An epidemic of loneliness? w/coda of poems by Elizabeth Alexander and Marcus Amaker

My new profile picture for face-book and twitter — a life apud libros — among books, of reading

I met America at a neighborhood bar last night …. Marcus Amaker

Dear friends and readers,

An “epidemic of loneliness” is the phrase the US Surgeon General leads with when he comes on News shows and other forums to tell us that how bad it is for people to be literally alone (no matter what electronics are around them in their living habitat). but since COVID is over insofar as a control on people’s behavior, all I can see for most of them is endless socializing — except when it comes to asking anyone to travel to a class or place of work when they can do the essential task or have the essential experience (often intangible intellectual) without the waste of time, or taking up of time to get there and back. That’s what’s asserted online — everyone gone out there once again socializing somehow or other, and even I may appear to be that way as I also am guilty of trying to appeal to the norms of my readers.

I do have another explanation for the US Surgeon General’s imbecility: statistically there has been a surge of suicide across the US; it was noticed a few years ago that white women ages 40-55 were killing themselves in greater numbers than ever before, greater than their portion of the population warranted. Why? I think it’s that their partners can now separate from them freely, no social stigma (and find a younger women willing to live with this man of means), and that their jobs pay them so little as well as giving them little respect.

Sometimes watching a popular serial can alert you to trends. So the serial Succession suggests to me a sick society.

Succession S1E1 I started the (in the US) famous serial Succession last night. Laura went to some trouble to transfer Izzy’s HBO Max into my computer and I can now watch it through Izzy’s account (she gets one guest it seems — or two computers somehow or other). Every other word was “fuck”, very foul language to say the simplest kinds of things in a metaphoric kind of way, very unlikeable characters — though with “vulnerability” especially the men. The women in such shows are characteristically harder and meaner than the men — part of the searing misogyny of this new era. There are also a limited group of motivations, ambition, competition to reach “the top” of whatever — and real meanness here and there. Very slick, does no one live an old house — NYC is chock-a-block (literally) with housing built before WW2 and 1 too Helicopter travel for the whole family. So they skip traffic jams. I know helicopters can save people but since Vietnam I loathe them. But I see the serial provides the lead story in the Style section of the Washington Post …

Succession S1E2: I watched the second episode. It is apparently a British show! — all the actors doing American accents. It has a to me odd sense of humor — they are making fun of any kind of kind or humane behavior. The characters are literally obnoxious and mean a good deal of the time — endlessly competitive The idea is the old man might die at any moment (they are in an ICU) and they vye for the money left, who will run the firm. One character is there for us to laugh at as he (and also Matthew MacFayden) are ceaselessly sycophantic. I wanted to know what is written a lot about and what people watch (It seems) a lot. The heterosexual relationships are all under terrific strain. No wonder I can’t get along in this culture: watching such a program if there are many like this has to be be bad for your moral character … I ask myself what do viewers think and feel when they watch such a program. Some people will say they don’t take it seriously, but you must do while watching it. It reminds me of how youngish women today may say that the present predatory heterosexual norms are things they can deal with and don’t matter or shrug.. In one of my classes someone said of that (taking of My Brilliant Friend) they are just refusing to think of feel about what happens to them. Really? I may stop now as I think it is too much for me …

I can’t figure out how Succession is escapist when it is so painful. I do have an explanation: to most people it is not painful. They don’t mind the mockery and cruelty — it amuses them.

I am not as lonely as I would be without the Internet, and all my activities with others coming out of books, talks about books, movies, shared daily experiences. The worst time is 4:30, but I admit that during the day I have often had hours of peaceful reading and writing. Zooms make an enormous difference. It is a central form of social life for me nowadays.

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

Me and Patty at Arlington House

Last weekend was over-full: On Saturday the 13th I went out with two friends, a married couple to Arlington House (mansion built and owned by the Custis family into which both George Washington and Robert E Lee married) and the grounds around it — the whole embedded at the edge of Arlington Cemetery. The most interesting exhibits today are the recreation of enslaved people’s cabins with photographs, family trees insofar as this is possible, whatever letters survived, and modern videos of descendants talking about what they have been told and experienced of US life themselves. My friend’s husband took a photo of her and me in the grounds. After, we enjoyed a long lunch out in good restaurant, Carlyle’s, at Shirlington.

She had made for my cats another beautiful comforter: crocheted it

Keeping each other company once again (since Clarycat’s stroke)

Another small step in improvement: today Clarycat carried another of her toys about, but this time she knew where to put it: right where I sit. She also is moving about with a sense of direction, knows where she’s going Each step in recovery matters and is heartening to see …

This morning I found Clarycat laying down alongside Ian. I hope he has understood that does not mean he can rough play, but it does show she is now willing to lie down with him as long as he is quiet and gentle. But then again he tries to wrestle and play and she has to scream at him, very high decibel to get him to stop. I run over and pick her up and soothe and reassure her. In another part of the house, he is clamoring for comfort.

Clarycat was better yesterday — well a good sign was for the first time in weeks now she was carrying one of her toys in her mouth. She trotted about with it, but she looked as if she was confused. Strangely, too, as if she didn’t know what to do with the toy. Finally she set it down when she sat down. But then today she was not managing getting onto the top of my bed. She tried 3 times, finally I picked her up and held her in my arms as I’ve been doing for weeks now while I read. She can no longer (like Ian) look intently out the window, listening, the way she once did.

But again this morning she kept banging against the wall in our hall. She was trying to trot along in her earlier way, following Ian or he by her side and she could not prevent her body from turning left. Bang bang bang. I hurried to retrieve her and hold her in my arms until her heart beat slower.

But then again or now she has picked up her toy and taken it to the spot she used to — where I sit. She was trotting around with another toy a little later and also knew where to put it — or she set it down where she clearly intended. And now every morning I am eating my cereal she gives me our new signal for her to be taken onto my lap (a kind of soft mew) and she stands against my chest and licks up some of the milk in my cereal bowl.

Then yesterday I met another woman friend at the Kennedy Center. Lunch, lecture before and a moving & ever-so-active (stage filled with vignettes at one point) performance of Puccini’s La Boheme. I relived the anguish I felt when Jim died as they enacted that closing scene. Auditorium was sold out. And audience rapturous. The production was reviewed as boisterous.

Exhaustion also from trip. I now have conquered how to get to Kennedy Center once again by using Arlington Memorial Bridge — 25 minutes at most. Did I say the wicked gremlins of DC reconfigured the route back that way so last time trying it I arrived home shattered after an hour?

This time I took an alternative route using Theodore Roosevelt Bridge (a fancy name for 50 West crossing the Potomac), which I learned during the closing of the Arlington Memorial Bridge: I had trouble getting my cellphone back on, but (before I left) Izzy had programed the Google maps part way, up to “start,” and I had my old print-out of directions from Mapquest (are people aware Mapquest is now destroyed by commercial greed? what is not? you will reply), and my pictorial memory. Then I could not get the voice to work until half-way, but when it kicked in finally, I was able to move over to a better “artery” into Arlington & to Alexandria, so home within 30 minutes. I feel I now know this way home and can begin again to go to Kennedy Center. No pictures beyond the promotional one for La Boheme. The day was lovely.

Recovery from each day’s social experience was collapsing for 3 hour nap in early evening.

Oh yes mother’s day. Izzy wished me well, Laura is coming over with a mug later this afternoon, and I had emails from Thao and a new young woman friend, Bianca.

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

Among those books being read by me now:

Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister. I keep reading this, almost I cannot put it down, and this is unusual for me nowadays and even more so for a sequel — for this is a kind of traditional sequel. We are going through the Pride and Prejudice story, much as one does in Jo Baker’s Longbourne. Daringly Hadlow quotes more than you realize from Austen verbatim, which shows how her artificial language is up to accommodating 18th century style.

What I like — and this will seem odd – is that the angle Mary’s experience projects turns out to be a real critique of Austen herself. You’d think a Janeite would not like that — think again. From Mary’s POV we see how cruel Austen’s favored characters can be — of course her non-favored characters have long been shown to be outrageous (D. W. Harding was showing that too). Hadlow is revealing Austen herself to be skewed — valuing Elizabeth because much of the misery of life Elizabeth simply shoves off as so much water off a duck’s back. We see the hypocrisy of many social pretenses — so Hadlow goes further than Austen. In this version Mary had worked very hard to play well that night at the assembly, and in fact had played well, but not in the mode that was wanted; she also made the mistake to try to sing. Afterwards — the next day, Mr Bennet tried indirectly to apologize and compensate but we can see how little he does there — better than the callous Mrs Bennet.

It’s like D.W. Harding carried further — I can see what is critiqued in line with Charlotte Smith and so the book w/o overt politics is political — set in the later 18th century of course. Jo Baker’s Longbourne too shows up the Bennets but not inwardly the way Hadlow does. I guess I have “catholic” tastes in my reactions to appropriations on film (for I like the Sanditons) and verbal post-texts.

Hadlow was at the BBC for many years, and her other books are all set in the later 18th into 19th century, some sequels, some historical fiction, some biography.

Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet was never a favorite of mine; I prefer the Elizabeth conjured up by Anna Maxwell Martin in the film adaptations of PDJames’s Death Comes to Pemberley. I also decided I like the PBS/BBC serial Sanditon, mostly won over by Rose Williams as Miss Heywood and Turlough Convery as Arthur.

I am now preparing for my summer courses: reading Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters and Jenny Uglow’s marvelous literary biography of her: A Habit of Stories — she is almost better than reading the Cranford stories themselves when she close reads them so beautifully does she explicate and recreate the experience of the stories; I re-watched the deeply moving film adaptation by Andrew Davies: Michael Gambon and Tom Hollander are unforgettable as Osborne and Squire Hamley (a kind of King Lear grieving over his daughter Cordelia is evoked). I was disappointed by Alba de Cespedes’ Forbidden Notebook: after a book long series of gradual rebellions and re-definitions of herself, her husband, her children, she caves in to re-become grandmother to this family, no longer even working outside the home and destroys her notebook, where she had been seeking a new identity.

For my Internet identity: I wrote a short talk for a coming Trollope Society Every-other-week group: it’s on Phineas Finn and I called it “Words for Sale.” Watched all three Tom Jones films (1966, 1997, 2023) in succession, preparing for a comparative blog alongside Fielding’s novel.

