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

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

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

From Atwood’s poem, “Spelling,” 1981

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

My blog-reading friends,

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

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

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

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

Another angle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A good review

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

Another fine review

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the close-up

Him circling me, warily but wanting to be petted

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

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

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

Eleanor Tomlinson as Demelza (season 3)

Elise Chappell as Morwenna following Drake

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

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

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

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

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

Ellen

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Our time on the shore of Calais

Calais Sunset on the beach from high up on a hill —

Me and Izzy on a walk along French coast line — rocks along private/public beach leading to Cliffs opposite the Dover Cliffs

Sitting on a bench on the beach, Laura says, “When I grow very old or can retire, I shall move to Florida, and have summer all year round. Isobel will join me. I reply: “She will never leave her librarian job at the Pentagon until it’s closed (by a Trumo) or she must retire.” Izzy says, “It’s too hot in Florida in summer.” So Laura: “Then we can stay in the house (mine now, I will not be here then, so Izzy’s, to whom I have left my house) In summer and Florida in winter.” Isobel makes no objection. So I sit there imagining them together when I am gone.

Another time Laura says, “I’d like a dog.” I reply, “Only when you give up travel, give yet more of yourself, and are willing to walk him or her every day twice a day.” She replies, “I wish I could walk my cats.” I say, “I’d like a dog once I stop traveling, and if Izzy could accept him or her.” Izzy, “What about the cats.” Me: “Alas, they are not long-lived.”

Laura K: Yep, that’s one of my reasons for not having a dog…

Laura suddenly declaring “we are in the middle of fucking nowhere,” I finding this hilarious.

Dear friends,

I thought I would write my travelogues this time as a daily journal, because this time I came on a kind of voyage of discovery with my daughters. We did not follow a pre-arranged itinerary, where lecturers had been set up, and everything was done for us to provide a specific kind of content or experience. We were doing it ourselves and were not sure what we’d encounter. And part of what I wrote was in response to what others on my timeline (where these entries were posted), said

On the days leading up to the trip, I told people in a brief phrase we had taken a bnb at Calais, and was greeted by a chorus of doubt. What could you possibly do there? Why go there? people just pass through. Here are some of my replies before the trip:

Calais St Pierre Gardens, one of the first places we passed as we walked from the train station with our baggages to our bnb on the beach that first day

It was Laura’s choice. We said let’s go to the beach and then let’s do it in France. So, first she wanted Nice and I pictured tall hideous hotels on a bare beach — which is what I saw when decades ago I stayed at Nice a block away from said beach; so I said Northern France as by train we can get to Paris and maybe London too. So she rented a lovely bnb by the Calais beach. The place does have historicals: the English owned it for centuries, it has prisons, castles, further afield is Proust country. Although this won’t make it sound appealing, it is where The Jungle was located, where refugees congregated in huge numbers until the French gov’t-state apparatus bulldozed it.

Judy S: Oho! It got its first city charter from the husband of the (once and future) nun whose career I was following on my trek in SE England last month.
Me: In fact it is a city or town over-burgeoning with history; a channel port fought over from 14th century (Field of Gold in 16th century nearby) to WW2; a castle, prison, favorite place for mysteries because in history for spies; it’s where the French thought they could marginalize the refugees but found that it grew hugely into The Jungle, which they bulldozed away …. Once and Future Nun — who was this?
Judy S: Marie de Blois/Boulogne is the nun. She was King Stephen’s daughter, also Matilde of Boulogne’s; her last sibling died while she was abbess of Romsey. Matthew of Boulogne/ Alsace/ Flanders, younger brother of Phillip of Alsace/Flanders (Chretien’s patron), swooped in and married her, and they ruled Boulogne for 10 years and had 2 daughters. After a sort of friendly divorce, she went back to the convent, but her older daughter did inherit the title for Boulogne. Other points: for some reason I had always assumed the Field of Gold took place in England; I guess Calais was an interesting venue. I think the refugees were hugging Calais for the same reason, trying to get to England from what looked like a good departure point. Terrible events.
Me: I may be wrong: maybe it took place in England, but I remember going back and forth. Where were Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII first married: I thought they had a religious ceremony in France near the coast …
Judy S: You are right that it was in now-France–or at least Wikipedia agrees with you!

Calais along the canal

Here is my reply when we got back:

A thought: Calais is good for the very reason people seem to pass it by. It is *well-located* and has been for thousands of years; interesting things happened there because it’s well-located and a deep natural harbor, channel port near the Atlantic — half of Dunkirk happened at Calais; the Jungle formed there. Trade routes go through there to Flanders from France. Lace center at one time. The problem was no cabs — the local people are heavily working class, and more or less left liberal in the French way, and middling — it went for Macron and it is now angry at Macron for good reason. And the price of the train tickets. But staying at the beach was perfect. Jim and I stayed in a ducal hunting lodge (for him and mistress and horses) with Izzy one of the summers he was in the NATO group; it was just outside Chichester — cathedral town, with wonderful bookstore, a theater, a festival. Now not far was the Chitterings a beach, and not far London — but you needed to rent a car and drive on the left. There are towns near London and then the shore — the way Austen did it — but you must drive to do it. Buses won’t work. There were lots of buses around Calais: Laura found out the buses (one set round and round the city were for free -every 20 minutes!) and the expensive trains. Phineas Finn goes through Calais twice: to duel with Lord Chiltern and return. Who has not heard of Calais. The field of gold, Henry 8 married Anne Boleyn nearby. What more do you want? It came up first on google when Laura was looking for a very nice bnb on the beach equidistant between London and Paris. It was bombed badly in WW2. But unless you are French, live all along the northern coast or English across the way you would not go regularly. Best of all the beach was beautiful, the sunrises and sunsets, it was unspoilt, a holiday spot for local people, and not commercialized because not advertised as a place to go to; the bnb was so lovely — very comfortable kitchen, fully equipped, large comfortably furnished front room; two separate rooms, three rooms with pictures windows. Filled with light. And inexpensive in comparison to places people are told are alluring.

Walking on beach that first day — we are the other side of the English channel and can see the White Cliffs of Dover in early morning before clouds come

First entry:

I can’t sleep. Probably I am over-excited from the day’s many adventures. Oddly (so I have concluded) when I’ve been up way too many hours I have trouble falling asleep. We (Laura, Izzy, and I) are safely ensconced in a comfortable reasonably well appointed apartment. It has two large windows and glass doors overlooking a truly lovely beach which winds all around the coastline. It became obvious we are in a holiday spot for local people, lots of children, stores brightly lit on an extensive pier offering ice cream, French fries, other delights, at the end of which is a lighthouse. Not far by eye signs of port and harbor — huge ships pass in the distance. I’ve counted 3 lighthouses across this seascape. Our host and hostess (so to speak) kindly and helpful. Tomorrow we must find food for the flat (although the one restaurant we managed yesterday provided me with scrumptious onion soup, very thick with potatoes, cheese, toasty bits if bread and onion that is all I have had for many many hours), bus passes, make small plans on what to do daily beyond the beach and planned trips. We may have to use Uber as there are few cabs. This is a driving community and we are not up to renting a car. The local craft specialty is lace; culturally they are influenced by Flanders still. The young woman (Marni) visiting and caring for my cats has sent photos of Clarycat playing with her and eating, and has glimpsed Ian whisking away (crafty cat). Now for a sleeping pill. Cool winds through terrace.

I am into Phineas Finn. How marvelously does Trollope take you into his book: he overcomes all surrounding circumstance no matter what these are — travel is travail …Also reading book I picked up on The Jungle ( as it was derogatorily called). I watched PBS news and Malcolm Bryant on how these cruise ships are at last being reined in—the towns they exploit are now going to charge them and put up restrictions.

Judy S: That sounds lovely. How long are you staying? This is the second week of the big European vacation, isn’t it?
Me: It’s not a big European vacation ; we are away for ten days or eleven, including travel time. We are staying in Calais and hope onceto take Eurostar to Paris and once to London. We thought another day we’d go to another oval Brittany city or town; someone gave me a list. Today we began to get to know the city, did see a few places tourists and others go to see, and we were at the beach.
Judy S: I meant, the period when Europeans who live in the cities take their own vacations at the beach.
Me: oh I see. I misunderstood. Yes we are away at the time of (to use the phrase Eric Rohmer adopted for one of his movies) “the green ray.” Maybe that is why we are seeing so many people on this beach. The begin to drive up around 11; by 3 no parking spaces in many lots, so they park on the sand or grass. They flit away beginning around 5:30, and by now (well after 7 pm) the evening group is there, ice cream and other shops nearby the beach having opened.
Judy S: I just remembered the term in Italian–Fer’agosto or something like that. I remember enjoying the beach at Rimini, long ago, because you could watch the Italian families enjoying themselves.
Miranda S: Welcome to the world of beach parking! 🙂 Much the same obtains in Spain, before the European schools go back in early September: family parties, including ours (!), set up and stay all day. But my Spanish nieces are amazing competitive swimmers, even ignoring jellyfish (nooo!) as they power across their Mediterranean bay.. Check online what is open in Paris before you go. Shame to get there and find your choice of attractions closed…been there, done that on a day trip! We can travel from our local station to Paris in 3 hours tops, but it is a good idea to check the days of fermeture, before you commit. There are good restaurants round the Gare du Nord, by the way.
Me: probably all is chance on these holidays, at least after securing the plane and place to stay, and a way from plane to place (say a train or a cab) when doing things on your own, there will be misses. That has been my experience.

Harry Potter Fantasy Exit Kings Cross

This sapphire stars is at Victoria Gate, from where our walk began – the artist is Daile Chihuly

Second entry:

So today we took one of our longer day trips—into London by Eurostar. We saw and did a lot, but highlights were the 2 hours in Kew Gardens, a beautiful exhibit of glass art by Chihuly: Reflections on Nature, carefully strewn around a quietly planned rectangular walk from Victoria Gate, eating in a restaurant nearby in business since the 19th century. We walked in Bloomsbury, by the Library; in Kensington and went to the Victoria and Albert museum (should have gone to the Imperial War Museum to see non-French impressionism), were in crowds of people strolling and eating ice cream. For me each return is a return to Jim and aroused memory of many years of companionship and deep contentment. Here he was born, grew up, though it was in the US where he made his way as an adult successful male. Here I married him — at Leeds City Registry office.

Calais — the Notre Dame Garden

Third entry:

Today is partial rest and doing more necessary things. I exchanged a whole lot of dollars for Euros. We bought bus passes, shopped again, saw the local Notre-Dame de Paris. This afternoon the beach. Locally we’ll go through the modern city center (industrial, international, fashion shops, where people work), where are the big working ships we see from far. I have learned (astonishing as this seems) refugees first came to the part of the city where I now am (it has the town hall, parks, churches). Then they were pushed back from the larger coast where the Chunnel is located. A very hard and sad story across many years, still going on, but less so, so rendered invisible. The French British and Dutch authorities were somewhat humane, nothing like the cruel depravity of the US gov’t today. I’m drinking some comforting chamomile tea, eating port salut with French bread. My French (spoken) is coming back, word and simple phrase by word and simple phrase—in execrable Bronx accent. Reading Beauvoir in French to help—a travel book about a time she spent in NYC in the 1940s. At the time she felt it to be a place cut off from the natural world

Anny: Enjoy your deserved trip!
Me: In my old age I am finding the beach magical while I sit on the sand and go in the water.
Diana B: Too funny, French Bronx! My French teacher at Hunter, Madame Hopstein, had a Bronx accent too, so if I still spoke French it would probably be a la Bronx. Glad you are having such a lovely time, though I can see why it wouldn’t be my choice – I already live by the beach, which explains why I crave mountains! Always want something different from what we’ve got…
Me: I miss very much how in NYC on any day, but to do this weekday mornings are best, you can get in your car and in well under 2 hours you are on a beach. Many free. Nothing like that in the DC or Va area: at least 3 hours which means you c…See More Decades ago on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, Jim and I would drive with our dog, Llyr, to a small pretty area of Jones Beach where dogs were allowed. She liked the water. We’d bring coffee in a thermos and 2 croissants. Happy moments. I feel guilty that in later years I didn’t want to go to the beach. It was such a hassle, traffic jams (we had to go when everyone else did), have to rent this often snobbish house. I didn’t enjoy the context, and there was nothing to do but the beach. He would have to sit under an umbrella or his skin would burn and peel. Now I wish I had compromised more. It just wasn’t the free and easy thing of NYC — or southern England. We did go to beaches in England in summer where they were close to where we happened to stay for his job: free and easy. Pebbled beaches, cold water, sweaters. You went all the way to England to go to the beach? Partly, yes. We did other things too. So now we go all the way to Calais to go .
Patricia: I loved Jones beach as a child
Me: It was Orchard Beach we went to as children. We were all in the Bronx, and so was Orchard Beach so there were buses. To get to Jones Beach still you need a car. I believe it was your mother and my father who took us; your father worked as a taxicab driver; my father had no car. My mother preferred to go to work.
Diane R: Sounds like you are finding much to do and much variety. It is true we always want what we don’t have.
Me: Vacations take much effort and self control and patience and courage. You’d think they were just more life.
Patricia H: Oh how wonderful to relax on the beach
Me: Do you remember when we were small going to Orchard Beach where my memory says it took 6 buses? Surely my memory exaggerates, and it was a mere 4. Your mother and mine, maybe fathers too—but I don’t remember your father or my mother there, just your mother but that cannot be, as more than one adult had to carry blankets, towels and plastic picnic containers. I remember my father there, faintly. The sand was so white and hot, the water calm, all under a wide blue sky. All 4 cousins.
Patricia H: “Just remember Jones and Rockaway beach when living in the Bronx. Then I guess wading river beach on long island ( went every day)
Me: We never went to Jones Beach unless someone had a car. Your and my mother could not drive. My mother would never have gone in such a jaunt if she had somewhere else to go to in order to make money working. My father bought his first car when I was 13. Your father’s cab was the company’s and used for his livelihood. Rockaway is available by public transportation from Brooklyn, as is Coney Island. Not the Bronx. Yes once Aunt Helen sold her house to my father, and he basically made it a family house, we all went to the beach on Long Island’s north shore—very pebbly, high cliffs. The nearest town was called Wading River. Early on (before my father bought that house) we somehow were all at that house and experienced two devastating hurricanes that hit the North Shore: Diana and Carol. Do you remember these? Again the only two adults I remember in one frantic flight from one of these two hurricanes was my father driving and your mother sitting in the back of a rented car. Ask Richard what he remembers. The waters came up to the top of the cliff and Freddy Eilmer’s bar. It was terrifying.
Patricia H: Gosh I don’t remember the hurricanes. Yes the bungalow was a summer place for the family. All aunt’s vacations took care of all kids during summer, even aunt Stella. Aunt Stella would buy Danish from that bakery one time your mother watched us
Me: Yes I remember that extraordinary set of boils you developed on your back, and going to a doctor in Riverhead (who had many patients). You may remember my mother being there, because it was so rare. She took you (with me along) to a doctor that day. I went to camp only once and hated it, but I did not come regularly to that house (we did call it “the bungalow”) until after my father bought it. There are (or were) photos of me as a young child in front of a water pump and that can only have happened in the early days of that house. I remember Bill building it (with others) and saying this would kill him. I remember later in time Aunt Stella going to a bakery to bring back morning rolls and cakes on Sundays. Yes I have some memories of comfortable happy times in that community—dances on Saturday night at the end of the block, a place called the Sugar Bowl where teenagers hung out and all bought ice cream. I believe Carol met Billy there, a fateful moment for her entire future.
Patricia H: I do remember the dances at the end of the Street, I loved it. I think building the bungalow did kill Uncle Bill in the end
Me: he died young, early fifties, as you will recall a sudden heart attack. Building that house with his bare hands and tools and knowledge gained so slowly was just another of the stresses he endured. His wife was a hard and could a mean woman (she would refuse to talk to him in their house for weeks). He job as a printer was long hours and hard physical labor; the union helped until technology defeated the printers and the old good jobs began to disappear. He voted against his own interest (the Republican Party has been fiercely anti-worker since the end of the 19th century; nothing has changed there). He might have been happier had he been able to divorce and build another life or (staying) had a son. Carol is now fierce Republican. My mother went back to remunerative work when I was an infant; at age 3 I was left with Helen and she washed my mouth out with soap over something I said, and my father would not leave me with her again. If she was a pitiless woman (as was her mother though not so obtuse). Life paid her back. Among other things, her daughter married who she did to spite her. The scary thing about these Trump worshippers is he has become a God and die of or for hatred for them. Of course they will not put it this way.
Michele Reday C: Sounds like a great trip! Bon Voyage traveling in France!

