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

Home Kit (a Getty image)

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

Here are a few stories:

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

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

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

A selection of moments from 2022

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

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

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

Ellen

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

Margaryta Yermolayeva — Witchy Art

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Famous still of Tim Courtney running for life

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

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

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

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

The pig is intensely relieved, feeling a puzzled gratitude

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

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

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

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

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

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

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

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

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

The Taxi

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

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

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

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

July 4th & On People not Wanting to (bother to?) come in person …

Mid-career — say the 4th or 5th season — the father-daughter pair, Sam Stewart [Wainright] (Honeysuckle Weekes) and Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen)

One of the last moments of this long-running series (began 2001, finally ended 2016)

I have been writing about Foyle’s War for some weeks now, watching & re-watching, and reading about the 8 series for some months, and originally intended to write one last blog tonight. These are seriously anti-war semi-historical mystery-thriller (seasons 1-6) and spy (7-8) DVD videos, from a beautiful box set I bought myself. I will write my last for now a few nights from now.

Dear friends and readers

This fourth of July in the US there has been another mass killing — during a parade somewhere in Chicago a man with a war weapon came along and began murdering people swiftly — as opposed to the way some weeks ago now now an 18 year old man executed slowly over an hour a group of children and their teachers in Texas some weeks ago, and some weeks before that a white man murdered a group of mostly elderly black people in a small grocery store because they were black.

Police literally shot to bits (rained bullets from high speed guns) a black man who was guilty of a minor traffic infraction. 60 shots. The white man who had been planning his massacre for weeks was just “taken into custody.” How is this?

It is no longer acceptable to use the word woman or women — you can be called out for complaining about being erased — while laws criminalizing pregnancy and women who get pregnant are now spreading across the US.

The heat in Alexandria today was so bad that after a longish walk in Old Towne, then supper, exhausted also from weeks of stress which makes me wake at 4:30 am (if I’m lucky enough to sleep 4 hours from midnight on), I fell asleep for 3 hours.

There are now 6 very bad people on the Supreme court who are busy making it impossible to do anything about gun proliferation, misogyny reaching new levels of cruelty, repression and absurdity, and climate catastrophe because (as they know) the congress is paralyzed due to an irrational custom called the filibuster where a group of people representing a minority of people in the US can stop all good or socially beneficial legislation. In their planned next step they are going to make it easier for states to prevent people from voting, to throw votes out, to do whatever any powerful group within a state wants to stop democracy from functioning.  They are also destroying whatever social safety net the majority of the people of the US want to function for themselves as a people.

Seven years ago now I posted on this blog what I thought was an appropriate video to watch during this yearly marking of the day in 1776 the Declaration of Independence was written, or published, or somehow made official. Appropriate then, before Trump took office as POTUS, it’s equally so tonight as the people in Ukraine flee their homes by the millions because Russian soldiers with ferocious weaponry and bombs are grindingly destroying Ukrainian city after city, and murdering as many Ukrainians as possible so that a very small number of Russians can take abolish a culture, take control of a land and its resources and use it to enrichen themselves further.

Zinn’s topic is “the three holy wars:” the American revolution, the civil war and World War Two:

Zinn points out that all wars consist of the indiscriminate killing of huge numbers (often thousands and thousands, millions sometimes) of people for uncertain ends. Maiming of thousands and sometimes millions more.

War is a top-down exercise; it cannot be carried on by any group in society but those who have their hands on great wealth, law and courts, power to make millions of people go out and kill others lest they be killed or imprisoned for not doing so. And so when the war is done very little reform the average person wants is achieved. After the Revolutionary war, very wealthy people made the constitution about property. After the civil war slavery was turned into state terror and semi-slavery for black people. Did World War Two end fascism? Not at all; turns out fascism lay low for a bit, and then emerged slowly again and eventually became strengthened, with new means found. In between war and passivity – or the stranglehold we are seeing in the US today in gov’ts, there are a thousands of possibilities to do good, and occasionally some good is done.

Listen up.

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For myself I have come up against the effects of Covid among the people I associate with: most of the people at the two OLLIs where I teach are still resisting coming, or have become unwilling to come, in person to classes or events. This is part of the bad effects of zoom technology. There are good ones (e.g., virtual conferences from far away).

Helen McNicoll, In the Shadow (or Shade) of the Tent — French Canadian painter, turn of century, found on the Net …

A week ago, the last Tuesday of June, at OLLI at AU for the fourth and last session of my Retelling Traditional Tales, just one person showed for my class. There were originally 8 registered. Two never showed; after two very good sessions; for the third, we were down to four but still a good session.  The one woman who showed for this last time and I had a good time one-on-one going over the second half of the book. I learned from her how hard Christa Wolf is for an average even good reader. She had not realized as a reading experience the two last essays of Cassandra and Four Essays were traveler’s tales. She could not see the funny and interesting adventures because she got bogged down with that Wolf was reading (Wolf’s talk about her reading and her thoughts about her reading vis-a-vis the time in Athens and Crete) so that’s part of what happened — she called it a “very literary text.” I could never have learned this about her reading experience in a zoom.  So I could not have helped her  She then said very interesting things about what she did understand, and I think had the two people I mentioned come they would have too. But these two central people had summer activities, one wrote me impertinently about watching the Jan 6th hearings, and 3 just vanished.

The larger or wider problem: in the wing of the OLLI at AU building I was in, I was the only teacher and class there. No one in the hitherto lively social space. I have been telling myself this is the result of fear of catching Covid among an elderly population & summer activities. I didn’t want to face what a friend told me flat out:  “it is just so much more convenient” to join in online. She herself had not registered for my class because it and getting there and coming back would have interfered with two classes online. Another friend registered for my OLLI at Mason class says when she comes she misses a very interesting class (more than mine?) that starts almost immediately after mine. It’s 45 minutes each way for a 90 minute class, she also said. I know one has to structure one day around coming if I go anywhere.

Well I almost switched to online for the fall. I went to the OLLI at AU office and offered to; I asked if half-way through the fall could she (Lesley is the person in charge of this) tell me if there were more in person courses for the spring, and she said 2/3s of the classes in the fall are in person. 5 of these hybrid, all the others just in person. I, just for myself so want to be in person, relented and agreed to come in person. I noticed none of the people blamed me — that would have worried me — I get very good evaluations in the fall and spring and my numbers were fine. This weekend the staff at OLLI at AU sent me a special thank you for coming in.

I have over these 8 years of teaching at these OLLIs twice seen a class fall wildly off — when I tried to teach the later Virginia Woolf (her books just did not satisfy and were too hard for the people) and when I tried the gothic in OLLI at Mason the first time I taught there:  in the case of the gothic I chose online texts and discovered these people won’t do that; they’ll use a kindle but an online text they want to print out. This was also the full 8 years ago; I was in bad state from just having lost Jim and I chose modern gothic texts.  The idea these people had of the gothic was they were going to read Hawthorne and Poe.  Of course the blurb told them otherwise. To me as a teacher there is no comparison to teaching in person and online yet I admit I too can enjoy zooms as a participant and my every-other-week Trollope zoom could happen no other way (it derives from the London Trollope Society) —

but I do need to come in in person in this summer. Otherwise I’d be alone most of the time — it’s not good for me. I become very melancholy.

One of last moments of 2018 Woman in White: Jessie Buckley as Marion free at last …

I have had two happy in person teaching experiences (90 minutes) this summer at OLLI at Mason — our subject is Collins’s Woman in White; there are 9 registered and 8 showed the first and second week. Practically all spoke; they spoke to one another; everyone seemed interested and enjoying our talk. But I worry about this Wednesday. One woman has already said she has a conflict (a summer invite) and I’m not sure this friend will make it. She doesn’t really value literary learning. The buildings at Tallwood are all deserted, no one in the hitherto crowded social space, no one sitting in the chairs placed out there for people to talk — as once people did. I was told the day before a class was held where 27 people came. The staff were ecstatic.

I went to a retirement party at OLLI at AU the week before and while there should have been more people there, those there were so glad to be there, and there were enough people so that a real party atmosphere ensued: wine, good music, talk. I’ll go in person to the OLLI at AU happy hour next week. So I shall carry on trying. I cannot help them in the evening or night. I can’t drive in the dark.

Another angle: as an Aspergers person I am often desolate, unable to socialize, to break in, finding that I have not been able to sustain a relationship (Mary Lee cut me off when her husband died because she knows I’m an atheist and think Jim doesn’t exist anymore and she can’t take that it seems), but this is my latest version of a lesson that teaches me that NTs don’t want to socialize either, or not in the ways I do or for the same reasons quite (in gatherings exclusion plays a larger role too for NTs too, the awareness of who is excluded and that you belong).

I do like to tell some good news. So Good news! for me. I’ve discovered a way to get myself to write legibly again. For a number of years now I’ve been often unable to read my own handwriting; well the other day I experimented in forcing my hand to write the letters slanted to the left instead of the right. I was taught when very young I must slant to the right, but quickly I knew as a kind of trick I could slant the letters the other way. Well I’ve begun to do this and I find by forcing myself to do this I write a round and legible script. I write the letters out again. I’m experimenting with my stenography but the problem is Pitman sten attaches specific meanings to when a stroke is to the left or right so this probably won’t work. But it is good news for me. I just have to remember to write slanting to the left (or backwards). It is strange for me to look at because the letters come out looking very rounded (so a different handwriting than the one I’ve regarded as mine for some 75 years) and neatly on a line even when there is none there.

Baby William a very few days old

And Izzy and I have bought two return-trip plane tickets to go to Toronto, Canada, the second week of August. Thao had her baby, now 3 weeks ago, William. Thao lives in Canada, where the gov’t is still run by sane people sanely. She has reserved for us two “suites” (rooms) in her condo building for 3 nights and 3 days. So we will visit. Izzy has been to Toronto once — by herself many years ago when she was doing her Masters Library degree at the University of Buffalo. It was her first trip alone: she stayed two days, explored the vast interesting city a bit, went to a museum, to a park and then back to Buffalo. She took photos too. For this past weekend it seems that Laura went to Colonial Beach, Virginia, a vacation beach spot where she and Rob enjoyed themselves. I go with the friend who said people were choosing online experiences to the National Building Museum to see the Folger Company do Midsummer Night’s Dream in mid-July (lunch out before).

I started my Anne Finch work today, once again, this time vowing to produce the review at last. (I’ve made arrangements to try to give a paper on manuscripts left by Jane Austen and Anne Finch at EC/ASECS this October.)  probably cannot convey the depth of my emotional reluctance to write this review.  It is enormously painful.  So I must follow Austen’s Catherine Morland and keep it brief.  The paper will not be as bad, and if my arrangements with Tony Lee fall through, I won’t go to the EC/ASECS at all, and then never again.