Mishandled an offer for me to review an edition of Dusinger’s work on Richardson: the woman said she wanted it yesterday and I worried I couldn’t do it, and then my “pay” was to be allowed to pick a book from their thousands or hundreds of unappetizing titles. I’m now sorry I missed out. I now think I might have had the time. But perhaps it’s better not to be so pressured. I did better at an offer to do a biography of Isabelle de Montolieu, an entry in a Palgrave encyclopedia. I’ll look at what’s wanted tomorrow morning. I think they were more polite in their first letter.

But am doing two reviews, one for the Intelligencer where the editor is my long-time friend and another for a long-time friend. In both cases there is no problem in having to understand what’s wanted, when, or special social skills.

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

And Izzy finished a second puzzle: Caduceus, cleric, of the Wild Mother. Notice how it’s hard to distinguish a male from a female gender, and look at the lovely purples and reds. An old-fashioned radio to the right at the bottom

Ellen

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Anna Nalick’s Breathe — as sung and played by Izzy

Izzy’s been working for a couple of months on this one so it’s time to share it.

Anna Nalick’s life and career thus far

The lyrics:

Two am, and she calls me ’cause I’m still awake
Can you help me unravel my latest mistake?
I don’t love him, winter just wasn’t my season
Yeah, we walk through the doors, so accusing their eyes
Like they have any right at all to criticize
Hypocrites, you’re all here for the very same reason

‘Cause you can’t jump the track, we’re like cars on a cable
And life’s like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button, girl
So cradle your head in your hands
And breathe, just breathe
Oh, breathe, just breathe

May he turn twenty-one on the base at Fort Bliss
Just today he sat down to the flask in his fist
Ain’t been sober since maybe October of last year
Here in town you can tell he’s been down for a while
But, my God, it’s so beautiful when the boy smiles
Want to hold him, maybe I’ll just sing about it

‘Cause you can’t jump the track, we’re like cars on a cable
And life’s like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button, boys
So cradle your head in your hands
And breathe, just breathe
Oh, breathe, just breathe

There’s a light at each end of this tunnel, you shout
‘Cause you’re just as far in as you’ll ever be out
And these mistakes you’ve made, you’ll just make them again
If you only try turning around

Two am, and I’m still awake, writing a song
If I get it all down on paper, it’s no longer
Inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to
And I feel like I’m naked in front of the crowd
‘Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud
And I know that you’ll use them, however you want to

But you can’t jump the track, we’re like cars on a cable
And life’s like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button now
Yeah, sing it if you’ll understand
And breathe, just breathe
Oh, breathe, just breathe
Oh, breathe, just breathe
Oh, breathe, just breathe

She’s 38, just Izzy’s age

Posted by Ellen

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

Margaryta Yermolayeva — Witchy Art

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Famous still of Tim Courtney running for life

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

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

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

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

The pig is intensely relieved, feeling a puzzled gratitude

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

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

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

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

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

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

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

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

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

The Taxi

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

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

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

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

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

Beatrice Potter — Mice at work threading the needle

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

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

So I wrote in reply:

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

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

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

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

They are the only ones
who are free.

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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Christmas returns: Louise Gluck & Persephone, My Dog Tulip & cats, The Durrells & Donmare Warehouse …

Back from Trader Joe’s this morning, Izzy put the yellow flowers I bought on the credenza, my photo includes this year’s tree

Dear friends and readers,

Another year draws to a close, my 8th winter without Jim. I don’t have the ambition or confidence of previous years to review another year in books, or movies; instead I thought I’d mark the time by framing what stands out tonight, what I want to recommend, with just a couple of Louise Gluck’s poems from Averno, her 10th collection of poetry, wintry as its title. I am gradually learning to love her poetry, and understand why the Nobel committee awarded her their prize this year.

From October, No 5 drew my mind because I remembered myself at age 24 during a two-hour subway trip to Brooklyn College reading intently, a small volume of poems, Minor Poets of the Eighteenth Century, chosen and seemingly edited by Hugh L’Anson Faussett, immersing myself, shutting out the world around me (screeching with noise, very ugly) with the melancholy, picturesque poetry of retirement of the era (Anne Finch, John Dyer, especially). Gluck also refers to the “ornamental lights of the season” which are (those I can see) outside my house, to which I contribute two sets, one on each of my miniature magnolia trees.

October, No. 5

It is true there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and I may be of some use.

I am
at work, though I am silent.

The bland

misery of the world
bounds us on either side, an alley

lined with trees: we are

companions here, not speaking,
each with his own thoughts;

behind the trees, iron
gates of the private house,
the shuttered rooms

somehow deserted, abandoned,

as though it were the artist’s
duty to create
hope but out of what? what?

the word itself
false, a devise to refute
perception — At the intersection,

ornamental lights of the season.

I was young here. Riding
the subway with my small book
as though to defend myself against

this same world:

you are not alone,
the poem said,
in the dark tunnel.

I remember that particular morning because when I got to my stop, I jumped out of the train, and left my little book behind. Oh how I grieved. I had found it in the Strand; I could not duplicate it in any way. Well this evening another copy of this edition is on a shelf behind me, I took down, a faded green covered volume I re-bought many years later off bookfinder.com, through the internet. Although I have not chosen two poems which show this, she is especially effective in her use of classical mythic figures — Persephone her icon.

Gluck’s Persephone: someone abducted, raped, imprisoned, then a bargain struck by predator Pluto/Hades with her mother Ceres/Demeter so she spends 6 months free and it’s spring
on earth, and 6 months in hell. A wanderer. No focus on her and her mother that is intimate.

A ruined temple to Apollo near Lake Averno

Ian today, one of my mostly silent companions

Clarycat too

One of Laura’s adorably innocently loving kittens, Maxx (photo taken by her)

Then dwelling here for a moment to answer the question does one book stand out for you from all the year’s reading as what you’d like to remind others of or recommend because it has important knowledge, compassion, beauty and truth in it: well, J. R. Ackerley’s tribute to his canine beloved, My Dog Tulip (non-human animals living lives as valuable as worthy as ours), Marjolaine Boutet’s Un Village Francaise: Une histore de l’Occupation, Saisons 1 a 7 (telling sincere truths about French life, society, occupied France, what happened and the aftermath). Any movie or serial for TV, on the internet: at the opening of this year I was still watching The Durrells (profoundly humane, delightful comedy, the tragic there too, from Gerald’s fat book).

Keeley Hawes, one of several beloved actresses, reading aloud Dowson’s “Days of Wine and Roses” to her 4 children & her household (Season 2, Episode 4)

I gave myself a course in E.M. Forster, the Bloomsbury group in all their phases, and what I could read of Black (Afro-diaspora, several blogs) and post-colonial literature and biography (ditto).

So here we are again (31 days before Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take office at last, and do what they can to rescue the people of the US from the results of a disastrous 4 years), winter solstice:

Louise Gluck, October, No 4:

The light has changed;
middle C is tuned darker now.
And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed.

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring.
The light of autumn: you will not be spared

The songs have changed; the unspeakable
has entered them.

This is the light of autumn, not the light that says
I am reborn.

Not the spring dawn: I strained, I suffered, I was delivered.
This is the present, an allegory of waste.

So much has changed. And still, you are
fortunate:
the ideal burns in you like a fever.
Or not like a fever, like a second heart.

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.
They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.
They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly
in anticipation of silence.
The ear gets used to them.
The eyes gets used to disappearances.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind;
it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

How privileged you are, to be passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestro, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us.
Surely it is a privilege to approach the end
still believing in something.

But I hope I will be spared, my two daughters and son-in-law — and all the friends and acquaintances I know — from COVID, impoverishment and despair,

A photograph I found on the Net this year: Amy Helen Johannsen, Woman Hitching Dangerous Ride, Bangladesh

Ellen

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Not a day goes by, not a single day … but you’re somewhere a part of my life ….

1999, Jim, me, and Izzy on a visit with Trollope Society friends to Salisbury Cathedral, we stopped off in a pub

Laura around the same time (so 21 years ago)

And it looks like you’ll stay …. from Sondheim, Merrily We Roll Along

Claire tells Frank several years after she has returned to the 20th century there is not enough time in her lifetime to forget Jamie, from Gabaldon, Voyager

Dear friends and readers,

Once upon a time October was my favorite time of year. Usually the weather is so pretty, and it was in October, the 6th, of 1968 to be exact, that Jim and I met, and again a year later October 6th, 1969, that Jim and I married; October 3rd was his birthday — he was born October 3, 1948. When Laura was married for the first time and planning an autumn wedding and settled on September 30th, I said wait a day and it’ll be in October. But now it is the hardest time of year: Jim died on October 9th, 2013. He was just 65. He stopped talking to us the 7th, that morning he had said “goodbye” to Izzy, the day before to Laura.

He died of esophageal cancer, one of the many cancers that are now not uncommon (once far rarer) because we live and breath and eat polluted air and food. I wrote about the whole course of this dreadful experience here, as well as an obituary for him. He was my prince, he was everything to me. Today I listened on and off to Stephen Sondheim songs — he loved Sondheim’s music, lyrics, the musicals themselves. So many capture my love for him, how I miss him, but I must choose just one for a blog, and it’s “Not a Day Goes By” from Merrily We Roll Along (which Jim used to say was his favorite Sondheim musical) — I am so lonely for his company.

I am not in as much pain as I was the first few years; I am no longer reading memoirs of grief, but the staying home in this pandemic strains me badly. Perhaps all the driving about to courses, to entertainments, very occasionally with a friend, or Izzy and once in a long while Laura, was distraction but it helped. Christmas is going to be very hard this year since the way Izzy and I got through was to go out to Kennedy Center with Laura, then dinner out with her and Rob, Christmas day a movie out for Izzy and I, and again dinner out. We go to see some Christmas play or concert, on Boxing Day, a museum, and until I could no longer drive at night, the Kennedy Center again for some gay entertainment. I’ll buy a tree, Izzy and I will decorate it, but beyond that, with a hope of Laura coming over once or a daring visit to a museum, it’ll be Christmas movies, friends on the Net.

