There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life (George Eliot): We must not reproach ourselves for unlived lives (Lost in Austen): a widow's diary
I’m having also a bit of an existential crisis: I’m running out of new teachable topics (topics this kind of student body will accept as relevant to them or important). I can’t drive at night, don’t drive as well during the day. I’m facing how stressful for me is traveling alone and that the conferences I land in are often not worth it — sometimes they are, this summer’s Trollope conference was. But all too rare. I could try Road Scholar again. JASNA for Izzy’s sake but doubt I’d find acceptance). But fundamentally as trips take only a small time, unless I can keep my daily studies and quiet activities with congenial others up, what shall I do with my widowed life?
Dear friends and readers,
I’ve not written any new blogs since my first two on Izzy and my trip to Somerville College, Oxford and London. She and I became very sick with a (watch for the word) horrendous respiratory infection or maybe it’s just a nasty tenacious virus shortly after we arrived home. Both of us now have sore left flanks from sore muscles left over coughing pathways. She had a light fever the first couple of days, and I have had bad trouble sleeping. She kicked her foot so bad at one point, it swelled up. I’ve lost more weight. We’ve had two Covid tests, one a home kit, and one expensive one at Kaiser: results negative. The virus is not killing us but I believe in the power of a virus to do just that. We’ve been to Kaiser at Falls Church, at Springfield, at Tysons Corner. We give up and are accepting the medications by mail. Izzy does video visits.
So this blog is a public service announcement: when out in a crowd, or crowded room, wear your mask. Never mind if you are among a minority or the only person. Anything is better than this misery — in my case it has not turned into pneumonia (which it could’ve), but bottles of steroids, antibiotics and cough suppressants are feeble against its power. I’ve not written that third blog on Izzy and my trip in early September because I have been trying to start teaching, beginning one of four reviews, and read on in both women’s mysteries and American literature (for a coming spring course to be taught hybrid fashion). I nap in the afternoon, watch (to me) pleasurable movies at night.
As soon as Izzy and I are well enough — we are better tonight — we will head out for our vaccinations against flu for this year, RWVP and a Covid booster. We go to Kaiser, but you can go to your local pharmacy and if you have insurance, the insurance will pay; if you don’t, the federal gov’t will.
I’m calling this a public service announcement and not putting it on my political blog. A pandemic, an epidemic, people getting sick and needing help and good advice should not be a political issue; it is a social issue yes, and a centrally medical one. Two of my favorite sub-stack newsletter writers so regard it: Heather Cox Richardson and Robert Reich. Remember climate break-up includes the extinction of species and plants; that all the earth’s creatures are criss-crossing where they once did not, and new diseases are forming and spreading.
While I’m at it, i.e., writing a blog by referring to good local journalism and periodical magazines and newsletters, newspapers, I’d like briefly to recommend subscribing to Liber: A Feminist Review, the contemporary replacement of Women’s Review of Books, which has at last died.
This month despite another awful cover (this periodical is not decorated with my taste in mind), Liber boasts a number of good articles: On Ani Franco (so now I know why Laura adopted part of her nom de plume when 13 from this singer, on Roz Chast’s art and life; on The Female Gaze by Michael Dango as reviewed by Debbie Stoller who persists in asserting that Madonna’s sexual act was not the result of trying to please men, but something she enjoyed and therefore liberating — against three generations of people who respond that it is sell out — in these terms the Barbie movie is liberating because she is what women want to be and do — if only she were not plastic. There is an article-review on Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words by Annie Finch (poet and critic) on how words are used by men to reflect men’s attitudes and how masculine POVs work to repress women’s desires and instincts. The way we give birth is defined passively, we are deprived of agency there too. There is an argument (again based on a book, Gwendola Ricordeau’s Free Them All, “Women at the Gates” by Rachel Dewoskin that mass incarceration does not make women safer (they rarely report violence for they rightly fear the system); the penal system overtly harms women. A couple of good novels are reviewed. There’s poetry from the isolation of the pandemic (Marilyn Hacker), and a short story. This from someone (me) who reacted violently against the first column for this month’s issue: a woman who says how she loved her Barbie doll … what could have been wrong with her is not what I asked myself, but rather confessed to myself I was never “with it.”
See the covers and reviews here. These I like. Indeed they are quietly superb. Like other good journals of our time, the on-line presence of Liber can offer more than the printed booklet. One of the covers for just one of many insightful and informative reviews.
Flowers from supermarket and snacks & drink for the week from earlier this autumn
Why we? I counted 5 friends and acquaintances who told me they are become 76 this year too
Dear friends and readers,
I turned 76 on November 29th. I’m using the occasion to express and reflect on this transitional state which I feel I’m in but don’t understand that well. I’m not sure what’s changing in me and time continues to separate me from what I was when Jim first died. Julian Barnes calls the time after a beloved person has died, their deathtime in one’s memory. It’s being brought on partly or even largely by my (and most other faculty, whether remunerated or volunteer-retired) inability to bring back enough people into the classrooms in person so as not to have to worry, that this day I may arrive at an empty or nearly empty classroom. For older people the partial cause is Covid is still attacking and killing off older people in visible numbers. So I am looking forward to teaching and taking courses online almost wholly until March, and after March (spring term) mostly online, perhaps until next fall (2023) or the following spring (2024). Maybe looking forward is not the phrase I want.
I’m going to try for a routine myself. By 8:30 this morning I’ll be exercising for half an hour, and sometime mid-day I’ll try for a 20-30 minute walk. Again, I’ll be in a great deal, and most of what I’ll do will be online so I must try to keep myself busy, communicate with people online cordially and exercise. Sleep I can’t force: last night I slept but 4 hours, but when I got up I read Magpie Murders, the novel by Anthony Horowitz. Yes I got the book. It’s a delightful parody of your typical Booker Prize books among other things — I’ll write about the book separately (see below for serial). Come near Xmas I’ll watch the Biederbecke TV series and others I can find that cheer me.
I’ve had a repeat of the experience I’ve often described here: another woman I’d become friends with and visited, visited me, or I went out with (though not since summer 2021) was breaking appointments to the point I finally wrote to her about it in such a way that I knew she’d either fall silent altogether or try to mend the relationship. So now she has silently opted for Choice 1 — the internet slang might be she’ll ghost me again (previous times she has pretended she didn’t get the email, or her phone was out of order just at the time I phoned her). She would never tell me openly how she felt; if at some point she wanted to break it, she never told me or why.
Joanna Trollope in Next of Kin has given me second thoughts: “It was simply that he couldn’t go on loving someone who kept sucking him down into the bog of her own personality problems — or at least, he could love her but he couldn’t live with her [I am thinking of myself as this guilty preying person but don’t think I did that this time, but I probably did in previous relationships] … He didn’t want to emphasize the effect of her defeatism on him, or indeed any other of her deficiencies but he wanted to make her think [again it’s me who am defeatist but one would then have to talk to me to bring this out more] ‘I don’t want never to see you again,’ he planned to say, ‘I just can’t see you for a bit. Not until you’ve got something to give me back'” [so what is it that I should be offering other people back?]
I saw this magnificent painting at the National Gallery this past Wednesday with Betty at the National Gallery — an exhibit of John Singer Sargent’s painting while he was in Spain. He copied several famous painter’s paintings and then produced the long-pent-up depictions of ordinary people in all their depths. The good there is inedible and Betty becomes quickly impatient at these exhibitions but I did see some art worth the gazing
It’s not just external things — I find I am not eager to go anywhere — it was Betty’s idea to go and we had made the appt a while back. I admit I was the one to back out of the second I was to go to (the Phillips Collection) with her this Saturday. But she wrote back very quickly, relieved herself. How relieved I was. I do worry so I won’t get back before dark – darkness arrives not far from 5 pm. “Hello darkness my old friend. What are you doing here at 5 pm!”
Now I wrote about this last time so will not repeat again the terms of or feelings I’m having as I struggle to understand this new phase of widowhood, and spend my time enjoyably and productively (for me this means new learning, new books, discovery of new authors, new topics and writing projects), and cheerfully online with others. Since I last wrote, I’ve gone deeper into Joanna Trollope (read two more books, listening to a third), and started both my women’s and Italian studies for winter and next spring. It’s hard to make a plan and follow it. Tomorrow I will disrupt my new pattern to attend a few of the Renaissance Society of America’s sessions for their yearly AGM (going on virtually these few days). A big help is I do love all the books I’m reading and find the topics I follow of intense interest. As usual I like particularly the secondary (critical and biographical) books.
But my body tires so I cannot exercise or walk was much, and I grow sadder as the day moves into night. This was exacerbated this past week by the insistent holiday statements I see everywhere on the Net and hear too among the occasional acquaintances I meet. I’m told to be very happy and loving amid my family and friends. I can see that my quiet relatively alone state is not uncommon because enough people describe what they are doing truthfully on the corners of FB, twitter and listservs I inhabit. Nonetheless, getting through Thanksgiving and my birthday became a sort of work project where I enlisted acquaintances and friends by posting about how I (we, for Izzy was with me) got through.
An Egyptian goose — each morning when I arrive at twitter — sometimes around 8 am or so — someone I follow who follows me has put on photographs of mid-England parks and birds near where she lives
So here’s what I posted onto FB later last Thursday afternoon (a short version appeared on twitter):
Izzy and I walked across Old Town this afternoon — balmy sunny weather. We used to do this each year after Jim died and before the pandemic. The tree is the Alexandria City tree in the Town Square and the lights are on — though you cannot see them. My strength did give out towards the end. That was 4 years ago and I was reminded of how I felt when we “did” Toronto with our two kind but much younger [than me] friends this past August, but home now. Another half hour we’ll put on a roast chicken for two. We could have gone out to a bought dinner, but I’m glad we have chosen this. From Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:
But when the long hours of public are past,
And we meet with champagne and a chicken at last …
We won’t have champagne, orange juice for her and Merlot for me must do us. Now I’ll return to Margaret Atwood’s sardonically funny (funny is not quite the word I want) Penelopiad. I hope all who read this message are having a good day and evening.
Then last this Sunday evening on FB (nutshell on twitter):
Promotional photo of Ada’s on the River looking outward from inside the place at the Potomac
My 76th birthday is in 2 days and so my daughter, Laura, and her husband, Rob, came around 6 to take us out to a new restaurant in a new area of Old Towne, Alexandria: Ada’s on the River. The dinner was delicious and the desert too. I had my first whiskey and ginger ale (two of them) for a very long time. I don’t keep hard liquor in the house lest I drink too much. I liked the walk back afterwards along the Potomac from boardwalk to boardwalk. It’s very rare I am out at night nowadays.
There are still several areas around the Potomac, just near the river, which have been relatively desolate — they were very much so when Jim & I first moved to Alexandria. This is a southern city, originally blighted by slavery for the majority of people, then gross inequality and severe racism and classism structured into all the institutions and gov’t of the area, and while after WW2 and middle 1960s, when conditions began to improve the growth of certain areas has been slow and uncertain — Carter had made a good start with new housing, but Reagan destroyed that. Very expensive housing developments along the edge of this town here and there in the 1990s, some on the river . Recently then — last 20 years all along the river for the first time building up the boardwalks, the places for sailing, areas of recreational fun — so new restaurants and bars.
