Hemorrhagic stroke

Dear friends and reader,

Here’s why I’ve not posted for weeks: I wrote this to a literary women, Anne Boyd Rioux, in answer to something she wrote to me on her substack newsletter: I had sent one of my foremother poet postings: Muriel Rukeyser.

Very unfortunately since I last wrote on this substack newsletter, I had a stroke (Jan 30th, 20240) and now find myself painfully trying to recover. Among the abilities I seem to have lost is typing. I have many ” side” problems like this (insomnia, constipation); centrally I cannot walk w/o a walker and am in danger of falling. I’m physically weak. Where I was for many years (until Jan 29), a rapid touch typist I cannot get my left hand to type anything but slowly and inaccurately. I have been trying to get access to therapy for typing, and as yet have failed. I discover Kaiser might not have such a service. I am again waiting to see — now next week. They provided therapy at the rehab (I was in one for a few weeks) and now at home; but hardly enough. I discover I don’t have medicare but medicare advantage paid to Kaiser– and nothing else. I find nothing on the Net; if this new offer by Kaiser is another sham, I shall try AARP, but feel I will again confront no living services.

To a friend at Olli at Mason: I can read and this isolation is bad for me so I am going to try a mini-course (4 weeks in June at OLLI at AU), using all I had created at that last OLLI at Mason. Going to try to do a Trollope talk using handwritten notes. I walk a little better but still need a walker and in danger of falling. Yes a dearth of literature at OLLI at Mason so I signed up for women’s rights and the Sayers Lord Peter Wimsay and Harriet Vane course at Politics and Prose (though they are pricey)

I’m told of complicated software I probably cannot operate without an at teacher. It is a kind of death for me.

************ — Update several days later — in a letter to a good (internet) friend who told me of an online class from Cornwall on Corish literature and culture:

It’s 2:50 am here and I’m up (unfortunately) as usual. Trying hard not to feel sorry for myself, but simply frustrated, I’m in a bad place just now. I can’t go out (can’t walk alone) and yet can’t talk to people as I’ve been doing for 35 years (via typing words) . I seem not to be getting better, and doctors are helpless against what the stroke has done to me — why I am so grateful for this Cornish class via zoom as a lifeline. My older daughter is trying to help me learn to use this Otter-AI, but I am here so bad with digital manipulation.

To facebook friends on my timeline:

I’ve had my first explanation as to why I feel I’m not improving anything when I do typing exercises. It seems the stroke disrupts neurological connections such that my brain does not know where my fingers precisely are and fails t control their movements. There’s a space gap. This is part of why I lose my balance — why I need the walker. I’m failing to situate larger parts of my body parts of my body too. So I hardly feel I’m coming closer to walking by myself and feel am often near losing my balance and falling hard.

A couple of hours later. I just finished participating in 4 classes on Austen with Maria Frawley (Politics and Prose online) and felt radiant when it ended. (really 8 because I watched 4 recordings of what I’d missed) For me life has long been worth the “cost” of it because of my literary studies. I can still read and enjoy with others. The opening picture is Emma painting from Andrew Davis’ BBC Emma.

I hop this is not my journey’s ending

Ellen

Winter Solstice — Limitations

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

Dear Friends and readers,

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

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

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

Christmas Day dinner

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

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

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

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

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

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

The poster for this production

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leontes and Hermione in anguish

The Spring dancing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bronte Sisters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

“At 77, it is time to be in earnest …”

Me and Clarycat, spring 2013, photo taken by Jim

Dear Friends and Readers,

If I’m not mistaken, this was the hardest birthday I’ve had to get through since Jim died, 10 years ago — 2013, when I was 67. I could, of course, have sat all day and cried, and sometimes I was very near tears. For example, when I thanked Norma Reck for organizing the luncheon for the Theater Group at a splendid restaurant tucked away in an older beautiful house, one I’d taken Izzy to several times when she was part of an Adult Aspergers Club. I always drove her there and back; now I got to go for the first time, and it was a yummy meal. I could feel that Norma felt my intense emotion. Why didn’t I? For the same reason as I’ve never sat for hours weeping over Jim. It’s just so useless –besides which it’ll exhaust me.  And such acts won’t bring him back, and nor cannot bring Clarycat back either.  With her passing, though, another of the fundamental presences which I’ve felt for years loves me, and who has been my companion is gone.

