Recovery a long arduous road which demands patience

A photo of me probably in 2018, honored for my years of teaching at OLLI at AU

Dear friends and readers,

I began the road to recovery sometime during my two weeks at the Rehab/Nursing Home/Subacute physical therapy clinic. Yes Vierra at Falls Church combined all three functions. After about a week, I began to notice bodily strength begin to return, that “I” (my brain and whatever else in me makes me move and speak) was in touch with my left side and could do things with my leg and hand on that side that I couldn’t before. I don’t want to harrow my reader yet I would like to tell people of what my experience of stroke was like.

It was a compound of physical, social and psychological experiences. I was unable to move parts of my body, dependent on others who were underpaid, worked too many hours supposedly caring for far more patients than they could and not respected much (hence sullen, and mildly to strongly bullying), very uncomfortable (constipated) and not able to help myself, worrying about what was to be, endlessly sleepless. I was never at peace, and as an autistic person perpetually offending others. I did what I could to avoid the (loud) TV programs others watched (asked them to “lower it, turn it off at 4 in the morning please”). MRIs are misery-inducing while one endures them.

When I finally got home, I didn’t know how to handle myself with my daughters at first and wanted to cry because I could not control my environment. Many of my books ended in great disorder in order to make walking space for me. I am now taking 2 zolofts a day to still the obsessive anxiety and panicked thoughts that plagued me. At last that spigot is turned off.

I can now walk (awkwardly) without the walker (or a cane); I am sleeping again; I can type some again, my mind clearer at last, sharpness and controlled memory returns. I’m still unsteady on my feet when I first get up. I just had an episode where water went down “wrong pipe” — I felt for a moment I couldn’t breath. It’s scary. I’m told swallowing is complicated mechanism and I’ve sort of forgotten how. I did once begin to choke but frantic coughing removed the obstruction. How exhausted I was from that.

These seemingly side issues are part of what makes for misery. Part of my brain died or didn’t get enough or too much blood, and my brain has to re-attach itself to things now cut off. I do cough a great deal. I take antihistamines. It’s a drip from mucus due to too much pollen. TMI, as Laura would say. The typing exercises are to re-teach or remind my muscles and re-teach my brain or wake it up about where my left hand fingers are.

I’ve started a reading program and routine. My proposals to teach online have been accepted (See below.). I was able to do an acceptable talk at the level I used to (arduous effort), I will fight again to get my driving license back (hire a lawyer) as I cannot get to either OLLI any many other places except by car This could condemns me to staying home, ergo gradual loss of what genuine friends I’ve made. You won’t hear about museum shows, or live theatre here for quite a while. The internet is my lifeline more than ever (zooms).

You will say, it could be much worse. Yes, I could be dead, a vegetable (I was terrifically lucky to get immediate help from ambulance and hospital people); my daughters have been an equivalent of angelic; enough money has helped buy an array of things to help myself with. Now I need to practice self-control (how over these many years since the mid-1990s I’ve learned that). Do much more exercise — it’s painful, with parts of my limbs very sore.

Laura and I trying to view the partial solar eclipse we experienced in an Alexandria park

Where am I tonight? Reading the superb Austen sequel, Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen, with 2 new computers (laptop, ipad with good apps to enable me to watch movies in bed), new furniture (comfortable stable chairs), Laura uses my car & generously takes me where I need & want to go (walks in Old Town, the park, loving a course on Cornwall from an OLLI at York). I’ve renewed long-time friendships here on the Net and participating in group reads once again, I watch cheering movie TV series over and over (All Creatures Great and Small, the Durrells), excellent ones too (Mr Bates and the Post Office, on the assassination of Lincoln, Manhunt, costume drama with Tobias Menzies). I’ve joined a Mary Oliver poetry group on face-book. Hudson River paintings, cat pictures. I will go on vacation (!) with Laura, Izzy, and Rob for the last week of July on Coronada island, near San Diego. I am planning in June to adopt a rescue cat a year or so old to help keep Ian company (with Laura’s help). I want a female like ClaryCat I’ll call Fiona.

