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

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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

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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

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

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

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

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

Dear readers and friends,

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

The OLLIs:

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

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

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

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

Others:

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

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

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

Online life:

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

Travel since Jim died

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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Christmas Eve …. what a good reading & watching year it’s been

Me as a young child in training for me in old age — I didn’t realize this at the time [by Margarita Kukhtina who didn’t mean it this way at all probably]

Gentle friends and readers,

I admit my present fate is not altogether unexpected. I have spent an enormous percentage of my hours of waking life reading. Probably the reliable happiness, joy that I’ve known in life comes from reading.

What’s different now is as a widow who has not belonged to any groups over her life, has made few friends of the visiting one another, going places together, confiding in one another kind, who did not achieve any permanent position in a university where I would have naturally been part of a network of professional groups (I was an invisible adjunct); now that the center of my existence, my best friend, my life’s support is gone.  Now I survive on my widow’s annuity, social security, plus rent from my daughter, and parents’ savings and what insurance and retirement money Jim and I gathered together.  Much as I love seeing other cultures or places, travel is an ordeal for an Aspergers person like myself — and my money does not go that far; I must spend savings for trips. So I’ve turned to volunteer teaching of my beloved books (my profession) for social life and structure, and fill my leisure time with quiet reading (and writing, watching movies) otherwise.

As to whether I am in old age?  I’ve been reading Devoney Looser’s Women Writers in Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850, and it turns out that 60-75 is youngest old, 76-84, middle-old, and over 85, oldest-old, that the term elderly may be applied to people past 70-75, but that whether you are looked upon as aged depends on your physical and mental health.

I want to quote Anne Elliot here (heroine of Persuasion) who is eager to refute an idea Captain Harville implies that she is boasting, is competitive, presents as an admirable “privilege” woman’s “constancy” of devotional love, “true attachment” (in Anne’s idiom) to a single man, that he need not envy her. So I want to repeat her phrases. This old age of mine is “not a very enviable one.” True I need not do unpleasant work for a living, endure no long anxious and stressed interpersonal hours — I was not trained for any ample money-making professions (my occupation was to be marriage and children in my parents’ eyes), and have been lucky thus far to have been left alone with the enough Jim carved out for me from gov’t policies, laws, customs at the time.

All I claim is a continuing temporal continuity, a link between the precarious intervals I had left alone as a child and now as an aging adult.  I am lucky thus far.

I now even have a cat, two cats — my parents would not allow me to have a pet, but I did know I liked animals, was comfortable around them.  Today I find them good company and did want a pet from the time Jim and I married, and we got Llyr, our dog, shortly after landing in the US in 1970.  She was with us for the first 11 years of Jim and my and all of her life together, and now I’ve had Clarycat and Ian with me for over 13 years. They were 4 months old when we adopted them.

Our bright babies more or less the first days they were with us

A description of Ian last week: this wicked and smart cat today plucked and pulled out of a slender piece of silk-like material with a non-tied string on top my reading glasses (for bedtime). I know that because when I came into the bathroom there was the material, minus the glasses, on the floor! He once stole a denture I never found and had to replace (luckily the below one but $1500). I’ve seen him fish a glove from my handbag and trot off with it in his mouth. He still nightly opens drawers in bureaus, climbs in, and hours later comes out. Other tricks include a double leap from the kitchen floor to the washing machine top to the top of the cupboards. Like a kangaroo.

Now I have 3 pairs of reading glasses (and 3 pairs of distance ones), possible since the Internet where I have found $39glasses (plus shipping, not a lot). They cost more than that when you have some fancy details changed on the frame or custom-made lenses but never above $100 for me. 3 pairs of reading glasses: an older loose one kept on my sunporch, a good pair kept on my desk and this $8 pair I bought in a Canadian Pharmacy and works very well. Indeed I like it best.

All’s well that ends well. I found this pair not far from the silk-like holder on the floor near my bed, a kind of trail Ian might have taken. He tired of carrying them.

The loving spirit of my cats and once my dog

Christmas eve is like most others. Here I am in my room. An old friend, scholar-colleague, I had lunch with and went to the Phillips’ collection with (once again), lost her husband two years ago now. Some dreadful condition/disease that resembled cancer destroyed him. We had our first one-on-one close time together since well before that, and she told me she has found widowhood “horrible” — this being left alone compounded by the pandemic lockdown so most of her work she does from home. Paradoxically she is now in phased retirement, she said in part because if she keeps up her teaching as she practiced it (she is tenured through incessant community service to the college beyond the many hours of teaching and researched and published writing), that will leave no time for making new kinds of circles of friends she finds herself suddenly bereft of and as yet in need of.

For me it has been rather desolatingly without joy, or sympathetic companionship nearby. I have imagined yet real friendships and acquaintances of imagined yet real communities on the Net. I see these are not real enough for her. Nor the worlds of her research which is book history, which is when you come down to what you are reading, about practicalities of networking with physical objects made by machines to be sold.

Dickens’s A Christmas Carol as a child’s puzzle

All this is to introduce my idea or say what a year of reading I’ve had. I’ve found to keep myself viable as a teacher continually teaching term after term I have had to move into wholly or mostly new areas and read and understand in order to convey the meaning of new books in new areas, or books I knew but not that well in areas I previously was a dilettante in – and basically remain so, even with these new layers of secondary reading in Anglo-Indian history and culture, European World War Two history and events, now Italian 20th century authors and culture (which means I must know more about the land and peoples’ history). I’ve been introduced to new women writers through zoom experiences with excellent teachers from the bookstore communities of Politics and Prose. Joan Didion’s fiction, James Baldwin’s fiction.

Opening up too, since his death, like my friend needing others far far more, and so now seeing my past through a prism of disability, and accepting this and the necessity to compromise, to exert self-control, and to do more than seem to accept others’ abilities and corollary different knowledge and ideas.  I find I understand and can enjoy more genres — like the detective story, the spy one; can appreciate comedy, laughter that forgets the hardnesses of life. So I’ve new stacks of books to conquer in the area of the women detective, especially as imagined by the woman writer. This is what has been memorable about this year, the experience I’ve had that’s been valuable.

