Returning to Trollope via maps, televisuality & Australia (!)

David Suchet as Melmotte facing them all (from Davies’s 2001 TWWLN adaptation — in the last phase Suchet has in mind Charles Laughton’s moving performance as Quasimodo)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve returned to Trollope with a plunge. A writer for our time. Like Dickens, a geographer of our imagination, utterly televisual (via Andrew Davies), and aptly post-colonial.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been reading his (magnificent panoramic) The Way We Live Now and his brilliant psychological-social masterpiece, He Knew He Was Right. I had begun them once again (I’ve read both at least twice) and gotten about one-third of the way through each when I wrote a proposal for a paper to be part of a collection of essays on British Historical Costume Drama on TV (from The Forsyte Saga to Downton Abbey), and though I’ve not had an absolute acceptance, it’s as near as firm yes as one can get. The only doubt will be if the group can get enough essay proposal to go forth for a fat volume.

Donald Pleasance played the character whose presence began for Trollope his Barsetshire novels: here he plays his cello (1982 BBC Barchester Chronicles, Alan Plater)

It would not be due until next fall, but my problem now is my proposal for Mapping Trollope was accepted by Sharp, and that will be due mid-summer. To map Trollope, to delve his re-creation of London, the mythic Barsetshire, the counties of Dillborough and surrounding areas from The American Senator (Ayala’s Angel), to say nothing of Barsetshire country (which includes both series, Barsetshire and Pallisers), I shall have to read in detail, taking down specifics from several very long novels. I know from experience the whole picture of Barsetshire first emerges in Doctor Thorne, that the chronology of the Barsetshire and Palliser books is more or less consistent and the mapping say of TWWLN fits into that of the Pallisers. And I did want to include the careful mapping of Western Ireland in Trollope’s 5 Anglo-Irish novels and two stories (consistent with the Phineas books), which are no where well enough known.

One world Trollope.

On top of this from my trip to NYC to listen to a lecture at the NY Trollope Society by Prof Nicholas Birns on Trollope’s La Vendee as historical fiction, I’ve again come into contact with this generous scholar who years ago (really) encouraged me to send him a paper on Trollope’s travel books for his Antipodes: a Global Journal of Australian/NZ literature. He told me he loved my book (I never forgot that), especially the Irish sections where I argued for the central importance of Ireland in Trollope’s life and work. I found myself unable to write the paper because at the time I didn’t understand post-colonial theories and perspectives, and the only thing I could think of was descriptive and that meant (I felt) going to Australia. Jim won’t listen to that (cost, distance), and how could I begin to spend enough time anyway.

Walhalla, Victoria 19th century print

Since then I’ve learned about post-colonial theory (see my blogs on Christopher Hodson’s Acadian Diaspora and Diasporic Jane and Indian films) and have been able to come up with a perspective which would enable me to discuss say the relationship between Trollope’s travel book, Australian and New Zealand and his novels set in Australia — without going to Australia, or if I did for a relatively short time (I do long to go). On line I’ve done that for his American Senator and North America, which we read in conjunction with one another on Trollope19thCStudies when it was still Trollope-l.

Trollope’s section on New York City and American culture as fuelled by a worship of money ever relevant (see this week’s New Yorker column, George Packer reading TWWLN).

I told him my idea for “On Living in A New Country: Inventing an Australian Identity” (a play on Patrick Wright’s On Living on an Old Country), and he seemed to like it very much, and more or less told me I could be on his pane, “The Australian Trollope,” in a coming Trollope conference. Yes a group of Trollopians are not waiting another 25 years to get together again (see Exeter conference), and in fall of 2015 plan to meet in Belgium at the University of Leuven. If I did that it would mean reading another set of long Trollope books but some new (and to me) interesting Australian literature which I have grown to love. I should say I was once part of a group looking to publish on Trollope as traveler (this was 10 years ago) when I read AngloAustralian novels (e.g., Henry Kingsley’s Geoffrey Hamlin) and Australian & New Zealand famous classics (Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, and Jane Mander’s The Story of a New Zealand River, Ethel (Henry Handel) Richardson’s enormous trilogy, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony.

Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin as Ada and Flora McGrath (1993 The Piano, Jane Campion)

The rest of my blog summarizess my proposal to discuss the film adaptations of TWWLN and HKHWR (“Andrew Davies’s Televisual Trollope”) and throws out a few ideas for “On Living in a New Country.”

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“Andrew Davies’s Televisual Trollope” will include two great artists, Andrew Davies as well as Trollope. I will show that

in Andrew Davies’s adaptations of Trollope Davies developed sophisticated televisual techniques expressively to convey Trollope’s interior monologues, epistolarity, and panoramic plot-designs and Trollope’s themes of delusional sexual paranoia and anxiety, and economic corruption. TWWLN and HKHWR rely on filmic epistolary sequences, montage, flashbacks and voice-over; Davies also breaks naturalistic conventions to allow for characters directly to address the TV audience, and for the TV screen to picture emblematic allegories. We will also see that Davies engages with Simon Raven’s famous 26 part Pallisers to replace a cynical patriarchal Tory implied author with a humane, liberal feminist one, and while so doing, critiques Trollope’s texts from a feminist and Oedipal standpoint ….

Mr Gilson overpowered by Arabella French’s chignon, and getting back when she says she will do anything he bids her including of course removing it: modelled on one of Marcus Stone’s illustrations (from Davies’s 2004 HKHWR)

The first part of the paper will examine the filmic art, themes, character types, plot-designs of TWWLN and HKHWR as a similar pair: since not enough films made from Trollope in close proximity have survived, Davies cannot (as with his Austen or Dickens films) conceive of these as part of a subgroup of author-connected films. Instead they belong to Davies’s own political satiric type films made from socially-concerned novels … In the second part how scenes and dialogues in TWWLN allude to scenes in Raven’s Pallisers to comment both on Raven’s and Trollope’s work. I will also show that Davies brightens and makes much gayer and more hopeful the perspective of HKHWR by imitating the décor and kinds of gentle caricature created in the Barchester Chronicles

For “On Living in a New Country” my idea would be to follow Trollope’s unusual (so I think) trajectory of dramatizing colonialism not from the angle of the higher echelons but from that of the desperate lower middle, working class person and family, or the angle of the younger son who is not the heir. It’s such people he tells his fiction about, and it was to them he directed his Letters from Liverpool.

In the part of Australian and New Zealand just on New Zealand where he visited the Maoris and went swimming with a group of them, we have Trollope as Bohemian (sort of), but (and now this is vague) I recall I thought he was prophetic in looking forward to how ethnic politics would work out, how these would be a core of conflict, that they would seem to replace class- and money-based politics. (It was an analogous foresight to those found in his Anglo-Irish novels about how communities react to outsiders, the use of scapegoats, and collusive officials.) Trollope saw that the person or people who live in a “new” country (so they see it) have to evolve a new identity, one connected to the old one, but different and while in his novels (John Caldigate) he warns out “gentlemen” could fall to lower ways of life, he was very enthusiastic about this new identity.

20th century illustration for Trollope’s John Caldigate (originally called Mrs John Caldigate)

I was amused to find that Robert Hughes actually ends his great book The Fatal Shore (one of the great books of the 20th century; it can stand alongside Primo Levi’s If this be man) by quoting Trollope’s graphic portraits of two men kept in prison for a very long time. I did want to produce a paper. I remember seeing a film at the time, The Proposition, which seemed to me to go into the areas I was interested in from an angle of high violence — and “Aaron Trowe” (the protagonist villain share’s Trollope’s initials, AT) is a story of high violence; so too Harry Heathcoat. Here’s a wikipedia article on the Australian film The Proposition just about this group of people, which starred Emily Watson and Ray Winstone.

The Stanleys (very much the sort of couple Trollope writes about).

TMI? If you were wondering what I’ve been reading while watching all these films and going to operas, what thinking about and why, there you have it. Next up will be a blog on Trollope’s novels HKHWR and then (separately) the TWWLN

Ellen

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NY Trollope Society’s Winter Meeting: Prof Birns on Trollope’s La Vendee

Death of Henri de la Rochejaquelein, painting by Alexandre Bloch

Dear friends and readers,

We’ve been to NYC with the excuse of hearing an (in the event) wonderfully suggestive lecture by Nicholas Birns on Trollope’s La Vendee. Prof Birns spoke at the Groliers’ Club, an older building with full library along 44th Street.

On the novel itself, we read this twice on Trollope19thCStudies and I’ve put the postings onto my website so the reader can find many good essay-postings on the novel there. What I have to offer here are notes I took from Professor Birns’s talk: heads of topics, sketches of themes, historical writing, and an insight into the visualization of place in La Vendee which connects it to Trollope’s novella, Cousin Henry where Professor Birns ended his talk.

One problem with the talk wwhich Prof Birns confessed upfront was Prof Birns had not read the French aristocratic woman’s memoir on which book is based: Memoirs of the Marquise de la Rochejaquelin (translated by Scott). It’s very difficult to access. Trollope did much research and other sources are Lamartine’s recent history, The Girondists and a long history of the French revolution by one Archibald Alison whom Disraeli mocked as Mr Wordy. Trollope did general research too — as he did for his travel books, one of which (abortive) was an Irish one around this time.

First Prof Birns offered a preliminary set of thoughts as a preface. This is Trollope’s third novel, and comes out of intimate relationship with Ireland and his experiences of countryside and marginalized world there. Trollope knew French culture and history. Prof Birns suggested that Trollope was looking for successful topic, and his two Irish novels didn’t sell. Representing a place became for him a way to represent hus metaphoric thinking … There is rich forest and landscape in novel. (Trollope is not known for his descriptive abilities but they are important as is his use of place, houses as symbols, landscapes too.)

Professor Birns reminded us that 1848 was a year of revolution in Europe. (There was much interest in revolution in this era of open class struggle and the first building of unions.) Carlyle has a real success with his French revolution book which is hard to read; Dickens writes or will write Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities. Trollope, though, chooses counter-revolution emerges. Why? He asks and tries to asnwer, Why did peasants not support revolution? They are guerillas. Prof Birns instanced the Spanish peninsular war as analogous complicated event. Prof Birns brought up Balzac’s Les Chouans, a violent book (it seems), but it was of course Scott who Trollope is centrally imitating in La Vendee. Prof Birns also recommended Flanigan’s 20th century historical fiction, Year of the French as a companion insightful book, showing French and Irish parallels? (I have it and could not get into it. Must try again.)

As to the kind of historical fiction, La Vendee represents: Trollope uses real historical characters. It is probably also true that place is central to historical writing. It was Prof Birns’s insight that Trollope resorted to historical fiction to write a book and used the characteristics of historical fiction to try to get into what was to him another time and place and also present an inner meaning or vision about the way human politics works:

What happened was the provinces resisted a central power. Rich lords against any revolution; military leaders had allegiance to ancien regime. This was also a conflict between modern secular groups and Catholic conservatives. Trollope take sides, clearly with rebels. The question would be, why.

The central appealing character killed off in Trollope’s novel, which comes alive around that point. There is an emotionally held-in unhappiness here (said Prof Birns). Trollope also against romanticism and revolution; Prof Birns then connected book to Cousin Henry, a self-flagellating book, where place is crucial. Wales the setting of this novella and Henry ostracized and terrorized by others in the village; Henry cannot understand brutal unsubtle culture.

Prof Birns said Trollope resorts to ekphrasis because he has trouble getting into these cultures. Ekphrasis is a word that has become fashionable nowadays; it appears frequently in academic discourses (and also talk about poetry). Myself I don’t recall Cousin Henry as visual but rather an intense psychological study of a man who is outcast and susceptible to cruel bullying, but I do recall La Vendee is striking in its visual portraiture, especially one scene where the wife of an openly loving married couple (unusual for Trollope) look out a window and the wife describes the battle seen to her husband much in the manner that Rebecca describes a battle to the wounded Ivanhoe.