Funny, I have less to do: there is less food to put out, the litter box is not as full; going through morning tidying up takes less time: no one to provide a snack for when I get to the enclosed porch. She would sit there waiting for it. When we’d done in the kitchen, she’d come with me to this study for the day’s activity — mostly mental — me sitting reading, writing, her looking out one of the windows mostly, or half-sleeping.  Morning was a thing we did together.

I had a bad night, bad dreams, and took a half a sleeping pill to get through.

I did it by having things to do or places to be with others around. So part of usual routine was posting to the lists, paying a bill (fraught because I have to do most of them online and thus have to have user name and password accepted &c), tidying up (as usual) and then the finding the place. I left way early.

A two hour luncheon where I listened to (and myself spoke sometimes to the people near me) all their plans (Norma’s) for the coming year. When I had left, Ian had stared at me going out — looking astonished and unhappy. I had told him “I won’t be gone long; I’ll be back before 3,” and so I was. He hopped out of the cat-bed with a wall around it, slightly too small for him, which he’s been preferring since Clary died. Meowing at me. It took a while to settle back, and then there was a zoom chat at 4-5 (again from OLLI at Mason), this one about stress.

What a topic. I thought it was supposed to be stress at holiday time, but it seemed it was to be about stress in general just as much. Perhaps I gave away a bit too much of myself, but probably not. The wonders of zoom include how structured it is, how it does distance people so though I told twice of Clary’s death, and at one point the conversation was about what we were to do when very old and if we were preparing for it, and I said, no, as I hadn’t the money for good assisted living, and had no one to turn to who understood me, so I hoped to pop off all at once so as to obviate any need for killing myself. I did say something like that. Others took us in other dire directions, even the slaughter of the Palestinians over the past 6 weeks, and fear (very real) of Trump winning as a Hitler. After all most of them don’t find holiday time especially stressful.

I had hoped that I had a third distraction: a young male friend said he would be singing in a choir, reachable by zoom at 7:30 pm. Izzy obligingly made supper a little earlier, and with cooking, talking, the dishes, I was busy until just then. I waited 7 minutes and then realized it was 9/5, not 11/29. I made this mistake this past Saturday when Izzy and I went half-way to the Folger before I realized our tickets were for 12/9, not 11/25. The Oxford trip I had us coming in a day too early, I had us not having the full 5 nights booked for the week in London that we needed. Last minute arrangements were managed though — at considerable expense. This time we just had to turn round and go home — Izzy took another train to the movies.

So I turned to the real source of quietude and ordered thought amusement that was taking me through the day: Dorothy Sayers’ Clouds of Witness, which I am truly enjoying. I read it on and off. I’ve just finished the fourth episode of the Ian Carmichael serial, Five Red Herrings — the movie much better than the book, from re-arrangement, re-emphasis on the characters, and the alluring scenery of Scotland. In both forms her forms of wittiness are so engaging.

Closing moments of Five Red Herrings — Lord Peter fishing, Bunter painting (Glyn Houston rightly got second billing) — what fun they might have taken it to drive all around that part of Scotland in 1920s luxury cars

I then watched DemocracyNow. org and learned of another massacre of civilians (just going from house to house, killing all the men, raping women first) going on in Darfur: the open genocidal slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza has set a dreadful precedent. And I read a wonderful essay on Protest Literature in American — a volume called A Political Companion to John Steinbeck, online book — a real lucky find because since he was a true protester, he has been utterly sidelined in publishing and curricula assignments in schools throughout the US. I have to get myself to try Of Mice and Men; I suspect I won’t like the depiction of the disabled man; and I don’t like Steinbeck’s way of depicting women.

But it was Sayers who kept me cheered. Laura wrote more than once, sending me photos of her cats; maybe over 50 people wished me a happy birthday on FB and my listserv. Again it’s so easy from afar; when I told anyone in person today, they rushed past that information.

