There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life (George Eliot): We must not reproach ourselves for unlived lives (Lost in Austen): a widow's diary
Here I am holding firmly to my sturdy fellow, Ian, Izzy taking the photo — greeting everyone on FB and twitter & bluesky & a literary mastodon
Dear friends and readers,
This has not been an easy year. As you know, we lost our beloved darling Clarycat. She is not gone from us because we remember her — not just the urn and the pawprints, but I’ve ordered four images to be blown up into framed prints (8 by 11) and I will have one in my workroom to sit behind me as she used to do, one in my bedroom near the one of Jim, and two more smaller ones (3 by 5) in the dining area and enclosed porch where I sit and read. I greeted friends and acquaintances on FB, twitter — and also BlueSky and a literary mastodon (which last place I don’t understand as a way to communicate with others at all, it being one of these Discords) with me holding onto Ian — quite a two-arms full.
I also as a match put onto FB and twitter a photo taken by Izzy and me holding poor Clarycat a month after she had her stroke. I had been told she probably had a brain tumor (because of the way she could not hold her head steady, stumbled to the left) but no hyperthyroidism. From her photo you can see she no longer had a natural expression on her face, nor is she holding her lower body up by herself any more. I am so worried. It matches the one just above
Izzy has commemorated the year with one of her music videos. I think Simon and Garfunkel’s “American” admirably suited to her low-throated soprano voice (with its mezzo contralto registers):
So, 12/31/2023, 5:45 pm, we (Izzy and I) have just (45 minutes ago) returned from the Kennedy Center where we saw The Girl from North Country, book by Conor McPherson (the last couple of years the Booker Prize has gone to Irish writers’ books), music and lyrics by Bob Dylan. Upfront it has its problems: that often, especially the first half, the songs, music and lyric seem to have nothing to do with the lives of this group of people living in or renting for now in a boarding house _is a problem_. Audiences don’t invent parallel universes (see review). But the stories grow on you and it is such a relief to get away from the script of competitive success and boasting — the choice of 1934, a year deep in the depression as speaking to Americans today tells us a lot. Everyone trying to fail better. Many not succeeding. It reminded me of Our Town (the imagined backward thrust from later death), and Steinbeck at his best. I loved the truthfulness of the down-and-out despairing stories and characters as well as their occasional hopefulness
The doctor character as MC (Washington Post, Thomas Floyd)
By the second half I was deeply roused. Not a happy or triumphant way to bring in the New Year; something better than that — a remembering, a refusal to stop looking at what’s happening through the lens of historical fiction: two reviews from the New York Times: Ben Brantley; same writer‘ for The Guardian, much more critical, but recognizing something deeply from within American culture, Alexis Soloski; the Irish Times.
Ensemble moment
We remembered our last year at the Kennedy Center with Jim, which I find I described here on this blog in 2013: “Elvis has left the building.”
Home again — both taxi drivers were friendly to us! About two hours after we got in, we sat down to steak and spaghetti and I have drunk half of one of three bottles of champagne that have been sitting in a cupboard for 11 years — since Jim died. The bottle was not so hard to open up after all. Main force and a scissor completed the work.
Cover illustration for the New Yorker for 2023 by Bianca Bangarelli — it’s how I bring in and out many days & nights of my life
In these New Year’s Eve blogs or postings/memories, one is expected to answer questions, like what was the best or your favorite book or movie or play. I just saw the question, What was my favorite moment of this year? I cannot answer such a question; it presupposes joy as some kind of regular recurrence. Joy is now twice gone from me: gone with Jim’s death, and now reinforced with Clarycat’s …
I do feel tired and admit this was the saddest Christmas and New Year’s I’ve had since the year Jim died. I have this feeling of wanting to do less, reach for less, but what I do do genuinely take real pleasure in. To slow down. I don’t want to stop traveling altogether but that the trips I take be genuinely meaningful. Now that I am so aware of Ian as a personality by my side, I am also very reluctant to leave him unless I feel for sure I’ll have a good time or need to go. He and I are getting closer.
But there is something else working its way through me — culminating this year in the loss of Clary. I want to think about why I do what I do. I want to get my priorities accurate. What shall I do about these blogs? I want to see some way to feel secure until my death. And, yes, recognize that my age will make me dependent on one or both of my daughters way down the line (I hope way down).
Thus to me this year was no transcendent book or movie or play, though I entered into (read, watched) some superlatively fine ones, which justified to me living on, experiences I felt on offer to live for and for trying to share them with others. I carried on trying to be a mother-friend to my younger daughter, Isobel. I am not going to make a listicle (as my older daughter ironically calls these, while she is paid very well for doing such). Going together (me and Izzy) to Somerville College, Oxford, and the experience there and some of what we knew in London was probably our highpoint; for me Clary’s death that which I cannot recover from, the year’s deep grief.
As to sheer enjoyment (sort of inexplicable except I do love literary allusive books to other books I’ve loved) I have been loving the Dorothy Sayers’ Wimsey/Harriet Vane books, and both TV series (Ian Carmichael and Edward Petheridge/Harriet Walter) — she is entertaining to me (literary deeply) and her life as told buy two biographies (I’m going to begin a third soon). I am so stimulated and feel so guilty that I did not begin to know and understand American literature, especially of the African-American type. I carry on my feminist literary studies, though I now realize my understanding of the word feminist is now not part of any public group …
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It’s nearly midnight just now. I fell asleep trying to watch another episode of the 6th season of The Crown but did finally manage, the 8th episode, The Ritz. This is the hour during which Margaret has three strokes; we trace her journey towards death while she remembers one night in 1945, the ending of World War Two, May 8th when she and Elizabeth went to the Ritz and Lilibet ended up in the basement doing some wild dancing with the people celebrating down there. The fireworks are starting and I hear the booming of the rockets. Another year gone, and a dangerous one to come.
My best friend, Ian, is on my lap pushing his body against mine, his head against my head
The Girl from the North ended on this song which I send along to you gentle reader, for all of us:
Two am, and she calls me ’cause I’m still awake
Can you help me unravel my latest mistake?