Olivia Hussey as Rebecca from the famous scene, and a felicitious still of Anthony Andrews as Ivanhoe (from the 1982 mini-series)

(Trollope’s novel has never been filmed.)

At this point my notes give out. I was really cheered by the friendly greeting of the man who runs the society, Randy Williams; by meeting Stephen Amarnick and hearing how his edition of the complete Duke’s Children is coming along. Two people told me they are on Trollope19thCStudies and read my postings sometimes. One woman said she could not stand I gave away something about Downton Abbey (! see my P.S). I hope now that I’ve retired to be able to find time to come to NYC to attend the society’s meetings, e.g., go to this year’s dinner and come far more regularly to the lectures.

For the rest of our trip, a diary journal (we saw 3 operas, 1 play, a movie, went to Central Park, the Met Museum, the Strand, and walked a hellavu lot: From NYC: a diary of shopping, theatre-going, walking …

Ellen

Postscript: Still on the train earlier in the day, coming into the station. We are waiting in the space between seats in a crowd of people pushing holding luggage, I see a young man with largish black laptop at the same time watching his screen. I peek. There’s Miss Obrien in her usual corner spot at the table next to her Shirley Maclaine’s maid, POV Anna, across the way Mrs Hughes … .. Later I go to lunch and open New Yorker, first joke I come to: lady visiting prison on phone reporting to husband “the bad news is Lady Sybil died but Bates is home … “

Jim now tells me the man had all 3 seasons of Downton DVDs on his table set up in his seat area …

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On a really enjoyable reading by Colm Toibin

Colm Toibin when much younger

Dear friends and readers,

Last night we went to a local bookstore which regularly hosts talks and classes about books (as well as a weekly storybook hour for children and tours too), Politics and Prose. We’d never been there before, and to the area only once, when last July we were invited to come to a fourth of July barbecue (what a treat for us). A member of the Irish embassy asked all those who came to read James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloom Day. We heard about this because Jim got an email from the Irish embassy which now has his name.

A large old-fashioned bookstore, two floor (!), where books are actually set up by their categories and within that the author’s name. A couple tables upfront with latest sellers, and in the back audiobooks on CD. You can wander about and come upon treasures just like this. I saw Alice Kessler-Harris’s A Difficult Woman (a biography of Lillian Hellman) on display, but had decided for Toibin’s Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature, a book of somewhat rewritten essay-review meditations published elsewhere (the LRB, the NYRB and other places). If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know how much I like his essays, and how I’ve loved those of his novels I’ve read thus far. It turns out I’ve read 4 of 7 (In praise of Colm Toibin: Un-put-downable).

Last night he was there to promote his latest novel (apparently the 7th), The Testament of Mary. Yes the central character is the Virgin Mary (does she have a last name like the rest of us?). It’s a really a novella, a short one at that, and from what he wrote a retrospective meditation by Mary some 20 years after the brutal crucifixion of her son. She is now living in safety, relative peace, left to herself by all and two visitors show up, one Lazarus. Yes he takes liberties — good historical fiction often does. The core idea is the irretrievableness of what happened and how she cannot forget and if she could change it, do it differently somehow, how she longs to. It’s memories poured out. As a subjective narrative by a women it harks back to his great The South. He seems to have a predilection for writing heroine’s texts (Brooklyn, Henry James in The Master is a kind of male heroine).

What a large crowd. It did not overwhelm the store, but it was much larger than we’d expected of such an intellectual sensitive author. There were not enough chairs for all.

He began by telling us of his trips to Venice and two paintings of the Virgin he had stood before repeated: a Tintoretto, perhaps The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, and a Titian, The Assumption. What he seems to have liked especially about the latter was her red robe and how she soared above reality. He is himself getting older.

Recent photo — he does look like this, only he is a small man, somewhat bent, light brownish-white skin, light brown hair

Today I see that the Tintoretto has Mary in a red robe too, and the picture’s content against the reason for its festival, takes us across her life.

They were the inspiration for the book. He did not tell us why he wrote it, only that he would like it to be taken seriously and he didn’t mean it as a mock. He didn’t think the church would bother notice it — he said this in answer to one question afterwards. He does read very well, and his voice was how I’d imagined it, Irish lilt but not too heavy. I stayed awake and listening for much of it, though when his register came too low I couldn’t hear it all. We were in the back, having arrived only ten minutes before the “reading” started.

It was obvious he’d done this many times. He was smooth, and seemed such a sweet man. These sorts of things are part of what makes an author successful. The book launch. He’s learned how to do it. Among questions asked were does he have a routine, a place he always writes, what does he write with. He said he writes anywhere and with any thing (mostly a pen) and no he’s not a routine type. He does sometimes have to write a book quickly or whatever quickly lest he forget it; get it down, and then he comes back to work at it. He is not a man who has written a lot of very long books, say like Dickens, Trollope, Margaret Oliphant, Wm Dean Howells, and they all had fixed routines and places they wrote. He has made his career through socializing too and his oeuvre (in pages) most actually be preponderantly non-fiction.

I wanted to reply to something he had said before starting his readings. He said that other “classic” fiction novels, 19th century, were no help “here.” He comically alluded to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Dickens’s Miss Havisham, they could not help him. Nor Henry James. Perhaps Mrs Touchett (Ralph’s mother, isolated, alone, an “odd” woman.) While he was reading I thought of Daniel Deronda’s mother, Eliot’s older heroine who returns 25 years after giving her son up to another so she could have an operatic career, a life of her own. Now bitter, not remorseful, but regretful because after all she ended up marrying and having children anyway. The dreams she had had not been realized and how here was this son reproaching her.
But the mike was too far away.

I didn’t try to buy anything directly afterwards. The line became very long. Instead we walked three stores down to the Comet, a pizza place with ambience. A large screen played over and over the poignant short Italian film, The Red Balloon. No sound just the images before you. The walls gray. The tables ping-pong, the seats benches. Soft lights. We had two pizzas, small, a white (all cheese, garlicky nothing else) and a red (just tomato sauce topping, more spicy, reminding me in its heavy dough and yummy surface of pizza in NYC in the 1950s, so-called Napoles-like). A carafe of chianti. The place was moderately full.

We talked. We realized this was probably the first book reading we’ve ever gone to as such. Play readings by a group, lectures, maybe a book reading within a performance of other things, but not alone. Jim said we never went to the Folger poetry readings because they cost. This was for free. Also the people were less known and there was obviously time for too much talk. So too much egoism would be on display he felt. I remembered going to listen to Empson read his poem in the Graduate Center in the 1970s. How he read little and talked much of his poetry. But the talk was splendid, really insightful (as Toibin’s was not quite, though not deliberately misleading as say Andrew Davies on his films), and how John Hollander got up to ask questions, all admiring and how Empson (spiteful in this but perhaps made uncomfortable) cut him down, half-mocked him. Also a lecture by Margaret Mead at the Museum of Natural History. All I can recall is how intelligent and humane she was and ever after have reacted to all dismissals of her work, denigrations of her with a memory of this seeing her and knowing they are unfair to her.

We decided we would try some more at this place. Then to support the bookstore, we went back. That’s when I bought Love in a Dark Time. All the Testaments to Mary were gone. To tell the truth, I was not sure I wanted it, as I felt it would be wrapped up in Catholicism as some level, and I’m an atheist. I was sure it’d be feminist in intent. If Toibin had said he found out or invented a last name for her, and told us of it, I might’ve. They had only had his most recent novels: (Blackwater Lightship two copies, one still left, and mostly Brooklyn and The Master, latest and best known. I have them all plus The South and Homage to Barcelona (not there). But there was suddenly one copy as if from deep in a basement (the girl at the counter said it was “a backlist” book), this book of essays. So I snatched it. His essay on Wilde’s exposure of his homosexuality as “found out,” as a person wanting to be “found out” has influenced my thinking ever since.

We got home by 10ish, not too long to write one final blog on Jane Austen’s letters. I’m not going to give them up, but maybe go yet slower and do it by myself. The prompting from Austen-l helps, and the sense (however deluded) of reaching people, but the flak, the continual cliched readings and occasional either preposterous or theoretical agendas don’t help me at all. I waste time and make no friends refuting them.

Earlier that day I had talked on WWWTTA about Temple Grandin’s film about how animals form bonds, friendships, and people’s perception of them, and the trajectory the film belonged to. Really worth while and gotten into other debates on the growing dissemination of how it’s okay for women to subjugate themselves to sadism, even light fun … ), but I’ll add these as brief comments here later today.

We wished we could have more such nights. People are only gradually becoming aware of what a delightful city DC is slowly turning into. The neighborhood around there is small houses, apartments further off, and some shopping blocks. It’s marred by a large street which traffic streams through daily and that obscures the quiet ambience of the play otherwise. I’ve vowed to myself to read Love in a Dark Time, Homage to Barcelona, and (connected to Toibin and the project on book illustrations to Trollope which I’ve just finished — a blog this weekend), Amy Tucker’s The Illustration of the Master.

Reprinted by Tucker, it was chosen by James as a frontispiece for A Portrait of Lady, and could serve as frontispiece for Toibin’s The Master.

Ellen

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Turtles, pussycats, glitter & a new coat at last, not to omit Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City: NYC 5 days & nights

An internet photo (we do not yet carry an ipad camera as a regular thing)

A cat curled up in its pod (Detail from A Lady with a Harp below)

We spotted the turtles before we did the pussycats, probably because the turtles moved and the pussycats didn’t. Also we were out-of-doors and it was earlier in the day.

Saturday morning our plan was to return to Madison Square garden & exchange our 5 o’clock train on Sunday for one much earlier in the day since for Sunday the reasonable prediction was much colder and heavy rain all day, and thus far our three visits to NYC had involved much living in the streets, walking, eating, watching, strolling, gazing. We’d had our Starbucks coffees and croissants in Bryant Park on the usual teetering pastoral green chairs and wobbly table while reading the New York Times, then succeeded in the exchange ($120 extra), taken the subway up, and entered the Park at 76th and found ourselves in the Ramble.

A lovely thick green lake with people rowing beckoned, so we got on that path, and following the stones I thought I saw a fake (stone sculptures very small) set of 4 turtles sitting very still on some stone or log. In Alexandria, where we live there are fake ducks in some of the ponds so life-like you think they are bobbing for fish. We came up to the log and I thought I saw one of the turtles move its head. Nothing unexpected. Often in Alexandria I see real live ducks come up to the fake ones. But then a much smaller size turtle began to climb the log. It struggled to pull up, and almost fell back, but somehow held out and heave-ho, up it got. Then I saw another turtle on the log appear to squiggle in response, and realized the whole lot of them were alive. This new medium-sized one, then four adults, each with a flipper on the others, and finally a very tiny baby turtle, at first hidden by the mother and facing another way.

We had happened on turtle pond. Over across the other side, nests of turtles.

I don’t know how long we walked, it was such a beautiful morning, in the 70s, sunny, breezy. We passed by some area where people were bird-watching: cameras, binoculars, special outfits, alert-looking with books all announced this. One man smiled from a bench and said hello as we passed.Past a playground named after its benefactor (the one with the three-bears statue) took us to the piazza before the Met museum and we went in.

It’s a vast people’s playground nowadays. We tried two of the exhibits and found one was done from a curator’s perspective (the Bernini clay models a vast distance from the blown up photos of the spectacular installation art (so to speak) everywhere in Rome, another mindless (how people love to fake photographs with no sense of what this implies). On the roof this Escher contraption for which one has to get a timed-ticket. So we visited a couple of favorite places — a room of Hubert Roberts badly hung and badly in need of cleaning amid the formal detritus, all uncomfortable to live in, of the super-rich 1% of ancien regimes (“period rooms”). This day for a time the museum, with its continual atavastic scary animal-like bizarre gods (a middle eastern room) and high hierarchical (wealthy, war-like) subjects (everywhere), reminded us how 90% of art has ever been deplorable.

