sorts of awards but played onto 2 weeks on Broadway so it was a financial flop. It is very hard to persuade even women to respond to a female/feminine or feminist (based on the former) aesthetic. Their taste often as vitiated as that of men. Turn on Fox entertainment or Starz … Izzy tells me it was done at Sweet Briars.

As to my experiment — to begin to go out with groups though I can no longer drive easily and have the real problem of getting lost, it was probably a semi-failure. It cost me $56 by cab to get to 1st stage. Too much. Then I discover the group had lunch first; “oh, did you miss the email?” It seemed innocent they left me out but whether or not, it was part of the whole lack of groupness. They sat in little cliques. I did talk to a couple of people, went over to the organizer who when I left thanked me for coming over and said they always had the meal before during short win. Then I had to remind the woman who had said she would take me to the restaurant that she had said she’d take me to the Metro. She assured me yes but as if I might not want this that she and her husband were not staying for talk about the show afterward. I discovered the walk was not only too far but across streets where there were no sidewalks and the cars moved as if they were on highways. I had had to stay alert to go back with her. Her husband apparently thought it very funny to say that he couldn’t be bothered to go all the way to the station and would leave me off nearby where it was convenient for them to turn onto the actual highway.

When they neared the sidewalk at what I recognized was the station, I opened the car door quickly. A tesla! I was glad to get out; she had treated me to how she never buys books any more, just buys ebooks. Any books she gets she sells or gives away. Why did she tell me this? Upon reaching the platform high up over an escalator, I elicited information from a black Metro person how to go back to Rosslyn on the silver (a new) line, then change to the blue line going into Virginia, to King Street Station. Then I had to get another cab — Lyft — home.

So I hope you can see why it was no wonder I backed out of today’s excursion. I was invited to by group very like the one that supposedly was organized to go to Quilters this past Sunday. I was supposed to go to a house, which I looked up on the Net and was very intimidating to me — super-expensive mansion set in a wide expanse of grass and driveway – by 11 am. The woman who lives there had never contacted me to let me know she knows I’m coming. How do I drive up into her driveway? A third woman is supposed to pick us up and then to take us to Lake Anne in Reston — to a restaurant that is probably expensive, and to me is in the middle of nowhere — vast highways and malls. I would have no way of getting back unless this third woman took me back to the car or I got a cab. I would be putting myself in the same sort of situation. I don’t need to made intensely anxious this way. If they want to meet in a place to be in person together why do they go to all this trouble? No they want more than that — the OLLI at Mason holiday party is in a Country Club — I went once years ago, never again.

A book upon which a film adaptation I watched was based: Free State of Jones: the author contacted me after I wrote about the experience on a blog — not telling it emerged from the zoom course below

By staying in I was able to participate in a zoom meeting of a superb course done by a brilliant retired labor lawyer (once clerked for Thurgood Marshall) on the Civil War and abolition of slavery. It began at 11:45 and he went on until 2. The group talked intelligently and it was just so enjoyable — and instructive.

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I’ve omitted Izzy and my time last Saturday to see The Winter’s Tale, our first time at the Folger in 4 years. Well the inside of the building where we used to go — hall, theater — are not much changed. And I could see the older reading room is left in its beautiful wooden state. What has happened is the building is twice the size, and we have yet to see an exhibition area, community center, and cannot see the increase in size for the library collection. It was once my favorite building in all the DC/Maryland/Virginia area. Here’s my brief review:

Leontes and Hermione in anguish

The Spring dancing

They are doing it very well: I’d say the ensemble effect is very strong with now and then a particular performance outstanding where it needed to be (Leontes, Hermione in the courtroom — like a black person coming out of a prison and allowed to speak); Autolycus and the man who played Antigonus when he became the shepherd. It would be churlish and uncharitable to complain about where they couldn’t reach the mark. The one mistake was to have a child do the Time speech. That is seriously intended and you really need someone who understand the purport of the words to speak the speech. For those who live in the area and can reach the Folger, it’s been extended. You will leave having come into contact with Shakespeare in some of his profoundest and fun-loving moments Here are the actors and directors’ names.

At least they did the play; a number of weeks ago now I went with Betty to a travesty at one of the two Shakespeare theaters around Gallery place: instead of Macbeth we had Macbeth In Stride  80 minutes of crude, tasteless hooting making Shakespeare’s hero-protaganist into a white male idiot. Lady Macbeth is a black woman bully seething with amoral ambition — and this is presented as admirable. Some of this comes out of a profound angry resentment at Shakespeare’s play. 3 minutes of Judi Dench reciting one of Shakespeare’s sonnets on a clip video on twitter is worth far more than the wasted time getting, sitting there and getting home.

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At home with Ian: I keep a lonely anxious cat, Ian, company — or he stays near me, quietly at more of a distance than Clarycat used to — coming onto my lap for bouts of close association now and again.

Ian now plays with Clary’s mice: she would never share ….

Zooms: this past Monday was wonderful: a zoom at 3 o’clock (to 4 pm) with the online Trollope group hosted by the London Trollope Society on Trollope and Christmas stories; another at 6 pm going on to 8:30 on Henry James’s ghost stories with the brilliant Nicole Miller — who had worked so hard again this week (as last week on Dickens).

A Laslo Kubinyi illustration for Wharton’s Kerfol: story of 16th century woman destroyed by her husband — they are often female gothics

I am reading a superb novel by a black woman author, Nella Larsen, Passing, and came near the end, and am more than half way through a brilliant collection of ghost stories by Edith Wharton — the key to the successful ghost story is an intense control of words, of style, of nuance, you need just the precise instance of power to evoke the supernatural presence. I hope to tell you of my studies of Frederick Douglas (especially the second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, far franker, far deeper in reach than the first carefully edited distant book) — a profound writer; of how John Steinbeck takes some getting used to. I will talk about these and other reading I am enjoying over this winter solstice time in another blog (see John Wood Sweet’s Sewing Girl’s Tale, my nomination for best book of the year) — some of it towards my wonderful coming course on Women in and Writing Detective Fiction. I am just loving Sayers’s Wimsey novels and the old Ian Carmichael serials; and learning to love P.D. James’s Dalgliesh novels and the recent serial with Roy Marsden. My Bronte course for the summer 6 week session at OLLI at Mason was accepted today too.

