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

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

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

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

Dear readers and friends,

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

The OLLIs:

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

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

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

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

Others:

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

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

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

Online life:

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

Travel since Jim died

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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Old-fashioned diary entry

This is a place in Central Park, NYC, I know well: ancient rocks. I used to sit there. (Izzy put it on twitter from her trip to NYC these 6 days)

Today nine years ago Jim died. The comfort of my existence went, my friend stopped existing literally. I have learned much about people since he is gone. A fourth wall in the house I imagined myself in fell away. I have had to interact and wanted to interact and in some ways have become a better person. I learn a lot by being with kinds of people I never came into contact with all that much, some of whom know a lot more than me on this or that subject. But I’d rather have been happy with him.

Here is the obituary I wrote the morning after he died

To mark this day here’s a diary entry (from a letter I write to a friend daily — usually early morning)

A glade in the Sheep Meadow

Now every Sunday I take one of these fosamax (brand name) pills for the osteoporosis.  I am then supposed to sit or stand up for 2 hours and drink 6-8 oz of water. After which I can eat my breakfast or do whatever I do normally. It’s awkward but this is what the doctor ordered.  The tests this past week showed that I don’t need injections or other supplements than the Caltrate-D and folic acid pill I already take daily. Dr Wiltz said that in another year I’d have the same tests and see where we are.

Izzy happened upon the zoo in Central Park:  she is looking down at a Bear going for a walk

I still get those pains in my chest — and now they come unexpectedly at any time of the day. I don’t take the pills for them (2 different bottles) most of the time because the pain is like a sore pain, and most of the time goes away quickly.   The pills are super strong

This is Izzy’s view from the new Whitney museum — I’ve never been there; it happened after Jim died and the one visit I took to the city since I suffered so trying to go places, including the park, the theater, I had a small heart attack when I got home. So I won’t go again unless I go with a friend. It’s too much for me.

I love to talk about books and love to read or to listen to others talk about them.  It does not at all get in the way of my enjoyment; it enrichens it  I don’t worry that this prejudices me or anyone else: it is probably the basis of English literature study. I have no understanding of spoiler warnings.   Only if it’s a mystery and at the end I am truly supposed to be surprised do I not like to be told what is going to happen  In fact often I’ll read the wikipedia article or something else to see if I want to read it; or if it’s an upsetting tragic or melodrama in some way book that affects me, I like to read what’s coming so as not to suffer too much anxiety.  Those that are too strong, I don’t read — Outlander has a lot of bad things that happen but our hero, heroine and other beloved characters usually win out or are happy for some other reason by the end.

For me to write a long piece I’d have to give up blogging. The trouble here is that I love (I admit) the gratification of readership and people saying they enjoyed what I wrote. I’ve now written about8 or 9 books, and produced editions of 5.  Of these 2 have been published as regular books, and 1 as an edition.  Most of the rest are on my website.  High scholarship, the translations, and some others have a readership but it took a long time for me to accomplish these.  It required really taking myself out of circulation.  I didn’t mind as long as I had Jim. But take these 5 days (Izzy away in NYC) I am alone and lonely but for my company on the Net. So that’s why I say when I can no longer go out and teach I’ll write these longer books again.  It is hard to be autistic, to be snubbed, not to be able to interact with others intuitively, to say things others find embarrassing or unacceptable for reasons I can’t understand. I’ve never made a friend in this neighborhood I’ve been able to sustain — and I have tried.

Although I say I’ll go back to Poldark and now accompany my writing with Outlander — finally or really — I don’t care if these are despised by the established literati.  It’s what I love: Historical romance and historical fiction.  (I cannot write the biography I am capable of because the son will not cooperate, I would need to travel and also socially interact with all sorts of people. I never realized to what extent a biography depends on social and traveling skills as I do now consciously.) Yes because historical romance and fiction are escapist & high literary imaginative achievements.  They come out of other books.  And also because I can identity with the heroines as I cannot with many contemporary heroines.  I could instead write on Trollope or try a sequel or post-text out of Austen or another beloved set of books.

I’m getting myself to drink water.

Izzy is walking in Highline Park and this is what she sees through her cell phone camera

This past Friday I sat next to a woman in the Films Moral, Political, Social, Aesthetic class I’m taking again. Every other term the teacher does it — usually brilliant artful films, that often I’ve never seen — though sometimes I have. When the class was over we had this conversation:

She expressed her displeasure with the hybrid form. She said she may not be there next week, remarking: “there is nothing I’m getting that I would not get at home.” She got to talk to me! What she said interested me because it showed how differently she thinks about these classes than I do. She told me some interesting information about Italy at the time of the film we had discussed in class (The Bicycle Thief). Why not speak up? She seemed to think that would be too much like a “little lecture.” I said you could keep it short. She didn’t have that much, only that she had lived in Italy for 10 years, recognized the neighborhoods the film occurred in and could tell whether class ironies were going on and where. I said when I am a SGL (teacher at OLLI at AU) I love such contributions. She was not convinced — I said she would have informed us. She appeared not to care in the least for my opinion. Did not seem to hear it.

Then I said to her comment that in person is not worth it to her, that in a class I taught in person I know within a few minutes who has not understood the text — remember I’m a literature teacher. That I couldn’t have told that on zoom. Therefore I became so much more effective a teacher because I could respond to that — I meant I see my task as improving understanding of books. Her reply startled me: well, you see why I prefer zoom. In other words, she would not want me to know she didn’t understand. So what does she come to classes for? Not out of any respect for the teacher’s discipline or training.

This woman didn’t value the social experience either.  She said she was getting nothing more from coming to the class than she gets from zoom.  I quite agree that the social space upstairs has few people in it nowadays but that’s because the people seem not to value it. Covid is not going away; they’ve been vaccinated to the hilt and yet they don’t come. I wish someone would explain to me what neurotypicals get out of social experience? Jim used to say much of the social experience we have here in the US is dysfunctional if you thought it was for making friends.

A small mammal, one of the earlier ones from which this human race sprung

I am following and enjoying Izzy’s trip with her by following the pictures she puts on twitter.

Stay for me there, I will not fail
To meet thee in that hollow vale.
And think not much of my delay;
I am already on the way,
And follow thee with all the speed
Desire can make, or sorrows breed.
Each minute is a short degree,
And every hour a step towards thee.
At night when I betake to rest,
Next morn I rise nearer my west …
— Henry King, after the death of his “matchless friend,” his beloved wife

Those who are left are different people trying to lead the same lives … (Winston Graham, Warleggan)

Autumn from Window — idealized image by Barbara Pommerenke

Ellen

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Post-Halloween: Izzy’s new song, plus ça change …

I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life … And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookstore [not so much that latter as the days of vast caverns of books, floors of them, you were left to explore on your own, i.e., the Argosy in NYC, 2nd Hand Bookstor in Alexandria, Va are gone forever, or so it seems mostly …] — Julian Barnes, A Life with Books

Friends,

I thought I’d begin with an autumnal poem, W.B. Yeats’s “When You are Old” as read by Tobias Menzies:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Equally moving for me is Izzy’s latest song, “All I want” by Toad the Wet Sprocket:

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Last night was Halloween, and from my hour-long zoom chat with Aspergers friends, to the few people I talk and email with, I was wished a happy Halloween. We did try: Izzy thought she was invited to go to a party on Saturday night by a man in her Wednesday in-person Dungeons and Dragons group, but when the time came close it seemed the party was to be an hour long or so, after which it would break up into people doing different things together, among these, bar-hopping. This is not for her, especially as getting there was an Uber (and back). So she thought the better of it – she is now getting older than many of the late 20s people who would show up, several gay (as the man was gay), what she had to wear was the regency dress she wore for JASNA (not appropriate for this, too naive). Instead she recorded her song.

I had hoped to join in on giving out candy for the first time in years as I still have the battery-operated candles I had found for Biden’s night-before-inauguration so I could light up my pottery pumpkin, put the stoop light on and be all welcoming. Well I got three groups and one lone girl in a clown’s outfit. Next door and across the street from me are older women too, who also had welcoming light and symbolic objects — they seem to have gotten the same groups. And then it was over.