Jim, Izzy as a baby, Laura a young child (perhaps 1985 or so)

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Phineas returns to London (1974 BBC Pallisers, Donal McCann as Phineas)

My teaching has begun and I feel my course in Phineas Redux is thus far going very well. Talk about how Jim remains part of my life every day, I’m taking a course in “Kipling and Colonial literature,” because Jim liked Kipling: he read aloud the Just So stories to both daughters and me, he read to me two short stories that were comedies of manners (not these god-awful misogynistic, racist, patriarchal soldier stories I can barely get myself to skim. The teacher is an intelligent woman and I hope the latter part of the course we’re we’ll read at least one woman writer from the period I’ve never read before and V.S. Naipaul’s Bend in the River will be more enjoyable. I’m also taking a course in Sondheim — six sessions, and tomorrow the topic is the musical Company: I watched it online just now and here it is if you would like to watch a splendid TV version:

Everything all around me that makes my life pleasant was and is part of him: the house, the books, my solvency, my daughters.

I did say my courses for the coming winter (online at OLLI at Mason), Two Novels of Longing in an Imperial Age (Forster’s Howards End and Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans) has been accepted and for the spring (online at both OLLIs, Mason and AU), 20th Century Women’s Political Novels (Bowen’s Last September, Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, Hellman’s Scoundrel Time, and Morrison’s Bluest Eye) also accepted (see two rough weeks for descriptions, scroll down). To these I’ve now added the coming summer, 2021, when there is a good chance the teaching and courses will still be through zoom:

Post-Colonialism and the Novel

In this class we will explore some realities covered by terms like colonialism & imperialism, nationalism & tribalism or identity politics as dramatized in three novels, viz., E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s A Backward Place, V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival; and a couple of short stories from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreters of Maladies. Beyond the seeing obvious inflictions of capitalism & industrialization, displacement of peoples & forms of enslavement, we will ask why people develop passionate identifications with a place (countrysides, cities), nostalgia for some imagined past (enjoy historical novels, romances & films), turn cultures into religions (& vice versa), how gender & art movements inflect all this

I am very much looking forward to re-reading all these books and discussing and talking and teaching (if that’s what it is) them to these classes of older intelligent people. Naipaul’s Enigma of Arrival has personal meaning for me: I had begun to arrive, be embedded in England, when we had to leave for a better income and opportunity to go to graduate school, but periodically we did return. And the reason I’ve taken trips with Road Scholar is to return to the UK where I met and married Jim and gave myself a happy peaceful life with him for so many years. I wrote on Austen Reveries of my other reading and writing projects: I too dwell in possibility. I finished reading Anne Enright’s Actress, it is finally a searching sceptical and pessimistic take on the life of an actress; I will use it as context and critique for the blog on Harriet Walter (and her book on playing male parts in all female-cast Shakespeare plays) on Austen Reveries soon.

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Claire (Caitriona Balfe) teaching Marsali (Lauren Lyle), making her an apprentice doctor (Outlander Season 5)

I have been just loving the 5th season of Outlander; it can hardly be more perfect: they have rewritten the 5th Outlander novel, Diana Gabaldon’s The Fiery Cross, which just is without a story, blended it with episodes from the 6th, A Breath of Snow and Ashes, to provide a slender action-adventure plot-pattern across the series, plucked out several of the moving episodes (anecdotes) and rewritten these to reveal characters movingly, interestingly, relevantly to us today. I am watching the series for a second time and will make one or two blogs — wordpress has renovated itself so now it’s harder to get to and use the “classic” template (which I know how to use) so I cannot write as many blogs I might have wanted to. I would, though, like to admit, that the intense joy of these books to me is the relationship between Jamie (Sam Heughan) and Claire: absurdly but irresistibly I find in their relationship elements of what I knew with Jim, with Balfe all along, from Season 1 on I have bonded, even deeply. I am back to dreaming of this series at night. I wrote as follows on face-book early one morning:

From the episode, the night of Brianna and Roger’s wedding in North Carolina

When long ago I wrote a book on Richardson’s Clarissa (an 18th century novel) I dreamed of the characters (these were often distraught, deeply upset dreams); when I wrote a book (about 20 years ago) on Anthony Trollope and his novels, I dreamed of him and those characters I was writing about; I used to dream of the Poldark characters (in the early 2000s from the books and actors of the first series, much less so during the era of the 2015 series — I never quite warmed to or credited the feel of the series) and now I find I dream again each time a new season comes of the Outlander characters. I cannot remember particulars once I am fully awake but I know this time as I awaken I am glad I was dreaming.

Until now (writing blogs) I never dreamed of characters until I was writing a book or something quite long. I have not dreamed of the Austen characters much that I am aware of, or in the same way, because although I’ve written about Austen’s novels and the movies, it was not consistent total immersion with a single set of actors or big text or texts over a long period of time. I received very interesting replies: I was especially struck by how the readers of Trollope shied away from admitting to dreaming about these characters, but not the readers of the Outlander books, and were I still in contact with the readers of the Poldarks, I’ll bet they dream too (a vindictive woman who runs one of these pages, not understanding my Aspergers ways blackballed me off these places).

A moment of upset for Becky as old Lady Crawley laughs at some make-shift that Becky has invented — not a characteristic moment but showing Hampshire’s talents; the series aired in black-and-white as did the original Forsyte Saga

I’ve carried on my project of watching 1970s BBC and British series adapting remarkable books, and have finished the 1967 BBC Vanity Fair, and would like to recommend it to you, gentle reader. The film-makers (David Giles, the director) manage to pluck out the central emotional and thematic elements of Thackeray’s extraordinary book, as well as its comedy, and with the strong performances of Susan Hampshire as Becky Sharp (one can see why she became Fleur in Forsyte Saga, Lady Glencora in the Pallisers) and Bryan Marshall as Dobbin (even better than Hampshire for he is given depths of plangency she is not), and a mostly good supporting cast, good scripts, well done scenes, you end up with a reading of the book that concentrates on Becky’s position in the world, and gifts as actuating her choices in life.

They condensed the novel by making Becky the central linchpin, then having key episodes or turning points of her story as climaxes in each of the episodes. It works, for Amelia’s occur alongside Becky’s and turn into a parallel. Their early adventures together, and then apart, Becky landing among the Crawleys, their marriages ending part 2, the calamity of Waterloo Part 3 (which Becky turns to her advantage and is superlatively anti-war), Part 4 with the jailing of Rawdon. Susan Hampshire began to resemble Sarah Badel as Lizzie Eustace in the Pallisers in the fourth part. My only complaint is the ending. The film makers did not have the guts to end on Becky living off Sedley and poisoning him slowly so we ended on her good deed, awakening Amelia, Amelia folded in Dobbin’s arms so no time to see Dobbin disillusioned. The lines about the puppets and ever all dissatisfied are uttered. As the budgets were as small as those for the Austen films (and a 1971 Jane Eyre), nothing outdoors, all sets, it’s remarkable how effective they were in using symbols.

Gentle reader, I prefer watching these British series of 50 years ago to contemporary films online. I mean to go on to watch the 1987 BBC Vanity Fair (which I’ve never seen but have had for a long time on a TBW pile) and Andrew Davies’ brilliant 1998 six part-er with Natasha Little and Philip Glenister in the two roles I just singled out

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Sunday morning, home from Trader Joe’s

Ian among books, an active, vocal part of my life today

So how shall I end this diary entry? I have spoken less of politics here than usual — this is not a political blog but usually what is happening in the public political world presses in on me. I shall confine myself to the dire possibilities that the Trump Junta will attempt to steal the election, undermine so totally the vote, suppress, throw out, start violence: read Barton Gellman in the Atlantic. I feel I have enough to communicate without it. I met an old old friend the other day, in front of the local bakery. Mary Lee Charles, a highly intelligent devoutly Catholic woman with whom I formed a deep feeling relationship for a time as our older daughter, Katie (hers) and Laura were friends. I would not have recognized her in her mask, she has grown so thin. She stopped me and attempted to convey a warmth of the old feeling when I told her Jim had died. I believe she stopped me because she wanted to tell me Katie has a Ph.d in English literature and is now going for tenure in a Maryland college. She looked at me significantly; she wanted to tell me this, remembering my vocation. We have now exchanged emails and I’ve told her that after all she was right so many years ago, and I do love the Poldark series — we knew one another in the early 1980s you see.

Last night I re-watched a TV series someone gave me a copy of shortly after Jim died: Coogan and Brydon in The Trip: to me a comforting movie because the film-makers and actors manage to convince you somewhat this trip to sample fine food for a magazine column (whose we are not told) on a drive through the north of England is really happening non-fictionally. Their conversation because of its edge is convincing, their lives suggested persuasive, and the filming of the countryside to me so appealing: I lived up north with Jim. I saw the second series too, the tour through Italy which conveyed genuine feeling about the past in the landscape, playing in individual memory. I shall never capture again the happiness and even innocence I once knew when Jim was in the world with me, but I can re-visit the landscapes in England we loved together. This is his (as Julian Barnes strikingly put it) death-time which I keep in my continuing existence.

Coogan goes out for a quick cellphone photo in Derbyshire

Lake District — the photography imitates ordinary people taking camera shots ….

Ellen

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My & US education; a new song by Izzy (“falling through the clouds”); online treats: Jonas Kaufmann in concert, and Hannah Gadsby as immensely cheering

Seascapes — Sara Sitting (I am not sure about this title or artist but very much like the image)

On morning early this week (Sunday) I remembered when in the mid-1970s Jim and I lived on Seaman Avenue in Manhattan (200th street, below the Cloisters hill) we would summer time on Tuesday and Thursday take our dog, Llyr, and drive to Jones Beach in the morning. There was a beach where dogs were allowed. We’d bring coffee & croissants for ourselves, water and biscuits for Llyr. We’d go in the water, stay close to shore (no life guards). Those were happy mornings long ago … I thought of this as I saw my neighbors, two married gay guys taking their dog to a nearby private pool …. the difference between now and then — includes then it was public beach, now it’s an expensive private pool. I did long to get out of the house, go to where the horizon stretches out and stand by the world’s waters — thus the above image by Sitting

On another I woke remembering a dream Laura outlined at the end of our time with Izzy in Calais last summer: upon retirement, she’d buy a second house for her and Izzy in Florida or some warm place, & they’d live there winters; and the present house I occupy summers — though now I’m thinking it’d be a bit hot here. They could sell my library and go to Vermont. I ahd found the idea of them together when I am gone comforting. I would not worry so about Izzy and feel better about Laura having a good companion

My image for this was Beatrice Potter’s Two Rabbits because Jim as a boy read the Potter books and even into his old age would suddenly quote from a scene or refer to Jemima Puddleduck or wry Potter characters

Last The comet. I am told there is a comet in the sky just now. One night around 10 pm Izzy and I took our binoculars and went for a walk around — that’s when the sky is dark where I live. We didn’t spot the comet — I don’t know what to look for. But we did see a sky filled with stars. Not strong as light pollution is too pervasive but we did see a sky just twinkling with many little lights. And a couple of stronger ones too. A comet apparently looks like a moving star ….