I don’t love him, winter just wasn’t my season
Yeah, we walk through the doors, so accusing their eyes
Like they have any right at all to criticize
Hypocrites, you’re all here for the very same reason
‘Cause you can’t jump the track, we’re like cars on a cable
And life’s like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button, girl
So cradle your head in your hands
And breathe, just breathe
Oh, breathe, just breathe
May he turn twenty-one on the base at Fort Bliss
Just today he sat down to the flask in his fist
Ain’t been sober since maybe October of last year
Here in town you can tell he’s been down for a while
But, my God, it’s so beautiful when the boy smiles
Want to hold him, maybe I’ll just sing about it
‘Cause you can’t jump the track, we’re like cars on a cable
And life’s like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button, boys
So cradle your head in your hands
And breathe, just breathe
Oh, breathe, just breathe
There’s a light at each end of this tunnel, you shout
‘Cause you’re just as far in as you’ll ever be out
And these mistakes you’ve made, you’ll just make them again
If you only try turning around
Two am, and I’m still awake, writing a song
If I get it all down on paper, it’s no longer
Inside of me, threatening the life it belongs to
And I feel like I’m naked in front of the crowd
‘Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud
And I know that you’ll use them, however you want to
But you can’t jump the track, we’re like cars on a cable
And life’s like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button now
Yeah, sing it if you’ll understand
And breathe, just breathe
Oh, breathe, just breathe
Oh, breathe, just breathe
Oh, breathe, just breathe
When you left this town, with your windows down
And the wilderness inside
Let the exits pass, all the tar and glass
‘Til the road and sky align
The strangers in this town
They raise you up just to cut you down
Oh Angela it’s a long time coming
And your Volvo lights lit up green and white
With the cities on the signs
But you held your course to some distant war
In the corners of your mind
From the second time around
The only love I ever found
Oh Angela it’s a long time coming
Home at last
Were you safe and warm in your coat of arms
With your fingers in a fist
Did you hear the notes, all those static codes
In the radio abyss?
Strangers in this town
They raise you up just to cut you down
Oh Angela it’s a long time coming in
Oh Angela spent your whole life running away
Home at last
Home at last
Vacancy, hotel room, lost in me, lost in you
Angela, on my knees, I belong, I believe
Home at last
Home at last
Home at last
Izzy took a week off work this past week, and seems to have enjoyed herself relaxing, reading (a book on the Louvre, a book on feminist films), going out to a movie (Dr Strange), once to the National Gallery where she saw the same Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibit I saw about a month ago, and once, this Friday, to the Washington D.C. zoo. She photographed a number of the animals
A mother and child
A noisy sea-lion
Two pandas
and a lion (among others)
She also wrote and posted one of her fictions: these are novellas which often take the form of sequels (fan-fiction), but some are original. I know she watched Eurovision, some ice-skating contests, and stayed in contact with people through groups she’s joined on discord. She drew too, and put a lovely picture of a bird on her wall. You will see it behind her in the above video.
A beautiful poster-like picture of a deer
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For myself, I conquered (wrote) that paper I’ve been reading for on and off for about three weeks: “Barsetshire in Pictures.” I covered the original illustrations for Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicle of Barset, as well as the film adaptations of The Warden and Barchester Towers in the 1983 Barchester Chronicles and the 2015 (ITV type production) Doctor Thorne (scripted by Jerome Fellowes). I tried to show through these pictures what makes the unity of Barsetshire. I am much relieved tonight for I was worrying I had taken on too much, and no more than anyone else do I like to be endlessly working, much less to deadlines. It has been very enjoyable and after I’ve given the talk, I’ll put the text online and write a blog about all I did for it.
Here is a still from Doctor Thorne: Stefanie Martini as Mary Thorne, doing good deeds in the village even as she is ostracized, humiliated — I found watching the film through the lens of how far did it convey the spirit of Trollope’s Barsetshire enabled me to enjoy it far more.
How did I manage this?
In my sudden nervous anxiety (for I have yet to write that Anne Finch review, and I’ve now promised a paper on the manuscript books of Finch and Jane Austen for the October ED/ASECS meeting), I this morning realized that I kept thinking today was 5/23, the day for registering for OLLI at Mason and a day I told myself I’d send in the proposal for the 4 week next (!) winter OLLI at Mason (The Heroine’s Journey, which I described here already but here it is again), but I find it’s only 5/16. Maybe I fooled myself to get myself to do this more than a week ahead of time.
The Heroines’ Journey
Many courses in myth take as Bible, Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (pop movies use an 11 page abridgement) so for this one we’ll take Maureen Murdoch’s The Heroine’s Journey (distillation of many books on “Archetypal Patterns in women’s fiction“) and read two mythic short novels from an alternative POV, Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad (no she did not sit for 20 years knitting and unknitting the same shawl), and Christa Wolf’s Medea (no she did not hack her brother’s skeleton to piece, nor kill those children); then two ordinary realistic ironic short novels, Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter (Leda is the lost daughter) and Austen’s Northanger Abbey (Catherine had it right). We’ll see Outlander, S1E1 (Claire transported) & Prime Suspect S1E1 (Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison).
So at 4 this morning then I read the openings of three books which just rejuvenated me: literary feminism, wonderful warm hearts (I loved the tone of all three): Heroine with 1001 Faces by Maria Tartar, The Heroine’s Journey by Maurren Murdock, Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction by Annis Pratt — filled with wonderful poetry too. They are the background for the course I mean to do next winter: The Heroine’s Journey. They are not just about books but about the cruelty and suppression of women in our society which as we know has stepped up in the US recently. I am rejuvenated and re-galvanized, refreshed.
1970s feminism is not dead, but, as you know there is a large body of people in the US out to re-bondage women, to renew and enforce more subjection of women.
On 18-l someone told of her struggles to reach J. Cameron’s great unpublished dissertation on Anne Finch (Australian university sometimes willing to share and then not again), and O’Neil’s banned to all eyes for huge numbers of years Oxford dissertation. She called this a copyright problem. She is an obnoxious woman who approves of the establishment, but her email (as well as my proposal for a paper on her and Finch’s manuscripts) reminded me of what research was like before the Internet, especially for someone like me: a nobody, with no professional title from an institution beyond my doctorate, having no connections, and finding travel such an ordeal. So I told of myself on this listserv:
I have a complicated xerox of Cameron’s great book on Anne Finch. I got it years ago when I was teaching at American University. The research and inter-loan librarian got it for me — all the way from Australia in a big box. I know about O’Neile’s Oxford University dissertation. I tried to get hold of it many years ago, and found that it was made totally unavailable — in no way could I reach it or any part. Then several years ago because of the presence of the Internet and having far more sources available, and librarians to consult I was told the man had banned use of it, and even looking at it for a long number of years — probably beyond my lifetime. This seemed very strange to me: why write a book and then ban anyone from seeing any part. But I have come across this in other studies (a similar case, funnily enough), in my Vittoria Colonna researches, where also, a coincidental parallel I was able to get a copy of the important 1840 edition of her poems, the first nearly complete ones as a xerox which also came to AU in a big box.
I still have both xeroxes and I still use both — having made them much more usable for myself (using stapler, scissors, folders &c&c)
There’s a kick to my story – -a true one. The same librarian got me both books. In some spate of firing during the 1990s she was let go as useless, unimportant, not needed. What a waste of money you see.
Thinking about Austen too and the pattern of Tuesdays across her novels (except in the cases of Northanger Abbey and Sanditon, early and very late novels) and drawing of the timelines from of her novel:
Every single Tuesday I’ve found – and I’ve found them in all but one of the 6 famous ones, in The Watsons (the first sentence), and (more vaguely) in Lady Susan are connected to a disappointment, humiliation or mortification. She is exorcising (or was the first time she did it) some hurtful grief; after a while, it became a code known to her family probably. I’ve never tried to publish a paper when I was trying because I didn’t want to be laughed at. I think it’s not a known truth because those who have seen it dismiss it. Janeites and many mainstream people don’t want to know of trauma dealt with in this way in Austen.