Jim joked to a guard, where is the nearest elevator. He not getting it, I said “we want to get out.” “Get out!” the astonished man smiled. “Don’t we love it here?” I excused myself that my feet were hurting and I am old. He pointed to a corridor leading to stairs and an elevator.

I don’t mean to say it was all loss. A few good moments here and there. The Hubert Roberts. A Reynolds of a small woebegone young boy aristocrat not yet trained out of his humanity. And Marianne Dorothy Harland (1759–1785), Later Mrs. William Dalrymple by Richard Cosway (English, Okeford 1742–1821 London), which used to be exhibited as A Lady with Harp:

Bad picture, absurd posture, showing off what luck had thrown the young woman’s way (as long as she obeyed all materialistic and rank demands), it had nonetheless caught my attention because of the title (I thought of Austen’s Mary Crawford, of Mansfield Park fame), and when we went over what did we notice but that 200 years ago people were providing pods for cats to curl up in — just the way our scared-y cat Ian loved to. The thought crossed our minds that in this era only rich cats might have this luxury, but then when over an hour later we happened on a museum-school we had never heard of before, the National Academy Museum, and went inside to view its collection, we came across an American picture with a perhaps not quite so rich little girl and lo and behold near her feet, a cat curling up in a more home-made pod.

We’ve become very fond our our two pussycats and as a consequence stronger animal lovers, more alert to the presence of cats than we’ve ever been before and to how others treat them and other animals too. I’m convinced we were too young when we had our dog, Llyr, and were not sensitive enough to her presence and needs.

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We spent 5 days & nights to NYC, the first full day of which I had attended a Burney conference, and the second morning I was with a long-time (constant) Janeite friend and her son. I’ll blog about the conference separately on Austen reveries. Herewith is another travelogue, a record of Jim and my good times together away from home. And again our choice was the exhilarating tolerant good city.

For the first time ever we bought ahead for all 4 evenings plays we wanted to see. The last three times we’d been back to the city this year and last year too we had had some good times, but managed never to see even one serious play. A combination of family emergencies & tragedy, the reasons we had come to the city, and just plain bad luck had got in the way: nothing on at half-price tickets we wanted to see or there between times when the opera or ballet is on or when the Delacorte did one of its marvelous performances of Shakespeare and other plays.

So we determined to make up for lost time. After Obama’s empty-chair indifferent performance against an exultant bully-boy Romney, we needed their inspiriting rebelliousness. How do New York City’s stages differ from those of DC, Virginia, & Maryland? Well, with no effort and on particular aim to see anything closely commenting on the political and economic catastrophe wreaked on the world for the last 30 years by a succession of US reactionary militaristic regimes and all their allies, client states, collusive victims and flunkies, three of the four did just that, and the fourth was not far off.

I’ll begin with the most magnificent and powerful of the lot, the great Brian Friel’s Freedom of the City, at the Irish Repertory Theater, on 22nd and 6th (not far from where Jim and I lived for well over a year — 22nd and 10th)

Joseph Sikora as Skinner dressed up in the Mayor’s robes, Napoleonic hat on head, cavorting about on the Guildhall

The play’s occasion was the slaughter of 13 people when on January 30, 1972 British soldiers shot down a peaceful civil rights march in Derry, Ireland (“Bloody Sunday” it became known as). The Commission and judges set up to investigate found no one responsible, no soldier or officer was tried or even disciplined. Only in the last 10 years has another enquiry been set on foot which reversed the findings of the early court and the Tory PM apologized.

Way too late. One of the awarenesses Friel’s play brings home to the audience is the three people who in the play stumble by mistake and panic into the guildhall will never be brought back. Nothing can ever undo what was done nor make up for it. The fantasy elaboration is to put before us three characters, Michael, an embittered young seemingly permanently unemployed man who longs to live a productive self-respecting life with wife, children, goals, good work; Lily, an impoverished mother of 11 living in a condemned shack behind a railway, with no hope of any improvement in her life or for that of her family (she has had no access to contraception), and a loner outsider, Skinner, refusing to be coopted into, or justify the stupefying displacements and compromises the other two seem silently to accept — all the while endlessly talking. These three inside are interwoven with the cold impassive judge coming to his inexorable conclusion they are dangerous armed terrorists, using the evidence of a constable, and a psychiatrist; a ludicrous professor with her deconstructionist understandings; a reporter. Hovering over them the British soldiers armed, in camouflage outfits, with terrifying weapons at the ready. I reread the play tonight and was so moved. I can’t find any reviews so link in just the wikipedia article on the play itself.

At the Booklyn Academy of Music The Paris Commune, a Cabaret by Steven Cosson and Michael Friedman as directed by Steven Cosson. BAM is now made up of 3 (!) theaters: beyond the opera house, this modernistic building with its black box, and another I saw across a parking lot disguised as a green park.

Most people seem not to have heard of this bloody slaughter, much less know that as many people were killed by the French military in this 4 month period as were murdered in the 1792 Fall Terror so often detailed as a peculiarly horrific occasion in order to indite the French revolution. Basically what happened was the people of Paris took over the gov’t of France and for a time succeeded in holding on and beginning to reform and plan a sort of new deal (separation of church and state, no night work, pensions, remission of rents, ease of debts). This time it did not take the armies of four countries (England, Prussia, Spain and Russia united to defeat Napoleon’s armies) to crush and slaughter the rebellion.

Daniel Jenkins as the baker

Cosson and Friedman present the incident by a combination of rousing songs, actively rebellious character types in soliloquies and scenes interspersed with (ironic) songs of a soprano (Offenbach) and citizen types (baker and his wife, seamstress, politician). Everyone had to work very hard to give us a sense of a large crowd in frenetic activity. The language at the end and final song made the parallels with our own time and the recent destruction of the Occupy movement in the US and elsewhere.

Cock: the title refers as much to the staging of the play (in an apt cock-pit) as the lead actor’s penis

Cock by Mike Bartlett has (I think) an unfortunate title. It is not at all pornographic, not salacious: I took it to be the playing out of the lives of three unlucky people involved with a self-indulgent bisexual young man, John (Cory Michael Smith): M (Jason Butler Harner) the unfortunate male lover who supports him in a fantastically expensive apartment in London, W (Amanda Quaid), a young woman he meets and brings to a dinner cooked by M; and John’s father, F (Cotter Smith) who wants his son to marry and produce grandchildren. The acting is superb, controlled; I didn’t find it funny but rather poignant, a stinging representation of relationships endured under the circumstances and pressures of our era.

The two brothers confronting one another with Kathleen McKenny as Katherine, Dr Stockmann’s wife, as moderating influence

The least exhilarating (the proscenium stage realism creaks) and yet most directly relevant and at moments suddenly so eloquent was the fully (elaborately) staged Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in a new translation by Rebecca Lenkiewicz in an elegant Broadway theater, formerly the Biltmore now called the Manhattan Theater club (probably the first time Jim and I had been to Broadway in years). The acting was again superb, minor and major roles, but especially Boyd Gaines as Dr Stockman who has discovered the water of the town is contaminated, and Richard Thomas as his brother, Peter, a politician. Reviews have been rightly excellent (see highlights). I just wished that the central speech was not against what the majority wants or needs. Ibsen’s language derives from his own rebellion against the restrictive social mores of his country and class when what is on the minds of US people today is a political and economic and military oligarchy enforcing vast capitalist profits for a very few at the expensive of the decent lives and the earth itself for everyone else.

The four theaters were all just about filled. We also in the DC area do not have a population which goes to the theater like this. To be fair, we are talking about millions living in, close to, or near Manhattan, while in my area we have suburban distances to travel and theater is scattered across the area. This matters.

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What else did we do?

Mickalene Thomas: this tiger cat image conveys some of the glittery texture of her work

We made it to the Brooklyn Museum for the first time in a few years, and were fascinated by Mickalene Thomas’s determined reversal images of much French impressionistic and white male art in The origin of the Universe: she replaces the white men & women with black women, and her pictures of the natural world and art in-doors sparkle with glitter and bold colors. It’s true that central to her project is supposed shock, but what has not been emphasized anywhere I can see is there is a story she tells here: of her and her mother’s supportive relationship (many of her pictures are of her mother), of her mother’s hard life (one where she endured physical abuse in a coerced marriage for many years). If you go, you’ll find this one touching rather than just about hard success. We again saw Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, some favorites in the American collection (new ones brought up) and the kind of odd new art (like a covered wagon made out of Christmas lights) found everywhere in active museums nowadays. There is a real attempt at the Brooklyn to mirror its surrounding population’s history and culture too. We were too tired to go very far into the Botanical Gardens once again.

We did, though really look at some some 300 out of 7000 [!] pictures said to be owned at the National Academy of Art. We just happened on the place later in the afternoon. A thin townhouse, its sign for an exhibit of self-portraits by women artists caught my eye, and we went in. It was like a trip through the history of American academic art, and quite revealing it was — we spent 2 hours there. Modernity and women’s art first hit these people around 1970, but they are making up for lost time. I now know what one of my favorite modern artists, Jane Freilicher looks like. Unfortunately, the feel of the place is exclusive, the behavior of some of its patrons snobbish, and online they don’t share much. By contrast, the Neue Galleries make the experience comfortable for all, even non-members. (This business of membership is creating little coteries — one is now found on the fourth floor of the Metropolitan museum.)

I won’t omit Lord and Taylor’s flagship store. Everyone who looks like they have money enough to spend is welcome. It too is filled with lovely art: really nice women’s clothes (probably men’s too) galore set out beautifully. I discovered that just like Kohl’s, L&T today indulges in putting prices on garments they don’t mean. When you get to the cash-register you just may find (not always) several different sales at once. The styles, choice, price and help everywhere account for the store becoming filled by the time Jim and I left. I bought myself a new fall jacket — and when we got back to the Princeton threw out my now ragged black one. Bras, a warm hat, neat thin woolen elegant gloves. I had to restrain myself not to go for more.

And we didn’t miss bookstores. At the Strand I got myself a new edition of a new translation of Lampedusa’s masterpiece, Il Gattapardo (complete with new introduction, notes, appendices), a new volume of Leopardi, a pleasurable and not too untrue anthology of bellestristic essays on Central Park (well chosen and inroduced by Andrew Blauner), a novella by Wm Dean Howells, A Sleep and a Forgetting, I’d never heard of.

Jim did not buy himself any new clothes nor books. I should perhaps have labelled this blog good or magical moments from our celebratory time away: Jim’s 64th birthday (yes we sang the Beatles’ song) and our 44th wedding anniversary. He seemed content to be open to experience, have it accessible, among the endless stream of people, seemingly sleepless once you go outside, staying again at the Princeton, enjoying what we did, being alive together at liberty. We ate out in fancy restaurants two different evenings, once Italian, and (recommended) once French (a place called the Marseille). We inhabited the bar for a time each night, and twice were content just to dine on its snacks, and sometimes talking with the other like-minded circumstanced inmates.

As I trundled my bag behind me on our way home through the tunnel and a narrow space where another person was standing I said to her, “I don’t want to hit your feet” so she smiled obligingly moved them.

Ellen

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Vermont: a diary

Amos Brown house, Whittingham, Vermont (seen from angle of the front porch)

Some of our stuff all over the desk in the front room: guidebooks, the log book of Landmark, my French dictionary

Dear friends and readers,

We returned a few hours ago, from our latest venture staying at a Landmark Trust house, the so-called Amos Brown house, in central-south Vermont, a short walk from the borders of Massachusetts, and not too long a car ride from the Berkshires where remarkable theater, museum shows, festivals of music and art go on during the summer months each year. This is our tenth Landmark house (we have gone to these many more times than 10, having stayed at Amos Brown twice now, and Cloth Fair, in London, many times), and that we did enjoy staying in this place may be seen by our having returned to it, and our new plan to stay at Danescombe Mine in two autumns from now, to be able to explore Poldark and DuMaurier sites in Cornwall.