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been almost three weeks now and I’ve made no entry because during mid-day I’ve been busy (driving myself to work on my Anne Finch review, immersed in the true wonders, good values and texts by and about the Bloomsbury group), and at night so tired, watching A French Village (up to season 6 now — what an education about real life politics during war), and as usual often melancholy, depressed, so worried about this endlessly spinning out calamity (COVID19, the devastation of unemployment deliberately spread by Republican-Trump policies) and how it might affect Izzy and I. But I do have a topic to share and performers to recommend: my education in the context of the US educational system generally speaking, and (among others) the comedienne Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette and Douglas.

Last week was the time OLLI at AU runs its “July Shorts:” these are courses which last just one week, and take place anywhere from 3 to all 5 days, about 90+ minutes each meeting. (They do the same kind of thing in February each year.) I could not myself teach such a course, and even going to them when it means driving there can be too much of a burden. Last week it was just sitting in front of my computer three times to participate in a four time course on the American education system (or some such title) so I registered and zoomed in. The two men leading the discussions, lecturing presented excellent material: good information, thoughtful commentary, genuine explanations for phenomena. I had to miss the fourth, because it took place in precisely the same time as each week I once a week give a course at OLLI at Mason on the Bloomsbury group: 90 minutes on the status of teachers K-12 (low, 80% female and white still) and the history and developments in chartered schools. While I trust my every instinct to distrust privately funded (you must pay as a parent to some extent) this is a means to destroy public education, to turn desperately needed good education into profit-making ventures (like medicine), and to pull in taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars to support turning schools into places with a false appeal of supposed choice and exclusionary policies — while I am distrustful I would have liked to hear an unbiased account.

A Community high school

Their over-riding theme was the need to make the system far more equal for everyone; as presently conducted the way US education works, its effect, is to increase the inequalities or (to be more frank) set up inequalities among children from day one, reinforce class, money and other social disadvantages. To produce badly or uneducated children whose whole outlook is shaped by narrow ill-informed prejudices. This is achieved (it’s wanted) by a mechanism or reality which lies at the core of all US inequality and social ignorance: residential localism. All education in the US is controlled locally, by localities; the schools are funded locally (by a town or at most city), with some controls placed on what they can and should teach and how they must behave by state laws. The state provides funds too, as does the federal gov’t (8 to 15% depending on how poor the district is, so the poorer get 15% or close to that, and the richer 8% or close to that). Any change in this is fiercely fought. As with the delivery of medical services in the US, the whole thing is endlessly fragmented, done differently in different states, with endless pockets of people in effect isolated from others — even nearby. This is exacerbated by he complete divorce between K-12 and post-secondary or higher education. The two groups run on different tracks, and both are (as a result) somewhat hostile to one another due to caricatures.

The public picture of schools in the US is distorted and falsifying — especially in the post-secondary area where education is suddenly expected (by many Americans) to directly lead to or produce jobs. It does not. Parents and students are paying for a certificate in an area of knowledge; nothing more is (literally) contracted for. The picture the public has as de rigueur or common is a four year college aspiring to at least look like Harvard, small private campus college, or state-supported be-prized institution measured by the US News and World Report. Only 17-18% of young US adults go to a four year college. 80% of young adults are enrolled in some form of publicly-funded post-secondary education, many of which are community colleges, which are weak on needed vocational training and apprenticeships. The fancy internships for upper middle professions are found in the 4 year institutions (and pay nothing). The average student is 27 and the majority are female, perhaps married, with one child. She is looking to “better herself” in the commercial marketplace. As to elite schools that are written about so much (this is the public media pretending that the small middle class is pervasive) less than 2% go to colleges like Harvard, Stanford — and where my younger daughter went, Sweet Briar (she had what was called a complete scholarship so it cost each term about what George Mason did for my younger daughter six years before).

This is a private and charter school — all white

K-12: 11% of children to teenagers are in private schools, of which 9-10% are religious schools, aka schools run by overtly religious groups (or in the south where there is more than a pretense a Christian academy for whites — these sprung up after Brown v Board of Education). The children of upper class and middling parents are taught self-esteem, self-assertiveness, how to cope with others and negotiate your way through life, to be pro-active for individual initiative at home; they have books at home to read; by keeping them away from the rest of the population, you leave that rest to become unexamined obedient instruments of capitalist enterprises — with the emphasis on obedience to group norms and acceptance of punitive measures to keep them that way. They are not to expect “perks” like art classes, music, shop, Advanced Placement (with better paid teachers) where they might learn what are their particular gifts.

The way the game is kept this way is fragmentation — the same thing is done in the area of US medicine (and now we see how US medicine is delivered is horrifyingly inadequate if there is any question of truly serious illness in the population). Those in the richer districts do not want to share their money with others. Most married Americans with children chose where they live in accordance with the schools available in the area. There is a tremendous gap between governance (those who govern, school boards) and anything to transform achievement gaps. No comprehensive school services across many districts (like social workers, nurses)

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Duncan Grant, The Stove, Fitzroy Street

All this for four days and watching what the 40 or so people in the class looked like as they listen, what they said made me remember my own experience. In fact my education enabled me to escape a stultifying working class background, and today still (even after Jim’s death 8 years now) live a life of the mind immersed in high culture in a comfortable house with books and nowadays computers. I am not altogether an anomaly because between the years 1946 and 1970 other trends and left-overs from the FDR era mitigated some inequalities, plus the way to be promoted and thought well of is through academic style tests where your ability to cope with language and math (symbols) are tested, your ability to memorize and what you have read and studied made the groundwork of the tests. On all these I did spectacularly well — as did Jim. Jim got 800 on both GREs to enter graduate school; I got 800 on the English and 798 on the math, at which he quipped: “Ellen was always weak in math.”

I know one of my prides is this education of mine: that I have a Ph.D. is central to my ability to hold up my head. I know how I was relieved to go to grade school to escape my parents’ house with their continual fierce fighting and the tensions and miseries of poverty and anger and frustration. It was a mecca. I know that once I got into my senior year in high school and throughout high school, college, even graduate school, I loved going to classes. In talking on FB of what colleges cannot do to set themselves up to teach students kept socially distant I remembered how for a year at Leeds University (for which I won a scholarship, my year of study abroad where I met Jim) I was given a tutor one-on-one. We met once a week to talk and together study Chaucer and medieval English and French romance. How scared I was at first of the professor; how young she was with a silver urn. I read so carefully each week. I also had wider tutorials with 4 students to a lecturer. Then Izzy at Sweet Briar had similar experiences.

But I also know what I didn’t learn. As I sat in a public school in the southeast Bronx where the majority of students were African-American or hispanic, I was put into a tiny group with “real books” to read – sometimes I was a group of one. The others were reading workbooks, Dick and Jane; I was reading books like Mary Poppins. I spent some of the day making posters. But I learned no manners, my accent stayed thoroughly southeast Bronx, I never took in groups of attitudes I encountered for the first time at age 10/11 when my parents moved to Kew Gardens. Ever after I was something of an outsider. There I was in groups of children with abilities like myself only I was behind in math and science — and no one took the time to teach me fractions, long division, how to do percentages. I still stumble and only my test taking ability, memorization, and ability to work out what a paragraph wanted got me though the Regents. We did have Regents in NY state so the high schools were forced to have teachers who did spend each year covering the curriculum for say chemistry or European (called World) history.

Another Duncan Grant — this time of Vanessa Bell painting, David (Bunny) Garnett reading, studying

Jim went to a “public school” in the UK — these are private schools for the elite — as a day boy in a different colored shirt (to show he was there without paying) because he did so well on the 11 plus, it was called. But he was merged with upper class boys from age 11 to 18 and that enabled him to know how to negotiate and cope in a managerial position, at conferences, he understood expectations. He had a silvery pure prose — from years of learning Latin and translating back and forth from Latin to English. He hated his school at times – he was caned five times and still had the welts on his hands when he was in his 50s. Like me in a different way an outsider, his politics he said were philosophical anarchy. He was deeply sceptical of all professions of ideology.

College came to me because I was living in NYC where it was basically for free. I had to come up with $25 a term. I got in through the night school. Never took an SAT exam, but within the first term, got all As and so switched to daytime college. Jim’s fees were paid for by the state — the Clement Atlee reforms were still in place. I know now how odd it is for me to be proud since I never went to a name school, cannot tell of knowing this or that person, but my expectations were so low to start with, and it’s what your expectations are as you start out that you measure yourself.

I did hold out. I refused to sell myself – I would not spend my life in a 8 hour a day 5 day a week job to make a higher salary. I was able to do that by being married to Jim and accepting that we would live on less, have less things people admire in our house, or clothes, prestige house. And it is chancy but then had I spent my life working at what bored or irritated or embarrassed or was trouble for me I would not be any safer as to money. To be truly safe you must be very rich in ways Jim and I (he with his gov’t job where he was promoted based on his intellectual abilities) never came near. And we spent what we had, I still do what is coming in, to enjoy life as we went along. We did do traveling as I have done since without him. I shall miss going to the UK if this pandemic makes it impossible for me to return to Europe safely. I was comfortable in the Scottish culture and norms; each time I returned to England I felt such cheer to think this is where he was born, where he became what he was. He valued me for what my education had made of me or what I had done with it to make myself what I was and am when we met at Leeds and throughout our lives together.

I did grow irritated at the course because when I would speak I could see that what I had to say was not wanted. Many of the people wanted to pretend they were for equality more than they were and they wanted to remain upbeat and talk of hopeful changes. One of the two leaders twice told a story of a teacher making a home visit and how the hispanic family all came out dressed just for her. I had a home visit when I was putting Izzy in the pre-school: the two women I learned later wrote up a very hostile description of me and my house (all the books offended). It seems Jim and I were at fault for my daughter’s disability. Others kept talking of how important success outside school, in businesses, was — in ways that showed they had no idea this is the kind of thing that cannot be taught. It is social cunning imbibed from your family habitat. I told a little of my experience in a southeast Bronx public school – it was not appreciated because it was downbeat. One was to be constructive. Large abstract pessimism is good, not local true-to-life anedote which exemplifies stubborn real obstacles.