The last two days I’ve pulled the inbuilt calendar in Woman in White out for about 2/3s of the book! Soon I’ll put that online too. Somehow or other.

So not giving up. Neither daughter is likely to ever get pregnant — this is nowadays a cause for rejoicing.

It is frustrating to me to have collapsed so this evening. Izzy and I had walked for an hour in Old Towne, up to the Potomac and back to my car in the deadly heat of 5 o’clock. Stubbornly I then watered my new plants and flowers — put in by Rosemont at last so I have six pretty beds of plants and flowers around the front lawn again.

I began this blog leading up to Howard Zinn; I end with Robert Reich, showing us that of course Democrats can pass bills protecting reproductive and voting rights. Why aren’t they?

Ellen

April — and the unspoken topic

My sixth flower bed — they are not doing so well as at first — late March and early April showers have been bitter chill … — so:

Truth to tell I’m having trouble writing these diary blogs even once a month — I’ve gone over to a fifth week. I’ve managed again by talking of an unspoken topic explicitly — my difficulties in socializing you might say, and linking these to topics in papers I’ve given and books and movies I particularly have loved. I didn’t quite ask if I’m one of these difficult women (writers) I spent a month reading and talking about online at Politics and Prose this March.

When that Aprill with his shoures soote … When in April the sweet showers fall … Chaucer, Canterbury Tales,
Prologue …

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
— T.S. Eliot — tonight this describes some of my garden — I shall
in 3 weeks spend yet more money to have new plants that do well in the shade put in

Dear friends,

Here I am over a month later. I waited until the night after I gave my talk, Trollope, Millais and Orley Farm, so as to be able to report to you how it went: it seems splendidly. There were a sizable number of people; they listened, and I got good questions. They were friendly and generous, and the Chairman of the society asked me if I would like to do another. So I said yes :):

“Barchester in Pictures”. If he would like to put it in between the end of The Small House (upcoming in two weeks) and before the group begins The Eustace Diamonds (next up after that), it would fit very well. I would talk on Millais’s and George Housman Thomas’s pictures and any other 19th century ones for the Barsetshire books I can find, and combine it with commentary on the 1983 BBC Barchester Chronicles. I have a number of stills from that. He would have to alter the calendar.

Fast forward to Christmas, I could try the pictures for Can You Forgive Her? and the first five episodes of the 1974 BBC Pallisers. It’d be interesting because it would combine the Phiz style for half the pictures, the other half by Miss E Taylor (memo to self I have to find where I saw the new information on her) – a few of which are good, and this Simon Raven 20th century film adaptation. What to call it? “On Seeing Divergent Pallisers.”

A month has passed and I’m now deeply immersed in my Anglo-Indian books, and the course too seems to be going well in both places. I’m finding Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland a compulsive page turned, as I did this past month Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays (in the Politics and Prose online class held by Elaine Showalter on “Difficult Women,” a bit of a disappointment — I will talk of this in my next Austen Reveries blog_. I’m watching a fascinatingly intricate and intelligent Anglo-Indian serials I missed several summers ago: Indian Summers. It is good: at long last Indian people are equally heroines and heroines, well nearly equally, in this psychologically complex portrait of the Raj in its last years.

Julie Walters as the tough memsahib with a gorgeous hat — the club was central to the culture, and today it goes on still for upper class Indians

These topics are not especially cheerful. I seem to see books and movies on Anglo-India and India everywhere and came across in The New York Review of Books, a grim report on how women are treated: horrifying story Indian girls kill themselves rather than risk return to family who’ve decided she had relationship with a man of they did not approve of: In the Orchard by Skye Arundati Thomas.

I’ve added to the two summer courses I told about in previous diary entries (Retelling Traditional History and Tales from an Alternative POV; and Sensational and Gothic Novels Then and Now), and one planned for next winter (The Heroine’s Journey): another fall Trollope course:

Two Trollopes: Anthony & Joanna: The Last Chronicle of Barset & The Rector’s Wife

We’ll read Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset, the last 6th Barsetshire novel, seen once seen as his signature book. I’ve read with OLLI classes the first four; there is no need to read these, but we’ll discuss them to start, & I advise, if possible, readers to read the 5th, The Small House of Allington over the summer. His indirect descendent, Joanna Trollope, has recreated the central story of the Last Chronicle in her Rector’s Wife, which we’ll read in the last two weeks, & discuss her The Choir, another Barsetshire post-text, plus two excellent film adaptations of these in the 1990s.

I’m taking a course on Thurgood Marshall (I cannot say how much this US owes this courageous intelligent man — risked his life for many years winning case after case with very hard work), on Lincoln (as I knew from years ago the man loathed slavery), and in May will do that Anne Finch review, which will feed into a paper for the fall EC/ASECS: ) “From Either End of the Long Eighteenth Century: Anne Finch’s ‘Folger’ Book and Jane Austen’s Unpublished Fiction” — the centrality of manuscripts in the experience of these books. Tonight I experienced an hour’s zoom from the American Antiquarian Society where I heard the historian Thavolia Glymph talk about her latest book, The Women’s Fight in the Civil War, especially enslaved black women

Not that it’s all hard work or seriousness. I am just delighting in the new Sanditon, second season (as I did in All Creatures Great and Small): I truly find Rose Williams’s character of Charlotte Heywood as close to Austen’s conceptions of her heroine, somewhat modernized as I have come across since the 2008 Sense and Sensibility (Hattie Morahan) and previous heritage and appropriation Austen films between 1995 and 1998 (four remarkable films, 199-96 P&P, S&S, Emma, and Persuasion). And many of the stories feel like replays in a good feeling, cheerful vein of many of Austen’s paradigms. I just love how Charlotte-Rose sets out for work everyday, bag on her shoulder, no matter how anachronistic it is. I’m writing postings each week towards two new blogs on Sanditon 2 to match the previous two on Sanditon 1.

Sanditon Season 2 – Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) calls to mind for me Cassandra’s drawing of Austen from the back gazing out at the landscape

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What is new is I’ve subscribed to HBO Max, because it has the first two seasons of My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Quartet is the truer name) and is one by one, each week adding one of the new 8 episodes for Season 3 (Those who leave and those who stay).

Lenu (Ingrid Del Genio) and Lila (Elisa Del Genio) reading Little Women together

I just love this serial as I love the books.  It’s a version of the working class neighborhood in the Southeast Bronx that I grew up in.  I understand it — or this is how people behaved so I feel I understand even if I don’t quite get the motives that actuate the characters. I identify with both heroines. It was harder to identify with Lila because she was so angry and seemed so needlessly cruel to others who had not hurt her, but eventually I’ve come to see she’s sort of the Marianne Dashwood of the books, the heroine Christa Wolf was drawn to, the misfit.

This gets me to my unspoken topic: why I am so alone, why in life I’ve had a couple of friends at a time and no more, why I can’t sustain friendships, why I get myself in trouble publicly sometimes because someone has done something that seems to me so outrageously obtuse or
cruel and I’ve not resisted calling her out for it. Not much, just on the tiny point, but I have somehow hit something important — usually their ego somehow. One woman attacking all those who complain or protest during the Trump era when I said that was a form of political protest and justified and she wrong, she produced long screeds of her resume about how important she was and all her achievements. I realized to many I looked bad, and yet to me she looked so arrogant, showing Writ Large just what I was pointing out in small.

You might say this sort of thing on my part explains why I’ve ended up excluded from JASNA, never was included in the inner circle of the Trollope academic groups, never came near getting a full-time job, except in each of these instances I was excluded early on, before such an incident occurred. When I was invited to the Jane Austen summer program, by the end or third day I knew I would not be invited back, though what I had done unacceptable so early on, I don’t know. I would be thanked for coming. Stood up is the frequent story of my life. When I’ve been able to articulate what a person couldn’t bear — somehow I didn’t figure forth what I call showing off — someone has said to me, of course. It’s these instances, enough across my life to decide I am Aspergers and begin going to Aspergers meetings in person and now online. They are a comfort to me. I find I share so many traits with people there: like hating change, loving routine. It does look like the woman’s group may not survive because the woman starting it is beginning to ask for other facilities and cancelled this month’s meeting.

Jim was the one friend I made who supported me in every way and whom I truly got along with, who enabled me — to travel for example — and his dying takes from me my seeming ability to be part of life’s adventures as others understand these. Am I a difficult woman? this was not the meaning of the course because the four women writers we studied all were worldly successes and much admired by those who admired the tremendous resume woman. He shared my sense of values at core. He was alone too, only once in all the years we were married did a friend of his visit us. He never came back — that was my fault for not feeding him enough. I don’t know that my life would have been better had I been able to see myself as Aspergers and thus at least controlled these impulses or tried hide some of them when I recognize I’m getting myself in trouble but I at least would have had some explanation — if not the values others seem to have in uncountable ways I don’t get.

The unspoken topic is why you see me spend my life hard at work for no money, with no prestige but respect from those who have recognized value in what I’ve offered. I am willing to follow along and to support others in intellectual ways, but that is not enough valued, or other things matter much more. I am Lila — deeply angry somewhere in me because of the unjust way the world works which resolves itself into how I’ve fared or not fared.

So you see, gentle reader, or you may understand why I seem to be mad: this is no retirement. It’s me work work working in a sense all the time. Surrounding myself with books. I don’t know how to play except this kind of work: read, write, watch movies, share with others what I’ve found. What in Aspergers groups is the obsessive behavior over some area I can conquer. For Izzy ice-skating, tennis. For me literature and art. I don’t go out much because the pandemic has made the excuse and turned the pattern into not that uncommon — last weekend I did meet a friend in Washington, DC, and we ate out lunch together, afterwards seeing a powerful Merchant of Venice in the 7th Street and F theater. I enjoyed it but was glad to come home, relieved I did nothing wrong. I think this is a friendship faute de mieux. Her friends are dying, moving away to be near grandchildren, she is unmarried, no children, frail now.

John Douglas Thompson staggered under the onslaught of punitive law …

The play was played in a very simple way, plain costumes actors on a stage emoting at us, coming through the audience discreetly to bring home to everyone the difference between film/TV/streaming on your computer and whatever other devices you might use — and going to a theater to see a play done live by people in front of you with people all around.

John Douglas Thompson, the actor play Shylock was its core – as is often the case when this play is done very well. He was just so deeply hurt and poignant as an open source of a wound leading to profound rage, and when cut down the way he is by them all, it’s almost unbearable. I still think the very cent er of the play, the trial, its language deeply anti-semitic, and the forcing of Christianity on this man is part of this. The actress plays Portira was weak, she swallowed the second half of her central speech, and the rest of them were basically non-entities as they often emerge. A darkness was brought in by interpreting Lorenzo as an abusive husband, and Jessica, an outsider. They play down except for one moment the homosexuality or eroticism between Antonio and Bassiano, the audience’s murmur at the one moment suggested to me why they decided not to dare the homosexuality as part of what is happening on stage — why Portia is buying herself a husband.