A favorite still from long ago now revived in my mind: Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison with Stuart Wilson as Dr Patrick Schofield

I have not named any but Persuasion as yet in this blog. I admit sometimes I think these autobiographical blogs are nothing but lists of books and movies, with variously accompanying explications (close readings). Do I dare not specify?

Famous writers are asked in these periodicals I subscribe to: what was the book that meant most to you this year. Why Iris Origo’s Images and Shadows where she wrote about what reading and writing has meant to her sounded in my imaginary ears what I would like to have written — and equally eloquently. Edward Gordon’s literary biography of Angela Carter has displaced Claire Tomalin’s Story of herself last year; which replaced Claire Harman’s biography of Charlotte Bronte a few year ago — how do they get inside a person and experience the very crevices of their existences and with concrete detail too?

Have I learned to love a new writer, yes, Joanna Trollope as a writer. This year’s new best novel:  Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White.  Best movies: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Monsieur Lahzar.  Have I gotten to a new masterpiece, yes Hugo’s Les Miserables (excellently translated). Annis Platt’s Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction has taught me more about l’ecriture-femme and that I have much more to learn. The year’s fun book has been Anthony Horowitz’s brilliantly playful Magpie Murders as last years was David Nicholls’s Us. Two new addictive serials (still watching) Foyle’s War and Prime Suspect.

And I’ve left out so many lesser great and wonderful experiences in books, the best of the finest souls before my eyes. Actors too on the computer screen. Tonight I was reading Gray Cavendiser and Nacy C Jurik’s Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect.

My picture tonight is from Poldark, Demelza’s first Christmas at Trenwith, meeting Ross’s great aunt … How I loved those first 7 Poldark and then the 11th books … They did alter my life for the time I was reading them, watching the serials, and then writing blogs and working on a book

That’s Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza and Caroline Blakiston as Aunt Agatha (2015 Poldark)

And so another year without Jim has passed. I am in my tenth year of life in the world without him. I miss him so. I wish I could tell him all I’m doing and have done for the past 9 years, wish I could have done for and with him what I did not know enough to do when he existed, but as I’ve told myself on this blog as epigraph, I must not reproach myself for a now dreamt-of unlived life with my beloved.

He would say when I asked, he was satisfied. It’s fine, I like our life together, he’d say.

Ellen

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We are 76: diary entries for 3 days and nights; the brilliant wit of Magpie Murders … Songs by Sondheim, art by Sargent

Flowers from supermarket and snacks & drink for the week from earlier this autumn

Why we? I counted 5 friends and acquaintances who told me they are become 76 this year too

Dear friends and readers,

I turned 76 on November 29th.  I’m using the occasion to express and reflect on this transitional state which I feel I’m in but don’t understand that well. I’m not sure what’s changing in me and time continues to separate me from what I was when Jim first died. Julian Barnes calls the time after a beloved person has died, their deathtime in one’s memory. It’s being brought on partly or even largely by my (and most other faculty, whether remunerated or volunteer-retired) inability to bring back enough people into the classrooms in person so as not to have to worry, that this day I may arrive at an empty or nearly empty classroom. For older people the partial cause is Covid is still attacking and killing off older people in visible numbers. So I am looking forward to teaching and taking courses online almost wholly until March, and after March (spring term) mostly online, perhaps until next fall (2023) or the following spring (2024). Maybe looking forward is not the phrase I want.

I’m going to try for a routine myself. By 8:30 this morning I’ll be exercising for half an hour, and sometime mid-day I’ll try for a 20-30 minute walk. Again, I’ll be in a great deal, and most of what I’ll do will be online so I must try to keep myself busy, communicate with people online cordially and exercise. Sleep I can’t force: last night I slept but 4 hours, but when I got up I read Magpie Murders, the novel by Anthony Horowitz. Yes I got the book. It’s a delightful parody of your typical Booker Prize books among other things — I’ll write about the book separately (see below for serial). Come near Xmas I’ll watch the Biederbecke TV series and others I can find that cheer me.

I’ve had a repeat of the experience I’ve often described here: another woman I’d become friends with and visited, visited me, or I went out with (though not since summer 2021) was breaking appointments to the point I finally wrote to her about it in such a way that I knew she’d either fall silent altogether or try to mend the relationship. So now she has silently opted for Choice 1 — the internet slang might be she’ll ghost me again (previous times she has pretended she didn’t get the email, or her phone was out of order just at the time I phoned her). She would never tell me openly how she felt; if at some point she wanted to break it, she never told me or why.

Joanna Trollope in Next of Kin has given me second thoughts: “It was simply that he couldn’t go on loving someone who kept sucking him down into the bog of her own personality problems — or at least, he could love her but he couldn’t live with her [I am thinking of myself as this guilty preying person but don’t think I did that this time, but I probably did in previous relationships] … He didn’t want to emphasize the effect of her defeatism on him, or indeed any other of her deficiencies but he wanted to make her think [again it’s me who am defeatist but one would then have to talk to me to bring this out more] ‘I don’t want never to see you again,’ he planned to say, ‘I just can’t see you for a bit. Not until you’ve got something to give me back'” [so what is it that I should be offering other people back?]

I saw this magnificent painting at the National Gallery this past Wednesday with Betty at the National Gallery — an exhibit of John Singer Sargent’s painting while he was in Spain. He copied several famous painter’s paintings and then produced the long-pent-up depictions of ordinary people in all their depths. The good there is inedible and Betty becomes quickly impatient at these exhibitions but I did see some art worth the gazing

It’s not just external things — I find I am not eager to go anywhere — it was Betty’s idea to go and we had made the appt a while back. I admit I was the one to back out of the second I was to go to (the Phillips Collection) with her this Saturday. But she wrote back very quickly, relieved herself. How relieved I was. I do worry so I won’t get back before dark – darkness arrives not far from 5 pm. “Hello darkness my old friend. What are you doing here at 5 pm!”

Now I wrote about this last time so will not repeat again the terms of or feelings I’m having as I struggle to understand this new phase of widowhood, and spend my time enjoyably and productively (for me this means new learning, new books, discovery of new authors, new topics and writing projects), and cheerfully online with others. Since I last wrote, I’ve gone deeper into Joanna Trollope (read two more books, listening to a third), and started both my women’s and Italian studies for winter and next spring. It’s hard to make a plan and follow it. Tomorrow I will disrupt my new pattern to attend a few of the Renaissance Society of America’s sessions for their yearly AGM (going on virtually these few days). A big help is I do love all the books I’m reading and find the topics I follow of intense interest. As usual I like particularly the secondary (critical and biographical) books.