The Bronte Sisters

In this course we’ll explore the Bronte corpus. We’ll read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Emily Bronte’s poetry. We’ll also discuss their other novels and poetry, and their brother, Branwell, and father, Patrick Bronte’s poetry, as well as the long legacy beginning with Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte to modern sequels, e.g Caryl Phillips’ The Lost Child. Class members will be asked to watch 2 movie adaptations and/or bio/pics out of a pre-selection of movies. The genius, influence and importance of the Bronte corpus is indisputable; the sisters’ works are also rivetting and relevant to us today.

Don’t get me wrong: I felt very fulfilled on Tuesday with my friend, Adele, at lunch, and ditto with my new friend, Pamela, yesterday also at lunch. Both are displaced British women, women brought up by or in English families who now live in the US. Tomorrow I look forward to a third friend, Linda, her name, whom I’ve been out with several times, and Saturday with Betty once again to see As You Like It.

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So what to conclude on? I had an invite to speak at Maplewood Park, a retirement assisted living home for the truly wealthy by a fool of a man whom I admit I had no idea how to respond to but appeared to think the people in the facility whom he spoke of with the highest terms of respect were not up to hearing a talk with any serious ideas about literature or on any but fashionable second-rate books. Apparently the rich stupid man had jumped onto a mention of me as a fine teacher by a woman at OLLI at AU without knowing what she was talking about. He succeeded in withering my soul, as I was made to feel contempt for myself for having said yes the second time.

A final facing up to where I cannot belong — I left the TWWRN FB group reading of E.H. Young’s Chatterton Square: I could just not endure their obtuse misunderstanding of this book, as they berated the male in the happy complacency they are being anti-patriarchal when Young was giving us a more in-depth portrait of a Mrs Ramsay type woman unable to escape the draining of herself. A courageous Woolf knock-off. I was offending the others once again and dropped out, promising myself to join in no more.

The autistic women’s group is failing: the other two “founders:” the tech woman repeatedly says how its existence causes her great stress; her reminders avoid saying anything about it; the eager woman prefers in person and there is now a woman running an in person Spectrum Friends just on the third Sunday of each month (the day we are doing this, and she knew it), which this eager (she is older, lives alone) woman much prefers. I have suggested altering the day and time not to conflict with in person Meet-ups. Say a Tuesday at 8 pm? A couple of the participants seemed to like the suggestion last Sunday.

Aloneness and living upon a more silent authentic self is what I must accept.

Clarycat once upon a time — see the strength of her lithe body some 8 years ago

I am still missing my Clarycat very much — most of all in the mornings when she accompanied me on all my chores, and late at night when she’d hop onto the bed and snuggle next to me as I turned out the light. I am grieving very much this year for Jim once again through my loss of her and her loss of her life. I could not save her.

Ellen

A public service announcement! Covid on the rise; a new good feminist magazine, Liber

Home Kit (a Getty image)

I’m having also a bit of an existential crisis: I’m running out of new teachable topics (topics this kind of student body will accept as relevant to them or important). I can’t drive at night, don’t drive as well during the day.  I’m facing how stressful for me is traveling alone and that the conferences I land in are often not worth it — sometimes they are, this summer’s Trollope conference was.  But all too rare.   I could try Road Scholar again.  JASNA for Izzy’s sake but doubt I’d find acceptance). But fundamentally as trips take only a small time, unless I can keep my daily studies and quiet activities with congenial others up, what shall I do with my widowed life?

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve not written any new blogs since my first two on Izzy and my trip to Somerville College, Oxford and London.  She and I became very sick with a (watch for the word) horrendous respiratory infection or maybe it’s just a nasty tenacious virus shortly after we arrived home. Both of us now have sore left flanks from sore muscles left over coughing pathways. She had a light fever the first couple of days, and I have had bad trouble sleeping. She kicked her foot so bad at one point, it swelled up. I’ve lost more weight. We’ve had two Covid tests, one a home kit, and one expensive one at Kaiser: results negative. The virus is not killing us but I believe in the power of a virus to do just that. We’ve been to Kaiser at Falls Church, at Springfield, at Tysons Corner. We give up and are accepting the medications by mail. Izzy does video visits.

So this blog is a public service announcement: when out in a crowd, or crowded room, wear your mask. Never mind if you are among a minority or the only person. Anything is better than this misery — in my case it has not turned into pneumonia (which it could’ve), but bottles of steroids, antibiotics and cough suppressants are feeble against its power. I’ve not written that third blog on Izzy and my trip in early September because I have been trying to start teaching, beginning one of four reviews, and read on in both women’s mysteries and American literature (for a coming spring course to be taught hybrid fashion). I nap in the afternoon, watch (to me) pleasurable movies at night.

As soon as Izzy and I are well enough — we are better tonight — we will head out for our vaccinations against flu for this year, RWVP and a Covid booster. We go to Kaiser, but you can go to your local pharmacy and if you have insurance, the insurance will pay; if you don’t, the federal gov’t will.

I’m calling this a public service announcement and not putting it on my political blog. A pandemic, an epidemic, people getting sick and needing help and good advice should not be a political issue; it is a social issue yes, and a centrally medical one. Two of my favorite sub-stack newsletter writers so regard it: Heather Cox Richardson and Robert Reich. Remember climate break-up includes the extinction of species and plants; that all the earth’s creatures are criss-crossing where they once did not, and new diseases are forming and spreading.

Here are a few stories:

From The Nation: “The ‘You Do You’ Pandemic by Gregg Gonsalves

From NBC News: one way to measure this rise is wastewater

From the New Yorker: “Best Shots” or “The Covid Bump” by Dhruv Khullar

A selection of moments from 2022

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While I’m at it, i.e., writing a blog by referring to good local journalism and periodical magazines and newsletters, newspapers, I’d like briefly to recommend subscribing to Liber: A Feminist Review, the contemporary replacement of Women’s Review of Books, which has at last died.