As has happened to me before, I discovered that there is little to join in on if you are trying simply to be part of a neighborhood community. Halloween you must go to a party, some 15 years ago, for two years running at the Torpedo Factory museum in old town, a Halloween dance was held, for the public & Jim and I went; one year we traveled to NYC to go to a Halloween dance at the Princeton club (as members of the Williams — old-fashioned rock for people mostly in their 50s too).  Thirty-five, say 1980s when we still had a (what I called) Welfare project down the hill, endless children and adolescents came, many Black. Thirty years ago in this neighborhood (all private houses, as we say in NYC) there were several floods of children coming through this neighborhood, and I’d give out candy, chocolates, cookies, pretzels with Izzy.  Twenty I went myself with Laura and Izzy (age 15 say and 9) with them in costume trick-or-treating. I’d stay back on the sidewalk and there were really lots of people. But this neighborhood changes every 7 years, and about twenty years ago, the welfare project was knocked down, super-expensive houses and condos with what’s called a few row of “scatter-site housing” for people getting subsidized rents, built in its place. Ten years ago or more a scheme in my neighborhood not to let most of their children trick-or-treat but make a party. Immediately it’s exclusionary of course. Excuses like strangers put razors in children’s candy. Tonight I wondered if the upper class mostly whites here did not like the children from elsewhere

A photo Izzy took that lovely afternoon as she stood by the Potomac in Old Town

I was advised to watch movies, told by others that’s what they did — horror ones — so I told myself I’d watch movies too and my choice was Shades of Darkness, a 1980s series of hour long adaptations of ghost stories, all but one by women, done with great delicacy, insight, mood creation. I bought it sometime after 2000 as a DVD — I watched one I’d seen before and one I probably hadn’t. Elizabeth Bowen’s “Demon Lover,” very well done, as much about WW2 in England, the Blitz as about this ghost that seems a distilled eruption of senseless indifferent harm I’d seen it before but have forgotten how well done. Dorothy Tutin, the central figure. This is a traditional ghost tale where the ghost is malign and we are made nervous because the whole experience is regarded as fearful, hostile — popular Kafka stuff in a way.

Dorothy Tutin as our Every ordinary women profoundly disquieted as she sees him across the room …

The other May Sinclair’s “The Intercessor” (first time seen), to me a strange ghost stories to me because the ghost is simply accepted as part of universe and the theme is we are supposed to understand the revenants, accept them — not pitiless mischief, but the ghost a redemptive pitiful ghost. The human story is dreadful — people can be dreadful and have very bad luck, but the ghost, unprepossessing as she is, brings renewal. John Duttine, the hero, often played deeply sensitive men in the 1970s-80s BBC dramas. I’ve read other Sinclairs of this type. This set includes two superb hard gothic Whartons, “Lady’s Maid’s Bell” and “Afterward” (stunning). This was an era of fine dramas from the BBC — and there are other series of this type — all June Wyndham Davis produced.

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Lucy Worsley getting to sit behind Austen’s writing desk with some paraphernalia Austen would have used

So my teaching and scholarly life went on. Some successes: my two classes on The Prime Minister are going very well. My paper, “A Woman and her Boxes: Space and Personal Identity in Jane Austen,” went over very well and I much enjoyed the virtual EC/ASECS. I’ve not yet returned to Anne Finch, though the term is winding down, because I changed one of my books for my coming 4 week winter course teaching at OLLI at Mason, and am very much engaged by the books:

Retelling Traditional Tales from an Alternative Point of View

We will read two books which retell stories and history from perhaps unexpected and often unvoiced points of views. In War in Val D’Orcia, An Italian War Diary, 1943-44, Iris Origo (British-Italian, a biographer, and memoir-writer, a literary OBE) retells the story of World War Two from the point of view of a woman taking charge of her Tuscan estates during the war. Then Cassandra & Four Essays by Christa Wolf (a respected East German author, won numerous German literary-political prizes) the story of Troy from Cassandra’s POV, no longer a nutcase but an insightful prophet written after the war was over, with four essays on a trip the author took to Greece and her thinking behind her book. The immediate context for both books is World War Two: they are anti-war, and tell history from a woman’s standpoint, one mythic, the other granular life-writing.

I’d get a crowd if I were doing Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, but no one needs me to teach these. I’ve learnt that Florence Nightingale wrote a novella turned into polemic essay, Cassandra, only published recently: beyond protesting the restrictive life of an upper class Victorian young woman, exploring her own depression, it’s an exposure of the Crimean war. Finally an excuse to read away books on and by these two brilliant serious women.

A modern Cassandra: Wolf has Aeschylus’s proud victim in mind

I got involved in a wonderful thread on Victoria when I told of my coming Anglo-Indian Novels: Raj, Aftermath and Diaspora (I’ve told you of this one before), this spring at both OLLIs and in person. I told of books and they told of books, and we all dreamed in imagined company. My thanking people included this:

I did send away for the Metcalfs’ Concise History of India, and Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India (2016 in the UK). I have the Dalrymple volume on the East India Company and am grateful to the pointed to the specific chapters. There’s nothing I like better than articles when I’m looking for concision and I have access to the George Mason University database and their interlibrary loan.

My course itself is not on the Victorian period as all three books were written in the 20th century: the first is Forster’s Passage to India, and I have got hold of his Hills of Devi, and a book of essays published in India about the relationship of his time there and books to India. One book I have read and is about 19th century colonialism through 19th into 20th century books (novels and memoirs) is Nancy Paxton’s superb Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947

Not for this course but about the 19th century and colonialism through another and classic 19th century novel is the Dutch Max Havelaar; or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company by Eduard Douwes Dekker (1859), using the pseudonym he often used Multatuli . Now this is a superb book where you will learn that not only the British were stunningly brutal to native populations when they took over, but also how the colonialists did it. It’s a novel that is heavily true history (disguised only somewhat) – a peculiar imitation of Scott as if through a lens like that of Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Dekker risked his life while a resident manager in Indonesia (and other places) and came home to write this novel.

I strongly recommend it – and it’s available in a beautiful new edition by New York Review of Books, paperback, good translation. I just so happen to have written a blog last night half of which is on this novel – the other half a film adaptation which descends (in a way) from it, Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (by way of an intermediary 1964 novel). Arguably MH is most important one volume 19th historical novel about the Dutch in Indonesia. The volume includes an interesting introduction by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an important writer and political activist (spent too much time in prisons).

The other two for my course are Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown, the 1st volume of his Raj Quartet (a historical novel, familiar to many people through the superb BBC TV serial in the later 1980s); and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake (a book showing the diaspora). The movie I’ll assign is Merchant-Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah, which I also cannot praise too highly

Outlander begins in Scotland, Inverness, at Samhain or Halloween — it is also a ghost story

I’ve splurged on two beautifully made copies of the first two books of Outlander (Outlander & DragonFly in Amber) for my birthday and am back reading these books at midnight after realizing I’d been dreaming for sometime of myself in an Outlander adventure. By the time I was fully awake, I had forgotten the particulars and wonder what was the prompting: it’s been weeks and weeks since I last watched an Outlander TV episode and months since I read in one of the books. Maybe it bothers me that I don’t have Starz so will have to wait to see Season 6 until the season comes out as a DVD.

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The cat meowed — the first voice of the series

I do most days need some cheering up, so often so sad that right now my movie-watching includes this year’s All Creatures Great and Small, the set of DVDs sent me by my friend Rory. They still my heart with the strong projection of love, understanding, kindness between one another. I am especially fond of the direct emphasis on the animals the Vets and everyone else too are caring so tenderly for. The first episode opened with an temporarily ill cat being taken care of by James (Herriot, Nicholas Ralph). As my daughter Laura (Anibundel) wrote: “Snuggling down in the Yorkshire Dales to save a few cows turned out to be just what the doctor ordered last winter.”. I regret only that there are only six for this year, so I’m re-watching last year’s seven. Re-watching beloved series is what I do a lot.

Izzy and I did vote early, this past Saturday at our local library. We got there early and found a reasonably long line. We were told turnout is high. Everything was done peacefully and democratically. No one there to intimidate anyone. My neighborhood is showing signs for Youngren and I’ve encountered the seething racism in many of these rich whites — they will vote GOP because they are most of all about their status (and feel it’s threatened by not having whites in charge), see Black people as dangerous and inferior, and yes the campaign against Toni Morrison’s Beloved has traction. The GOP even has a mother-type inveighing against the book in a campaign commercial.