But my body tires so I cannot exercise or walk was much, and I grow sadder as the day moves into night. This was exacerbated this past week by the insistent holiday statements I see everywhere on the Net and hear too among the occasional acquaintances I meet. I’m told to be very happy and loving amid my family and friends. I can see that my quiet relatively alone state is not uncommon because enough people describe what they are doing truthfully on the corners of FB, twitter and listservs I inhabit. Nonetheless, getting through Thanksgiving and my birthday became a sort of work project where I enlisted acquaintances and friends by posting about how I (we, for Izzy was with me) got through.

An Egyptian goose — each morning when I arrive at twitter — sometimes around 8 am or so — someone I follow who follows me has put on photographs of mid-England parks and birds near where she lives

So here’s what I posted onto FB later last Thursday afternoon (a short version appeared on twitter):

Izzy and I walked across Old Town this afternoon — balmy sunny weather. We used to do this each year after Jim died and before the pandemic. The tree is the Alexandria City tree in the Town Square and the lights are on — though you cannot see them. My strength did give out towards the end. That was 4 years ago and I was reminded of how I felt when we “did” Toronto with our two kind but much younger [than me] friends this past August, but home now. Another half hour we’ll put on a roast chicken for two. We could have gone out to a bought dinner, but I’m glad we have chosen this. From Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:

But when the long hours of public are past,
And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last …

We won’t have champagne, orange juice for her and Merlot for me must do us. Now I’ll return to Margaret Atwood’s sardonically funny (funny is not quite the word I want) Penelopiad. I hope all who read this message are having a good day and evening.

Then last this Sunday evening on FB (nutshell on twitter):

Promotional photo of Ada’s on the River looking outward from inside the place at the Potomac

My 76th birthday is in 2 days and so my daughter, Laura, and her husband, Rob, came around 6 to take us out to a new restaurant in a new area of Old Towne, Alexandria: Ada’s on the River. The dinner was delicious and the desert too. I had my first whiskey and ginger ale (two of them) for a very long time. I don’t keep hard liquor in the house lest I drink too much. I liked the walk back afterwards along the Potomac from boardwalk to boardwalk. It’s very rare I am out at night nowadays.

There are still several areas around the Potomac, just near the river, which have been relatively desolate — they were very much so when Jim & I first moved to Alexandria. This is a southern city, originally blighted by slavery for the majority of people, then gross inequality and severe racism and classism structured into all the institutions and gov’t of the area, and while after WW2 and middle 1960s, when conditions began to improve the growth of certain areas has been slow and uncertain — Carter had made a good start with new housing, but Reagan destroyed that. Very expensive housing developments along the edge of this town here and there in the 1990s, some on the river . Recently then — last 20 years all along the river for the first time building up the boardwalks, the places for sailing, areas of recreational fun — so new restaurants and bars.

I shall have to find my own travel plan this summer — next week I’ll call Road Scholar and if the Irish registration is still there, I’ll go with them. I’ll try to do the global retry and pre-TSA stuff at the airport in the spring. There is now a silver line Metro going to Dulles that stops at King Street Station; Izzy has said she will come with me to help me through the machines going out.

In the meantime we four planned for a Christmas time together, a movie (an Agatha Christie type), a dinner at home (cooked by Rob, who’s become quite a cook) and exchange of presents.

What I didn’t tell anyone on FB or twitter was after an hour or so when I’d got home and was watching Magpie Murders (on which see below) I began to cry and cry and cry. I could feel Laura’s reluctance to be there when they first arrived, and know we won’t see them again after Christmas for a long while. It was Rob who walked beside me there and back.

For my birthday itself I took it easy, read favorite books, had yummy soup for lunch, and put this on FB (nutsell on twitter)

I am 76! In my now enclosed porch or sunroom where live my movie (dvds) collection, notebooks, films scripts, companions … all around me my little radio, ipad, pussycat bed by window … I am torn between sending a link to Sondheim’s “I’m still here ….” (as belted out by Elaine Stritch) or Old friends (done by a variety of male singers): favorite line: “What’s to discuss? …”

Izzy took the photo with her cell phone

This is to thank the many people sending me cards, pictures, good wishes, wise sayings … I can’t seem to reach every one to thank each person individually but know that I do thank you and you are helping me to pass a cheerful good day ….

About an hour or so later I listened to and watched Elaine Stritch on YouTube: when I watched I thought of my 27 years as an adjunct lecturer, and remember the line from Elaine Showalter quoted about a heroine in one of Jean Rhys’s novels who stands for all women: Still one man away from welfare ….

Over the long day and evening and next morning I really did get many cheering messages, a lot of them individualized, a few teases, but kindly meant I felt. Two cards, one from my aging aunt, another from a long time old Internet British friend, met three times in Oxford; my cousin, Pat had phoned me too

Then very late in the evening: from Merrily We Roll Along (Jim thought this probably Sondheim’s deepest truest musical) “Old Friends:” now I had to admit I have damn few old friends (or they live far away, a few old acquaintances. This was after the final episode of Magpie Murders

We are coming to the end of the year, its ripe death (as people might say), so I’ll end on citing just one book I feel I drew most joy and learning from across the whole year: Iris Origo’s Images and Shadows, especially when she talked of her writing, art, and the imagination. A new author answering the needs of my heart in a new healthy way, teaching me to see and to help myself, Joanna Trollope (not a comfort read at all after all).