This month despite another awful cover (this periodical is not decorated with my taste in mind), Liber boasts a number of good articles: On Ani Franco (so now I know why Laura adopted part of her nom de plume when 13 from this singer, on Roz Chast’s art and life; on The Female Gaze by Michael Dango as reviewed by Debbie Stoller who persists in asserting that Madonna’s sexual act was not the result of trying to please men, but something she enjoyed and therefore liberating — against three generations of people who respond that it is sell out — in these terms the Barbie movie is liberating because she is what women want to be and do — if only she were not plastic. There is an article-review on Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words by Annie Finch (poet and critic) on how words are used by men to reflect men’s attitudes and how masculine POVs work to repress women’s desires and instincts. The way we give birth is defined passively, we are deprived of agency there too. There is an argument (again based on a book, Gwendola Ricordeau’s Free Them All, “Women at the Gates” by Rachel Dewoskin that mass incarceration does not make women safer (they rarely report violence for they rightly fear the system); the penal system overtly harms women. A couple of good novels are reviewed. There’s poetry from the isolation of the pandemic (Marilyn Hacker), and a short story. This from someone (me) who reacted violently against the first column for this month’s issue: a woman who says how she loved her Barbie doll … what could have been wrong with her is not what I asked myself, but rather confessed to myself I was never “with it.”

See the covers and reviews here. These I like. Indeed they are quietly superb. Like other good journals of our time, the on-line presence of Liber can offer more than the printed booklet. One of the covers for just one of many insightful and informative reviews.

Ellen

Adventures in Oxford and London; Meeting Friends

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

Old Parsonage Hotel, at night, from the outside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Victoria and Albert Museum pool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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

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

A Going Away Blog

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

Clara Tornvall

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

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

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

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

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

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Edward Petheridge and Harriet Walter in an exaggerated dance scene

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

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

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

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

Ellen

We are now looking forward to our trip to the UK

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

Dear Friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

Anna Carteret as Lady Mabel Grex

Miranda Otto as Mrs Hurtle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morning Athletes

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

Summer begins — breathing in air that makes you sick; return to Gaskell

I thought maybe this still of Hattie Morahan as Elinor enduring on during summer might be appropriate (Sense and Sensibility, 2009, scripted Andrew Davies)

Dear friends and readers,

Summer has begun because my teaching has begun, and if I’m not mistaken, my first class at OLLI at AU for 4 weeks on The Heroine’s Journey has thus far gone very well. I’ve written my first letter to my coming class (less than 2 weeks) at OLLI at Mason, on what editions of Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters to get, two exquisitely good readings aloud of an unabridged text (Patricia Tomlinson, Nadia May) and the wondrous movie, and I was delighted two people on Trollope&Peers appear to be planning to read along! I have incontrovertible proof that last summer’s dismal numbers were due to people still in large numbers refusing to come in person, for I now have 30 people in The Heroine’s Journey (the texts to some as obscure as the texts for last summer); and an astounding 40 for Gaskell whose book, Wives & Daughters, cannot compete in known-ness, surface excitement and media triumphs (a couple of musicals, 3 film adaptations) of last summer’s Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White. Last summer I had 6-8 people at OLLI at AU which went down to 4 and then 2; 6 people at OLLI at Mason which went up to 13 registered 9-10 attending.

I am myself literally lonely — physically at home — though amidst kind and generous friends on the Internet so I’m doing things remotely for a fourth summer — virtual festivals (Hays, Yorkshire), virtual conferences (Elizabeth Gaskell). I read over half the office space for office workers that was once needed is now going unrented. Had this been the case the summer after Jim died, I would have been devastated — I built a sort of life before the pandemic which the present one is a morphed version of.

Maybe it’s for the best — because not only are there now daily massacres and killings (sometimes I fear some neighbor will shoot at me as I take my daily afternoon walk — or, worse, Izzy), but I became very sick two days ago and am still not over having had my body filled with deeply unhealthy air. Thousands of fires burning across Canada, sent smoke-filled air south as far as South Caroline, west too, and DC/Maryland/Virginia had the worst pollution ever experienced on record.

It’s no joke. The smoky burnt air is real, with little bits of stuff in it, and I have been having a major sinus attack/hay fever. I find wearing the KN95 mask in the house helps, a spray helps a tiny bit, the over-the-counter histamine, Claritin-D — I’ve taken 4 since yesterday afternoon. I’m filled with itchy liquid, my chest, face, nose pouring out, throat parched. My ears popped and were hot. I took a sleeping pill to sleep.  The air and I have improved over today but I am still not well, still parched and blowing my nose and coughing hard.

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I’ve made a good start overall for all my summer projects: I’m working on two reviews for publication, and have finished a third. I’ve finished reading Wives & Daughters silently to myself, and I loved it, and now am listening in my car (when I get a chance) to Patricia Tomlinson reading it aloud just magnificently. W&D is Tolstoyan, strongly feminist, a wondrous literary masterpiece. I accompanied it with Jenny Uglow’s equally moving brilliant book on Gaskell, reading her books closely sensitively imaginatively, A Habit of Stories, am onto criticism. Evenings I reveled in Cranford and the Return to Cranford and all of Sandy Welch’s North and South. So you might say I’m about ready to make that syllabus (Sunday) and send it to the class, to begin June 21st. I found both movies closely related, rooted in Gaskell’s life, dreams, strong ideas about gender identities transformed; my favorite character-actress still Anna Maxwell Martin as Bessie Higgins, with scenes of strong friendship with Margaret Hale (Daniela Denby-Ashe) and her father, Nicolas Higgins (Brenden Coyle)

Also reread Maria Tartar’s Heroine with 1001 Faces. I was so newly impressed by Tartar’s achievement I thought I’d share any reviews: they are all inadequate and (ironically) re-emphasize masculinist values — the book is also about another emphasis, re-nuanced values and norms. But I have found Tartar on video discussing her book. Is there anything not on video nowadays – yesterday I listened to Mary Beard on women and power and the effect of the continuation of pernicious classical tropes on our society today —

You see I am staying in mostly — for a fourth summer.