One reason for this is it’s not a good choice for a high school class. It’s too hard (not linear at all); its content is problematic: the use of the ghost is part of a skein of irrationality and violence justified in ways that most high school students will not understand. But she won the Nobel, and this is the most famous one: much better, more appropriate are Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (varied, sane, also about economic structuring to keep people poor), Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Lorraine Hansbury’s A Raisin in the Sun, August Wilson’s Piano (Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is rightly assigned in junior (3rd year high) years. But this is an argument for people teaching literature to think about. Youngren is insinuating profound resentment, implying this book teaches white children to hate themselves and their parents. The reality is it’s a book too hard for students to take in, with some of the same problems of vindicating violence you see in popular US movies. I never assigned Twain’s Huckleberry Finn after seeing a Black young man get up and do a talk about how painful it was for him to read such a book and hearing white boys in the class snicker at him. The choice of Beloved tells about the conformity and non-thinking of US high school curricula than anything else.  And now it’s weaponized against Democrats and liberal gov’t.

If I could bring Jim back, I’d give up all I do — for I wouldn’t be doing much of this probably, wouldn’t have known of the OLLIs, of the Smithsonians, become part of these zooms, but I admit it does make me feel good that I prove to myself and do cope with so much nowadays. Today I resolved two bill problems from goofs I made in using websites to pay my bills — I now get e-bills for seven of my bills (post office becomes worse each week). I’m not as afraid as I used to be — though still frightened some (terrified at what could be done if the GOP cabal does take over), at least I know so much more about all that I need and do related directly to my life, who to go to (AARP, EJO-solutions for my computer, Schwabb guys for money). It is good to feel capable and useful and appreciated – though I began with the Yeats poem because Jim was and will be the one person in the world who loved the pilgrim soul in me. And every day, every night I feel his lack. So much I could do were he here, so much I miss out on (the new Met Meistersinger 6 hours!) how he would have reveled in it.

Ellen

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Nearly 8 years a widow

Sophie Thomson as Miss Bates: in the 1996 Emma: I dislike most of the movie, but her performance as Miss Bates and the way she is filmed is the best Miss Bates of all I’ve seen

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

Friends,

On October 9th of this year, Jim will have been dead 8 years. I have learned many things since he died (because I had to or die myself), and much has seemed to change or alter in the world over these years (not fundamentally but surface changes make a lot of difference to individual ordinary relatively powerless lives). I wish sometimes I had behaved differently when Jim was alive but I do not believe that anything I refused to do or was lacking in fundamentally hurt or deprived him of anything he wanted.

For myself I am again not not sleeping well. I have periods where I sleep fine (5 hours and a bit more on average) and periods where I don’t (waking in the night, up after 3-4 hours). Just now it is the stress of returning to these classes via zoom, worry the two classes I teach won’t go well, the new relationships, and seeing out in the world that the present peaceful seeming settlement in the US is at risk.

The lack of a close relationship such as I had with Jim is, though, what is very wearing to me. I am not made to be alone I need someone to confide in, to turn to for advice, support. I’ve now tried several friendships and friendship is not a substitute for a partner/loving spouse. I have had a hard time even sustaining these, most have broken up, attenuated, the person moved away or died. No man I’ve met or briefly gone out with (3?) or known more at a distance comes near him for compatibility, intelligent understanding and of course love for me. Nor will there ever be.

I’ll mention this:

For the last few days I’ve had a persistent pain in my chest; for a few days before that side (right) arm has been too painful to lift
sometimes. I did take a weaker pill, one I’m told to take twice a day at 12 hour intervals, and while it helped, the pain did not go away. I don’t feel the pain when I’m standing or sitting up most of the time, some movement brings it out. So I couldn’t do my full set of exercises yesterday. And do them but one a day, trying to walk (earlier) in later afternoon or evening. I should phone the doctor and go. I have said I’m told I have a aneuryism in my aorta.

I suppose you (those who read this frankly autobiographical blog) know that writing itself cheers me up. Writing helps buoy my spirits after I wake and as the day begins. I don’t need the helps visualized in this film adaptation of Mansfield Park (1983), with Sylvestre Le Touzel as Fanny but I know why the picture of her beloved’s ship as drawn by him, the transparencies, and other meaningful objects are set around her on her desk near a window

I am feeling slightly overwhelmed just now. Take this past Monday:

I had 4 zooms. I was dizzy by the end but I will stay with all 4. One, mine (I taught, The Prime Minister at OLLI at AU online), went well, but too many men. I don’t do that well with men. And my anthology is all women and my desire for truer representation on behalf of women, so I may have a small class eventually. 3 people were already not there. They emailed to say they had a conflict and they would watch the recording later in the day. 3 people for the repeat tomorrow later afternoon at OLLI at Mason online have already sent messages to this effect. So recording has a down side in a sense — the classroom experience must be redefined.

I had suspected the teacher for the Theban Plays would be very good — that she is very intelligent and, alone (not with the usual partner) a good teacher whatever she does – and she was — though she did not handle the zoom aspects of calling on people or any of it at all, which did make her presence less felt, less effective (she seems to erect barriers between herself and others). There was the London Trollope Society Zoom at 3 (BST 8 pm) on The American Senator (with two talkers) and then at 6:30 pm EDT another fine teacher (from Politics & Prose) on Wilkie Collins’s No Name. I was probably too tired by that time to take it all in coherently.

No London Trollope Society zoom next Monday and the No Name class is only 4 more. So it will be only 3 more Mondays this 4 zoom line-up will happen.

Meanwhile last night I was reading the book by Fagles (translator, editor, introducer) the Theban Plays teacher had suggested. Wonderfully naturalistically translated. I thought of Philoctetes and how Sophocles made marginalized powerless people his central figures: a woman (all 15,000 spectators men, all actors men) and a cripple. I loved it and wrote my one paper on an ancient classical work on it (with a little bit of help from my father): the teache, a long=timed tenured person hated it and gave me a B. “How could you talk about heroes in this vein?” I am fascinated by Collins’s power of description of the 19th century cityscapes (walking on a wall) and charged feminism of No Name (two heroines completely cut off from any money because their parents married after the father made out his will), and am reading a new edition of Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall, early feminist masterpiece, by Stevie Davies (Unbridled Spirits, effective half fictionalized accounting of 17th century women involved in the civil war; Impassioned Clay, with its insight into how historical fiction is ghostly, about the now dead and vanished bought back (one feels that in Gabaldon’s Outlander serials).

I napped twice to do it that day. Just fell asleep around 4:20 (I did lay down on the bed telling myself I was just laying down) and then woke at 5. Again around 8:30 and woke at 9 pm — watching PBS, Judy Woodruff had put me to sleep.

I also “visited” the National Book Festival and for a while listened to & watched Ishiguro manage to make intelligent talk. On a JASNA channel of some sort for about a third of a session, listened to Janet Todd, some of whose books as a scholar I admire, who has written a new novel on Jane Austen (and Shelley I thought but not quite) and whose fantasy I thought might be like Christa Wolf’s No Place on Earth, where early 19th century Germany romantic figures who never met meet. Alas, not so; it’s a re-hash of a biography she did of the Shelley women (Fanny Godwin who killed herself, Mary Shelley).

Tuesday so much easier. I re-make lecture notes for tomorrow’s class at OLLI at Mason on PM, and I’ve a later afternoon class at OLLI at Mason on Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall (I’ll be writing a blog on this book & the Brontes, Gaskell & Scott later next week).

Egon Schiele, Four Trees (1917)

So Anne Finch has been put to the side again, and I’m struggling to do the reading for a paper centered on Austen I’ve promised for October 16th: A Woman and her Box: space and personal identity. Luckily the book I agreed to review for Peter Lang was on Jane Austen, Non-Portable Property and Possessions (not the exact title). (They have not acknowledged receipt of my report nor paid me in the books they said they would. I love getting back to Austen (as you can see from the stills I’m using for this blog), and the books I’ve read for it (Barbara Harding, A Reading of JA; Amanda Vickery on what Katherine Shackleton bought, lived in, made a life out of; Lucy Worseley on JA’s life through her houses once again. I’ve learned about traveling libraries: books put in boxes that are bookcases! A sudden spurt:

Which of us is not familiar with the much-attested to story of Jane Austen hard at work on one of her novels, toiling over tiny squares of paper held together by pins, crossing out, putting carrots and arrows into the lines, second thoughts or words over the lines, on one of her novels in draft. Where?  on that tiny round table, sometimes referred to as her desk, a relic now found in the Jane Austen House museum. We are told that she did not want a creak in the door to the room fixed because it functioned as a warning. Upon hearing the door open she would of course stash these papers away – perhaps in that writing desk, which, another famous story tells us, was filled with many such manuscripts and was almost lost forever on a trip where it landed in the wrong coach? The writing desk is another relic to be found in the Chawton Jane Austen House museum.