And as with two years ago with David Nicholls’ Us (book and film), I have truly got a great kick out of Magpie Murders, a murder mystery serial in the Agatha Christie tradition, scripted and produced by the inimitable Anthony Horowitz (I am still re-watching Foyle’s War)

Atticus Pund explaining where they are going to Sue Rylands

It’s self-reflexive: it’s Anthony Horowitz meditating the life and work of a mystery writer, a hack out of the Agatha Christie tradition — only Horowitz knows he is no mere hack and has gone beyond the originating subgenre. We have two different levels of story: in one we are with the writer, Alan Conway, his editor, Sue Rylands (Leslie Manville), the head of the publishing company, Conway’s cynical homosexual ex-lover and his embittered sister, Claire; in the other the characters in Conway’s book most of whom correspond to counterpart characters in the series’ real life, often ironically — except for the detective, Atticus Pund (Tim McMullan, originally Timothy Spall was dreamed of) and the editor, Sue Rylands. The same actor will plays at least 2 roles — one person appears in three (if I’m not mistaken). We also see these characters when they are playing characters who existed decades ago and when they are playing contemporary characters (a downright common trope nowadays is a jump in time but rarely this cleverly done and usually with two different look-alike actors).

It’s not too mechanical, too much artifice of this type would cloy. So beyond Atticus Pund and Sue Rylands, Sue’s sister, Katie (Claire Rushbrook) and Sue’s lover, Andreas (Alexandros Logothetis), a teacher of Greek who would like to go live in Crete with Sue, have no counterparts in the 1950s story in the book. The two murderers are played by different actors, they look and are different, though they do the deed in similar fashion. The murderer’s black girlfriend in the 1950s story in the book has no counterpart in the contemporary life story. You might have expected this to be the other way round, but no. In both narratives, the same black actor plays the Anglican vicar.

What’s fascinating is how we move from book (takes place 1950s) back to life (takes place 2022). The camera is following the 1950s characters and car in the book down the road, we reach a bend and turn and now we are with the 2022 characters in life. One moves back and forth starting with the third episode, Atticus Pund; but he is noticed by no one but Sue Rylands, who at first regards him as simply an individual figment of her imagination, but by the end treats him as a person like herself and enters the world of the book to discover how the book ends. The tone throughout is warm and witty

I am now taught how this kind of material — murders growing out of deep bitterness, jealousy, selfishness, sociopathic impulses — a dog is even poisoned — can become absorbing and curiously comforting matter — as in Foyle’s War we have good guys and they win through, with a justice of sorts achieved

So that’s all for tonight as I move into winter. Better to be alive than not (as Elaine Stritch reminds us)

John Singer Sargent: Snow — I wonder if we’ll see any this winter in Alexandria?

Ellen

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Widowhood: I seem to be going through another transition

Woods and Streams in Delaware, [early] Winter, 1916 (Edward W. Redfield)

“Alas, with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing” (Austen, Persuasion Chapter 7)

Dear friends and readers,

I seem to be going through yet another transition in this seeming both long and short widowhood. I’ve stopped going out as much as I once did. Of course part of the cause of this is that I can no longer drive once the sky reaches dusk, but I could go out more during the day, and I could have recourse to Uber/Lyft
and ordering cabs ahead. I don’t. Part of this the effect of self-quarantining taken well past what I understand most or many others have done. It is so peaceful; I am no longer used to enduring the agonies, anxiety as I begin to realize I am lost and panic when I find I am not at all where I meant to be. Waze recently updated itself and now it is of no use to me at all. I can’t get past “save this destination” to “go now.” I’m telling myself I shall be reading more, and I think there’s evidence that I am already.

This is a matter of telling myself what I’m not quite following. I’m telling myself I’m giving over trying to write longer books and volunteering for talks and short projects. I’m not quite following this as I volunteered to give another talk to the Every-other-week online London Trollope Society group on (as I’m calling it) Anthony Trollope’s American Civil War Christmas Stories: “The Widow’s Mite” and “The Two Generals.” As a result of doing a talk on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for an OLLI at AU class, I’ve thought of a course for spring 2024 that might actually attract enough people to dare to do it in public: I’d call it “Everybody’s Protest Novel” after James Baldwin’s famous scathing essay on Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Richard Wright’s Native Son. And I’d do:

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Louisa May Alcock, “Contraband;” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Joan Didion, Play it like it Lays and El Salvador by Joan Didion, and James Baldwin’s short non-fiction story, “Stranger in a Village” and novel, If Beale Street could talk …

But this will be the last; after this I will stick with the new terrains I’ve carved out: Italian literature, Anglo-Indian memoirs and novels (British style fiction set in India is the longer phrase) and women writer courses. And 19th century masterpiece courses, mostly by Trollope as central and framing presence.

This means I will be alone more, and am teaching myself to accept being alone and this great loneliness since Jim died. I am tired of trying uselessly for what cannot be and what I am not sure I’d at all like. Go out with friends who ask me, but don’t chase, don’t be the one to suggest unless it is really a museum show, a play, a musical or concert you want to go to.

I do not mean to deny what joy or happiness I can feel when I’ve been out with others, spent good time with others. I knew such exhilaration and contentment when the class I had been teaching these past 9 weeks ended today.

One person had suggested we start at 1:15 to give us ourselves full time to cover all we wanted and watch film clips from the early 1990s BBC The Rector’s Wife, and the 1983 Barchester Chronicles. Eight of the nine people who have been coming steadily agreed and what a splendid class it was. I know they were enjoying it and so was I. It is so much better in person when there is a full enough class.

Yet I will not do it again until Spring 2024 since it is such a difficult thing to build a class of people coming regularly nowadays that I lose perspective, fret over how few may show up (an inappropriate response to an adult education or playful college class).

Can you understand this, gentle reader? Some new phase of calm is what I am feeling come over me, or wanting calm at long last. I discovered I lost weight when I went to Dr Wiltz a couple of weeks ago with a list of pains and complaints that he duly checked over, to tell me I am fine, just getting older yet. I’ve kept to my vow not to add sugar to anything and so I eat less.

18th century lady’s shoes

Every Friday until I run out I’m putting foremother poet blogs on Wompo — the only one. No one can bother post anything which is not about building their career. Last week it was Mary Jones, an 18t century chantress (as Johnson called her) who wrote these beautiful verses upon the death of her beloved friend, Miss Clayton; they are to her memory

Still, but for Thee, regardless might I stray,
Where gentle Charwell rolls her silent tide;
And wear at ease my span of life away,
As I was wont, when thou were at my side.

But now no more the limpid streams delight,
No more at ease unheeding do I stray;
Pleasure and Thou are vanish’d from my sight,
And life, a span! too slowly hastes away.