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I have met a couple of friends for time in museums — the National Gallery three times, with its Phillip Guston rooms and rooms; I admit I like his earlier more realistic art much better than the abstract expressionism, but the film where he talked of how he moved from one type of art to another (excuse the immodesty) reminded me of how I feel about my work, how I’ve developed a blog art, moved from studying one century to another, from the UK to Italy seriously, to post-colonialism in English books set in and about India (the Raj and its aftermath. This is only one small part of it, and not the most interesting (that was the inward man):

One afternoon a kindly friend, Adele, came over — from OLLI at Mason, an Englishwoman just my age, living in Reston. A rare treat for me. I made us a lovely lunch — if I do say myself. It required no cooking beyond emptying a jar of delicious homemade soup (feels like that) from Trader Joe’s, making a very plain salad & salad dressing, buying two kind of delicious traditional cheeses and bread. Then we watched the first episode of 4 of the 1999 Wives & Daughters on my DVD player attached to my computer (plays Region 2 DVDs). I was so cheered when both my cats joined us! even Ian who usually runs away, and poor Clarycat on my lap. It was all too short an afternoon — the best kind …

She will be in my class; it was educational for me to listen to how she reads the book and what she saw in the movie.

Not all goes that well at all. One afternoon was so fraught with tension (me masking myself, her irritated at me, tired of me I expect). After a few hours out with her, I was that exhausted and nerve-wracked that I became confused and stepped out into traffic! luckily I pulled myself back quickly enough. I just had felt bewildered by the stress. I held onto myself (so to speak) on the Metro ride and then driving myself back to my house when I opened up a small bottle of prosecco. It helped. But I needed a nap and for the rest of the evening and night could not do anything constructive. I am wondering what do others do to recover from social experiences? We are all probably having more of then now since we are said to be post-pandemic.

I should remember this kind of thing is as common with me as I listen to various people in my neighborhood having their summer parties on their very fancy lawns behind their super-expensive mansions. People’s laughter floating in the air. My tenth summer without my beloved, Jim.

Donal McCann as young Phineas Finn speaking to no purpose in Parliament (Pallisers, 1974)

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Have I covered everything that mattered over the last couple of weeks and weeks to come? My talk on Phineas Finn, “Words for Sale: Chapters 13-26,” went well, and here is where Dominic has put up the video and transcript and soon I will make a new blog for Trollope and Phineas — and Ralph the Heir, where I will discuss politics in Trollope.

Phineas Finn ~ Chapters 14-26

I’ve registered Izzy and I for Somerville College, Oxford, for September 1-2, for the conference we are to go to and this Sunday Laura will be over and we’ll rent a hotel in London for 4 days and book a plane! I reveled watching and re-watching and then blogging on the three Tom Jones movies.

My beloved pussycats grow closer and closer to me; Clarycat asserts herself in new ways; she sits against my chest as I eat breakfast and lunch. He is on my wave length a lot.

I attended another Poetry Reading Group online (a club) at OLLI at Mason, and my chosen poem was Elizabeth Bishop‘s One Art. It stood out among the choices as the deepest, most vivid, clearest, many-layered poem of grief and endurance:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Have I mastered the art of losing yet? Get used to it, she says. The villanelle form just a bit distorted captures the manic feel of the genre. Over and over disaster, master. It seems to take a long time.

What I miss most each summer is a nearby beach. There is none her in N.Va; there are only close-by lakes which are taken over by exclusive clubs; niches in the Potomac taken over by the super-rich of Northwest Washington (private parks). For all too short a time, Jim and I, taking our dog Llyr, would summers driven to Jones Beach on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The drive took 40 minutes; we’d arrive around 10 and stay until 11:30, with coffee and coissants. How the dog would romp in the water. No photos, just memories. I must remember he does not exist any more except in my mind and in the minds of those who remember him (Laura and Izzy), with the house around me and much that is in it gathered by us, which I keep up. (How relieved I was when Biden outwitted those horrific people over their manufactured crisis of a debt ceiling — they would have stopped all the money Izzy and I have coming in). If there was such a beach, I would get Izzy to come with me once a week, mornings, the two of us, with books … NYC public beaches everywhere, easy to get to. NYC is one of the cities I’ve lost, Leeds the other.

From the 1930s, Ken Howard, Beach Life

Ellen

The tenth year — and then rewind 65 years ago; Childhood & Adolescent books; Time itself

Jim and I in 1985/86 in this house — sent me by a kind Iranian Internet poet-friend — how happy we were

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been thinking about how now into my tenth year living without Jim how little I actually go out — and that I don’t because it does not make me happy. It distracts me but I am not happy going to plays &c by myself. Indeed I have had my worst moments of grief standing on a sidewalk trying to hail a cab. Izzy doesn’t want to go with me any more except on special occasions or for some very special play or movie any more. I had rather see the 10 films the New Yorker critic said were truly the ten best of the year than most advertised plays. I don’t want to drive to the gym any more either — at least 40 minutes each way, for 50 minutes of mild exercise among people too unlike me for a relationship beyond parallel exercising.

This brings to mind how I have a hard time sometimes fitting into these OLLI classes as a student in person — that happens to other SGLs (many do not go to classes or much more rarely than I’ve been doing) and the truth is that true social life for many of these people is something quite apart from taking courses. This was prompted by a bad time I had last Wednesday at the OLLI at AU where the teacher in the room refused to call on me, and when I overtly protested, he became all the more adamant. I had handled criticizing him badly. When I got home I finally filled out one of their feedback forms:

The class is so poor I must say something. The SGL refuses to provide context or content: when someone suggested we would understand Shakespeare’s plays better were we to have some historical background, he replied by exaggerating the amount required into something impossible; asked to define his terms, the reply is this is to make us think. He never once went over the texts assigned thus far. The conversation is self-deprecating semi-mockery, a kind of rebarbative challenging, he snubs people pointedly or gives out “gold stars” (or half a gold star) when he approves of an answer. If this is a political theory class, it is wholly lacking in clarity of discourse.

This week he sent the first decent serious set of questions on the plays he’d sent. But I can no longer go back and half-regret it.

It must be I stay in love with Jim insofar as men are concerned — I don’t want a lover and don’t want anyone to displace my books. I also don’t want to lose Isobel which I would do were I to enter into some kind of real relationship. I am not sure any of the men wanted to because I don’t truly attract them as too old and too ugly from age (I see this in their semi-reluctant eyes). I’ve made a acquaintances and friends by attending these classes (though zoom just as much) but I’ve been able to hold onto hardly any to see them outside the OLLI.