The way to figure out what year a novel is set in — or what possible/probable years is to work out where Easter is in the novel. Novels which don’t let you work this out — well for those looking up Easter won’t work. But Austen does notice Easter in her books. Another way is two dates where you are given day, date, month — there are nowadays calendars on the Net to use. One used to have to buy them. Fanny Price’s stay in Portsmouth is at first prolonged because (we are told) Easter came late that year. And then Austen mentions days of the week and also how many days go by for a trip say. She had an almanac on her desk — to her I think it was a way of establishing probability through having events take place in probable amounts of time. We do not in her 6 books and older fragments suddenly leap many years or even months. A couple of or few weeks, yes.
Where there is no mortifying Tuesday: the juvenilia, scraps, and Northanger Abbey and Sanditon. NA too early, first draft before the event that gave rise to these occurred; Sanditon a tremendously rushed draft, she is very sick, dying, and has no time for working out such (haunted) in-jokes.
I don’t try to publish this because I don’t want it to be rejected and I don’t want to be laughed it if it were to published in some toned down form.
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My two classes on Anglo-Indian novels went so well this term. The OLLI at AU people even lovedShakespeare Wallah! I shall do the topic again in two years with a different set of books – and having read more on the history, more memoirs and novels in the meantime. I’m still reading the Raj Quartet, into the fourth volume and last night was so moved by the last episode of 1984 Jewel in the Crown.
Geoffrey Kendall, the great disillusioned actor — like the poor monkeys on the road no longer wanted as once he was (from Shakespeare Wallah)
The Rosemont Garden people came up with a new plan for my garden, for re-planting and weekly care: $800 less than I paid the couple I was not comfortable about. I’m signing and look forward to a normative business relationship.
A gratified evening’s note — I feel so good for Izzy that she had a good week and that I am wanted too — as long as I come for free– I am glad to fit in. Relieved I was able to do what I promised.
A beautiful depiction of a cozy bed — seen on twitter
I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life … And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookstore [not so much that latter as the days of vast caverns of books, floors of them, you were left to explore on your own, i.e., the Argosy in NYC, 2nd Hand Bookstor in Alexandria, Va are gone forever, or so it seems mostly …] — Julian Barnes, A Life with Books
Friends,
I thought I’d begin with an autumnal poem, W.B. Yeats’s “When You are Old” as read by Tobias Menzies:
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Last night was Halloween, and from my hour-long zoom chat with Aspergers friends, to the few people I talk and email with, I was wished a happy Halloween. We did try: Izzy thought she was invited to go to a party on Saturday night by a man in her Wednesday in-person Dungeons and Dragons group, but when the time came close it seemed the party was to be an hour long or so, after which it would break up into people doing different things together, among these, bar-hopping. This is not for her, especially as getting there was an Uber (and back). So she thought the better of it – she is now getting older than many of the late 20s people who would show up, several gay (as the man was gay), what she had to wear was the regency dress she wore for JASNA (not appropriate for this, too naive). Instead she recorded her song.
I had hoped to join in on giving out candy for the first time in years as I still have the battery-operated candles I had found for Biden’s night-before-inauguration so I could light up my pottery pumpkin, put the stoop light on and be all welcoming. Well I got three groups and one lone girl in a clown’s outfit. Next door and across the street from me are older women too, who also had welcoming light and symbolic objects — they seem to have gotten the same groups. And then it was over.
As has happened to me before, I discovered that there is little to join in on if you are trying simply to be part of a neighborhood community. Halloween you must go to a party, some 15 years ago, for two years running at the Torpedo Factory museum in old town, a Halloween dance was held, for the public & Jim and I went; one year we traveled to NYC to go to a Halloween dance at the Princeton club (as members of the Williams — old-fashioned rock for people mostly in their 50s too). Thirty-five, say 1980s when we still had a (what I called) Welfare project down the hill, endless children and adolescents came, many Black. Thirty years ago in this neighborhood (all private houses, as we say in NYC) there were several floods of children coming through this neighborhood, and I’d give out candy, chocolates, cookies, pretzels with Izzy. Twenty I went myself with Laura and Izzy (age 15 say and 9) with them in costume trick-or-treating. I’d stay back on the sidewalk and there were really lots of people. But this neighborhood changes every 7 years, and about twenty years ago, the welfare project was knocked down, super-expensive houses and condos with what’s called a few row of “scatter-site housing” for people getting subsidized rents, built in its place. Ten years ago or more a scheme in my neighborhood not to let most of their children trick-or-treat but make a party. Immediately it’s exclusionary of course. Excuses like strangers put razors in children’s candy. Tonight I wondered if the upper class mostly whites here did not like the children from elsewhere
A photo Izzy took that lovely afternoon as she stood by the Potomac in Old Town
I was advised to watch movies, told by others that’s what they did — horror ones — so I told myself I’d watch movies too and my choice was Shades of Darkness, a 1980s series of hour long adaptations of ghost stories, all but one by women, done with great delicacy, insight, mood creation. I bought it sometime after 2000 as a DVD — I watched one I’d seen before and one I probably hadn’t. Elizabeth Bowen’s “Demon Lover,” very well done, as much about WW2 in England, the Blitz as about this ghost that seems a distilled eruption of senseless indifferent harm I’d seen it before but have forgotten how well done. Dorothy Tutin, the central figure. This is a traditional ghost tale where the ghost is malign and we are made nervous because the whole experience is regarded as fearful, hostile — popular Kafka stuff in a way.
Dorothy Tutin as our Every ordinary women profoundly disquieted as she sees him across the room …
The other May Sinclair’s “The Intercessor” (first time seen), to me a strange ghost stories to me because the ghost is simply accepted as part of universe and the theme is we are supposed to understand the revenants, accept them — not pitiless mischief, but the ghost a redemptive pitiful ghost. The human story is dreadful — people can be dreadful and have very bad luck, but the ghost, unprepossessing as she is, brings renewal. John Duttine, the hero, often played deeply sensitive men in the 1970s-80s BBC dramas. I’ve read other Sinclairs of this type. This set includes two superb hard gothic Whartons, “Lady’s Maid’s Bell” and “Afterward” (stunning). This was an era of fine dramas from the BBC — and there are other series of this type — all June Wyndham Davis produced.