10 years and now I’ve lost my second beloved. Ian is a different sort of cat: he is attached but he shows it far more distantly. For example, he sleeps elsewhere in the house, not in the bed near me.

An old photo of Rosalind Carter — my guess is she knew what it was herself

I also learned (from Amy Goodman) of how Rosalind Carter worked hard and effectively to make real help for people with mental health problems. She was very concerned that the stigma associated with this should be wiped away. I doubt it has because people fear mental distress, depression, sadness, anxiety, panic (and yes stress too). But she has made it less acceptable to reject and ignore people needing mental help. A stubborn woman who lucked into a good marriage with a man who acquired a lot of power and respect and shared it with her. She could not know but perhaps suspected how many people have such problems who don’t begin to bear true witness to it.

I’ve always been in earnest in life — I do hope when it’s time to go, I go quickly. I see now that I did the kindness thing I could for Clarycat. I gave her as much precious life as she could enjoy and then endure.

The local vet practice sent me a card where the two vets, the one I saw twice for Clary, and the one who sat with me and kept me company and basically did the euthanasia, wrote a paragraph each. In long hand. Kind, assuring me I’d done the right thing, spared Clarycat much suffering. This is better more humane treatment than Kaiser ever provided.

Posy Simmons’ image of Mrs Scrooge and her cat on Christmas eve — I shall have to dream of Clary that night

Ellen

I say very little that’s cheerful, so …

One of today’s books whose subtitle should be Rape, Class & Gender in late 18th century NYC

Dear friends and readers,

Prompted by the cheerful news that the gov’t will not shutdown for the next couple of months:  that on my mind, with my 2 basic income streams secured for now, I I gave into myself and for Izzy and I for New Year’s Eve have bought for the day time tickets for us to see a new musical, Dylan Thomas & Conor McPherson, Girl from North Country. For myself I signed up for 2 online courses from Politics and Prose, 3 sessions of Dorothy Sayers and 8 of Austen (the 4 finished novels) by teachers who are good at teaching and women I like — plus bought books for Sayers as I discovered I have no decent copies of precisely the 3 Kara Keeling chose. It’s Maria Frawley for the Austen. I bought Izzy’s two Christmas presents books (biography of Edith Hamilton and the latest Mary Beard, lovely hardback books — these cost less than the kindles or paperbacks).

I now have four theater events for this coming season/month and will go to all of them by public transportation. Izzy and I agreed to go New Year’s Eve by public transportation (cab, Metro, shuttle bus) — see above splurge. We take a cab on Dec 23rd to the nearby Signature theater in the evening to see Ragtime; we have not made up our minds for the Folger Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale (it is the play) whether cab or train and cabs. The one event I’ll go with the OLLI at Mason women (Quilters somewhere in remote Fairfax) I’ll go by cab and back by one of the women driving me to the Metro station and from King Street a cab. I shall still use my car but for things like I’m doing today.

Today I am heading out for the Whole Foods Market at 10 am because yesterday when I attempted it yesterday at 4 I found the sun in my eyes way too much, the crowds way too much too. For me long trips by car are over for good.

I want to remark how wonderful excellent is the Washington Post Book World. Each week good and uplifting and intelligent too essays — this week a book on an owl, on Anthony Hecht’s poetry come to mind. For myself I carry on with Sibilla Aleramo’s astonishing A Woman (Una Donna) – a kind of portrait of the artist as a trapped wife until she escapes (like Joyce); two books on mother-daughter pairs across literature; biography of Steinbeck (John, whom I’m getting to dislike very much);  Hilary Mantel Pieces, beginning again Victorian women, as in Geraldine Jewsbury and Annie Thackeray Ritchie, Jane Carlyle; and re-watching the film adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay …  And every day with great patience Dickens’s Little Dorrit.  Learning about Disability in 19th century novels from Clare Walker Gore’s insightful book.

Clarycat was better today, eating, drinking, using the litter box when she could. She tottered about. I think she’s now at rest for the rest of the night. This morning she was doing her old routine of climbing onto my bed and sitting by me as I read – what I do the first couple of hours in the morning (and last hour at night listening then to WETA the third hour of quiet classical music. I wish she could look out the window but there’s no way unless she can sit on a bench or on a table in a cat-bed and she tumbles.