I recommend it strongly to be seen as a live play. It is for Americans is so resonant as we have just watched the disgracefully racist and misogynistic attack on Ketanji Brown Jackson and all that that implies about the state of US society today. I also loved the outcast person.

Barnaby and his Raven, Grip — by Phiz, from Dickens’s novel, Barnaby Rudge

My paper on Trollope was on another of the solitary radical characters throughout Trollope’s novels who become his central heroes and heroine: this one Mary, Lady Mason, criminal forger, who just about gets away with it. She does not go to prison; she achieved her goal (providing a gentleman’s life for her son, a lady’s life for herself) by living apart. Phiz’s picture was one of my central pictures for transcendent book illustration art. I wrote and said:

This by Phiz again of the mentally disabled Barnaby Rudge and his faithful friend, the raven, to me captures more pity, respect and understanding for the comradeship of this outcast pair than any of Dickens’s words in the novel.

I will write a brief blog here, connect the talk put on the Trollope Society website eventually to my paper on Austen as a woman with traveling boxes but very little space to herself in my central Ellen and Jim blog soon (I hope).

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Sunday another friend, long time for me, also now alone (two divorces), but several children and grandchildren (whose successes she never tires of boasting of) came here and we ate together and watched three (!) episodes of A Jewel in the Crown and walked. But this is unusual. My life is here online, at my desk, with my books, DVDs and cats … It is form of keeping depression and loneliness at bay.

As I said last time, I find since before Christmas I am feeling less afraid of being alive in the world without Jim. I’ve lasted nine years, and (as long as social security and my widow’s annuity are continued) seem on a path to do this until I’m no more. I’m doing better on a form of acceptance of my lot without Jim. Not seeking distractions which make me nervous and eat up time — like going out so much to courses or lectures.
Traveling to try to make friends. I fought hard the first few years after he died, but now after the 3 year pandemic, I find I’m back where I was with only a world of Internet friends and acquaintances at a distance, a couple of friends nearby at most.

This month too, my long-time friend, Mary Lee, her husband died suddenly. She is (self-described) heart-broken. They were married for 51 years. I’m not seeing her much and like other friends whose partners have gone her life will change, and I doubt there’ll be the room for me there was. I find a deep congeniality with her despite her devout religion and my (as she recalled it in a letter so it irked more than I thought a joke phrase would) “fervent atheism.”

The thing is I have to be occupied – my mind absorbed. One new change or change back this past month is renewed anxiety and worry of the type I felt in the last months of Trump’s “regime,” and especially his concerted attempt to overthrow the US democracy-oligarchy and establish himself as a permanent corrupt dictator (Keptocrat) president pushing the US population into fascism. Not as strong, but Biden’s programs are not getting passed, this evil GOP is working successfully in many states to suppress voting rights, and they have in store for US people immiseration. I’m horrified by the brutally inhumane criminal war inflicted on the Ukrainian people by Putin and his Russians — and there worry about nuclear war as suddenly an actual possible death for us all here in DC.

The poor terrified animal — Ukrainians are modern people and value their pets

So I just can’t read E.M. Forster too many times, cannot lose myself in the intense sexual and affectionate bonding of Jamie and Claire (of Outlander) at midnight reading in bed or watching via DVD too often. I don’t tire of Cavafy’s poetry, which Jim so loved — “The God Abandons Anthony” Jim’s favorite.

And when the time comes and I can’t teach any more (I cannot predict what talent or gift or ability will have to go), I will turn to writing a book once again — something longer, and it will be an outgrowth of all the courses I’ve been teaching myself to give and all the books and movies I’ve been watching, all the blogging I’ve done over these past few years, alone with my beloved cat, ClaryCat (near me just about 24 hours a day) and writing about the next day to friends

Beloved Clarycat in a sun-puddle

I carry on having obscure pains in my chest, my face looks older every day, my body sagging, exhausted from a day of simply going to hairdresser, shopping for food, and practicing a talk 3 times while reading during interstices, this poem speaks to me especially (thanks to Graham Christian for putting the following as a posting on face-book:

Any Soul to Any Body

So we must part, my body, you and I,
Who’ve spent so many pleasant years together.
‘Tis sorry work to lose your company
Who clove to me so close, whate’er the weather,
From winter unto winter, wet or dry;
But you have reached the limit of your tether,
And I must journey on my way alone,
And leave you quietly beneath a stone.

They say that you are altogether bad
(Forgive me, ’tis not my experience),
And think me very wicked to be sad
At leaving you, a clod, a prison, whence
To get quite free I should be very glad.
Perhaps I may be so, some few days hence,
But now, methinks, ’twere graceless not to spend
A tear or two on my departing friend.

Now our long partnership is near completed,
And I look back upon its history;
I greatly fear I have not always treated
You with the honesty you showed to me.
And I must own that you have oft defeated
Unworthy schemes by your sincerity,
And by a blush or stammering tongue have tried
To make me think again before I lied.

‘Tis true you’re not so handsome as you were,
But that’s not your fault and is partly mine.
You might have lasted longer with more care,
And even now, with all your wear and tear,
‘Tis pitiful to think I must resign
You to the friendless grave, the patient prey
Of all the hungry legions of Decay.

But you must stay, dear body, and I go.
And I was once so very proud of you:
You made my mother’s eyes to overflow
When first she saw you, wonderful and new.
And now, with all your faults, ’twere hard to find
A slave more willing or a friend more true.
Ay — even they who say the worst about you
Can scarcely tell what I shall do without you.
–Cosmo Monkhouse (1840-1901)

Monkhouse devoted most of his literary career to sensitive art criticism, including a life of the visionary English artist H.M.W. Turner. This poem, from his 1890 collection, *Corn and Poppies*, exhibits skillful musicality, gentle humor, and hard-won wisdom that compare favorably with the achievements of Monkhouse’s more celebrated contemporaries, Tennyson and Browning. Like the best poems, it resists paraphrase; its wistful wit lingers in the mind. — Graham Christian

Ellen

because it’s spring

I’ve been steadily buying chrysanthemums each week they are here

daffodils/that come before the swallow dares/and take the winds of March with beauty … TheWinter’s Tale

Dear readers and friends,

So I begin this blog with e.e. cummings and Shakespeare, and I am cheerful for myself just now. The new spring term at OLLI at AU begins this week, and I have a couple of courses I’m looking forward to at Politics in Prose, just loving the books and movies I’ve been reading and watching for my own (Anglo-Indian Novels). The usual anxieties are appeased: Izzy and I have already gone to the AARP people at Sherwood Library and our taxes are paid (!), I’m not going this year to the ASECS (much relieved), and the course I gave in winter (Retelling Traditional History & Tales from an Alternative POV) went over very well at OLLI at Mason this 4 week winter semester so that I’ll repeat it at OLLI at AU for the 4 week June course. Best of all for this time, I’ve written my first full draft of a talk I promised to do for the London Society Zoom group on Millais and Trollope (centering on Orley Farm) and now need only revise (writing is rewriting).
The easier frame of mind I described in Facing February continues.

The natural world is indeed waking up around me.

Ian sniffing the warmth and breezes

Clarycat alert to the twittering swallows re-building their nests in the awnings above my study window

I saw two daffodils in my garden today, and a row of the little white bell-like tiny flower. Lots of green shoots sprouting in each flower bed. I’ve five now and may ask the man and wife team I pay to garden for me to make a sixth under the windows on the right side of the back part of my house.

Shall I confess I got a Valentine’s present — presents (!): a sturdy book of goods essays on 18th century topics of interest to me, a Nature calendar (lots of flowers, landscapes, animals) and a card from a now longtime male friend. Thoughtful and kind. Without my having to prompt him at all.

I’ve invented a new 4 week course for next winter, OLLI at Mason!

The Heroines’ Journeys

Many courses in myth take as Bible, Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (a reduction of Frazer’s Golden Bough) so for this one we’ll take Maureen Murdoch’s The Heroine’s Journey (distillation of many books on “Archetypal Patterns in women’s fiction“) and read two mythic short novels from an alternative POV, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (no she did not sit for 20 years knitting and unknitting the same shawl), and Christa Wolf’s Medea (no she did not hack her brother’s skeleton to piece, nor kill those children); then two ordinary realistic ironic short novels, Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter (Leda is the lost daughter) and Austen’s Northanger Abbey (Catherine had it right). We’ll see Outlander, S1E1 (Claire transported) & Prime Suspect S1E1 (Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison).

Two pairs of short novels. What fun this would be.

I have thought of another one for such a time span (maybe 6 weeks?): Animal Tales for Adults, together with articles on animal rights and present day animal abuse for a 6-8 week course. Begin with Woolf’s Flush and Frances Power Cobbe’s The confessions of a Lost Dog; go on to Paul Austin’s Timbuctoo and A.N. Wilson’s Stray; switch gears slightly to David Garnett’s Lady into Fox and Goodall’s Ten Years with Chimpanzees or end on Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation and Sy Montgomery’s Walking with Great Apes

I could show or advise Frederick Wisemen’s Primates (only a bit of this as it’s horrifying what academics do to animals — or show the film adaptation of J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip.

I now try to take seriously What do We Owe our Fellow Animals (Martha Nussbaum): what are they capable of doing? what do they enjoy that’s healthy? and how can we enable them? All day long nowadays Clarycat is by my side somewhere close. Just now on my lap. Sometimes she truly forgets I’m not a cat and tries to play-bite with me. No, say I. Too far.

End of February on Washington’s birthday, when the weather was very pretty Izzy attended the President’s Day parade in Old Town — there’s a long tradition of fake and erased history. Alexandria was a market for selling enslaved people because of the harbor; it has banks. So the history has been and yesterday still was it was a Scots place. The usual Scots band (all white males) marched with bagpipes and in traditional kilts. Izzy said hardly anyone with a mask anywhere. There was quite a crowd and no masks — I’m not sure I like that. She watched for a bit and then found a place she could cross to get to the Potomac and watch the birds.

In lieu of the violence and celebrity posturing of the annual Superbowl event, I watched 6th episode of 2nd season of All Creatures great and small (Home truths); shamelessly sentimental and ratcheting up lots of angst, yet nothing but good happens. Why? I’ve decided it’s a show with women in charge — for real. Mrs Herriot gives up James to Helen, Mrs Hall and the woman with the perpetually nearly mortal cows. Mrs Pumphrey is the local central goddess, and Tricky woo, her animal. A new woman came in, an aging gypsy who lives with stray dogs. Parallel to Mrs Pumphrey. I love it.