Sculpture of kitty at Chapter House, Lichfield Cathedral, UK

I’ll be teaching online this summer (Women writing and character in detectve an/or spy fiction), taking courses on line (2 on Woolf, The Waves and To The Lighthouse, one on Sayers Lord Peter/Harriet Vane), Doctorow’s Ragtime), some at the OLLIs, some from Politics and Prose, one from Cambridge). Pray for me my connectivity is stable.

Recent funny scene (I’m alive to the comedy of it): me wandering about my house trying to find where I abandoned my walker or left my cane

Ian now sitting where ClaryCat used to — he cries for company and attention a lot

Gentle reader, anything you would like to know about strokes? This blog will now return to recording my reading and other lives autobiographically, e.g.

I’m now into the second half of the fourth season of All Creatures, and discover I must’ve fallen asleep on a number of them, especially the second half. I did know I was overdoing it. Well here they are on Passport, and I’m loving them. No or Yes the war is kept in the background but what is repeatedly in the front ground is a slow moving intimate story of things not usually paid such attention to: aspect’s of Helen’s pregnancy, Mrs Hall’s distress at what filing for divorce entails, Carmody’s shyness and difficulty in adjusting to both Siegfried and James’s demands. I enter into these cases fully — Gerald’s need to care for his sister, the animals themselves. I’ve now bought the DVD for the season from WETA and have felt tempted to buy the first book in order to compare and deepen my knowledge of the source books. Samuel West is often the quietly riveting presence, but I especially love Anna Madeley as Mrs Hall

father-pregnant daughter pair from All Creatures

A widow-mother-scholar-writer-teacher-lady of 77,
Gladly would she learn, and gladly teach,
Ellen

We are now looking forward to our trip to the UK

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

Dear Friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

Anna Carteret as Lady Mabel Grex

Miranda Otto as Mrs Hurtle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morning Athletes

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

Summer begins — breathing in air that makes you sick; return to Gaskell

I thought maybe this still of Hattie Morahan as Elinor enduring on during summer might be appropriate (Sense and Sensibility, 2009, scripted Andrew Davies)

Dear friends and readers,

Summer has begun because my teaching has begun, and if I’m not mistaken, my first class at OLLI at AU for 4 weeks on The Heroine’s Journey has thus far gone very well. I’ve written my first letter to my coming class (less than 2 weeks) at OLLI at Mason, on what editions of Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters to get, two exquisitely good readings aloud of an unabridged text (Patricia Tomlinson, Nadia May) and the wondrous movie, and I was delighted two people on Trollope&Peers appear to be planning to read along! I have incontrovertible proof that last summer’s dismal numbers were due to people still in large numbers refusing to come in person, for I now have 30 people in The Heroine’s Journey (the texts to some as obscure as the texts for last summer); and an astounding 40 for Gaskell whose book, Wives & Daughters, cannot compete in known-ness, surface excitement and media triumphs (a couple of musicals, 3 film adaptations) of last summer’s Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White. Last summer I had 6-8 people at OLLI at AU which went down to 4 and then 2; 6 people at OLLI at Mason which went up to 13 registered 9-10 attending.

I am myself literally lonely — physically at home — though amidst kind and generous friends on the Internet so I’m doing things remotely for a fourth summer — virtual festivals (Hays, Yorkshire), virtual conferences (Elizabeth Gaskell). I read over half the office space for office workers that was once needed is now going unrented. Had this been the case the summer after Jim died, I would have been devastated — I built a sort of life before the pandemic which the present one is a morphed version of.

Maybe it’s for the best — because not only are there now daily massacres and killings (sometimes I fear some neighbor will shoot at me as I take my daily afternoon walk — or, worse, Izzy), but I became very sick two days ago and am still not over having had my body filled with deeply unhealthy air. Thousands of fires burning across Canada, sent smoke-filled air south as far as South Caroline, west too, and DC/Maryland/Virginia had the worst pollution ever experienced on record.

It’s no joke. The smoky burnt air is real, with little bits of stuff in it, and I have been having a major sinus attack/hay fever. I find wearing the KN95 mask in the house helps, a spray helps a tiny bit, the over-the-counter histamine, Claritin-D — I’ve taken 4 since yesterday afternoon. I’m filled with itchy liquid, my chest, face, nose pouring out, throat parched. My ears popped and were hot. I took a sleeping pill to sleep.  The air and I have improved over today but I am still not well, still parched and blowing my nose and coughing hard.