The one thing I don’t forget today — is my awareness of the continued slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Yesterday I phoned all three of my congressional representatives, wrote again to PBS to deplore their inadequate coverage of this genocidal destruction — though I concede they are improving, they had Malcolm Brabant equating demonstrations on behalf of ceasefire, the Palestinians with anti-semitism (I wrote them condemning him for that).  I am no joiner, no demonstrator, so what else can I do but these kinds of things and my blogs …

Charlotte Heywood (Rose Williams) — a favorite still from Sanditon, Season 2 off to work, by the seashore

Ellen

Adventures in Oxford and London; Meeting Friends

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

Old Parsonage Hotel, at night, from the outside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Victoria and Albert Museum pool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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

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

A Going Away Blog

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

Clara Tornvall

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

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

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

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

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

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Edward Petheridge and Harriet Walter in an exaggerated dance scene

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

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

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

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

Ellen

We are now looking forward to our trip to the UK

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

Dear Friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

Anna Carteret as Lady Mabel Grex

Miranda Otto as Mrs Hurtle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morning Athletes

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

I on myself must try to live

My daughter, Laura, at the National Building Museum, earlier this week

for there is no help for it. This is my 11th summer without him, the 5th since I can no longer drive at night. I can’t go far by myself — and have no stomach for it any more. It’s true that Jim having been cut off from fulfillments of older age, so am I. Tonight it rained and thundered and there is still lightning, I went out, walked round the block as in a circle, all the houses are lit, more people home than usual (it said on the news how crowded roads and airports are) or seeming so. I left my teeth off, counting on meeting no one, my shawl over my old clothes, my bedroom ballet slippers … an old woman walking alone I’ve become one of those women I used to see walking on the streets of NYC when I was young.

Dear friends and readers,

Remember my proposal to give a paper on Intriguing Women in Trollope at Somerville College, Oxford, between Sept 1-3 this year, and plan to go to London afterwards, all with Izzy, and visit the International War Museum, take in a play. Well I’ve been rereading Jane Nardin’s excellent (clearly written) He Knew She Was Right. The book is about Trollope breaking away from conventional and patriarchal views of women and in the latter part of his career depicting unconventional women sympathetically. Nardin writes is insightful in the intricacies of her arguments. This past week too I learned there is an overt homosexual man in Trollope’s oeuvre: Archie Clavering, and he is treated so obnoxiously by the other characters, and made a butt by Trollope so shamefully, it’s distressing. I have in my readings in archives come across real homosexual men in diaries and they are hidden in plain sight by their families so as to make them marriageable and safe — not boasted about but not ridiculed. Important sources for The Claverings include the 18th century iconoclastic sexually candid plays by Van Brugh, The Provok’d wife and The Provok’d Husband I’ve a chapter on this in my book, Trollope on the Net.

Well we are in a pickle (sometimes to me it’s a nightmare) and our trip to Oxford and then London in early September now uncertain. Izzy goofed on that application we sent in for her. She made it out in blue ink; we got back an email telling us she must make it out again in black ink but they did not send the old passport back or previous application. We did not think to scan in that old one with all the information so she can’t make out the new form since she doesn’t know the number of the book or its issue date. I’ve been on the phone three times and was told the congressman’s aides can do nothing until either 3 months after we first applied (April 29th) or 2 weeks before we are set to leave. People wouldn’t listen to me on the phone. I wanted advice: should we send the form without it being wholly made out and with a letter explain they have this information we don’t and either fill it out themselves or send back the old passport. No one will answer. Finally someone answered an email of Izzy’s who is in this congressman’s office (Don Beyer) and said he is now working on this and has begun the process with the agency but he can guarantee nothing. I tried to reach him on the phone but did not. I told our story to another aide emphasizing Izzy’s autism, and how nervous and tense we were that morning doing these applications. This is causing me great agony of mind.

Can you imagine what federal gov’t would be if Trump had had a 3rd term, or if he were re-elected. Nothing functioning; everything up for bribes after you “know” someone.