I haven’t even learned to travel except as an ordeal — though I’ll do it in September because Izzy has consented to come with me. I like to see far away people I’ve communicated with on the Net and share real interests with but beyond that I worry I’ll get lost (because I do). I never will adjust to leaving home and coping with liminality. Trollope has come to mean so much because of all the zooms I’ve experienced now.

Widowhood is a very sad condition for an Aspergers woman who has lived her life the way I did — an invisbile adjunct with her husband the center of her life — but I have all Jim and my things around me and love to read and to write and to teach and have my daughters, my cats and the friends here on the Net to the couple I’ve made —

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Exactly the same cover as the Little Women and Good Wives book I read and reread at age 11

Rewinding more than 65 years. My reading life before, into and just after puberty

My father took me to the library for “good” children’s books — often they were not series books; one library level series was the Mary Poppins one. He often chose British books for those were the ones he knew from childhood (1930s) because they were the ones in the library he went to as a child or he found in his school plus very classic American ones: Booth Tarkington comes to mind — now I realize racist (Sambo is the name of the little black boy), Uncle Remus tales (Aesop in a black accent). I remember the Lamb’s rendition of Shakespeare; all Louisa May Alcott, and very quickly (because I could read well from about age 8-9) it was books like The Secret Garden, Peter Pan. His sets of books in our house were also part of his sets sold cheaply by Left Book clubs for children at the time. All of a Kind Family (about a Jewish family) was in the library.

Only when I could myself go places by myself (age 10, walking, taking a bus) did I begin Nancy Drew and other more famous popular series — girls’ books and some boys’ books (my father made fun of these mostly gently but not always — I remember he made fun of Five Little Peppers): I would buy them from used book stores. then my mother belonged to a book-of-the-month club (that’s where I encountered Gone with the Wind) and there were the rows of classics my father had in a bookcase (see above). Two long rows of Walter Scott were part of this. Just about all British classics except Mark Twain.

The real reason I didn’t “do” American literature in graduate school is that it is too close. I still can’t stand the underlying religiosity of just about all American texts (false optimism) or it’s an irritant in the way it’s done (this is Marilyn Robinson — only she is an adult overt version). My experience of American life has been so very terrible; I’ve been reading Joyce Carol Oates in a Politics and Prose course with Elaine Showalter and what she shows me resonates as real and horrible.  I am, nevertheless, thinking of doing an American literature course next spring: I’ll call it “Everybody’s Protest Novel” — James Baldwin’s scathing phrase it will be all protest books; I am amused to discover almost or every one of my choices either the book or author is now banned in Florida! except maybe Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but someone has said it was not newly banned because in most southern states it has been banned from just before the civil war. I did not do this consciously deliberately.

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How to close?

Burt Lancaster as the melancholy Fabrizio from Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo

My own course (the one I am teaching just now: 20th Century Italian Memoirs and Novels) appears to be going over well once again, and my online groups thrive with me in them (especially the Trollopes).

I was happy last night when I re-watched (it is a sitting through as the movie moves slowly) Lucino Visconti’s The Leopard. Three weeks I was bored and in turns irritated; this time I was fully involved and discovered the movie to be (for 2 hours and 40 minutes) mostly a light comedy with melancholy undertones, with a simple story, focusing on the central male, the Prince played by Lancaster. He dominates the film and carries it — not an easy thing to do.

The difference: I watched what’s called The American version rather than the Italian one I did last time: the Italian is 3 hours and 20 minutes while the American is 2 hours and 40. The American is also re-arranged and Visconti didn’t like the re-arrangement nor cuts. I would not be surprised if what was cut was anything of Visconti’s left-socialist POV. What made the difference for me is the American version is dubbed in English almost throughout and the Italian in Italian with subtitles. So what happens (my view) is you are cut off from Lancaster altogether. He is a rather still passive figure on a screen.

Lancaster delivers a remarkable performance – he is convincing as this melancholy disillusioned Sicilian aristocrat (he said he made Visconti his model). The film still has problems. The second star cast was Alain Delon and he speaks French so in neither version can you hear him. The one street battle scene (Garibaldi invades Sicily) is very well done, but at a distance and not long enough for the burden of meaning it’s asked to bear. The outlook is very anti-risorgimento from the reactionary idea that the peasant world does not want to change (as in enslaved people are satisfied); since we hardly see any we are not in a position to judge. The other idea that you have to permit change in order to keep things the same is acted out in an election presented in the film as useless. As in Lampedusa’s book, the class snobbery as in the book is not contradicted; there is no downstairs. The scenes between the prince and a sort of hunting comrade and the middle mayor whose daughter the Prince’s nephew marries are among the best for understanding people and the films views. Beyond that the filming of the places is remarkable and the last quarter a ball which reminded me very much of balls in Gone With the Wind — we do glimpse that the nephew’s marriage is one of convenience, but the inner life of his coming wife is downplayed — as are all the women).

But I think it’s really worth seeing as in intelligent serious attempt to make a costume drama about important issues and history limited by nature of the poetic masterpiece (for Il Gattopardo by Lampedusa is that) it’s adapting. Its central topic is time, personal time, body time, the time of a nation of people and how history somehow exists and is ever shaping our lives.

Yesterday too I came across Richard Brody’s choice of the 10 best films of 2022. I think not one appears in the Oscars best pictures. He argues that all of the Oscar films were money-makers to some extent; that despite the true excellence of so many films, audiences didn’t come enough: a rare big seller was Everything Everywhere &c. Two male action-adventure (Top Gun) and something else were the only 2 movies which saw audiences come the size of pre-pandemics. Of those he mentioned, I hardly heard of them; I am not sure they came to my small semi-art theater but he made them sound very interesting and I’ll see if I can locate any streaming. I agree with all he says; the Oscars have fallen to a new level of junk.