The inferences I take from these are that Jane Austen was a woman who had no control over her space and no control over her portable seeming property. She had not been able to place the writing desk on her lap in the coach.  Remember Fanny Price seated in her unheated attic room amid her nest of comforts, not one of which she actually owned, not even the row of workboxes abandoned by the Mansfield Park heir when someone was trying to instuct him using them as a device for organization and storage.

Still it won’t do to say I don’t believe in the first story because I cannot conceive how anyone could produce the artful and controlled four novels.  The first two, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, to some extant flawed, when studied carefully, now and then revealing curious gaps which can be explained by too many revisions, but on the whole extraordinary.  Much less all six famous books, including the posthumous, to some extent, not finished or truncated, named by Austen’s brother and sister, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. For these she must have had far more consistent hours of time free of anxious worry lest someone coming with the right to interrupt create an embarrassed moment to find this woman writing. Is not Emma virtuoso perfection in its use of ironic perspective and voice? Despite what some today might feel to be a narrow rigidity of moral judgment actuating aspects of Mansfield Park, it is arguably as strong a protest and radically questioning as well as aesthetically exquisite book as any of the 19th century novel masterpieces produced in Victorian England.

But there is the table, there the desk and document describing the second incident refuting me.

Such a warm comfortable scene by Joe Wright from P&P — filled with food and things for the table, in a relaxed comfortable aging home:

Brenda Blethyn, Rosamund Pike, Keira Knightley and Jena Malone as Mrs Bennet, Jane, Elizabeth and Lydia in Pride and Prejudice (2006, Joe Wright)

I am pushing myself every minute I have extra around my other commitments to get this done. I don’t know if I’ll make it as I feel I must go through her letters once more — skimming but taking them in. E. M. Forster wrote one problem he had in reading Austen was he tended to be like someone in a beloved church; I’m like someone scrambling in a coach with her by my side, me holding onto to that writing desk and those papers.

So now I’ll subside into a movie:

I’ve understood that Simon Raven in his 1975 26 part serial of The Pallisers tried to turn the secondary story of The Prime Minister (Lopez, Sexty Parker, Emily Wharton, her foolish brother and strong wise father) into a sort of Washington Square, Lopez into a sort of lion-feline gay and violent macho male cad, Emily a Catherine Sloper who is loved by her father, and was sexually entranced and excited by Lopez, but does not succeed in understanding him, or growing up so at the end she does not set her face to the wall (a la Catherine Sloper) but turned from the world to her father’s arms. Olivia de Haviland would have done justice to this as she could not to the 1940s Washington Square movie (The Heiress) she was inserted into. So you see I’ve been keeping up with watching The Pallisers for this course I’m teaching too — for insights into the novels. For lovely pictures go to: syllabus for reading The Prime Minister together. Here we see both the Duke and the Duchess miserable from the social life they have kept up: it’s from the political story:

Her hands are shaking with tiredness (Susan Hampshire as the Duchess, Philip Latham as the Duke)

All this is the usual screen to what I let you see in my opening paragraphs today as I approach the 8th anniversary of my widowhood. Deep loneliness with a wish I could do the sort of things I could with him. I like the teaching and classes very much  but they are no substitute for the fulfilled reality I had with him, and the sense of security and peace and understanding his presence provided.

Izzy has been without him too. Tonight we watched on her ipad as we ate together a soothing episode of Critical Choice as lovely cartoon, Mighty Vibes: two siblings sitting close, she reading, he working on the computer, keeping us and themselves company. She’s got a new bed coming in early November, and Mr Christbel will take apart her present one (Jim and mine from 1983 to 2000) and put it in the attic with the beautiful crib (first Laura’s and then Izzy’s) no one will ever use again …

Laura’s Charlotte, in a chair, making a mighty mew — one of my grandchildren with 4 paws

Maxx as snugglicious — another

Saturday night our monthly Aspergers meeting online. The topic “personal safety and emergency preparedness.”

Ellen

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On my being a widow — from the COVID perspective; Izzy’s song — Louise Gluck’s Landscape

Izzy singing It’s the End of the World as We Know It — by R.E.M.

Dear friends and readers,

Izzy’s latest song puts before us the idea this pandemic has heralded the end of the world as we know it. It is said to be the result of transmission of a virus from non-human animals to us, the event the result of climate change (break-up), which may well be bringing many of us on earth to the end of our worlds as we have known them. Seemingly silly fleeting experiences will change: many a conference will from here on in be held via zoom, or partly via zoom (or some improvement thereof – I hope not), so too work jobs, universities, schools. These too will occasion deeper changes.

My yearly endurance trial across early October is over, and I’m into my 8th year of widowhood. I have changed a lot since Jim was alive, or had many new kinds of thoughts and experiences. Unexpectedly (yes) I had a lot to learn, mostly about social life, but also myself. I have enjoyed some of these new experiences, wish in fact Jim could have had them with me, especially some of the activities that go on in the Oscher Institutes of Lifelong Learning, come with me to Scotland, to the Lake District, Northern England; with our daughters to Milan, Calais. The experience of widowhood is so various: some women don’t want to be called a widow (they feel the term as a stigma), but that is part of what defines who I am.

It depends on whether you loved your husband (partner) or he (she) loved you; whether you are left with money enough to retire in comfort, of course your age; do you have children, are you parts of circles of friends, have relatives who are close to you; where you are; what you like to do, and what you can do without him (her). I was shielded, still am (by enough money through my widow’s annuity, social security, and my parents’ savings — which they could not pull off today), but for now mostly physically alone with Izzy and our two beloved cats.

I know, banal.

And Laura not far away. Ten minutes by car when she flies low. Here is her delightful imagining of Biden’s Field Office in her Animal Crossing series:

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With such thoughts embodied in particulars I have been feeling and thinking what do I want to do in the near and further off future. I will not be publishing that review on the Austen, Art and Artifacts book, for a while. I find I cannot bear what Austen studies and Austen fandom has turned into. I’ve decided to wait until the 2nd volume of the new standard edition of Anne Finch’s poetry has been published; to write an evaluation of the first, I need the second, which explains the first and exemplifies more of what principles and attitudes are actuating the first.

Marie de France, found in an early medieval manuscript

The question then — for when I have time left over from teaching or taking courses (or blogging, posting &c) — is, What do I want to study now? These past days I’ve been rationalizing and downsizing my TBR and TBW piles, ordering and labelling and have discovered all my piles of books and individual endeavors (like reading and blogging on Harriet Walter since I found and am reading her book on acting Shakespeare’s heroines) devolves into two areas: women’s literature, which devolves into historical romance (Diana Wallace’s Women’s Historical Novel, 1900-2000) and poetry (Alice Ostriker’s Stealing Our Language — history of 20th century American women’s poetry); the lives and work experience of lifelong single women (which may include widows, spinsters, divorced, separated women, not just Virginia Nicolson’s Singled Out).

Not everything I do fits into these two trajectories; Trollope, for a start, E. M. Forster, some novels, memoirs (travel and other) by men that I do enjoy so, most recently David Downie’s Paris to the Pyrenees (see Colleen’s Paris, I demur on the smirk, I never smirked), studying Italian, reading French, watching good movie series.

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Frederick Morris (1889-1982), Vase with flowers, dried plants, berries …

The COVID perspective. Jim’s death now impersonally considered. It’s known, understood that the calamitous death rate in the US (still rising) now past 217,000 is the result of a lack of a decent public health system, stubborn ignorance, brought on (in schools too) by a greed so gargantuan it will chose openly choose profits over thousands of fellow citizens lives and wreck the lives of those surviving. I read of experiences daily that remind me of Jim and my own when he was dying of cancer:

I am convinced his early death, the miserable way he died (the gross mistakes, excruciating suffering from a brutal useless, as it turned out probably cutting out of his esophagus and forcing his other organs to be reconfigured, the one he almost bled to death because three different “providers” had to give permission for medicine and had to be paid separately or he was threatened with the horrors of the US emergency room) are in analogous terms just what’s killing thousands of people in the US (needlessly) today. All the respect and grief Judy Woodruff(every Friday night on PBS) pays to the dead cover up what was the experience each person had of US medical capitalism unchecked.

From Louise Gluck’s Landscape:

1. The sun is setting behind the mountains,
the earth is cooling.
A stranger has tied his horse to a bare chestnut tree.
The horse is quiet — he turns his head suddenly,
hearing, in the distance, the sound of the sea.

I make my bed for the night here,
spreading my heaviest quilt over the damp earth.

The sound of the sea —
when the horse turns its head, I can hear it.

On a path through the bare chestnut trees,
a little dog trails its master.