I re-watched The portrait of a Lady on Fire, (with French subtitles). Blogged about it, together with Deux (Two of Us) and Capernaum on my blog tonight. Women’s films. True Valentine. Also Gwendolyn Brooks.

And then 5th episode of 4th season of Outlander (Savages). The men are: the crazed German settler who thinks the Native Americans are stealing “his water” so when his daughter-in-law and grandchild die of measles, he murders the beautiful healer of the tribe — they retaliate by murdering him and his wife and burning down his house. Claire had been there to help bring the baby into the world. The coming problem that most counts is measles. Jamie and Ian discover they can’t get settlers while the Governor and his tax collectors are taking all the profits from settlers and using it to live in luxury, and Murtagh is re-discovered. Very moving reunion with Jamie and Claire — keeping the estates, feeding animals. She is Mrs Hall.  I love how in the next season Marsali is growing up to be a medical apprentice.

Finished Christa Wolf’s Cassandra on how all rules, genres, simple truths of literature and myth, the way science conducted the result of the dense war-like oppression of males. Aristotle especially ridiculous and Goethe’s final stance a version of Voltaire-Candide cultivating his garden. Some know better, like Schiller For Valentine’s Day, this cartoon (I don’t know the name of the illustrator, sorry) is also a day to remember as Against Violence inflicted on Women.

I’ll recommend a charmingly written (full of ordinary details) book by Margaret Macmillan, a Canadian writer called Women of the Raj What was life like for the hundreds and more of English women who traveled to stay, or were born in the Raj, with references to women who left diaries and son. How real is the missionary in The Jewel in the Crown? Were all Raj English women as awful as they seem in some TV adaptations. If some were, we might try to understand why.

Claire and Adewehi

Anne Maddeley as Mrs Hall

Matilde, Heloise, Marianne

Not that all is well with the world. Oh no. Especially with the worst men in charge. Putin invaded Ukraine and is actually threatening nuclear war if anyone directly intervenes to save that country from death and devastation and (upon defeat) tyrannical dictatorship combined with kleptocracy (what the GOP longs to mete out to the majority of liberal Americans insofar as they can pull it off).  Horrifying.  Russian soldiers are simply killing people.  Destroying their houses.  Took over a nuclear power plant.  I’ve sent $160 altogether to different places on the Net. It seems such a helpless act. Biden cannot (it seems) pass a voting rights act, nor a Build Back Better bill. I was made very sad by a email from a friend — her husband died suddenly two weeks ago. She had expected that he would have an heart operation, and be at risk from that but not just go. I found myself crying for her, in a way re-living what I felt when Jim was gone. Part of the funeral was held in the same place we held Jim’s – very differently. I didn’t sleep well for three nights — she is experiencing heartbreak.

I nowadays follow the actor, Samuel West, on twitter. He’s rare for not incessantly promoting himself. He had a photo of himself, a son, and his father, Timothy West (so aging now — wonderfully read so many Trollopes for Books-on-Tape) and mother, Prunella Scales, playing a board game. His response to nationalisms:

No attribution but it might be by him

For myself I am going slower, stiffer in body. It takes me much longer and it is much harder than it used to be to do my calisthenics each morning and I’m even tempted to stop. Thao advised me to keep it up — and I’ve read the only way to prevent atrophy is to steadily keep up what exercise I can. My chest has a soft pain now and again but I discovered (as when I was in my 30s and 40s and had these, two ibuprofens makes the pain go away.  I have stopped adding sugar to my coffee and morning cereal.  I’m walking in the afternoon around 4 for half an hour or so. I still can’t resist coping with swallowing glue all afternoon by a couple of glasses of wine. There are few people who understand the nature of addiction and self-harm practices. I take so much longer to heal. I sometimes end up wasting evening hours recovering, especially when I’ve gone out to be with a friend.

I’m in two minds about how the world is going back to being in person — for myself as problematic as ever even if I long for whatever real companionship once again. It turns out the majority of courses at OLLI at AU this spring are online. I regret not going in and yet I have no desire to go to in person conferences — it was better when I could participate online. Yet I’ve been encountering a congenial Englishman who lives not far from me in my walks – he is out playing with his dog. I know I go out at a time he might be there and he does the same. We share an Anglophilic taste in PBS and BBC — and books too. That I enjoy these brief conversations shows what I’m still doing without.

To end on a better note: Not uncommonly when I go to museums with other people (women friends) I find they are not as interested in the pictures as I am but I do get to see more and one favorite painting in the National Gallery for many years I re-found: Redfield’s Mill in Winter, 1922. Well when I got home I found a relatively inexpensive study of his art, very good, by Constance Kimmerle. Out of fashion but fine and beautiful and accurate ….. and meaningful too. Reveling in it

I do think life is good and want to stay here as long as possible with my daughters. Carve out a small place to have some comfort and pleasure the way Voltaire advises. And vote to help and enable others.

Monet, Ice thawing on Vétheuil (1880)

Ellen

The death of the US Post Office

Heather Cox Richardson talks of how gov’t will start to fall apart and become poor if you go wholly local. It did snow in my area (Northern Virginia) and hundreds and hundreds of cars were stuck on the highway for 27 hours.
In my tiny local no plowing of my block for a whole day — very treacherous to go out. Snowed again, iced again, but sun came out and there was a use of sand mixture and one plowing. Used as excuse for what has been happening for months: slow death of post office service.

Has she been paying attention to what appears or doesn’t in her US Post office box near her door? This past week 3 out of the 5 days there was no mail from the US post office. No post man came to the neighborhood. This is an astonishing record I thought. I queried that neighborhood list and discovered that several people have had similar or worse things happen. The GOP is partly responsible, having decades ago decided to attack the USPS and demand they provide pension for 20 years ahead to cripple them – they want to private this national service. Constant derision.

The key here is the USPS is heavily minority and people of color, especially Black. One person came on to say we get what we need electronically: nonsense, not even all bills can come that way: insurance packets, tax from gov’ts. I keep being told Biden can do nothing until the board changes and has changed one member and another needs to die or something. What is with him?

All but two of my bills now come electronically but I must pay the two and a third by post office check. I will not put my rout number to my bank on line anywhere. I do it once a year to pay fed and state tax because AARP won’t do it any other way. As a place by the way the UPSP in my area now looks desolate. Again neighborhood listserv another person said how disgusting the PO is (it’s not, just desolate — poorly lit nowadays! nothing added by way of decoration — clearly no group spirit any more) and made slurs against the employees

Until the attacks and underfunding the USPS has been a terrific service performing daily a seemingly impossible task and well. Academic friends of mine who were (or are) GOP types regularly attacked it in slurs. It was “understood” how bad this service was. That’s racism

I used to get my passport through the Post Office. It had a subsection where a federal person was there for applying and renewals. Has that subsection been closed down?

When I once bought stamps online I found that I seemed to be conned into accepting Paypal for _all my purchases_ by the card I used from now on. I discovered this was a false email. but LeJoy lets crooks onto the USPS website. Paypal are crooks; once they get your name if you do buy something through them, they send false bills. I did it once and got false bills for weeks.

I’m not say the feds are by any means perfect: read They really are trying to kill us. Perhaps it should be put that those in power in most states across the world do not care if the citizens in those states die if it means disrupting power relationships and profit-making.

One of hundreds of small local post offices closed down around the US: a small one in the next neighborhood after mine was shut down during the pandemic (an excuse)

Anthony Trollope would be turning over in his grave with real upset if there were some kind of afterlife ….

Ellen

Remembering yet again — Autumn — a few plans — Worrying political developments — Dreams as reality & JASNA

Seen on twitter

Friends and readers,

The past couple of weeks may be divided into four themes. My yearly October memories, sad now since Jim died October 9, 2013; autumn events, like conferences, Laura and Izzy going to New York City for five days of fun and ComicCon in Manhattan; planning for next spring and summer courses and this term the wonders of Trollope’s masterpiece, The Prime Minister (I never realized before quite how brilliant and absorbing it is); my usual latest books (Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables) and writing (“A Woman and Her Boxes: Space and Personal Identity in Jane Austen” for EC/ASECS) and continued investment in Austen, her movies and JASNA politics: and the recent very worrying political developments. I usually reserve the last for my Sylvia I blog, but tonight I’ll write about the coming immediate elections (one here in Virginia for governor may, frighteningly return us to a Republican leader who supports the openly destructive vengeful Trump) as I experience it — because it seems to me we are seeing an open repeat of the post-Reconstruction era where White Supremacy and ruthless political reaction is taking over parts of the US.

I wrote about nearly all of this on Facebook and twitter which have now assumed a kind of public short diary entry function for me — to remember for this blog and to express myself to others.

I began the first commemorations on October 3rd: My beloved husband, to whom I would have been married 52 years ago (Oct 6th, coming in 3 days) would have been 73 years old. Here’s a photo of him taken when he was probably 63 …

I re-shared the obituary I wrote for him. He was beloved by all three of us — and Clarycat. In my sadder moods I worry he didn’t know how much I loved him. But I think he did when his mental health was strong. People were very kind. October 6th, would have been Jim & my 52nd anniversary; we married a year to the night we met (so 1968 to 1969). In remembrance one of his favorite poems, one he’d quote once in a while, by Basil Bunting, a Yorkshire poet, a book of whose poems I bought for Jim one Christmas:

A thrush in the syringa sings.
Hunger ruffles my wings, fear,
lust, familiar things
Death thrusts hard. My sons
by hawk’s beak, by stones,
trusting weak wings
by cat and weasel, die.
Thunder smothers the sky.
From a shaken bush I
list familiar things
fear, hunger, lust.
O gay thrush!
— Basil Bunting

More favorite poems, one brief lyric he wrote himself, some favorite songs, and Clarycat as she was when she at the time was so deeply attached to him (she is the kind of cat who attaches herself to a special person and stays around that person all the time; now I am her staff (pun intended): Poetry and Song

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Outlander — poster for 6th season, a key sentiment for me for my love of the series: they will be together forever come what may (as in the haunting song, Never My Love) — I put it on a wall in my workroom

What a splendid time Laura and Izzy had in NYC. I read their tweets as (for example) Laura attended the Outlander session (the only actor there was Sam Heughan, together with key producers and Diana Gabaldon — all else zooming in); Izzy walked on Highline Park (near where their hotel room was), they ate out, saw many amusing sights.

They visited the 14th street subway station to see the Live Underground statues:

Laura has lifted my heart by saying yes, she’d like me to come with them next time they go to the city. I’d like to try again. There’s some life in the old girl yet. I enjoyed her homecoming tweet:

Maxx jumped on the counter while I was prepping dinner and knocked a bowl off the counter and it shattered.