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So this piece of genuine autobiography in the context of a course I just took has taken me time to write and space to do it in. So I shall save for next time some of the wonderful books I’ve read these past 3 weeks, movies, art works looked at, music listened to, Laura’s kittens, and end on music and comedy. Now just onto experiences I’ve had I would not ever have been able to without so much coming online — ingenious people determined to reach everyone at home, to socialize, to make money in their professions.

This past Saturday I took a chance and paid $20 to listen to Jonas Kauffman in concert from the Met. At first I shuddered at the hype introduction, over-dressed woman, and began to fear this would be glittering commercial phony-ness, but bear with the opening 8 minutes, and they leave you alone to listen and watch. An hour and 20 minutes of moving magnificient songs from this handsome and extraordinarily talented actor-singer. Sometimes he was in an old (Baroque?) Bavarian church, and sometimes it was clips from him in costume in a opera. I just love his “Pourquoi me reveiller?” I learned to like and to appreciate and love opera through my 45 years with Jim. The songs sung made me remember our relationship

And then Hannah Gadsby. I have joined online an aspergers group I could never have reached, am attending regularly and making a few acquaintance friends I look forward to seeing again. We talk about things I have trouble with and am given good advice. How to stop interrupting people at the wrong time when I am just trying to join in. What I’m doing wrong? — I am not recognizing their flow of talk and its origins and understanding where it will subside. They meet once a month to discuss a book or movie or person who is known to be autistic or writes about the condition.

It was 10 at night and I had been thinking somehow that I had not laughed in a long time. This is probably untrue. Only I couldn’t remember any true exhilaration either — well only inward exhilaration. I had promised for a coming Zoom session to watch Hannah Gadsby, an Australian comedienne “out”as autistic and lesbian. I did laugh and she made me feel better. On Netflix: I’d say I laughed more during Nanette because she did startle me, but the second,Douglas, with her dog as its center, was brilliant. I gathered from both “autism is seeing what no one else has noticed” and autistic people because we are different and vulnerable are more patient, tolerant, accepting of other people in all their variety Here is a clip from Douglas:

What awoke me to a certain cheer was my thought a way to understand her is: :if I can stand life on these terms, amid these cruel and inane absurdities, so can you.” Douglas contains one of the most brilliant exposures of quite what we are looking out in some of these fossilized religious devotional pictures. Hardly anyone really looks at them.

Then I read into a new humane Guide to Aspergers Syndrome by Tony Attwood arguing strongly the label should not be dropped. It is a different quality of disability but nonetheless disability. Nanette closes with her re-telling how she was attacked at a bus station.

Izzy’s new chair

While we are on this subject: this past Sunday Izzy and I managed to find a store Jim used to take me to to buy decent well made furniture — wood mostly. Izzy badly needs a new chair and I could use a small table in the kitchen. What a time we had! Very nervous trying to remember the name of the place and then the street. All I could think was chair store and Edsall Avenue. Well google and mapquest finally turned up a photo of the place that I recognized. I find things out by pictures. So, armed with 2 printed out mapquests, and Izzy programming Waze (then plugged into i-something or other, after which we turn off Godsford Park music and voila there is that lady’s voice), we made it. We have figured out how to put Waze to sleep (not to quit it, that’s not possible apparently)

I did get confused coming back and was nervous the whole time. My mind continually slightly flustered. I had not been out in the car to a new place in quite a while — I cannot find the category for this in Attwood’s book — it is probably under movement in space but there is nothing specific. I have hunted in the book. But Izzy bought a pretty ivory colored wood chair. She looks so comfortable in it. Here is her latest song:

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I never was able to find the place near us where there is testing for COVID19. I did discover that in the Alexandria there are places where you can be tested nearly for free, several cost starting $50, and many many more $150 – $300. Nuts. Why do some cost $300 — luxurious surroundings? But why try for anything labelled $150-$300? I have to find the place too. Of course Kaiser will test us but we must have symptoms to be eligible. She is to go into to work at the library this coming Thursday and may start going in once a week. She has fashion masks, santizer, and I have ordered a face shield for her.

Have I mentioned this time yet that I believe unqualified uncontrolled predatory capitalism everywhere in our lives in the US is at the core of the failed society of the US we are now experiencing — one result of this is thousands and thousands of deaths because we have no central govt that wants to do anything but exploit and abuse us. So another result of the miserable state of education across the US today and I end where I began this diary entry blog.

Ellen

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An unhappy 4th: Amid inertia in a calamity we each carry on, my on-line talk & A French Village (3 & 4)

A cat face-mask made for me by a person in one of my classes

Friends and readers,

Before telling you of a small achievement I managed week ago, and about our lives over the last half-month, I had a question for all who come to this blog — it was not rhetorical. I wanted an answer:

In the US we are now into well over a hundred thousands deaths in the US from COVID19 and each day the numbers of infected, very sick, and dying or maimed people increase. We don’t have to live with this — sickening & dying by the thousands? Going in and out of lock-down, so people lose their jobs once again, with far less savings to carry them through. There is a way to contain and to suppress the coronavirus. Everyone across the US who is willing be, can be tested and then if positive, all contacts traced, and everyone testing positive put in quarantine. Keep doing that for 2-3 months and the virus is contained and suppressed. The US has the billions to spend. Even if some people refused, or some communities refused to test and trace and quarantine, enough would and could be argued into this, to make a big difference. It would be enough to start to contain even if not suppress the virus. Why does no one propose this? why do reporters not ask any of the people they interview this, including Trump — and repeatedly.

Gentle reader, this was answered for me on FB, look on my timeline for the conversation: in brief, too many people & whole groups of delusional ignorant people in the US would refuse; these are joined by large enough groups of people who will not pay any iota of tax for anyone that they don’t have to, and finally an insufficient identification of many groups of people in the US with differently ethnic and racial groups as a community. The leadership we have reflects and exploits this dire situation. So, having let the first lock-down go by with doing nothing, and now this open up and acceleration, we would have to lock-down first and then begin the testing, tracing &c. It is possible that Biden could get a majority of people in some areas of the country to cooperate and we could try to control and suppress the virus in those areas of the US. 39% of US people voted for McGovern, for Mondale, it’s a stable size body of people but scattered and rendered powerless in comparison to their numbers when it comes to any general scheme. Greed, hatred & fear, ignorance encouraged, gentle reader, at the heart of it all: the exploiters and exploited may outnumber and certainly outvote and nullify the 39% I speak of.

I have told you the main news and the response of many local, state, and federal gov’t — inertia because even if some places are closing down bars, restaurants and other large gathering places, the rest of the public world remains open. And testing is not general and continual. Here in Virgina Izzy & I looked into testing, & we discovered Kaiser will not do unless we are having symptoms, and that even if they did (or other public places offering this), they are not tracing our contacts and not attempting to quarantine. So it’s useless except that we know we are not infected and can with more confidence see other people who might have been tested and know they are not infected.

This is so important that (as in my last diary entry) I must lead with it, and make it the context, the framework, the insistent atmosphere of all we do in life — wherever we go (few places) and whoever we see (hardly anyone and from far away). We do make contact online – I through email, FB, twitter, lists, zoom session; Izzy has had two phone conversations, one with a young man she met online and the other with Thao

Statue of Samuel Johnson’s cat, Hodge, in Gough Square in London

Another insistent context is the exposure of the constant killing of black people by whites and by police in the US, and one specific reaction as a way of making visible that black people are demanding that they be treated as equal human beings the taking down of racist symbols, of statues put there to intimidate, and the removal of names meant to insult them. Statues are emotional sites and we do pay attention to them; they have an importance as do names. They are asking at a minimum, that the police be reined in so they can live, and also hoping to gain more traction to live better with more progressive policies that include or are aimed at their well being. So Johnson’s cat is a symbol of kindness and loving companionship between a man and his pet cat From Boswell’s Life of Johnson:

Nor would it be just, under this head, to omit the fondness which he showed for animals which he had taken under his protection. I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature … I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson’s breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, “Why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;” and then as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, “but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed [admittedly selective quotation.

So I want here to say how I see we are doing & why we are doing it when we take down statues, for as I was with all the people who demonstrated, protested, and yes those who were violent and screamed and raged, so I am with them in taking down these statues of military men especially everywhere: we are doing this as I understand this by taking into consider what specifically the statue is of (who depicted), how it is functioning in the communities it is set among, and of course if it is intended to cause or to threaten harm to people around them, which includes an understanding of who put the statue up, when, for what purpose, what it is supposed to signify. Is it intended as an insult, racial trolling (as when in Alexandria, Va, where I live once segregated wretched looking schools where only African-Americans went were named after ferocious killing Confederate generals), to intimidate. Lee in Virginia. To celebrate enslaving, killing, turning a people into suppliants. Theodore Roosevelt in front of the Museum of Natural History, NYC.

We need to notice to how many statues are militarist, pro-war, “great” men on horses with guns high up on pedestals. I’m for taking all such statues down wherever they have occurred and stopping all manufacture of any more.

I looked to see if I could find a good depiction (clear, accurate, appealing) of a cat by Hogarth (Johnson’s friend, also 18th century) but alas I could find none: he did draw, engrave, print, & sell a 4 part narrative series called The Four Stages of Cruelty where he showed tormenting, torturing being cruel to animals functions as a prelude, replacement or as part of cruelty by those people who are cruel to other people. I cannot bear to look.

I do feel for Hodge as a statue out in all kinds of weathers. I imagine him sometimes holding himself together when he is cold or wet. Nearby him is a bench. Many people do not appear to notice he is sitting on one of Johnson’s books; this one probably intended to be one volume of Johnson’s dictionary. My cat sits on my books, my computer, sits by me in and around my chair, lays all over me when I am in bed. You can see a depiction of the oysters Johnson would go out early in the morning to buy for Hodge.

So there is the world this unhappy fourth of July

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Izzy on Father’s Day

To ourselves (Izzy and I), the London Society Trollope zoom group I was participating in finished Framley Parsonage and started The Last Chronicle of Barset, and I was asked to give a thirty–minute talk on the Last Chronicle out of the blog I had written on the novel when I finished it with my groups.io friends. Well, the talk (a thirty minute paper) I gave seemed to go over very well. Here is what you need to know and here the YouTube video (yes I am too low, but for next time I have bought a bolster cushion and will be seated a bit further off):

Further to this, I started the second round of teaching my course The Bloomsbury novel, and am having a bit of trouble because the etiquette over on the OLLI at Mason online has encouraged an attitude towards the experience which assumes that most people will appear as black boxes with their names, that the way to be together is for all to be muted except the one person who is talking (and when he or she stops, they re-mute themselves. I find this so counterproductive, if the goal really is to have a classroom experience online. I today wrote the class the first of the two weekly letters I usually write my classes, and in it urged them to behave otherwise.