I shall have to find my own travel plan this summer — next week I’ll call Road Scholar and if the Irish registration is still there, I’ll go with them. I’ll try to do the global retry and pre-TSA stuff at the airport in the spring. There is now a silver line Metro going to Dulles that stops at King Street Station; Izzy has said she will come with me to help me through the machines going out.
In the meantime we four planned for a Christmas time together, a movie (an Agatha Christie type), a dinner at home (cooked by Rob, who’s become quite a cook) and exchange of presents.
What I didn’t tell anyone on FB or twitter was after an hour or so when I’d got home and was watching Magpie Murders (on which see below) I began to cry and cry and cry. I could feel Laura’s reluctance to be there when they first arrived, and know we won’t see them again after Christmas for a long while. It was Rob who walked beside me there and back.
For my birthday itself I took it easy, read favorite books, had yummy soup for lunch, and put this on FB (nutsell on twitter)
I am 76! In my now enclosed porch or sunroom where live my movie (dvds) collection, notebooks, films scripts, companions … all around me my little radio, ipad, pussycat bed by window … I am torn between sending a link to Sondheim’s “I’m still here ….” (as belted out by Elaine Stritch) or Old friends (done by a variety of male singers): favorite line: “What’s to discuss? …”
Izzy took the photo with her cell phone
This is to thank the many people sending me cards, pictures, good wishes, wise sayings … I can’t seem to reach every one to thank each person individually but know that I do thank you and you are helping me to pass a cheerful good day ….
About an hour or so later I listened to and watched Elaine Stritch on YouTube: when I watched I thought of my 27 years as an adjunct lecturer, and remember the line from Elaine Showalter quoted about a heroine in one of Jean Rhys’s novels who stands for all women: Still one man away from welfare ….
Over the long day and evening and next morning I really did get many cheering messages, a lot of them individualized, a few teases, but kindly meant I felt. Two cards, one from my aging aunt, another from a long time old Internet British friend, met three times in Oxford; my cousin, Pat had phoned me too
Then very late in the evening: from Merrily We Roll Along (Jim thought this probably Sondheim’s deepest truest musical) “Old Friends:” now I had to admit I have damn few old friends (or they live far away, a few old acquaintances. This was after the final episode of Magpie Murders
We are coming to the end of the year, its ripe death (as people might say), so I’ll end on citing just one book I feel I drew most joy and learning from across the whole year: Iris Origo’s Images and Shadows, especially when she talked of her writing, art, and the imagination. A new author answering the needs of my heart in a new healthy way, teaching me to see and to help myself, Joanna Trollope (not a comfort read at all after all).
And as with two years ago with David Nicholls’ Us (book and film), I have truly got a great kick out of Magpie Murders, a murder mystery serial in the Agatha Christie tradition, scripted and produced by the inimitable Anthony Horowitz (I am still re-watching Foyle’s War)
Atticus Pund explaining where they are going to Sue Rylands
It’s self-reflexive: it’s Anthony Horowitz meditating the life and work of a mystery writer, a hack out of the Agatha Christie tradition — only Horowitz knows he is no mere hack and has gone beyond the originating subgenre. We have two different levels of story: in one we are with the writer, Alan Conway, his editor, Sue Rylands (Leslie Manville), the head of the publishing company, Conway’s cynical homosexual ex-lover and his embittered sister, Claire; in the other the characters in Conway’s book most of whom correspond to counterpart characters in the series’ real life, often ironically — except for the detective, Atticus Pund (Tim McMullan, originally Timothy Spall was dreamed of) and the editor, Sue Rylands. The same actor will plays at least 2 roles — one person appears in three (if I’m not mistaken). We also see these characters when they are playing characters who existed decades ago and when they are playing contemporary characters (a downright common trope nowadays is a jump in time but rarely this cleverly done and usually with two different look-alike actors).
It’s not too mechanical, too much artifice of this type would cloy. So beyond Atticus Pund and Sue Rylands, Sue’s sister, Katie (Claire Rushbrook) and Sue’s lover, Andreas (Alexandros Logothetis), a teacher of Greek who would like to go live in Crete with Sue, have no counterparts in the 1950s story in the book. The two murderers are played by different actors, they look and are different, though they do the deed in similar fashion. The murderer’s black girlfriend in the 1950s story in the book has no counterpart in the contemporary life story. You might have expected this to be the other way round, but no. In both narratives, the same black actor plays the Anglican vicar.
What’s fascinating is how we move from book (takes place 1950s) back to life (takes place 2022). The camera is following the 1950s characters and car in the book down the road, we reach a bend and turn and now we are with the 2022 characters in life. One moves back and forth starting with the third episode, Atticus Pund; but he is noticed by no one but Sue Rylands, who at first regards him as simply an individual figment of her imagination, but by the end treats him as a person like herself and enters the world of the book to discover how the book ends. The tone throughout is warm and witty
I am now taught how this kind of material — murders growing out of deep bitterness, jealousy, selfishness, sociopathic impulses — a dog is even poisoned — can become absorbing and curiously comforting matter — as in Foyle’s War we have good guys and they win through, with a justice of sorts achieved
So that’s all for tonight as I move into winter. Better to be alive than not (as Elaine Stritch reminds us)
John Singer Sargent: Snow — I wonder if we’ll see any this winter in Alexandria?
Woods and Streams in Delaware, [early] Winter, 1916 (Edward W. Redfield)
“Alas, with all her reasonings, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing” (Austen, Persuasion Chapter 7)
Dear friends and readers,
I seem to be going through yet another transition in this seeming both long and short widowhood. I’ve stopped going out as much as I once did. Of course part of the cause of this is that I can no longer drive once the sky reaches dusk, but I could go out more during the day, and I could have recourse to Uber/Lyft
and ordering cabs ahead. I don’t. Part of this the effect of self-quarantining taken well past what I understand most or many others have done. It is so peaceful; I am no longer used to enduring the agonies, anxiety as I begin to realize I am lost and panic when I find I am not at all where I meant to be. Waze recently updated itself and now it is of no use to me at all. I can’t get past “save this destination” to “go now.” I’m telling myself I shall be reading more, and I think there’s evidence that I am already.
This is a matter of telling myself what I’m not quite following. I’m telling myself I’m giving over trying to write longer books and volunteering for talks and short projects. I’m not quite following this as I volunteered to give another talk to the Every-other-week online London Trollope Society group on (as I’m calling it) Anthony Trollope’s American Civil War Christmas Stories: “The Widow’s Mite” and “The Two Generals.” As a result of doing a talk on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin for an OLLI at AU class, I’ve thought of a course for spring 2024 that might actually attract enough people to dare to do it in public: I’d call it “Everybody’s Protest Novel” after James Baldwin’s famous scathing essay on Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Richard Wright’s Native Son. And I’d do:
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Louisa May Alcock, “Contraband;” John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Joan Didion, Play it like it Lays and El Salvador by Joan Didion, and James Baldwin’s short non-fiction story, “Stranger in a Village” and novel, If Beale Street could talk …
But this will be the last; after this I will stick with the new terrains I’ve carved out: Italian literature, Anglo-Indian memoirs and novels (British style fiction set in India is the longer phrase) and women writer courses. And 19th century masterpiece courses, mostly by Trollope as central and framing presence.
This means I will be alone more, and am teaching myself to accept being alone and this great loneliness since Jim died. I am tired of trying uselessly for what cannot be and what I am not sure I’d at all like. Go out with friends who ask me, but don’t chase, don’t be the one to suggest unless it is really a museum show, a play, a musical or concert you want to go to.
I do not mean to deny what joy or happiness I can feel when I’ve been out with others, spent good time with others. I knew such exhilaration and contentment when the class I had been teaching these past 9 weeks ended today.
One person had suggested we start at 1:15 to give us ourselves full time to cover all we wanted and watch film clips from the early 1990s BBC The Rector’s Wife, and the 1983 Barchester Chronicles. Eight of the nine people who have been coming steadily agreed and what a splendid class it was. I know they were enjoying it and so was I. It is so much better in person when there is a full enough class.
Yet I will not do it again until Spring 2024 since it is such a difficult thing to build a class of people coming regularly nowadays that I lose perspective, fret over how few may show up (an inappropriate response to an adult education or playful college class).
Can you understand this, gentle reader? Some new phase of calm is what I am feeling come over me, or wanting calm at long last. I discovered I lost weight when I went to Dr Wiltz a couple of weeks ago with a list of pains and complaints that he duly checked over, to tell me I am fine, just getting older yet. I’ve kept to my vow not to add sugar to anything and so I eat less.
18th century lady’s shoes
Every Friday until I run out I’m putting foremother poet blogs on Wompo — the only one. No one can bother post anything which is not about building their career. Last week it was Mary Jones, an 18t century chantress (as Johnson called her) who wrote these beautiful verses upon the death of her beloved friend, Miss Clayton; they are to her memory
Still, but for Thee, regardless might I stray,
Where gentle Charwell rolls her silent tide;
And wear at ease my span of life away,
As I was wont, when thou were at my side.
But now no more the limpid streams delight,
No more at ease unheeding do I stray;
Pleasure and Thou are vanish’d from my sight,
And life, a span! too slowly hastes away.
Yet if thy friendship lives beyond the dust,
Where all things else in peace and silence lie,
I’ll seek Thee there, among the Good and Just.
‘Mong those who living wisely — learnt to die.
And if some friend, when I’m no more, should strive
To future times my mem’ry to extend,
Let this inscription on my tomb survive,
‘Here rest the ashes of a faithful friend.’
A little while and lo! I lay me down,
To land in silence on that peaceful shore,
Where never billows beat, or tyrants frown,
Where we shall meet again, to part no more.”
Change a name and a pronoun and this connects to the way I feel about Jim, though I know I shall never meet him again, since literally he no longer exists, nor will I when I die.
This is what I have to report. This is what I have to come in the next two months. Lunch out with my friend, Alison tomorrow, two museum shows with Betty and one play (MAAN) and one musical (Into the Woods) with Betty in December. Lunch with Eleanor sometime in December: Zorba the Greek restaurant in Dupont Circle. One in person DC Trollope reading group meeting this Sunday — just outside Bethesda (Nina Balatka), and lunch with OLLI at AU SGLs one day in December. Laura and Rob with Izzy will take me out to dinner on Nov 27th as two days before my birthday. Christmas we’ll go with Rob and Laura to a good movie, and then back to their house for dinner at home and exchange of presents. I’ll tell you about these as they happen.
Now I’m evolving a reading plan for myself and I’ve begun with Italian studies (first up Grazia Deledda’s Cosima), Heroine’s books (Charlotte Gilman Perkins’s Women and Economics and Annis Pratt’s Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction), back to, beginning again Valerie Martin’s marvelous The Ghost of the Mary Celeste (a ghost story!). Then as I please beloved individual authors as I feel them (Joanna Trollope a new source of comfort and strenght, Next of Kin) and literary history (Joan Hedrick’s biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe).