Dinner was then delayed by 15 minutes while staff vacuumed and mopped the kitchen.

His Royal Fluffytail was most displeased.

Welcome home, me.

I spent about three weeks altogether with Austen’s novels and a set of very good books on them and the topics of personal and real property in her life (she had so little control over anything), space (ditto). I re-watched in binge ways the 2009 Sense and Sensibility (Andrew Davies, featuring Hattie Morahan, Charity Wakefield, Dan Steevens), the 1996 Persuasion (Roger Michell, featuring Amanda Root and Ciarhan Hinds), Lucy Worsley’s Jane Austen At Home, Amanda Root’s At Home with the Georgians; I’m now into 2008 Lost in Austen, Guy Andrews wrote it, and I swoon with Amanda [Jemima Rooper]) I’m not sure I realized how much this travel back in time enables a serious critique of the characters as conceived by Austen (hard and mean Mrs Austen, irresponsible Mr Austen), a critique partly meant by Austen herself.

Anne and Wentworth coming together in a sliver of space and quiet within the crowd ….

I enjoyed reading Wilkie Collins’s No Name (so there’s another Collins’ novel I’ve managed to process) and see what a strong male-type feminist he is, partly enthused by a class I’m attending at Politics and Prose via zoom with a very bright teacher, and so put in for a summer 6 week course at OLLI at Mason in person!

Sensation and Gothic Novels: Then and Now

In this course we will read Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White (4 weeks) and Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly, a post-text to R. L. Stevenson’s Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, the novella retells story from a POV of the housemaid (2). We will discuss what is a sensation, what a gothic novel, and how both evolved out of the Victorian era: what are their characteristics? how do these overlap & contrast; how do the genres differ. Many movies and plays have been adapted from Collins’s and Stevenson’s novels; we’ll discuss some of these, and I’ll ask the class to see the latest (I think brilliant) BBC 2018 Woman in White serial, featuring Jessie Buckley, scriptwriter Fiona Seres; and Stephen Frear’s 1996 Mary Reilly film, featuring John Malkovich, Julia Roberts, scriptwriter Christopher Hampton

First shot of Jessie Buckley as Marian Halcombe

I admit I so much more enjoy these serials and film adaptations of novels than the famous “art” movies we are supposedly studying in my Foreign Films course this term: the teacher carries on unerringly choosing these masculinist films (400 Blows, Fellini 8 1/2, King of Hearts), but even when the film’s center is a woman, Bergman’s Persona, she is kept at such a distance, cold and strange. I have dropped two of the courses I intended to attend — I grow so impatient with moral stupidity (how arrogant is the hero!) or complacency and conventional religious assertions over Oedipus in Oedipus Rex after the night before I’ve watched the old BBC 1980s Theban play with Michael Pennington playing the role so brilliantly, movingly, so shattered holding onto dignity. Claire Bloom as the mother forced to give up her baby only to find the gods have a wonderful joke of returning him to her. Who says Euripides is the more subversive?  The teacher makes good comments: how astonishing 15,000 men watching, all men actors, and the center a woman (I thought of the marginalized cripple Philoctetes). Enjoying Smithsonian lectures very much thus far — on Notre-Dame de Paris, moving account of the life and work of Van Gogh, now a series of musical concerts with Saul Lilienstein (he is aging but still so fine).

So my nights and days pass when I am at my best or luck in. Kind friends’ letters, poems sent me: a new friend made from Trollope zoom has organized a meeting: we are to meet with a few local Trollopians here in DC in November in a park one Sunday morning. Bad moments too, anxiety attacks: worry over bills, comcast (the bill never came; no use phoning them; did the check arrive? who knows?), the computer mysteriously shutting itself off so I babysit it for a couple of days. I remember what a desperately unhappy teenage-hood I experienced: came near killing myself at age 15. Literally took decades to come away from all the inward destruction of what was best about me and throw off bitterness and resentment. What’s not gone yet is the later results of that teenage-time in my life’s occupation, as a mother. What ever proliferating harm class contempt, predatory male heterosexuality do.

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Serious worry about the coming election at 5 in the morning, when the sky is dark:

I’m up early because I got out of bed as I was worrying about some serious developments happening which I daresay, dread, will affect the coming election. I probably will write a blog about this and put it in my Sylvia I because it’s my own POV and is about what I see affecting ordinary life which I’m part of. It seems for fear of losing many of these GOP people are running not only on the lie that Trump won but with the determination to rig the election if they are in a GOP controlled state (through votes out, refuse to certify) and if still the democrats win refuse to accept the results. This is what Trump wants; he wants default, he wants to see the US govt as we know it now destroyed. He made speeches openly asking for this — the last one in Iowa where GOP is dominant (Trump did win the state and the machinery there is GOP). If you stop doing elections fairly and stop accepting results, the US gov’t is over. It is true that in numbers there are now more democrats than republicans but since so much is gerrymandered, the electoral college and way senate is set up, GOP could still win “legitimately” — but they may not and that’s not enough for them.

There are Republicans now telling fellow GOP people to vote democratic on the issue of democracy. But not enough will do it. I have one of these angry faced women in my OLLI at Mason class: she is a classic white middle class GOP person voting for Trump. There are 3 males in my OLLI at AU class (uncomfortably to me but I ignore it) who look all iron indifference at any mention of women as a subject class — just bored silly and oh no that cop who murdered Floyd he did not lean on the black man’s chest the way is claimed (very unusual for any literature class I’ve seen in either OLLI and highly unusual for me to have so many males and they don’t go away) — in local neighborhoods I see red signs. Izzy says locally people don’t like Terry McAuliffe, a long time democratic political person. I don’t know him — I think of how we talk of politics in the class on The Prime Minister and realize such meditations make no transfer for most people to their lives.

Some of this was put on PBS last night – segments about how the GOP is now determined to rig the elections to come to win — and 90% of those calling themselves Republican are pro-Trump. It remains to be seen how people will vote of course. He is not literally on the ballot and it’s hard for me to accept that a huge minority of US people would vote Trump in again — his presidency was a disaster because of his treatment of COVID and because he was dissolving all agencies insofar as he could and setting up a kleptocracy. But they are (I think) determined to put down all social changes so as to keep a white male supremacy in charge — these people do not want the infrastructure bills — they don’t care if a huge number of US people live in hard poverty because they think only this way can they keep their privileged lifestyles. They want to see woman kept subordinate

Stupid stuff in a way shows this serious riff. It’s serious because Trump for example would end social security. He’s shown out: stop the central funding mechanism. Really put the US back to pre-1920 — I would not put open concentration camps beyond him — prisons are now partly that. Which stupid stuff. Well was yesterday Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s day. Biden signed an executive order calling Oct 12th Indigenous People’s Day. But he did not end Columbus Day. In NYC Columbus Day had become fraught years ago when the people living there started having 2 parades: one down one Avenue by Spanish people and another another avenue by Italians. Now you are getting demands not just for celebrations of Indigenous People but demands that Columbus Day be abolished. It was apparently signed into law by FDR — in the same era as these Confederate statues went up — and it was backed for years by Italian-American and Catholic groups who made Columbus their patriotic symbol. The man was a cruel thug, a thief, cruel beyond speaking (see Even the Rain), was failure in what he tried, but then was followed by similar Spanish behaviors (he was funded by Spain), he would not have regarded himself as Italian; he was Genoese. It’s all bogus history what’s said — many of these statues have been taken down in the past couple of years. US people are regularly refusing to recognize one another’s symbols and it is true progressive do want to change the way history is taught because what was taught was nonsense and validated great cruelty.

I tell the above because I think it indicative.

Yes maybe a civil war is coming. See these GOP governors resorting to ending all vaccines, literally amassing troops. AT core it is money for it began in the 1980s when the corporations put their money behind Reagan and the tax structure was altered dreadfully and it’s only gotten worse since then. Biden was to return to pre-1980s but is taking baby steps in that direction and he can’t get that passed. This propaganda on behalf of forcing women to remain pregnant when a man impregnates them, white supremacy, tyrannical police are what they (the wealthy and smart) have used to push fascism in its primal sense (states run by corporations and military) into now near wins if you rig the elections.

Biden of course was put into power because on the area of foreign policy he remains a modified colonialist, imperialism (he keeps up all Trump’s sanctions thus far — on Cuba which Obama was changing, on Iran thus far which Obama was changing, and on Venezuela where Biden is in the position of claiming the legitimately elected socialist president is not legitimate – he is still deporting these non-whites in big numbers, still building and expanding private prisons. He would have a qualified imperialist state where the people within the US would live decently: the GOP and corporations are no longer compromising and want the whole world to be impoverished to keep themselves in great wealth. The EU are a bunch of bankers. But he is law-abiding and within the US and for other peoples round the world is trying to re-spread social people-centered democracy

So there’s where we are — I am – on this October evening.

Autumn Woodland by Mark Preston

And dreams as reality: this comes from the long hours alone. I sleep but 4-5 hours a day. I get up and at first am drowsing and what happens is some dream I’m having is taken by somewhere in my mind to be real. In the afternoon my mind recurs to it. And I dream it again at night. Only if it lasts until wakefulness in the morning do I realize this is not so. For weeks I’ve been dreaming I’m writing a book on Austen; there is an author I’m dealing with, a publisher. Often the figures of these dreams come from movies I’ve been watching of late and so yes I’ve been steadily re-watching favorite Austen movies. This is innocent, non-hurtful dreaming, obvious wish fulfillment but other fragments are of the type I can’t tell about.

From Lost in Austen: she watching (Amanda in lieu of Fanny Price); a male figure emerging from the depths of consciousness (Mr Darcy), the used-up book dropped by a fountain (in the movie a Penguin copy of Pride and Prejudice)

The following morning into early afternoon: What I especially love about my Sylvia II blog is it allows me as far as doing such a thing in public is possible (I can’t openly discuss sex, nor specifics about individuals nor names) express my grief and occasional happinesses.

I now realize this coming weekend when I’ll be attending the EC/ASECS virtually, is also the first in-person JASNA in three years. I couldn’t go anyway as there is a conflict; I’d hate the hotel and the times I went to Chicago to conferences, disliked it. Once Jim and I went for our 39th wedding anniversary and explored the city, and we did enjoy it — except for that anonymous granite lonely hotel. But I am excluded regularly now because there is no reason to include me — no patronage, no title, no business I’m running, and so on, and I’ve written reviews which didn’t please (& I don’t fawn on people), gotten into miscommunications with the business DC group (enough to remind me of how I felt about feminism in the 1970s — for middle class snobbish ambitious privileged women). The last three times Izzy was hurt — she went out of her way to register promptly and saw herself put back again and again until of course there was no room. Years before I had bitterly complained and that was why we were allowed in. The price is very high. The dinner is a display of who you know. But Izzy has loved Austen (like me) and written fan fictions, enjoyed some of the lectures and the dressing up (the last time she bought herself a splendid hat) and conquered an original trauma over the ball so that she got to the point she stayed to the end.