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Lucy Worsley getting to sit behind Austen’s writing desk with some paraphernalia Austen would have used
So my teaching and scholarly life went on. Some successes: my two classes on The Prime Minister are going very well. My paper, “A Woman and her Boxes: Space and Personal Identity in Jane Austen,” went over very well and I much enjoyed the virtual EC/ASECS. I’ve not yet returned to Anne Finch, though the term is winding down, because I changed one of my books for my coming 4 week winter course teaching at OLLI at Mason, and am very much engaged by the books:
Retelling Traditional Tales from an Alternative Point of View
We will read two books which retell stories and history from perhaps unexpected and often unvoiced points of views. In War in Val D’Orcia, An Italian War Diary, 1943-44, Iris Origo (British-Italian, a biographer, and memoir-writer, a literary OBE) retells the story of World War Two from the point of view of a woman taking charge of her Tuscan estates during the war. Then Cassandra & Four Essays by Christa Wolf (a respected East German author, won numerous German literary-political prizes) the story of Troy from Cassandra’s POV, no longer a nutcase but an insightful prophet written after the war was over, with four essays on a trip the author took to Greece and her thinking behind her book. The immediate context for both books is World War Two: they are anti-war, and tell history from a woman’s standpoint, one mythic, the other granular life-writing.
I’d get a crowd if I were doing Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, but no one needs me to teach these. I’ve learnt that Florence Nightingale wrote a novella turned into polemic essay, Cassandra, only published recently: beyond protesting the restrictive life of an upper class Victorian young woman, exploring her own depression, it’s an exposure of the Crimean war. Finally an excuse to read away books on and by these two brilliant serious women.
I got involved in a wonderful thread on Victoria when I told of my coming Anglo-Indian Novels: Raj, Aftermath and Diaspora (I’ve told you of this one before), this spring at both OLLIs and in person. I told of books and they told of books, and we all dreamed in imagined company. My thanking people included this:
I did send away for the Metcalfs’ Concise History of India, and Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India (2016 in the UK). I have the Dalrymple volume on the East India Company and am grateful to the pointed to the specific chapters. There’s nothing I like better than articles when I’m looking for concision and I have access to the George Mason University database and their interlibrary loan.
My course itself is not on the Victorian period as all three books were written in the 20th century: the first is Forster’s Passage to India, and I have got hold of his Hills of Devi, and a book of essays published in India about the relationship of his time there and books to India. One book I have read and is about 19th century colonialism through 19th into 20th century books (novels and memoirs) is Nancy Paxton’s superb Writing Under the Raj: Gender, Race and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830-1947
Not for this course but about the 19th century and colonialism through another and classic 19th century novel is the Dutch Max Havelaar; or The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company by Eduard Douwes Dekker (1859), using the pseudonym he often used Multatuli . Now this is a superb book where you will learn that not only the British were stunningly brutal to native populations when they took over, but also how the colonialists did it. It’s a novel that is heavily true history (disguised only somewhat) – a peculiar imitation of Scott as if through a lens like that of Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Dekker risked his life while a resident manager in Indonesia (and other places) and came home to write this novel.
I strongly recommend it – and it’s available in a beautiful new edition by New York Review of Books, paperback, good translation. I just so happen to have written a blog last night half of which is on this novel – the other half a film adaptation which descends (in a way) from it, Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously (by way of an intermediary 1964 novel). Arguably MH is most important one volume 19th historical novel about the Dutch in Indonesia. The volume includes an interesting introduction by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an important writer and political activist (spent too much time in prisons).
The other two for my course are Paul Scott’s Jewel in the Crown, the 1st volume of his Raj Quartet (a historical novel, familiar to many people through the superb BBC TV serial in the later 1980s); and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake (a book showing the diaspora). The movie I’ll assign is Merchant-Ivory’s Shakespeare Wallah, which I also cannot praise too highly
Outlander begins in Scotland, Inverness, at Samhain or Halloween — it is also a ghost story
I’ve splurged on two beautifully made copies of the first two books of Outlander (Outlander & DragonFly in Amber) for my birthday and am back reading these books at midnight after realizing I’d been dreaming for sometime of myself in an Outlander adventure. By the time I was fully awake, I had forgotten the particulars and wonder what was the prompting: it’s been weeks and weeks since I last watched an Outlander TV episode and months since I read in one of the books. Maybe it bothers me that I don’t have Starz so will have to wait to see Season 6 until the season comes out as a DVD.
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The cat meowed — the first voice of the series
I do most days need some cheering up, so often so sad that right now my movie-watching includes this year’s All Creatures Great and Small, the set of DVDs sent me by my friend Rory. They still my heart with the strong projection of love, understanding, kindness between one another. I am especially fond of the direct emphasis on the animals the Vets and everyone else too are caring so tenderly for. The first episode opened with an temporarily ill cat being taken care of by James (Herriot, Nicholas Ralph). As my daughter Laura (Anibundel) wrote: “Snuggling down in the Yorkshire Dales to save a few cows turned out to be just what the doctor ordered last winter.”. I regret only that there are only six for this year, so I’m re-watching last year’s seven. Re-watching beloved series is what I do a lot.
Izzy and I did vote early, this past Saturday at our local library. We got there early and found a reasonably long line. We were told turnout is high. Everything was done peacefully and democratically. No one there to intimidate anyone. My neighborhood is showing signs for Youngren and I’ve encountered the seething racism in many of these rich whites — they will vote GOP because they are most of all about their status (and feel it’s threatened by not having whites in charge), see Black people as dangerous and inferior, and yes the campaign against Toni Morrison’s Beloved has traction. The GOP even has a mother-type inveighing against the book in a campaign commercial.
One reason for this is it’s not a good choice for a high school class. It’s too hard (not linear at all); its content is problematic: the use of the ghost is part of a skein of irrationality and violence justified in ways that most high school students will not understand. But she won the Nobel, and this is the most famous one: much better, more appropriate are Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (varied, sane, also about economic structuring to keep people poor), Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk, Lorraine Hansbury’s A Raisin in the Sun, August Wilson’s Piano (Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is rightly assigned in junior (3rd year high) years. But this is an argument for people teaching literature to think about. Youngren is insinuating profound resentment, implying this book teaches white children to hate themselves and their parents. The reality is it’s a book too hard for students to take in, with some of the same problems of vindicating violence you see in popular US movies. I never assigned Twain’s Huckleberry Finn after seeing a Black young man get up and do a talk about how painful it was for him to read such a book and hearing white boys in the class snicker at him. The choice of Beloved tells about the conformity and non-thinking of US high school curricula than anything else. And now it’s weaponized against Democrats and liberal gov’t.
If I could bring Jim back, I’d give up all I do — for I wouldn’t be doing much of this probably, wouldn’t have known of the OLLIs, of the Smithsonians, become part of these zooms, but I admit it does make me feel good that I prove to myself and do cope with so much nowadays. Today I resolved two bill problems from goofs I made in using websites to pay my bills — I now get e-bills for seven of my bills (post office becomes worse each week). I’m not as afraid as I used to be — though still frightened some (terrified at what could be done if the GOP cabal does take over), at least I know so much more about all that I need and do related directly to my life, who to go to (AARP, EJO-solutions for my computer, Schwabb guys for money). It is good to feel capable and useful and appreciated – though I began with the Yeats poem because Jim was and will be the one person in the world who loved the pilgrim soul in me. And every day, every night I feel his lack. So much I could do were he here, so much I miss out on (the new Met Meistersinger 6 hours!) how he would have reveled in it.