Yet if thy friendship lives beyond the dust,
Where all things else in peace and silence lie,
I’ll seek Thee there, among the Good and Just.
‘Mong those who living wisely — learnt to die.

And if some friend, when I’m no more, should strive
To future times my mem’ry to extend,
Let this inscription on my tomb survive,
‘Here rest the ashes of a faithful friend.’

A little while and lo! I lay me down,
To land in silence on that peaceful shore,
Where never billows beat, or tyrants frown,
Where we shall meet again, to part no more.”

Change a name and a pronoun and this connects to the way I feel about Jim, though I know I shall never meet him again, since literally he no longer exists, nor will I when I die.

This is what I have to report. This is what I have to come in the next two months. Lunch out with my friend, Alison tomorrow, two museum shows with Betty and one play (MAAN) and one musical (Into the Woods) with Betty in December. Lunch with Eleanor sometime in December: Zorba the Greek restaurant in Dupont Circle. One in person DC Trollope reading group meeting this Sunday — just outside Bethesda (Nina Balatka), and lunch with OLLI at AU SGLs one day in December. Laura and Rob with Izzy will take me out to dinner on Nov 27th as two days before my birthday. Christmas we’ll go with Rob and Laura to a good movie, and then back to their house for dinner at home and exchange of presents. I’ll tell you about these as they happen.

Now I’m evolving a reading plan for myself and I’ve begun with Italian studies (first up Grazia Deledda’s Cosima), Heroine’s books (Charlotte Gilman Perkins’s Women and Economics and Annis Pratt’s Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction), back to, beginning again Valerie Martin’s marvelous The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (a ghost story!). Then as I please beloved individual authors as I feel them (Joanna Trollope a new source of comfort and strenght, Next of Kin) and literary history (Joan Hedrick’s biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe).

Leslie Manville as Sue Ryelands (she’s also in Sherwood, The Crown, was Mrs ‘arris who went to Paris)

Evenings wonderful serials — I am actually enjoying Magpie Murders on PBS, which I’ll blog about with BritBox’s Sherwood and Karen Pirie (Val McDermid’s Distant Echo, set in modern Scotland. The year of Leslie Manville! Last blogs have been on Outlander 6 (1-4 & 5-8), seasons of processing grief, time of trauma; and upon the coming retirement of Judy Woodruff.

How much this house means to me I cannot express strongly enough. My refuge, my memories (Jim all around me), my beloved cats. I vow (like poor Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda, I’ve just finished) to remain more cheerful, open to others partly by drawing boundaries.

Here is the red berry bush on one side of my house: finally it bloomed and turned out to be the sort of bush I associate with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and beautiful middle English poetry

Late autumn, beginning my tenth year without Jim,

Ellen

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Autumn: Early October days are hard for me

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

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

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

Dear friends,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian sitting up for Laura

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

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

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

Ellen, still his faithful wife

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High or Mid-summer

Beloved Clarycat in a sun puddle  — she stays near me, is with me day & night

Voters in Kansas overwhelmingly voted to reject an amendment to their constitution that would have stripped protections for abortion rights: this despite the wording of the question which made yes into no, & absolute lying texts about which vote was which. This in a state where GOP in charge, a so-called Red state

Hurrah!

Dear friends and readers,

We’ve reached August, and it’s ferociously hot outside — 90F and high humidity so it feels like 107F. The heat exhausts me this year; so too my cats. One day they frightened me by not eating for what seemed 24+ hours, but what they wanted was a new brand — and they were hot because I had been gone for hours and put the air-conditioning up so as to save money. It’s also Laura’s 9th anniversary — married 9 years ago, together with him 18.

Laura and Rob — they’ve taken one vacation this summer and are about to take another (the first they went to a beach place for a week)

On my political blog I’ve been keeping track of the news from a general POV, but here as to inflation and the power of uncontrolled monopoly capitalism what is happening is felt directly by all of us now and it hurts. I pay on average every couple of weeks over $300 for food; my cleaning bills are well over $40 when Izzy goes out to work; $200 a month at least for the air-conditioning that makes living endurable. It now costs $25 to fill up my car (small). At the same time I was told by my financial advisor the literal amounts my investments are worth went down 10%; I have to pay Schwab hefty fees for taking care of what in detail I don’t understand. I am wondering if the advisor and consultant are paying as much attention to my portfolio as they once did.

I am among millions of people being squeezed. Corporate profits are soaring because they put prices up; they are doing all they can to stop legislation from helping people and dealing with climate change. Their power goes back to Citizens United where it was decided corporations are people and free speech= money. (The way fetuses are people but women it seems have no rights.)

Izzy and my visit to Thao and Jeff and baby William is next week! we will glimpse something of Toronto for two days. This necessitated filling out forms, and after all there is random testing on top of vaccination required at the airport. Doubtless what should be done but the whole situation — uncertain with virus morphing continually — is again a choice pushed on us by continual inadequate reactions and now cutting funding. If this had been the situation when I broached the idea I would not have gone through with it. And I’m told airports (Toronto-Pearson one of these) are madhouses with long delays. Of course not to worry the airlines are making any less money; the situation is that way because they’ve set it up to make sure they still make large profits while Covid is still scaring people, and others have decided they will not be as exploited as they were before the pandemic and not gone back to work at these terrible airport hangers. I’m always nervous about trips but I do want to go and see this young woman and so does Izzy.

Midsummer — planted hydrangeas doing well — a lovely white and blue flower

More news of this happier sort is my teaching is over and went very well. I had small classes, and it’s becoming obvious that in fact the population of the two OLLIs do not value the social contact as much as I had supposed and prefer online classes for convenience. I could attract a much larger class if I went online or (shudders) did a hybrid. I’ve now watched a hybrid while I was on campus: the teacher sits in front of a desk with a screen behind him or her of him or herself very large; in the room most of the seats were empty and perhaps 5 people literally there; to the side, a whole bunch in the gallery of tiles formation, many of them resolutely in black boxes (unseen). I am told if I’m home in a hybrid class I will no longer see the gallery, but just the teacher across the screen. Yuk. My habit for zooms is always to keep my view gallery view, including when I’ve given a talk.