Why do people love to exclude others — I regret that my daughter is excluded — and so enjoy getting back? I’m sure there are hundreds of variations on this story when it comes to conferences where exclusion patterns do not cost organizers anything. This is the reality of JASNA.

Ellen

Fall & 9/11 twenty years since

Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood, drawing gazing on a Devonshire cliff (2009 S&S, scripted Andrew Davies) – a very favorite still for me

Friends and readers,

To one such as I most of whose working life — child, adult, and now older widow – has been spent in some version of school, there’s no firmer sign of fall than the “term” (or semester) is about to begin. Online OLLI at AU, three courses beyond the one I’m teaching, one on foreign films, one on race in America, from end of Reconstruction to 1965, and a third on the Theban Plays. Online at OLLI at Mason, one course beyond a repeat of the same one at OLLI at AU, Anne Bronte’s magnificent feminist The Tenant of Wildfell Hall begin on the same week. From Politics and Prose a week after that one 5 session cours on Wilkie Collins’s No Name with a superb teacher who enabled me to read Collins’s Woman In White some 3 years ago now. By October I hope to have enjoyed at least one of several sessions/lectures (a combination of books, art, music, architecture) I’ve signed up for online at the Smithsonian. The course I teach, two sections in effect, will be on Trollope’s The Prime Minister (Palliser 5) as qualified by a book of Victorian Women’s Writing, edited by Susan Hamilton, Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minor — the groundswell of proto-feminist essays and columns as the century evolved (on work, law, custom, the quality & circumstances of real women’s real lives)

The Pallisers, Episode 20, the two friends, Duchess & Mrs Finn, just before they meet Ferdinand Lopez who quotes a Swinburne poem at them, which Mrs Finn knows well is homoerotic (Susan Hampshire, Barbara Murray, Stuart Wilson)

The sky is darkening quickly just now (7:49) so you would not be able to see my new chrysanthemum bushes (4 larger, two dark colors, and 4 small around the miniature Maple): faithful watering twice a day, early morning and dusk has brought out more of the poppies (I put a photo of one of the bushes on the last diary entry) on my several bushes of these, and red berries on the holly (are they?) bushes

I did manage two more in-person events. Both rejuvenating and linked to the coming term. I had a late lunch with another new friend, a scholar-acquaintance this time, Maria Frawley who taught the Middlemarch at Politics & Prose this summer — the store slowly coming alive again. It was quite a trek to get there & back once again. Another happy couple of hours. I think I’ve gone to lunch over these past 6 weeks something like 10 times! (I haven’t told them all). I’m a lady who lunches. DC itself filled with traffic jams.

Then this past Thursday, the Pizza party across the street from OLLI at AU was to me delightful. These are people I’m comfortable with. I’m also respected by them — as I never was when I worked at universities as an adjunct (for over 30 years). Not invisible any more. Only 30 allowed and I recognized three people I also have seen and one person talked to at Politics and Prose too. I had found a small parking lot where I could park for 4 hours for $12 so I could have peace of mind — it’s an area where the city tows you away if you violate parking regulations, which are strict and user-unfriendly.

The last time I was in a group of people like this was Dec 2019, the OLLI at AU Christmas party. Then we had a band and dancing. I began to wish I had registered for the one class in person that attracted me but there was only an hour between its ending and the beginning of the class I teach at OLLI at Mason so I did the right thing.

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But what is heralding fall emotionally this year is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. There has been a pouring out of memories, on twitter, on News programs, emails, blogs, news-sites, newspapers. One of the more powerful and poignant was written by the gentle author at Spitalfields. My comment to him (he didn’t let it appear):

It is untrue that the world was changed by this single event. It was and remains an incident on an on-going cruel capitalist world, however scary and unusual on who was killed; a circus symbolic spectacular stunt pulled off by people who loathed the US for its imperialist and colonialist policies and actions; it was a horrific tragedy for those who died and all those connected to them; for those who became terribly injured and sickened working on the site in the days that followed — and were often refused decent health care because that would make it obvious that that NYC, and the stock market should have shut down for weeks. It made manifest what was and still is the underlying realities of US political policies.

The world did not change even if some of the policies of these gov’ts did. The Internet has changed some aspects of the world in this time of the pandemic but by no means the basic attitudes of the right wing capitalists who seem to hold the real power in any situation..
After 9/11, many corporations and individuals went on to make a lot of money in Iraq and Afghanistan and the real individual particular states who were involved (Bin Laden could not have done it just with with his Al-Quaeda — Saudi Arabian groups were part of this) were never exposed.

So here’s mine, all too ordinary: as has been true for most of these catastrophic world-as-village events, seen at one time on TV, and now this PC computer, I was at or near home, leaving a dentist’s office a little after 9:30.   I had felt suddenly & seen a commotion, excitement among the other people waiting, and asked the reception what was happening. I was told airplanes were hitting the World Trade Center!  I am ashamed to say I dismissed this as typical of this gullible receptionist. Could not be.

I went out to my car and found myself in a mounting traffic jam, so instead of 5 minutes to get home, it was 20. The phone was ringing as I reached the door, and I ran in and picked up, and it was Jim, in a drawn voice, “Not to worry. I’m just fine. I’m in the basement of the Australian embassy where we were all told to go, and scary huge men armed heavily are filling the building.” He had to get off his flip phone, but said quickly “put on the TV, CNN.” I did and I saw the first of the two tall buildings sliding down. Horror, shock, as I saw the fire line in the middle, and the camera switching way below to see a man shrugging intensely.

Soon from CNN I knew a story of  these two planes and that there was a third that hit the Pentagon. As it happened the library was hit — since rebuilt as a small annex where Izzy works today. I went onto the Internet, queried friends at C18-l and read the name of Osama Bin Laden as the perpetrator for the first time. I had never heard this name before.

The rest is quickly told. A phone call from T.C.Williams telling me the school was in “lockdown” and of course “not to worry,” as the young adults would probable be let out at the usual time. Another from Laura, frightened; she surprised me by coming over about two hours later with Wally (with whom she was living at the time, and whom she would marry the following year). She needed to see me and Jim and the house and that all was the same, as it ever was. The news shows had less news as time went on.

Two friends called for the first time in years to express anxiety over Jim.  I said he was not in the Pentagon that day, and my cousin contacted me.  The next day I did have bad pains in my chest, suggesting I was experiencing more stress that I admitted to myself.

I did think to myself what Susan Sontag wrote in a newspaper and was castigated for: “well, what do people expect — the US for decades stops social democracies, foments civil wars, pulls off coups, creates situations where no young native men can get a good job and itself bombs, strafes, this is the afflicted world hitting back. But astonishment at the audacity and effectiveness of this plan to take down the center of capitalism (Wall Street has no such hubristic building), of the US military (the magically numbered Pentagon), and a fourth plane (never hit) to set on fire and destroy the central imperialist house in classical style, painted white … ”

Now 20 years on, two horrible wars later, instigated by George W Bush and his cronies and associates in crime (making oodles of money as unscrupulous oil and other corporations), carried on to no reasonable purpose (at least in aims originally by this crew), hundreds of thousands of people killed, untold billions spent, with “surges” by Barack Obama as president in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Then the institution of these inhumane murderous drones aka killing people without trial and often getting “the wrong target” so even the last day in Afghanistan a whole family was murdered, the US support of an utterly corrupt puppet regime in Afghanistan, laying waste a country and leaving a life-long psychological maiming of countless young adult Americans — I met two of these when I taught in the years past 2003 – a young woman and a young man.

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Last night I re-watched a candid history for a second time, with informed (insofar as he could) and perceptive and humane analysis, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. He streamed it from his corner of YouTube. In my judgement it should be required watching for everyone. Wikipedia offers a precise accurate summary.

I want to call attention especially to the unknown and uninvestigated business and political connections between Bush fils and the Saudi Arabian ambassador and gov’t leaders, to how most of the “terrorists” were Egyptian or Saudi Muslims, to the creation of an atmosphere of fear and dread around the US by Bush’s gov’t for two years in order to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 but has vast oil fields and Saddam Hussein, who disdained Bush senior. The years of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan where the US built up the origins of the Taliban (to defeat “communist” Russia). The lying forms of recruitment, the horrific treatment of Afghans. One scene stays with me that flashes through: a beheading of a man in Saudi Arabia. The legless young men in Veteran’s hospitals whose funds Bush was cutting.

Three other films to be watched in order to learn what happened and what the war in Afghanistan is rooted in. 9/11’s Unsettled, is second in importance because of its perspective: the first responders. Alas, apparently not being distributed anywhere I can find. This is about the thousands of people who grew very sick, and developed serious diseases in the time after 9/11 when they worked at ground zero with inadequate protection, and within days Wall Street was opened again, a local high school, Stuyvesant, because what was wanted was to be seen to be carrying on making money. And to make money. From Rudi Giuliani to Christine Todd Whitman, ironically the head of the EPA, what was then wanted was a cover-up and not only did the US health insurance companies fight back and refuse to pay for people’s treatments and injuries, refuse to acknowledge they were the result of 9/11, those who protested were maligned and punished. Read the story of Joe Zadroga, after whom one of the bills to provide for compensation was named, his wife, his father. One of the important reporters on the stories was Juan Gonzalez.

Lisa Katzman

The third is a Netflix serial, Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror, directed by Brian Knappenberger. This is an unflinching look at what was done by three administrations, but especially Bush, where the incident was used to extend surveillance, legitimize torture (Black sites), the nature of the Patriot Act, what came from it, Guantanomo, and again Drones.

There is a fourth, a Frontline series on PBS too: American After 9/11, directed by Michael Kirk. There is no reason anyone in the US should be ignorant of what happened, how it relates to what came before, and how it relates to how the GOP went extreme and is following Donald Trump (if it can and it’s going far) into destroying the US democracy, such as it still is (very oligarchic) and was (thoroughly racist, punitive in outlook, deeply anti-social individualism promoted).

Also talking about Biden

This might all lead to my reader wondering why I insist 9/11 didn’t change the world. It happened as a result of all the US gov’t had done since 1947, and the reaction to it was to intensify what led to it. 9/11 was the result of what the world had become since WW2 and the reaction just intensified those conditions and attitudes of mind towards empire and money.  I’m now thinking of the GOP efforts (thus far successful) of stifling the vote, and on that you can read Heather Cox Richardson and listen and watch over many days and weeks. Here is just one

A graver and more overtly political blog than usual. But it’s appropriate. Not to say anything would be deeply wrong, reprehensible to me who does care about what happens to myself, my family and friends, all the people I know, the thousands and thousands inside the US whose destinies are intertwined with mine, and by extrapolation (since especially since the pandemic) our connection to all those vulnerable and powerless people who are not making oodles of money but at risk or suffering badly because of the people in these gov’ts, their allies, their donors, and parties’ behavior. Silence could be construed as consent.