Danescombe Mine turned into a vacation place, Cornwall

But we did return early by two days and because this time we had a working ipad, I was able to write genuine diary entries each day, I offer to these who are interested to explain why we returned early (a problem with the Brown house), and give more of a genuine immediate feel of our travel experience than I usually do — since travel to and from this house we did.

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Ellen reading later in the evening front room

Jim upon arrival, in kitchen

July 30, 2012

We arrived yesterday afternoon. It is now morning and I am describing our experience yesterday. The place felt lovely partly because it is so quiet. I am now made aware of noisy even our Alexandria suburban block is. Few or no cars pass by here, and we have a minimum of electric appliances. Sitting in the garden on a rocking chair the air is restorative too — as it’s so cool in comparison to Virginia. All is comparison. The house is a genuinely later 18th century house tactfully restored. We can live here in comfort. On the drive here, I finished Graham’s The Angry Tide, began Baker’s The Rise of the Victorian Actor, and am now going to try Holroyd’s A Strange Eventful History (the enormous book you see on my lap). Jim made us a lovely meal and we once again explored the house.

The handwriting style on this iPad is so pretty but I cannot share it.

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I find a working radio!

Said to be paintings of Amos and Sarah Brown

July 31, 2012

Morning again.

I should have said yesterday that I regretted not staying to see Laura (that is, getting off at 9:00 am yesterday morning), as after all we got here by 4:30 pm. Last night our i-pad enabled us to listen to Leonard Cohen and Mahler. This morning we found a working radio and outlet and have listened to Boston’s version of NPR. So we had news (Nevada judge says forbidding late term abortions doesn’t get in anyone’s way, India having life-threatening storm), weather (cool), and now Ravel’s Pavan for a Dead Princes.

It is better having this connection to the outside world. I find this time (as I did the summer we stayed in the 19th century New York house, near Glimmerglass in Cooperstown), that I want to have this sense of connection. I miss the Internet and my Net friends, I miss knowing the news. I wished I could work my DVD player to help tire myself at night so I could sleep 6 hours in a row.

At the same time I like staying in centuries old houses. It makes me feel special, as part of history, conjoined to others. After its history as the Amos Brown farm (basically an agriculturally-based middle class family group), this place became a pleasure second-home for upper middle class people. For example, In the 1930s the rich Grace family played polo here with friends. It reversed this trend in the later 20th century, when it became a Carthusian monks’ sanctuary; it was the monks who let the place go to ruin (while they dreamed of paradises), and devastated the still unrestored Unit (it would cost so much to fix) by using cheap materials to fix things (like cement instead of bricks).

Like the other Landmark places, this house’s furnishings are tasteful. The chandelier in the dining room is such as the Brown family might have had had they had electricity, modern materials to look like lovely imitation iron, and a taste for simplicity. The pictures in the house are much improved. Beyond the supposed portraits of Amos and Sarah Brown, nice landscapes, flower still-lifes.

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One of the many new pictures in the Brown house: a landscape in the bedroom

Armide, Cupid, with Hatred (the soprano and two dancers), from 2012 Lully’s Armide, Glimmerglass

August 1, 2012.

Morning again. Last night I had that strange experience I sometimes have at home: I could make out everything in the rooms in this house even though I didn’t put the lights on. This time yes it was the full moon outside. I love the luminosity of the darkness. At nearly 10 pm we did walk out to see the stars and I could make out so many despite the moon making the sky less black. The light comes from 100s of years ago.

Yesterday (July 31st) we drove to Glimmerglass, a long drive there and back (3 hours) but worth it. Beautiful place, friendly talk with people like ourselves in taste, a witty lecturer, Lully’s Armide. The second half very good: Armide is turned from Tasso’s evil witch into a sentimental romance heroine enthralled by Rinaldo, and I feel the story is Dido and Aeneas. I found the music dull, non-expressive. The singers playing the parts looked right. Rinaldo very handsome. The whole thing done accurately as a Baroque opera, costumes, much dancing and beautifully woven in. We ate our own picnic and had white Riesling wine, and ate our dinner at home too.

When we returned, we looked at the Landmark Trust book and discovered we’ve stayed in 10 places: Cloth Fair (London, Smithfield, many times); Fox Hall (Chichester, a duke’s hunting lodge); Elton House (Bath) to follow in the footsteps of Austen, Burney, Radcliffe; Peters Tower (clock tower, near Exeter) to go to a Trollope conference; Shute Gatehouse (Devonshire) to go to Lyme;, the Old Hall (Somerset) to go with Laura and Izzy to neolithic sites, great houses; Georgian house in Hampton Court, the gardiner’s house, wonderful wandering around the grounds at night; Steward’s house (Oxford), from which I went to the British 18th century conference and Jim bought and cooked pheasants; Amos Brown farmhouse, Vermont. Now we hope to stay in Danescombe Mine, Cornwall.

I found in the library in the house (each house has an appropriate library) and red Charles T. Morrissey’s Vermont: a History. Informative, lightly written, decently mundane. 23per cent of people in Vermont live in dire poverty. It’s 19th century iron industries sailing trade, and farming are gone. Factories too — along the road they are arts buildings. Tourism, people who come to second homes, vacationers, and local economies (people serving one another’s needs) are its bases. It’s unlike New Hampshire which is arch conservative, has no income tax, and practically no services for its people. But the decent socially responsible attitude of Vermont’s legislature can be thwarted by the way business is conducted: a meeting is held for passing each law (includes the public and is advertised), thus no laws can get passed constraining hunters to control themselves and keep the deer population up. Hunting and gun types come and shout down, threaten the legislators, and will have brought enough people to vote down the representatives.

We move across centuries in our imagined places.

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A picturesque but not untrue photo of main street area in Williamstown — first built in the 18th century

One part of one portion of a wall in the Clark Museum Remix/UCurate exhibit

August 2, 2012.

Morning coffee done I sit and write. The first part of yesterday (August 1st), we enjoyed. I wrote on this iPad, breakfasted, and were happy together. We went back to bed, afterward talked, then rested, and then we drove to Williamstown, to the Clark museum. The drive was pleasant, past quiet streams, around mountains.

We had a good time at the Clark even though most of the museum is closed for extensive renovation. The people running the museum set up two spaces which could give you hours of delight. One, made up of three large interlocking rooms was called Classic Clark. The rooms had the usual set-up pictures on its walls (say 4 to a wall), and these had been taken from the museum’s most beautiful interesting paintings: the curators showed their stuff, they have good taste, intelligence, a sense of humor. We saw some favorites we remembered from last time, a few startling ones (one by Laurence Alma Tadema), each group set up by era (such alluring Constables, and set up with respect to the doors and arches so that when you see one set you have an amusing counterpart looking at you (it seems).

The characters in Alma Tadema pictures are so English upper class — these resemble the actors in the BBC I, Claudius — yet the painting is so good, especially the marble

The other was one huge room called Remix/UCurate was a work of inspired tricksters . I had noticed that there was a selection for small paintings in Classic: I thought the criteria was unusual, no it was small to fit more in. So Remix had many small gems as well as some medium-size, and a couple of well-chosen large. Extraordinarily good and unusual choices juxtaposed in non-era and non-school ways, but whose content made all sorts of comments on one another, often ironic. What made it though was words.

On a ledge were about 10 or more i-Pads, tablets like this one. You took one round with you and it was easy to get to literally several intelligent easy-to-read paragraphs on each, sometimes the painter, sometimes the painting – making you see so much more than you can on your own – I have been persuaded (you’d think I would not need this) words can be an intrinsic part of an art museum experience. And of the wonders of technology. They had four cabinets of small sculpture, plates, silver work, all keyed to paragraphs on the i-Pad. They had fit in in effect a floor of fascination in one room. They had two desks with large versions of these tablets: there the reproductions of the paintings could be large, and, candor here, vied with the tiny painting themselves, at least for clarity.

We stopped half way through and lunched at their service cafeteria and had fine meals. Mine was salmon, good lettuce and tomato salad, and yummy potato salad (with egg and onion), with cabernet sauvignon.

It was too hot to walk much and we could not find anything having any wi-fi. We came home. Jim was too tired to go out and we decided to walk to Massachusetts (half hour walk), and stay in to eat our roasted chicken, carrots, salad. Alas, after putting the stove in, it rained, and it seems Green Mountain Electric Company is not prepared for thunder or rain. We lost power. We found we had no water, and the stove provides no way to shut it off. No on of off button, no plug could be found. We feared leaving the house lest the stove set the place on fire. Even if we had planned it, the Bennington concert (we had thought of going to) was out.

The kitchen, showing the stove we could not shut off

This occurred at 5:30 pm. We called the caretaker number we were given and were assured someone would come to shut off the stove. No one ever came. So we couldn’t leave lest the chicken inside set the house on fire. There was one large candle and we drank wine ate peaches and cheese and bread, but soon it was dark, and we were aware of how isolated this house is. I phoned the electricity company several times, each time getting more response. The last call produced someone for me to talk to. We were promised power back at 8:30 pm but in fact it came back after 11 pm by which time we had gone to bed. No water means no working flush.

Someone in the Landmark log book said they had been this way for three days and nights. Someone else said this house is haunted. We heard what seemed to be human howling down the road twice. Jim suggested screech owls but my guess we are again near a man who beats his wife. In NYC across the alley from our apartment every Saturday night we’d hear this snarling gnarled male voice and then a woman screaming screaming and then she’d cry and then silence; this went on for some 7 years.

The working radio this morning (Vermont NPR) says rain, thunderstorms today and tomorrow. Yesternight involved 1044 houses. I know travel means travail, but last night did not amuse Jim. I began to have bad thoughts about my life. Jim says today we will fit in 2 days activities and go home tomorrow. I am willing to chance until Sunday, partly not to lose the money or time away. I have said to him, let’s not over-react, let’s see how the promised rain affects the house today.

I would be sorry not to go through with my plan to spend a day translating poetry by Elsa Morante, using French intermediate verse in a bilingual edition of her Rime I found on the Net. That’s why I brought my dictionaries.

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A tall bear made of woolly roses from Oh Canada

Mass MoCA, the outside and parking lot

August 3, 2012

Morning again. Yesterday (August 2nd), we ended on a high note. We have been very good here together, very happy — in the car, walks, touring towns and countryside, a lake, and our bed much used.

We went to another museum, Mass MoCA it is called, in North Adams City. Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, it made the MoMaA look staid. Three exhibits, and a tiny permanent collection.

Most objects were not paintings on walls, and those which were used the cartoon-y style that has become common. I found charming a large dollhouse complete with furniture. There was one called “love which dare not speak its name and it included a dramatization of the Lone Ranger and Tonto (partly meant to be funny). Much was hard satire on modern culture, the capitalist exploitative sexist absurd and cruel arrangements and norms but much was not preachy, and actually understandable. A book of photos of stealth airplanes used to kidnap people and take them to interrogate, torture and imprison them in secret places. Shell planes run by the U.S. There was a hut with a bed, surrounded by electronic gadgets, the hut a hexagon tent on which were beautiful films of nature, the natural world, including people.There was the usual self-indulgent kind of thing which shows no art (a film of clouds given explanations, surrounded by detritus), but Oh Canada (an exhibit) was superior to much contemporary art.

From the dollhouse exhibit

I remember the bad taste of junk across the Whitney one year by star pupils, doubtless conceived in a strongly competitive environment. Oh Canada had scenes of snow, wilderness used, and history. Two paintings on the Acadian deportations and massacre, parodying the lies of Benjamin west and Edward Dicksee. Artist Marie Doucette.

The building itself was a vast factory where the art was continually to show us the bare brick walls, pipes, all the stairways metal, all doors metal, ceilings with bare pipes. This decor was kept up everywhere, toilets too. We ate in a cafe which had good small meals. I note all the people we see in these places are clearly middle class looking, modern dress versions. Near us in this cafe a man read a Wall Street Journal, his wide had her hair carefully died and cut so as to look super casual.