I admit myself I’m attending two wonderful classes from Politics and Prose online: Elaine Showalter is just so insightful and well-informed on four women writers, and Helen Hooper can conduct a class discussion very well — at Politics and Prose just about everyone turns the camera on (as opposed to OLLI at Mason where just about everyone turns it off — I am an exception to that). I couldn’t come to the one in the evening. And my beloved London Society Trollope group comes from London. I admit my favorite of the novels of the two P&P classes has been Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (not my first time reading it) and I enjoyed mightily the recent movie by Dan Ireland (with Joan Plowright and Rupert Friend and Anna Massey and David Lang, who died during filming — it is a book and film about aging people and dying) even if it sentmentalised the book (which is not over-sad given what it shows about typical old age — loneliness is a central problem)

Anna Massey as Mrs Arbuthnot, what’s left of the usual cruel woman of Taylor’s books is more softened yet to the point we love her …

Nevertheless, as a teacher there is no comparison between teaching online and in person. Going in person is good for my mental health; also I find that when I’m in a zoom I can’t tell if the people are understanding the text; an example of this is I taught Christa Wolf’s Cassandra to a group at OLLI at Mason online and because a few people were talking, and two of them seem to have understood some things better than me I thought as a whole it had gone well. I go in person this summer for the same text, and within minutes I can see over 2/3s (a small class) were lost, so I ignored what I had and began by going over the overall story line of her trip to Greece (part of the book) — which they missed and it made a difference. Eyes lit up. You can get 4 way talk. I don’t use power-point and I show clips from movies only at the end of a course — after we’ve finished a book. Education comes from the talk with one another after reading excellent books. So I’ll hold out another term to remain in person, and only if the Trollope classes truly shrink will I return to online next spring (maybe).

I also finished my review of the Cambridge Complete Works of Anne Finch, and after three revisions, it’s accepted! What a relief. I feel relatively free. As I’ve said I am going to give a paper on the difference of studying an author through manuscripts than in printed books, with my two examples Jane Austen and Anne Finch, but for this I’ve done all the reading and thinking now and can draw on many blogs and reviews of editions of Austen’s manuscripts (also new Cambridge editions).

Elena (Lenu) and Raffaelle (Lila) don’t want to be lost to one another

So pleasing myself without regard for any commitments: tonight I watched the last episode of the second season of the film adaptation of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (The Story of a New Name). It’s superb. Tomorrow night I’ll go on to the third season (Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay) and begin summarizing them towards a good blog: here is a fine review talking of why the series is so brilliant — the minute-by-minute intricate intimate kind of tracing of the girls’ experiences over a lifetime. I spent the last week and a half mesmerized by the five extant Persuasion movies and wrote a good blog (it includes a review of the latest 2022 adaptation). I’ve turned to new beloved books: Italian in William Weaver’s excellent translation, Bassanio’s The Heron, with Ferrante in the Italian as I go through the film episodes is a new one I’ve not mentioned. I devoured Joanna Trollope’s Other People’s Children; Angela Carter’s strange The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales (for Showalter’s course I admit).

I subscribed to the online edition of the New Statesman. Jim and I used to love it; it was our first subscription. Then during the 1980s we dropped it as costing us too much then, but here I am going to get it again as a digital edition. It is wonderfully intelligent and genuinely pro-labor.

I will remember Jim this way too

As to online (delightful commitments) my Trollope&Peers list we really talked in detail and openly, usefully about The Small House at Allingham; I am learning why The Eustace Diamonds is so popular (it is vigorous entertainment, very funny in its sardonic uses of dramatic irony over Wilkie Collins kinds of stories except Trollope tells you up front who did what so it’s more fun), and we return to E.M. Forster next week. The FB TWWRN book just now is Bowen’s remarkably evasive The House in Paris, and for once for a little while friendly and revealing talk with one another on Janeites discussing what we learn from Austen’s characters in her books. (Next up for me is Joanna Trollpe’s Sense and Sensibility – her method is the same as her ancestor and Austen, only less ironic).

Shall I confide here that Elaine Showalter said she’d like to take my course this fall at OLLI at AU (the two Trollopes) if she can get transportation — well I was that chuffed …

No summer should go by without at least one strong dose of Shakespeare and happily I saw an absorbing and enjoyable Midsummer Night’s Dream performed by the Folger Shakespeare Company at the National Building Museum (A Summer Frolic and Community Event)

One afternoon I spent with two OLLI girlfriends in a sumptuous (truly beautiful, therapeutic gardens all around) terrace room talking. Twice I’ve gone out with Betty from OLLI at AU to plays and lunch in DC (actually the food pretty bad in the famous place but good in an unknown one in Chinatown); twice out to a movie and lunch and twice home here for a movie I play on my TV with Panorea. So much for social life. Panorea and I have begun to dream of a trip next summer using Road Scholar to go island hopping in the Mediterranean or to Greece (Athens, then Crete — like Christa Wolf did in her Cassandra book).

On the theme of long-term worries, the weather itself — the fires I watched start up spontaneously in London when they had several days of 104F weather made me begin to cry — I am that attached; but also the fires here in the US destroying vast acres of houses, flooding Kentucky where everything one has is lost terrify me. This too could happen to my house and its irreplaceable treasures.

Kentucky flooding — lives lost too

London on fire — you’d think it was California

This is summer too nowadays —

and it is the saddest one I’ve known since the first summer Jim died. I don’t know why but maybe it is settling in he’s never coming back … and all that means. I like my new life insofar as the teaching is concerned, the friends I now have, my sense of self-dependence but all pales besides how bereft I really am

That concludes this evening, gentle reader, all might want to hear (and that decorum in public allows me to tell you), so I end on a summer image from a beautiful painting, early 20th century, Russian woman painter where I didn’t manage to take down her name

Ellen

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May: I seem to be busy once again

Me and Ian, photo taken by Izzy this past month

Dear friends and readers,

I thought I was looking forward to much less to do, but find after all I made new commitments on top of my old ones and am struggling to catch up. This month too I felt again worried about my health (signs of aging); I had some good moments — mostly honestly when I was teaching, or reading a good book; and some bad — I got lost twice trying to get to the Tysons Corner clinic center, and when by myself simply returned home without getting the scheduled second booster shoot; when with Izzy, she saved the day by whipping out her cell phone and using the app called apple. Though she said the apple app (a mapping software) was inferior (as it did not tell us which direction to go in, only showed the road itself), the apple app as used by Izzy got us to the Tysons site, where I had a heart stress test. The nurse practitioner pronounced “you have a healthy heart” after I had sustained quick walking on a ever faster treadmill for over 20 minutes.