Izzy has re-arranged and produced a new song, this one originally song by David Bowie, Labyrinth, or As the World Falls Down
The lyrics:
There’s such a sad love
Deep in your eyes a kind of pale jewel
Open and closed
Within your eyes
I’ll place the sky
Within your eyes
There’s such a fooled heart
Beatin’ so fast
In search of new dreams
A love that will last
Within your heart
I’ll place the moon
Within your heart
As the pain sweeps through
Makes no sense for you
Every thrill is gone
Wasn’t too much fun at all
But I’ll be there for you-ou-ou
As the world falls down
Falling
As the world falls down
Falling
Falling in love
I’ll paint you mornings of gold
I’ll spin you Valentine evenings though we’re strangers ’til now
We’re choosing the path
Between the stars
I’ll leave my love
Between the stars
As the pain sweeps through
Makes no sense for you
Every thrill is gone
Wasn’t too much fun at all
But I’ll be there for you-ou-ou
As the world falls down
Falling
As the world falls down
Falling
Falling
As the world falls down
Falling
Falling
Falling
Falling in love
As the world falls down
Falling
Falling
Falling
Falling in love
As the world falls down
Makes no sense at all
Makes no sense to fall
Falling
As the world falls down
Falling
Falling
Falling in love
As the world falls down
Falling
Falling
Falling in love
Falling in love
Falling in love
Falling in love
Falling in love
The image on YouTube which accompanies this song as sung by David Bowie, is that of a nightmare kind of masquerade ball, people dressed up in very glittery fabulousl soft, much woven, silken clothes, wearing bizarre masks, loaded down with sparkling jewelry. This 18th century print (ca 1724) is not adequate but it will have to do. The original is ascribed to Giuseppi Grisoni and said to present a masquerade at the Kings Theater in Haymarket.
Seascapes — Sara Sitting (I am not sure about this title or artist but very much like the image)
On morning early this week (Sunday) I remembered when in the mid-1970s Jim and I lived on Seaman Avenue in Manhattan (200th street, below the Cloisters hill) we would summer time on Tuesday and Thursday take our dog, Llyr, and drive to Jones Beach in the morning. There was a beach where dogs were allowed. We’d bring coffee & croissants for ourselves, water and biscuits for Llyr. We’d go in the water, stay close to shore (no life guards). Those were happy mornings long ago … I thought of this as I saw my neighbors, two married gay guys taking their dog to a nearby private pool …. the difference between now and then — includes then it was public beach, now it’s an expensive private pool. I did long to get out of the house, go to where the horizon stretches out and stand by the world’s waters — thus the above image by Sitting
On another I woke remembering a dream Laura outlined at the end of our time with Izzy in Calais last summer: upon retirement, she’d buy a second house for her and Izzy in Florida or some warm place, & they’d live there winters; and the present house I occupy summers — though now I’m thinking it’d be a bit hot here. They could sell my library and go to Vermont. I ahd found the idea of them together when I am gone comforting. I would not worry so about Izzy and feel better about Laura having a good companion
My image for this was Beatrice Potter’s Two Rabbits because Jim as a boy read the Potter books and even into his old age would suddenly quote from a scene or refer to Jemima Puddleduck or wry Potter characters
Last The comet. I am told there is a comet in the sky just now. One night around 10 pm Izzy and I took our binoculars and went for a walk around — that’s when the sky is dark where I live. We didn’t spot the comet — I don’t know what to look for. But we did see a sky filled with stars. Not strong as light pollution is too pervasive but we did see a sky just twinkling with many little lights. And a couple of stronger ones too. A comet apparently looks like a moving star ….
Dear friends and readers,
It’s been almost three weeks now and I’ve made no entry because during mid-day I’ve been busy (driving myself to work on my Anne Finch review, immersed in the true wonders, good values and texts by and about the Bloomsbury group), and at night so tired, watching A French Village (up to season 6 now — what an education about real life politics during war), and as usual often melancholy, depressed, so worried about this endlessly spinning out calamity (COVID19, the devastation of unemployment deliberately spread by Republican-Trump policies) and how it might affect Izzy and I. But I do have a topic to share and performers to recommend: my education in the context of the US educational system generally speaking, and (among others) the comedienne Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette and Douglas.
Last week was the time OLLI at AU runs its “July Shorts:” these are courses which last just one week, and take place anywhere from 3 to all 5 days, about 90+ minutes each meeting. (They do the same kind of thing in February each year.) I could not myself teach such a course, and even going to them when it means driving there can be too much of a burden. Last week it was just sitting in front of my computer three times to participate in a four time course on the American education system (or some such title) so I registered and zoomed in. The two men leading the discussions, lecturing presented excellent material: good information, thoughtful commentary, genuine explanations for phenomena. I had to miss the fourth, because it took place in precisely the same time as each week I once a week give a course at OLLI at Mason on the Bloomsbury group: 90 minutes on the status of teachers K-12 (low, 80% female and white still) and the history and developments in chartered schools. While I trust my every instinct to distrust privately funded (you must pay as a parent to some extent) this is a means to destroy public education, to turn desperately needed good education into profit-making ventures (like medicine), and to pull in taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars to support turning schools into places with a false appeal of supposed choice and exclusionary policies — while I am distrustful I would have liked to hear an unbiased account.
A Community high school
Their over-riding theme was the need to make the system far more equal for everyone; as presently conducted the way US education works, its effect, is to increase the inequalities or (to be more frank) set up inequalities among children from day one, reinforce class, money and other social disadvantages. To produce badly or uneducated children whose whole outlook is shaped by narrow ill-informed prejudices. This is achieved (it’s wanted) by a mechanism or reality which lies at the core of all US inequality and social ignorance: residential localism. All education in the US is controlled locally, by localities; the schools are funded locally (by a town or at most city), with some controls placed on what they can and should teach and how they must behave by state laws. The state provides funds too, as does the federal gov’t (8 to 15% depending on how poor the district is, so the poorer get 15% or close to that, and the richer 8% or close to that). Any change in this is fiercely fought. As with the delivery of medical services in the US, the whole thing is endlessly fragmented, done differently in different states, with endless pockets of people in effect isolated from others — even nearby. This is exacerbated by he complete divorce between K-12 and post-secondary or higher education. The two groups run on different tracks, and both are (as a result) somewhat hostile to one another due to caricatures.