Leslie Manville as Sue Ryelands (she’s also in Sherwood, The Crown, was Mrs ‘arris who went to Paris)
Evenings wonderful serials — I am actually enjoying Magpie Murders on PBS, which I’ll blog about with BritBox’s Sherwood and Karen Pirie (Val McDermid’s Distant Echo, set in modern Scotland. The year of Leslie Manville! Last blogs have been on Outlander 6 (1-4 & 5-8), seasons of processing grief, time of trauma; and upon the coming retirement of Judy Woodruff.
How much this house means to me I cannot express strongly enough. My refuge, my memories (Jim all around me), my beloved cats. I vow (like poor Gwendolen Harleth in Daniel Deronda, I’ve just finished) to remain more cheerful, open to others partly by drawing boundaries.
Here is the red berry bush on one side of my house: finally it bloomed and turned out to be the sort of bush I associate with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and beautiful middle English poetry
Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood, drawing gazing on a Devonshire cliff (2009 S&S, scripted Andrew Davies) – a very favorite still for me
Friends and readers,
To one such as I most of whose working life — child, adult, and now older widow – has been spent in some version of school, there’s no firmer sign of fall than the “term” (or semester) is about to begin. Online OLLI at AU, three courses beyond the one I’m teaching, one on foreign films, one on race in America, from end of Reconstruction to 1965, and a third on the Theban Plays. Online at OLLI at Mason, one course beyond a repeat of the same one at OLLI at AU, Anne Bronte’s magnificent feminist The Tenant of Wildfell Hall begin on the same week. From Politics and Prose a week after that one 5 session cours on Wilkie Collins’s No Name with a superb teacher who enabled me to read Collins’s Woman In White some 3 years ago now. By October I hope to have enjoyed at least one of several sessions/lectures (a combination of books, art, music, architecture) I’ve signed up for online at the Smithsonian. The course I teach, two sections in effect, will be on Trollope’s The Prime Minister (Palliser 5) as qualified by a book of Victorian Women’s Writing, edited by Susan Hamilton, Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minor — the groundswell of proto-feminist essays and columns as the century evolved (on work, law, custom, the quality & circumstances of real women’s real lives)
The Pallisers, Episode 20, the two friends, Duchess & Mrs Finn, just before they meet Ferdinand Lopez who quotes a Swinburne poem at them, which Mrs Finn knows well is homoerotic (Susan Hampshire, Barbara Murray, Stuart Wilson)
The sky is darkening quickly just now (7:49) so you would not be able to see my new chrysanthemum bushes (4 larger, two dark colors, and 4 small around the miniature Maple): faithful watering twice a day, early morning and dusk has brought out more of the poppies (I put a photo of one of the bushes on the last diary entry) on my several bushes of these, and red berries on the holly (are they?) bushes
I did manage two more in-person events. Both rejuvenating and linked to the coming term. I had a late lunch with another new friend, a scholar-acquaintance this time, Maria Frawley who taught the Middlemarch at Politics & Prose this summer — the store slowly coming alive again. It was quite a trek to get there & back once again. Another happy couple of hours. I think I’ve gone to lunch over these past 6 weeks something like 10 times! (I haven’t told them all). I’m a lady who lunches. DC itself filled with traffic jams.
Then this past Thursday, the Pizza party across the street from OLLI at AU was to me delightful. These are people I’m comfortable with. I’m also respected by them — as I never was when I worked at universities as an adjunct (for over 30 years). Not invisible any more. Only 30 allowed and I recognized three people I also have seen and one person talked to at Politics and Prose too. I had found a small parking lot where I could park for 4 hours for $12 so I could have peace of mind — it’s an area where the city tows you away if you violate parking regulations, which are strict and user-unfriendly.
The last time I was in a group of people like this was Dec 2019, the OLLI at AU Christmas party. Then we had a band and dancing. I began to wish I had registered for the one class in person that attracted me but there was only an hour between its ending and the beginning of the class I teach at OLLI at Mason so I did the right thing.
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But what is heralding fall emotionally this year is the 20th anniversary of 9/11. There has been a pouring out of memories, on twitter, on News programs, emails, blogs, news-sites, newspapers. One of the more powerful and poignant was written by the gentle author at Spitalfields. My comment to him (he didn’t let it appear):
It is untrue that the world was changed by this single event. It was and remains an incident on an on-going cruel capitalist world, however scary and unusual on who was killed; a circus symbolic spectacular stunt pulled off by people who loathed the US for its imperialist and colonialist policies and actions; it was a horrific tragedy for those who died and all those connected to them; for those who became terribly injured and sickened working on the site in the days that followed — and were often refused decent health care because that would make it obvious that that NYC, and the stock market should have shut down for weeks. It made manifest what was and still is the underlying realities of US political policies.
The world did not change even if some of the policies of these gov’ts did. The Internet has changed some aspects of the world in this time of the pandemic but by no means the basic attitudes of the right wing capitalists who seem to hold the real power in any situation..
After 9/11, many corporations and individuals went on to make a lot of money in Iraq and Afghanistan and the real individual particular states who were involved (Bin Laden could not have done it just with with his Al-Quaeda — Saudi Arabian groups were part of this) were never exposed.
So here’s mine, all too ordinary: as has been true for most of these catastrophic world-as-village events, seen at one time on TV, and now this PC computer, I was at or near home, leaving a dentist’s office a little after 9:30. I had felt suddenly & seen a commotion, excitement among the other people waiting, and asked the reception what was happening. I was told airplanes were hitting the World Trade Center! I am ashamed to say I dismissed this as typical of this gullible receptionist. Could not be.
I went out to my car and found myself in a mounting traffic jam, so instead of 5 minutes to get home, it was 20. The phone was ringing as I reached the door, and I ran in and picked up, and it was Jim, in a drawn voice, “Not to worry. I’m just fine. I’m in the basement of the Australian embassy where we were all told to go, and scary huge men armed heavily are filling the building.” He had to get off his flip phone, but said quickly “put on the TV, CNN.” I did and I saw the first of the two tall buildings sliding down. Horror, shock, as I saw the fire line in the middle, and the camera switching way below to see a man shrugging intensely.
Soon from CNN I knew a story of these two planes and that there was a third that hit the Pentagon. As it happened the library was hit — since rebuilt as a small annex where Izzy works today. I went onto the Internet, queried friends at C18-l and read the name of Osama Bin Laden as the perpetrator for the first time. I had never heard this name before.
The rest is quickly told. A phone call from T.C.Williams telling me the school was in “lockdown” and of course “not to worry,” as the young adults would probable be let out at the usual time. Another from Laura, frightened; she surprised me by coming over about two hours later with Wally (with whom she was living at the time, and whom she would marry the following year). She needed to see me and Jim and the house and that all was the same, as it ever was. The news shows had less news as time went on.
Two friends called for the first time in years to express anxiety over Jim. I said he was not in the Pentagon that day, and my cousin contacted me. The next day I did have bad pains in my chest, suggesting I was experiencing more stress that I admitted to myself.
I did think to myself what Susan Sontag wrote in a newspaper and was castigated for: “well, what do people expect — the US for decades stops social democracies, foments civil wars, pulls off coups, creates situations where no young native men can get a good job and itself bombs, strafes, this is the afflicted world hitting back. But astonishment at the audacity and effectiveness of this plan to take down the center of capitalism (Wall Street has no such hubristic building), of the US military (the magically numbered Pentagon), and a fourth plane (never hit) to set on fire and destroy the central imperialist house in classical style, painted white … ”
Now 20 years on, two horrible wars later, instigated by George W Bush and his cronies and associates in crime (making oodles of money as unscrupulous oil and other corporations), carried on to no reasonable purpose (at least in aims originally by this crew), hundreds of thousands of people killed, untold billions spent, with “surges” by Barack Obama as president in Iraq and Afghanistan. Then the institution of these inhumane murderous drones aka killing people without trial and often getting “the wrong target” so even the last day in Afghanistan a whole family was murdered, the US support of an utterly corrupt puppet regime in Afghanistan, laying waste a country and leaving a life-long psychological maiming of countless young adult Americans — I met two of these when I taught in the years past 2003 – a young woman and a young man.
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Last night I re-watched a candid history for a second time, with informed (insofar as he could) and perceptive and humane analysis, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. He streamed it from his corner of YouTube. In my judgement it should be required watching for everyone. Wikipedia offers a precise accurate summary.
I want to call attention especially to the unknown and uninvestigated business and political connections between Bush fils and the Saudi Arabian ambassador and gov’t leaders, to how most of the “terrorists” were Egyptian or Saudi Muslims, to the creation of an atmosphere of fear and dread around the US by Bush’s gov’t for two years in order to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 but has vast oil fields and Saddam Hussein, who disdained Bush senior. The years of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan where the US built up the origins of the Taliban (to defeat “communist” Russia). The lying forms of recruitment, the horrific treatment of Afghans. One scene stays with me that flashes through: a beheading of a man in Saudi Arabia. The legless young men in Veteran’s hospitals whose funds Bush was cutting.
Three other films to be watched in order to learn what happened and what the war in Afghanistan is rooted in. 9/11’s Unsettled, is second in importance because of its perspective: the first responders. Alas, apparently not being distributed anywhere I can find. This is about the thousands of people who grew very sick, and developed serious diseases in the time after 9/11 when they worked at ground zero with inadequate protection, and within days Wall Street was opened again, a local high school, Stuyvesant, because what was wanted was to be seen to be carrying on making money. And to make money. From Rudi Giuliani to Christine Todd Whitman, ironically the head of the EPA, what was then wanted was a cover-up and not only did the US health insurance companies fight back and refuse to pay for people’s treatments and injuries, refuse to acknowledge they were the result of 9/11, those who protested were maligned and punished. Read the story of Joe Zadroga, after whom one of the bills to provide for compensation was named, his wife, his father. One of the important reporters on the stories was Juan Gonzalez.
Lisa Katzman
The third is a Netflix serial, Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror, directed by Brian Knappenberger. This is an unflinching look at what was done by three administrations, but especially Bush, where the incident was used to extend surveillance, legitimize torture (Black sites), the nature of the Patriot Act, what came from it, Guantanomo, and again Drones.
There is a fourth, a Frontline series on PBS too: American After 9/11, directed by Michael Kirk. There is no reason anyone in the US should be ignorant of what happened, how it relates to what came before, and how it relates to how the GOP went extreme and is following Donald Trump (if it can and it’s going far) into destroying the US democracy, such as it still is (very oligarchic) and was (thoroughly racist, punitive in outlook, deeply anti-social individualism promoted).