The little dog — didn’t he used to rush ahead,
straining the leash, as though to show his master
what he sees there, there in the future —

the future, the path, call it what you will.

Behind the trees, at sunset, it is as though a great fire
is burning between two mountains
so that the snow on the highest precipice
seems, for a moment, to be burning also.

Listen: at the path’s end the man is calling out.
His voice has become very strange now,
the voice of a person calling to what he can’t see.

Over and over he calls out among the dark chestnut trees.
Until the animal responds
faintly, from a great distance,
as though this thing we fear
were not so terrible.

From Averno

Gentle reader, you need to know the concrete reality such a poem refers to. Amy Coney Barrett is a fanatical heartless monster, read her view on a 19 year old female prisoner continually raped by a guardsman, after she gave birth forced to suck his penis; she lied continually during those hearings. How did Trump find her — and the thug-rapist pseudo-virgin Kavanaugh? why the Federalist Society. Listen to Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

Ellen

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“I cannot visualize what 11,00 books look like”

Vilhelm Purvitis (1872-1941), Winter, Latvia 1910 — I’ve been reading much Atwood this week, stories of ice and snow …

“We still think of a powerful woman as an anomaly, a potentially dangerous anomaly; there is something subversive about such women, even when they are taken to be good role models. They cannot have come by their power naturally, it is felt. They must have got it from somewhere. Women writers are particularly subject to such projections, for writing itself is uncanny: it uses words for evocation rather than for denotation; it is spell-making.” Atwood, “Witches.”

From Atwood’s poem, “Spelling,” 1981

My daughter plays on the floor
With plastic letters
Red, blue, and hard yellow,
Learning how to spell,
Spelling,
How to make spells.
*******
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky, and the sun,
Your own name first,
Your first naming, your first name,
Your first word.

My blog-reading friends,

A friend and I were talking of how when people grow old, they must to smaller quarters. and that “it is extremely hard to pack up your life and say goodbye.” Especially, to sell and/or give away one’s books.

I remembered a section in Carol Shield’s Mary Swann where a character who is a widower is forced to sell his and his wife’s library and says “Our books, dear Book Browser, are a comfort, a presence, a diary of our lives. What more can we say?” I thought of how Jim and my books were the center of our lives together: we read them together, consulted them, collected, loved, gave them a good home, and told him I have nearly 11,000 books now. About 1,000 more since Jim died. Specifically, 10,989. As I’ve said here more than once, I had told him I have 5 rooms (excluding the kitchen, two bathrooms and a hall and vestibule), large square spaces with high ceilings, and each room has two walls with one large window each. That leaves a lot of wall space for books. Since Jim’s death I enclosed my porch, adding a sixth rectangular sun-room (much sun comes in as it faces east) with one wall having two large windows on the long wall. I also use the long hall in the back of the house for book cases on one side.

And he replied: “I cannot visualize what 11,000 books look like.” So I took photographs across my house and sent a representative example to him.

My living room showing the fireplace, mantelpiece, coffee table and a ceramic cat I bought in Milan as a keepsake — also a home-made doll I fell in love with at the Museum of the American Indian and could not leave behind. You see a sort of shrine I’ve made for Jim: his urn, glasses, picture, a toy sheep we bought at Stonehenge when we went there with our daughters, and a toy penguin Izzy added after she & I visited Chawton House

Another angle

The same living room, the other side — facing the neighbor’s house

I and my cats’ bedroom with a tall cat tree Izzy and I built to one side

Another corner of the bedroom, door leading to the small bathroom just by it

Part of the hall between the two rooms — to one side is a large bathroom and on the other Izzy’s room and my workroom (in both the latter we have books across the walls)

My ex-porch, now an enclosed sun-room: you see my stationary bike

And one more of my porch — oddly the porch, though I don’t spend that much time in it, is my favorite room. It’s without any pretensions whatsoever and the chair is comfort itself.

Today is the 7th anniversary of Jim’s death: Oct 9th, 2013:

Those who are left are different people trying to lead the same lives … Demelza to Captain MacNeil who attempted to console her for death of infant Julia (Bk 1, ch 4, p 55)

This week I saw on face-book many photos of women looking ever so happy in pairs and groups, dressed in 18th century clothes, at the JASNA: the cherry-picking who could come and who was excluded was shamelessly transparent this time, but as I told one friend I felt better off totally excluded because when I go I experience long hours of wasted time in soulless hotel spaces: nothing to do as only 4 to 5 hours have sessions of papers (9 on at a time, so you cannot participate in most of it). Last time I returned repeatedly to the pool where they serve decent whiskey and ginger ale. Another friend said of the 2012 as “the AMG committee thinks that by reducing the numbers who can attend and upping the cost they can “control” who can and cannot enter,” and found “dreadful,” “grown women dressing up, a clubbish attitude, a bovine-like system of hierarchy that puts one in one’s place if you didn’t “belong,” and on and on.” I don’t belong to any of the “clubs” (as in “life-long member reception,” with more and more private parties on in people’s rooms at night) so I’m left with no one and away from all the comforts of my home, in a sense my existence itself. This past week I enjoyed myself at the classes I taught and went to, and the rest of the time at home or in car listening to books, working away at projects so I was not lonely.

I had thought Izzy hadn’t noticed what this conference was like for real (so taken up was she by distracting activities, the sessions she did get to go to, the ball), because she never said anything (and loves to dress up and has learned to go to the ball and dance), but on Saturday evening when we returned from a marvelous performance of Henry IV Part I (Ed Gero as Falstaff unforgettable, so alive) at the Folger Shakespeare library, to eat out together, her talk suddenly showed she had: she said that people join professional organizations (for her librarians) and were they to be excluded from the AGM, what would be the point of paying the yearly fee. Said she, JASNA gets away with this because there is this “pretense of disinterest.”

A good review

I read this week the first of 9 tales of Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress, “Alphinland,” (also all of The Testaments) and lo and behold it’s about a woman whose husband has recently died and she hears his voice over the day and at night talking to her telling her what she needs to do: it’s just ice-stormed so she must go out and get salt and food stuffs; the electricity goes out, so she must find her candles. Her grown children keep telling her she must move, downsize, sell her furniture, give away his clothes, but she will not because then she will be parted from him. In our end is our beginning, a powerful original early book of literary criticism about Canadian literature and culture by Atwood is called Survival and is about how the harsh cold climate is at the heart of their worlds. Our widowed witch remains seemingly cheerful because his spirit is with her. It is not irrelevant to know that just upon the publication of The Testaments Atwood’s partner of many years died.

Another fine review

I am still suffering from the loss of my supposed friend on the internet because I find letters so wonderful and now I have to get through most of my days without this imagined support. It’s time I learned to do without this — a last left-over from the idealism of the first decade of the Internet when one could make real friends even frequently through this medium. But, to paraphrase Johnson, it may there are some who would dismiss such susceptibility (“common losses”), but he says of their lack of tenderness, they lack humanity:

“It is the part of a man to be affected with grief; to feel sorrow, at the same time that he is to resist it, and to admit of comfort” (Rambler No. 47).

For this week’s Caturday I wrote about my “third” cat and put photos on face-book: I’ve been in a relationship with this cat ever since the man who owns him/her left him (I’ll chose a gender) for two weeks with only someone the owner called his (“my”) daughter visiting the house to leave food for the cat once a day. (Maybe 2 years ago.) There is apparently a way for the cat to leave the house. He first began to visit me during this time when I responded with affection. I left food for him as at first there was no collar and I thought he might be starving. But no he is “owned” by by this man who seems to show him little affection because the cat does not know how to show it easily and moves to hissing nervously. Other neighbors had complained because they saw him on their lawns and he might shit on these. Can’t have that. Or just a sense of nuisance: how dare this animal be there? Then I saw a raccoon and knew I was endangering this cat’s life. I tried calling local authorities but saw quickly all they would do was come and take and probably kill a cat without a “owner, and this one has this legal tie (such as it is)

The cat laying on my sidewalk waiting for me to come out

The cat apparently goes missing once in a while: once the man who owns him came over to see if he was with me — I said no and I had not seen him for several weeks. Nowadays the cat sits under a tree just on the side of my lawn, a bush, or lays on my sidewalk waiting for me. Often when I come out he scoots or walks slowly over to me. He meows at me and waits for me to pet her. I give him a small amount of food once in a while which he finishes quickly but he doesn’t go away. Stays mostly under the bush. He is very wary. He does not expect or know how to show affection: will hiss after he has nudged me lest I hurt him. The other day I saw on his head a shaved spot and wondered if the “owner” had done that. The owner is someone who moved into one of these obscene McMansions in my neighborhood after he married a woman who looks 50 from afar; she has a daughter of her own but they seem to have nothing to do with this cat. He is a small grey cat with white feet; if I thought the cat a boy for sure, I’d call him Martin. The photos were a close-up, him outside waiting for me, walking about me, wanting to be petted, coming over to me when I open my front door ….