Paris — the Seine

Paris — morning tour of Marais, ends on cheese and wine tasting

Paris the Musee D’Orsay

Musee D’Orsay hall

Fourth entry:

Today we spent the day in Paris and I can testify to a truly interesting and at moments transformative time. Laura had been determined to join this tour called “Paris by mouth.” The very name embarrassed me. It is misnamed. Perhaps testing food tour with somewhat nationalistic lectures intended to impress ( in front of apparently prestigious maker of remarkable food) would be more accurate—as in fact I got little to eat. (Very like a “Whiskey night” in Scotland which was sillily presented as an opportunity to be drunk when it was the barest tasting with similar long speeches.) The frame was historical: we walked all around Marais, (swamp), an ancient area of Paris, once a slum, now gentrified with these exquisite expensive shops. It was not widened in the 1870’s. Then drinking wine and eating good cheese. Lots of museums, and older buildings. Then in the afternoon I was dazzled by the Berthe Morisot exhibit in the Musee d’Orsay. I bought the first big heavy art catalogue book I have for years: so many pictures I’d never seen before. Reproductions well done. She has her own peculiar technique — and her own outlook and mood. Maybe now justice will be done. I will try to write on her separately.

Berthe Morisot, Field of Wheat

We wandered about the rooms of beauty—impressionist and post-impressionists, which I have not seen or not seen for years; then walked along Seine, saw what’s left of Notre Dame, the Louvre from far. Time was up: no time for a book and DVD store hard to find (as in “you can’t miss it” — “oh yes I can”). We did manage a bookstore in London. It was time hurry down to underground Metro to find our way to train to return to Calais. Laura took many photos. Tomorrow the nearby Cliffs by bus and the museum of lace work, and then we have earned another time at the beach. Not that we are not there right now as I look down from the terrace and listen to the sounds of the water and people in restaurants on pier while typing this. Someone playing the guitar and singing. I have neglected some (to me) funny moments. Laura suddenly declaring “we are in the middle of fucking nowhere.” I found this hilarious. Me telling her travel is liminality, and liminal time is anxiety-producing for me, and her answering: to me travel is getting from one place to another, with Izzy explaining “this is an anthropological concept used in other contexts—no longer uncommon”. Laura then looking this up on Wikipedia on her trusty cell phone.

Diana B: I love you can’t miss it, yes I can. Know it well!
Diane R: I too have experienced “you can’t miss it” as the guarantee you will!

Cap Blanc-Nez — Cliffs along the north coast of France

Escalles from the cliffs as high as we were permitted

Cap Blanc Nez looking down

Fifth entry:

I sent to face-book a panoramic photo of one of the two sets of cliffs on the Brittany shore we visited by bus today. They belong to the Calais area. It’s a scene of great natural beauty, but its interest is it was taken over and used by the Nazis after they conquered France. Huge machines of war, technology, and displays of military might were brought here and broadcast from 1941 on. The Germans tried to help their side from here in the Battle of Britain. Then when the Nazis felt they could not invade Britain, they surveyed the British coast and listened. From here Rommel had himself photographed surrounded by other known Nazis. The Germans fueled deadly planes with bombs from here. They succeeded in preventing the Allies from landing in Brittany (the landing was Normandy). Propaganda to intimidate was sent from here. Not long ago many encampments of refugees spread out along this coast.

The Nazi monument

Flowers Nearby

Today the cows, sheep, people enjoying themselves walking, swimming, bicycling, dressed up to eat out in nearby elegant restaurants were what was visible. We all three spent a long morning using local buses exploring the coast, walking mostly. At one point while waiting for a bus an English gentleman type said to me “how strange to come here for a holiday when there are so many more interesting places to visit.” The choice of Calais as a beach also puzzles all but the people who live here and also come to visit. Laura said I should have asked him why he is here, the puzzle comes because you are supposed to go to Nice.

Diane R: Lovely–it seems to me you are precisely in an interesting place because not everybody goes there. Those places are the true finds–and you are conveniently or semi-conveniently located near two major cities.
Me: I should have said it was Laura who took this and several other magnificent photographs.
Judy S: I was going to ask. That’s the sort of thing I would never bother to learn because when will you need it? But you are right, it is magnificent.
Me: We learn things for the joy of knowing and being able to do things, here remembering how it felt. What need does anyone have of Arthurian legends? What use 18th century poetry? Remember Lear on never ask a person what he or she needs? What use are so many thing I spend my existence on?

Sunset from our Window

Sixth entry:

Around 9:30 pm Calais time on Thursday evening. I am sitting on this terrace which closely overlooks the beach. The beautiful colors of the sky (pink, orange, faint yellow, shades of darkening blue) are finishing and fading. The sea has gone dark blue. I can, though, still hear the surf, and sounds of cars passing, human beings below, all around sbout. It is very cool, and soon (in this light nightgown) I shall have to go on the other side of the glass sliding doors.

Dunkerque beach

Dunkerque Park

Dunkerque Monument on beach ….

Today we made it to Dunkirk by local train and back. It was an 8 mike walk altogether across the city to the Dunkirk park and garden (with sculptures including one of red poppies) to the monument on the beach, and them a converted large bunker now a museum. A video of about 15 minutes made up of clips and films of the events and swarms of people, ships, planes over the for days. Countless died, the French who were rescued were returned to Vichy France and taken prisoner. Some of Churchill’s speeches, to its credit also the one where he said one does not win a war by evacuation. The museum itself made up of arefacts found rotting and otherwise on the beach, photos, and (like the African-American museum recreations using mannequins. Tonight the finest level of food (like a poor fish caught) simply but rightly cooked. I now retire to Amy Goodman news report (if I tell the name I get a picture that functions as an ad) and the Judy Woodruff hour (dittto) via this iPad to hear the latest, and then absorb myself in Trollope’s Phineas Finn.

Brent Donna R: Sounds enchanting!
Me: Laura’s message (and another panorama on her timeline) remind me that alongside a bridge just by the Beach not far from the Memorial too was a young man playing the bagpipes. Why he was doing this we could not know, but it was the right music for the spot.
Brent Donna R: It is all so amazing! Bagpipes have become a symbol of mourning and remembrance.

Calais Lace Museum from outside

Olivier Theyskens fashions — just two pictures from vast exhibit and slowly stunning experience of history and art

Seventh entry:

So today we saw a remarkable exhibit tracing the history, art, and uses of lace and lace-making — it is all women’s art gradually integrated, modernized, capitalized upon, often taken over by men. It was not dull but continually alluring and insightful. Two huge floors, from earliest ingenious tools and ceaseless female labor (I thought of Wolf Hall where Mark Rylance watches Natasha? as Liz, Cromwell’s wife intuitively winds several threads at once) through all stages of industrialization and fashions. Accompanied by just the right examples of complicated technology (amazing machines), beautiful lace objects as part of all sorts of clothing as one moved through the ages. Dressed mannequins embodying each decade. All in soft lighting. This Musee de La dentelle Calais was also showing an exhibit of Olivier Theyskens fashions which seemed some how fitting. I was reminded of the Laurent Versini exhibit two summers ago now. I was enthralled then too, but there is no single catalogue book of the museum—only this exhibit and individual books on individual topics. I loved many thing there, elegant subdued versions of late 19th and some early 20th c fashions, but tonight the colors he achieved in some of the dresses stand out in my,ind: curious rich dark reds and acqua-blues.

I did not know the punch holes of the earliest machine made lace are the true origins of computer tech.

We had taken a bus again round and round, this time allover Calais, and beyond, and had learned of a Musee des beaux arts, by a park garden, which we went to in the later afternoon. There was interesting modern urban art exhibit , a few older masterworks, but nothing as a whole surpassing like the lace museum. (Photos from Laura presently).

And we finally reached the local vast cathedral:— a Notre Dame, much bigger than I thought it would be, begun in tenth century as partly a fort, expanded in 13th century (so very high spaces, arches, windows, columns, the like); beautiful Tudor garden; then again the two world wars hit hard, and it was bombed and all glass windows destroyed; now slowly being replaced by modern stained glass art.I admit the churches in France seem to leave me cold. Too overly ornate, busy with absurd statues and (to me) gilded decorations. It was funny to see a row of such statues lined up against a wall: no where else to put them, they looked so out of place.

That sigh of relief and quiet I sometimes feel in a church (so I wish there were no tour guide or groups of people) I am feeling rather on the beach in these past couple of years. Yes. Something contemplative takes over—some experience of reaching nature’s rhythms and letting go by just going and sitting there. Though part of it the moments in the water staring at the sky. I look out and see the blank wall that encloses us as earth’s atmosphere.

We did the beach too today, Izzy wanted to; then got all the way in and frolicked in the waves—it was windy most of the day. Watching the conscientious lifeguard I suddenly recalled a time when I was young on Rockaway beach where the waves were wild and high. I hear my father’s voice saying to me “watch those guys, they are perpetually pulling people out.” Sure enough. They are not just there as show-off males but watching intently and with those tubes suddenly running in and pulling people out. How old could I have been? Today’s French young man nearly scolding a couple with two small children going out foolishly far.

Another extravagant gourmet dinner and then the serene beautiful sunset over the Channel. I can’t sleep, overexcited from so much in the day.

Patricia H: Oh I would have loved to see the lace being made. Four years ago we toured the Biltmore in North Carolina.They had a mannequin displaying of beautiful simple lined lace wedding gown. Breathtakingly beautiful.
Me: If that is a super-rich family’s mansion in Asheville, I’ve been there. It resembles an English country mansion.
Patricia H: Yes Ellen, we were going on a trip for our 50th anniversary , Richard invited us to stay with them. He lives in South Carolina about 45 minutes away.

Lille Braderie statue – many of these lined the streets — enormous balloon looking sculptures

Lille Art Gallery museum — closed, far shot includes Izzy sitting on square

Lille — a 17th century building

Eighth entry:

Win some, lose some. Laura declared us defeated at Lille today. I am not sure it was an unmitigated disaster. What happened is when we arrived (after a slow non air-conditioned train trip 1 hour and 1/2) was we were confronted with a mass fall festival. We and 3 million other people had come to the already fourth largest city in France, for today & tomorrow all northern France seem to come to Lille for this early September festival cum-art and flea market. Also a fun fair in the Central Park area (so I named it), which effectively cut us off from a famous huge protective wall and fortress we had thought we would see from the outside (no ordinary people allowed in). The rides were as scary as anything in Coney Island. People, people everywhere. Eating, drinking, buying, milling about, all talking French. The famous Louvre-like museum ( if you believe the hype) was for free, but we get in and discover all the art is closed off, and what’s left, a massive used book sale. If there were any quiet nice restaurants, they were obscured by masses of on the spot cafes. Loud bands, and unrecognizable celebrities everywhere. I felt we saw the culture of the area. Jim would have said as he did of local flea markets and “estate” sales of Alexandria, Va, so-and-so is putting her shit out. We did see and Laura photographed still standing 17th century complex buildings (beautiful if we could have gotten closer, a cathedral (gothic, maybe 14th century). My guess is for reasons I now nothing of the Nazis neglected to bomb this place flat. So we got back on the train and returned to Calais.

High winds and strong chills here so Izzy and I stayed in to make ourselves plain pasta and scrambled egg. Yet it felt very hot this afternoon in Lille. I probably now have a bad cold and sore throat.

We are recovering. Tomorrow a beach day (weather permitting). I’ll try to phone my lovely taxi man who made London and Paris possible, to confirm he’ll be here Monday morning at 8:30 am to take us to the local train station or we are “up shit’s creek.” I haven’t learned to use Calais numbers. I never thought I’d say this but outside Paris (and maybe truly large cities) France is in desperate need of Uber.