Also talking about Biden
This might all lead to my reader wondering why I insist 9/11 didn’t change the world. It happened as a result of all the US gov’t had done since 1947, and the reaction to it was to intensify what led to it. 9/11 was the result of what the world had become since WW2 and the reaction just intensified those conditions and attitudes of mind towards empire and money. I’m now thinking of the GOP efforts (thus far successful) of stifling the vote, and on that you can read Heather Cox Richardson and listen and watch over many days and weeks. Here is just one
A graver and more overtly political blog than usual. But it’s appropriate. Not to say anything would be deeply wrong, reprehensible to me who does care about what happens to myself, my family and friends, all the people I know, the thousands and thousands inside the US whose destinies are intertwined with mine, and by extrapolation (since especially since the pandemic) our connection to all those vulnerable and powerless people who are not making oodles of money but at risk or suffering badly because of the people in these gov’ts, their allies, their donors, and parties’ behavior. Silence could be construed as consent.
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That’s a volcano — the islands are volcanic
To return to my small life among books. Although it fails to bring me in, Edward Douwes Dekker’s Max Havelaar, a mid-19th century Dutch novel has taught me more about colonialism’s workings, how it’s done, than any single book previous: stunning cruelty of the Dutch in Indonesia and all around India, the southasian pacific. The brave life of the introducer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
I attended a Bronte conference last Saturday, wonderful, and I’ve yet to write up my notes, which I’ll couple with a couple of Gaskell and Bronte sessions from Gaskell house, and a May Sinclair session at Cambridge (profound talk, Sinclair also much influenced by the Brontes). I promise myself I will write up a blog about the Brontes, Sinclair and Gaskell next on Austen Reveries. I’ve been astonished by what I’ve found in Trollope’s Vicar of Bullhampton, reading it daily with a group on FB – I certainly will write about it, together with John Caldigate, as unexpected radical social, justice and sexual politics.
I carry on reading Anne Finch’s poetry, going more thoroughly immersed into it, so that my old inner relationship with her is returning: extraordinary masterpiece Poems never published by her; and Poems she chose to publish or let others publish. I will read or read in the important books about her once again. And I listen on to Elena Ferrante’s The Story of the Lost Child, even poorly translated by Anne Goldstein and dully read by Hillary Havens, I am so drawn in I am continually thinking to myself well I would do that but not this. They are both me, Lila and Lenu. Ferrante hates fascism and misogyny (they are one and the same she says in her Frantumaglia
Good Heav’en I thank thee, Since it was design’d
I shou’d be fram’d but of the weaker kind,
That yet my Soul, is rescu’d from the Love
Of all those trifles, which their passions move
Pleasures, and Praises, and Company with me
Have their Just Vallue, if allow’d they be;
Freely, and thankfully, as much I taste
As will not reason, nor Religion waste,
If they’re deny’d, I on my Selfe can live
Without the aids a cheating World can give
When in the Sun, my wings can be display’d
And in retirement I can have the shade.
— Anne Finch, early in the first ms book
This is what I see on my screen when I first put on my computer (before I type in my password): it’s a hotel on the Bray Dunes in France — I don’t deny I wish I were there this weekend, with say a beloved comforting novel like Eliot’s Middlemarch
From a friend:
I thought this important enough information put in a context (US health care capitalistic marketplace as I have experienced and seen it in operation) to break somewhat with my customary personal diary entries and offer explicit advice on this July 4th, a time when many Americans gather in groups, go to the beach, eat barbecue together, swim in pools, in short socialize in myriad ways.
From my Irish friend:
Much of the slowness to respond to the virus seems to have been the “ignore it and it will go away” syndrome. Also the WHO saying it was a pandemic – well, it is their job to say these things, and they could easily be overemphasising to justify their existence.
Currently the situation seems to be that a peak is expected from the Delta strain, but everyone hopes it will not lead to as serious illnesses as earlier peaks, as so many are vaccinated or possibly immune from earlier bouts of the virus. I think governments are currently trying to find a balance between allowing opening up, which will be popular, and cases of the virus; the governments can come back to the people and say “Well, you wanted opening up, so if you caught the virus, it is really your fault”.
The epidemiologists, to whom I prefer to listen, are more cautious – they advise keeping as much social distancing as possible, remaining masked in close contact public places, routine hygiene of handwashing on return from out (when out, I personally use a pair of surgical latex gloves, under a pair of light fabric running gloves). Their fear is that the Delta is so infectious it will run through the unvaccinated, and there are so many of these that the relatively small proportion needing hospital and intensive care will once again overwhelm the hospitals – everywhere, not merely in UK.
One sympathises with any family or workgroup who have had a bout of the virus; good that they emerge well from it. Hopefully, their encouragement will encourage some others (however few, but even if only one, it is better than none) of their social circle to get the vaccination. One of the encouragements not to get the virus is the risk of what is being called “Long Covid”. It is suggested that between 1 in 3 to 1 in 20 (exact number depends on definition and group doing analysis) who have had covid (even if not hospitalised) suffer persistent symptoms for more than twelve weeks
I don’t think there is anything in the US which comes close to providing the kind of protocols and thus care that the NHS outlines — however you can read what they say. Why not? The profit motive (money-driven) has made a “health care industry,” which is utterly divided into different “providers” and sub-industries so no one can take such a thorough initiative across a population.
That’s why US people die younger and so many died during the height of the pandemic — I did tell here how Jim came near death one night because his care was so subdivided that one group did not know what another group was doing, and they were enacting this criminal procedure of having someone supposedly care for you by phone — a pharmacist whom Jim never saw and who never saw Jim had prescribed blood thinners to the point Jim was about to ooze out all his blood. Supposedly the man was controlling Jim’s blood count by studying tests. Right. Now how many people was this pharmacist calling a day? how much did he make for each person or batch of people for a company. I had that when I had Hepatitis C — there was nothing I could do — it was only through a person who phoned me I finally got the bottles and advice and injections and she never gave me her number.
Also to get the payment okayed (because there is a payment over everything or a bill made out to keep track) you have to have several people sign. Welcome to what passes for care of the sick in the US still. It was not just Trump’s incompetence, malevolence, and counter-productive measures from the federal gov’t (like intervening to snatch ventilators from state trucks), but this deeply anti-social inhumane way of delivering any medicine (once payment is made or thought to be secured) that keeps Americans away from physicians.
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I had told my friend how my hairdresser, Sheila, and her family all had COVID last July. They had been to the beach. She is just my age, 74 and she weathered it very well — exhausted, no taste buds, felt terrible, sleeping all the time — frightening her son (in his early 50s) who took her into his house and hired a nurse 24/7. What happened was this son got it – he’s a (was a) restaurator and didn’t stay home, didn’t wear a mask at first. He has lost 3 of his 5 restaurants; what happened was his partner in business did something illegal to stay afloat or perhaps get money from the gov’t in that first partly phony bill in Trump’s regime (it was partly phony because like everything his regime did, it was aimed at giving billions at the rich and very little to anyone else), and he got scared and so divested himself, but he lost a lot of money. Now he has one bar that serves food and one restaurant. His wife (hispanic) then got it, then Sheila, then the grandchild, and then Sheila’s partner who became very ill. All of them. The wife had been the manager of at least 2 of these restaurants; during the Covid time she stayed home and tried to teach their son as he tried to connect to school through a good computer. Son’s wife became very sick (the nurse was there for her too), child mildly sick; Sheila’s partner was hospitalized with pneumonia, he did not have to be ventilated but he seems to have recovered – he is 78. He might have long covid. Ripped through the whole family. Sheila has Trumpite relatives she knows and while she, her partner, her son now scream at these people to get vaccinated, they refuse. I tell this as an exemplary anecdote of US social life.
My friend said that UK Sunday papers are suggesting that Boris will remove the requirements to wear masks in all locations, urging people to “take personal responsibility”.
In the US, here is the attitude as far as I can tell: the vaccine is there, everywhere (in blue and many non-blue states it is — it is again the vicious south culture where it is less accessible — they do want to kill Black people still, e.g., in Mississippi the GOP governor refused FEMA money and 4 counties which are heavily black people have no vaccination sites whatsoever). Pfizer and Moderna are 90% effective and against the Delta will protect you against serious serious attack, hospital and death. AstraZeneca is 60% and helps enormously. We cannot endlessly be in lockdown. So CDC says if fully vaccinated go out and live, but use caution – wear mask indoors, stay away from crowds (this is not enforced — football crowds, baseball and theaters are opening with full capacity). Then ads gently urging people not vaccinated to vaccinate. The worry is, and Dr Fauci said this, in non-vaccinated places these variants are emerging and he and Biden & whole administration repeatedly express concern for people in red racist states or rural ones.
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I re-watched the 6th part of Andrew Davies’s Middlemarch last night and cried and was suffused with painful emotion as imagined joy and from my own comparative loneliness at its end. It so moved me. Beautiful, intelligent truly adult book and serial drama: themes include the enemies of promise, and the deeper traumas of our existence which leave us so hurt and vulnerable along the journeys we have courage enough to take, with the very occasional (for me rare) company of a friend. Today movie-makers are almost afraid to show such true emotion. More hopefully that it’s the little things we do for one another that mean a lot to us, and we should accept what our lot gives us, and help others. Eliot was a deeply ethical writer and she counsels humility and forgiveness and sympathy too. I had a friend, my Jim, for 45 years, now gone forever, but I surrounded by all he has provided for me, with some considerable support and what help I could give (monetarily I mean, always very small) to him on our now ended journey literally together.
Middlemarch – the happy ending for Fred Vince (Jonathan Firth) and Mary Garth (Rachel Power)
Part of the joke is the Bergman films: this low anguished voice muttering on and on, mad figures in black-and-white, outside somewhere, old man in meadow, girls by the sea or by trees, old women in beds, a figure shrouded in black playing chess; deserted streets, ticking clocks, crosses carried by quiet medieval-dressed mobs crossing bridges … What’s a cat to make of this?
Friends and readers,
We all need hope, we need reassurance. As yet the election of Biden has held fast, the courts, the state legislatures have all held to the law and order and truth; the only mobs and violence have happened one Saturday when a group of horrific Klu Klux Klan types of white man in suits rampaged through DC looking for someone to fight/kill, and finding few targets defaced Black churches and burnt their Black Lives Matter signs. Now Trump and his junta are at it again, threatening a coup of January 6th in congress, backed by violent mobs invited to come to DC.
How shall we keep our spirits up? to get us to January 20th when we hope to watch Biden and Harris inaugurated into office and the Bidens move into the White House that or the next day or so? With their two dogs, Major Biden and Champ, and their First Cat, a rescue animal
He is moving in January 20th. He has outlined his strategy: When Proud Boys and such-like Trumptrash ilk go low, he’ll go lower: right under a nearby bed. Let us hope (rely on him also) to sniff out any remaining rats.