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That’s a volcano — the islands are volcanic

To return to my small life among books. Although it fails to bring me in, Edward Douwes Dekker’s Max Havelaar, a mid-19th century Dutch novel has taught me more about colonialism’s workings, how it’s done, than any single book previous: stunning cruelty of the Dutch in Indonesia and all around India, the southasian pacific. The brave life of the introducer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

I attended a Bronte conference last Saturday, wonderful, and I’ve yet to write up my notes, which I’ll couple with a couple of Gaskell and Bronte sessions from Gaskell house, and a May Sinclair session at Cambridge (profound talk, Sinclair also much influenced by the Brontes). I promise myself I will write up a blog about the Brontes, Sinclair and Gaskell next on Austen Reveries.  I’ve been astonished by what I’ve found in Trollope’s Vicar of Bullhampton, reading it daily with a group on FB – I certainly will write about it, together with John Caldigate, as unexpected radical social, justice and sexual politics.

I carry on reading Anne Finch’s poetry, going more thoroughly immersed into it, so that my old inner relationship with her is returning: extraordinary masterpiece Poems never published by her; and Poems she chose to publish or let others publish. I will read or read in the important books about her once again. And I listen on to Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child, even poorly translated by Anne Goldstein and dully read by Hillary Havens, I am so drawn in I am continually thinking to myself well I would do that but not this. They are both me, Lila and Lenu. Ferrante hates fascism and misogyny (they are one and the same she says in her Frantumaglia

Good Heav’en I thank thee, Since it was design’d
I shou’d be fram’d but of the weaker kind,
That yet my Soul, is rescu’d from the Love
Of all those trifles, which their passions move
Pleasures, and Praises, and Company with me
Have their Just Vallue, if allow’d they be;
Freely, and thankfully, as much I taste
As will not reason, nor Religion waste,
If they’re deny’d, I on my Selfe can live
Without the aids a cheating World can give
When in the Sun, my wings can be display’d
And in retirement I can have the shade.
— Anne Finch, early in the first ms book

Ellen

As the year turns, & since in the US over 50% people are vaccinated, the pandemic in the US recedes …

On J. R. Farrell’s Troubles [1971 novel set in Ireland 1920s] “Troubles is not a ‘period piece’; it is yesterday reflected in today’s consciousness. The ironies, the disparities,the dismay, the unavailingness are contemporary” (Elizabeth Bowen, a review published 1971)

Dear friends and readers,

You see the increasing good news for people in the US — also other countries, where vaccination is proceeding apace (Israel, the UK, Chile, the US, Bahrain are among these). Pressure is being put on the Biden administration to cooperate quickly over sharing our excess vaccine supply (AstraZeneca, as soon as the FDA approves it officially), and to use a temporary waiver on copyright. I hope people here are aware of how much we owe to Biden and his administration as we move into a post-pandemic era, which Biden is trying also to renovate through the first large and decent gov’t programs intended to reach everyone to enable us to improve our and all communities’ lives. He, his wife, the VP and the others working with and for them are my new paladins and heroines.

I do have some news. I’m near finishing teaching and following courses for this term (today my courses on the weather, Early Pulitzer Prize-winning Women Poets, and Edith Wharton ended) and within a month the summer’s teaching and new (though less than I have been taking) courses begin. For June at OLLI at AU, I will repeat my Two Novels of Longing Across an Imperialist Century, and for June-July (6 weeks) at OLLI at Mason I’ll continue my study of contemporary novels from a political POV, this time colonialist: my books will be Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s A Backward Place, Caryl Philips’s Crossing the River and Jane Mander’s The Story of a New Zealand River. Although I do have my review of the standard edition of Anne Finch’s poetry yet to do (I must buy the second very fat and very expensive volume), and am part of two reading groups on line (my Trollope&Peers, and an FB The Way We Read Now page) and via Zoom (Trollope Society), I fancy I have enough time to get back to my original projects, let go of this past winter.

But they have morphed from my reading and trying to be more realistic so I can envisage single volumes. Don’t imagine I seek to publish these; I’m returning to the way I was when I translated the poetry of Colonna and Gambara, and did all that original scholarship on Anne Finch, wrote a biography of her, did etext editions and so on. This is to give me a meaningful goal and extend myself, teach myself how to write a book regularly — so to speak. Even at age 74. So I rearranged my books, put many away, made the two stacks for the two courses, and fixed the others towards the projects and towards my sheer love of this or that topic or language or type book — some of the books I read relate very much to my movie-watching and love of travel books.

This was not a trivial task. Some still had their spaces waiting for them but others has lost ground, and I had to improvise shelves, turn the books this way and that, and it took hours to re-pile what I hope to go through this summer in a way that showed the trail or path ahead. Gentle reader, I chain-read.

In this remarkable book (which I’ve been reading) Bowen teaches us how to travel, enacts for us how to think and feel to get inside a place and understand its feeling, an extraordinary recreation of atmosphere

an evocation of a city – its history, its architecture and, above all, its atmosphere. She describes the famous classical sites, conjuring from the ruins visions of former inhabitants and their often bloody activities. She speculates about the immense noise of ancient Rome, the problems caused by the Romans’ dining posture, and the Roman temperament, which blended ‘constructive will with supine fatalism’. She envies the Vestal Virgins and admires the Empress Livia, who survived a barren marriage. She evokes the city’s moods – by day, when it is characterized by golden sunlight, and at night, when the blaze of the moon ‘annihilates history, turning everything into a get together spectacle for Tonight. [As good as Eleanor Clarke’s Rome and A Villa

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So I will work on, maybe write my Poldark book but not as a literary biography. I just don’t have the resources or personality to do what’s necessary to be done. My aim now will be to return to reading all his extant works, which I have, including re-reading the Poldarks, and then writing a book on historical fiction and romance. This will lead to me reading more 20th century books, probably mostly by women. I have this term been reading political novels by women, which I discover, to be like many men’s often, set back further in historical time. I need to get back to the Graham books and historical romance.

Lampedusa’s Gattopardo – which I read in the original Italian and at the time thought the best book in Italian extant

This connects to the other project, a book on life-long single women writers. I was having the hardest time deciding which ones — there are so many, as my definition of lifelong single women does not exclude women who have been married. The criteria is rather that they have lived independently, developing their own career or vocation for most of their lives. This term I discovered how much I love 20th century women writers — I just fell in love with two of the women, Bowen and Manning — and how many of these fit my definition. So here as in the other project I must not dwell on a limited number of people but see their work as part of groups, subgenres, and emerge with another related theme beyond this groundwork criteria of a long time alone. If nothing else, this will guide my chain-reading. Right now I’m so taken, exhilarated (by Bowen), interested touched by Olivia Manning and am finishing all of her Balkan and Levant trilogy.

It’s not only the franker and deepening depiction of what goes on between heroine and hero, Harriet and Guy (I may be wrong about Aiden but I’m thinking that Guy is also implicitly supposed to be having an affair with Edwina — the giving her of that rose diamond that Harriet treasured as a gift from Angela is singularly cruel as a careless act) but the actual events we are shown — in the desert and also the colonialist politics where the English are now outsiders, unwanted — for the Greeks divided into fascists who wanted them out and nationalists and communists types too. The gov’t such as it was made a pact with the Germans, who proceeded of course to invade anyway.

I’m finding the whole depiction of Alexandria in a book on far more than Manning: Eve Patten’s Imperial Refuges of such interest – there is a section on the people who lived there — this brings us back to the Durrells — Lawrence, EM Forster, Cavafy, and group of gay people as well as others leading fluid lives not just sexually but also financially (desperate poverty some of them, while others have the private income). She means to bring this group in to — so that’s why I wondered about Aiden Pratt — based on someone real. The matter flows into my interest in colonialism (above), the course I’ll give at OLLI at Mason June-July — and poetry below.

Episode 6 of The Fortunes of War where Harriet (Emma Thompson) visits Luxor conveys the profound pessimism of the symbolic statues Manning intuits
(I’ve been re-watching Alan Plater’s masterpieces of BBC/ITV films)

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More very sad news: one of the friends I mentioned last time who I’ve become close to since Jim died, and who dropped me, Phyllis Furdell, has died. At age 75: her third husband (ex) emailed and then I phoned him and I will be going to her funeral service May 18th. Cheerful on the surface, in her inner life she was a troubled and acid soul; she had only one son, now in his late 50s, who needs someone to help him survive psychologically. She was a good painter and left paintings of the Washington DC subway with people on it (studies). Also astute portraits. Her ex-husband is trying to get some institution or art-seller to take them.

A fellow 18th century scholar, in his later 80s, a colleague, Manny Schonhorn. I knew him only in his later years and as a friend-acquaintance at the EC/ASECS meetings. He was so friendly, kind, full of fun, and candid. Wonderfully pleasant over drinks, informative if you sat with him for a full lunch. He and I would exchange email missives too. I’ll miss his presence at our meetings. He was a Defoe, Swift and Pope, & Fielding man from before feminism and post-colonialism so changed the field.

And a young woman of 43, once Laura’s close intimate friend, the maid of honor at Laura’s first wedding, also died — probably of cancer. Jessie never was able to emerge from her working class deeply anti-intellectual Trumpite family environment; going to college did not help pull her out into other worlds. Her last job was that hard work, little pay install electricity for rich-people’s parties that Laura did for a couple of years. Jessie never got another job; both husband/partners were utter failures; she left a 16 year old daughter. She never traveled (as my 75 year old friend did), never had a chance to fulfill her considerable gifts, never discovered where she could put them to use. Very sad.

20 Years Ago: Laura (bottom to the left) Jessie (top row to the right) as part of a theatrical crew and production

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On the up side now that the pandemic seems to have lost its grip (and Biden is aiming at 70% vaccination by June), it does look like I’m managing to keep enough students taking my courses and either in the fall 2021 (I’ll do Trollope’s Prime Minister with a book of political writings by 19th century women) or spring 2022 teach in person once again. I hope zooms will continue (from the Trollope Society, from Cambridge, from other academic type environments), for they are a mainstay for me where I don’t have to waste time traveling and can reach more than I ever dreamed of — and where I used to go when my eyes were better, like Politics and Prose Bookstore community in DC where the classes are often at night and I can’t drive. And in less than 2 weeks Laura, Izzy and I will find an Italian restaurant where we can eat outdoors and commemorate Izzy’s birthday: she’ll be 37!