Me: This morning I could see the whit cliffs of Dover from this terrace. This evening fall has arrived. Suddenly much colder, a deep low tide so human figures seen far out. The water dark blue.
Rictor N: You will laugh at the memory in the future.
Me: Towards the end of most “times away” (how I term what others call holiday, vacation, travel) I often find myself repeating a line from Austen’s Mansfield Park. Fanny Price has been at Portsmouth over a month now, and has realized she now thinks of Mansfield as her home, and repeats a line from one of Cowper’s poem voicing what a boy might feel in one of those boarding or public schools: “ With what intense desire she wants her home”
Diana B: Yup. I have thought of that line on every single trip I ever took, no matter how magnificent! And, what Rictor said.
Me: That’s interesting, Diana, from the way you picture and comment on your trips I would not have expected such a sentiment. No I won’t eventually laugh st what happened today. Remember some truths are omitted (of what occurred). Maybe I’ll be able to cry. It’s hard for me to let myself cry. I’ve hardly cried over Jim’s death when I think about how I’ve felt and all I’ve Endured since. Once a bit older, Fanny cries only when her cruel aunt and stern uncle emotionally assault and berate her.
Diana B: But of course – I have almost always said “with what intense desire,” and to *you*; I know we picked up the saying of it from each other! 🙂 It is true, most of my trips have been the very greatest happiest memories of my life, the things that stand out, and there has been surprisingly little negative, little for me to “hold back,” not to tell on Facebook. Even so, there is always that “intense desire” moment, to be home. To be with Peter and Paul and the cats, my quiet routines. And THAT thought is what reconciles me to the fact that even the most glorious trip has to end. So I say it. It is good to travel; and it is good to go home.
Me: I do hope I have not given the impression this trip has been magnificent. There have been interesting new and good times. And I have yet to get home without going through an ordeal; if I manage that, on the whole it’ll have been worth the time, effort (considerable), patience, self-control and money. Oh courage too.
Diana B: Ellen no, I didn’t get the impression you’d ever said “magnificent.” That’s my feeling about trips because, living in bland California, they mean everything to me. My impression about your trip was that it was curious how many people’s reaction was like mine, “Why Calais?” and you proceeded to show everyone why! Because it IS interesting; because it is France, and Europe, and history; and because staying off the beaten tourist track is often the very wisest thing to do! That you banged into a tourist event by accident just proves that point – but these things do happen, and by no means “ruin” a whole trip: of course not! Have a nice last day or two, a safe trip home, and it will have been a very fine and successful family trip indeed, and one to *your* taste, no one else’s! And that is what matters.
Me: Yes that is what I was doing: showing this is a remarkable and vacation-beach place. I ought to be paid. But I have also been writing to write somewhere. I find face-book is the cyber space I can write easiest in using my iPad. Finally these are diary entries, capturing my actual mood on the day of whatever it was. They will save me the trouble of writing a travel blog for this trip. I will string them altogether with a few pictures from Laura. I could write separately on that museum of lace because Izzy did come away with a free full description (with a few pictures) of the place. That would be interesting for Austen, considering how she probably spent too much time sewing—as women did then. And remember her shoplifting aunt stealing a card of white lace.
Diana B: Yes, the diary aspect and ease are among the things I do like about Facebook. Ideal for running trip descriptions – satisfying to write, and everyone likes to read them, too.
Me: I looked up Lille for the first time on Wikipedia; it is a major city in the region, with a long (2000 BC), varied history (sometimes Flemish, part of Burgundy in medieval times, then again French, took an individual position during the Revolution,alas occupied by Germans during both world wars). Prosperous from its textile industry originally, now fourth largest city in France. Hubbub for modern travel. The Braderie fair which we encountered yesterday dates back to late medieval times; it attracts 2 to 3 million people.
Brent Donna R: Taking trips away is courageous. It is change which most fear. Brava to you Ellen!

Poppies are seen in many places — this is from the two cliffs

The Seagulls

Ninth entry:

Today a relaxing day by and around the beach front, watching mingling with people and birds. Air has too much bite, wind and water without strong heat too cold to get in. Izzy taking photos of nearby aggressive seagulls. I bought from supermarket some yummy onion soup; with that, scrambled eggs and wine and tea I nurse my cold. Izzy and Laura plan an inexpensive meal tonight in one of the beach places; Laura tells me (and I tasted some) French soft ice cream is delicious. We cleaned up, packed, ready to be out of the apartment by 8:30 am tomorrow; if taxi does not show, Laura assures me it’s less than a 20 minute walk, even with bags, and I figure that’s so, so we should make our first train home at 9:06 am.

Now very sunny, light cool winds, near 6 o’clock, we sit on terrace watching: a steady stream of cars coming onto the beaches (ours is just one) for the last hour, more, also buses: groups on young people on bikes; young men on noisy motorbikes; a scene of people enjoying themselves in various ways; lots of family groups, all sizes and types; their dogs; many birds, especially seagulls; one side ice cream, fast food places, two piers, lighthouses, fishermen, beyond that Dover ferries going back and forth across the channel. One the other more apartment houses with terraced condos, playgrounds, restaurants. Lots of voices and sounds. I read Phineas Finn, Isabel watching tennis on iPad, Laura busy with cell phone.

Day and night, night and day, ceaselessly the two ferries go back and forth from Dover to Calais, Calais to Dover. Daytime you see whole huge ship carrying cars, on decks little passengers seen from afar. Tall stacks are engines. High cabins for captain and crew? But at night ship vanishes and instead you see a kind of odd vision: you see moving slowly high rectangular rooms ablaze with neon and other lights, inside the frame up and down lines with more faded lights, as these rooms seemingly tirelessly go back and forth. Sometimes the two are passing in front and behind one another. At first I didn’t realize these rectangles were the ships as visible at night. From our large picture windows …

Miranda S: Britain is an island. We need those ferries for our food and to connect us with the rest of Europe…along with the tunnel, which is admittedly quicker but lacks the sea views.

Lastly, a Calais sighting in my novel: Lord Chiltern challenges Phineas to a duel. Dueling illegal in England by that time and liable to prosecution so they do it on the sands of a Flemish beach. How do they get there? Why all four plus doctor separately head for Dover and then to Calais before proceeding to Bruges and these sands on the other side of (in the middle of fucking) nowhere. And then back through Calais crossing over to Dover… We could see the white cliffs of Dover from our terrace on clear days.

Pictures of our cats while we were away

Clary Cat close up — Marni was very loving to her

Clary comforting Ian

Ian alone, early on he looked harrowed, and here is more himself

Tenth and last entry:

I’ve been home for over 24 hours but am having a hard time re-adjusting (sleep patterns all awry) plus so much to do to catch up and compensate for not being here (like doing my bills) so no time for diary entries or blogging as yet. I want to say after the long ordeal home, especially the tiny space in the plane where I didn’t have enough room to lean down to reach my purse or fold my knees, I am convinced a law should be made that airplane companies are not allowed to have more than half the number of people per plane I was with on this last plane. All Americans should boycott all planes until such a cut in numbers is achieved. As the plane landed safely and became a jam-packed bus, and we escaped that crazed scene …

I did turn to Laura and say of the whole time since first we met at the counter at Dulles 11 days before, “The charm is wound, the deed done” [paraphrases from Shakespeare], we had a good time, no? Yes” she said. As we parted at the cab stand, I said, “you this way, we that.” We all 3 had agreed maybe we’ll do it again in another year and one half. But it was a wrench to turn away.

Diana B: Do it sooner!
Me: It cost a great deal of money. I’m already committed to going with a friend on a Road Scholar in August 2020 to “Enchanted Ireland” (maybe it’s 12 or 14 days?) and twice a year would run me out of money before I die.
Diana B: I see and understand your point entirely!
Me: I would go quicker if I could. Izzy and Laura pick up their share too and they too have to watch expenses. Want to know what we dreamed of this time? a week or so in London or near some Italian lake in the north of Italy at different times of year (not August into September).
Diana B: We have to find the right balance between having enough to live on, and not wasting our last good traveling years *not* traveling. I think a sight of Italian lakes is essential to stock up one’s minds eye with what Byron and Shelley and Mary saw!
Me: Well there are other things I enjoy much more than touring or living in another culture for a while (or returning to Jim’s); the travel itself (the long distance to get to where you tour) is a miserable ordeal. This year I had more happiness is other ways than this past week or so. So I’d say finding the right balance for what you find pleasure in and what you need — for example, in my case, teeth to eat with. No small expense for me. Yesterday it cost me $1095.00 for a new denture as my old one is cracking and for some seal to keep the old one in repair in the meantime. This after the Kaiser discount and paying for Delta Dental supplementary insurance. Laura’s medical bills are very high because ACA has been decimated of funding. She pays for her “office,” with its two computer screens and printer. Izzy’s deepest pleasure is watching ice-skating, tennis and writing. There are books I delight for hours in: I brought home an expensive beautifully made book filled with the art and essays on Berthe Morisot. There’s making sure my house is comfortable and paying people to clean, keep the yard, also keep my car in good order. Moments with friends out somewhere in local space … there’s walking in the woods on snowy evenings, which Frost forgets to tell us cost (as in it costs to breathe ….). Ian was harrowed in the first couple of days; Clarycat is continually half-crying looking about to make sure we don’t vanish. They matter too.

Tree Next to Calais station

Final thought several mornings and long days and nights back home again: it does not matter as much where you go, or what you specifically do at all — as long as what you are doing relaxes and gives you pleasure. The deeper reason for going away is going away. You escape your condition: whatever is the place you live in and all its troubles, and right now the public world of the US is infused with vileness and punitive exclusionary policies, much of them based on money, but others on the spectre of imagined identities. For me I escape the thoughts that bother me daily about who I’ve become, what I have not done in life, if you will my failures, and some of these are hard for me to accept even now. I escape my isolation for hours, maybe it’s for another kind but it is one that is another kind. In this holiday time away I was with two people I care about very much and hope care about me. The result is refreshment, a different perspective partly from the coloring of the area in which we found ourselves, and when you dare a new place, you never know what it is. So it can be a learning experience if you open up to it, don’t insulate yourself though accident, anxiety, and mistake, and all that liminality can bring will have to be endured. It was a good time for us on the whole, new places, renewed thoughts of old (for me, Jim again and my life with him), different books to read. I read the book about the Calais immigrant townships that sprung up and (like Occupy Wall Street) were destroyed, though not so ruthlessly as in the US, Michel’s Agers’ The Jungle, which will be the first book I’ll blog on on JimandEllen when I begin that blog again.

All that said our favorite places and experiences were at the two cliffs and walking along the northern coast of France, the Cite de la dentelle et de la mode (as the Lace Museum Frenchified it), the Kew Gardens experience. All day in Paris came next. Best of all our beach and the scenes from our high windows. From Philip Larkin’s High Windows:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

It was the kind of holiday time away Jim would have liked; he would have been moved by the Dunkerque beach, museum, bagpipes. I shall now try to re-see Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, with Mark Rylance saving us all, quietly in his unobtrusive sweater on his and his son’s fishing boat.

Ellen

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Another time away: Cornwall again, John Berger in the comments

The Falmouth Hotel

I am not as I have been — Benedict, Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, me after six years sans Jim

Friends,

A tout a l’heure. A first photo ahead of time. I’ll be going to Cornwall, starting out May 13th in the afternoon and flying home the 22nd to arrive mid-afternoon. A second time.  friend who will be on the tour with me (I met him last year on the Road Scholar tour to the Lake District and Border country) sent me the promotional photo. Falmouth Hotel, first built 1865, with chateau-style architecture and surrounded by lawn and gardens. A seafront location. I don’t know how I’ll manage to imagine Verity Poldark here … But I can imagine tonight the people who will be on the tour, older middle class people. I have checked out all the places we will visit in Cornwall against a map of the place and will bring a map with me so I can know where things are relative to one another.

I have at long last been diligently reading my books on Cornwall, finishing those half way through, looking at those I’ve finished, trying to make it all vivid in my mind so I have the place and its history fresh in my mind – I will take with me a Daphne DuMaurier novel (Jamaica Inn?), Graham’s Warleggan (Poldark 4), I’m still hoping that Peter Maxted’s The Natural Beauty of Cornwall (he is one of the two Road Scholar leaders) will have come in time. I might best enjoy Bate’s book on Shakespeare, Soul of the Age! (I loved his Future Learn lectures, 1-3, 4-8) but my copy is a heavy hard-back, a beautiful book, but can I lug it? I admit the book that got me through the Lake District last year was a hard-back, beautiful book, Lucy Worseley’s Jane Austen at Home.

One of the real reasons I go away is this way I am with people doing things, looking at the world from a safe vantage provided by Road Scholar and I have gone in August twice because there is no teaching at the OLLIs and most events going on in DC and here in Virginia come to an end, or occur at night and it is so hot here, just about impossible to go out. Looking at the Road Scholar itineraries I found many places don’t have an August set of dates and that was true of Cornwall and I did want to go for the sake of this Poldark project of mine. (That seems to me ironic — and also indicate Road Scholar types don’t worry about when in the year they go. I would have thought August was a vacation time.) So I am making do with mid-May.

All Road Scholar three trips have been to the UK not only based on what I have read but because Jim and I went there once and I’ve wanted to go again or he and I never made it (Lake District). Another motivating force is each year to return to the UK where I met and married and first lived with Jim. England and the countries on these isles have a strong nostalgic memory meaning for me which I’m renewing each year. It’s like I’m going back to him, to where what happiness in life that I’ve know started in England with him in Leeds. “This is where.”

Jim would have picked out this from a book shelf: see John Betjeman at St Enodoc Church, Cornwall

Come on! Come on! This hillock hides the spire.
Now that one and now none. As winds about
The burnished path through lady’s-finger, thyme,
And bright varieties of saxifrage,
So grows the tinny tenor faint or loud
All all things draw toward St. Enodoc.

Where deep cliffs loom enormous, where cascade
Mesembrynthemum and stone-crop down,
Where the gull looks no larger than a lark
Hung midway twixt the cliff-top and the sand,
Sun-shadowed valleys roll along the sea,
Forced by the backwash, see the nearest wave
Rise to a wall of huge, translucent green
And crumble into spray at the top
Blown seaward by the land-breeze. Now she breaks
And in an arch of thunder plunges down
To burst and tumble, foam on top of foam,
Criss-crossing, baffled, sucked and shot again,
A waterfall of whiteness, down a rock,
Withot a source but roller’s furthest reach:
And tufts of sea-pink, high and dry for years,
Are flooded out of ledges, boulders seem
No bigger than a pebble washed about
In this tremendous tide. Oh kindly slate!
To give me shelter in this crevice dry.
These shivering stalks of bent grass, lucky plant,
Have better chance than I to last the storm.
Firm, barren substrate of our windy fields! …

19th century church: St Enodoc, Trebetherick, North Cornwall: Betjeman may be buried here?

And I’ve not given up my dream of a study of Winston Graham’s Poldark novels, working title now, A Matter of Genre.

Speaking of travel, or at least navigation, my garmin is fixed! working again. The man I found to fix it said I must treat it far more gently, and I will. In the meantime I’ve made some progress in learning to use Waze. I now know (more or less) how to get to “where to.” Izy and I did this on Sunday using the Waze to get to the supermarket. But alas I cannot figure out how to shut Waze off. The voice carried on telling me of road conditions.  It kills me how people will persist in saying this or that in electronics or digital things are so easy. They never are to me. I have no intuition and when I do something I must do it several times before the sequence of motions sticks in my head. I assure you I had my heart in my mouth as I drove to the place and tried to find this man without benefit of GPS (though I had taken a mapquest map).