I suggest we all make a list of 10 good things that happened to each of us this year, ten events that made your or a friend happy, gave you joy, pleasure. Here are mine:
1 Biden won big;
2 Laura & Rob know great joy from adopting adorable loving active kittens;
3 I found fun in London Trollope Society and pleasure in many sorts of zooms & online culture (I did a live video talk!);
4 I taught wonderful Bloomsbury in novels & pictures this past summer;
5 I did read some wonderful books, lately Harriet Walter on acting Shakespeare (Brutus and Other Heroines), Carol Rutter’s wonderful actresses on acting Shakespeare’s women (Clamorous Voices), the book’s editor, Faith Evans. Then Anna Jameson’s Shakespeare’s Women, Loraine Fletcher, Honor Killing in Shakespeare (she really reads Shakespeare from a vitally alive thoughtful feelingful woman); returned to reviewing the new standard edition of Anne Finch’s poems and reading the two new literary biographies of Vittoria Colonna in Targoff and Musiol’s books;
6 my cats crossed a threshold of becoming overtly loving as I reciprocated better;
7 the fifth season of Outlander, & I watched all 4 seasons of The Durrells, all 7 of A French Village (in occupied France);
Keely Hawes as widowed Mrs Durrell
THEY are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
— Season 2, Episode 4 of The Durrells explores the nature of a widow’s loneliness & grief (not well understood) through Louisa Durrell’s case, and the story includes a fraudulent spiritual medium, Louisa’s relationship with three men (by this time), her children, theirs with her and one another, not to omit Aunt Hermione (Barbara Flynn) come for a visit. Towards the close Keeley Hawes reads aloud the above poem by Edward Dowson
8 I was able and continue to be able to stay in my house with all Jim & my things around me still, with Izzy staying well and keeping her good job as librarian remotely;
9 people were remarkably resilient and resourceful during horrific pandemic, even in US where their fed govt has been taken over, corroded, ruined by a remarkably evil man;
10 I cannot think of any more because over 330,000 people in the US died (millions elsewhere), economy is tanked, evictions near for millions, and at the rate the vaccines coming from Trump & Junta we’ll reach immunity 10 years, but remember No 1 which Heather Cox Richardson reassures me will be realized, with a new POTUS, and decent competent people in charge Jan 20th of US for better or worse this powerful nation-state, with much riches now kept to a few but hope this will change somewhat …
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Rituals together every year can and do help; they embody hope, perpetualness, a stability and order, security into the future. That’s why putting up the tree, exchanging gifts, or whatever you do each year matters. So this year again watch a favorite movie or movies — as we cannot go out lest we spread the disease and sicken ourselves – let us stay above ground!
Marley was dead, to begin with …
Scrooge dancing with Fred’s wife … a polka
Earlier this week I watched the 1951 Scrooge — I didn’t realize it was not titled A Christmas Carol (they used to do this sort of thing, mistitle classics as if that would make the film more popular?) — with Alistair Sim. I had read Margaret Oliphant’s ghost story riposte; nonetheless, I wept and wept towards the end. With a kind of painful joy — worried the old man would not be forgiven. It’s wonderfully witty too. See my blog. I felt similarly towards the end of the 1945 It’s a Wonderful Life! (with of course James Stewart and the old MGM crew, Capra doing it) — my younger daughter, Izzy, and Capra’s beautifully socialistic angel film, on Christmas Day. I had forgotten I admit how small a part in time the Clarence segment is against the whole film; it’s only the last quarter or so. I found myself moved to tears. It’s more relevant than ever. Mr Potter is now a (weak) stand in for Trump (who just cruelly threw a wrecking-ball at any security or peace those dependent on gov’t in some way [and who is not?] needs). I had forgotten how Clarence appears only in the last quarter or so of the movie. All an apparition? a bad dream? No one takes it that way but you could.
Clarence, Angel (second class) listens to the distraught George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart)
Modern day re-makes have no idea of how to come near these because the emotions brought out are positively discouraged, even sneered at in our culture. Yes great performances, but no actor would be permitted or dare to show such anguish, such joy, such social feeling — it’s as if we no longer understood these feelings. But I don’t think that’s true because there are two films of Dickens that come near — though shying away from total immersion: these are with respect to Dickens books (whether faithful or appropriated) the 1999 David Copperfield (BBC serial, with Bob Hoskins and Maggie Smith), and at moments the 2002 Nicholas Nickleby (Douglas McGrath, wonderful cast).
Then we had a Zoom with Laura and Rob, and exchanged presents (they had sent ours to our house; we had sent theirs to their house). Then Izzy and I had a steak dinner …
I did miss Boxing Day. I didn’t expect I would miss the second day of Christmas as so often the first has been a trial. But what a let-down to just go to the supermarket the next day. Whatever smidgin of magic is left from early childhood hadn’t a chance. And, Izzy and I, — with Jim, have gotten so used to this second day. Around 2000 Jim, I, and Izzy, went to Paris for 2 weeks in the course of which occurred Christmas day and New Year’s Eve. It was partly to break a pattern of very bad Christmas days — we did a totally different set of things. Paris is not closed on Christmas day at all — or it wasn’t in 2000. An open market had a lovely French Christmas roll cake; we went to the theater; walked … Thereafter at home, here in Alexandria, we had Jewish Christmases: a movie and a Chinese meal out (mostly Peking Duck); then the next day, a museum trip.
And now tonight. I watched the Metropolitan Gala from Germany, two Italian tenors and two Black sopranos, one a beautiful young woman from South Africa. I didn’t care for the first part (about an hour) where they did Donizetti as if they had to prove how brilliant singers they are but were not permitted to sing anything truly moving, but the second half was traditional Italian songs (the kind Pavarotti used to sing), haunting tunes from The Merry Widow and Die Fledermaus (the bat!). Tears came to my eyes again.
The Met has not been generous with allowing clips of this concert onto the Net so here is Jonas Kaufmann and Diana Damrau in a softly intimate rendition
Now at 10:30 pm for the first in my life (74 years) there is no mass crowd in Times Square! I looked on TV and it’s nearly empty. I have been on Times Square on New Year’s Eve at midnight twice (with two different husbands), and have wandered through earlier in the evening a number of times. I am told that the clock will still come down at midnight but we must watch it on TV or some Internet channel — to be safe and help others stay safe.
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A 1950s cover and price …. — it is still in print with a cover that appeals to audiences today
Recent cover — a much less silly version of a romantic male, more a man of sensibility (like Hans Matthesen whom I loved in Davies 2002 Dr Zhivago serial)
Rituals include remembering back. An FB & Trollope friend posted a photo of a set of very old-fashioned Christmas classic books for children (or just the 19th century good ones that ended in children’s hands, some of which are also reading for adults). He said he was reading through them (they included books like Treasure Island, What Katy Did, Water Babies), whereupon I made a feeble quip: “Very virtuous.” But then I told a memory that often lingers in my mind because it is how I first started to read the English classics which have been so influential in my life:
Another thought: I first became acquainted with, well, read British classics because my father had sets of books which looked like that. They would be a soft hard back, colored brown or some other serious color, with silver or gold lettering. Memory is treacherous but I think he told me he bought them from the Left Book Club when he got into his teens. He kept them all wherever he moved. It is a sad conclusion: but Trollope was in none of these. Austen, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Brontes, RLStevenson but no Trollope. Perhaps he was considered too “adult” — without adult meaning sexy or violent. Another neglected author was Elizabeth Gaskell. I first become acquainted with (there I go again) Trollope as an undergraduate in an American college classroom (Dr Thorne); I first heard of and then read Gaskell at Leeds University; one of our “set” books for the third year (the one I placed in) was North and South. The influence of such sets of books for more working class and lower middle American children may be important — but it was the Left Book Club that offered them very inexpensively.
I hope I am not writing too much here. I looked at the spines and some are books I identify as for adults (Lorna Doone), or the kind of book that really is for adults but has been relegated to school reading (Silas Marner). I find I have not read a lot of them (just an impression) and my surmise is that shows I’m not British so many were not available just like this (for example so much Kipling), but also around 11-12 I switched to supposedly adult books brought into the house by my mother who joined a Book-of-the-Month club and there I read books like (wait for it) Gone With the Wind, by pseudonym authors (Frank Yerby) and voyeuristic semi-salacious (Peyton Place, probably around age 12 to 13 or so), historical romances.
In more chat I had to confess I’d never read Forever Amber, or God’s Little Acre. But I do remember to this day a historical romance set in the Highlands of Scotland (!, yes even then I was allured by books about Scotland), The Border Lord, whose author’s name started with Jan, but maybe it was a pseudonym. Within minutes someone told me the author’s name was Jan Westcott, and the book a perfectly respectable researched fiction; Westcott makes wikipedia, The Border Lord her first bestseller. I didn’t write that I wish I could remember the title or part of the name of another Book-of-the-Month club set in Italy, about a peasant girl called Pia. I read that over and over, & identified with this girl consciously; now I guess I knoq I also identified with the upper class Anglo-Italian narrator (a precursor for me of Iris Origo). In our ends are our beginnings. My mother persisted in throwing out these books. I tried to stop her but she’d throw them out when I wasn’t around. She sometimes overtly hated the reality that my father & I were reading people, we did it “all the time” (angry tone of typical quarrelling) instead of the kind of socializing she wanted from us. So the book is lost; it too harbors what I would read and study still.
The 1920s Everyman — noticed it’s packaged as part of a set of elite elegant beloved books — Dent then as found in Penelope Fitzgerald’s wonderful The Bookshop.
I will be watching the 1983 BBC Sense and Sensibility scripted by Denis Constantduros later tonight: I am up to episode 6-7. It is very good if you give yourself time, patience and are willing to enter into the dramaturgy of the era.
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Their closest physical moment: Miss Kenyon (Emma Thompson) attempts to make Mr Stevens to show her what book he is reading (Remains of the Day, 1992)
I am now reading for my coming teaching this winter and in the spring (and even thinking ahead for the summer. I finished Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and realized I cannot put it across to a class. How to explain this wild post-modern post-colonial parody of a 1930s female detective story morphing into wild gothic parodies (a la Radcliffe around labryrinths) and finally a spy story of horrific violence and betrayal. Then I watched the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala The Remains of the Day, and knew I loved it, understood it, can explain (as there is rationality to explain), the film being better than the book. Here’s my new blurb:
Two Novels of Longing
The class will read as a diptych E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989). Both examine class, race, war, fascism and colonialism; family, sex, and property relationships from the “empire’s center,” England, from a post-colonial POV. The core center of both novels is the human needs of their characters against capitalist, gender- and class-based backgrounds. I suggest people see on their own either the 1992 Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala film Howards End (w/Thompson & Hopkins) or 2015 HBO serial, Howards End (Kenneth Lonergan w/Atwell & Macfayden); and the 1993 Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala film The Remains of the Day (also w/Thompson & Hopkins). We can ask how ironic romances can teach us fundamental lessons about how to survive and thrive in today’s worlds.
For summer, though I love it, I doubt the class will love Naipaul’s Enigma of Arrival — I identify with his outsider meditations, and longings to belong in my uprootedness, and especially in England, but will they be able to cope with these meditations. I tried In a Free State, the Booker Prize winner, and discovered it’s painfully racist: if I were a Black person reading this satiric comedy by supposedly naive Indians seeing Black people for the first time, I’d be electrified with mortification. So I switched to Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River and wondered why I hadn’t thought of this Carribean Leeds man in the first place. I also loved his Cambridge, and am now set to read two more: The Lost Child, a sequel to Wuthering Heights, perhaps The Final Passage. I’d do Andrea Levey’s Small Island but it’s too long for summer. So, with my blogs (e.g., on The Crown) and other projects (women’s poetry once again), and for two very different list communities reading Trollope’s The Three Clerks, and Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Diary, I have not lacked in things to do … Lucky me, to belong to two OLLIs and have made so many friends on the Net.