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What time does to us too. Two nights ago I watched the last hour of Andrew Davies’s marvelous rendition of Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right. Something about the aged tightly squeezed wrinkled face of Mr Crump, the curve of his chin, as he faced the enraged desperate Camilla knife at the ready, alerted me to the idea I’d seen that face before. I looked up the cast and lo and behold it was John Bolam. Who was or is John Bolam: he was the male lead in the 1987 Beiderbecke Tapes, of which I am a fan. Sidekick to Tim Courtney in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. And who was the female lead? why it was none other than Barbara Flynn, and I’ve know all along that there she, so very heavily with a worn face in that big dress playing Mrs French trying to cope with the contemptible Mr Gibson. Barbara Flynn has been in many beloved movies (by me) from Mary Bold in Barchester Chronicles to the Aunt in the Durrells and a very funny series by Davies: Something like Peculiar Practices of Education, a broad satire by Andrew Davies. She was in Cranford

Jill and Trevor (Yorkshire TV)

Their Yellow Van

Ellen

Happening on Trollope … and other hope-filled plans

Anthony Trollope by Julia Margaret Cameron, albumen print, 1864

Dear friends and readers,

I have some news. My proposal for a talk by me for the coming Trollope conference at Somerville College, Oxford (England) has been accepted! The conference takes place Sept 1-3 and Izzy and I have put in for accommodation at the college. She will get a chance to roam around the city and discover it, and I will spend 3 days with Trollope friends. Here’s the proposal:

Intriguing Women in Trollope:

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.

I won’t omit the normative women either — as a control group; and here I’ll say one of my favorite of the older women in Andrew Davies’ films is Geraldine James as Lady Rowley in HKHWR

I am at this moment reading with a group of people on TrollopeandHisContemporaries@groups.io, Ralph the Heir, a chapter a day. This Sunday I will have finished the slender partial Christmas story, though far more about colonialism, unusual action-adventure of men against [bush]-fires, Harry Heathcote of Gangoil, slightly more than a month ago, I managed to skim-read closely enough Trollope’s dystopian ironic semi-autobiographical fantasy The Fixed Period to join in on the zoom NYC and Beyond Group; at the end of another month, they are due to discuss The Vicar of Bullhampton. Since not too long ago I participated in an intense close reading of that book with a readers’ group on face-book (The Way We Read Now), I’ll join in. Week by week, every-other-week with around 100 people I’ve been reading the major giant books by Trollope, and just now it’s He Knew He Was Right (actually there too I skim-read as I’ve written about it three times, taught it once). You know of course about my 5-6 online talks to the Every-Other-Week group (now on the London Society site). This does not exhaust it: our coming DC Trollope in person group is to discuss Sir Harry Hotspur Humblethwaite, a novella which bears a remarkable resemblance to James’s Washington Square (published after Trollope’s novel).

Am I wholly sane?

I am finding the Ralph the Heir second-rate Trollope. Maybe I’ve been having a surfeit? There is a readable book by Walter Kenrick on Trollope called The Novel Machine. I thought of the title as two mornings ago I read Chapter 13 or Ralph the Heir. I have to admit it is very strong:  the characters thoroughly believable, their dialogues just what they might say, and very suggestive of a depth level personality behind their words, we are interested in their concerns at the the moment — so I want to withdraw my comment about second-rate Trollope. A real falling off after the introduction of Sir Thomas Underwood in the first chapter (the early title for the book was to be Underwood); much of the comedy of the women not taken wholly seriously; Neefit pure situation comedy. I compared the pallid feel of Patience with the brilliant gravitas of Priscilla Stanbury in HKHWR.

It is almost as if when Trollope sat down he could not help but write quintessentially good novels, novels offering strongly what we expect a novel to offer, so my complaint is more that I don’t feel him caring very much; it’s not a driven book but written because it’s Trollope’s business to write novels.

This morning I picked up Harry Heathcote and after a couple of minutes remembered where I was, the characters springing back to life individually with its suggestive colonialist and autobiographical themes driving the narrative. The characters don’t need to be quite as rounded as Ralph the Heir; they are sufficiently dimensional for their purpose as are the characters in The Fixed Period.

Is it any wonder that when I received the acceptance to go traveling once again I remembered how I just happened on Trollope once again when I came onto the Internet for the first time (1994/5) and Jim went looking for a literary listserv for me to join, especially a Jane Austen, and saw the names Trollope, Austen and James. We couldn’t reach the James but we did the other two — how lucky. Then I had read only the Pallisers, The Vicar of Bullhampton and maybe one or two Barchester ones. I had never read Austen’s letters, only some of her Juvenilia and never The Watsons, Lady Susan or Sanditon. At this point I’ve read the complete writing of Austen and all Trollope’s fiction, and a good deal of his non-fiction that matters.

What has been the deep appeal of Trollope? company. A lonely autistic girl and then woman finds this extraordinary Novel Machine. And he has provided her with an important part of her life.

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A new gravator: Margarita Kukhtina: I’m calling it girl in spring on Cornish Cliffs …

While I’m about this entry, I’ve some other news I don’t want to broadcast everywhere so don’t include it in my title. I’m forming with two other women an as yet small zoom group (it probably will not become very large) called Women with Autism; we plan to meet every third Sunday of each month in the later afternoon. The word women is understood as an umbrella term including however you identify: lesbian, non-binary, trans and other ways. We’ll discuss our lives, how we cope with this condition; the purpose if to be supportive of one another, to enjoy ourselves together. A development filled with hope for the three of us and all who join. Above the gravatar for it.

And I’ve invented a title and group of books for the next 4 week mini-course (winter 2024) I might have to submit to OLLI at Mason soon (they want these very early):

Sophie Rundle as Eva Smith/Daisy Renton/Mrs Birling/Alice Grey (from Walsh’s 2015 An Inspector Calls)

Women writing Detective Stories, especially with women in them …

The title is not quite accurate as I’ll include men’s mysteries and have male detectives/sleuths. 3 possible books: Josephine Tey’s (Elizabeth MacKintosh) The Daughter of Time (the story the mystery of Richard III); Sayer’s Gaudy Night (where I first encountered Miss Sylvia Drake); Amanda Cross’s (Carolyn Heilburn) Death in a Tenured Position. We’ll have 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). I’m not sure about the books. I trust everyone who registers will like it and I can talk all I want about the genre as written by females and when a female is the detective too. And also as capable of serious ethical criticism. Of course it is an outgrowth of my studies of women detectives in all detective fiction which came out of the 4 week mini-course I just taught this past winter and will do again at OLLI at AU in June: The Heroine’s Journey

The opening session will cover Nancy Drew …

Ellen

The name Ellen — Helen, Eileen, Elinor, Elaine — & a quiet routine path ahead

Winter morning: Ian his paw stretched out to me while guarding my Xmas present to Izzy: under white protector she’s working on a puzzle: of women writers including Austen, Eliot, Woolf, Morrison. Behind him NYTimes & Wash Post for Sunday …

Dear Friends and readers,

I feel reluctant to carry on with my three blogs; the excuse here is how small and untendencious, how atypical is my existence. I can look at the world only first through my own lenses, however varied. Take this week where on facebook my long-time friend, Diana, is posting her experience of her long-time (over 50 years) beloved husband’s death, and now the long aftermath or coda of her existence. As she posts, I find myself identifying and re-living Jim’s death. We have acted comparably. A small funeral, ashes in an urn, staying within the home we made with this husband for a lifetime. Peter was a poet and wrote and gave her many poems.