But I now do have two working GPSs!  So one to use and a back up. I should get lost less often and have courage to try again to get to Politics & Prose Bookstore when I come home from Cornwall. I have become a member. I see they have mini-courses all year round, staggered across August too. I shall keep an eye out for a course I might enjoy and try it.

Laura told me over dinner (see below) that the pizza place next door is a where a wild myth about Hilary Clinton and child-trafficking occurring in a basement emerged in brains of impoverished crazed white Americans — Jim and I went there several times after hearing lectures at Politics & Prose — for pizza and to watch a classic movie playing on in a screen above the tables — one lecture I remember by Colm Toibin, who disappointed Jim; Jim had not yet learnt to compromise when you go to a fine author’s lecture for the public generally …

I am told one is paid to teach the courses there, and can see from the site that the people who teach there include people like myself, and I suspect a course once a month or four times over a month on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet might be welcome and go over very well. A new goal … I am well into Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and reading it with the Italian of Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta under the English text. A profound text.

From the film of My Brilliant Friend, Lila and Lenu reading Little Women together (I carry on with Anne Boyd Rioux’s Writing for Immortality about 19th century women writers & artists, two of whom are Louisa May & May Alcott)

I just finished teaching Trollope’s CYFH? and in the class where the institution encourages people in the class to provide an honorarium in cash, I cleared $300. A card with many generous thank yous. At the OLLI at Mason, the last class went very well too. In both I again had my Macbook pro laptop and showed clips from the Pallisers, using the cursor and a scroll along the frame of the in-built DVD, good talk after. The Mason group appeared genuinely interested in my Enlightenment: At Risk course. So I will have plenty of cash to take with me, and I will bring Andrew Curran’s Diderot, or the Art of Writing, at least one book by one of my Booker Prize Short and Short listed books (the course I’ll teach at OLLI at AU in June) authors, perhaps Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 and 1/2 chapters.

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Wednesday was Isobel’s 35th birthday, and so an anniversary for me who gave birth to her too. Yesterday I remembered how on my 35th birthday Jim sent me Johnson’s poem to Hester Thrale:

On her completing her Thirty-fifth Year

OFT in danger, yet alive,
We are come to thirty-five;
Long may better years arrive,
Better years than thirty-five.
Could philosophers contrive
Life to stop at thirty-five,
Time his hours should never drive
O’er the bounds of thirty-five.
High to soar, and deep to dive,
Nature gives at thirty-five.
Ladies, stock and tend your hive,
Trifle not at thirty-five;
For, howe’er we boast and strive,
Life declines from thirty-five;
He that ever hopes to thrive
Must begin at thirty-five;
And all who wisely wish to wive
Must look on Thrale at thirty-five.

I didn’t send it to Izzy because she would not understand it — instead I sent her a lovely Jacquie Lawson card — it looked like a 19th century book illustration in black, white and greys and ivory colors and is gradually filled with colorful flowers, music En Bateau from Petite Suite by Claude Debussy.

I replaced a broken frame and put a photo taken of Jim and I two mornings after we had met, had come together and were living for a week in an attic flat in Leeds. I then realized that in my sun-room I have no picture of him, so now it stands on a medium bookcase where I can see it from my chair as I read. The way we were:

I am just 22, and he is 20. As I look at myself I see the same face that appears in my profile picture. Much smoother, rounder, high cheek bones but the same face, also my hands are the same. Just the color hair. Mine is grey-white now.

But he lost that sweet boy look soon after we came to live in NYC, so well before his thirties. His face no longer so round and flat, his beard much fuller. His very skin color lost the whiteness; I have some intimate photos of him looking very gentle but am unwilling to share these; one close up shows the same features in a face altered by 8 years in another culture:

Tonight we went with Laura and her husband, Rob, to dinner on Friday to Izzy’s favorite restaurant, the Olive Garden on Columbia Pike. The meal delicious, the place comfortable and pretty, we had some cheerful talk — about Laura’s trip to Chicago this spring. She was surprised by the intense cold and wind. The restaurant gives so much (yummy) food that I, Laura, and Rob brought home 3/4s of what was on our plates.

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This Gorey drawing with colors is the April picture in my desk datebook, and now that April’s done and we are into May rains, I share it here: a fair metaphoric representation of humanity too. I have all five Gorey books — Jim enjoyed these enormously.

Thus I conclude on my two beloved cat companions.

One sign of how ClaryCat is now middle-aged is how she now sits or lays calmly in her catbed by an open window which has an awning overawning it, which has 2 bird nests on its inner shelves. Eggs and a momma sparrow with occasional visits of papa appear seasonally. When Clary was young, she be all over Jim’s desk (on which the catbed lays) in hectic excitement, trying to reach the birds and knock down things. Now she sits there and makes little whimpering or squeeky noises. Very alert. She looks out and sees a great deal from that window of interest to her: other birds, squirrels, she follow noises. But just sitting now — staid. She also stretches out luxuriating in the sun in my sunroom for considerable half hours — something she didn’t do when younger. She murmurs at me as we go through our days and nights together. So does Ian when he first turns up (after periodic hiding) again. “Here I am again,” he is saying; he comes up to my chair sometimes and puts his paw on my arm. I’ve read that cats do not instinctively make noise to communicate — it’s their long association with people that prompts this way of communicating.

Clarycat

I so love my Clarycat.

Often when I’m about to go out and I find her latest trophy toy (the tiny mouse has disappeared), a sock with catnip in it (long gone) laid over my shoes. Nowadays she puts this sock where I am or have been just or where something I’ve just worn or read is. She will trot about with it in her mouth, making crying sounds to get my attention, before she puts it down. Just as she used to, her little mouse. Above is a photo of her on the other side of my computer before she stretched out in the patch of white light sun to sleep.

I look at their bodies and see (from books) what are signs of middle-agedness — they are in their early 50s. A pouch; they are no longer that graceful or agile as they run. His face is funny colored and longer. Well look at me — remember the opening of Persuasion; we don’t want to be like Sir Walter, do we? and not realize how old we get. Ian still loves to play and his favorite time is just before supper; he waits by a colorful string attached to a kind of funnel, murmurs at me, and I take it and he wrestles and plays until he has had enough.

They are also wiser, mature in their interactions with me and so am I with them. I shall miss them while I am gone, and they me.

Ian, his latest favorite place high on the cabinets where he can see me and thinks I cannot see him (like Snuffalupagus)

In the long days and nights, my cats’ murmuring at me or meowing in a talking way and my talking in English back to them breaks the silence — mornings I use my ipad and listen to the Pete Seeger channel, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, but just as often Nanci Griffiths or Mary Chapin Carpenter with other women singing country.

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Just before going to bed, I’m watching Andrew Davies’s magnificent Middlemarch (1994) — having finished his Doctor Zhivago (2001). Zhivago done in by war, revolution, his own susceptibility to tenderness and integrity. My favorite line was his stubborn reiteration that what he wanted to do with his life, his hours, was what he could do with it best: be a doctor and write poetry. Leave him alone to do what he can that a few others might value in the world.

I had forgotten the story of Lydgate to some extent: the thwarting of all his hopes to do some real extensive good in the world, to be a scientist, the political and career angle of the book. Davies brings this home so poignantly — also the story of Farebrother. I had also forgotten just how truly masterly is this earlier film adaptation. It is so detailed in the speeches, and they are so intelligently done and pointed. Middlemarch stands out as a high standard: fully intelligent believable thought, these truly well and carefully studied, integrated scenes of several complicated human presences at once are not what’s wanted any more. My midnight project is to go through everyone of Andrew Davies’s films.

Douglas Hodge as Lydgate: young, eager, unbowed — come to think of it like Yuri in Zhivago, he dies relatively young – so here is the pull, why Davies lit on this pair

Juliet Aubry as Dorothea hard at work on plans for cottages for workers

I also read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing bit by bit (after seeing YouTubes of his famous series) and fretted that I am going away for false reasons, allured by publicity pictures of un-reality, desirous not to be left out of this other (luminous?) world. But Pas de fantasie? Last words read by me on some nights putting out the light are words of sex reverie from an Outlander volume.

Ellen

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Spring: Recuperating the Self: the work of a lifetime

“Daffodils/That come before the swallow dares, and take/The winds of March with beauty” … aka spring. Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale (Act 4), once my favorite of all Shakespeare’s plays: I once taught it.

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve rewritten, re-framed this blog so as to give it an adequate framework: recuperating the self:

Get leave to work/In this world — ’tis the best you get at all — Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1853-56).

This morning I took this photograph of some of the daffodils in my front garden — under the miniature maple tree not yet in bloom …. There are other circles of tiny daffodils on both sides of the house (two circles of flowers and bushes are there), and there are some tiny white crocuses in another part of this circle under the tree, and tiny buds here and there in all the plants that survived and have now popped up green … To me they are living images of hope and each individually has delicate beauty.

I need to see them this way.

The British are not the only group of people being forced to leap into risk

For these past two weeks I would not be telling the truth if I did not say that the externals of life have hit me hard: I have been rightly terrified over the coming plane trip since I am flying Southwest: we now know that added to egregious abuse of passengers to wring the last dime out of them, planes are being rebuilt to hold more people and things and thus becoming unsafe.  Then I was reeling after coming home from the AARP having made out my tax forms and uncovered an unexpected and large tax bill such that I must change my withholding on my monthly annuity and social security checks so as to live on less from here on and pay it bit-by-bit over the year. I am floored by the online boilerplate and relieved my financial adviser has promised really to help me do this when I get back from my trip. The obscenely expensive pills for hepitatis C are working (no sign of the infection in the latest tests) but I’m tired, head-achy (have again scraped my car badly), but each night sleep more deeply than I’ve down for years, except when waked by anxiety-dreams stemming from the coming trip- and conference-ordeal, these renewed money fears.

Ian also has had a hard time recovering, in his case from the new cleaning team, with their loud machines and quick work, now here twice and left a truly clean house (for the first time in years my windows are clean); it won’t do to think about the sums this switch cost me. The business is run by women and only works the first 2/3s of each workday.

After a many hour disappearance, walking about so lightly that his bell did not tinkle: he hoped to escape notice and at first would not eat or drink.

So where to find that peace and trust I can live out what future I’ve left in my quiet ways in this house.

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L. Scott Caldwell, left, and Shinelle Azoroh in Gem of the Ocean in Costa Mesa.

Well throwing myself into what I am capable of succeeding at doing, and thus enjoying. This past two weeks I have taught/led a class of some 23 retired adults reading (apparently with real enjoyment) Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? and myself as a class member felt new interest in rereading the first three acts of King Lear and watching the 2008 Ian McKellen version (director Trevor Nunn, with outstanding performances by the actresses playing Goneril and Regan) and the 2016 Anthony Hopkins (director Richard Eyre, with outstanding performances by too many to mention). Despite the cutting, the Hopkins-Eyre one is the vastly superior by original direction and Hopkins’s performance). I’m stunned by Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean and Joe Turner Come & Gone, only beginning to realize the lack of fundamental safety, security, ability to accumulate, and radically de-stablized relationships and lives this causes — a journey through the century from an African-American perspective. With my two list communities, I’m reading EBB’s Aurora Leigh, which I know I ought to be more affected than I am, and Margaret Kennedy’s Together and Apart, which, by contrast, I’m having a visceral personal response to the point I find myself blaming the heroine for not caring enough about her children, for in effect abandoning them, while on what seems a sort of whim at first, she pursues a divorce.

Wednesday I leave for Denver, Colorado, to endure a three-day conference on the 18th century (ASECS) and have my paper, “After the Jump:” Winston Graham’s use of documented facts and silences,” down to 19 minutes. Winston Graham has taken up much of my time therefore, with intervals filled by absorption (when I can) with Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name, Margaret Kennedy’s Together and Apart. I’ve added Somerset Maugham as an author who would shed light on Graham’s peculiar story of a blind man in internecine post-WW2 southern France (the hero stalks a heroine of the resistance), Night Without Stars, and am into Jeremy Poldark, a deeply melancholy troubled yet loving book once again. I now see that the murdered young woman in his Take My Life (I understand the title as a cry of the soul) and this heroine as seeking safety, the first women was destroyed by cruelty, meanness, the tunneled ambition of a schoolmaster; the second rescued as a fellow disabled person to return to quietude in a quiet corner of England. I came to this by watching a modern so-called “thriller:” In a Better World: To call it a thriller is so wrong, it’s hilarious: The film brings out the trauma underlying some thrillers which the thriller distorts in order to sell widely, and there are authors who appear not quite to understand the fundamental groundwork of such texts. I must write this up separately.

I’ve gone on to the intelligent Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies (which begins in the 19th century and takes the story to the 21st) and Ann Rioux’s Writing for Immortality, on four American women writers whose determination to write well for the sake of their art will be explicated as a fight for self-esteem and creating works of integrity, so am now eager to include at least one 19th century American women writer amid my Anomaly women. When I read Traister, I realize I am somewhat compensating for the loss of Jim: in small ways I am learning to live the way she has, learning about a world outside my coupled life. It is as yet on the edges of my existence because I have not managed to hold onto friends or a group of friends locally. Throughout my life with Jim, though, if the truth be told I would have one girlfriend usually, a kind of best friend, and so this pattern is one I know, only now I see this in a different context. I know I am right to value my FB women friends (and men too). I understand Laura’s life choices better too.

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My solitude, my self … at night (when I write these blogs too, gentle reader)

Shadow of the Tower: Episode 4: The Serpent and the Comforter

I’m riveted nightly by yet another episode of the truly astonishing 1970 BBC multi-episode studio drama, The Shadow of the Tower, with James Maxwell — why is not this more famous? A blog will follow when I’ve gone through all 13 hours twice. I started it after it was recommended by an uneven Future Learn on the Tudors I’m following just now.

Episode 4 is a study of people about to burn alive a man who has a set of radical common sense beliefs — one guard becomes unwilling and realizes this is all wrong and so does the king but goes through with it — so it’s idealized but this allows for conversations between the man and guard and king. We don’t see the torture off stage as they attempt to make him recant — just hear it and it’s agonizing to hear and then see all the signs on the man’s body. The real thrust is to shove in our faces at length the deep inhumanity of man to man and also the fierce unreasoning religiosity of the era as a cover up for power plays and fierce demands for obedience to strict conformity. James Maxwell is brilliant as the king throughout the series: witty, somehow likable, warmly human in his closest relationships, subtly intelligent yet peevish, neurotic, but effective, slowly becoming a terrifying inexorable monster to others because he has been given such power

I am also nightly now making my way through all Andrew Davies’s films, beginning with deeply mourning from within as I sit up and feel with Claire Foy’s inch-by-inch agon as she copes with her half-mad neurotic father played by Tim Courtney. Half hour by hour I am her — as I am Lila and Lenu.