Dear readers, friends, I end here. I’m trying to think how to pass the last hour of this profoundly dangerous year for us all — and we are by no means out of danger yet — another coup will be attempted Jan 20th, a variant of COVID 70% more infectious is spreading, and as long as Trump and his vicious crooks are in charge you may be sure nothing will be done to get the vaccines to the average person for months to come … (forget the ordinary postal mail, and the poor post office people until the Trump rats can be removed). We may be sure Biden and his wife will go on no killing sprees (such as Trump has and now pardoned people committing massacres, a woman who set a dog taught to be vicious on a homeless old man, like to do).
Here is one of their Christmas messages to the world:
We must carry on — there is no other choice. Not give in, not give up. There is harm in not hoping, in resigning and complicity and good in holding onto our moral compass as we enter another cycle of seasons. Let us remember E.M. Forster’s What I Believe and his adjuration: we with those like us can slip under the wire, form small groups of decent ethical people, sensitive, for good arts, true beauty, a pro-social democratic multi-ethnic, racial, religious secular tolerant world; the gate is opening again and we must be alert to go through to prevent it swinging shut again.
A November Sunset (idealized) by Lucien Pissarro (Camille’s son, his years 1863-1944)
Friends and readers,
I’ve blogged on Heather Cox Richardson‘s How the South Won the Civil War and a talk I heard her offer in conversation with Joanne B. Freeman at the Politics & Prose bookstore. But I have not given her the credit and platform (insofar as I can do such a thing), she deserves. She apparently talks twice a week, Tuesdays with a slant towards immediate politics, Thursdays, with her slant towards history. All talks or chats (the word lecture is nowadays a “no-no” seen as grim scolding) are a mix of both. I have linked my FB page to hers as a follower and I will check and listen twice a week, and when they are as good as the one this past Thursday I will devote a whole but short blog to her.
Tonight she was extraordinarily pellucid and strengthening. She got close to demonstrating that there will be no coup by Trump & his junta before January 20th. One factor here is the military will not back him: they told him so this past summer.
She argues what is happening is Trump & Republicans are siphoning off funds to pay Trump’s debts, to set up a news channel for him, and to cushion the RNC. All his appointments are always all about money and so these new ones: all that he is doing militarily is done with a view to selling off parts of the US gov’ts technology to his corporate friends to enable them to make big bucks. It is not just a con game: Trump is also getting attention for himself, which is what he wants, thrives on. He may move to running a TV channel. She acknowledged he has a genius for media presence.
She then took us back to 1986 when the Republicans put in place the earliest legal acts to take power from congress and switch it to the executive office so as to rid themselves of all progressive legislation from the 1930s through the Eisenhower years. She shows that the claim made in many circles that the election was close is not true: Biden won handily, but the claim that this is an acutely polarized country where equal numbers of people voted for Trump and the Republicans is not true. What happened was they were very successful in a myriad of methods of voter suppression, which have not been given adequate explanation anywhere. Among other things, hundreds and more of mail-in votes arrived too late to count. What is astonishing is how the democrats nonetheless won with an undefeatable margin (stop crediting Shields and Brooke as a place for good information and insight; they are not).
Finally, what she had to say about what Biden is doing is very reassuring. So let me see if the video comes on.
Let us hope very hard her first “demonstration” is accurate. I am still not sleeping more than 3-4 hours a night.
I will not cease my autobiographical blogs, but I find I can make an entry at most once every two weeks. I don’t have the strength to remain what’s called “sensible” (the way HCR does) nor have that much new about myself to report, though today I do have a small but significant item (see directly below). Plus I have over these years since Jim died, used this blog to tell of what books, videos, and other things of interest I read, watched, participated in. I’m now going to read, watch, and listen to Heather Cox Richardson twice a week.
What is this item: I’ve had half the tests that Kaiser decided to give me to see if there is any serious breakdown in my systems that led to my mind slipping for a couple of moments now two weeks ago, and these show no abnormality at all. So what I was experiencing was intense stress and loss of sleep, almost wholly related to what is happening over the election & Trump and junta’s attempts to set up dictatorship.
Her book has made a splash and you can hear it read aloud and find it discussed online
The Run-up to the Civil War: Field of Blood
Dear friends and readers,
I sometimes do give over a whole blog to an important or wonderful movie or play I saw, or a course I took. The value of this is such blogs are much shorter than my diaries of 2-3 weeks.
I want to convey the content and importance of a lecture and talk I watched and listened to last night, one in conversation form between Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Friedman. The occasion the recent publication of Richardson’s book. She and Friedman know one another. They are scholars and historians and now public intellectuals.
It was via Zoom from Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington DC, now online, as well as open to the public for buying books, and with the cafe working.
In a nutshell, Richardson’s shows how Goldwater’s defeat showed the Republicans how to build a new coalition after the Civil Rights act of 1964. Out of that defeat they pulled 40+ years of slow built-up victory to produce the fascism we see around us now
Click on the above title: despite the cover, this is a serious book showing parallels of violence then (1850s) and now (2012)
I had a hard time even sleeping after listening to Richardson and Fielding. They talked of how the Postal Service was attacked and censored in the 1840s to 50s. They said the measure of the crisis we are in now — that Trump will not concede even if he loses, and try to stay in power by any means if he is at all backed — is that the Postal Service is openly under attack. From the time there was a postal service it was obvious it was an important means of communication between people. It still is a life blood of a state.
Their way of talking about the crisis is different from what one usually hears. Instead of putting racism to the fore, they put oligarchy. They said the US was conceived as an oligarchy with some ameliorations; the people who wrote the constitution enshrined as an ideal equality, but they owned slaves and limited suffrage.
What is happening is the oligarchy which never went away is back in full force. They said that in the 1950s there was a consensus between liberal Republicans and conservative democrats that ideals for all were strong infrastructure (building highways, bridges, improving public transportation & communications), a strong safety net (social security, good schools) and equal opportunity for all in business; strongly individualistic all the time. But blacks & hispanics kept out except as subordinated workers (caste system).
But a wing of the Republicans (John Birch Society, remember them?) always hated this and fought (remember Buckley) against it, and ceaselessly tried to change the consensus: they won a major battle when equal time for all points of view on TV was made by them and their connections to vanish.
This powerful group (they go to the elite schools, sit on elite boards, fill local gov’ts) have worked to return to oligarchy once again. They believe only a few who are better than everyone else, more deserving, should have good services, food, freedom, live exclusive lives of privilege based on the long hard hours of work of everyone else: “mudsills” was the word in the 19th century. Mudsills now refers to working class whites and as many of the middle class whites as they can subordinate and crush to work for very little (as well of course as people of color of any ethnicity).
This group is replicating what was done in the 1850s: they have taken over the courts. They have gerrymandered the states & US senate egregiously and the courts allow now it — and they have harnessed to them white supremacists (idiot bigots), frantic evangelicals; a 15% portion of the American middle class who think they will be just fine. These people only talk about keeping women subordinate indirectly since they want their upper class white women to identify as powerful by virtue of belonging; so the issue is anti-abortion, anti-women’s rights over their own bodies as that is perceived as not threatening to wealthy or religious white women.
The pandemic has this group worried, but nothing else (they want more police), and not enough as the stock market is kept up by free money from the Fed. They are still using the word communism as a bugaboo because what they truly loathe is anything socialistic They may stop at nothing to stay in power — those in office are those obviously are not prepared to go against Trump publicly — or crooks sycophants themselves. They have oodles of money to send their children to private schools, to charter planes to their summer homes. The accumulation of preposterous amounts of money for themselves and their adherents, near zero taxes are their goals (pay only for military and protecting private property).
Richardson and Friedman suggested we are seeing a replay of the 1850s in 2012 terms. Below is a 1911 US political cartoon.
… thou mettst with things dying, I with things newborn — Shakespeare, A Winter’s Tale
Friends and readers,
For two weeks now I’ve watched from my computer scenes of protest, demonstration, and high destructive violence, burning, smashing, stealing, the defacing of buildings, walls, and the toppling of statues, across the US, and (it seems) across the world, from France to Hong Kong — and have in spirit been with the enraged, suffering, and immiserated people. The relentless brutality of US police has been before the eyes of the world; they treat the people they are supposed to serve as the enemy, armed for war. The murder of George Floyd has this week been followed up by more murders; people have remembered the murders so shocking that rose above the hubbub of daily news, and tonight there is evidence of literal lynching: two black men found hanging from trees, Robert Fuller and Malcolm Harsh, 45 miles apart. Meanwhile Trump’s gov’t with its no plan, no money for anyone in true need, and anti-mask posture is leading the way into a second wave of COVID19 deaths. Tonight the figure of 117,000 dead was cited. Unemployment massive, food-lines everywhere and long.
I can’t begin to outline Trump’s destruction of the US gov’t agencies set up to help people and save our environment; his crony takes over the Post Office in 3 days. My anxiety is over a coming possible coup. People in western social democracies profess surprise that this wealthy country with its extraordinary sites of bio-medical science has worse conditions than most of the world — they forget for decades the US gov’t and its agencies destroyed all new social democracies, set up death squads and periodically does what it can to make the peoples of South and Latin America into serfs and the peoples of the Middle East unemployed & desperate for any job, any place in highly conflicted theocracies. The difference is now the US gov’t has aimed its cruelty at its own citizens in massive numbers. A war on the middling classes like elsewhere.
Against all this there is not much material for hope. Some police reforms are being enacted into law, some de-funding of them, the one in Minneapolis abolished (my own experience is for this), and in some states attempts to open up judiciously, slowly to institute anti-COVID19 social practices. Today the US supreme court affirmed that the Civil Rights amendment includes LGBTQ people.
I led with Laura’s kittens because they are oblivious to all this & appear to have realized they have lucked into a wonderful home, and enable Laura to put photographs of them on FB and twitter looking adorable, heart-melting, close ups almost hourly.
I did come across in TLS a review of a book by the artist Leah Goren, Catlady who in slight sketches captures profound love:
I feel any diary or writing in the US today that does not take into account what is happening here shows a moral indifference and simply sheer stupidity — as if to suggest the bell is not tolling for that person too. We are as yet not gone over the cliff into the fascist dictatorship Trump is taking all to; we are as yet in one of those “intervals” between the rule of crushing cruel force; there is still time and place not just for protest, for good things for the human spirit, “breathing holes”, “snatching [an] opportunity while the going is good.” These words are E.M. Forster in his famous “What I Believe” — and Biden may yet win the presidency, enough of congress go democratic, so we may yet not be overwhelmed, and those left (who can) set the world moving back towards a humane order and (who knows) something better than we had emerge again. I don’t mean we should count on much, but maybe it will not be as bad for so many (it’s been worsening for decades) as it’s been of late. Some new patterns are very worrying: the enforced continued de-personalization of daily business contacts.