Here is the close-up

Him circling me, warily but wanting to be petted

A small instance of basic human reactions this cat has mostly known, ranging from indifference to callous selfishness (neglect) in a world bursting with these … This morning the hairless part of this poor creature’s head has grown larger and looks reddish. He greedily drank the water I put out for him. The cat is going into a new phase. He avoids people — that’s what animals do when they are very ill. He stands aside on the side of my house all elusive, looking at me when I come out to go somewhere or stand in my stoop area looking about. Close-by or passing neighbors have asked me if he is my cat and I say no and they say he comes up to them and acts oddly and is seen now and then about my house. I point to the house of the owner and say “he is said to or does lives there.” There is so much misfortune in this world but this cat could have been taken good care of, and had a good longer life.

Having gone through all four seasons of Outlander (Claire a white witch) now four times, I’m back to re-watching the whole five seasons of the new Poldarks, one episode after another in a row as far as time and evenings allow. I had been doing that for over a month (or so) when my Irish Internet friend sent me DVD copies of the British BBC programs as they appeared on British TV. I much prefer these because the American ones are rearranged, often cut (sometimes drastically or carelessly, which comes down to the same thing).

So coming back to Season 3 (The Black Moon and part of The Four Swans), I am impressed by how a few of this particular season are mood pieces — if you simply ignore (more or less) the specifics of what’s going on, enough of that (like the seashore romance of Drake and Morwenna and Geoffrey Charles), of the setting (as in the episode where our local friends learn that the ship Dwight was in was captured or fear that Andrew Blamey’s ship has gone down), allows for many sequences of filming (or whatever you want to call this) of the sea, the near landscape accompanied by appropriate music. The effect is sort of symphonic — a pleasing visual and aural experience. There are mood sequences in seasons 1 and 2, but I feel that in season 3 this kind of thing is allowed to take over and is enjoyable if you can lend yourself to it. They did not try for this except briefly in the 1970s — they didn’t have the kind of mesmerizing computer techniques (and cameras) they do today.

Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza (season 3)

Elise Chappell as Morwenna following Drake

I’ve also embarked on a study of Austen’s Sanditon, using Janet Todd’s edition, after reading her brilliant essay (crisply written, with a fresh feel), going over and over Davies’s new adaptation, returning to Brindle’s, Anna Lefroy’s continuation. See if I can make some sense of this fragmentary text, written by a dying woman, in bad pain on and off, where the beach, the seashore, the air all around it, is a central character.

From Episode 2 of 8 (2019, an ITV product, scripted mostly by Andrew Davies)

To conclude this entry, a woman on a closed face-book page for “Autistic Women” (how I was told about this or got on I no longer remember) told of how at her new job as a cashier, she found the pace and crowds hard, but was trying hard when one customer accosted her for “not paying attention,” and when the woman kept up this harangue and she tried to explain she is autistic, the woman rushed over to her employer’s office and complained bitterly about anyone hiring such a person. So I wrote:

I have learned, much to an increase in sadness and regret, that if you tell someone of your disability or inexorable problem, far from feeling for you, many will act out contempt and try to expunge you away. Thus the way to protect yourself is not allow most others to see your social predicament. It’s the only way to maintain the respect of the cruel, stupid, selfish, unthinking bandwagon types. And that is why a space like this where we are all here together in candour and true support and friendship can mean so much. It is very hard how one cannot tell but must bear on alone. You expected some understanding instead you got hate — you must tell yourself this woman is horrible, behaved truly horribly and not blame yourself but her even if the world is filled with people who react in such ways to disabilities.

A rare oil painting by Honore Daumier: On a bridge at night — a homeless woman, perhaps refuge, with a child or disabled adult

Ellen

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New Song from Izzy: Falling Slowly from Once

She bought a new keyboard about three weeks ago now, and I hope you can hear the difference:

The song comes from a movie called Once, made a couple of musicians who made a movie about how they met and fell in love. John Carney, the film’s director built the movie around this song provided for him by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. The song won an Oscar the year of the movie. They made a second album about dealing with fame. The third is about how they broke up.

Here are the words of the lyrics for “Falling Slowly:”

I don’t know you
but I want you
All the more for that
Words fall through me and always fool me
And I can’t react
And games that never amount
To more than they’re meant
Will play themselves out

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice, you have a choice
You’ll make it now

Falling slowly, eyes that know me
And I can’t go back
Moods that take me and erase me
And I’m painted black
You have suffered enough
And warred with yourself
It’s time that you won

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice, you have a choice
You’ll make it now

Take this sinking boat and point it home
We’ve still got time
Raise your hopeful voice, you have a choice
You’ll make it now

Falling slowly sing your melody
I’ll sing along

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

This morning I was thinking about earlier stretches of my life. The phrase “long ago” is so common to my imagined conversation in my mind. So long ago Jim and I did this, Izzy would do that. I saw a child walk by from my window, on his back a carry-pack, shouldering a musical instrument. That once was Izzy going to junior high, to high school.

Last night (not atypical day and evening), alerted to it by a book on British TV costume drama I’d been reading, Conflicting Masculinities (one I sent a proposal for on Wolf Hall but was rejected, because I’m not a Brit, have no title or position in a university and my thesis was too much about deeper humanity and attributing the way men are presented in costume drama to an era), I watched Banished, a serial drama which was cancelled but is powerfully about one group of men destroying the manliness and humanity of another group, treating them like enslaved beasts; also showing how one group of people can be so cruel to another when no wider public eyes are upon them. Banished is a parable about how people in our modern societies are now pulverizing the poorer, vulnerable, ethnicities that are not in the majority among them, and refugees from countries these same groups of people are busy destroying so they can steal their natural resources. Unlike Poldark there is no fundamental place, home, knowledge of one another and known community whose interest it is to support one another they can turn to.

Yesterday during the day I read one third of an immensely sad novel, Crossing the River, nominated for the Booker (when it still didn’t accept imitative crap, hadn’t become a sheer advertisement mechanism), by Caryl Phillips. Crossing the River a related book about a white man sending a beloved black man who was enslaved in the US to Liberia (both die of grief as the people they are surrounded by live these punitive lives) made me realize what a fantasy of escape Outlander becomes in this story of Jamie and Claire and Ian making a secure home so readily (he is a wanted ex-convict). I also thought of how I cling to this house as giving me some meaning and safety, not naked in the world among all these indifferent people. Phillips’s message is do anything but separate yourself from a beloved and send them somewhere where life is said to be better — all you are doing is breaking your two hearts. I’m drawn to Phillips: born in St Kitts, yet British, he grew up in Leeds, a place I did love.

Both together — serial drama and book — made me think of how I cling to this house as giving me some meaning and safety, not naked in the world among all these indifferent people, and a book about the Acadia diaspora when threatened by “ethic cleansing,”

“Falling slowly” is a song that cries out for help (as some tweets really do). In retrospect, its framing is a young couple who broke up.

It is March now, signs of spring — such a sweet moment from Emily Dickinson: No 1320, just the first stanza:

Dear March – Come in –
How glad I am –
I hoped for you before –
Put down your Hat –
You must have walked –
How out of Breath you are –
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest –
Did you leave Nature well –
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me –
I have so much to tell —

How I wish I could find a choir for Izzy to belong to. The only ones in my area are part of churches Izzy won’t go near — and she’s probably right not to, reactionary Catholicism she would be a very much outsider in all ways in. With that man I went out briefly with I saw an episcopal church, almost non-denominational, eucumenical, which had a poster looking for people to join their choir. A modern building, maybe enlightened people running the place. But it’s a 45 minute drive and would be at night so I can’t provide a way for her to get there, if I could get her to go. She did say yes when I showed her the place. Too far. But this is her home too.

Writing Last lines ….

Miss Drake

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For my 72nd Birthday: how did I get to be so old :) ?

Richard Feynman: I share his metaphysical and pro-education outlook and assigned his books to classes for many years …

Friends,

This I wrote four days ago upon waking:

I looked out the window and saw such a pretty winter scene — the differently colored leaves (some withered, some not) scattered in the light green grass like decorations. I love these darker flowering bushes, the auburns, and browns, the chrysanthemums, bareness and configurations of the trees, the light blues and pinks in the sky. I find winter’s austerity beautiful.
And it’s another reason to stay alive.