In some of this there was a lesson to be learnt — or reminded of. I rescheduled the trip to Ireland for August 2023; yes to go and come back on the plane I’d have to be tested for Covid, and if the test were positive have to stay for 2 weeks in self-quarantine in a hotel room. I would truly become half-crazy were I to be so stranded (and charged for it). Tonight I made an agreement with a male friend with whom I once before went to ES/ASECS in October with to go again this year: he flies here and stays with me one night; drives me to the place (a inn in Wilmington, Delaware, near the Winterthur museum where the conference will be held); we stay there together for 2 nights, 3 days; he drives us back, and then takes an airplane back home (Arkansas of all places — poor man). When I looked at the address, I knew I couldn’t find it myself and on top of that can not drive at night even the shortest of distances.

My friend has made two panels up, and will himself chair a festschrift meeting in honor of a long-time member of EC/ASECS, head of the Bucknell Press. For me this means I will automatically be part of 3 sessions, active, and due to the way he wrote up the panels, I’ve thought of a new paper: “From Either End of the Long Eighteenth Century: Anne Finch’s ‘Folger’ Book and Jane Austen’s Unpublished Fiction.” I’ve now for months (on and off) been studying how the new Cambridge complete edition of Finch’s poetry is a book which attempts to give the reader the closest experience one can have of the original 3 manuscripts they are found in, and a number of years ago I wrote a review of the Cambridge edition of the later manuscripts of Jane Austen where I studied how these works are shaped and project meaning through their manuscript state. It’s is almost a matter of reading quite a number of blogs and sitting down and writing it out, and then turning to the review of the Finch book at last, and writing it. My friend’s financial needs and academic outlook are fitting mine. A positive development, no?

Another lesson came out of my PC computer acting up in the later afternoon. The fan kept coming on. I emailed the IT guys and one came on quickly and did a bunch of updates for about half an hour and the problem seemed to cease. Alas, the next day it came back in a milder form. I had the idea to google and ask what I should do and read there that fans can come on if one has too many applications open. So I put a huge number of files and pictures on my desktop away in windows explorer, and voila, the fan ceased. My desktop is also clear. The IT guy had claimed to fix my landscape mechanism so that it would once again change every once in a while the first picture that comes up after turning the machine on, but he had not succeeded. In a way I prefer it — changes make me nervous.

Below is a favorite image — one I would not mind as my wall paper. You have seen it on this blog before, gentle reader. I am imagining I am by the sea (by the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea … ), a beach — something that does not happen to me much (at all?) any more. Staring out into the sky, at the birds.

Sara Sittig — By the sea (by the sea, by the beautiful sea ….) — knowing Jim not out there any more

Much solaced and compelled absorbed this month by Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (I’m in the third volume, Barbie Batchelor’s mind pure visual poetry – I’m teaching only Jewel in the Crown), Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (where she lets loose at long last the tragedy of diasporic disconnection and search for individual fulfillment through a woman character who ends up alienated from all who would have loved her), and have learned of and enjoy her rich Italian identity and beautiful language In Altre Parole and Trovo Mi Dove.

To speak in, think in, read and (the highest attainment) write in another language is to become part of another world — and I too love the Italian one. On Trollope&Peers our book for this month of June-July is Tarchetti’s Fosca as translated by Lawrence Venuti as Passion(the name from a 1980s movie and then Sondheim’s musical). Lahiri’s In altre parole is actually a perceptive study on what one gains by reading a translation consciously — not pretending it is the actual original text but a translation into another language and (often) place.

As to movies I was truly absorbed once again in all four Mansfield Park (Metropolitan one of them) movies as I reread that strange book by Austen — and it is strange the perceptive heroine, full of a depth of emotion, imprisoned in taboos. I’ve also been reading through the startling depths and intricacies of everyday life and emotional attachment and cool calculation in Trollope’s masterwork, The Small House at Allington (modeled on and meant to surpass I’m sure Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, with Lily a fully sexualized Marianne, and Bell a yet more careful of her heart, Elinor Dashwood). I promised a talk to be called Barsetshire in Pictures.  I admit the sex is pretty good in the first Outlander book, and I’ve bought the DVD for the sixth season and await it impatiently.

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Barkley L. Hendricks, George Jules Taylor (1972)

The above is but one image of many works of art of all sorts that make up some seven rooms of an exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in DC, called Afro-Atlantic Histories. I had made a date to go the National Gallery and have lunch there too with a friend, and see any new exhibits and old favorites. I did not realize was one of these blockbuster shows which offers unexpectedly extraordinary experiences, but individually and within the context the show creates. Powerful art depicting and showing frighteningly inhuman remnants (e.g., irons to put around enslaved people’s necks to continually hurt and cow and control their every movement) and recreating the experiences of slavery in the Afro-Atlantic world from the 17th century to the 19th, and then a recurring reformulation (direct choices by powerful people in gov’t and business in cahoots) of impoverishment and immiseration for black people by making situations where they stay in the lowest and poorest classes of people. Not all was despair, for the art tended to be modern, 20th century and after because only in the 20th century are the realities of the experience for enslaved people and then impoverished people acknowledged. Some striking photography in the 20th of admirable looking or celebratory people (mostly black) in the US, or Latin or South America. Portraits of individuals. Some of the older pictures were beautiful too — done by abolitionists in the 18th and 19th century following picturesque and other eye-pleasing costume and arrt conventions.

Theodore Gericault’s 1811 Portrait of a Mestizia

I came home to buy at ebay the companion book which includes 2/3s as many art works as are in the exhibit. It came very quickly and I’ve been finding it very much worth immersing yourself in. Sometimes going to a country does not help learn its history since those who were in power erased everything they could about the means they took inflicted on other people. Art brings these things to light and re-imagines and re-creates them here. I’ve been taking two superb courses at OLLI at AU: one on the achievements of Thurgood Marshall, and the other on Lincoln which focuses on his evolution towards complete emancipation for all enslaved people, and his thinking about political and civil rights for African Americans which they as all people innately must have to live a good human life. Lincoln not only opposed the expansion of slavery but also condemned slavery as evil and wrong. I bought and am reading Eric Foner’s Lincoln and American Slavery and Juan Williams’s Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. There is a coterminous area between the two men: no one anywhere has a right to anyone as property. Marshall saw the way to achieve equality of life and fulfillment for black people was full integration.