The public picture of schools in the US is distorted and falsifying — especially in the post-secondary area where education is suddenly expected (by many Americans) to directly lead to or produce jobs. It does not. Parents and students are paying for a certificate in an area of knowledge; nothing more is (literally) contracted for. The picture the public has as de rigueur or common is a four year college aspiring to at least look like Harvard, small private campus college, or state-supported be-prized institution measured by the US News and World Report. Only 17-18% of young US adults go to a four year college. 80% of young adults are enrolled in some form of publicly-funded post-secondary education, many of which are community colleges, which are weak on needed vocational training and apprenticeships. The fancy internships for upper middle professions are found in the 4 year institutions (and pay nothing). The average student is 27 and the majority are female, perhaps married, with one child. She is looking to “better herself” in the commercial marketplace. As to elite schools that are written about so much (this is the public media pretending that the small middle class is pervasive) less than 2% go to colleges like Harvard, Stanford — and where my younger daughter went, Sweet Briar (she had what was called a complete scholarship so it cost each term about what George Mason did for my younger daughter six years before).
This is a private and charter school — all white
K-12: 11% of children to teenagers are in private schools, of which 9-10% are religious schools, aka schools run by overtly religious groups (or in the south where there is more than a pretense a Christian academy for whites — these sprung up after Brown v Board of Education). The children of upper class and middling parents are taught self-esteem, self-assertiveness, how to cope with others and negotiate your way through life, to be pro-active for individual initiative at home; they have books at home to read; by keeping them away from the rest of the population, you leave that rest to become unexamined obedient instruments of capitalist enterprises — with the emphasis on obedience to group norms and acceptance of punitive measures to keep them that way. They are not to expect “perks” like art classes, music, shop, Advanced Placement (with better paid teachers) where they might learn what are their particular gifts.
The way the game is kept this way is fragmentation — the same thing is done in the area of US medicine (and now we see how US medicine is delivered is horrifyingly inadequate if there is any question of truly serious illness in the population). Those in the richer districts do not want to share their money with others. Most married Americans with children chose where they live in accordance with the schools available in the area. There is a tremendous gap between governance (those who govern, school boards) and anything to transform achievement gaps. No comprehensive school services across many districts (like social workers, nurses)
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Duncan Grant, The Stove, Fitzroy Street
All this for four days and watching what the 40 or so people in the class looked like as they listen, what they said made me remember my own experience. In fact my education enabled me to escape a stultifying working class background, and today still (even after Jim’s death 8 years now) live a life of the mind immersed in high culture in a comfortable house with books and nowadays computers. I am not altogether an anomaly because between the years 1946 and 1970 other trends and left-overs from the FDR era mitigated some inequalities, plus the way to be promoted and thought well of is through academic style tests where your ability to cope with language and math (symbols) are tested, your ability to memorize and what you have read and studied made the groundwork of the tests. On all these I did spectacularly well — as did Jim. Jim got 800 on both GREs to enter graduate school; I got 800 on the English and 798 on the math, at which he quipped: “Ellen was always weak in math.”
I know one of my prides is this education of mine: that I have a Ph.D. is central to my ability to hold up my head. I know how I was relieved to go to grade school to escape my parents’ house with their continual fierce fighting and the tensions and miseries of poverty and anger and frustration. It was a mecca. I know that once I got into my senior year in high school and throughout high school, college, even graduate school, I loved going to classes. In talking on FB of what colleges cannot do to set themselves up to teach students kept socially distant I remembered how for a year at Leeds University (for which I won a scholarship, my year of study abroad where I met Jim) I was given a tutor one-on-one. We met once a week to talk and together study Chaucer and medieval English and French romance. How scared I was at first of the professor; how young she was with a silver urn. I read so carefully each week. I also had wider tutorials with 4 students to a lecturer. Then Izzy at Sweet Briar had similar experiences.
But I also know what I didn’t learn. As I sat in a public school in the southeast Bronx where the majority of students were African-American or hispanic, I was put into a tiny group with “real books” to read – sometimes I was a group of one. The others were reading workbooks, Dick and Jane; I was reading books like Mary Poppins. I spent some of the day making posters. But I learned no manners, my accent stayed thoroughly southeast Bronx, I never took in groups of attitudes I encountered for the first time at age 10/11 when my parents moved to Kew Gardens. Ever after I was something of an outsider. There I was in groups of children with abilities like myself only I was behind in math and science — and no one took the time to teach me fractions, long division, how to do percentages. I still stumble and only my test taking ability, memorization, and ability to work out what a paragraph wanted got me though the Regents. We did have Regents in NY state so the high schools were forced to have teachers who did spend each year covering the curriculum for say chemistry or European (called World) history.
Another Duncan Grant — this time of Vanessa Bell painting, David (Bunny) Garnett reading, studying
Jim went to a “public school” in the UK — these are private schools for the elite — as a day boy in a different colored shirt (to show he was there without paying) because he did so well on the 11 plus, it was called. But he was merged with upper class boys from age 11 to 18 and that enabled him to know how to negotiate and cope in a managerial position, at conferences, he understood expectations. He had a silvery pure prose — from years of learning Latin and translating back and forth from Latin to English. He hated his school at times – he was caned five times and still had the welts on his hands when he was in his 50s. Like me in a different way an outsider, his politics he said were philosophical anarchy. He was deeply sceptical of all professions of ideology.
College came to me because I was living in NYC where it was basically for free. I had to come up with $25 a term. I got in through the night school. Never took an SAT exam, but within the first term, got all As and so switched to daytime college. Jim’s fees were paid for by the state — the Clement Atlee reforms were still in place. I know now how odd it is for me to be proud since I never went to a name school, cannot tell of knowing this or that person, but my expectations were so low to start with, and it’s what your expectations are as you start out that you measure yourself.
I did hold out. I refused to sell myself – I would not spend my life in a 8 hour a day 5 day a week job to make a higher salary. I was able to do that by being married to Jim and accepting that we would live on less, have less things people admire in our house, or clothes, prestige house. And it is chancy but then had I spent my life working at what bored or irritated or embarrassed or was trouble for me I would not be any safer as to money. To be truly safe you must be very rich in ways Jim and I (he with his gov’t job where he was promoted based on his intellectual abilities) never came near. And we spent what we had, I still do what is coming in, to enjoy life as we went along. We did do traveling as I have done since without him. I shall miss going to the UK if this pandemic makes it impossible for me to return to Europe safely. I was comfortable in the Scottish culture and norms; each time I returned to England I felt such cheer to think this is where he was born, where he became what he was. He valued me for what my education had made of me or what I had done with it to make myself what I was and am when we met at Leeds and throughout our lives together.
I did grow irritated at the course because when I would speak I could see that what I had to say was not wanted. Many of the people wanted to pretend they were for equality more than they were and they wanted to remain upbeat and talk of hopeful changes. One of the two leaders twice told a story of a teacher making a home visit and how the hispanic family all came out dressed just for her. I had a home visit when I was putting Izzy in the pre-school: the two women I learned later wrote up a very hostile description of me and my house (all the books offended). It seems Jim and I were at fault for my daughter’s disability. Others kept talking of how important success outside school, in businesses, was — in ways that showed they had no idea this is the kind of thing that cannot be taught. It is social cunning imbibed from your family habitat. I told a little of my experience in a southeast Bronx public school – it was not appreciated because it was downbeat. One was to be constructive. Large abstract pessimism is good, not local true-to-life anedote which exemplifies stubborn real obstacles.