This to someone who this morning objected to my analysing the Outlander films, one at a time each week as they are shown andp posting it onto a face-book Outlander non-censored page:

I’m with Richard Feynman: To me to know more about a thing only adds to its beauty and interest: I don’t see how it subtracts.  I taught a course in science from a humanities point of view for many years and used to read these passages aloud to my students — at three different times as they come from three different places:

To which I add Patricia Fargnoli (one of my favorite poets), a poem I’ve not posted here before:

The Room

The clock pressed the hours by,
frost blinded the windows.
The language beyond them disappeared
into ice.
If you sit in such a room you can forget.
The orange cat stretched out full-length
on the table and slept
the sleep of a careless one.
I lived there — or did not live¬ —
the future a cutoff thing,
the past not part of me anymore¬ —
smoke flying back from the train
on a Russian steppe
in an old complicated novel.
Gone, gone. Gone, gone. And goodbye.
In that standstill time, the cat and I
studied each other like mirrors —
his topaz inscrutable eyes.
I thought I was safe in the room.
The plow came to plow through the whiteness.
Because I was locked in my body
the frost climbed higher.
Because I was not safe
my arms wrapped around me.
One minute became the next¬ —
nothing shifted
except the cat
who jumped down and went to his bowl.
In the bookcase, the books leaned
to the right and glazed over.
The white Greek rugs and three bright watercolors
dulled to the gray of a wolf’s pelt.
The ice entered and shook the curtains.
Then it was time to move, however slightly

some action to break the frozen surface.
Still I did not move but the cat disappeared
into his hiding place between the boxes
under the bed.
I think of the people out in the world
moving around in their lives.
in/out, up/down, bending, standing,
wheels under them, the open skies.
How brave they all are.
In that room, I held fear
like the egg of a beast, about to break open.

and a favorite picture – by one of my favorite 20th century women artists:

Nell Blaine, Night Light Snow

Ellen

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A hard week

Jim, summer 2006, on a bridge in London leading to the Globe theater

Friends,

My late husband, Jim Moody, was born on October 3, 1948; he would have been 70 today. When I would ask him, if he would like to travel here or there or he himself would talk of it, it was ever when he was 70 and some percentage of the money he had set aside for us via his job and added to over the years, would have to be spent, so much each year. I reached 70 more than a year ago and have found an alternative is simply to take out this percentage and put it in my taxable Schwabb account. I have also been spending it — with the money unexpectedly to me left me by my mother and the unexpected windfall amount from the insurance company as he died at age 65.

We married on October 6, 1969; we had met October 6, 1968 and we married a year to that first night. We went to a registry office and it took 5 minutes. We were married 44 years, together 45, to the day (or night). His parents and two girlfriends of his (friends) showed up; his parents took us out to dinner and when we woke and discovered we had 10 shillings between us, we shared it out, 5 each, and then went to work that day. I asked for an advance from the Chief Engineer whom I worked for and got £25 in cash across my palm. Not the first time I had had a pay packet that way. I told him I had been married the day before.

The last day he spoke was October 7, 2013. He had been been doing that hard dying for a few days. He made some sign for Izzy to come in before going off to work and she came in and he said “goodbye” and kissed her. Later that day he said to me “I don’t want to die.” These may have been his last words.

He died October 9, 2013, at 9:05 am, in my arms. I felt his heart stop and was glad for him that he knew no more suffering.

I am aware that since his death I have done a number of things he said were not a good idea, or had stopped me from doing, and that I couldn’t get him to agree to travel to the Hebrides, where I had this long-held dream to follow (more or less Johnson and Boswell’s route), he wouldn’t hear of Cornwall (not as bad an idea as Australia as impossibly far away), and didn’t want to return to the Lake District either. I can remember him only talking of Venice. If he knew how I loathe airlines, airplanes, airports, he would think I might go for his dream of taking one of these ships that carry cardboard boxes all over the world. Jenny Diski went round the world in one, but I had read they are dangerous, and wouldn’t hear of it. We both agreed we’d be bored out of out wits in a luxury cruise as I nowadays know I dislike luxury hotels, large anonymous soulless tasteless exploitative palaces. You can’t take a train to Venice ….

This to introduce my six blogs on my time in the Lake District and borders of Scotland and Northern England. I went with a tour group: I don’t see how he would have been able to get himself to try that — though he once said of a tour we took with a guide to Gettysburg battlefield, we did learn a lot. And there was no other way to see it. For me there is no other way to travel without enduring an ordeal of intense anxiety and perpetual mistakes (which end in my being cheated of too much money). I already told of this time in my Canterbury Tale of Road Scholars here.

Alnwick Castle, a photo taken from a bus stop by one of the “pilgrims” as Jim and I once took pictures of Eastwell, Kent, where Anne Finch had lived

The Wordsworth people and their sites; Keswick & neolithic stones

More Wordsworth sites; Beatrix Potter; lakes, mines & churches

Roman, ancient Celtic and Reivers Britain; castles, fortresses, dungeons …churches & mines …

Carlisle & the Tullie Museum; Lannercost & Hermitage; Scotland & Lindisfarne

Wallington Hall, Vindolanda & Hadrian’s Wall, Durham Cathedrale & heading home again

He had stopped me for many years from enclosing the porch; well, now I have, and did manage by lying to the city at first and not taking out a permit so I escaped the absurd expenses builders are able to pile on through these permits. Jim would never have done that nor permitted me to. I spent under $30,000 to enclose the room, build a new floor in our vestibule, paint the house and install a new ceiling fan. The room is far larger than he and I imagined it could be. The cats love it for the sunshine. I like it as a quiet rest away from the Internet, TV. I like looking at the world from the large windows and garden I have overpaid for (but not badly).

Suits me perfectly … my father used to say I never use a room in a single consistent way. No.

Jim thought working for nothing a very bad idea. He was thinking of how I got for Izzy two volunteer jobs working at libraries through a couple of students I knew. And he was correct insofar as enabling the capitalist system to flourish on the labor of ordinary people at wholly inadequate compensation. He saw she learned that she loved library work and had a good letter to show for the one chance she was given. Wage theft, starvation wages, have grown much worse since his death. Imagine college students now get on lines to receive bags of food sent by charitable organizations. Don’t even think about what Obamacare is fasting becoming.

Well, I spent 5 hours just doing the lecture and notes for my course on Monday (The Enlightenment: At Risk) and 5 yesterday for my course today (Wolf Hall: A Fresh Angle on the Tudor matter). I expect he would understand as he said to me “do what you can to get through the rest of your life.” Also “if you can’t do something, live with it.” I need company of like minds, and I love the work no one would ever pay me for. They paid me a derisory sum for years as an adjunct teaching undergraduates introductory literature and composition courses (one on Science and Tech writing faute de mieux) and when I had the first grounds of a job being paid similarly for teaching this sort of thing again I couldn’t manage it.

I sometimes ask myself if he knew about the OLLIs. My guess is no, because he would have enjoyed some aspects of both: Bridge at Mason, and the intellectual challenges and new materials in both in some classes. He did try to join the Wagner Society of Washington DC, and was bitterly disappointed when they excluded us from their yearly weekend away. He liked going with me to the 18th century conferences and even insisted I try (with him) two Victorian ones and both Trollopes. There is another one set up the London Society about to go on now in some far away expensive place — I just learned about it on the Trollope face-book page. Did he know about these package or Road Scholar type tours? I’ll never know. He spent so much time on the Net in later years, how could he not have come across them? but he never mentioned any of this ever.

He must have known about the Smithsonian where I’m going tonight for a George Gershwin concert — if I can find it, if the Metro works, if the crowds don’t stop me (I’m told Gallery Place has some kind of celebration on – I hope not). Note: I went, found it easily and the man’s talk was so stupid it was embarrassing: silly really, but he played wonderfully well and had remarkable clips and knew Gershwin’s career. My feeling is Jim would not go again while I am willing to compromise now that he is not here.

It has not been made much easier today because one of my proposals was rejected: the good original strong one on Anne Boleyn, Jenny Jones and The Provok’d Husband in Fielding’s Tom Jones (scroll down). In a text message though an app on my cell phone (which happily I don’t know to read so managed only so a part on face-book messenger) which mentioned my [lack of] “rank” and being a “senior” [age] as why she had to reject it. Is it that serious research and original ideas is not what conferences are for?  I will put my thoughts towards this paper on my Austen Reveries blog.