A photograph of the company for A Month in the Country, set against a photo of the theater

The piece de resistance of our trip, and perhaps all the performances we’ve been to this summer was the Williams Theater production of Turgenev’s A Month in the Country. I’d never seen or read it. We arrived about an hour before the performance was to begin, and it took 3 hours, including intermission.

A very great play modestly put before us with a minimum of stage props and costumes and lights. The actors performed it wonderfully well. Real inward selves versus intermittent public facades to protect themselves was the basic perception with a real attention to power relationships undercut by irresistible human emotions and inescapable social arrangements made the perception Turgenev had of the characters. I felt so for the male friend of the family, living off them, and us by them. Hard parts were sympathetically done — like that of the husband. Comedy, pathos, even quiet tragedy as the young girl is driven by our heroine to marry a rich kind man the girl feels nothing for, yet this problem is and was and is the central arrangement of our heroine’s life.

There is just too much to say so I’ll leave it at that only saying my respect for Trollope went up as I remembered how much Trollope admired Turgenev, that Turgenev wrote an empathetic biography of Gogol. I hope Tyler on Trollope19thCStudies is willing to read and talk about Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons.

I remembered the parking garage and the theater from 5 summers ago when we saw here a superbly rich Lilian Hellman play set in Louisiana and a southern woman’s play about 3 sisters. WTF (a pun) is willing to do quiet Chekhovian as well as radical farce plays. Last time we saw 4 plays (a Stoppard comedy, Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession), a Glimmerglass production of an Offenbach opera; we had one day at a lake. This time we have not been as lucky with the summer theater on offer just when we came, and we have had one bad night.

We then drove back to and toured North Adams City, found an assuming good restaurant where “casual American food”, scotch and ginger ale (for me)’ and artisan beer (for Jim) was to be had, and where there was at last wifi. Jim emailed Izzy we would be home today in time for supper; Laura responded almost immediately. They were at the tennis match together.

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Our bed

Our clothes across the way

Jim has surprised me by his determination to go home early, as maybe I surprised him with my willingness to stay, not until Monday, August 6th by 10 am (I had thought that overdone), but till Sunday — to see the musical Class Act, about Chorus Line, which Jim had bought Saturday matinee tickets for in Stockbridge where there is an exquisitely good Italian restaurant; to go to a lake (Friday, today that would have been), and in the l’apres-midi sit and translate Italian out of the French Morante.

But no. We had been away from home long enough. I never heard him say that before. Myself I started perhaps for the first time to talk of how I understood now why people took vacations. This year I had had a culmination of more social experience and interaction than ever before, and understood vacationing was getting away from the stress, self-comparisons and beratings of all that. I really was willing to stay, but as I am ever intensely relieved to be home. I remembered how Laura had said “be sure and come back,” and wanted to know how Izzy was doing, how the cats were too.

On the radio the weathermen kept predicting a hard rain, thunderstorm, maybe even lightning (and perhaps the Vermont electricity company was not prepared for this). I had been scared again last isolated position of the house. Ever since I read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood I’ve been unnerved at the idea two lone gunmen can come into someone’s house and bully, emotionally torture and then kill everyone in the house. The recent Aurora massacre had reminded me how the US is a violent place, filled with people driven wild by excruciating demands, norms, and deprivations.

And I usually do what Jim wants. I spent my life by his side and he takes care of me. So we packed, and drove home. I’d like to go to the Berkshires again, next time stay in Massachusetts or New York where we are surrounded by people, houses I can see, and feel I am in an area served by an electricity company prepared for rain.

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Chairs in front room

I did read Kate Summerscale’s Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady (excellent, recommended), Lucasta Miller’s The Bronte Myth (which I hope to blog about), am almost finished with Graham’s Stranger from the Sea (Poldark novel 8, which I hope to write about as I’ve changed my view on it, and now like it very much), and began Charlotte Smith’s Young Philosopher, Margaret Kennedy’s Troy Chimneys (a historical novel set in the Regency period — who knew?). I gave up on Holroyd’s overdone saccharine book on Ellen Terry and Henry Irving and never got into his wife, Margaret Drabble’s Arnold Bennett (another time …. ). Jim read Irving Howe’s Notebooks (critical essays), John Hollander’s poetry, and Sondheim’s Look, I Made a Hat. We listened to much music together, and Jim & I read to one another Hollander’s poem, “The Ninth of AB” which begins

August is flat and still, with ever-thickening green,
    Leaves, clipped in their richness; hoarse sighs in the grass
        Moments of mowing, mark out the lengthening summer.
        The ground
We children play on, and toward which maples tumbler their
        seed
    Reaches beneath us all, back to the sweltering City:
        Only here can it never seem yet a time to be sad in.
Only the baking concrete, the soften asphalt, the wail
    Of wall and rampart made to languish together in wild
        Heat can know of the suffering of summer. But here, or
        in woods
Fringing a pond in Pennsylvania, where dull-red newts
    The color of goals glow on the mossy rocks, the nights
        Are starry, full of promise of something beyond them,
        north
        Of the north star, south of the warm dry wind, or east of the
        sea.
    There are no cities for now. Even in this time of songs
        Of lamenting for fallen cities …

It ends with the poet not escaped after all, in a room dark with the old tropes of despair as he turns to fallen cities, to ruined places, wailing walls, human history. It is a profound lamentation

As I used to say to my daughters, when we got home from a trip, home again, home again, jiggedy-jig.

Ellen

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Three nights & days in Manhattan

Bryant Park, at the back of the NYPL, since 1992 a vibrant area where we had breakfast each morning (croissant and coffee)

Dear friends and readers,

Duty brought Jim and I to New York City this past week: we had to help make a decision about how and where my aging frail mother (now 90) is to live, and, as we had expected some of our time during the week was devoted to this. This blog is not about this search, discussions, and decision with relatives (she will go into what’s called assisted living), but rather what the need to come back to the city caused us to do so we can visit more regularly and our time away itself as an exhilarating rejuvenating holiday. People people everywhere, we were knee deep in people wherever we went. And the culture I record is one which is a cooperative reaction to having so many people in a small space. You make way for people on the sidewalk, you weave in and out, so social street events are mass cooperative moments where all try to enjoy something in life side-by-side.

It’s a large room with TVs and blown-up photos of Princeton looking idyllic on the walls: one commercial: “Join the 1%!”

About five years ago, the Williams Club closed its doors (on 37th St just off Madison Ave), and since then, Jim and I have not found anywhere to stay that we found to be comfortable and (for what we experienced) worth the money asked. We had been there since Jim is a graduate of Columbia University (math) and Columbia does not have its own “clubhouse” (as the buildings are called), and had resisted moving to Princeton (on 43rd St just off 5th Ave). It’s more expensive and maybe we would not find it as “home-y.” We gave in, re-joined and the event showed us this rooms are much nicer (bigger, airier), there are more amenities, such as a working library; a front drawing-assembly sort of room, open from noon to 6 where one can find coffee, tea, comfortable tables and chairs, working computers attached to the Internet, and yes lovely chess and backgammon tables too; a nice gym; a interminably open bar (with snacks), dining and breakfast rooms open much of the time. Like the Williams, it has staff who sponsor events like parties, lectures, tours, singles nights. There are conference groups. It’s located more centrally: close to Tickets, a block away from Bryant Park, within walking distance of several museums, parks and of course subway and bus anywhere in the city.

We liked the place that much that we have booked again for early October as that is our 43rd or 44th wedding anniversary, depending on how you count it. We were married 43 years ago October 6th, at 1:30 pm in a Leeds registry office (that’s Leeds, England, up north), but we were also married a year to the night we met, an October 6th, 1968. My joke is I invited him back for coffee and he never left. A JASNA and Burney Society meeting is also occurring that week, and I’ll attend the Burney group whose panels are meeting in a building on 44th St off 5th Avenue.

Beyond drinking, eating, relaxing, talking with congenial people we met there (as we used to in the Williams Club), my reading (including Doris Lessing’s delightful and profound On Cats, on which I’ll write separately) and Jim watching movies using his laptop (one of Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde), what did we do that renewed our relationship, brought us closer too once again?

We walked from 43rd and 5th to 30th Street and 10th Avenue and climbed the stairs up to the new HighLine Park. Part of its deep gratifying pleasure is you remember the intensely crowded and noisy streets you had to wade through before you can “get on.” The stairways are places where people get on and get off. This meandering narrow walk with natural seeming greenery, flowers, bushes all along turns those parts of the city next to it into art works as you see them from the perspective of this park — from alleyways to buildings you walk among. The view over to the Hudson is spectacular. The place is quiet, people strolling, sitting, playing and listening to music, reading, just looking out. We exhausted our knees as we couldn’t resist staying on to the end when we debouched around the Village and found a nearby restaurant where we were relieved to sit and have a decent meal out on the sidewalk and watch “the world” go by. We had watched others on the Highline probably also seeing us.

Had we known, we could and would have watched the 1954 movie, On the Waterfront for free at Byrant Park when we returned. As we did not, we listened to music in our room and soon were asleep.

The gateway to the building and grounds

Tuesday we managed to spend a few hours at the Hispanic Society of America, a brief visit to the Morgan Library, and in the evening saw a fine production of a rarely-done Cole Porter, Nymph Errante in the Clurmont Theatre on Theatre Row off 10 Avenue and 42nd Street. I’ll dwell on the absurdly neglected Hispanic Society site: it’s made up of several buildings desperately in need of air-conditioning; the organization lacks the money to renovate because it lacks the audience its rich collections of great Spanish art, potential gardens should have. Within its narrow range it offers experiences likes those at the Metropolitan museum.

Sea Idyll by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida (1863-1923), whose work the museum has some stunning examples of, especially one vast mural around one room

We found playful work by a 16th century woman sculptor (Luisa Roldan), Goyas we’d not seen before, and unexpectedly striking interesting pictures from the later 19th to early 20th century. The pottery and arts and crafts rooms would have held us but they were stifling. We went into a small library where we saw about 20 dedicated scholars: the society owns 600,000 items from the 10th century to the present day from Spanish and Portuguese speaking cultures around the world.

We walked to a nearby building where Jim said was right now available a huge old-fashioned 8 room apartment for $400,000. We need only sell our house … (I do love my house.)

Jennifer Blood as Eve, Abe Goldfarb as Alexei

Nymph Errante is a paradoxically innocent play: the heroine never manages to lose her virginity; she journeys from finishing school with her friends to a succession of half-mad wild romantic places in the company of risque males, none of whom attempts anything more than the latest Twilight vampire. While its conventional approach to sex for women is grating and some of the dialogue hopelessly naive (a full audience became less than full after intermission), the music is so appealing, lyrics witty and amusing enough, and the tone of the characters and situations so good-natured, and actresses and actors doing their parts so well, the whole is hard to resist.

We enjoyed it, and I recommend trying to see it if it comes near you or you come near it. It was blotted out by the super-successful Anything Goes (both of them starring Gertrude Lawrence). No film has ever been made. That’s a shame since the costume changes (Eve visits that many cultures) begin of themselves to intrigue.

We did get to the two big Manhattan museums. We went to the Metropolitan Museum Wednesday morning. I saw a (to me) horrifying exhibit: Naked it was called, and it was made up of photographs of the naked women famous artists used. It exposed the ruthlessness of these artists, how they used these women sexually. Not one woman’s name appeared. These were handed about instead of hiring more poverty-striken girls. Sheer unconscious porn some of it. That Diane Arbus’s photo of two elderly middle class people naked in their living room just fit in tells you what the curators were implicitly showing you.

I refreshed my mind with staring at a Monet of a lashing sea under a ston-y arch.