I’d like to ask all the people in the class who are able to (have some form of webcam), to make yourself visible. I think one thing that gets in the way of discussion in a zoom setting, are black boxes with people’s names (or some other label) in the middle on them. I can’t get to know or remember people this way. If I am differing from what you’ve heard or been told, well I think and feel differently about this. I asked for a meeting style, and kept the numbers down so that we could have a version of a class meeting online and people participate actively. I admit I probably let too many people in as there are two screens of people, but I’ll struggle to look at both if in general people are visible and respond by raising hands.

Don’t forget to use the chat, which we have in this meeting version of zoom. I go a bit further and say when we come to discussion parts of the time together, after you’ve unmuted yourself, it’s fine to stay un-muted. I do. If you have a problem with noise, that’s another thing but if you have no such problems, it will enable a flow of conversation instead of long pauses while someone finds or makes their un-mute mechanism work.

ClaryCat on Father’s Day

Some funny experiences: my cats and I have grown very close and we reciprocate now through talk and just realized mutual feelings, gestures, sounds.

So what happens now is when I have to keep Clarycat out for the 80-90 minutes when I’m teacher online. ClaryCat the girl does not like this one little bit. As the 85-90 minutes wear on, she becomes more insistently vocal, and begins to scratch and push at the door. She is unaware of how fragilely the latch is nailed into the door-frame, and if she did thrust, she might pull the latch out. I open my door upon clicking “leave meeting,” and in she rushes. And then she proceeds to scold me. She circles me and comes in front of and squats down and meows very insistently. If I walk around and keep going she follows, circles and squats again. Meow meow meow! Or she stays by me, meowing. She is just not having any of this. After a while, she calms down. And now we are back in my room together, she in her very comfortable (soft round knobby surface) cat-bed near my desk. I am paying the bills so she & I can stay in this space together (most of the time) for (I hope) a long time to come.

Most of the time when I go out I put my cats outside my workroom lest they get entangled in wires or bored and do something untoward. And they know the signs for this. I get up, take my handbag, the phone, sweater on my shoulder, somehow look “getting ready.” Turning off my computer is an especially grievous (to both cats) sign. My violent-purple LLBean suitcase in my room leads to all sorts of behaviors showing their anxiety.
Well today I noticed a new signal alerts them. I put on my face mask. Toute de suite ClaryCat was rising, murmuring against this, but, knowing what was about to happen inevitable, jumping down from my desk and trotting to the door. I find this so sweet. When I return most of the time she comes to the door and turns with me towards the door of my workroom expecting me to open it, which I do. Then in we go.

Izzy is all set up with her new PC, wifi, webcam, mic, speakers, the lot. She carries on teleworking from home, and has been told she need not start coming in because she hasn’t a car, and perhaps someone has a conscience about the Metro as a petri dish. She says she also told them she has a 73 year old mother. She reads and watches all sorts of programs — TV and Internet series (many seem to be on-line conversations between people); she practices singing.

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For Father’s Day — when these commemorations began I don’t know. I hope they are not an invention of holiday card companies. Still my awareness made me remember my father who was born 1921 (July) and died 1989 (December) and my husband born 1948 (October) and died 2013 (October). My father would instantly have recognized the profound danger Trump represents, the evil he is, and predicted he would win. When he died, we were no longer living on the terms of understanding we once had, and that gets in the way of my saying I miss him. I miss what we once had. For Jim it’s not even yesterday. He would have wanted to return to the UK, but Teresa May had put paid to my having any change for permanent residency as his wife.

I took a photo of three of my flowering bushes in commemoration. The dark pink re-flowered, the yellow and white are new ones my mowing-gardening man planted for me (I forgot to tell him to plant perennials so I’m not sure they have any chance of coming up next year). I put them here in remembrance. My father did not at first have sympathy with Jim and I buying this house (“what a shithouse!” — we were at first renters and it was in bad condition, or we could not have afforded it), but he had begun to see why we liked the house, and a couple of years later during the day on a couple-of-days visit with us, he said, “It’s beginning to look like Seaman Avenue [our long-time apartment in NYC up under the Cloisters[, to which Jim replied, “These things take time, Willie.” Jim would not have been surprised to see what I’ve made of my sun-room [the enclosed porch he could never make up his mind to agree to, lest it cost too much — without him there, I was able to hire a man who did not have a license and he built it much less expensively than the building industry’s codes would have allowed]. But he would have liked its comfort, sunshine, and lack of any pretensions.

Jim was born in Hampshire, grew up in Southampton, I met him in Leeds when I was there for a year as a transfer student from Queens College, CUNY, NYC. When he died, I wrote this obituary for him. Clarycat was much attached to him, grieved for him for days, she sat in his chair for over a month …

Jim with our dog Llyr, 1972, in an apartment on 76th Street

I am at the same time reading on, more books, looking at more art, thinking more and just loving the thought, art, world of these circles of people. Just now finally coming to the end of Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting and feeling so sad it’s coming to an end. Since I have so much to read, that is not a common feeling with me. I am, for example, moving at a snail’s pace, in order to be able to critique the new standard edition of Anne Finch, to expose its narrow-minded careerist (morally and aesthetically dumb) agenda. I join in on zooms among small groups of friends, or for a particular topic (Jane Austen). And watch movies, among which the most important and best is the 7 season series, A French Village. I’ve mentioned this one before and will end on it tonight.

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The Parade through Villeneuve November 11th

It is important: here’s why. And I’ve written about the first two seasons. I’m now nearing the end of the fourth.

Season 3: The Gestapo has entered the village, and Jews are being rounded up and they are told they are to be put on a train for Paris. Then rumor has it they will be taken to Poland. They are being treated horribly, cruelly, starved, humiliated, three have now killed themselves.

What is extraordinary is that the film-maker has set up the situation based on the idea that nearly all the Jews and all the French, collaborators and not, have no idea these people are going to be sent to their death. I’m not sure all the Germans know, some do. What is being conveyed is that the idea they are being sent to be killed never enters the minds of most of them – because it is so extraordinary. It is such an outrageous horrific unthinkable thing to do – until we are after it’s done — in 1946 and all see what happened. By showing how such wretched treatment of them still does not evoke in most minds what could be the aim here. they are told they can take only one small suitcase. It’s strange but they don’t think about this beyond that maybe there is no room or the suitcase inconveniences their masters.

Caroline Moorehead’s Village of Secrets. The point of her books (including A Train in Winter) is to vindicate the Resistance from 70 years of denial from the right, trivializing them and turning them into “thugs” or naive simpletons. A French Village party keeps that perspective up, and partly vindicates or explains how decent people came to collaborate. By the end of season 3, Judith de Morhange emerges as a woman collaborator: she just can’t conceive that what is about to happen is extermination. Dr Larcher, on the other hand, is beginning to see that there is no compromising with these people, alas only beginning.

The slow creep still goes on. I was struck by one moment where Marchetti (whose conscience bothers him) asks Servier if he can get a letter to his wife’s mother. Servier looks astonished and puts him off. Marchetti asks for an address. Servier’s face turns to stone. In that moment my guess is we are supposed to see that Servier knows these people have been sent to their death or are dead and had not realized Marchetti didn’t know. Or if he knows Marchetti didn’t know, did not realize how such a question would be “natural.” Marchetti says he doesn’t why a natural letter and address is not available. He seems not to guess – the truth and horror of this is as yet so unthinkable.

It is not unthinkable today. Were trains to come in and take black people, we would all immediately think extermination.OTOH, the US population has not risen against Trump when he broke all laws and intentions of immigration and separated parents from children and began to throw all the people in privately run prisons. Trump’s new rule for hospitals tells all medical people you need not treat LGTBQ people.

I wonder if in 1942-43 there were the same kinds of murders of Jews everywhere — they are profoundly unsafe wherever they are in the world of the series. The point is made that gradually the very worst people are rising to key positions (as with Trump) and now the mayor is someone prepared to slaughter anyone he doesn’t like — anyone called a Resistance person, communist, whatever.

No Jew is safe anywhere from anyone. This reminds me of what black people repeatedly said during the protests, demonstrations & riots: they can’t leave their houses without being afraid some small incident will cost them their lives. Indeed Taylor was murdered in her house – not the first. I keep my eye on how many disabled people police murder with impunity.

A brilliant actor plays the sadistic Nazi officer, Muller

Great ironies at the end. Marie’s photo in the paper and Schwartz runs over it with his latest girlfriend. It is beginning to penetrate though except in the scene where Muller gloats over how he kills groups of Jews and can get individuals about to be killed to dig the mass graves to Hortense Larcher, it is not explicit – -to penetrate individuals the people sent away on the train “will never come back” i.e., are being killed somehow. But that this is a strategy, a plan for all Jews is beyond comprehension

Some very ugly portraits of women. Much to my astonishment Hortense, Dr Larcher’s wife, prefers the sadistic Nazi Muller to her husband — this after he was prepared to torture her and wounded her arm. Schwartz’s wife tells him she loves savagery — I take this to be a slur on all woman’s sexuality and something brutal men want to believe, but the program has Hortense as another prime example. So too Marie with her affection for Schwartz: while he is not altogether devoid of any principle, he is profoundly untrustworthy and un-principled as a principle.

A Jewish young woman, Rita, refuses to accept Marchetti’s deportation of her mother (some might), flees him but is (we learn) re-captured

Women are presented as irrational: Beriot’s wife, Lucienne, loves him now because he has learned some physical technique and we watch her pray; she is against the Resistance. Marie is the most competent of the resisters — and a prostitute whose name I didn’t catch (what an old myth here). The two Larchers are now our emerging our heroes, together with DeKevern and Beriot.

The old lie about the Nazi-Soviet pact is worked tirelessly to condemn communists as if every minute of their conduct is controlled by it. There are superb books about occupied France reviewed in the New York Review of Books: it was the communists and socials who resisted the Nazis and fascists, and who the allies were determined to throw off once their use was over — for they had supported fascism itself as a bulwark against socialism and communism for years. The article does ample justice to twists and turns and details. Who Resisted the Nazis.