One striking if not unique I hope rare desperate-helpless kind of experience this month was when face-book a few days suddenly would not download on my Macbook pro laptop and on this PC Computer none of the postings I wrote or anyone wrote to me or any postings at all were visible. My groups pages were all awry. Extremely trying since on google I was told face-book was not down, and therefore something was wrong particular to my computers or settings. But then I found where it seemed many people were having all sorts of odd barriers and problems, and a few the same as mine. So every three hours or so I sent messages to places on face-book where it says “report a problem.” You were told you would not get a reply and it would be used “to improve the general service.” But who knows? Here is what I found two mornings later on google: an explanation of sorts:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/10158791436142200/

And then last night around 1 am I went to face-book once again and all I need had returned. All messages are visible. My laptop uploading normally again. FB has changed again. All the groups have been reconfigured so the banner is smaller. What I can do, or the software and links on my timeline are slightly changed, so I can do less. I know an algorithm began to do to FB what it does to my gmail; in a pattern not all messages show all the time. I conclude they made it less expensive to run. It was not all bad. Numerous kind and generous people emailed me off FB, replied for me on FB — and I felt indeed I have FB friends with genuine concern for me. Pace all the pundits and political savvy types can say, I come to FB for companionship and they validated my raison d’etre for being there.

Here is my experience of the internet as of 1995 and then when these social media emerged from 1998 or so (blogs) and 2003 or so (social media, from livejournal to wordpress to FB, twitter &c): for the first time in my whole life I made a number of friends at once. Real friends then — some people I’ve never lost contact with — Michael Powe, still co-owner of Trollope&Peers; Diana Birchall, plus others. I found myself talking about books to others for the first time. I could read others’ opinions and yes tell my own more bravely for the first time. I was in an ongoing social life for the first time. Hitherto I was mostly alone. I loved it. I have omitted all the bad stuff — the bad stuff is a cyberspace version of the bad stuff in life. On FB over the past 9 nine years I’ve found forms of companionship I needed since Jim’s death — and the near death of listservs — surely you see how few of us there are here. Mine died because I gave up volunteer schedules, elections of books (where people vote books they don’t read) and because my approach is intellectual and often radical in some way or other or just doesn’t please – but also much competition. I now regard it as a small group of friends who read slowly together sorts. Social life through writing used to be the sole center — now I contact people by zoom, face-time, google hang-out and hear and see them and they me — am part of worlds and these worlds lead to worlds in physical space with others.

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The Stanhopes arrive at Mrs Proudie’s Converzatione (at the center Susan Hampshire as la Signora Nerone)

So what lies ahead? why so busy? In a few weeks I shall give another talk to the London Trollope Society group: Barsetshire in Pictures. This necessitates (see above) having read all The Small House in Allington (for Millais’s illustrations), going over all the many pictures by George Housman Thomas for Last Chronicle of Barsetshire, and watching once again the delightful (work of comic-grave genius) 1983 Barchester Chronicles – to get up and present and make interesting the pictures and sets of stills.

June I re-give my 4 week course (this time OLLI at AU) Retelling Traditional Histories and Tales from an Alternative POV. June into July a six week course on Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White and Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly) with two superb film adaptations for the Sensational and Gothic Novel Then and Now. Fall in both places: Anthony Trollope’s Last Chronicle (yet again!) with Joanna Trollope’s The Rector’s Wife and The Choir (and their film adaptations): Barsetshire Then and Now. I am really wondering if I should take off next winter, but now without Jim all alone here for weeks I would lose perspective (so to speak) so The Heroine’s Journey it is for 4 weeks a OLLI at Mason online next winter (Atwood’s Penelopiad, Wolf’s Medea, Ferrante’s Lost Daughter & Austen’s Northanger Abbey).

A surprise for me is the persistence of online classes: for OLLI at AU in June out of 29 classes, 18 are online, 2 hybrid, and only 9 in person; for OLLI at Mason in June-July, the greater number of online and hybrid to in person is even more striking. Do people fear Covid? Is it not worth the time and trouble to drive in and they feel they “get what they want” out of zooms: but 2/3s of a class may stay in black boxes (as if they had bags over their heads). Do you have any understanding of this?  I’ll be there in person with no hybrid alternative.

Olivia Coleman as a lost daughter (La Figlia Oscura)

August Izzy and I will travel to Toronto, Canada! to visit Thao who will have had her baby (William) in June: her first, and my first sort of grandchild, with Izzy as Auntie. We will book in later June. We are face-timing with Thao now once a month on Sunday evening.

Izzy this morning, as yet unlost

And I thought I had nothing to tell you. All this to fill my mind so that I can be at peace alone for reality, and with Jim in my mind and memory in the house and world he and I made together

Away, Melancholy

Away, melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.

Are not the trees green,
The earth as green?
Does not the wind blow,
Fire leap and the rivers flow?
Away melancholy.

The ant is busy
He carrieth his meat,
All things hurry
To be eaten or eat.
Away, melancholy.

Man, too, hurries,
Eats, couples, buries,
He is an animal also
With a hey ho melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.

Man of all creatures
Is superlative
(Away melancholy)
He of all creatures alone
Raiseth a stone
(Away melancholy)
Into the stone, the god
Pours what he knows of good
Calling, good, God.
Away melancholy, let it go.

Speak not to me of tears,
Tyranny, pox, wars,
Saying, Can God
Stone of man’s thoughts, be good?
Say rather it is enough
That the stuffed
Stone of man’s good, growing,
By man’s called God.
Away, melancholy, let it go.
Man aspires
To good,
To love
Sighs;
Beaten, corrupted, dying
In his own blood lying
Yet heaves up an eye above
Cries, Love, love.
It is his virtue needs explaining,
Not his failing.
Away, melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.

—Stevie Smith (1902-1971)

See Cats in Colour,

Ellen

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