A few years back now the Metropolitan Museum in NYC began a policy of
bringing up to the galleries lots of paintings hitherto consigned to the basement as inferior. Among these was Henry Lerolles’s The Organ Rehearsal.

I did notice it when it was first brought up — as who could not. It’s so big and filled with a quiet passion, and the woman dressed like the heroine of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. The conventional prejudices were against it (it’s anecdotal, about middle class doings) as well as a relatively unknown painter (another no no still), but it is winning out now. here’s a fine lecture from YouTube from an ex-ballerina French woman now involved in conserving and bringing back paintings, Isabelle Duvernois:

Walking away we went through Central Park, and wound about and about (we did a lot of walking), then on the block between Amsterdam and Columbia, West 76th Street where we used to live. I hardly recognized the brownstone we rented a flat in for a year. It did seem the same size. I had forgotten there was a synagogue on the street; now it houses an international school. We ate at the Amsterdam Ale House, not there when we lived there either.

In the evening we went down to 16th Street, to a new complex of small theaters (Potomac Theater Project) to see Caryl Churchill’s prophetic 1980s Serious Money. I could not understand all the details of the money-transactions going on (as I cannot today derivatives and the like), but I certainly got the central point: these amoral thieves and gamblers with everyone’s money are preying on the rest of us, destroying us, while they one-up, needle, and use one another.

A Spanish type Mrs Thatcher keeping up with the lying Mitt Romney (American) wheeler-dealer type

It includes suicide, and inspired wackiness (see review) in the service of showing how little these wealthy people care to help those they impoverish (that’s why in the play they pretend not to know what to do).

The Modern on later Thursday morning to mid-afternoon. A long-twisting and turning line to get in. It had left over from its Cindy Sherman triumph the book of the exhibit and several others; I just bought the cheapest, in paperback, the book of the exhibit. It’s filled with riches, especially the earlier series of untitled black-and-white stills where she is at her finest — her exposing, imitating, parodying whatever word you want to chose how women presented themselves in life and the media 1950s to 60s.

Someone studying one of the Living Man Declared Dead and other Chapters exhibit

Less famous apparently but stunning, maybe more is was a long exhibit of part of a huge book of photographs by Taryn Simon. The museum’s carefully neutral description does not convey the horror and terror of individual lives (some of whom were responsible for this horror and terror) that she got at by tracing the genealogy of the relatives afterward, photographing them and gathering and photographing the detritus of their lives. It was not necessary to find victims of pogroms to do this, though some of the chapters are about descendents of Nazis and the Nazi lives and doings; others are about the winners whose winning ought to appall; ways of desperate lives in Africa. One particularly got me: an Indian region where relatives of one branch of a family will often bribe officials in a court to declare the legitimate heirs to some property dead and take over that property. We see what happens to the disinherited.

Take the time to listen to the brief YouTube on the side. Usually I stay away from anything having to do with genealogy since usually the people want to find famous numinous pasts. It’s silly; you can prove anything about your genealogy too. But I had not taken into account an intelligent use of researching different family patterns in different cultures. Simon herself gets on and discusses what she does. Many are women who can’t be photographed — not allowed by men, or frightened by what others will use of this. And so sad – these rabbits deliberately killed in Australia, how given disease and all their pictures. Tons of money to kill. Trying to stop people gathering chocolate rabbits. Representing a massacre in the 1990s. A woman who hijacked planes. We are all forms of the dead, living ghosts of the past shaping us today.

We even got down to the Strand for an hour or so. it has not gone down! They have just as many and maybe more books than ever. In fact, they’ve improved: nor more turnstiles with lots of suspicious searches of customers. You just walk in . Downstairs has not changed much: still not air-conditioned, but the reviewer books section is now alphabetized:

Our house is like a library too

The books I treated myself to: Adeline Tinter’s Edith Wharton in Context, Kate Summerscale’s Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady. I found a whole row Winston Graham Poldark novels under “G” in the fiction section. Very high up. I had to climb a ladder and then made a young male clerk worried about me as I came down; he came over to stretch out a hand as I tottered up there. These were a 1960s set of books, Poldarks 1-7, a Bodley head Oxford edition whose suggestive illustrations reminded me of an edition of Susan Hill’s Women in Black or the Oxford set of Palliser books.

Demelza on the back end paper

I can’t afford to buy books just like this but as I have just one Jeremy Poldark (in the series the third novel) I bought a second. The set didn’t go beyond novel 7, confirming my sense that novels 8-12 have never been read as much. The best of these latter is Twisted Sword, novel 11 of which I have only a book-of-the-month club version.

For last Christmas Izzy and I got Jim a book of lyrics with attendant comments put together by Stephen Sondheim and a team, Finishing the Hat;; well he bought himself the second volume, Look, I Made a Hat.

Then it was time — just in time — to hurry ourselves to Grand Central, and get on the train to go home again home again, jiggedy-jig. We made very good time, arriving at Washington DC by 7:30; we took the Metro from there and we were Izzy by 8:05 and sitting down to Chinese food with her before 8:30 pm.

We had had some ill luck. Just when we were there Shakespeare in the Park was dark; we found we had just missed out on this lecture or were not in the right week for that show. My spirits were more consistently cheerful than I usually am, I was up to it. What we did not get to do this time we’ll do in October.

Ellen

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The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: Blogging Away, One Day at a Time

Evelyn (Judy Dench), our resident blogger (Best Exotic Marigold Hotel)

When first seen: Maggie Smith as Mrs Donnelly making a scene in a UK hospital room: “There’s an Indian in there!” she says

Dear friends and readers,

For a few minutes afterward, this movie helps make you be glad to be alive, with time yet to retrieve, to compensate, to use as best you can. Now I’ve written the sort of review where you should’ve seen the film first. So let me say to anyone coming over here, go see the film first, and then come back here, and read. To those who have no intention of going to see the film, read on.

It’s more touching than funny; the trailer (as ever) misrepresents it as vulgar exploitation of remarkable older British actors placed in India with lots of (probably) stale jokes. Well, certainly it does have a roster of superb older actors, all of them getting on and photographed to show that. They do go to India and the photography is spectactularly good, with a successful filming of places to give us a strong feel of their presence and what it might feel to be in such a place, this from the time it opens in modern UK (London mostly) to the airplane trip, the busses, India and its environs.

India — early landscape seen from afar, before landing

The theater we go to was unusually crowded — and perhaps yours will be too. The movie was playing on two screens (very unusual) and the auditorium we were in was jam-packed. Indeed we were not able to go to the show we came for (4:45); but instead went to the 5:05. There were lines to get in – another rarity for this small semi-art theater. However, it didn’t take much to see the lines were made up of mostly older people. There were people younger than 40 I’d say but they did not predominate and the average age might have been close to mine. Lots of older men — which is not common in costume dramas or movies of this type (maybe at all).

The movie was about retired people. Seven of them, to which an eighth is added who was born and grew up in India. As the movie begins, we are introduced to each in turn, complete with an intertitle typed (computer style print-out) first name right before our very eyes:

Inside of a UK building (we do also see some gardens from high windows)

The contrast in India

Judi Dench is first to be seen. She is phoning someone who makes her wait and then refuses to answer her questions about the computer program whose terms are puzzling her. You see she’s not the registered owner. Can the voice speak to the owner? Evelyn says he’s dead (her husband). Evelyn or Mrs Greenslade goes from this opening of not coping with a computer to being quite the daily blogger. Dench’s over-voice provides the sense of time passing (Day 9, Day 51) and she functions as a kind of reflective narrator. The lines are very good. Filled with thoughtful reflections on life as lived for this group of people but also anyone. I would have liked to take some of it down. I hope I don’t have to tell my reader that Dench reads superbly well (well they all do). You don’t really have to be 60 or 70 to bond with this film.

Mrs Greenslade and Mrs Hardcastle look about them

At least four of our group are struggling to survive on what has turned out to be too small a pension (Bill Nighy and Penelope Wilton presented as married Ainsleys, Douglas and Jean), or life-savings gone (same couple, Celia Imrie as Mrs Hardcastle and she without a partner), or unexpected indebtedness when a husband dies (Judi Dench’s character). One or two or just had enough of their repetitive lives (Tom Wilkinson, a successful court judge, Mr Graham Dashwood), or have been left out in the cold with no one to be with and nothing to do (Jack Pickup as Norman and Maggie Smith as Muriel Donnelly).

Maggie Smith’s story unfolds from that of a woman on a hospital bed with wheels, waiting in a corridor to be seen to because she has refused the services of a black doctor. She is working class (a strong working class accent is used) and racially a bigot, xenophobic it seems. We gradually learn that she spent her life as a high servant in a great house, housekeeper cum-nanny (shades of Downton Abbey except that most houses did not have extensive staffs) who when she grew too old was her pensioned off, deemed useless (superfluous) once she trained the replacement. Now she just doesn’t know what to do. She has nothing to do, nowhere to go (and no one to be with). Some of Smith’s expressions as she retold her story reminded me of Smith in her magnificent part of Alice in Bennet’s Bed among Lentils.

She needs a new hip and the quickest way to get it is go to India for the operation. She learns that people abandon her wheelchair if she is unpleasant; have little use for her demands. She must live in this multicultural multi-colored world. Arriving, an untouchable young girl provides her with food and company, invites her to see her family because she, Mrs Donnelly, notices here. Of course she gradually softens, begins to shed her bigotries.

Later on in India

She is relieved to see that her approbation is wanted, then worries she has hurt someone’s feelings, then grateful these Indian people want her, need her, and by film’s end (after her hip replacement and her first short walk) is womaning the clerk’s desk at the Hotel, managing it the way she once did her employers’. It is she who goes over the hotel’s books and devises a scheme for keeping it afloat.

Saving the day

By the end of the movie we feel she saves the day for the young Indian couple who need the hotel. (I told you to see the film first.) No need for her to worry what to do next anymore.

*******************
To go through the story line as a whole chronologically:

Negotiating for seat

On the trip out. We see them see the ads, and then begin to form their group as they get on the same plane. That’s probably improbable: there are many improbabilities, including the idea such people could thrive in this half-rundown hotel taken over by a third son, Sonny Kapur (Dev Patel) who is trying to break away from a family group, and especially a dictatorial mother, Mrs Kapoor (Lillete Dubey) who seeks to stifle him because he is not the eldest.

The group forms — before our very eyes — on their way

Once arrived, we see them all coping, sometimes well (Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson start out strong), or not well, as individuals (Celie Imrie joins a super-expensive mostly white club) and as a group.

Jean Ainsley indignant at the difference between the hotel as pictured in the brochure and its reality

Mrs Hardcastle takes over Sonny’s room because it has a door. Norman does exercises in his home-made shower, sets up his transistor radio high on the roof on a clothesline.

We have experienced the long journey there and now watch each person setting him or herself up and then their gradual adjustment individually and as a group. Until near the end much of it (if you accept the story’s faery frame) make sense and are touching. It’s people getting used to a different life — and their age matters, their looks. At the same time a story of a young Indian couple with a tough mother or prospective mother-in-law and equally tough older brother for the young heroine ensues. Real emotions are brought out.

The courtyard with Norman on the lounger and Mr Dashwood come to sit in the swing

As Izzy says, Penelope Wilton as Jean has the most thankless role. She is the middle-aged woman who is tired of her long-sufferingly kind but mechanically incompetent indeed self-deprecating husband, Douglas. She endlessly complains. He agrees with her the “sodding” flat they would have been reduced to in the UK won’t do, but does not agree that the way to endure life in India is to sit in a chair not going out, reading a book and hoping for English grilled food for dinner.

One of the pleasanter shots of Jean with Douglas on the other side and Mrs Hardcastle inbetween

She makes the mistake of semi-falling for Mr Dashwood who turns out to be gay. We are in fairy tale land, and as Bill Nighy’s culminating (reproachful) speech to Penelope Wilton makes explicit, the film tells us, make the best of things, do your best and don’t worry about it, and, well why not be cheered, why not show the better or happier face for yourself and others too. The movie is self-reflexive.