Three in the Resistance group

As I come near the end of the fourth season I was moved to compare A French Village to Renoir’s famed Grand Illusion (as I saw that for another course where the sentimental teacher conceded how Renoir idealized and mourned the death of an older aristocratic world — where aristocrats transcend mere local wars …..

Not only is Grand Illusion too kind, and too idealistic (especially about individuals confronting one another), with the women and captors sentimentalized (like when food is offered to prisoners so politely), but Renoir believes in this film that people in general will hold out, be brave against the threat of death, he does not begin to comprehend what people in general will accept, do without thinking of cruel consequences, how communities will dissolve. A French Village is sincere in its depiction of the hardness of people and how they seek first to protect and second to place themselves. He does not come near to understanding or dramatizing how weak bodies are.

I do think the depiction of some of the women in A French Village is unfair: two especially who are shown to be drawn to cruel men they know will turn on them and do. Two of them do push back: one flees her lover once she discovers he deported her mother (and everyone now knows to death), and the other tries to kill herself by hanging. The third is kicked out by her sadistic Nazi officer lover. I did wonder to what extent women collaborated with Nazi men, collaborators and police and military for protection. They are show as active in the Resistance the way the men are (in Grand Illusion they are only sentimental lovers or prostitute-like)

Grand Illusion is itself filled with naive illusion.

Beating, hideous food, torture a matter of course in A French Village (not seen anywhere in Grand Illusion)

This may be too much of a detail for anyone who has seen the series to remember. The fourth season culminates in Antoine pulling off a spectacular stunt, which both unnerves the Nazi-Vichy regime and inspirits the townspeople — & the Resistance fighters who pull it of: Antoine and his training soldiers. The Nazi attempt to force young men into enslaved labor in Germany has backfired for a number of local village young men have fled to the wood to join the Resistance under an emerging new leader, Antoine. They stage a parade across the village bridge (see above still), hold a ritual ceremony for (and on) November 11th for WW1, where the French (let’s recall) were on the winning side, play La Marseillaise, sing & dance. For not very long. To do it at all is astonishing — which to me at first seemed a senseless stunt but which when it succeeded did have meaning and added strength to the Resistance when the Nazi regime was unable to hunt the men out. Perhaps this is improbable, but I suspect some real incident lies behind this story

They had to have trucks, guns to some extent, but most of all cut off communications — cut off phone lines, radios, telegraph and get the occupying force out of the village. They do this – our focus is the two women who disable the radio – Lucienne and the new singing teacher, a Resistance person and it turns out lesbian. But quickly Muller (no fool) realizes a phone call which directed the occupying force to hurry to the next village was a key moment. I cannot remember who made the call. Was it dramatized? Or was this the sort of thing mystery-detective stories often do – I am to infer from what people said who did it? This is so frustrating. I will give this series that I feel I should have been able to infer (or saw ti) because generally speaking they do not go at lightening speed and everything is developed coherently with explanations emerging as we go along. I asked but no one remembered who made the phone call? I suppose I could re-watch the two (or maybe three) episodes to try to catch it … I do have the time ….

At the Window, an early 20th century painting whose title and painter I do not know

Ellen

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Modes of social life: real life bewilderment, a hard take in Bong Jong-ho’s The Parasite

One morning over the past two weeks, photo taken from sun-porch/room window

A poem I came across, which I like:

Reading Greeting Cards Before and After

His photo in the hallway greets me each day
Being in my life was an extraordinary gift
He left my world leaving a huge vacuum

Still I feel his ever presence in my life
Triggering a burst of smiles and tears
Looking at the gardens he built for me
Coming across a book we read together
Hearing the evening news and imagining his comments
Knowing he would re-load the dishwasher if he were around

An accomplished writer of research papers but not love letters
He’d spend hours searching for my perfect greeting card
Now assembled in a large basket I select one daily
Before I used to read them quickly and thank him with a kiss

Now I read them slowly, sometimes over and over again
Savoring each written word and signed “Love, Charles”
Yet to me his actions spoke more softly
Than the words on any card

—- By Ruth Perry

Dear friends and readers,

This winter I have become more intently aware than I’d been in a few years (since Jim died) of the fragile fleeting character of social life as I experience it. How easily people drop you, are glad of an excuse to ostracize or exclude someone.

One dark morning as I lay in bed waiting for the sunlight to come into my room (with my two cats beside me), I tried to think of all the places or organizations I belong to that now provide me with what social experience I have: above and beyond all in frequency, intimacy (yes) and closeness as well as a spectrum of socializing from acquaintance-polite to friendly to friends where I know something of the person for real and the person me, plus experiences of exclusion, discomfort, hurt, on the Internet as much face-book nowadays as list-servs, blogs, websites, Future Learn courses, twitter.

But after that, what physically in the face-to-face bodies and places-in-the-world included? the two Oscher Institutes of Life-long Learning (at AU and at Mason), classes at Politics and Prose (Northwest Washington Bookstore-as-community center), the Smithsonian (more impersonal) lectures, twice a year conferences (ASECS), the WAPG, an Aspergers group in Washington DC (I rarely go but I keep in touch by email), a summer film club at Cinema Art theater (once a month for 5 months). I live with one daughter, Izzy, and occasionally the other, Laura, visits or we go out with her. I’ve joined on three and this summer I’m going on a fourth Road Scholar trip. That’s it. I’ve counted 22.

Two of the experiences over the last two weeks have been especially fun — or felicitous.

Covers of audio recordings

In a dramatic reading class I listened to people read aloud passages from Dickens and we discussed Dickens, reading aloud, listening to another read, in a group, by a CD audio in a car, or reading silently (how they differ) and one I read aloud (very well if I do say so myself), the opening chapter from Pride and Prejudice (“It is a truth universally acknowledged” — with that bitter caustic yet very amusing dialogue of Mr and Mrs Bennet), the closing dialogue in Volume I where Mr Bennet tells Mrs Bennet she should not worry about Charlotte Lucas replacing her in Longbourne for perhaps she will predecease him (she finds little consolation there), and then the explosive proposal of Darcy to Elizabeth where he unknowingly insults her deeply and she refuses him. On another I read the scene from Emma where Emma deeply hurts Miss Bates in front of a group of people (Box Hill), Frank wounds Jane by in front of others saying how easy it is to make a mistake at a watering place and engage oneself to someone you don’t want, and Mr Knightley lights into Emma so damningly — all the while we hear the pain of Miss Bates, of Jane, the swelled complaints of the obtuse Mrs Elton. The others read from Dickens and I was astonished to realize that Dickens wrote a near-rape scene at the end of Dombey and Son, where a much abused wife excoriates marriage as then practised — who knew Dickens could be so subversive? Now I wish we had talked more about the spreading popularity of dramatic readings in audoibooks

Just Mercy: Bryan Stevenson (Michael Jordan) and Walter MacMillan (Jamie Foxx)

On two Thursdays at the Mason OLLI I participated in class discussions of movies where the teacher is very good at teaching (he spent decades doing it before retirement) — they were lively, intelligent, fun, one on Just Mercy and the other The Parasite (see further down below).

On Just Mercy: a powerful film done in direct simply ways. I was struck after a while at how little filmic “tricks” of the trade; no flashbacks, not subtle in juxtaposition or dialogue at all. It moves forward,and the language is direct, simple. The movie is nerve-wracking to watch because I didn’t know it ended. The young African American lawyer, Bryan Stevenson (played by Michael Jordan) is almost throughout the film at risk for his life — he patiently endures set-back after set-back and finally gets the case on Frontline from which he gets to go to the Alabama supreme court to ask that the charges against his client, Johnny McMillan (James Foxx), simply be dropped immediately as the original trial was gross miscarriage of justice. It is an anti-capital punishment film. We see a black man who should have been put in a hospital for PTSD and was left to stew and put off a bomb in front of a house and killed a woman, now lamenting and so sorry, a one incident actually killed by an electric chair. They were still killing people that way in Alabama in the 1980s and early 90s? we the full barbarism of it — how there is this pretense of humanity on the day the man is murdered.

As with When They See Us, Dark Waters, and Chernobyl, at the end of the film we see photographs of the real people the actors played. It is very effective to do this. The African-American actor, Michael Jordan, playing the lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, has been snubbed: his performance is as good as James Foxx (nominated for best supporting actor, partly because played Ray Charles in another film)

A third was enjoyable in the class (at Politics and Prose) but it was the books we read and movie I watched that mattered: Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy and Alan Pater and Cellan Jones’s 1987 Fortunes of War. There is so much time to be alone.

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Sometimes it is so hard to get to and from these places. This to introduce a distressing — frightening in implications — experience I had this past Friday early afternoon.

As I was driving from Northwest Washington DC to get to Northern Virginia and took my usual turn to get onto some feeder road which takes me to South 110 and that to South 395, I found the whole roadway blocked. There was no way I could get onto that feeder road. I was quickly hopelessly lost. I became bewildered as I usually do in streets I am not accustomed to even if some of them were familiar to me from previous excursions. My garmin showed itself to be dead and I couldn’t get the cell phone even to connect to the network. I kept making wrong turns and feared in my bewildered state I would get into an accident. Finally I remembered I had put the phone on airplane mode so that it would not disturb a class I had been in. Luckily I was able to find a sidewalk I could park by. I put the setting back and voila the Waze program began to work.

But alas I have never been able to make the Waze program or app talk — or to be truthfully only intermittently. In fact what has happened is once it starts talking and I get home I can’t figure out how to shut it up. I don’t always get an “exit” box.

Another problem I have is I never knew where I want to go west or east — say on 66. I can’t tell what is north, south, east or west. I can with thought say to myself this is left and this right. Is there a long word for this for an autistic person? So that’s my first question. I would feel better if my condition — this has happened before – had a name. Getting lost. Not being able to tell where I am — have a big picture of coordinates unless I’ve lived in an area for a very long. A good pictorial memory but it has to be real buildings or streets I recognize.

So what I had was a map with lines and arrows. I managed to put it on the seat next to me and very slowly attempted to follow all the turns and arrows. It was difficult because Arlington around Rosslyn (I live in Alexandria) is no fun. The ironic paradox is what I knew to be true; I was at most 5 minutes away from some highway if I could figure out how to get to it. What happens is the lines and arrows began to show this way to South 110. I recognized that was one of the highways and going in the right direction. I drove very slow and kept adjusting the cell phone to face me.

Anyway I swung onto the highway from another exit but I could recognize pictorially where I was, and could calm down and saw this way to Exit 27, South 395 and knew where I was and then got home. Whew!