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So this piece of genuine autobiography in the context of a course I just took has taken me time to write and space to do it in. So I shall save for next time some of the wonderful books I’ve read these past 3 weeks, movies, art works looked at, music listened to, Laura’s kittens, and end on music and comedy. Now just onto experiences I’ve had I would not ever have been able to without so much coming online — ingenious people determined to reach everyone at home, to socialize, to make money in their professions.
This past Saturday I took a chance and paid $20 to listen to Jonas Kauffman in concert from the Met. At first I shuddered at the hype introduction, over-dressed woman, and began to fear this would be glittering commercial phony-ness, but bear with the opening 8 minutes, and they leave you alone to listen and watch. An hour and 20 minutes of moving magnificient songs from this handsome and extraordinarily talented actor-singer. Sometimes he was in an old (Baroque?) Bavarian church, and sometimes it was clips from him in costume in a opera. I just love his “Pourquoi me reveiller?” I learned to like and to appreciate and love opera through my 45 years with Jim. The songs sung made me remember our relationship
And then Hannah Gadsby. I have joined online an aspergers group I could never have reached, am attending regularly and making a few acquaintance friends I look forward to seeing again. We talk about things I have trouble with and am given good advice. How to stop interrupting people at the wrong time when I am just trying to join in. What I’m doing wrong? — I am not recognizing their flow of talk and its origins and understanding where it will subside. They meet once a month to discuss a book or movie or person who is known to be autistic or writes about the condition.
It was 10 at night and I had been thinking somehow that I had not laughed in a long time. This is probably untrue. Only I couldn’t remember any true exhilaration either — well only inward exhilaration. I had promised for a coming Zoom session to watch Hannah Gadsby, an Australian comedienne “out”as autistic and lesbian. I did laugh and she made me feel better. On Netflix: I’d say I laughed more during Nanette because she did startle me, but the second,Douglas, with her dog as its center, was brilliant. I gathered from both “autism is seeing what no one else has noticed” and autistic people because we are different and vulnerable are more patient, tolerant, accepting of other people in all their variety Here is a clip from Douglas:
What awoke me to a certain cheer was my thought a way to understand her is: :if I can stand life on these terms, amid these cruel and inane absurdities, so can you.” Douglas contains one of the most brilliant exposures of quite what we are looking out in some of these fossilized religious devotional pictures. Hardly anyone really looks at them.
Then I read into a new humane Guide to Aspergers Syndrome by Tony Attwood arguing strongly the label should not be dropped. It is a different quality of disability but nonetheless disability. Nanette closes with her re-telling how she was attacked at a bus station.
Izzy’s new chair
While we are on this subject: this past Sunday Izzy and I managed to find a store Jim used to take me to to buy decent well made furniture — wood mostly. Izzy badly needs a new chair and I could use a small table in the kitchen. What a time we had! Very nervous trying to remember the name of the place and then the street. All I could think was chair store and Edsall Avenue. Well google and mapquest finally turned up a photo of the place that I recognized. I find things out by pictures. So, armed with 2 printed out mapquests, and Izzy programming Waze (then plugged into i-something or other, after which we turn off Godsford Park music and voila there is that lady’s voice), we made it. We have figured out how to put Waze to sleep (not to quit it, that’s not possible apparently)
I did get confused coming back and was nervous the whole time. My mind continually slightly flustered. I had not been out in the car to a new place in quite a while — I cannot find the category for this in Attwood’s book — it is probably under movement in space but there is nothing specific. I have hunted in the book. But Izzy bought a pretty ivory colored wood chair. She looks so comfortable in it. Here is her latest song:
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I never was able to find the place near us where there is testing for COVID19. I did discover that in the Alexandria there are places where you can be tested nearly for free, several cost starting $50, and many many more $150 – $300. Nuts. Why do some cost $300 — luxurious surroundings? But why try for anything labelled $150-$300? I have to find the place too. Of course Kaiser will test us but we must have symptoms to be eligible. She is to go into to work at the library this coming Thursday and may start going in once a week. She has fashion masks, santizer, and I have ordered a face shield for her.
Have I mentioned this time yet that I believe unqualified uncontrolled predatory capitalism everywhere in our lives in the US is at the core of the failed society of the US we are now experiencing — one result of this is thousands and thousands of deaths because we have no central govt that wants to do anything but exploit and abuse us. So another result of the miserable state of education across the US today and I end where I began this diary entry blog.
From the Christmas Revels, which when Jim was alive, he, I, and both daughters at first, and then just with Izzy, would regularly find a performance of somewhere in our area. Izzy now listens to it at least twice on CDs she has every year. It ends with Amazing Grace.
THE SHORTEST DAY
So the shortest day came, and the year died,
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen,
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing, behind us — listen!
All the long echoes sing the same delight
This shortest day
As promise wakens in the sleeping land.
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends, and hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now,
This year, and every year.
Welcome Yule!
During this time Izzy finished a rendition of another of her expressive songs; she has been working on this for a couple of months now; she is basically a light soprano; somewhat outside her range she is singing her heart out.
The song is by Irene Cara
Sometimes I wonder where I’ve been,
Who I am,
Do I fit in.
Make believein’ is hard alone,
Out here on my own.
We’re always provin’ who we are,
Always reachin’
For that risin’ star
To guide me far
And shine me home,
Out here on my own.
When I’m down and feelin’ blue,
I close my eyes so I can be with you.
Oh, baby be strong for me;
Baby belong to me.
Help me through.
Help me need you.
Until the morning sun appears
Making light
Of all my fears,
I dry the tears
I’ve never shown,
Out here on my own.
But when I’m down and feelin’ blue,
I close my eyes so…
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We managed three Christmas events for this year’s Winter Solstice.
From Come From Away: a scene where the local inhabitants welcome the US passengers
December 21st, a Saturday, Izzy, Laura and I went to see the extraordinary (in the depths of feeling it occasionally reached) for an group concept, Canadian musical; and astonishing (in sudden individual moments, separate soliloquies, character sketches), Come from Away. It is the upbeat story of how a large group of American planes were landed in Newfoundland, Canada, because the area had a large unused airport, and how the people living in the towns all about welcomed the people on the planes, took care of them.
It’s a story we are much in need of since the spread of hatred and fear these past few years by Trump and his regime, and others like itaround the world. I’ll content myself with a review in the New York Times. Ben Brantley explains this show and its context better than I could.
The 12 players as puzzled passengers
I had not thought it possible to write and embody an meaningful humane tribute to the senseless slaughter of what happened on 9/11/2001; a reaction to decades of cruel repression around the part of the world called “the Middle East.” If it comes near you, try to go see it. It cannot be a film; it must be done live on stage.