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On the Net, I’ve been stirred by the life and work of another woman artist, one I won’t write a blog for (as I would be wholly inadequate) but can here invite my readers to dwell in the Spitalfields bloggers’ essays: on Dorothy Rendell:

Dorothy Rendell, View from Standhead (1955)

http://spitalfieldslife.com/…/an-exhibition-of-dorothy-ren…/

Then Stephen Watts, described as a poet and novelist, wrote about her art, the legacy of what’s left:

http://spitalfieldslife.com/…/the-legacy-of-dorothy-rendell/

Rendell, Studio Parrot (1960)

Now the gentle author preparing for a lecture, shares with us the Rendell’s drawings and illustrations:

http://spitalfieldslife.com/…/03/12/dorothy-rendells-london/

Her first (posthumous) solo exhibit:

http://spitalfieldslife.com/…/16/dorothy-rendells-solo-show/

The gentle author is pseudonymous; I originally assumed the writer is a woman, but recently I’ve become aware the writer is a man — he has begun to use a pronoun for himself. Also that more than one person writes this blog (Gillian Tindall has written here) — it’s astonishing high quality, frequency and point of view are all outstanding, but also the amount of knowledge displayed. Probably it’s find-out-able if I tried or asked someone who knows people who are part of real art worlds in London.

One we learned in another blog that a pub that has been on the site since the 17th century, with one period of total obsolescene and desuetude (between 1970s and 2000) is now to be razed and replaced with a hideous mall that will look like a thousand others

http://spitalfieldslife.com/20…/…/13/so-long-the-water-poet/

This touches me because in one of my periods of being alive I spent all my time reading and writing about the early modern Renaissance and 17th century. Anne Finch was a later 17th century poet who lived into the 18th century. This blog is or should be of interest to anyone interested in the long 18th century.

Most recently, at and on the Whitechapel Bell Foundry:

http://spitalfieldslife.com/2019/03/17/dorothy-rendell-at-whitechapel-bell-foundry/

Camille Cottage, Castle Hedingham with red chair (1970)

W.S. Merwin has died, and an FB friend pointed me and others to a New York Review of Books essay-review by Ange Mlinko on Merwin’s life and poetry as that of an whole earth troubadour, who learned his art by the humble practice of learning other languages and translating wonderful poetry in them. I liked this (though I taught myself Italian enough to read and to translate it, and now need to return to it and to French

There is nothing for you to say. You must
Learn first to listen. Because it is dead
It will not come to you of itself, nor would you
Of yourself master it. You must therefore
Learn to be still when it is imparted,
And, though you may not yet understand, to remember.

What you remember is saved. To understand
The least thing fully you would have to perceive
The whole grammar in all its accidence
And all its system, in the perfect singleness
Of intention it has because it is dead.
You can only learn one part at a time.

The ghost of a sestina (invented, they say, by the troubadour Arnaut Daniel) haunts these six-line stanzas, with their repetitions of individual words (though they don’t repeat mechanically at the ends of the lines, as they do in the sestina). What is repeated? Learn, dead, remember, understand. As the poem goes on, it repeats saved, intention, order, passion. Here is the fifth and final stanza:

What you remember saves you. To remember
Is not to rehearse, but to hear what never
Has fallen silent. So your learning is,
From the dead, order, and what sense of yourself
Is memorable, what passion may be heard
When there is nothing for you to say.

Merwin in his last year of life

The question is, how to recuperate the self. Mlinko believes translation is the suppression of self and that in poetry at its finest we suppress the self, we make something from nothing tangible or new as I have done tonight: Guilhem IX’s “Farai un vers de dreit nien” (“Sheer nothing’s what I’m singing of”)

This reminds me of Virginia Woolf: she wanted Anne Finch to transcend herself. This is mistaken, or need to be put another way. We can never leave ourselves, but what we can do is throw off the attacks and pressures from all around us (the wolves of society) and recuperate by following our true bends with integrity. That is the work of a lifetime. Finding who we are, and as Pope said, following nature, our nature. Making what we can. Recuperating by flowering out. I can link August Wilson’s plays to Shakespeare’s this way too: although we do not know what was his private life, only that he is incarnate in his plays.

Dorothy Rendell, Jerena at Harry Gosling School (1960): recuperating the self — look how beautifully Rendell has caught the child’s hands, the textures of her jacket and skirt, her body inside them ….

I have taken to going to Evolution Home, a consignment shop for furniture where older things are rescued. I am making my home comfortable by buying appropriate (for my needs) tables, retro clocks, rugs, baskets for my library of DVDS (kindly sent by a friend so that I have such a collection of splendid wonderful movies, often BBC). Rearranging furniture, making corners for pretty things and where I do my work. All recuperating the self, having respect and concern for myself and what I see. I hope you don’t need photos of these, for there’s not much to see. It’s the inward experience behind such changes I’m trying to steady myself with.

Ellen

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Weary Penelope — & the poetry of Ithaca

J. J. Sempre one of my favorite cover illustrators for The New Yorker: the reading group — I like the tone, his pictures often filled with human kindness and need fulfilled. Often pleasant landscapes & rooms.

Keep Ithaca always in your mind — C.V. Cavafy

You will go uncompanioned, but go you must — Theo Dorgan

Friends and readers,

I got through last week with much reading, some in-depth, the close reading sort, then immersion in films, and writing, writing, writing and hurrying about to classes. I’ve out in (so to speak) for some new experiences: I’m to have a visitor here with Izzy and I in our house, the night and morning before I go off to the East Central ASECS (American Society for 18th century studies, regional conference) in Staunton, Virginia, with me on the long drive there and then again back three days later, and again staying over the rest of Sunday and Sunday night. I cannot remember doing that in all my 71 years. I told the people on that tour group around the Lake District and Scottish/English borders I grow weary, tired with all this learning, all these new experiences. But here I am again. How do people do this? I never got the memo of instructions.

Shenandoah Shakespeare Company — Jim & I have been to Staunton many times to see this company — where “they do it in the light”

I’ve returned in thought and reading to that project I developed into a CFP and paper: The anomaly: the adult woman living alone: widows, divorced women, spinsters. You might remember it, I was given 2 (!) panels because 6 papers came in that were thought related, and an editor from LeHigh University said if I could develop it into a collection of essays they’d be interested. I tried to publish my paper on Widows and Widowers in Austen, but Susan Allen Ford didn’t care for my perspective, and I didn’t know how to go about to write prospectus, and worse yet, gather contributors.

Well I’ve been re-thinking this — from reading Barbara Pym on WomenWriters@groups.io or not quite sure why, from thinking about early modern or Enlightenment women? — and come to the conclusion one obstacle was I was mis-formulating the very core title. A male hegemonic point of view has been obscuring that immediately I write down the phrase, what do I do: I begin to formulate the group by defining each woman there as there because of her relationship (or lack of one) to a man. The assumption is there needs to be some sort of explanation why a woman is forced into this, not that she wanted it in the first place — spinster as we know has such negative connotations (like bluestocking). And when I come across essays on these typology the assumption immediately is that the woman is clubbing together with other women or doing this or that because without a man she has not the wherewithal to support herself on her own.

Adrienne Rich

Diane Reynolds had been reading Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Experience” and pointed to that. I read it and find she writes about how men have denied women their own continuums of sexuality, one of which begins with the mother-daughter bond, can move to sister-bonds, female friendship and then for some sexual engagement. Why is “sadistic heterosexuality” more normal than lesbian and mother-child sensual bonding. The “rich interior” life bonding with women is marginalized as unimportant. Her desire for work of her own apart from her functions serving and being with men discounted, or (in many societies in the past and some today) forbidden. Diane points out though the dilemma is not to move to see the choice as simply happy as to chose it is to be hedged about with incomprehension, misunderstanding, disapproval, circumstances become to hard to cope with. “A single woman has such a propensity to be poor,” says Austen.

Think about things from a perspective not yet formulated. Do something never done before. Me who resists change. We have been talking about one theme of Forster’s Howards End on TrollopeandHisContemporaries@groups.io: how moving is often an experience of existential loss, of one’s identity and past erased (herein is it like experiencing the death of a beloved person whose life intertwines with our own), all the sites, symbols, things suffused with memory thrown away, re-vamped, the very streets one lived on when we come back we find have vanished. To leave this house would be to lose what enables my life. Forced into a new life, much barer, stripped before the world.

Joanna David as the displaced Elinor Dashwood in the 1971 BBC Sense and Sensibility (scripted Denis Constantduros, perhaps the first BBC film adaptation of an Austen novel & among its earliest scenes)

Lucy Worsley (JA: At Home) suggests Austen’s fiction fueled by her loss of her original home and her heroines’ attempts to recreate, re-find a new one.

Kauffmann, Angelica: Penelope Taking Down the Bow of Ulysses

I told the people on Trollope&Peers (the list’s abbreviation) how Jim read Forster’s letters with C. P. Cavafy and tonight will end this brief excursus with Cavafy’s poem (translated from Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard). Here the courage needed for life’s adventures and the experiences you might enjoy so are set out before us:

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

— original Greek linked in; or read aloud

and Theo Dorgan’s response (for Leonard Cohen)

When you set out from Ithaca again,
let it be autumn, early, the plane leaves falling as you go,
for spring would shake you with its quickening,
its whispers of youth.

You will have earned the road down to the harbour,
duty discharged, your toll of labour paid,
the house four-square, your son in the full of fatherhood,
his mother, your long-beloved, gone to the shades.

Walk by the doorways, do not look left or right,
do not inhale the woodsmoke,
the shy glow of the young girls,
the resin and pine of home.
Allow them permit you to leave,
they have been good neighbours.

Plank fitted to plank, slow work and sure,
the mast straight as your back.
Water and wine, oil, salt and bread.
Take a hand in yours for luck.

Cast off the lines without a backward glance
and sheet in the sail.
There will be harbours, shelter from weather,
There will be long empty passages far from land.
There may be love or kindness, do not count on this
but allow for the possibility.
Be ready for storms.

When you take leave of Ithaca, round to the south
then strike far down for Circe, Calypso,
what you remember, what you must keep in mind.
Trust to your course, long since laid down for you.
There was never any question of turning back.
All those who came the journey with you,
those who fell to the flash of bronze,
those who turned away into other fates,
are long gathered to asphodel and dust.
You will go uncompanioned, but go you must.

There will be time in the long days and nights,
stunned by the sun or driven by the stars,
to unwind your spool of life.
You will learn again what you always knew —
the wind sweeps everything away.

When you set out from Ithaca again,
you will not need to ask where you are going.
Give every day your full, unselfconscious attention —
the rise and flash of the swell on your beam,
the lift into small harbours —
and do not forget Ithaca, keep Ithaca in your mind.
All that it was and is, and will be without you.

Be grateful for where you have been,
for those who kept to your side,
those who strode out ahead of you
or stood back and watched you sail away.
Be grateful for kindness in the perfumed dark
but sooner or later you will sail out again.

Some morning, some clear night,
you will come to the Pillars of Hercules.
Sail through if you wish. You are free to turn back.
Go forward on deck, lay your hand on the mast,
hear the wind in its dipping branches.
Now you are free of home and journeying,
rocked on the cusp of tides.
Ithaca is before you, Ithaca is behind you.
Man is born homeless, and shaped for the sea.
You must do what is best.

Here the poet is online reading aloud:

I have been companioned these last couple of nights though: by Claire Tomalin in her marvelously good A life of My Own picked up for £5 cash in Keswick — she is keeping me good company just now

Ellen

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A Canterbury Tale of Road Scholars (1)

Lake Windermere, the largest of the lakes (second is Ullswater, all others much smaller, meres, waters)

There is a comfort in the strength of love;
‘Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would break the heart … ” — Wordsworth, Michael

Dear Friends and readers,

I’ve been back from the Lake District and Northumberland for two days now, and am re-settling in. I fulfilled a long-held wish thoroughly: for six days two tour guides, one from the area, Anne (with a strong Lancashire accent) and the other originally from London, Peter (so a sort of Cockney accent now laid over by several others), who was said to know a lot about local northern border history, took 20 Americans on two mini-buses for an average of 8 hours a day up, down, and all around the winding roads and many lakes of Cumbria. Immersion. Like last time, the first night we were asked each of us to tell why we had chosen to come to this area, and a little bit about who we are. I spoke (briefly) of my bad miscarriage in 1974 in the Lake District, which had led to Jim and I spending the five days we had planned to travel about in, in a small Kendal hospital, that I had come originally because it might be said 5 lines of Wordsworth’s Michael decided me in my line of life, English major, teacher of English literature, then literary scholar and college teacher, writer. I had come back alone because my husband died 5 years ago, but I was there with him in my spirit. I came to England after the first year every year since he died.

Otterburn Castle, where we stayed — the Internet access was dodgy, but my room was magnificent, large, with a landscape tapestry above my bed

That first night was indicative of an important aspect of the trip this time: it was a Road Scholar experience. I had not realized this so strongly last time. Last time had been 7 days at the Aigas House restoration ecology estate (2 days arduous traveling), in Inverness, and I sort of put down what happened to John Lister-Kaye, and his wife, Lady Lucy, with their hierarchical ways, and various interning science students as guides with deep interest in the area, its history, its culture, gardens, cookery, animals, the Scottish environment and history. Now I realize whatever they were individually, and the local culture, the program was shaped, inflected by the Road Scholar point of view, which is thus far educational touring. There are athletic programs, and (I was told) much more “commercial” ones with a large group of people, say a cruise. I thought people were friendly but last time had gotten to know only a few people’s names well, and little about them individually (one woman artist, a widow, working in New York City, and another never married woman who lives about five minutes from me especially); I just saw most of the people as types. This time it was some 11 days (again 2 day traveling ordeal), in three hotels (one in Manchester one night at airport), two places, Lake District in Cumbria, Lindeth Howe Country Hotel, Bowness, which had been Beatrice Potter’s country house mansion; Otterburn Castle, Northumberland, which had been a Peel Tower in the days of ferocious Reiver violence, then a 10th century castle (which is from the outside still what it looks like), renovated again and again, especially in Victorian and then later 20th century. The Aigas experience dominated by two people, all tourists in single large bus, with little free time, evenings occupied too (lectures, music one night); this time four different Road Scholar tour guides, evenings free, a full Sunday free day to do what I liked — I mostly sat in front of a real fire reading Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques. Free hours in several towns — I saw exhibits, and there were pre-paid lunches sometimes together, sometimes separately or formed into smaller groups: Keswick, Grasmere, Hawkshead, Jedburgh (Scotland), and Durham. This time by the end I knew everyone’s name, something of the history and character of each individual or couple; they became very vivid in my mind. I keep hearing one man’s pleasant voice.