Mr Dashwood talking quietly, the actor dressed as the character explains he’s gay (not in the film)

The key note moving story is that of Mr Dashwood, Graham (Tom Wilkinson), the gay seeking the young gay Indian young man he left behind 40 years ago. He seems at first to be just wandering about. Taking the place in. He plays cricket with some street boys. But he is doing something, researching day after day in a Records Office. Graham finally finds the name of the young man whom he last saw disgraced and has imagined lived a hard ashamed life. He goes to meet him, Evelyn and Douglas backing him there.

In fact his friend has been happier than Graham, with a wife who understood him (as Jean has not, at least not respected or appreciated Douglas). They hug so intensely and Douglas says the morning after spent that night talking. At this moment of fulfillment and peace Mr Dashwood dies. Izzy said that when someone is to die, it is often the homosexual person. I had not noticed and she may be right. Wilkinson plays the part with such dignity, we grieve at his loss. His ashes are scattered in the Ganges by his friend. But it is true we are deprived of a happy homosexual couple at the film’s end. Only heterosexuality is celebrated in the last moments.

The Judith (Lucy Robinson), the eighth lonely soul is Norman’s new partner, found in the same expensive club Mrs Hardcastle joined: Mrs Hardcastle is never explained; could be a quiet lesbian but we are not told this

After Mr Dashwood’s death we have the denouement. A slowly building story is that of Sonny and Sunaina (Tena Desae). Sunaina works for her brother as a telephone answering highyl-educated person. The brother does not respect Kapoor but his sister loves him. She agrees to go to bed with him, but when she comes to the hotel late at night, strips and moves to what she thinks is his bed, she finds herself in bed with Mrs Hardcastle. Mrs Hardcastle refused the room assigned her because it lacked a door. Kapoor’s mother comes in and thinks Sunaina is a prostitute. Over the arch of the story, with a little help from Mrs Donnelly reading the records, Kapoor wins his right to renovate and keep the hotel up and last scene the pair of them are in their bike driving into the horizon:

I don’t want to give away the final still or moment. Suffice to say that this is such a sheer moment of unexpected joy at the end for another newly formed couple there was a kind of startled stillness in the movie matched by a stillness in the audience. It’s touch and go: the chance to try again for love is almost lost. Let me say just say it’s pulled off because Douglas gets to the plane hanger too late after Jean sends him back to the hotel to go on herself:

Mr Ainsley has his dreams too (an early Austen-like film with him as father is an adaptation of Jodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle) (this is not in the film, but from the feature)

Many wry jokes. It’s an intelligent entertainment. We are told of India’s poverty, the caste system, see a little of it, but the accent is on the color, noise and there’s a sort of fun folk rendition of the sort of song that is typical of Bollywood films. The writer of the originating story or novel is Deborah Moggach, who wrote the screenplay for Wright’s 2005 P&P. The director is John Madden and the brilliant script by Ol Parker.

A kiss

Closing

Ellen

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Museum of Modern Art: another way to house ourselves & get to one another

March daffodils to the side of my house (close up)

Dear friends and readers,

Yesterday I had to expend a goodly sum to a group of workers (acting with alacrity to obey their boss), the man who owns Residential Lawn Management, to cut my grass, ground down the hedge in front of my house, hand-cut my new flower bed (which unfortunately I had not thought through so didn’t realize I had to set aside an area they didn’t just mow through), cut down and take away a tree in the back of my garden-yard which had been growing upside down (!). First I phoned him twice (landline and cell phone), half an hour later they arrive; I try to re-tell them the message, they listen patiently and then go about the business after themselves phoning the boss.

They did it with good humor and very well — especially considering they don’t understand English very well and my Vietnamese is non-existent.

So this morning I was drawn to a story by Alex Ulam in the Nation (entitled “Foreclosures” and this exhibit), which I found reprinted and slightly revamped here, How to Rehouse the American Dream, about a new unusual exhibit in the Modern of Modern Art, which exposes how the way Americans end up in car-dependent houses in the suburbs (and lawns of grass to have to cope with) is the result of right-wing polemics as well as control of public media and dreams. Really worth reading about and looking at. I can’t send you to Ulam as one needs to be an online subscriber (I’m only paper subscriber and the Nation is not generous this way), but I can to the exhibit itself:

Rehousing the American Dream

Jim and I also have car troubles, large car bills. Luckily we do live in a city-like suburb with strong pro-social attitudes, Alexandria City, where we don’t have to drive miles and miles to get anywhere that’s fun and interesting and has other like-minded friendly people.

My nearly 20 year old chariot

See Surroundings. The truth for me is I love my unpretentious house set in a series of quiet green-laden streets. Sitting in my screened porch this afternoon, I remember how for nearly 30 years I’ve lived here as I look out at the familiar trees, flowering bushes, houses, streets. But the point I make here is there should and could be an alternative within the reach of a majority of people’s incomes and place.

Ellen

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Books in art and science, Sharp (2): the role of covers, periodicals (Romantic era); Mudie’s non-English and Murray’s travel books

The picture gracing the cover of Restless Spirits: Ghost Stories by American Women Writers, 1872-1926, edd. Catherine Lundie

Dear friends and readers,

I continue my tales of my time at this summer’s Sharp conference. I here cover three sessions, two on the first Friday afternoon and the first of four all day Saturday. My topics this time are book covers; the problem of really knowing or reflecting what people were reading during the romantic (or any period) and descriptions of searching among monthly periodicals, compiling lists of books; Mudie’s library, the “foreign division” (the part of Mudie’s which rented books not in English) and travel books: the origins of Murray’s formulaic travel books, and so Baedekers and on travel out of the UK in the 19th century in general. Among the surprising (though if you think about it, this should not be) finding are there are many more men writing gothics and romances than we think because they write anonymously.

In a nutshell: book covers as identity politics; women writers not so superabundant yet blamed, censored; Mudie’s “Foreign” Library mostly in French; and Murray’s and other delightful travel books.

Would you guess the subtitle of this book is “An Orphan Girl’s Struggles and Triumphs”?

Recent covers move even further & further away from book’s anti-machine mood and vulnerable heroine’s story

The first session, “Covering the Book in the Literature classroom” included three papers on experiences the speakers had had as teachers where they assigned books with an eye to making students aware of how the book’s packaging affected their experience, defined the book’s audience, and told something of its themes. Stacy Erickson told of student responses to reading texts and the kind of covers pictured in the Norton Anthology of English literature; Jennifer Nolan-Stinson discussed how the use of popular paperbacks changes the experience of teaching novels; and Heidi I.M. Jacobs suggested that it was possible that if a best-selling American novelist, Maria Susanna Cummins (1827-66) had had twitter, we might not have had her written letters to find today and reprint (as she, Ms Jacobs, has done.

This was the kind of session where the discussion afterward was as stimulating and informative as these informal talks. I remember we talked of how a book’s cover reflects the identity the publisher may think the book’s audience wants to have; how books issued by the government (the military during WW2) look strictly utilitarian; covers with stills from popular films; and the language used in blurbs. I answered Ms Jacobs’s “what if” scenario with the counter that while it may be true that if Cummins had put her letters on net, we’d have nothing to reprint if they had (as they might) disappear, but that she might have had the gratifying satisfaction of a broader audience at the time. The great poignancy of Emily Dickinson’s case is that no one but a very few people read her poems and the evidence we have suggests they were not appreciated or understood; if they had lain in shoeboxes until now we’d still not know of them. Had she had had the Net to put them on she’d have reached people, and why should one care if people after we are dead can read our stuff? The Net is filled with the communication of thousands of people who would have little or no access to conventional publication. So what if they never receive scholarly packaging?

An Illustration in The Ladies Repository: A Monthly Periodical, Devoted To Literature and Religion (1855, Cincinnati, Ohio)

The second session I managed, “Romantic Readers and Writers,” had two presentations from women who work for Chatto & Pickering and are involved in producing thick books of bibliography listing and briefly describing all the reviews they can find in the romantic era (say 1790-1825?). Basically they were describing the enormous effort of producing and obstacles in the way of producing Romantic Women Writers Reviewed. These will be a set of volumes that reprint and/or describe reviews and reception for hundreds of women writers and female-gendered pseudonyms along with references, all from 24 reviewing journals and miscellanies.

Stephanie Eckroth, “A Faithful Picture: Monthly Periodicals and Romantic Readers” told of the obstacles preventing a compiler from producing a selection of listings which genuinely reflect the typical kinds of books, numbers, types, reception in the romantic era. She has gone through monthly periodicals in her attempt to list books to be bought and read, and said we end up with over-, an under-representations; for example, men published romantic novels anonymously so we seem to have more women proportionately than there were.

Modern facsimile reprint of one of Ward’s literary works

Ann Hawkins told of how few studies today cite William Ward’s contemporary huge bibliography (The Index of Contemporary Reviewers) and yet she repeatedly traced citations back to his badly organized inconsistent book. (One must remember the man had no computer, no Internet). Ward included only poetry, fiction, and plays, no life writing, no essays, so Hester Piozzi’s Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey doesn’t exist as far as Ward’s book is concerned. Piozzi’s book was enormously popular and influential, for example, she is among the few authors from all she read cited by Austen — and imitated: “I had some thoughts of writing the whole of my letter in her stile” (Tuesday, 11 June 1799). But modern anthologies equally don’t reflect who was important to readers at the time: Donald Reiman’s modern 9 volume edition of romantic writers contains only 1 woman (Mary Shelley) for the whole era; The Critical Heritage series contains only 6 from a couple of hundred writers. So Romantic Women Writers Reviewed aims to use and go well beyond these inadequate volumes (new attributions, new archival work).

Irene Lyistakis gave a close reading of hostile reviews of gothic novels supposed by and for women, “The Neurophysiology of Reading: The Female Brain and the Gothic Novel.” The most common idea is women read as creatures subject to sensibility and men not at all. The reviewers complained gothic novels encouraged women to abandon their social duties. Reviews of sensation novels in the Victorian period were especially anxiety-ridden over the books’ sexual transgressions. Among the comments Ms Lyistakis quoted was this perceptive one: Margaret Oliphant complained that ultimately gothic and romantic novels often projected an ugly portrait of women as amoral and egoistic in the extreme.

I was very tired by then, headachy, and my hands unsteady so I skipped the Ian Gadd’s plenary keynote, “Book History and the Organization of the Early Modern English Book Trade” at the Folger Shakespeare Library and reception (which would have been fun, for it was in the Elizabethan theater) and went home where I rested.

I have, however, since read on the Sharp listserv in a posting by Jonathan Rose that Ian Gadd suggested economic historians are now doing work that book historians ought to read, but usually don’t, and cited two good articles:

Jan Luiten van Zanden and Eltjo Buringh, ‘Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries’, The Journal of Economic History, 69:2 (June 2009)

Jeremiah Dittmar, ‘Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press’, forthcoming at The Quarterly Journal of Economics: download from http://www.jeremiahdittmar.com/research

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Saturday morning traffic coming into DC is light so Jim drove me there, and the trip took less than 15 minutes. I found the domed building quickly and discovered that it goes deep into the ground (two sets of winding stairs and then a long escalator). At the bottom was an art gallery show of fine paintings by the staff. The refreshment room had good coffee and decent cakes & breads, but of course the real treat was the four excellent sessions I participated in over the course of the day. Here’s just the first of that morning.