This put me in mind of how Jim would find good poems and give them to me on my birthday. I even panicked slightly when I could not find one of them in my computer because I couldn’t remember the mid-18th century author’s name, nor the title of the poem nor first line accurately enough to google it. Finally there came floating into my brain faint glimmers of his name and I went to my microsoft files under “18th century” and then under “poet,” and finally, voila, there was the name “Samuel Bishop,” and the first line of the poem

Jim copied out and gave this to me when we had been married 16 years:

To Mrs Bishop, on the Anniversary of her Wedding Day, with a Ring

Thee, Mary, with this Ring I wed” —
So, fourteen Years ago, I said. —
Behold another Ring! — “for what?”
“To wed thee o’er again?” — Why not?

With that first Ring I married Youth,
Grace, Beauty, Innocence, and Truth;
Taste long admir’d, Sense long rever’d,
And all my MOLLY then appear’d.

If she, by Merit since disclos’d,
Prove twice the Woman I suppos’d,
I plead that double Merit now,
To justify a double Vow.

Here then to-day, (with Faith as sure,
With Ardor as intense, as pure,
As when, amidst the Rites divine,
I took thy Troth, and plighted mine,)
To thee, s, sweet Girl, my second Ring
A Token and a Pledge I bring:
With this I wed, till death us part,
Thy riper Virtues to my heart;
Those Virtues, which before untry’d,
The Wife has added to the Bride:
Those Virtues, whose progressive claim,
Endearing Wedlock’s very name,
My soul enjoys, my song approves,
For conscience’ sake, as well as Love’s.

And why? — They shew me every hour,
Honour’s high thought, Affection’s power,
Discretion’s deed, sound Judgment’s sentence, —
— And teach me all things — but Repentance. —
— Samuel Bishop (1731-95), he married Mary Palmer

Here is one of the costumes used in Andrew Davies’s 2009 Sense and Sensibility; worn by Hattie Morahan as Elinor — my favorite heroine still, and Morahan nowadays my favorite actress playing her

Then in on online class at OLLI at Mason, where we were discussing the recent film, Tar (Todd Fields, w/ Blanchett, Hoss, Merlant), someone said: If you could back and talk to your younger self, what would you say? the idea devastates me; of course I’m thinking of my younger self in my early 30s. I put this on facebook and people expressed astonishment at my melancholy sense of deprivation. Someone said in exemplary reply she’d give her daughter piano lessons: Me: Is that really all you think you were missing out on that mattered?, another he’d give his younger self Gray’s Anatomy. Me: That’s all you think you were missing

Tar is magnificent if perverse, for it’s rare any women is prosecuted for abuses of power; women can inflict themselves on people but it’s usually through indirect devious ways (caught in Arsenic and Old Lace where two old landladies are trying to poison Cary Grant)

In my thirties there was no Internet; I returned to teaching at age 40 — here in N. Va and DC. As to now I could never have guessed that there would be such a free and open medium, for despite all everyone says, it is still true that you can meet, encounter, write in places, be with people w/o passing the kinds of thresholds one had to pass before. Free in this sense, not in the sense of having to afford the kind of power to host a computer, the connectivity, the computer, the IT people to help … here you do need middle class money and time. My older daughter has monetized and networked a career out of this. I found a lifeline and an important support for a way of life I could endure and enjoy — with Jim’s help & Companionship at the time. I found the above puzzle because it and another (with two cats) were described on a blog about Virginia Woolf. For people like me without much visual talent who nonetheless loves doing pictures … putting them together in another medium is an intriguing delight.

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I have been carrying on a correspondence with an Irish friend now for a number of years; a real friendship has emerged (though only through emails), and somehow we got onto the topic of my name. See what a Narcissa I sometimes am. So I repeated the question impersonally, rhetorically:

Katherine Hepburn as Elinor of Acquitaine (from 1960s A Lion in Winter, Peter O’Toole as Henry II)

Where does the name Ellen come from? I was inclined to say it’s an Irish version of Helen, and said (this is true) that when I worked in England (Leeds) at John Waddington Ltd lots of people called me Helen. Since I answered to it, I was often Helen. My friend suggested an alternative of a Gaelic derivation: from Eileen (Eye-leen). I know my mother said she named me Ellen because we lived in a Bronx neighborhood then predominantly Irish. Everyone who reads 19th century novels (and some 20th) remembers that Ellen is often a servant’s name (maid, nanny &c).

But further “research” (googling on the Net) turned up other etymologies, and one I am drawn to is this. Ellen may be from middle English, a spelling variant of Helen (as of Troy), which would make sense, given English dialects’ tendency to drop initial “H”. my friend checked the traditional (if dated) Gaelic dictionary; the initial sequence “el” is not a usual Gaelic initial sequence – this is “eil”, as in Eileen. So most probably the origins of Ellen as a name are middle English or perhaps Norman-French – think Elinor of Acquitaine — embodied above by Katherine Hepburn. Whether Ellen came direct from Greek Helen into English, or via Norman French as a derivative of Helene, who can say.

I am remembering all those medieval and very early modern queens’ names which are not Elizabeth or Isabella but Elinor Vague memories of medievally spelt Ellens in Chaucer? One nickname for Elinor is Nancy …. Yes! So it comes from more than Anne — to Nan — to Nancy.. I am glad that Elena Ferrante has so many forms of Ellen in Italian for several of her heroines.