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I’ve made a good start overall for all my summer projects: I’m working on two reviews for publication, and have finished a third. I’ve finished reading Wives & Daughters silently to myself, and I loved it, and now am listening in my car (when I get a chance) to Patricia Tomlinson reading it aloud just magnificently. W&D is Tolstoyan, strongly feminist, a wondrous literary masterpiece. I accompanied it with Jenny Uglow’s equally moving brilliant book on Gaskell, reading her books closely sensitively imaginatively, A Habit of Stories, am onto criticism. Evenings I reveled in Cranford and the Return to Cranford and all of Sandy Welch’s North and South. So you might say I’m about ready to make that syllabus (Sunday) and send it to the class, to begin June 21st. I found both movies closely related, rooted in Gaskell’s life, dreams, strong ideas about gender identities transformed; my favorite character-actress still Anna Maxwell Martin as Bessie Higgins, with scenes of strong friendship with Margaret Hale (Daniela Denby-Ashe) and her father, Nicolas Higgins (Brenden Coyle)

Also reread Maria Tartar’s Heroine with 1001 Faces. I was so newly impressed by Tartar’s achievement I thought I’d share any reviews: they are all inadequate and (ironically) re-emphasize masculinist values — the book is also about another emphasis, re-nuanced values and norms. But I have found Tartar on video discussing her book. Is there anything not on video nowadays – yesterday I listened to Mary Beard on women and power and the effect of the continuation of pernicious classical tropes on our society today —

You see I am staying in mostly — for a fourth summer.

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I have met a couple of friends for time in museums — the National Gallery three times, with its Phillip Guston rooms and rooms; I admit I like his earlier more realistic art much better than the abstract expressionism, but the film where he talked of how he moved from one type of art to another (excuse the immodesty) reminded me of how I feel about my work, how I’ve developed a blog art, moved from studying one century to another, from the UK to Italy seriously, to post-colonialism in English books set in and about India (the Raj and its aftermath. This is only one small part of it, and not the most interesting (that was the inward man):

One afternoon a kindly friend, Adele, came over — from OLLI at Mason, an Englishwoman just my age, living in Reston. A rare treat for me. I made us a lovely lunch — if I do say myself. It required no cooking beyond emptying a jar of delicious homemade soup (feels like that) from Trader Joe’s, making a very plain salad & salad dressing, buying two kind of delicious traditional cheeses and bread. Then we watched the first episode of 4 of the 1999 Wives & Daughters on my DVD player attached to my computer (plays Region 2 DVDs). I was so cheered when both my cats joined us! even Ian who usually runs away, and poor Clarycat on my lap. It was all too short an afternoon — the best kind …

She will be in my class; it was educational for me to listen to how she reads the book and what she saw in the movie.

Not all goes that well at all. One afternoon was so fraught with tension (me masking myself, her irritated at me, tired of me I expect). After a few hours out with her, I was that exhausted and nerve-wracked that I became confused and stepped out into traffic! luckily I pulled myself back quickly enough. I just had felt bewildered by the stress. I held onto myself (so to speak) on the Metro ride and then driving myself back to my house when I opened up a small bottle of prosecco. It helped. But I needed a nap and for the rest of the evening and night could not do anything constructive. I am wondering what do others do to recover from social experiences? We are all probably having more of then now since we are said to be post-pandemic.

I should remember this kind of thing is as common with me as I listen to various people in my neighborhood having their summer parties on their very fancy lawns behind their super-expensive mansions. People’s laughter floating in the air. My tenth summer without my beloved, Jim.

Donal McCann as young Phineas Finn speaking to no purpose in Parliament (Pallisers, 1974)

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Have I covered everything that mattered over the last couple of weeks and weeks to come? My talk on Phineas Finn, “Words for Sale: Chapters 13-26,” went well, and here is where Dominic has put up the video and transcript and soon I will make a new blog for Trollope and Phineas — and Ralph the Heir, where I will discuss politics in Trollope.