Victorian illustration of Mudie’s Library patrons

“Transnational Circulation of 19th Century Texts” covered my personal interests: French literature read in England, translation, and travel books too. Marie-Francoise Cachun’s “Books from France at Charles Mudie’s Select Library in Victorian England,” was based on her study of the foreign department catalogues of Mudie’s. She looked to see what foreign books were rented, how Mudie got them, and what readers rented them. Mudie bought 3 volume books which sold for a guinea and a half a volume (prohibitively expensive for most middle class readers). He began with one shop in Bloomsbury, by 1852 he had created his extensive lending library, by 1861 he had 180,000 volumes; he would sell the surplus books off regularly. His books reached as far as India. Only a limited number of catalogues survive, and she covered 1848-1936 of these. The Indexes are inconsistent: in 1857, 4 sections (Select library, 158 pgs; fiction 52 pgs; juvenile 18 pgs; foreign 55 of French, 21 of German and 3 of Italian books. Later catalogues divide the books into fiction and non-fiction, with some books offered as suitable for presents and prizes.

Typical catalogue cover for the era

What French books are present? still famous writers: Balzac, Sand, Hugo (Hunchback of Ntre Dame, 1848; Les Miserables, 1865); popular writers then like Eugene Sue. She mentioned that you could find English and Russian books in French tanslation (LeFanu’s Uncle Silas in French). Popular women writers then: a Countess whose name I couldn’t catch was enormously popular for her French silver fork type romances; another man for his historical fiction. There was much non-fiction; items include George Eliot’s translation of Renart’s Life of Christ. Expurgated versions of Zola. Foreign books in English translation were in the regular select or fiction sections. The firm acquired books from French publishers mostly. French was the primary language for Russian books (Turgenev, Tolstoi).

I asked about the later 18th century French woman because Prof Cachin had not mentioned Felicite de Genlis, and she assured me Genlis was there (5 items in 1868, 7 in 1899) as were some of the later 18th century French writers (Stael, Constant). (See Julia Kavanagh’s reading in my Julia Kavanagh: 19th century disabled woman of letters). She also said there were other language books rented (Swedish) but it was a tiny group; Chinese books appear with French titles in the catalogues. Her published book is Une Nation de Lecteurs: La Lecture en Angleterre (1815-1945).

John Murray (1808-92)

The second paper was just as germane to my favorite reading. Pieter Francois described “The Transnational Origin of British Travel Guides on the Continent (1815-36). His thesis was that the later travel guides (post-1836, the year John Murray published his first guide) were developments out of and imitations of travel guides from the later 18th century. These earlier books have not been studied much, and so we are attributing more originality to John Murray’s successful marketing of travel books. Early on Murray admitted that he derived his formula from these earlier books, but later on began to present himself as the founder of the type that led to the famous German Baedeker series. The books fell into types: the practical guide, the meditation which attempted to recreate the experience; they were strongly nationalistic (celebrating specific cultures).

The practical and economic: Murray’s Egypt

The success of such books was also dependent on the spread of travel to middle class people looking to go to places they knew nothing of but wanted to see what was said to be most enjoyable and worth while. This began in 1815 after the end of the Napoleonic wars. Who read these? Prince Albert represented one high culture type. People writing about such travelers often denigrated them as philistines, with no love of the natural world, no real understanding of the places they were visiting. They write against those who waste money abroad when they can spend it inside their country and help fellow citizens that way. It is very hard to reconstruct the numbers and exact purposes for which people traveled. He also described advertisement for these books where we can see the writers present themselves as relatively humble in origin and as having gone to and described the “important sites.” He told of individual remarkable books too (one in 1800 called Letters from Italy; an 1834 book which told you precisely what to say in given situations, where to stay.

The discussion afterward was lively and wide-ranging and there seemed to be people in the room up on general issues of nationalism, problems in traveling freely, translation studies. I again asked specific questions. In answer to what did he think of Francis Trollope’s travel books (one 2 volumer about France) and other Victorian travelers I knew of, Mr Francois said while travelers could combine purposes the way these people did (business, visiting family, escaping a narrow milieu) most were really unconnected people on brief holidays. I described Wilkie Collins’s Rambles Beyond Railways to ask if it wasn’t so that many books would combine several purposes and kinds of texts (historical, imaginative, playful, and practical too), but again he seemed to suggest such texts were more for an elite readership. Baedeker was what became wanted.

The book Lucy Honeycomb avails herself of in A Room with a View

Since then I’ve been reading Robert Southey’s 1807 partly ironic travel book, Letters from England, where he assumes the persona of a Spanish man in order to critique English society. Southey suggests that the market then was inundated by travel books written by English people), and came across this note by the 1951 editor: “The best known of the Road Books (more practical ones) were Daniel Paterson”s New and Accurate Description of all the Direct and Principal Cross Roads in Great Britain (18 editions, 1771-1832) and Cary’s New Itinerary (11 editions, 1798-1828)

As again my report is long enough and my clock on my wall tells me it is getting near 2 a.m. and I want to write an essay on Jane Austen: Women and Food tomorrow, I had better end here. To come is a revealing series of papers on the realities of the prize culture, the transmission of Australian books to the US and UK and how books help form national culture in South Africa; the role of libraries in social life, children’s reading clubs and storyhour in libraries and illustrations to Dickens and Trollope’s novels as well as Charles Kingsley’s popular science books.

A modern “classic travelers’ logo (from Murray)

See Sharp 1, Sharp 3, and Sharp 4.

Ellen

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Two day New York interlude: windows & walks

Leon Cogniet (1794-1880), The Artist in His Room at the Villa Medici, Rome (1817)

Dear friends and readers,

The Admiral (aka Jim) and I returned this afternoon from a two day interlude in NYC of nearly non-stop delightful (really) visits and talk with friends, a birthday party, walking in Manhattan and Central Park (whenever it was in the way we went through or at least into a path), time in galleries (Neue Galerie on 86th to see an exhibit of startlingly sexually candid and disquieting Viennese art, circa 1890 to 1920ish), time in the Met museum, bookstores. During lulls on trains, the subway, when I couldn’t sleep at first from excitement and anxiety and generally (as I usually do) to keep my mind calm, I absorbed myself by reading Elizabeth Von Armin’s Enchanted April, finished an unfortunately nowadays unsung masterpiece in the Ivy Compton-Burnett vein, Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and then Winston Graham’s nineteenth century historical novel, Cornelia (on both of which latter more perhaps next week).

This is a brief report on the exhibits we saw — whose centrality in most of my travel accounts I excuse by saying I am a lover of pictures. Maybe that’s why I so love films too. The Met as ever is overcrowded with people and nooks and crannies of unexpected new and rearranged art. The most memorable is Sabine Rewald’s (doubtless the daughter, granddaughter or niece of the great scholar of impressionism, John Rewald) Rooms with a View, several rooms filled with pictures which include windows. It is an odd exhibit. It is described by her and elsewhere as inspired by her love of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and his imitators, e.g., George Kersting (1785-1847, Woman Embroidering by a window) and Carl Gustave Carus (1789-1869, Woman on a Balcony) and as about views seen through windows in Romantic painting. The lead picture plus the blown up ones at the opening and end of the exhibit are of characters looking out a window:

However, most of the pictures instead show characters resolutely ignoring the view (one is even titled that) or for the most part oblivious to it except as the sun provides some light on their work (as in Leon Cogniet’s above). Funnily some of the pictures show the windows covered up by curtain. viz.,

Adolph Menzel (1815-1905), The Artist’s Sitting Room in Ritterstrasse (1851).

In some we are to see the artist is wasting time looking out, most of those having views show unreal perspectives because it’s most unlikely that the window would be so beautifully squared on just the picturesque angle we repeatedly see. Most appear wholly unself-conscious of this falseness; a rare witty exception is

Martin Drolling’s (1752-1817) Girl Tracing a Drawing (undated, early 19th century)

where it’s still not clear that we are to realize what we usually see through windows in paintings is artificially set up. Many of the pictures have windows because rooms do have windows. It is also disturbing that not one picture is by a woman though windows in pictures are so common in women’s paintings as to constitute an obsession, a melancholy sort of joke about how a woman looks out on the world through her enclosed environment,

Jane Freilicher (b. 1924), Casement Window (1974)

To be fair, Rewald acknowledges the woman’s angle in her lead picture, and she does show an interest in paintings sheerly of windows (many of her photos and studies of paintings are of windows, particularly when painted by Friedrich) and some of the views captured are original in feel, not pastiche,

Friedrich Wasmann (1805-86), A View of the Campagne (1832)

What puzzled me and Jim was how nothing was sorted; all the different motifs or types just higgledy-piggedly as if to distract the viewer from perceiving the contradictions and absurdities in the chosen paintings.

Among other pictures viewed a the Met we loved a room of very late 19th to early 20th century art, much of which we’d never seen before, neither impressionistic or anecdotal, not falling into any school at all. We tried to like the pastel portraits of the 18th century and did, but since most of the pictures were of people we’d probably have rightly disliked intensely in life (arrogant aristocrats flattered excessively), we were not bothered that we had to hurry through.

The Neue Galerie is the first private gallery we’ve ever gone to. Countless museums, many small, and we were therefore a little disappointed since the permanent collection was not on display. Jim is taken by the Vienna 1900 art and we stayed quite a while looking at Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele (see a sample). I agree they are important as breaking down taboos that uphold systems of privilege and power, that make for unhappiness through repression, and I did love the landscapes,

Schiele, Town Among Greenery (1917)

But some of the pictures of women masturbating, the complete absence of women artists and focus on genital sex, the harrowed imagery of trauma, distress, derangement, and cruelty were not exactly pleasant. I am not keen on gilded designs and abstractions either. In short, I would not have liked to own any of this and had no desire to buy a book, though I acknowledged that the choice of art books and literary accompaniment in the book store showed great care and money had been spent in putting together a learning experience. I could have bought myself a hard-to-get Zweig short story volume, Rilke’s poems, histories of Weimar. Instead I bought at the Strand (hurrah still going strong apparently) the book of the exhibit of Open Windows even if much less intelligently put together.

What else can I celebrate? My friend’s birthday party in Brooklyn took place in a non-pretentious restaurant in far Brooklyn (the stop on the BMT, the Q train, was Avenue U), with good food: 3 hours of good talk, a time filled with warm feeling among friends. I learned a lot about Brooklyn! We had two yummy meals with good friends originally met here on the Net, one brief phone call. As ever Central Park is this pastoral place fiercely protected by the Conservatory so as to be both beautiful and a public playground, picnic, idyllic exercise haven. Even the subway had its charm. I cannot recommend the Hotel Wales where we stayed: while the hotel is respectable, i.e., safe and quiet and mostly comfortable, the room was so small for the price we paid, it felt like a dark closet, and I couldn’t sleep the first night also because of the noise made by an inefficient window air-conditioner, but it was in a convenient part of town for us. One of our friends lives in an apartment from which we could view much of Manhattan around it, to the old fair grounds of Queens, the river and beyond. I began for the first time to “get” Starbucks. A place where you can wind down to appropriate music, drink coffee and consult your laptop as you watch the people around you and going by the windows of the store.

We did acquire a few new books beyond the Rewald’s Rooms with a View: Daphne Du Maurier’s Cornwall fantasy landscape, Castle Dor, two keepsakes from friends, L. I. Davis’s A Meaningful Life and a paperback single volume edition of Jocelyn Harris’s edition of Richardson’s Grandison (handy for working with on a paper and bringing to conferences).

I did feel the old urge to want to return to live in NYC. A fine place to live but hard to visit is my motto. It’s so vast with so many places with interesting things to see, hear (lecture series, concerts galore) and stuffed to the gills with people that one gets a healthier perspective on life than in a suburban homogeneous limited environment. We also have friends there and think we could make more and be much happier therefore in this environment. Izzy might find a rich life for herself there. Alas, we don’t have the money to repeat the kind of home we have here (Izzy would probably not have the same lovely airy large room with picturesque view), and most of one’s time is spent in one’s home. Still we said we’d think about it again …

And now to settle down to watching my two-hour version of Frederick Wiseman’s brilliant rarely happy documentary, Central Park (downloaded for me by Jim from Pirate EBay).

The first shot of the movie, accompanied by pleasant off-beat jazz

Ellen

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