I am like a blind person when it comes to understanding directions or what I am on a map. Utter bewilderment is awful. I have tried buying a new garmin twice. But I cannot program it. All of them require some programming and I have no one to do that for me. Everyone says it’s so easy, nothing to do. I have no idea what to do and twice I have had to take back an expensive Garmin or GPS. The one I have now was programmed for me by a kind IT guy who was in my house shortly after my husband died — and helped me install a computer.

Intensely relieved to be back home. My younger daughter, Isobel, cannot help me because she is autistic and asking her to help, this kind of experience makes her intensely nervous.

My older daughter came the next day and — what happened? — within no time she had no problem.

At first the Waze was silent. Her response was to say “Waze stinks” and download google maps. She tried to look at the settings and could find nothing wrong. She did fiddle with them. Then she tried both Waze and google maps and both talked! We get in the car and both talk. But the problem is she never figured out what I had been doing wrong or what I needed to do to make the thing talk because it was talking. I did see that I often put my own address into location and she said don’t do that, just type where you want to go in the next rectangle below.

The problem is Laura (her name) really had no problem. She clicks away and after a while the Waze program talked. She finishes, somehow an exit box is there, and she clicks on it. Calm as the proverbial cucumber. I did sit with her in my car and I clicked and it talked. She could not fix for me what was working.

So a week and a half from now I have two new places to go. I worry the thing won’t talk for me. Has anyone had this problem of the cell phone Waze not talking — My cell phone is an Apple iphone 8 — I think.

To me it’s a wonder I go anywhere at all. If I were black, I would fear a cop might kill me. Laura installed for me Uber — I have Lyft. This is for my coming trip to St Louis. If I want to find a restaurant I am to go to on Friday night, and then a play on Saturday the only way is to hail one of these cab services there and back.

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The destitute-desperate family in The Parasite

Bong Jong-ho’s Parasite is part of my theme tonight: it seems to be a study of social modes of interaction exposing gross class inequities among three families. I’ve now watched it twice and people you should not miss it. It will absorb and entertain and then maybe horrify you. I am still not sure what I think about it.

First thing to be said about the film is how hard it is to talk about it, part of this Is the story line is unpredictable – that’s why you keep watching (even if it’s not assigned). You get drawn in because you are not sure what is going to happen next at all

Second it seems to me most of the thematic descriptions don’t apply generally. It’s not a thriller. We see a class war only at the very end when the destitute family driven to desperation because there’s another desperate destitute pair of people hidden deep in a many level basement of the super-rich people’s many layered – crack up and out comes from them terror, hatred, an urge to destroy these people who are exploiting them utterly – smiling all the while as if it’s perfectly okay to the destitute to be so exploited. The super-rich husband-father drops his mask for a moment when the destitute father playing a chauffeur for the first balks at an order – and threatens to fire him.

For a horror film (another designation) it’s constantly witty and funny – we laugh very uncomfortably at these desperate people – up to their chins in sewer water when it rains – yet they are endlessly ingenious, crackerjack it seems at surviving – they are all kept at a social and psychological distance from one another.

Realism is besides the point: the mother-wife is unbelievably naïve, believes anything – I saw misogyny in the way she was treated as someone who has nothing to do with her life but make expensive parties – we are better not knowing what happened to the employees the destitute family replaces – the housekeeper come back is living nightmare with her husband fleeing creditors

So I looked up Korean films and could find only a history which offered no interpretation, but I did find an essay on films called “periphery” films. Idea is developed countries, run by white people are at the center, and countries like Korea, Palestinine, Saudi Arabia – countries colonized – Australian are periphery. So I’ll conclude on 4 characteristics such films are said to have and this one has these:

1) An intense focus on place and setting. You never forget this is Korea and the two different houses are centrally photographed to stay in your mind as character in the drama – the people in the semi-basement stealing wifi in such appalling conditions – and the rich with all space hardly enough furniture, gadgets everywhere – I suppose it’s order if order is soulless.

2) A use of folk or story telling traditions – at the beginning of the film a brief fairy tale looking picture seems to suggest that the family is going to get their dearest wish using some stone – and this stone appears in the opening and closing sequences of the film. The son carries it around – it is dangerous and bad things happen around this stone. The talk is in European tradition — the fisherman and his wife, with its moral of watch out what you wish for ….

3) Looking at everything from the point of view of the excluded – no matter what it is or how – you might say those colonized whose everything is taken from them or are not allowed anything – cannot accumulate – so destitute cannot go to college — along with this these excluded people feel they can’t belong anywhere. They don’t fit in. The son says this at one point. It ends on the father in the deep basement obviously doesn’t belong anywhere. Even the super-rich don’t belong anywhere – their home is not a home, it’s an place for the real estate sellers furniture makers gadget makers, party makers to supply and sell stuff to — to make money on

4) Money and bullying. Any time a rich or powerful person is denied anything he or she resorts to bullying. But the predators all of them prey on other predators – -like the destitute family on the original employees – everyone searching for an identity – I saw an Israeli film (art film) where the characters are all seeking an identity – queasy comedy and sudden stark tragedy happen over money and bullying ow or what – at any moment a mask drops and you are facing the faceless

At any time the mask drops and you are facing the faceless

So I thought about movies made from the center as a control mechanism –- say The Durrells of Corfu, which I wrote about in my previous diary entry.

The exact place does not at all matter – they can make a home of anything.
No one bullies others and minimal money does – you need some but not a helluva lot.
The know who they are – they really do.
Point of view is that of the privileged those who assume courts are on their side – no masks – and those who have to wear masks very poignant, like Sven the homosexual man – everyone feels for him.

Last night I re-watched The Parasite, having read about cinema at the periphery (movies made by film-makers who don’t come from powerful countries run by white people, countries not colonized i recent history) and it struck me the destitute desperate family’s behavior is like that of us — when it comes to airplane travel. That is one place middle and upper middle white people come across the treatment poorer people across the globe do all the time. Similarly it appears on the surface and maybe is true that these white people accept this treatment from the airlines. They don’t go to war or paroxyms of rage, the candidates for office don’t use as one of their promises to regulate the airlines and stop their outrageous behavior to everyone but those who can afford to be deeply gouged.

OTOH, the movie makes this analogy hard to see because it calls itself Parasite and in Korean parasitic worm and seems to refer the to the destitute desperate family – a squalid word, and it also means blotches on your skin from such worms. I am not sure that the film is not problematic — partly because in the class I was in many of the people in the room defended the super-rich family: they were paying the others, they were “decent to them;” okay they were tactless and unaware of the horrible conditions of life of the others. But that’s not their fault.

If you can reach it, Michael Wood of the London Review of Books for January 2020 is very worth reading

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How to end this entry? We are today surrounded by creeping and overwhelming fascism in our public media and art — that is the mindset actuating not only the Trump administration. Every day another evil deed, yet more ugly hateful ideas and feelings spewed out. Yesterday the Trump regime rescinded decades of work to change attitudes to protect birds from wanton killing — now you may kill them as you please (and you can have as many and what kinds of guns you want. Public schools? why these are low-class government schools which debased people attend — a sign of their inferiority is no one is excluded.

Human beings need to think more about the nature of our social lives today in the year 2020. What are we seeking? What do these activities of ours depend upon? how or on what basis are we setting up our relationships with one another? Is it to escape from a default setting (to use the ubiquitous Internet jargon) of alienation, a world of cruelty and indifference as seen in Parasite and Last Chronicle of Barset and Curate in Charge? (David Copperfield ends in a wish fulfillment fantasy and the emphasis is — to be fair to the book — more about the richness of a life of solitude, of inner development of self and strength and also about death and sheer vulnerability.) These questions are urgent as we find ourselves more and more without the solid social support systems our daily lives and attitudes (beliefs in our togetherness) used to provide, more and more turning to the Internet worlds, to voluntary organizations unsupported by anything but human need.

Ellen

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Another time away: this time, Calais

The World at Evening — Summer

As this suburban summer wanders toward dark
cats watch from their driveways —

The color of the sky makes brilliant reflection
in the water

There is a time, seconds between the last light
and the dark stretch ahead …

— Rachel Sherwood

A little more than a year ago, I made a summer interlude for my Sylvia I blog; now I’m content with a few words. Then I was gone for 16 days, now it’ll be 10. Then I went with a Road Scholar group to the lake district and borders of Scotland and England in the UK; now we go (me, my two daughters) to Calais, northern France.Why? well I said I wanted to go to the beach, Laura said she wanted to go to France, and Izzy was not going to be left behind.

This sculpture commemorates an eleven month siege on Calais by the British during the hundred years war …

The town or small city has a long history, it’s one of the channel ports between England and France and was owned by England for a very long time. Lots to see beyond the beaches. Castles, prisons, towers, a cathedral, museum. I looked it up on Amazon and bookfinder.com and found many books: on the recent history of immigration to the place and the development of what was known as The Jungle; as a place of war, from 14th century to WW2; where peace treaties and the like were signed; fishing and trading, commerce; a place to set mysteries. Today there are beaches, hotels, shopping, roads to drive, walks to do, markets to buy food and all sorts of goods. There are even ferries.

Laura rented a bnb for us that looks lovely in the picture: it has air-conditioning and wifi. We’ve bought to go to London at least once (see Kensington Garden exhibit), to Paris more than that (we signed up for a food fest). So we’ll use cabs and trains — spend money. The hard question for me is which books to take — to guess which ones will hold you when traveling and away is not easy, but I know Trollope may be relied upon, and so one will be Phineas Finn (as I will teach it this coming fall). I should probably take a good book on or by Austen too. They usually “work.” A small French dictionary — though for a long time it was an English city in France.

Google produces many pictures. Painters like to paint fantasies and semi-realistic images.

I love the art of Eduard Vuillard; many years ago with a visiting friend, I saw a gigantic exhibit (rooms upon rooms tracing his career) of Vuillard’s paintings, murals, drawings at the National Gallery: Dinner with Two Lamps: rue de Calais:

Chez nous, here in Alexandria, Laura’s friend, Marni, will come every day and has promised to stay 45 minutes with the two pussycats, provide food, water &c. Clarycat already made friends with her, and I hope before the end of the time, Ian will come out of hiding and join them in play.

An archetypal harbour scene by Nell Blaine (1986) — Banner Hills, 1986

From Three Poems at the End of Summer by Jane Kenyon

I stood by the side of the road,
It was the only life I had.

Miss Drake

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