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For ourselves, I will be teaching online in the fall, & Izzy will not have to return to going to work until August, and then not all 5 days; I’ll drive her to nearby and pick her up; the library has but five people in it as staff. She has bought herself a new computer. We had much worry over the installation. The guy forgot to bring wifi, speakers, webcam and mic. It’s a PC. I did discover how we have wifi in this house: it comes from the comcast three boxed in my room; Izzy’s is just behind mine. But you need software in your computer to access it without a wire. All okay now. We have altogether 10 computers in this house if you add in cell phones, ipads, her gov’t laptop (her now partly retired laptop is not broken and now resides in the dining room).
George Inness, The Monk (1890)
I have begun my classes and one is very enjoyable and instructive: American Artists in Italy, 1740-1860: the lecturer presents slides of beautiful paintings by individual artists about whom he knows a good deal. OLLI at AU. The man is a German scholar who means very well.
I joined on in a wonderful two hours with people who understand how to read and we poured over Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry: because of this I have a much better understanding and appreciation of her work and am starting reading towards a foremother poet blog for her. Here is one which is not very well known — it was published after she died and apparently not in my edition of the Complete Poems:
It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air suddenly clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.
An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;
And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one’s back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as the kisses are changing without our thinking.
The joy of loving companionship. Two more sessions with Aspergers friends and I’ve learned more about myself through Temple Grandin (a movie and her book, Animals in Translation).
Dora Carrington, E. M. Forster
And my 4 week class on The Bloomsbury Novel appears to be going well. A moving moment came today when one woman said she wishes Forster had had the courage to publish his book, Maurice decades ago: it would have helped her to come out of the closet. That is, she opened up before us all. I tried to register this and reciprocate by saying how in the early 1990s when I first read Mary Pipher’s Saving Ophelia, it was an explosive mind-opener and relief for me; I could see I was not alone in those years of abrasive loneliness in a regime of predatory male heterosexuality and complicit female support for it. I did my level best to bring out how one need not be homosexual to enter into the bewilderment, alienation and emotional pain Forster’s hero knows for years, and then with a release and relief join in his joy with his companion, Alec. Here is the syllabus for the 6 week version I begin in a week and one half.
A friend gifted me with a exquisitely appropriate (for me, knowing my taste) group of books, all the way from Germany. She seemed to do this for the years of my efforts on the three listservs (now on groups.io); I began them this morning, — Margaret Macaulay’s The Prisoner of St Kilda: The true story of the unfortunate Lady Gange (restraint characterizes this one too, deft concise and suggestiveness) — and resolved that I would keep up from this line of books two of my TBR longed-for piles — one of 18th century women (fine biographies and studies) and the other of Scottish/Irish women (fine novels as well as critical books). Lady Grange crosses both. And I’ve piles with books by and about men in them too: early modern, and just gems left from my Italian Jewish reading: Giorgio Bassani’s The Heron, and Carlo Levi’s Fear of Freedom.
I got such a kick out of a map my friend sent: you open out the folds and it shows you 30 of the locations where the five seasons of Outlander has been filmed, most of them have been in Scotland. I miss the programs and am awaiting a DVD of the 5th season now.
And I read some wonderful writing this week: the two fictionalized biographies in Woolf’s Memoirs of a Novelist (Joan Martyn and Miss Willatt) ironic and persuasive gems of historical fiction, her “Gypsy, a Mongrel,” exquisitely sad and touching, yet so natural about a dog; her “Rambling Round Evelyn” brings him before us; Jacqueline Banerjee’s Literary Surrey, two sections, one on Evelyn and the other Forster. Woolf’s fictionalized biographies I suddenly realized Vita Sackville-West’s biographical work on Joan of Arc and Anne Lady Clifford was the result of her identifying with them as manly woman, cross-dresser and lesbian. Well, duh … All this for the Bloomsbury course …
And I was able to join in on an interview online of Francesca Wade (Square Haunting) that would have happened in York, but was instead placed in Zoom webinar online — and she talked of her book in plain simple terms that are not available in book writing and the led me to return to her book and read Eileen Power’s Medieval People and buy her tremendous Medieval Nunneries, c 1275 to 1535. The last time I communed with this book was in the 1980s in the evenings at the Library of Congress. I still have my old notes and xeroxes. Well now I have the book itself in front of me.
The illustration makes me recall Remedios Varo’s pictures, e.g.,
Embroidering Earth’s Mantle
I think to myself how often in women’s novels do we get this scene of our heroine being encouraged, helped along, loved, bonding with a Mother Superior nun. From Claire Fraser and Mother Hildegard in the HopitalDragonfly in Amber, to Anna Bouverie and the Mother Superior Ignazia at St Saviour’s in The Rector’s Wife: Claire is encouraged to become a doctor, Anna, a teacher of German and French. The older woman and young one. Frances de la Tour perfect for such parts.
Saving someone with the help of her dog — Outlander, season 2
Some lines from Shakespeare’s Lear as re-worked by Alan Bennet into his Madness of George III, spoken lyrically by Mark Gatiss as the recovering king (National Theater on-line)
These were the high points in the last two weeks for me — when my heart sung.
A more mixed pleasure: I’m following a Future Learn on Penhurst and the Sidney family poets — of the early modern period. I was chuffed at long last to see Gary Walker whose work on Mary Lady Wroth’s sonnets I used so to admire. He spoke frankly about the real pain her work, and I watched Glasgow students enact parts parts of Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia (out of Euripedes by way of an Italian translation. I realize Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke’s Tragedie of Antony (French classical concoction in English) has a Cleopatra who is fully noble, plangent, as a conception much kinder to woman than Shakespeare. Jim and I visited Penshurst — or was it Wilton House? There are pictures of Mary Sidney, Lady Wroth (coerced marriage, love liaison with cousin, Wm Herbert, and two children by him) – I loved her father, Robert’s , harsh poetry just as much. I dreamt once of writing a paper on her and sending it to a learned journal. I did start a biography ….
Lady Wroth
A virtual Dickens conference instead of the yearly extravaganza in California at the Dickens museum. I was able to listen to and see several remarkable Dickens and Victorian scholars speak.
The OLLI at Mason on American poetry, modern, has as a teacher a published poet, a man who makes big deal out of knowing “scenes” and inner circles, disliking academics, a bad chip on his shoulder, very dogmatic when the class basically emailed him to ask for discussion (to be sure from what a couple of people said, many there might not be capable of understanding what is good poetry, how to talk about it). His choices are mostly white males (three females briefly, all white), but he presented a cogent guarded but convincing history of American poetry, especially de- over politicization since the 1950s. The socialistic and radical poetry of the 1930s to 40s, social critiques silenced, and US poetry becomes all about self, says he. I’m not so sure or I doubt it.
I had some low points too: when (should I say) a long-time frenemy who has caused me so much grief to the point of last spring provoking a bad case of dermatitis, and scapegoating me off the Janeites list for good did it again (she got under my skin as they say) — though not before scores of eyes: a half-phrase meant descriptively (her reactions to these demonstrations are more white than mine) was excuse enough to vent her contempt for me, withering (because she knows she can get away with it) and vow never to email me again. I should have written, is that your arrogant promise? Alas, I didn’t. I was too stunned.
The OLLI at Mason staff is again pretending to but not helping (just the opposite) the teachers to cope with their zoom stuff. Extraordinary: they try not to give out the codes to the teachers individually. The woman running it is a bully, with a dense face. Perfect for our era. I had to pull teeth to get the code to get into my class zoom. I am supposed to have one session today with a site assistant and she didn’t give me the code for that. I’ve not gotten the code this morning. For your class you are told to “click” here and like some child are supposed to stand for not knowing. Hours later: I did have the training session and discovered that the problem was pressure on me to lead a Webinar (a kind of TV show where I see nobody nor does anyone else except for me; it allows for hardly any real class discussion but does allow for a couple of hundred “viewers;” perhaps it looks good on paper and they think will fool people into saying they have had a class. But all know the difference. I resisted and now have to trust again to these people and hope the meetings come over, 6 of them. As someone told me in OLLI at AU, worry not, it’s on them to make it happen.
Perhaps I miss some of the Poldark talk I used to join in with on an FB page devoted to the books (a vindictive FB owner who loathes critical evaluations worked to exclude me — these are fan places — again I was stunned, but again all this occurred where there is nothing to see), I miss reading the comments as they helped keep me at that project through reminders of Graham’s Poldark texts. The historical fiction project as a writing goal, is in retreat just now. Laura used to tell me to stay away from such places, ask me why I went there? I keep away from the Outlander FB on my own now as its material too is turned into open sexual fetish all too often or in this fifth (perhaps wearied material) season, they fall silent. One cannot learn from such places what the material they are talking about is even about. I suppose that is not much different at core from too many academic studies.
I return to my complicated work on Anne Finch’s poetry and life. And there I am fretting: undecided how far I should try to expose the craven career devotion that has led to the new edition omitting so much of her inner life, the actuating emotions and beauty in the poetry that would make her poetry come alive instead of remaining a historical dead-weight. I too have to have a care not to offend. The work goes very slow as I return to the manuscripts once again, combing through to decide, is this her? is it a corrupt text? is it any good?
Still of Ackerley and his dog, Tulip, from the cartoon movie by Saul & Sandra Fierlinger, with Christopher Plummer voicing Ackerley, & Lynn Redgrave, his sister, Nancy (2009, from Ackerley’s 1956 book)
Neighbor
Build me a bridge over the stream
to my neighbour’s house
where he is standing in dungarees
in the fresh morning.
O ring of snowdrops
spread wherever you want
and you also blackbird
sing across the fences.
My neighbour, if the rain falls on you,
let it fall on me also
from the same black cloud
that does not recognise gates.
— Iain Crichton Smith
Friends and readers,
If I’ve not written for over three weeks, it’s because I’ve not much new to say. I am prompted tonight because I have learned that sixteen (16!) years ago, Izzy wrote new lyrics for the Twelve Days of Christmas out of the Harry Potter world, and put it on our website. Now recently her song inspired someone calling herself Semperfiona to record it as a song, someone else, yue_ix, to provide a cover album for the song as if it were a record for sale, with the whole thing edited by a third person, pseudonym, flowersforgraves. Alas, I cannot transfer the podcast or picture over here, but you must click on this URL to reach this composition, an art work by 5 people (if you count in J.K. Rowling as inspiration, The Twelve Days of Christmas, Harry Potter Style, by Miss Izzy.