An Image of Stark Grief

That’s all I have to report that’s new of changing, moving on. Maybe I should close on a movie I recently saw which I found to be a dazzling masterpiece — costume drama, period piece, Martin Scorcese’s Age of Innocence out of Edith Wharton’s remarkable ironically titled novel of the same name. I usually tell, however briefly, of a book or movie I’ve recently read or re-read. I was bowled over. Truly. You do have to pay attention to nuances, and respond to the imagery and what happens — Daniel Day Lewis as a profoundly melancholic Newland Archer – and the narrator’s studied lines.

Suffice to say it seemed to me for a movie to be the closest thing I know to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: more adequate to Tolstoy’s book than the 1977 Anna Karenina (which, together with oe Wright’s AK do as much and more justice to a deeply felt and complicated story of human beings than I ever realized before — yes I’ve been reading in this one). Even if I found a class to be worse than a waste of time (parts of the book were dismissed as of no interest – Levin, the politics of the three men &c), I have stayed with the book insofar as skimming/reading and then watching and thinking is concerned.

Stuart Wilson as Beaufort

Joanthan Pryce, the dangerous (blackmailing ever-so-discreet) secretary

Stuart Wilson, the Vronsky of the 1977 AK is the Beaufort of this Age of Innocence: we are in the movie (never mind the book) to assume he and Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer as a nervous, neurotic, deeply passionate and in the end withdrawn to find “repos” woman) have been having an affair — that she succumbs to several men, including her brutal husbands secretary (played by Jonathan Pryce — only a few minutes but he manages to emerge from the costume to dominate the stage with an insinuating dangerous presence). Sian Phillips as the knowing mother who backs the manipulative winner May Welland (Winona Rylands) in order to hold onto her son. The old woman grandmother (the book is about a world of women, a matriarchy) played by Mariam Margoleyes who loves Ellen and knows she should marry Newland but let’s the repressive even spiteful world have its way and grants Ellen the allowance which allows her to live independently in peace, privately.

One of the miracles of the movie is how it alludes to other movies in the same spirit. It is intended to project 19th century or now collapsed attitudes towards marriage and sex – -and does this through presenting the characters as neurotic and near breakdowns as well as the society as incessantly nasty and oppressive. It’s a costume drama about costume dramas as much as anything

Ending on a poem by C. P. Cavafy as translated by Edumund Keeley (there are better translations, one by Lawrence Durrell):

The City

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

This harsh ending means to convey to the person who wants to travel to entertain, flee themselves, provide substitute (tourist?) meaning, that the soul makes her own landscape, your own inner environment, out of ennui or social desperance, you can create your own forms of beauty. It might be you want to reach Ithaca, far away, but take a long time getting there. Olivia Manning returned from Egypt having learned from Luxor to write of Ireland, The Dreaming Shores, with these exquisite photographs of this green temperate world – which I’ve been reading and perusing too.

Ellen

A welling up of peace and satisfaction and hope: January 20, 2020

After four years of worn-down nightmare
After the long anxiety of having won
Then the startling horror & disbelief
We are at last rewarded with the usual

I’ll never know why people want fairy tales

The sane people have come out of hiding

Or, In which the miraculous no longer feels like a common occurrence … (I paraphrase former POTUS Reagan)

The inauguration of Joe Biden as President and Kamala Harris as vice-president began last night at 5:30 pm. As per the instructions I saw on a tweet from the Joe Biden group (what shall I call them?) Izzy and I put 6 (battery-operated) candles in two of our front windows to shine out to our neighbors (and by extension the world) to remember with others all the people who have died and celebrate the coming inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as President & Vice President of the USA. I watched the ceremony on TV, PBS — very beautiful, discreet, contemplative. The house next to me (a male gay couple), one across the street from me (another widow living with an adult child, in her case a son), and a house not far off (very rich people, two couples now living there since the adult son had lost his good job) all had candles in their windows.

Then the next day around 10:30 Izzy put on her TV and the events of the day had begun. I went in and out of said room from mine to see how proceedings were going. Of course I had seen the images of DC as a militarized fortress (later I learned that 12 of the 75,000 + National Guard from around the US had been plucked out of their ranks, that five were indeed dangerous, and one boasting of what he did on Jan 5th or was going to do).  I had worried a lot about a sniper. I am old enough to remember the Kennedy assassination and how Lee Harvey Oswald was able to murder Kennedy from the window of a high office building (or warehouse) in Texas. I kept trying to remember if there were any high buildings close to the capitol and could not. I relied on said military, FBI and all the responsible people to have made the building and stairs and area safe.

When I had woke up, I had had this strange feeling this was a special day. I have never felt that about any day but Christmas when a child, and that has faded. Clarycat was puzzled. I was not sitting in the usual places, doing my usual routines. Why were we spending so much time in Izzy’s room? Why were we in the front room? but she followed me back and forth, sometimes taking out time to sit by a heated grate or lick Izzy lest she feel left out.

The TV was replaying Trump’s goodbye address. I saw only the lift-off of the US tax-payer-paid military helicopter carrying the Trump grifters into a distant sky, & thought to myself what the band should be playing is “Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more/Hit the road, Jack, and, don’t you come back no more …. I expected to cry at noon as Biden and Harris are sworn in (I get slightly choked up just thinking of it), but I remembered that in Austen’s Mansfield Park when Sir Thomas left for the West Indies, not to be back for however long, Lady Bertram & Mrs Norris both expected to cry & didn’t manage it …

In the event I didn’t cry, I managed only a welling up of satisfaction, and sense of peace and hope. The building which had around 2:30 pm on January 6th been swarming with crazed men filled with hatred, armed (in the background the ever-present Judy Woodruff her voice quavering with horror, trying to remain calm), police getting beat up, was now a scene of orderly democratic ritual. Soon I would hear strains of John Philip Souza, and indeed I did eventually.  I began to watch in earnest around 11:20 as the central actors came down the steps.

I hope I will be permitted a feminist joke. Izzy had on MSNBC and I had put my TV on in the front room (just in case somehow something somewhere was registering how many viewers PBS was getting) and kept going back and forth to hear Judy Woodruff, James Fallows (once a speechwriter for presidents), and a little later Michael Gerson (his face was suffused with tears). After VP elect Harris came down the stairs with her husband (the second gentleman — like a character in The Winter’s Tale), Judy Woodruff could not resist seeming to express admiration for what she said was a feat: “she didn’t hold onto the bannisters, but took her husband’s arm.” Yes Harris was in absurdly high heels. Judy would notice — probably there was a time when she wore such shoes. I never wore quite such high ones. I had noticed First Lady Dr Jill favored very high heels, and lo and behold down she came, arm-in-arm with her husband — so there was no need of negotiation — she just sailed down. I did like her blue coat and under-dress with its shimmering white effect; the colors she wore favored her so why shouldn’t her also very high heels also match? The queen (Elizabeth)’s mask nowadays matches her (probably empty) purse and (far more sensible) shoes (but then she’s in her 90s). (On Trollope&Peers a friend reminded me that Nancy Pelosi is another powerful woman who teeters about in these lunatic shoes — in her case doubtless to beat back any realization she is a great-grandmother.)

Former president and Michelle Obama coming down the stairs – she gets to (or thinks she should) wear flats because she would tower over him, as she is very tall

Biden said all the right things and it felt sincere. I begin to see why he gets votes. Not super-intellectual, not rhetoric, but plain words sincerely meant. Four points: he will lead a successful effort to end this pandemic, to stop the sickening and dying. We can do it. We can also turn around this bankruptcy, desperate economic conditions for most — and he has a trillion dollar bill to do it. We will control climate change. And we will work to eliminate (as far as we can — there was always this reality check in his language) racial injustice. On the way he talked of a plan to bring some millions of immigrants to this country into citizenship. End the hate, end the lies. It was what I wanted to hear and I am for his achieving that and much more. He did talk about US allies, rejoining our partnerships, with an implication of securing peace and helping prosperity for all together. It was a continual rebuke of all Trump had been.

I stayed for the songs — Lady Gaga was embarrassing because she over-did her costume and her song — she was trying to turn rhyming 18th century verse into personally felt rock-n-roll. Jennifer Lopez also (to me) overdid it. “This is my land” (Woodie Guthrie) and “America, America” (Ray Charles’s old standby) are not supposed to be personal expressions of an exotically dressed star. A male country singer came down the steps without a mask, sang more simply (acapella Izzy calls it — without instruments) “Amazing Grace,” and succeeded much better. Unlike most others, he shook people’s hands. I wondered if he was a lost Trumpite come to the wrong place (bad joke alert). Amanda Gordon’s poem rhymed, it felt rollicking. The prayers of the two preachers before and after were also appropriate — I like the second man’s especially.

A little later I again watched — all the three former presidents and their wives stood at attention, in came POTUS Biden and VP Harris and they symbolically laid the waiting wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier. A trumpet played taps. Very touching.  Then they all departed, the Bidens to the motorcade, which would take them to their home for four years — to start work, and they did. Around 8 or so I caught the new press secretary, Jen Psaki, back in the familiar room, doing the usual things, even calling on the wire service person first. She promised more print-outs next time.

I did mean tonight to watch on TV the virtual celebration. Since I have never been invited to any of the usual balls or parties, this could have been for me a first time in joining in. But Judy Woodruff would go on and on with her thoughtful interviews (people saying the expected things far too carefully) so I gave up. When I came back, a group of Latino young men were making music I can’t respond to, so I turned back to this computer and watched and listened to a couple of interviews Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez conducted with Waleed Shahid, the campaign manager of AOC on how to push centrist democrats to the left — Shahid seemed to feel this might be a moment like that of FDR where the need is so strong and the past so grim, Biden will succeed in getting his program through before the next election can threaten his thin majority. A “whistleblower,” John Kiriakou, a former CIA analyst and case officer who exposed the Bush-era torture program and was the only official jailed in connection with it, had a true story to tell about how pardons were “going” for thousands of dollars or a couple of million (Rudy Guiliani’s price) to get to Trump to ask. He was told by Trump’s son-in-law to write his story on 3/4s of a single page, and the last quarter should say what Donald Trump will get out of this. Then a Vanderbilt professor and political analyst-author, Michael Eric Dyson talked of what an unmitigated disaster the last four years have been (a fulcrum for fascism).

Undeterred I tried again, this time through WETA online and finally was rewarded by this beautiful song, beautifully sung — out there in the freezing cold windy night beneath the statue of Lincoln, on the steps of the memorial, Bruce Springsteen: “Land of Hope and Dreams:”

I can hear fireworks from afar.

Hope is alive tonight as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris get to work with their team,
Ellen