Phineas Finn ~ Chapters 14-26

I’ve registered Izzy and I for Somerville College, Oxford, for September 1-2, for the conference we are to go to and this Sunday Laura will be over and we’ll rent a hotel in London for 4 days and book a plane! I reveled watching and re-watching and then blogging on the three Tom Jones movies.

My beloved pussycats grow closer and closer to me; Clarycat asserts herself in new ways; she sits against my chest as I eat breakfast and lunch. He is on my wave length a lot.

I attended another Poetry Reading Group online (a club) at OLLI at Mason, and my chosen poem was Elizabeth Bishop‘s One Art. It stood out among the choices as the deepest, most vivid, clearest, many-layered poem of grief and endurance:

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Have I mastered the art of losing yet? Get used to it, she says. The villanelle form just a bit distorted captures the manic feel of the genre. Over and over disaster, master. It seems to take a long time.

What I miss most each summer is a nearby beach. There is none her in N.Va; there are only close-by lakes which are taken over by exclusive clubs; niches in the Potomac taken over by the super-rich of Northwest Washington (private parks). For all too short a time, Jim and I, taking our dog Llyr, would summers driven to Jones Beach on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The drive took 40 minutes; we’d arrive around 10 and stay until 11:30, with coffee and coissants. How the dog would romp in the water. No photos, just memories. I must remember he does not exist any more except in my mind and in the minds of those who remember him (Laura and Izzy), with the house around me and much that is in it gathered by us, which I keep up. (How relieved I was when Biden outwitted those horrific people over their manufactured crisis of a debt ceiling — they would have stopped all the money Izzy and I have coming in). If there was such a beach, I would get Izzy to come with me once a week, mornings, the two of us, with books … NYC public beaches everywhere, easy to get to. NYC is one of the cities I’ve lost, Leeds the other.

From the 1930s, Ken Howard, Beach Life

Ellen

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

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Me and Patty at Arlington House

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Among those books being read by me now:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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

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

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to close?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jill and Trevor (Yorkshire TV)

Their Yellow Van

Ellen

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

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

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

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

Dear readers and friends,

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

The OLLIs:

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

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

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

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

Others:

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

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

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

Online life:

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

Travel since Jim died

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

We are 76: diary entries for 3 days and nights; the brilliant wit of Magpie Murders … Songs by Sondheim, art by Sargent

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?

Ellen

Widowhood: I seem to be going through another transition

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

Late autumn, beginning my tenth year without Jim,

Ellen

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

Margaryta Yermolayeva — Witchy Art

Dear friends and readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Famous still of Tim Courtney running for life

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

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

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

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

The pig is intensely relieved, feeling a puzzled gratitude

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

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

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

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

Madonna of the Evening Flowers

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

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

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

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

The Taxi

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

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

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

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

Autumn: Early October days are hard for me

I don’t know who painted the painting this is an image from

“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love – that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one’s very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”
―George Eliot in a letter (Oct. 1, 1841)

The reality is it poured heavily and intensely last night but not enough to cause floods massive enough to wash away the neighborhood (as a hurricane has just done in Cuba and then in Florida), and today the air was filled with wet moisture and it rained lightly and then a bit heavier on and off all day, and tomorrow we are promised pouring rain once again, but nowhere near hurricane strength …. Oct 1, 2022

Dear friends,

Once again I must live through October 3rd (it would have been Jim’s birthday, now it’s his birthdate, 1948), October 6th (the day we met, 1967, and the day we married precisely a year later, 1968), and October 9th (the day or evening he died, between 9:05 and 9:10, me with my arms around him, 2013). He stopped talking to us on October 8th. Since that last grim October day, some years I have been at a conference, for early October is academic conference time across the US; not this year, but

I will no longer go to any JASNA conferences after the way they rejected us transparently (having registered almost immediately it took the organizers several weeks to drop us to the lowest rung of who might get in) during registration four years ago now, causing Izzy to cancel her membership for good (I wrote about this elsewhere, useless to repeat it); and now this year I’m not having any luck reaching the virtual forms of the sessions (live-streaming) so the money paid is the last dime the AGMs will have from me.