A Harry Potter Christmas moment …. a little out of season, but WTF, we are in need of cheer wherever we can find it
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I have been escaping myself into my past, bringing it up to the present. This morning as I lay in bed, facing another day at home, sheltering in place, I thought to myself, why does it bother me not to go out and circulate “in the world,” drive places to teach or take a course, see people regularly. After all at home I am among one of the lucky ones to be able to reach friends through the Internet by email, social media platforms, zooms, even the phone, and as I thought about the day ahead I told myself I or my life is not useless, empty and meaningless — for I am doing what I value and sharing my doings insofar as others want this – an authentic existence (as philosophers would say). So today I posted to my listservs, exchanged letters with friends, participated in a zoom session (a class on existentialism seen historically), then worked on Anne Finch, read more of Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent, watched Part 3 of the three part movie: otherwise exercised, walked, talked with Izzy, was on the phone with a friend, ate and now am blogging here. Other days I have other schedules, but this is my main one for now. I’ll talk of these two projects (for they represent two sets of books) here.
Today I worked on 25 years worth of materials gathered from libraries (manuscripts, printed books) in an effort to supplement Myra Reynolds’s sadly inadequate 1903 edition of the poetry of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilesea: I ended up writing a biography, preparing or annotating nearly 300 texts, ordering them, writing about them, and putting them on my website. I have been asked to write an evaluative review of the new standard edition of this poetry published by Cambridge UP, from which there is a small archival site online now.
This is an ambiguous experience slowing going over my mountains of copies of original manuscripts, the letters I wrote, my hundreds of pages of notes, on sources too, rereading my biography: the first phase of being in a position to evaluate this new standard edition of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea’s poetry. They renamed the manuscripts in accordance with who owns them or where they were deposited: I named them after the places in which Anne and Heneage wrote them out.
Egoistically I was chuffed to see in my view the two editors have not (as I see this) truly gone beyond Reynolds because they have left out many poems that are by Finch — lest they be accused of false attribution. They have not (in Volume I — I won’t get Volume II until after the review of Volume I is done and printed) as far as I can tell as yet even included a section with poems of doubtful attribution. Doubtless because there are so many of them — about 30, with about 20 serious contenders. It would cost money, would it not? Mar their edition; they would have to quote me more centrally. Several of these are so strongly hers that they have been quoted elsewhere by scholars and written about (from my site); one is autobiographical but not sufficiently detailed to nail down an attribution. One cannot get rid of self. I ought to be so pleased that this edition exists for it makes of this poet for 18th century scholars an established central voice.
I am chuffed that they argue with me in their notes over my biography: they chose McGovern’s conclusions (she published what passes as a standard biography) over mine, several of which I am persuaded are wrong — so for those who come to my site, there is an alternative story which makes sense here. They do also correct me — apparently Anne’s older brother killed their Haslewood uncle (in a duel) not the uncle’s older son as I had thought: the two had the same names. I learned that one of the scholars who never answered any of my letters put on his dissertation a stop-reading so that no one shall read it for another 50 years!
Ah, me, were it not for Jim, none of this would have gotten out into the world.
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I am also hoping to teach online. It is evident that most Americans who can afford to stay home and avoid this dreadful COVID19 disease and the risk of death will do so until such time as it’s safe to come out, & that will not come soon for Trump is still refusing to allow “his” federal gov’t to do wide-spread testing and tracing across the US, and he squashed the CDC plan/strategy for opening the US in stages so as to minimize the risk. He thinks to force people out who need the money (by not sending them any more, by depriving the of unemployment insurance) and others will follow suit, unable to resist temptation to say make money on their businesses; universities he thinks will open up lest they lose the egregious fees they demand. He is counting on greed, fear, despair. But more than 81,000 Americans have now died — and early signs are that some or many universities at least, and more to the point the two OLLIs I work at, will carry on delivering their content remotely until well into the fall.
Mecklenberg Square by Margaret Joliffe (1935): one of the squares where the four Bloomsbury women Francesca Wade writes about in Square Haunting, one of the marvelous books I’m reading
So I’m reading towards what I hope will be a wonderful course called The Bloomsbury Novel. I changed my books slightly from what I had intended:
This course will examine novels & art included in the term Bloomsbury through three texts: E.M. Forster’s Maurice, Virginia Woolf’s Memoirs of a Novelist, J.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip, and Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent. Bloomsbury novels, books of all sorts really, are written by people who belonged to an amorphous early 20th century creative group, associated with a specific area in London, who were friends, or whose works were printed at the Hogarth Press. This (semi-invented) sub-genre is splendidly interesting, many thoughtful highly original texts of powerful art. There are good movies for Maurice, My Dog Tulip, & All Passion Spent. I ask everyone before class to read E.M. Forster’s “What I Believe” (from Two Cheers for Democracy); we may read a couple of other on-line shorter texts for context.
And also watching movies, and reading more than one excellent book on the Bloomsbury crowd, some on art. I know I don’t half-talk enough about the love and companionship dogs provide for human beings and (it is to be hoped) vice versa. (I’m ever on about cats.) JR Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip is about a deeply companionable interspecies love relationship; rated as a “classic” book and is certainly complex and beautifully written: he has his obsessions, some of which are clearly intended to shock the reader, wake us up to what an animal is(that includes us) , the book is at times hilarious and at others so moving: he also indites the way human beings regularly treat animals (dogs specifically); the brilliant cartoon (or should I say graphic novel, see way above, the picture from the film)rather indites British society vis-a-vis its treatment of animals; it too is a curious delightful experience. I am not sure you can get it streamed online — the creators intended this but other people may have gotten in the way since then. If you buy the DVD it comes with a marvelous feature about the making of the film. Here is Ebert interrupted by commercial ads (these are getting worse by the day, the hour). Ackerley was gay, a good friend to EM Forster, an important person at the BBC, editor for years for The Listener, wrote another “classic,” My Father and Myself, which I’ve sent away for.
As her final segment on PBS reports last night, Judy Woodruff did a number on pets; the pets of the staff and everyone working on the program, now all remotely. It was called the Newshour’s Furry Friends, and just delightful; she was so touching in her final words; she almost broke down saying how much they loved their companion-animals.
What had happened was people noticed cats in the background of William Brangham’s room — on the couch to the side of his wall of books; and also one cat in Lisa Desjardin’s space; sometimes on the couch but once the cat came up to look at the camera. This started mail which suggested viewers were not listening dutifully to the content but watching out for the cats.
So now we know Wm Brangham has 3 rescue cats and their names, and one dog (not permitted in TV room as he barks); and we have seen an array of pets. It seemed to me more dogs than cats; first with the person — very quickly shown — I spotted Amna Nawaz has a cat; then a shot of the animal alone posed properly as if for the cover of a book or other work he or she had achieved.
The title of the segment put in mind of a Sesame Street alphabet song, “4 furry friends, faithful together. Fun-filled, and forever free …” Jim used to say if he had to listen to that once more, he would do such things …. !! Aargh!!
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It is for me also an ongoing struggle just to carry on living sanely. Yesterday I was feeling parts of my body ache, and think that I am not getting enough exercise. As mild as it was, getting in and out of my car, walking to classes, to shop, to different places every day mostly was good for my body. I am exercising on the bike 20 minutes, walking outside 20 minutes but it’s not enough.
Nowadays social obligations shape my reading patterns. I’ve stopped getting on with my reading of Hilary Mantel’s Mirror and the Light pile: each book just about belongs to a project or a group of books I love and am reading with it: in this case, a wonderful book on the man and poet, Thomas Wyatt, another on Cromwell (a biography), a French biography of another woman (beyond Anne Boleyn and the English) taken by Protestanism: Jeanne d’Albret by Francoise Kermina. I have put these aside for now.
Charles Laughton as Quasimodo in the 1939 Hunchback of Notre Dame film (as powerful and relevant as ever)
Sanctuary! for Esmeralda (Maureen O’Hara) up high in the cathedral, he cries!
A set of books for the Bloomsbury novel course, a set of books for now this review I’m doing of the standard edition of Anne Finch’s poetry, yes, I am participating in the listserv for Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, with Victor Brombert’s book on Hugo as visionary, and four movies to watch! My ongoing commitment to Winston Graham and the historical novel: I just finished Graham’s powerful and good The Black Moon, and am going to being The Four Swans; I’m well into Jenny Uglow’s In These Times, a detailed wonderfully readable description and evocation, utterly convincing of the worlds of the 1790s, Nina Auerbach on DuMaurier, The Haunted Heiress, and her fiction; with a biography of William Hamilton (for Volcano Lover). Piles of Italian-Jewish writing (Natalia Ginzburg books) left over and inspired by Judith Plotz’s course (an OLLI at AU, the one true good one I had this term); and still on that supposed anomaly, single women authors & women’s writing. I give little time to the courses I attend by zoom but I do give some. And they help during the day connect me to people. I know others look at my workroom, my files, and are alert to see my cats. Where are they today, someone asked?
They are in their cat-bed to the side of me, said I
My new backdrop in zooms — only I am in the way so some of this obscured, and at a slightly different angle
At night I work my way through serials, documentaries, and Un Village Francais — 7 seasons, 13 episodes each. I just finished My Brilliant Friend (book 2 of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet). On these I will write separately. I also keep up friendships by letter, am on FB, nowadays a little on twitter, and blog to readers and friends here — all of which keep me “grounded” — and give me preciously needed company if at a distance. I saw, thought and wrote about a film about autistic women made in Iceland; see the comments for a review, which links the book to violence against women: Seeing the Unseen. Annie Finch revived Wom-po, a listserv for women who write, translate, write about love, women’s poetry. It is lucky and meaningful to me that this old project of a quarter of a century’s work, my love of women’s poetry suddenly is structuring my days, and if I can pull off online teaching, delving the ethically comforting and strengthening Bloomsbury group.
All this keeps me grounded. I read JK Johnstone’s superb study of The Bloomsbury Group, an old fashioned 1950s style oh so readable study, with a long section on the philosophy of GE Moore as well as Forster, Woolf, and Lytton Strachey, the art lectures of Fry and criticism of Andre Maurois.
I connect the seen with the unseen and imagined and remembered and learned from — and not only because we must not forget the tremendous misery that is being inflicted on thousands of Americans by the present stranglehold fascist regime. I try not to let convention, fear of others’ conventionality/disapproval, authority and power come between “me” and what? a life my instincts have led me to make and share with others who recognize what I recognize. I no longer have Jim, his life was taken from him by a dread disease, and I am honoring him and the dog he and I had, Llyr, by some of what I am doing this spring and summer.
Jim and Llyr in our apartment on 76th Street off Central Park, 1972
We did “own” a dog for 12 years, Llyr was her name, partly a German shepherd. I was too young to appreciate her, and wish I could bring her back and make up to her now what I couldn’t give when I was younger because I let my depressions and nervous breakdowns get in the way. I feel such remorse. I did not know how to cope, to control them, to what’s called comparmentalize. We had $125 a week to live on, and so I starved us all, including the dog (but not the child). The atmosphere in the last 2 years on Seaman Avenue was bad. She died of cancer; my father paid for a couple of treatments, but then the vet said it had spread throughout her body. Now I would treat her with extra-consideration, the kind of respect I would an adult companion-friend, as I try to my cats. If the non-traveling continues I will think of a way to persuade Izzy to accept another animal in the house, a dog I shall call Llyr.
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 