I still have a chance to go to the ASECS in Denver if the panel head for my other proposal (on Graham’s Poldark novels) get two panels. I thought I’d like to see Denver; have never seen the middle west of the US; it’s a single plane, direct and for all I might dislike the hotel, there is one set up.  Sometimes these conferences include tours for the people to go on so I can get out of the hotel. I am not holding my breath.

Jim was even against my developing the Poldark material seriously for scholarship on the very good grounds I have not the personality or connections to try to make this material respected after all these years. He did not live to see the new Poldark mini-series. He would not have been surprised at Andrew Graham’s grudging half-permission to look at his father’s archives.

How ironic all this is. Am I happy in this new life? I am cheerful, I sometimes enjoy myself. There is much to interest, amuse me, I do know some deep pleasure. I have companionship now and again. I’m thus far solvent. He would never write such a blog as this. The way he dealt with grief and rage is silence and eventually humor or poetry.

He had a wonderful sense of humor, the ability to make a funny joke which did not hurt people and yet could turn an experience around to put it in its place and make as absurd as much of life is. Now and again Izzy will remember his gentle jokes at her.

So why did I marry him and was so happy — I’ve given so many grounds and reasons in this blog since he died, I will only refer the interested reader to explore, among other things his love of poetry, a shared love of the intellectual and imaginative life, both of us strong leftists in politics, both atheists, we liked the same paintings?

But there is something specific I wanted to commemorate Jim today for, which I may not have mentioned as yet. Yes. We have today had the loathsome creature who some large enough minority of Americans voted for to become the new corrupt president ridicule, deride, and mock a courageous woman, Dr Christine Blasey Ford, who came forward to give credible evidence (as they say) that the new nominee for the supreme court (a lifetime appointment) is a thug, was a rapist for fun, a perpetual drunkard during his “glorious time” in prep school and at fraternities in college. I have been aroused so deeply by her testimony that in my blog on his motivations and behavior (An Instance of Male Bonding) to tell however briefly some of my story as to why I married Jim.

I experienced a series of deeply traumatic experiences from age 12 to 15. I finally tried to kill myself and when I didn’t manage that I retreated and retreat became my safety. It was the males who attacked but my experience was females didn’t support me at all and I saw they didn’t support others. Far from it, they spread rumors about one as a tramp, slut. When I had tried to find a friend and tell someone I thought was my friend, another girl came over and “as a gesture of friendship,” told me mot to do that any more. That girl had promptly told others so they could all jeer together and triumph as “chaste” and “good girls.” I never forgot that lesson. It was as important in understanding safety as keeping away from abrasive vile males of the Kavanaugh type and his buddies. So I went anorexic and was left alone. It has taken me decades to eradicate some of this anorexia (like alcoholism, one never recovers fully.)

She has said once of the same kind of treatment maimed her for decades. How shocked she was — coming from the sheltered privileged environment she had known. It apparently did not stop her from being (as all report)  “in the midst of a distinguished career.”

Unlike most other boys or men I ever met, Jim never tried to harass or rape me; he never came near to insulting me or making fun of me. He never treated me with discourtesy. He never badgered, never pressured me — well over traveling he did, but I did manage quickly to bring an end to that and we came to a compromise over his desire in the 1990s to begin to travel to Europe. And there was no residue. No reminders. No asking for gratitude for anything he didn’t do because he shouldn’t. He didn’t pretend to do what he didn’t want to do and kept his right to his own life — as how long he would work, where, and how. He never told defamatory stories about other women or men: he said of a man who refused to marry someone because she had had some unfortunate sexual experience, it was “a failure of imagination.” I can never remember him lying. He did omit to tell the truth sometimes but never concealed that ploy either. When he said he would meet me somewhere at a certain time, he never failed me. He was there and on time. He was to me utterly trustworthy.

I’m now taking on Future Learn a course on Violence Against Women. I recommend it. In the first week, the women scholars stressed that violence connects directly to the way women are gendered: men are violent to them because they can be and the gendered behavior imposed on women, how they are understood allows men to get away with.

Women do not trigger violence and victims are never to blame and the way she does this is to show all the different each of us live in: our habitas, our family and friend types, our class, what community we live in; all these show that women have to and do expect violence because it comes; it has nothing to do with them personally often. I was struck by how Dr Ford talked about how shocked she was when she was assailed. She repeated that word shocked and over. Well I never was shocked, not I had seen my uncle beat my aunt, other people beat up, the lack of respect and status for many people around me, the way the police behaved to people in the South east Bronx. Dr Ford never expected such a thing could happen to her and there she was treated as a female thing. Remember the crude medieval tales: all women are alike. I will put in the slides that were used to identify these contexts into our files — if they will go.

This was not yet been brought up except tangentially: an important point is ever after you lose your trust in everyone. If it’s someone inside your family and the family ignores it, and he has full access to you, imagine the loss of security and trust. That’s Woolf’s case — and many women in traditional family structures. Someone in her family did it, and no one would show they noticed. In many cultures, if the woman tells, she is punished, disbelieved (as Freud disbelieved Dora). In some, they’ll be honor-killed. My experience was I lost trust in everyone, not just the people who did it and laughed but those who from afar spread rumors, mocked, and then tried to climb on board. So how escape? retreat, anorexia, suicide ….

In the second week how violence exists in contexts and all these contexts are set up to shape what happens and exert control over women. Lots of slides. From all of it I take away this:

Violence against women begins early, the girl’s earliest years. I knew this and that this takes the form of setting up coercion in such a way that you prevent the girl from learning a skill, or idea that is enabling, gives power to act freely on her own behalf. Later on when she is married (forced or seeming to choose), more than half the battle is done for the husband whose pride is made to inhere in controlling her to do his bidding and act out of his interest. Again I knew this but didn’t make it explicit to myself in quite this way.

What I had not thought and this relates to the Woolfs is this silent violence against the child is secondary; it’s first aim is against her mother who is kept in an invisible straitjacket this way. The aim is twofold, mother and child. If we think about how Woolf hero-worships her mother in her Moments of Being, the first long piece and will not blame her but sees her father as the ogre, we see she is not understanding the full source of her oppression. In To The Lighthouse she does see how Mrs Ramsay is a controller, a forcer of marriage, teaching her daughters to re-enact her life but she is not truly seen as complicit.

Where Virginia broke away, was she did not grow up to be another women like her mother or at least she tried. When she became too ill (that is too nervous, too unable, too sad, or too angry to function), then she too came under the control of Leonard and the doctors and also her sister. I don’t know how Vanessa treated her daughter, I do know she rebelled utterly against Clive and lived the way she wanted to — it ended in great emotional pain for her since her choice was a man who was homosexual and promiscuous. But did she leave Angelica free?

I am probably not expressing what I want to as strongly or focusing sufficiently on it. It’s the early coercion which is not visibily violence except when the child disobeys and is punished (say put in her room, deprived of this or that) with this act being a secondary accompaniment to making the mother obedient and having her enact forcing obedience on the daughter I think so interesting.

As part of the second week, there is a number delving into female genital mutilation showing a girl who was mutilated growing up to understand how terrible her physical condition and returning to Gambia to be part of a campaign to stop the practice.

I hope they go into this from an inside view — thus far they have emphasized the larger outside view to show how women exist in contexts and these violations occur in contexts. The inner people count just as much in the experience of life

So why did I marry him and love him: he was everything most of the men I ever met were not. Only twice in our lives together did he ever become violent and in both cases he was provoked beyond bearing (the first instance included mockery and humiliation). I am not a sentimental liar; I can’t write a “how do I love thee” poem, so I wrote this.

He used to say: “I can deny thee nothing.”

Ellen

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Not many days now ….

This past spring a particularly obtuse woman asked me “how long ago [I should have guessed what was coming from that phrase] had Jim died.” I said “five years.” She: “A long time.” I wish I had had the courage to say to her (another person was listening), “it’s not even yesterday.”

In 14 days Jim will have died 5 years ago:

Not a day goes by.

He loved Sondheim and said this was his favorite tune and song:

Both singers are somewhat overdoing the performance but that is to be expected when a general audience must be entertained.

ClaryCat taken two mornings ago — she was very attached to him, grieved for a couple of days trotting up and down the halls, with a sort of wail, and then silent for quite a time sitting daily in his chair:

I had my arms around him as he died, I felt his heart stop, and the searing worst was I was glad for him he had no longer do endure what he had so (most of the time) unflinchingly. October 9, 2013, 9:05 pm.

Ellen

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