The tapestry over my bed in Otterburn castle

One problem I’ve been having is I dream of them. Each night I find myself waking early and not realizing I am in my house in my own bed living my usual life in Alexandria, but coming out of a dream which is inhabited by these people, and for a few moments am so confused as I try to work out which hotel I’m in. Usually when I wake from a troubling or obsessive dream, I break “the spell,” and it stops or is transformed so that the material is being lived in by someone else and begins to fade. But today I had a brief nap in the afternoon (I am very tired) and found the same phenomenon occurring: I woke in confusion, got up and began to walk about, stressed, to see what was happening now, where I was, only to find that I am home after all, not surrounded by these others, but rather my two very loving cats:

Clarycat missed me badly: Izzy said Clary would not have anything to do with her, but remained in a kind of retreat, and until today Clary has been yowling at me (vocalizing) in a harsh tone, now she is simply all over me, all the time. Ian did sleep with Izzy, stay around her, and at first stayed with that pattern, but today he began to nudge me, rub me, stay close, playing, and making me alert to his companionable presence.

You see some of the group: the woman with white page boy hair facing us and other woman, helping her, is the fellow New Yorker, Barbara (same accent as me): Inside the Hermitage: a place of fierce cruelty. The story repeated is how Bothwell was badly wounded trying to arrest some murderous Reivers lords so Mary Queen of Scots rode here to see him. She didn’t stay long. Walter Scott included it in a couple of his historical romances …

I don’t want to intrude on anyone’s privacy, but would like briefly to name and describe them (using substitute first names) so as not to forget. It was a group of people very similar in type, age, profession, and marital status and income to last time: ages from mid-50s to later 80s, mostly retired, though some had jobs they could carry on with in older age or volunteered (teachers for example, writers).  Mostly pensions from years of working were enabling this. Both times I have been in all white groups but then my choice of literary writers and places would lead to that.

5 married couples in their sixties to mid-eighties. Larry and Lea (from Oklahoma, he wrote a poem for the last night, not very good, she boasted of how he was thinking all the time); Clarence and Sheila (from Alabama, not far from Asheville, North Carolina, where they attend an OLLI as students; he a retired mine owner, she with him had had 4 children, then discovered she was good at running non-profits, he went to Yale, she Vassar, living a charmed life, by virtue of wealth from his career, and a sale of property in Florida so that today they have a beautiful apartment in Tudor City, Manhattan too, conservative democrats); Bob and Cynthia (New York Jews from Rochester, he a practicing psychiatrist of the old school who really try to help people, humane brilliant witty man, interesting to talk to about human relationships, with daughter who was a White House correspondent but quit after Trump and wrote a book about a community destroyed after a corporation left, Janesville (Amy Goldstein), Paul Ryan’s home town); Sandi and Dave (from Florida, decades ago he traveled with a friend all over southeast Asia, he kept getting left behind, at one point locked into a dungeon like fort-castle, he was determined to do all as if he were 40, and not so forgetful, refusing one of the guide’s offer of his van instead of walking, she told a story of a previous miserable Road Scholar cruise tour; as in the previous trip here was a couple who were living in a late second marriage); Rick and Maggie (she originally from Australia wrote a wonderful Chaucerian parody with vignettes of all the people channeling different Canterbury Tale characters, which gave me the idea for the title to this blog; he helped me download my boarding pass from my cell phone in the 10th century castle renovated into a hotel, the hotel reception clerk helping; otherwise they go from holiday to holiday, from Broadway play to musical). All with children and grandchildren.

Four aging widows: me; Norah (from North Carolina, husband died at 40 but as alive in her mind today as he ever was, an environmentalist, she has written 7 books, gave the impression of countless articles, reviews, post-polio she called herself, but personally daring, at dinner an effectively sharp tongue when she wanted to); Suzanne (also North Carolina, Bavarde, social worker, psychologist, doing good work with groups trying to raise minimum wage, kindly easy going mostly silent lady with a cane, lucky to be alive after many operations, husband died 24 years ago next month); Sara (Cape Cod, widowed 3 months, in throes of trauma, ceaselessly talking, insistent). Two sisters, Ginny and Linda (from California, perhaps divorced, perhaps widowed, living near one another, lots of stories, one a teacher of disabled children, teacherly; the other living this seeming cheerful life, so good-humored, with children living these successful prestige lives of university, laboratory and business). One widower, Gary, turned out to be divorced years ago, brought up his children himself (Swedish by background, has traveled to every continent, so many countries, son lives in Germany and talked of how good life is there for him). All with children and some grandchildren.

Steve, one of the 20, at the Wallington House conservatory gardens

Single people. Two never married women living in mid-town Manhattan, Dorothy (successful academic art historian professor, interested in 12th century church architecture, lived much in Italy, worked for the Met); Barbara (high school teacher in English for 35 years, I liked her, we compared notes on British costume dramas, including Poldark, liberal democrat, Jewish her talk of nieces, nephews, brother she reminded me of Vivian). They told me of how in the last 10 days of August, the Met Opera puts up a huge screen in the Kennedy Center square and screen one a night each of the 10 HD operas for that year for free. Who knew? and other stories of delightful lectures, poetry reading (Jeremy Irons reading Eliot’s The wasteland at the 92nd Street Y. One single man, Steven (from Texas, MD, PhD, pathologist, retired has taken or is taking anywhere from 17 [to 34?] Road Scholar and Overseas adventures tours, highly intelligent man, vegetarian, up early in morning, walking away, something of a loner,thought grave by the others, prickly).

One conversation. How what we use as words matters. Somehow famine came up, and I said that famine is not the result of not enough food in an area; it’s that a group of people have precarious entitlement to the food that is there, and the amount of food goes down, becomes scarce and prices soar. Steve said, “yeah, it’s a distribution problem.”

Then two of the tour guides who were with us most of the time: Anne, “happily divorced” (from the Lake District, northern Lancashire accent, thoughtful of everyone, conscientious, a model of patience, good driver, knew a lot about the area’s culture and history and geology, botany, bogus and real history, very bright, as so many Brits accepted her lot and the world she finds herself in, loves to hike, bike); Peter, now living alone on a small island (from London originally, said to be an expert in history, he did know the fierce legends, about battles, lively and tactful, bubbling over if a man can bubble over, also conscientious and knew better than a GPS where everything is, except when he got tired).

Something like 10 people had Ph.Ds, several had been teachers in college or high school, a librarian, three physicians. People with professional certificates. Three business people.  A well-educated bunch of people (like last time). Comfortably well off but not above trying to save $200 say in the fare. A number had been on quite a number of Road Scholar tours.

I learned as much from being with these people as from being on the trip. I found myself remembering back to when I was 5 and asking myself where I was or how I related to all the different houses we visited, museums exhibits I saw, amid all these different eras and varying cultural groups (Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, French Normans, Reivers, modern English, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish) who left their rubbish and precious things and writings and inventions, and made the world we are now living in a palimpsest (if we will only look) through whose relics, remains, and texts we see them. I am become versions of my central self after these 6 plus decades, first in New York City, then in England, and now in Alexandria.

Lady Mary Lowther (1738-1824), The Waterfall — from Stephon Hebron’s In the Line of Beauty: Early Views of the Lake District by Amateur Artists

Most days were sunny and very warm by noon, though I needed the fleece I bought for the trip by the later afternoon; it would rain now and again. The mini-bus going up and around in narrow twisty-lanes sometimes very close to a steep edge of a cliff made for excitement at Hardnut and other passes. I began to wear my training shoes towards the end.

So, gentle reader, now I have prepared us to tell of my latest pilgrimage on Ellen and Jim have a blog, two. It is crucial to understand that everything I saw and did was in the company of these people and the choices I made were limited and shaped by their presence. It is not true that when one visits a site de memoire what matters only is the history of place, its function as a symbol to a culture, but what is being done at the moment, how it is functioning today as what 20th and 21st century people do around it and as a result of the visit. I will now go on to describe the tour itself.

I did read away for a couple of hours a day every day while away, and (among other volumes) my remarks blog style on Gina May’s moving biography of Madame Roland, and her famous memoir, and Lucy Worsley’s Jane Austen At Home will be found on Austen reveries.

Ellen

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Milan Diaries

Via Navigli, Sunday March 25th, Antiques sale …

with my friend, Luca Gandolfi

The cats of Campagnatico,
Which are never fully grown and have never
Been kittens, will not move for the honking motorist
But expect to be gone round — Peter Porter (1929-2010)

Friends,

The last of my Milan diaries. I’ve described wandering in central Milan on Friday, 4/16 afternoon and evening, and Tuesday, Wednesday and our neighborhood. We are come to all day Friday, Saturday morning, and a long Sunday morning and again in the evening into night.

We began Friday 4/23 by heading for fabric stores and bookshops. Laura likes to sew and make herself clothes. These were goals to take out outside the core place of cathedral, castle, and environs. We took trolleys and trams to find two fabric stores and two used bookshops.

New Tess, Milan

When we entered the fabric stores, at first the owner and/or employees wondered at us, and seemed decidedly uneager — they seemed to me to sell to the privileged. There was a language barrier, but as soon as they realized Laura meant business, somehow all was accommodated, and she came away with some beautiful material folded in rectangles in big shopping bags. For myself I bought Enzo Striano’s Il Resto Di Niente, a fictionalized biography of the later 18th century Italian woman political radical and poet, Eleonora Pimentnel de Fonseca, tragically executed during the brief Neapolitan republic of 1798, Elena Ferrante’s La figlia oscura, and Mario Soldati’s Lettere da Capri. Used bookstores in Italy are polite, quiet places, small, subdued, books set out in alphabetical order by the author’s name within categories.

We did go to Rizzoli’s and I could not find any Italian book that I might want that I did not own already. I was dismayed to discover that like US bookstores, there are less books than there used to be. Things are set up in fanfare ways: I found and bought (Italian) Atwood’s L’Assassino Cieco, traduzione di Raffaella Belletti; in the “classics” E.M. Forster’s Passaggio in India, traduzione di Adriana Motti.

What did we notice in all (some elite and expensive) and ordinary neighborhoods of apartment houses, shops, small parks? Laura noticed that Italian women tended to dress in black. A male-kind of jacket, sweater, subdued, black skirt. Very unchallenging, unobtrusive. Men very casual. Suits for those clearly going to offices.

People are permitted to bring dogs into public transportation as long as the dog is somehow kept close in a carrier of some sort. All on leashes and all small. People must buy or adopt dogs small enough to put in carriers to take on buses and trains. The dogs look nervous when the jump is made onto a trolley, but trust to the master-friend. Just about all these dogs had sweaters on (it was cold), but I spied no boots, so I conclude no corrosive salt is used to remove snow and ice (as in NYC). One woman’s dog’s sweater matched the color of her cell phone cover.

It was distressing to me to see how beggars behaved – very like in France. Utterly humbling themselves. Abjectly squatting on the street like they were praying. Alas, there was no place next to one of them I kept seeing to put money.

We then hopped onto a trolley that took us back to the park in the back of the Castle Forza (which I described in my last blog), and visited a museum with very contemporary art:

Outside sculpture

Unlike older museums (Castle Sforza or the Metropolitan in NYC), where you meander about unexpected corridors, mazes, but like contemporary ones (the Whitney, MoMA), all is clearly laid out, a few select and permanent rationalized exhibits labelled. We spent time in three.

The first was a Rick Owens exhibit (see one of Laura’s blogs on one of his fashion shows): a vast installation of a hundred or so mannikin models in de-humanized, aggressive, parodic outfits, a dark disquieting satire on what we wear and fashion shows themselves:

After a few rooms of these, we sat and watched films of models doing shows of these clothes — many with heavier bodies, many people of African heritage. Haunting, and creepy images.

They still had some of the traditional kinds of art one sees; there was a sculpture exhibit of the history of the bicycle, and intriguing paintings and photos on walls here and there:

A photo-painting of realistically conceived figures looking at art

On the upper floor there was a vast exhibit showing the visitor how we live now or how we ought to live — very modern furniture and appliances; there was a kind of neon-lit forest of electric poles. What kinds of habitations we make for ourselves, how many of our rooms don’t make sense if the point were to be comfortable.

We walked around the park to where the two main streets are, and found a restaurant for lunch. Unluckily, it featured bad service and worse food, but from there we spotted a sight-seeing bus-stop, so we hurried away and took a bus all around another part of Milan. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) the microphone sets which were supposed to tell us where we were and the history of what we were seeing didn’t work.

Evening was coming, we were very tired by this time, and hopped off the bus around the shopping centers near the Cathedral and walked through very expensive shops, took a train back to a supermarket and then a cab home. You can see our feet had had enough. We stayed close to our apartment, we had reserved a table at a restaurant nearby so exclusive you could miss it as you walk by. The meal was exquisitely good.

This was the appetizer from another night: a restaurant where you pay a set fee and have many small courses where you have a taste of this or that food, and with each a glass of wine.

Home again that night to read quietly and rest.

Saturday, 4/24: we had seen on our peregrinations what we thought were basilicas, and decided the next day we would try to go into one of these. We tried for three, and they were either turned into schools or closed.

I suppose if you use Road Scholar, you won’t make these kinds of mistakes but we did learn that basilicas have found new uses in 21st century Milan.

An horse-shoe shaped church in front of the cemetery

What we did happen on was an an enormous monumental cemetery. If you have deluded yourself into assuming the impulse which made Egyptian pyramids is gone, think again. Huge cement buildings as crypts, tombs, massive sculptures of idealized figures (mythological, Catholic-religious, some realistic), many doing things (looking like they are thinking, or about to pick something up, the material they are made of often in bad shape (the damp is not good) in which families asserted their wealth, status, heritage, some of them built as far back as late Roman times, some dated 2015.