I was going to go to the annual EC/ASECS, where the sessions are to be held at Winterthur museum, the hotel is a drive away (Wilmington, Delaware), and two night time things also a drive — I can no longer drive at night. I remembered that Jim said the one time before the EC/ASECS held the conference there, the drive is hellish and twisting so we took an AMTRAC and then he rented a car. I was foolish enough to try to go with an untrustworthy (I half knew this) friend, a man who turned out also to be cunningly false, and without telling you the uncomfortable several week’s details, I finally told him to go by himself directly there, cancelled the hotel reservation, too embarrassed to be there while he would be (it being a small group you see), and not wanting any scenes, having told him never email, text or phone me again. I will hope to go next year, if they have it in a place where the sessions and hotel are the same building, and in a readily accessible place.

So here I am alone at night remembering. The Facebook software not knowing what was the content I wrote on FB on this day 2015, reminded me (they do this) of what I sent that day, and invited me “to share” this on my timeline. I did; the material contained a link to a blog I wrote that night: this was written before Trump campaigned and then won the election to the US through gerrymandering and the peculiar injustice of the electoral college (he did not win the popular vote) at which I turned the Sylvia I blog over to politics wholly: you will see how Jim and I resolved issues over the years together, with me admitting that most of the time one might say he won, but he got me to accede to what he wanted with terms set up I could endure. You will also see what he looked like the year before his body developed esophageal cancer.

And what he looked like the month we met, October 1967, in front of the Leeds terraced house we were living in together that first week: above is a mature man, below is a boy:

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Before I tell my readers here, how & something of why I am for this term and probably the foreseeable future online for all but three classes, and living most of my life online still, when I was hoping to go out regularly to teach in both places, lest you think I am more cheerless than I am. My mood (though near tears somehow) resembles Austen’s when she wrote

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

Over the past few days I’ve had some lovely letters from real friends, today I was on the phone twice (!) with two girlfriends who live in DC and we made plans to meet soon, a third friend I had happy time with lunching at a Greek restaurant at Dupont Circle has proposed a zoom together, tomorrow at 6 pm Izzy and I will have our monthly face-time with Thao (electricity holding up — fingers crossed). Tonight I enjoyed (not sure that is the correct word) — was fully absorbed watching Ingmar Bergmann’s The Seventh Seal, the first time I’ve seen it in decades, as part of an excellent course in “Movies, political, moral, aesthetic,” where I am one of those attending in person at OLLI at AU.

I’m as thorough going an atheist as anyone is likely to meet, and I do not think I’d find life easier were I to believe in any god or supernatural. It would have to be a hideously malevolent as the burning of that woman in the film — and that did happen and horrible tortures and deaths are happening in many countries. The film shows how much worse religious beliefs and practices make life for many. It’s so allegorical – I was interested to watch how consistent the allegory is with medieval art and texts as the austere noble knight (Chaucer), his earthy squire, the young wife and husband as circus performers (Renaissance theater). For the first time I understood what the famous image of Death and the Knight playing chess is about: it’s the story of the film, a kind of bet. If the knight wins, death takes no one on the spot; the duration of the game gives him time to go on a last journey; if he loses, he dies immediately, and those around him

The next morning the day dawns brightly and we see our young couple and baby hasten off before anything untoward could happen.

This season I’m finally reveling in Outlander, the sixth season, re-watching The Crown (for the sake of the queen’s story, I tell myself). I watch and re-watch Foyle’s War, each time more deeply moved, feel good at the ending as our “friends,” Foyle, Sam, sometimes with Milner or Foyle’s son, drive away … I have all three as DVDs with lots of features (which I sometimes enjoy as much as the episodes).

I am so chuffed my review-essay of the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Poems of Anne Finch has just been published in the Intelligencer. Soon I will write a blog about it, and put it online at academia.edu.