Finally we got some material from the state department (with a special envelope and case number) but again they do not return the old passport or application. So she filled it out as far as she could in black ink, and added a letter explaining why we don’t have the old passport book number or date issued, asking them to finish filling it out (as they do) or send all back again with needed information. All this takes time.

I did goof on the airplane too. I was unclear and now we land a day ahead. I have us to stay until September 8th, but if she cannot come with me I shall not go alone. I cannot face it. I did get my new passport and scanned it and her and my drivers’ licenses. So I may bow out of this conference which I did want to give a paper at. It is all too much for me. Loss of $4800 for the non-refundable tickets. This is the biggest haul the airlines have had from me since Jim died, and if I don’t get to go, it will be the last plane tickets I ever buy.

Each day on the Internet I read of this conference or that here and there (ISECS just now in Rome!), where people are going, and I remember how Jim and I for a couple of summers in NYC would drive on Tues/Thurs mornings at 9:30 to Jones Beach with our dog LLyr, bring coffee, croissants, a corner where dogs were allowed and stay for an hour and one half. The drive each way 40 minutes. Llyr would rush into the water and I would go in with her and play longer. Jim sat under an umbrella; he’d swim too.

There is no public beach near here closer than 3-4 hours. Here in Virginia all lakes are exclusive and membership price very high — so too do they have these in DC; I’ve learned of them since teaching at OLLI at AU.

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Hydrangeas (I’m told is the name) and ferns — one pink!

I bit the bullet and hired (for not that much less than the plane tickets) two black guys, tree people, and they came with a crew, and did a lot of work in my front yard and along the sides of the house. Among other things they injected the buses and flowers with some mighty compounds, mulched, fertilized, added ferns, but best of all I now realize they cut back the trees that overhang my property all along the right side. Asocial utterly selfish neighbors I’ve had over the years plant their trees at the edge of my property and then don’t cut them back. This is the second or third time I’ve let a group of guys cut back severely in a kind of line. What I didn’t realize was not only more sun would come in during the day, but in evening a plot that seemed to be only shady except the very earliest dawn is now in early evening. So here is the right side of my house — one half the plot they worked on; the other half is ferns and hydrangeas with the bouquets of white flowers at the end.

My teaching has gone very well this summer: people seemed really to enjoy The Heroine’s Journey with me (23 people), and a similar experience is emerging in the Gaskell Wives and Daughters class (25, though 40 registered). I am just loving her books; I’ve just re-watched the first part of Andrew Davies’s beautiful serial adaptation, for an umpteenth time. I’m rereading her Life of Bronte for the first time in decades. How powerful it is. It is made up heavily of Charlotte’s letters once she grows older; as I read of the deaths of Emily and Anne I thought of Jim’s death and how I watched over him in his agony of mind when not deeply drugged against the pain.

Thus far I’ve attended one class in person this summer. I’m told that those that are in person are again having trouble getting more than 6 to attend. I do miss the pizza parties they used to have at OLLI at AU.

After I wrote two blogs on Jane Austen sequels and Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister a distant (by space) friend sent me Charlie Lovett’s First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love and Jane Austen (I may have his Bookman’s Tale somewhere in the house) and will soon start it.

You see I finished the beautifully titled Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill. I have a love-hate relationship with her: I’ve loved a number of her books (not just The Woman in Black, but also In the Springtime of the Year, her Various Haunts of Men made me intensely anxious) but every time I read something she says in her own voice, I dislike her. So too here: I found myself bonding, learning from, interested in her love of certain books, why she’d reread this and not that, as a book about book reading so satisfying, but depart from this and she begin to offer her reasons for her values (not the values themselves) and I was turned off. but individual sections are worth consulting: for example, on book titles, how important, they must be appealing; how: an inner pattern, rhythms, capturing a theme or place; with a list of these (p 10), her own chapter headings exemplifying what she writes.