Afterwards we ate in an unpretentious Asian restaurant (food yummy, wine good), joined by Rob, near where Izzy & I live, all four exchanged gifts. I got two velvet-like blankets, soft and warm, one for my bed, and one for my desk chair. The book Izzy bought for Laura a time-traveling tale: The Future Of Another Timeline — Annalee Newitz. I bought for Laura Charlie Ann Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night and for Izzy, Adam Rippon’s Beautiful on the Outside: A Memoir. Rob got a cooking book: Midnight Chicken & Other Recipes Worth Living for by Ella Risbridger. You see one piece of evidence that the two cats are of the opinion my presents were for them.
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Central to getting through Christmas Day: around 1 o’clock Izzy and I went to see Greta Gertwig’s splendid Little Women. It’s so good I haven’t got the time or vocabulary to list all the elements that are so effective and right. Gertwig has updated the material and yet kept the core content of the book intact, with the old moods, charity, and deep sentimental feeling. By the astute use of flashbacks for the first third or so of Little Women (Volume 1 of the two, the childhood years and most straight didacticism of the books), and making the last part of Little Women and most of Good Wives, the present, a reverse in emphasis without loss was achieved.
Jo, Meg (Emma Watson) and Amy Florence Pugh) walking about Plumfield Academy, the new school run by Jo and Prof Bhaer (Louis Garret)
It is thus an open scandal, disgrace, that nothing is going to be done about that fact that this movie — superior in just about everyway to all those now playing, all of them, this movie garnered but one award — for Ronan for acting. Even that is wrong as the film features all four girls and the role of Amy has been transformed from villainess to a heroine as worthy imitation as Jo herself. Thus do we today honor ambition, materialism, selfishness, and the burning of Jo’s manuscript is somehow regarded as not the heinous cruelty it is in the book. After all Jo writes endlessly, she’ll write on and she does. We have a confrontational Jo and Laurie
A confrontational Jo ((Saoirse Ronan) and Laurie (Timothée Chalamet)
And then Amy is made unselfish at key moments, and suddenly it is she who urges Jo to run after Prof Bhaer. Until now Jo needed no help from Amy to retrieve her love. It is very hard to find a good photo of Louis Garret as Prof Bhaer online with Jo, though the movie (rightly in my view) makes this relationship the partnership Jo chooses in life.
The movie auditorium for Little Women was far more crowded than those showing other junks — Cats, action-adventure, moronic Marvels and the deeply reactionary The Irishmen (a re-make of On the Waterfront in effect). I did see two men falling asleep. Is the gender fault-line that big? if so, well then we need to stop making the moronic violent curse-ridden movies and return to 19th and 20th century stories by women. I’m just now watching the 1970s Fortunes of War adaptation of Oliva Manning’s Balkan Trilogy: magnificent, beautiful, intriguing, and the material frighteningly relevant — fascism taking over, gradually killing destroying wreaking unretrievable damage …
Just 3 of the countless favorable reviews (if you include non-professional or unpaid ones like mine):
Ronan is now a “celebrity” — she was Mary Queen of Scots (she began with playing a very unlikable young woman in Atonement). Florence Pugh was Cordelia in the powerful (good) Lear movie with Anthony Hopkins in the lead ….
So many LW movies: Trom Robin Swicord and Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 Little Women: a rare appreciation of the role of Mr Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne) in New York going over Jo’s (Winona Ryder) stories (see my “Christmas in Little Women,” book and films …. )
I am sorry to admit the meal at our usual Asian restaurant was not enjoyable. We finally faced up to the reality this restaurant is going down: this time the service was nothing short of terrible. Half a Peking Duck is no longer possible; you must buy a whole one, but they don’t bring it out hot in front of you and carve; it is pre-carved (yet it took ever so long for them to bring it out), and they had run out of the usual side dishes. We had ordered other dishes but as they seemed not to be coming, we canceled it all and left. We will find another Peking Duck Asian restaurant next year.
Come from Away and Gertwig’s Little Women are filled with progressive social values; semi-didactic scenes of charity, people loving one another, giving, forgiving accepting: works we are much in need of since the spread of hatred and fear these past few years by the lies and control over social media Trump and his regime have achieved, and others like it around this cold commercialized world. Journalists who once would have been continually helping are today regularly killed, imprisoned, cannot find paying jobs where they can learn to do investigative reporting.
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Mill in Winter, Edward Willis Redfield
Then there was Boxing Day (the 26th). We have been doing boxing day for about 20 years now; the last 8 without Jim but remembering him. How do we do boxing day? we go to a museum, of which there are many choices in DC. This year, like most, we went to the National Gallery. The advertised exhibits were neither that interesting (though I admit one was filled with precious historicals) or large; one small one not mentioned much, that we just happened upon (the best way) of the work of a 15th century Spanish sculptor was fascinating: remarkable moving statues and bas relief; the film brought the figures close up and was a good travelogue through Spain in its own right. For me best of all were old friends — paintings I like especially to look at and return to. The pizza wasn’t bad either (in the cafe) and people ice-skating just outside to look at. Above are a photo a kind African-American young man (with a friendly family, wife, three children) took of Izzy and me in the central atrium (high up is a giant Christmas tree ball — there were two of them above the flowers this year) and a reproduction (it does not convey the quality of the impasto white paint and just glorious sense of space and sky) Mill in Winter by Edward Willis Redfield (one of my favorite pictures in this museum, an “old friend”).
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I did have some good conversation at a Christmas luncheon with the other teachers and volunteer board members at OLLI at AU early in December, and there was a party on another later afternoon in mid-December — not as good because however well meant the noisy band got in the way of what most of the people were there for — to talk to those you don’t see all term. Izzy skipped her Christmas dinner with her Aspergers Adults club this year (sometimes her outings with them are a trial, as in a recent dance), but she appeared to enjoy her party at work (the Pentagon Library). Apart from my own Christmas movie watching at home, and reading about and around Christmas (about which see, What do we mean by a Christmasy story & C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed), this exhausts our going out. I socialize on the Net and she does too –in her case this year through exchanging and reading aloud original stories with other people on a website. We fall back on and support one another & our cats love us too, and we have our tree.
I am irrationally fond of the tree each year — somehow it is a cheering sight (if not over-decorated and a real tree)
In my view the way some practice Winter Solstice can be very stressful for people, for a good deal of unreality is expected and imposed. Family get-togethers are potentially fraught times. For older people they are often facing increasing deterioration (I can’t drive at night so that’s why Izzy and I are not going out New Year’s Eve for the first time in 4 or so years; I’ve now got a case of eczema because of the stress I’ve had to deal with on the Net), relatives and friends have died in the previous year. Do you know what I’ve liked? I think its rituals can make many people lonelier, especially if you are someone who doesn’t have other people to do these rituals with or feel yourself not comfortable or wanted among those you can go to. I sent out 20 paper cards and about the same number of electronic Jacqui Lawson cards, and in return I had letters from old friends I hadn’t “talked” to in quite a while, and a renewal of feeling. Perhaps the best way to endure and enjoy what you can is think of it as time off, a time to remember, time (if you can) to gain some perspective.
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 