Part of the prompting of the topic for me is the heroine’s name in Elena (ahem) Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend: Elena. This name and many Italian variants thereof are everywhere in Ferrante’s books and very often the heroine. So the heroine of The Lost Daughter is Lena, the child’s name Elena. In Italian that aspirated “h” disappears. I said I lived/visited Paris in January 1968 and a week into February and I was there all alone so began to talk French and spent time with a Frenchman I met. I found I was called something like Elene which sounded to my ears like Elaine said with a French accent. Elaine is a central heroine in the Arthurian cycle — she involves herself with Lancelot. Elaine of Astolat.

In French it’s Helene (with the aigu and grave accents) or Elaine (with an accent aigu on the E). I once spent 2 weeks in Florence and again I made a few Italian acquaintances and found myself called Elena.

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Daisy Edgar-Jones as Kya (Where the Crawdad Sings, 2022)

And near the end on how I loved this movie, and how, after reading several reviews ridiculing (soggy, pretentious) mocking (it goes nowhere and so little time spent on showing us that and how she did the murder), but see!  I dreaded going to the OLLI at Mason class worried the people there would complain. I should have trusted them more: all but one dim man loved it, several saw it as a feminist film (director, scriptwriter, producer, writer of original book all women): it’s the beauty & tact of the quiet performances, the resolute turning away from modern technical aggressive capitalist and patriarchal world (this is one where men beat women, rape them, and laugh, no one stops them), its racist world, with Jim Crow terror firmly in place, by a young girl and then her growing to become a naturalist-artist. Also the use of the mystery-murder and trial paradigm as endowing power because she refuses to submit on stand. And an underlying mother-daughter paradigm (fitting that course I’m now teaching, The Heroine’s Journey, going very well as far as I can see): her mother fled or was beat to death by the father, and as Kya now aged, dies is seen on the path as a vision.

It stands out against Women Talking‘s meretriciousness. For this coming week we have She Said to discuss, and we began with A Man Named Ove. The course is staying with its art-house movie type choices. Did I say I joined a Poetry Reading Group at OLLI at Mason too. Each brings a poem we love, reads it aloud (it must not be too long) and says why. They meet every-other-week inbetween terms.

It would not be a blog from me if I were to leave out some criticism, how brief, of Books. As to Spare by Prince Harry: it’s pastiche, highly literary, highly concocted and carefully arranged. I don’t believe this is Harry Windsor. It feels fake. Not until three paragraphs before the very end (acknowledgements at the back) is the name J. R. Moehringer mentioned and then as “my collaborator and friend, confessor and sometimes sparring partner about the beauty (and Sacred Obligation) of Memoir …. ” That gives a bit of the tone: continually fulsome, self-congratulatory. Yuk. I don’t know if I have the patience. It does not amuse me the way it did Andrew O’Hagan. Is this what palace & monarchy culture produces? Yes get rid of it. But see the hilarity of Andrew O’Hagan and his sympathy (the LRB).

A literary masterpiece, a woman’s holocaust memoir, Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz and After as translated by Rose Lamont; I must finish it (very hard) and then write about it and three other women’s holocaust memoirs as l’ecriture-femme versions of this savage tragic genre. Also from the LRB. I”ve sent away for (bought) her Convoy to Auschwitz: a collective biography of the women of the French resistance; some couple of thousand were rounded up and taken off; 49 returned alive. Their stories insofar as she can construct them.

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I am trying, gentle reader, to stay cheerful.

So I did not say until now that most unjustly Laura has lost two of her jobs (streams of income she called them). NBCThink was destroyed, eliminated by the online NBC journal: smart people are not read as much. This is called “downsizing.” For having joined the union, been pro-active, and helped to resolve that all part-time people shall get benefits, she and all other part-time people working for Daily Elite were fired.

That’s the phrase that was used to describe me; basically these employers don’t give you enough hours (just under) so that they fall under a law to protect full-time workers. I really worked full-time if you counted my hours; each term I was supposed let go and rehired the next with term-length agreements (not contracts lest the university have to honor them if they want to cancel a class to suit their needs/wants). The company is now asking full-timers to do more work for the same salary. Laura had a union meeting yesterday (zoom) but there is not much they can do. The woman Laura actually worked with (“pitched” to) was indignant for Laura and said she’d keep hiring Laura for individual assignments (w/o contract) but she may not be able to. As with Starbucks, Amazon & these places are ruthlessly fiercely punitively anti-union — for obvious reasons. Last time Laura was fired – -at the beginning of this new profession, she had no one to talk to, to turn to and now she’s in a network of different people.

And she is fine on WETA where they already give the benefits these unions demand — so they don’t have to deal with unions – this was John Waddington’s way of keeping unions out of their business (where I worked when I lived in Leeds, 1969-70). If you did join the union, and it was found out you’d be fired that day. WETA doesn’t mind if people join the union. She has a lot of work from WETA but not enough to support her and Rob, though she has now been told if they can “find” a full-time job for her this summer, they may offer her one. Good of them. She says full-time work can cut you off from contacts elsewhere and if you are “let go,” then you are without resources quickly. A friend of hers, long-time there, was fired within 10 minutes and was cut off from all her Internet accesses, which included her notes, addresses &c. Rob has hurt his shoulder now: I suspect he will have to retire early. No pension. The holiday in Haiwaii to celebrate their 10th anniversary this summer is now on hold.

Welcome to today’s world of work. She has now had a small contract offered her — fewer hours a week from Best Life. Journalism even 35 years ago was not this.

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And so I close. Off to watch more Prime Suspect for my The Heroine’s Journey class. Soon I shall find time to formulate a plan towards writing a book on Poldark/Outlander and women’s historical fiction/romance. Ghosts and Every Woman’s Protest Novel (say Mantel’s Wolf Hall). Go through all the Poldark books & films. One at a time, so much a day. Then some comparative series you see and Outlander is the natural comparison. I can do that kind of thing if I set myself the pattern. Routine is a strong point with me!

Patricia Hodge as Mrs Pumphrey, Take 2, with her beloved Tricki-Woo, just now my favorite weekly show on TV (All Creatures Great and Small Take Three — once upon a time Anthony Hopkins played Farnon)

Ellen

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