What else shall I say? Izzy has just risen from her early evening nap. My Clarycat is slowly getting better: she is lively all day, sits near me, trots round my chair, sits on my lap leaning against my chest while I eat; she can climb up on the desk and kitchen table once again, and jump down lightly to chair and floor. She eats a lot though so thin, drinks, uses her litter box and cleans herself though her coat is not smooth any more. She must be careful and still has problems going where she wants (her body pushes left when she wants to go right), bangs against walls. It is good I scarcely ever leave her.

Said to be Virginia Woolf’s Sappho (1947), of course it’s not — look how the birds are unafraid

How shall I end? I’ve this two weeks read a brilliantly witty, suggestive literary biography of a once famous 18th century writer, Richard Steele; it’s by Calhoun Winton (now 96): no one writes books this way in academia any more. He made me understand Steele to some extent, taught me about the milieu deeply, brought out how Steele lived, what were his finest works (the periodical essays). I ended respecting the man. All this because I’m reviewing a badly written (the jargon sentences make me blink) on captivity as everywhere in the 18th century (there’s legal as well as physical) and the author wants me to read The Conscious Lovers as about colonialism: it does have a heroine who I now realize might be a mulatto, an Indiana (played by Anne Oldfield at the time — who also played the leading roles in the Van Brugh plays I cited above). Steele owned slaves in the West Indies — from marrying as his first wife a very wealthy woman. Who knew? One source of his wealth.

A modern sexed-up conception of the 18th century play as played by 18th century actors …

Well I’m watching and re-watching Sanditon, getting to know it, getting to like it more and more and realize how in several ways what we are told about Austen’s Miss Lambe in those 12 chapters when we first meet her makes parallels to Steele’s heroine. I don’t think Andrew Davies began by reading this play, but he is probably much more steeped in 18th century literature then he gives away (he adapted Cleveland’s book, Defore’s Moll Flanders), but it’s fascinating to how some the peculiarities of Sidney’s relationship with Miss Lambe when we first meet them are analogous or similar.

The Conscious Lovers was first staged in 1722, it was the most popular play across the century, lasting well into the 1790s. In the play she is being (idealistically) kept by the hero of the play, Bevil Junior, who is having sex with her, who wants to marry her first. Maybe Austen had in mind that Sidney Parker would be involved with Miss Lambe, Sidney’s “virtue” or goodness that slowly emerges is seen in how she is boarded with a school of girls: he is protecting her reputation. The attempt to claw away her inheritance in the third season has parallels with this and other colonialist literature of the 18th century.

Solly McLeod mesmerized, Sophie Wilde eager, unsure as Tom and Sophie

Should Davies have worked the story so that the pair we were at first going to end up with were Theo James and Crystal Clarke. Imagine it …

The way Nikki Amuka-Bird was dressed as Lady Russell (Persuasion 2022) would be appropriate for Indiana

Indiana was always played by a white woman and usually the big star of the year: Anne Oldfield first played the part, but like the heroine of the recent Tom Jones, where just a few changes in Sophia’s background turned her into a mulatto, daughter of a white man and enslaved black woman. As a side comment, whether Austen ever mentioned The conscious Lovers or not, it’s improbable she didn’t know it. A number of the values underlying “true love” (respect, esteem, knowledge of the other party) are part of the discourse in CL. So there you learned something about the 18th century without having to travel to Rome.

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Oh hope very hard for Izzy and I she gets her passport back in time — or just back, we’ll settle for just back. To tell the truth I don’t know if I’m up to getting proper lodgings for Izzy and I — the way we have made a mess of what we’ve done thus far, how we’ve felt about it, shows me it’s time perhaps to concede to the realities of autism. In my Women with Autism monthly zoom I’ve now met a number of women who find travel the same ordeal I do (and Izzy at times seems to)

Last book ordered and on its way: Clara Tornvall, The Autists: How Autism is expressed in Women or Women on the Spectrum.

A generic picture that appeals to me

Ellen

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

Tazzi — December 2014, probably around 19

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On her blanket a couple of mornings ago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is my proposal:

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

Intriguing Women in Trollope’s Fiction

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

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

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

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

Women in and writing Detective-Mystery Stories

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

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

I was moved to write as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to close?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jill and Trevor (Yorkshire TV)

Their Yellow Van

Ellen