One of several wide and long lanes

Yes that’s me looking cold

The newer ones had photographs framed. The effect very creepy. Worse yet was a large house-like structure: we went into it and discovered that the poorer could buy a sort of drawer or shelf; rows and rows of these with people’s names. This reminded me of Arlington National Cemetery where there are now vast rectangles of cremated bodies and urns, each having a kind of drawer with the name of the person who once lived on its outside plaques. People were coming in to leave flowers. Everywhere also evidence that this was a way of extending the person’s life, memory, creating let’s say a deathtime. Laura fascinated took quite a number of photos. I’ll spare you the rest except for one of a cat who has found a home there:

He or she has a corner with an umbrella and under it dishes of food and water. Puss did not appear to have any cat-mates.

Perhaps our the pleasantest time we had was on Sunday morning,4/25, at the Antiques market, where I came upon my friend, Luca (above) on the lookout for good rare books. He did find one, a nineteenth century edition of Dante’s Commedia with illustrations. As I reported in my first blog this market runs up and down the length of a central canal, spreads out to side streets, and as the day progresses all around open cafes, and gradually walls are covered with artists pictures, and people come from all round to buy both ordinary clothes and needed things as well as art and craft objects. I wanted to buy a lovely watercolor of a woman and daughter on the seashore but couldn’t convey in Italian I wanted to be shipped as well as wrapped. Maybe she didn’t have any shipping services. I now regret not persisting. I worried over the price and that I might not get the picture by mail after all. It was a woman on a beach with a young girl.

It’s a flea market too: every kind of hand and machine crafted object you can imagine; some very old, some made recently, art. People talking to one another. Friendliness. I bought a sculpture in a sort of China of a sleeping cat. I looked for Trollope in Italian but no luck; most of the Italian books I found I wanted to read I already had. People kept coming and stalls being added to. There was also a marathon running in Milan that. Every one knew of the massive march in Washington DC and approved heartily.

I found the ceramic cat I described and took home (scared that wrapped up it would be taken for a bomb at the airport but it was not),

Her face held up to the light by Izzy

and here I’ll add a pink warm woolen cap with a fluffy pom-pom, lovely part leather gloves, grey on one side and multi-colored the other, Izzy found a piece of jewelry. Around 11 church bells began to ring upon the hour and seemed to keep that up until 5. Laura said that first ringing of the bells somehow made the day.

Houseboats allowed

Much later in the evening we went to the 19th century museum to one side of the Cathedral for another excellent dinner. The restaurant was on the top floor and we could see the Cathedral to our right and across the square as we ate. Later we tried to walk around the lively square for our last night. Some of the stores closed all day for Sunday opened in the evening. There were street musicians, and yes homeless people (some with pet dogs).

Our time away had come to an end, and the next day getting up around 7 am (our time Milan) we had a 19 hour trip by cab, plane, cab, train and perhaps Laura’s husband Rob’s car awaiting us at 11 at night (his time DC).

I remembered trips Jim and I took within the US, up to Canada, or just to Maine, twice to Vermont, several times to New York State, and how we’d have driven there and drive home together. How content I’d be to go home. How eager then. And tonight I’ve found a poem to express this:

David Holbrook (1923-2011)

Coming Home from Abroad

The air is high and blue yet, as we drive
Northwards across High Marne: summer
Again, after the stormy cold of June.
Yet there’s a ghostliness a sadness in the wind:
I feel it first, in the little park at Enghein
Where the tall plane trees shivered in the breeze.

Oh, I am so content, sitting beside you,
Driving home over the Northern Plains of France,
The sun still strong, everything going well,
The wine and poulard good at lunch at Chalons;
Yet, in the sky, there’s this tall hustling ghost
Drawing a veil across the face of summer.

On Zeebrugge beach all next day, the sane
Unites me to Suffolk: the cold onshore breeze
Whispers of Cotman, and those severe scenes
Of grey half-muted tones, the figures bent
Against the elements: and so we sail
Steering irrevocably into the Felixstowe fog ….

John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) Carnavon 1800

Ellen

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Doing Milan

Izzy wearing Laura’s hat just as we entered the castle chapel

A small park, and ruin in a street near ours

Friends,

I’ve told of our trip, our first evening in Milan, three day jaunt out to Zurich, nearby Germany and France, and first general impressions of Italian culture.

When they do have trees on their blocks, they tend to place the same kind of tree in rows (as they do in France)

For the rest of our time away we stayed in Milan, either exploring the city and partaking of its pleasures (each night a different restaurant), or gazing at ice-skaters in the stadium. For me the enjoyable and engaging moments were in the city: all Tuesday, Wednesday morning and night, and all day Friday, early Saturday morning and Sunday morning until 1. Here I tell of Tuesday and Wednesday, early mornings and the neighborhood.

Izzy on the cathedral roof, wearing Laura’s hat

Walking into the castle entrance — a fountain is in front

The center of Milan (not just for visitors) exists between the large square called the Duomo, around which are the enormous cathedral, which everyone will tell you took 6 centuries to build, two beautiful glass covered shopping malls, two museums, with smaller institutional (cultural, gov’t, educational) buildings scattered all about. And blocks going this way and that. The opera house La Scala is right there. Two long wide parallel streets coming away from the back of the cathedral take you to the Sforza castle, an enormous building, which probably took a few centuries to settle into its present state. Between the castle and wide streets, there is what in the UK would be called a round-about where you can catch buses touring all Milan, and see different groups of people gathering. Nearby a movie theater and further along a playhouse (with a repertoire going on). Behind the castle is a large park that reminded me of Central Park in NYC (except not so big): picturesque, meant for leisured walking, with at least one lake, birds, a modern museum at one edge, near which there is an in-door and an out-door stage (for plays or concerts).

The wrapped up person is me contentedly gazing at water birds in a lake in the park — do not mistake how old I look for discontent

Further on, you come upon a beautiful state-of-the-art library for ordinary citizens’ use; wander a bit and you’re sure to come upon the usual ruins tucked away here and there, I believe a carousel, and bike paths.

Ruins

You leave the park area through a massive carved gate which tells you it commemorates a probably not very welcome visit from the armies of Napoleon III.

Tuesday we spent all morning in the castle in the morning, and much of the afternoon in the cathedral. The high point of the castle came swiftly: a sort of chapel in which we could view Michelangelo’s late Pieta.

Michelangelo’s late Pieta, at the Sforza castle

Michelangelo’s work just stands out as more sincere, realer than anything near it, anything we saw in that castle and most that we later saw in the modern museum. we viewed his last work. I sat by it for a while. All around the chapel were artefacts and plaques telling the story of its many adventures before it came to rest, let us hope safely for a long time to come, in the quiet room. It took a long time to walk all around the castle, up and down: clearly originally a fortress from which arrows and later guns could be aimed. Among the more interesting objects we saw were some beautiful later 19th and 20th century (recent) furniture, musical instruments from across the ages. We three enjoyed a good meal in a place where we could watch people go by and I listened to a street musician who played very well and whose apparent poverty touched my heart.

The cathedral roof from just one of many angles

Doing the cathedral is no trivial task. First you must avoid waiting for hours to get in through the front. A comparable tourist attraction is the Eiffel Tower, which is a many hour wait if you want to climb up. You can save the wasted hours and tedium by buying a more expensive ticket which allows you to take an elevator straight up to the first level of the roof.

Then you climb and climb and climb in and out of nooks, stairways, past gargoyles, statues, rows of battlements, seeing Milan become lower and seeing our farther, until you get to the very top.

I almost didn’t make it, and was saying “Non posso,” when someone helped me up the last stairway.

The cathedral highest roof

I saw one young woman with a baby in a carrier against her chest, holding a toddler’s hand. I would not have risked that child. You then climb back down, not all the way, and are led into a corridor where you take another elevator, and by some sleight of hand your ticket takes you into the cathedral by a side or back entrance, and voila.

What we saw as we came in

Walking about

The altar

In order to enjoy the place you have to forget that it was and is a seat of power, intended to impress you with its wealth. Every inch carved; many places sites of worship, shameless individual tombs, marble floors, magnificent windows. Perhaps one can reconcile oneself to it by reverse thinking: imagine where it bombed to the ground, then it’s a treasure of history, beauty, aspiration lost forever. Besides an ancient crypt, there is beneath the building an archaeological dig which has unearthed a previous basilica on the same site. Now we were in early Roman Italy. So this spot has been a community center for thousands of years. We regretted leaving.

The same Duomo square, another angle, at night when after resting in our own apartment we returned for dinner

Wednesday morning we learned how difficult it would be to leave Milan on Thursday to go out by train to the countryside: the biggest disappointment for me of this trip was that I did not get to visit another friend, the biographer of Veronica Gambara, Antonia Chimenti. She lives not far from Reggio Emilia, the area Gambara lived in. There is but one bus from where she lives to the train station, and another to Correggio. A city whose institutional buildings she said not all that much changed from the outside physically from the 16th century. People there still living a quieter traditional life. We would not have had time to get to Correggio, stay there, and get back to the train for Laura and I to return to Milan and she to her home. She sent pictures, we emailed but it seems what we needed was to have someone drive us. I translated all of Gambara’s poetry, wrote a short life myself.

Piazza del Monte, in Reggio Emilia, Correggio today

Laura and I also worried that Izzy would not be able to get all the tickets to go to the ice-skating events at once, and that she might need help from us on Thursday.

So on Wednesday instead of buying tickets at a local train station, we ended up in a local supermarket, and brought home some needed comforts for the flat (juice, milk, sugar, tea, bread, cheese, wine, cereal for the morning).

From our seats inside La Scala

But Wednesday night we had a rare treat: while Izzy remained at the ice-skating stadium, Laura and me hurried back to Milan for a quick dinner and to watch the Goldberg Variations as a ballet at La Scala. Astonishing. As we watched I realized I had seen part of this modern ballet in clips of videos on TV. A wikipedia article details the Bach music. As for Robbins’s choreography, the work consists of many ballet dancers, men and women dressed in the most minimal outfits, beginning dancing as a group, gradually emerging as varying couples and individuals, with no single individual emerging as a star or personality, and then back to the group dancing, with many moods, and much repetition. The last movements repeat the first and the dancers are all back where they began on the floor. By the end you feel you have experienced a life-cycle of humanity.

Here is a typical moment from almost an hour and one half

We were one night too late for Gluck’s Orpheus & Eurydice. Izzy almost said that had that opera been on, she’d have taken off from ice-skating.

Not all our adventures were outside or far away from the house our apartment was in. Laura had brought her laptop and we watched two (to me) unusual movies where food was the central subtext of stories and interviews; one traced the life story of am impoverished girl who became an austere nun who lives to cook simply; another was part of a series, each featuring a different type of food or dish which is central to a class-, race- or culture-laden experience, and that experience is ethnographically considered. Each morning Laura found herself breakfast in nearby bars. She and Izzy took walks around the neighborhood. We discovered two rare book stores, one much better than the other, but alas I owned a copy of the very book that tempted me: a volume of poetry by Elsa Morante. There was a convenient lunch place around the corner from where we were, a sort of snack place for the late afternoon. I read the books I had brought with me, and wrote to a friend; Izzy wrote in her diary (and kept very good records of the ice-skating she was seeing); and Laura kept up her paid work online and texted with her husband and a friend.

Another photo taken from our windows, a different angle includes a basilica like roof near us

Miss Drake

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Arduous Tourists: an ancient thriving city and four countries in one weekend

Laura & me

Izzy & me
Photos taken the first afternoon in the Duomo square (Friday, 4/16) before the Cathedral

Friends,

Last Monday (4/26) we walked out of Union Station (a DC train and Metro center), pulling and carrying our bags after 19 hours of travel from Milan: around 9:30 am Milan time that morning we had gotten into an Uber cab for a 45 minute ride to the Milan airport; it was now 10:30 pm Washington DC time and we were stacking our stuff into Laura’s husband’s car for a half-hour ride home to Alexandria. It was an arduous trip and had been an arduous time away.

So vigorous (rigorous?) had we been that I had come down with a bad cold on Wednesday before (4/21) after a long day at the Assago Milanfiori Forum (where the ice-skating championship was held) and it had not abated one jot. By Thursday (4/29, a week and one day later) Laura was diagnosed with walking pneumonia, and yesterday, Monday (4/2) Izzy was suffering from the same bad cold (painful chest, rough hot throat, constant sneezing, blowing of nose and so on) I still have as I write ths tonight. I will drive Izzy to the doctor tomorrow for antibiotic, cough medicine and (we hope) nose spray.

Next time we better take better care of our selves. There was a raw cold in the air throughout our stay. We just never felt the balmy (warm) air we often enjoy in this southern end of the mid-Atlantic temperature zone. We kept hoping and we would take one of our layers off, and say how warm and sunny it was. But go inside some heated place, and we knew better.

What I saw each morning and evening from my window in the flat — look how antique much below is

We also had not reckoned on steep stairs on long high stairways everywhere. I became convinced Milanese people have yet to be educated into the true wonders of elevators everywhere, with conveniently located escalators a ready alternative, such as we more or less expect in NYC and Washington DC. We had a comfortable enough flat, airy, high ceiling, enough beds, a TV, wi-fi, fridge, tables, chairs, decent bathroom, but getting there was arduous: it was on the third floor. Laura counted 68 steps, stone. One merciless stairway was 14 steep ones. The stairs at the Forum looked like nearly a foot high or inbetween. By Thursday (4/22), both my knees were in pain as I walked up the stairs one last time after dinner, and my legs ached so as I got into bed, I wanted never to take off the covers or move them again. Laura’s feet were covered in bandages. Izzy was so buoyed up by her long days at the Forum she probably didn’t notice, and anyway since she spent long hours, early in the morning to late at night 4 of the days, watching the ice-skating didn’t walk nearly as much.

But now you have had the worst of it.

I’ll tell the second worst and then we can get on with what was good, instructive, fun, beautiful: if you are determined to see the world, and where you want to go is so far, you must take a plane, I would even recommend Alitalia. The Milanese airport had enough chairs for people to sit in (by contrast, in the Icelandic airport nowadays people are treated like cattle). Granted Malpensa is not genuinely comfortably with cafeteria-like places with a variety of food to eat nearby such as I saw in Dublin’s airport. Food was limited to croissants and pizza, and not in convenient locations (Italians have not discovered the wonders of attending to convenience, nearby-ness). But there were no humiliating practices of extra scrutiny at the airport or conducted by the airline (nor at the Forum — there I was waved by) as in all US airports (and twice for me in Iceland, once in Brussels in US space). Alitalia seats were fantastically small but we were fed going and coming, two meals, plenty of water, soda and wine and tea and what they called coffee for free; movies for all (I saw a movie about Thurgood Marshall and Holofcener’s wonderful Friends with Money going). The Italians were not determined to punish us because oodles of money had not been extracted from us. We were not mistreated as one is on so many airlines and in US airports today (where you officially have no civil rights).