And I read away, these past weeks the profound brilliant James Baldwin (for an excellent and yes online Politics & Prose class) one of the greatest voices in American literature in the 20th century and of the African diaspora itself. I have said the last two years now I feel my outward character has changed to be more able to understand and even feel some ordinary sense of peace, security, and be able to read affirmative books and learn from them (I’m on my fourth Joanna Trollope — I come away having learnt a healthy lesson or outlook from her books), while drawing sustenance from the quietly bleak ambivalent — even in a Jane Austen sequel, Catherine Schine’s The Three Weissmans of Westport, a true updating of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

This enraptured review must be by a friend of Schine’s: The humor is the grimace and witticisms and irony (as in Austen’s book); the daughters are step-daughters who don’t love nor forgive the unforgivable stepfather who utterly betrays his wife (the Mrs Dashwood character) and left them for a character who shares a Lucy Steele personality with another character who pretends to be pregnant to get the Edward character to marry her. Like other sequels, she has in mind actors and actresses from different movies; Gemma Jones for Mrs Weissman-Dashwood, Hattie Morahan for Annie-Elinor, Robert Swann for Brandon (he keeps that name), Gregg Wise (though unlike his usual persona and the Willoughby of Emma Thompson’s S&S, the utterly untrustworthy and cad-like Willoughby (he too keeps the name) of Schine’s novel. Her novel ends with Annie-Elinor and Brandon character forming a quiet supportive friendship. I loved that.

The 2008 version of that journey from Sussex to Devonshire: I never tire it seems of Austen

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So what happened with my I’m beginning to think misguided attempts to teach in person. Only 9 registered for the course at OLLI at AU; hitherto all my Trollope courses regularly began with over 30 and ended with about 22. I went online, lost one person that way but added 4, 3 of whom come from further away and had told me they would have taken the course had it been online. I was shooting myself in the foot. 13 registered for the OLLI at Mason Barsetshire Then & Now or the Two Trollopes (Joanna and Tony), but only 6 showed up. I was devastated and saw the summer disaster that occurred in OLLI at AU when I tried Christa Wolf (she is too difficult for most readers I now know — as hard as George Eliot without the reputation to bring people in for self-improvement and self-esteem) this summer — it’s not enough to sustain a class over a number of weeks. I’m told this is the average number who show up in person (6); 4 came from the spectacularly enjoyable good class I did in person on The Woman in White and Mary Reilly for the 6 week summer course at OLLI at Mason. I’m also told that the over-riding factor is convenience.

So I must accept that what compels me to enjoy in person contact so much (truly perceiving what’s happening within students vis-a-vis a book) cannot motivate people in the class. Who among them is widowed in my way? For many what they got in person that they valued they feel they get via zoom. I have again misunderstood the nature of a social experience and the attitude of the people towards it. As I age, I admit also that driving even during the day is not as easy, and I myself as a member of the class find online delightful when the teachers and level of class are wonderful.

It’s not inappropriate to write of this on this first night of the coming week of remembering Jim since I turned to the OLLIs as a way of building an acceptable life for myself without him literally with me. So now I have had to change again: the pandemic itself has transformed the public world. I used to wish more people understood that life can be full and rewarding online; so here’s another instance of that fable, careful what you wish for, for you may get it.

My two cats and I have grown closer still. I find it so touching when as I prepare to go out (I do go out), whatever it be, getting dressed (shoes), putting stuff in my handbag, getting together stuff to take out with me, and especially when I either turn off my computer or put on a face mask, they both get up from wherever they are in my room and start heading for the door. It’s the awareness of me, and the desire to cooperate with me that moves me. Cats are sensitive, affectionate, communicative animals and they and I understand one another in all sorts of ways. At this point too Ian has bonded with Izzy, and stays a lot with her in her room: this is the result of the pandemic and her working from home remotely 2 days a week.

Ian sitting up for Laura

Clarycat on Jim’s lap — both photos taken before Jim died, say 2012 (like the photo of Jim above), the two cats are are about 2-3 years old

I close tonight with the lines Jim wrote for the top of the urn in which his ashes remain, which urn sits on my mantelpiece along side a photo of him, his reading glasses & ancient Anglican Book of Common Prayer; the DVD the funeral company made of photos across his life; a toy sheep Laura bought from the shop at Stonehenge that summer the 4 of us spent 3 weeks together in England, and a small stuffed Penguin Izzy added to the collection from her and my visit one summer to Sussex to go to a Charlotte Smith conference together (I could not have gotten there w/o her).

Jim’s play on Rupert Brooke’s famous lines: If I should die,/think only this of me:/That there’s a corner of a foreign mantelpiece that is for a while England.

Ellen, still his faithful wife