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So the first night, Friday (4/16). I had messengered (is that the verb?) a long-time Internet friend, Luca Gandolfi, just before we left, and that very afternon he phoned me to say he was giving a lecture on Jane Austen and her contemporaries: minor women writers. Would I like to come? Would I? Laura’s google map enabled her to help me find the place among turning alleyways and streets near the Duomo. Laura and Izzy thought they’d be bored so went for an hour’s walk near this institute, which houses a club, lecture hall (Luca is teaching a class of about 6 women as a volunteer lecturer — which scene reminded me of the OLLIs), musical concert places. Imagine we were talking of Julia Kavanagh and her novels. Luca said he preferred women writers to men. So do I.

His wife, Grazia, was there and at the end of the lecture Laura and Izzy were back and we all retired to a local Italian restaurant he and his wife often go to. Lovely place, good pizza and wine, and lots of company. Much good talk. Laura began to take many photos. Unfortunately, she put them on instagram which only later did I realize would not let someone else download them as jpgs. Nor does face-book, where you can find a photo of Luca and me.

I did not realize as yet I was having my first experience of an ancient thriving city. As the days and nights wore on, I was impressed by how everyone is interdependent in Milan. Wealth does not insulate you. Most stores have some time they are closed and everyone seems to know, for example, which pharmacies are open when. So you get lines. Everyone in Milan seems to accept lining up. The antiques market we spent hours at on Sunday morning (4/25) winded up and down the long canal, moving left and right with little spurs on side streets: slowly all the spaces filled up, slowly more and more people; around 11 the hourly church bells heard across the city. and what a higgledy-piggedy of things. I came home with this ceramic cat:

In much bubblewrap. The great Milan cathedral on the one side of a great square and down a wide pair of streets, the Castle Sforza with its vast park — are central sites, the first is tourist-infested but the places all around, the shopping is for everyone. There is some system of cabs where you must phone first but when you do phone, everyone is served. Uber is disruptive of this. The repeated trolley cars and trams going every which way. Higgedy, piggedly modern shops with ancient ruins, old buildings with new made to fit them. The restaurants are places for groups of people and are used a great deal until late at night. You must make a reservation but many do this seems.

There are exclusive practices. La Scala was so dull. As opposed to the wonderful bars (more than 2 usually) in the bowels of UK theaters and on different levels in the US which makes for much interactive experience, there is just the show, hardly announced, it’s over and all spill out. Cabs picking people up. Except for places like La Scala the lesson taught is we must and do all of us live together interconnectedly. Egalitarianism is too much an abstract word for what days really spent across Milan makes one feel.

To return to our lecture and dinner out with a friend, we were very tired, having left DC that morning 19 hours before we got to Duomo square. He and his wife walked us home and on the way showed us where the Milanese gov’t is found. In front of it is a large statue of a hand with its third finger stuck up. (Fuck you is universal.) We said goodbye and hoped we would see each other on Sunday (we did, albeit briefly) at the antiques fair where he sometimes has a stall and hunts every other week for good buys in books (collector’s items). Izzy, Laura and I must have been going 27 hours before we went up those stairs, opened the difficult door, managed to arrange the space in the flat so we slept in separate areas with doors inbetween. Privacy to read or write on ipads. And collapsed.

A Swiss lake from the train as we wound through the mountains of the Southern alps (where there are palm trees!)

Up the next morning bright and early, Saturday (4/17) to get to the Milan railway station leading us out of the country by train to Zurich, Switzerland. Why? We had been invited by a very long-time Internet friend, Fran, to visit her in her house in a small town in Germany about an hour’s drive from Zurich. I have known her since around 1997 on listservs, via email letters, in group reads, as friends, and whom I once met for an afternoon in London for lunch and a visit to a museum (the Wallace collection).

The Black forest from the car

She showed us all around Zurich that afternoon: its church, its very expensive shops, its library; its canals, bridges.

Modern shopping area

Zurich
Zurich church with spire

Then into her area of Germany by Saturday evening and we saw some remarkable small towns. One was called Doherty, Germany. Original gates preserved, streets and squares from 14th century.

A community place

There was at one end community center where immigrants could come to be acclimated, where clubs and civic activities go on; near by the statue of local woman who did much to build the town center. Home again to Fran’s beautifully custom-made house and lovely meal of melted cheese and boiled potato and pickles and pineapple and other things (it has a name but I missed it). It was the next day we visited 4 countries: we drove through the Black Forest, into Frieberg, Germany; Colmar and a French village surrounded by vines; ended in wine-bar.

Three different French villages

We were inside several interesting and quite different churches — it matters whether it was Protestant and stripped bare or high church Catholic, both were built in this region (and ferocious wars fought).

Outside a cathedral

Inside

A clock tower

High points of what we saw: one small Catholic church; Chagall stained windows; little scenes — in one street with the 14th century floors and windows and roofs I remembered how hard it was in Austen’s Emma to get a pianoforte into Miss Bates’s flat. You dropped it by ropes from the roof. Birds nesting on a roof

It has been so heartening to see so much civic pride. This is what is not seen in the US anymore. Everything has been done that can be done to break the spirit and shrink the pocketbook of the average American, at the same time as prices for everything are jacked up, no money put into anything public (not into transportation, not into schools, community centers are closed down if not run by a religious organization). Wide stretches of impoverishment and despair as the blight spreads.

Nourishing meal again at home with Fran and Karl. Much talk. Sleep. Next morning light snow, so pretty in Dogern. We returned to Zurich with Fran and got back on the train. I was sorry to part. I used to have a friend who consoled me after we had visited Salisbury cathedral and a house said to be the one Trollope modeled the Warden’s house on (in Southern England), and it was time to part. He lived in Arizona and I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again. “You know you’ve had a good time when you feel you are parting too soon.” His name was Sigmund Eisner and he was an important presence on the Trollope list with Mike Powe, the first listowner, and me and a few others in the early years. He would describe the original illustrations to Trollope’s novels as we went through them. Sigmund died about 15 years ago. I hold him in my memory.

We were in Milan by 5 pm and had to find a place to eat in — without reservations. We managed it — with difficulty. It took much walking, several rejections, and then luck. After the dinner we returned to the flat and collapsed. We slept late the following Tuesday morning (3/20). When I next write, you’ll hear all about Tuesday exploring,eating, planning for the week, shopping for food in Milan.

Gentle reader, I hope you forgive me these records of the time away with my daughters and contact with a few friends. Most of my life is spent alone. I’m back to that now: I go out to the courses at OLLI so as to be with people. I read with others online so as to be part of an imagined good community. On any given night when so many people might be out with or visiting friends, I’ll be in my house reading, writing, watching movies, listening to music, my cats nearby. So I write these to extend the times and relive them again I’ve had been out in the world with others.

Ellen

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We go traveling again & my friend, Vivian

Vivian and me, July 14, 2015, taken by Izzy: Alexandria’s yearly birthday party, a large park area by the Potomac, a concert and fireworks for all for free; we had a picnic

Dear friends and readers,

We are near setting off on our journey to Milan, Italy — Laura, Izzy, and I — where among other things (a visit to a friend who lives near Zurick which will necessitate a train-ride through the Alps and beautiful lakes; a visit to a fellow biographer of Veronica Gambara, in Reggio Emilia) we plan to attend the World Figure-Skating Championships, and find and look into what fashion museums and exhibits there are in this famous world city.

The last time the three of us were in Italy was 1994, 5 weeks with Jim in an apartment in Rome, from the which we took 4 trips: to Pompei, to Naples, to the island of Ischia for 3 days (where there is a beautiful beach and Vittoria Colonna lived for a number of years it’s thought), to Marino (where Colonna was born). We all three have many memories of that time. Upon coming into the flat, Laura, then 15, declared Italy had not invented air conditioning yet. Izzy said to another child at the beach: “mi chiamo Isabella.” A high point for Jim and I was a fresco we saw in a fourteenth century church one morning. We all wandered in the heat over the forum, the Colosseum, saw an opera amid some ancient Roman stones.

And early yesterday evening my good friend, Vivian, died: she went quickly, three weeks after the cancer resumed. I wrote about my visit to her in a hospice place in my last blog. I have learned as she died she was quiet (perhaps sleeping?), appeared to be at peace, kept out of consciousness of pain by drugs. Did she go gentle into that good night? I was not there and in her two earlier phone calls she expressed anguish.

What is it Macbeth says upon being told: “She should have dy’de hereafter;/There would have been time for such a word.” I will not be here when the memorial service is held. I grieve for her and will miss her.

Every moment I’ve been able to I’ve been either reading, writing, thinking for the courses I’m teaching (The Later Virginia Woolf; Sexual & Marital Conflicts in Anthony Trollope: HKHWR), or taking (The Brontes, a book club whose first item is Atwood’s The Blind Assassin), or still at that paper (Woolf & Johnson, biographers), or online with friends, blogging, nurturing (so so speak) my 3 groups.io (the book, the extraordinary American Senator) — not to omit getting through all things needful for the trip. Some of them arduous, time-consuming, confusing — like airline reservations supposed to be on a website which are not there. Not to worry: Laura made a phone call in her firm determined voice and our tickets & we now exist again. “Able to” is the operative phrase: many a later afternoon or evening I give out and succumb to a movie that can keep me up; this weekend I reached the fifth episode of Alias Grace (another Atwood adapted).

I’m more awake tonight than I have been for several, enough to tell of how this past Wednesday I went to the last of the four lectures on Impressionism outside France: so to my last blog on Russia, the low countries and Italy, I add the UK, and I was not surprised it was the most interesting because he had the most paintings to show. Gariff went on for nearly 3 hours. This time I had heard of most of the painters, but had not realized that the work of many of the painters I had “placed” in separate schools when regarded as impressionist made a different kind of sense. Elizabeth Forbes (1859-1912), who I’ve written about as an Edwardian woman painter in the Newlyn School, links to Laura Knight (1877-1970), who I wrote more briefly about as a Cornish artist. Victorian artists familiar to me as recording the abysmal poverty of the countryside and cities, i.e., George Clausen (1852-1944) belong here; and some I’d never heard of, Spencer Frederick Gore (1878-1914):

The Icknield Way (1912) — a road in Surrey since Roman times

Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, and his fostering of post-impressionism, his pictures belong here too. A Scottish woman artist, Ethel Walker (1861-1951) now fits. She painted Vanessa Bell, the first image I’ve seen that enables me to begin to understand why Bell was so liked:

Vanessa 1937

Two American artists this time were very influential: Whistler and John Singer Sargent. I learned that the next time I go to London I should go the London Imperial War Museum. Its name (because of the militarist connotations) is misleading: it is a leading place for artist painting during WW1, which most of these people did. Sidney Starr (1857-1925) has such a poor wikipedia page, I have to link in a sales one (he was an important art critic):

Starr’s City Atlas (1889-90) was part of an exhibit or talk about how difficult to get to know London

Philip Wilson Steer (1860-1942) ended up an important teacher (teachers matter), he was influenced by Monet and this is his most famous painting.

Children Paddling, Walberswick (1894)

But perhaps this curiosity, of an over-dressed woman with a cat called Hydrangeas is more characteristic

Vivian’s favorite painter was Monet, and during the visit her brother and sister took her on to Paris this summer they took her to Giverny. She also had a cat called Sammy (Samantha) for seven years.

Izzy and I almost didn’t go to a performance by Catherine Flye accompanied by Michael Tolaydo as narrator at the Metrostage of a revue of the life and songs of Joan Grenfell. We had tickets for Saturday, and were so preoccupied we forgot to go. The woman who basically runs the Metrostage single-handed phoned us 5 minutes before, and offered to let us come Sunday instead. This remarkable pair of actors presented a later afternoon of witty cheer with an undercurrent of desperate acceptance; there were some twee moments but also direct hits at frustrated longing hearts. My favorite was a piece called “The Telephone Call” (a woman spending her life caring for an aged parent). A couple very funny: one of a woman on her first airplane flight when people were still treated with respect and given comfort as human beings. The pianist played wonderful older melodies I recognized, one famous from WW2, The Warsaw Concert by Richard Addinsell (who wrote most of the music performed).

Michael Tolaydo and Catherine Flye, 2002 (Gardener McKay’s Sea Marks)

We had both wanted to go because we both remembered the moving play Sea Marks, with Tolaydo and Flye, which we saw with Jim in 2002 at this Metrostage. I’ve had that black-and-white newsprint picture on the wall of my study all this time

I return to Vivian. One of the class members of my Later Woolf came for the first class and for the rest I’ll keep him in the email list as I send comments and readings out, and lectures too. He can’t come regularly as he’s taking chemotherapy and radiation for cancer. Vivian was killed by lymphoma (as was Jenny Diski) combined with brain cancer. She was no reader: odd for a best friend for me, but there are other things that matter. She was a kind person, sensitive. Charitable and forbearing at others’ flaws. She shared my politics, my lack of religion. While she didn’t read books, she always seemed to know the latest US political development; she’d take the progressive side most of the time, and post about it on face-book. We went to Bernie Sanders rallies. We also took wandering walks in Old Town. We’d go to some movies together (we didn’t quite have the same tastes): I went twice to Kedi (the movie set in Isanbul about feral cats and their caretakers in that city) so she could see it, and she cried. She stayed up (she had problems sleeping so would often fall asleep at movies) for and was moved by Still Alice.

Here is one of the poems Flye recited, movingly:

If I should die before the rest of you,
Break not a flower nor inscribe a stone.
Nor, when I’m gone, speak in a Sunday voice,
But be the usual selves that I have known.
Weep if you must,
Parting is hell.
But life goes on …

That doesn’t mean one forgets however little one is given chance to mourn with any ceremony. I feel bad because Vivian had emailed the suggestion when she still thought she would live (some 5 weeks ago) that she and I go to the Grand Canyon this coming May. I had balked at the idea of the plane and asked if there was a way to go by train. No. It would take some absurd amount of time. A drive was ridiculous. I was adjusting to the idea of taking yet another plane (how I hate them all) and was beginning to propose we look into a package tour. I told her I imagined us on donkeys going up and down vast cliffs, which probably showed how little I know about modern tourism in the Grand Canyon. It was still in the realm of half-joke when she phoned to say the cancer had returned and she was in hospital. We had some good walks in Old Towne this summer: a ghost tour, one night along the water eating ice-cream listening to street musicians in the mild crowd.

We all come from the past … life is a braided cord of humanity stretching from time long gone … it cannot be defined by a single journey from diaper to shroud … (Russell Baker, Growing Up, an autobiography I read with freshman composition students decades ago, which I remembered tonight)

Ellen

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