Summer’s here: my past year’s listening & new routs

Dear friends and readers,

What do you mean summer’s here? It’s the beginning of May. Well, arguably from the point of view of weather, here in Northern Virginia we have two seasons: the cold (or maybe it would be more accurate nowadays to say the mostly cool and chilly) where days are short, and the light is ruthlessly husbanded to make it last as long as possible in the later parts of the 24 hour cycle; and the hot (sometimes fiercely) with long enough light, so those of us who find demands we awaken in the darkness so hard to take, have the relief of a lit sky by 6 am. And we are in the latter season now.

But that’s not how I’m defining summer. I’m defining summer as the day when teaching ceases, and my schedule turns into a summer one for the next 3 or so months. As I teach in a college where the semester’s classes ended for me yesterday, that’s what happened today. Some people don’t feel the term is ended until the literal work is & I understand that. In a way I’ve a third of the reading of students’ papers to go. They hand in their last (3rd) paper and do a final (which has 3 short essays in class as part of it and outside class answer about 20 questions) but for me once my summer routs begin the summer begins. And while I like it, indeed find it exhilarating, sane or larger perspective-giving, what I find hard is the teaching itself. That’s the ordeal, that’s the strain.

And today I began to develop my summer’s reading and started to develop the trajectory into my summer’s writing. I sent off a final copy of my review of the Later Manuscripts of Jane Austen, a Cambridge book edited by Janet Todd and Linda Bree, and am finishing the last of the reading for my on-going project of reading and writing about a letter by Jane Austen each week: Mary Brunton’s 1810 novel, Self-Control and Brian Southam’s Jane Austen and the Navy. I began my return to Sophie Cottin to see if I can make a proposal on infamous novels for the coming EC/ASECS, using Cottin’s Amelie Mansfield and Charlotte Smith’s Manon Lescaut. I’ll write more about this as time develops — I have no deadline as I’ve also decided to go down to one section a term starting this fall so this new group of ever-revolving routs is not going to end come late August, only diminish somewhat. Over on my Sylvia blog I’ll try to work out my plan every so often. I do need order so I feel I have meaning and if only to know what to read and what to write next.

For tonight I thought I’d say here what I’ve been listening to over this past year in my car — using MP3s as CDs which I have to buy. I’ve tried the librivox recordings: Mil Nicholson reading Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend is probably among the better as she really reads dramatically, but I found I couldn’t enjoy it. She just tried too hard, went excruciatingly slowly in order to pull the voices and imagined scenes off, seemed after all to miss the larger implications or meanings and it strained my patience how at the end of each chapter I had to listen to a full announcement once again that this was librivox, in the “public domaine”, by whom, who reading and where we were. I was told this was to try to stop those who are unscrupulous from selling these readings by informing anyone who bought it they need not have. To my mind all this did was allow the private property and personal profit system to invade the world of the imagined books naggingly.

Audible.com and other venues where one can supposedly buy (or perhaps rent) many kinds of recordings are set up to cheat the customer, to trap him or her into spending huge amounts of money (see “Stay Away! it’s filled with traps!”). So my plan to use my new ipod this way didn’t work. And there’s nothing for it but buy what one can find at Amazon.

I checked out how much it would cost to turn my audiocassettes into tapes. I might do this eventually — a little at a time though. It costs $9 a cassette. That doesn’t sound overmuch, but what happened when you have 18 tapes for one of the book so Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet. That’s $180 for the book. You see the problem, especially as I’m not sure the book’s tapes are not dried out and will transfer well.

For me that means mostly older books and what’s called classics and better fiction when it’s on sale. A sad decrease in what I can choose from. The old books-on-tape used to include read books that sold only to relative minority of people — good non-fiction, history, biography, science, e.g., David Case reading abridgements of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle or Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire which were not savaged but long enough to include a lot; Donada Peters reading Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Anthony Trollope. When the demand for big profit and wide sales as the criteria for what would be read aloud took over, mostly trash or this year’s fashionable book for an elite is all one can obtain — and by buying, not renting.

Still I made do. Why? I still spent a lot of hours in my car, often driving Izzy somewhere. These hours were cut down as of December when she got her good full-time job as an Information Technologist. Yes she did. I still though have many as there is no good public transportation in Virginia. And, as I’ve mourned as Sylvia, I can no longer read much or even at all at night. My brain gives out and at best I can watch movies — or write blogs. Summer being here I will be much less in the car (twice a week for 90 minutes to and from GMU was a central time), so I thought I’d record what I read this year — or listened to which comes down to the same thing sometimes better as books brilliantly read aloud are true to many authors’ purposes.

Unless I’m misremembering (which I don’t think I am) I began with Donada Peters and David Case alternating the two narrators of Anne Bronte’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall. This was so good, especially the soft brogue Case used for Gilbert Markhan, I sometimes could hardly wait to get into my car. This was late spring just after my tape deck broke and I never finished David Case reading Fielding’s Tom Jones.

Come June I was into Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset read aloud by Simon Vance. While he is good, his interpretation was grating: he read Josiah Crawley as not tragic but veering on the comic-ridiculous (or contemptible). Hot or true high summer (August) I began and through the early fall (much of this with Izzy) listened to Donada Peters reading Daniel Deronda (we loved it, especially the Jewish half of the novel or intertwined stories), Middlemarch (I don’t think it could have been better read) and Romola (a book that fails but nonetheless has some great, riveting sequences — Izzy found it so as well as I). One might call it a George Eliot year.

I tried to post regularly in the morning on some of this in order to keep notes and remember. Only for Romola did I have anyone reading with me (on Trollope19thCStudies).

Then we turned to Dickens. I regret to say I succumbed to an abridged version of Dickens’s Little Dorrit. I thought I’d try it as the complete was so expensive — so many CDs. Anton Lesser was superb and, with a little help from Davies’s film adaptation and interpretation of Amy Dorrit (and memories of Christine Edzard’s), I felt we were in the presence of preposterous genius. The book is prophetic of today. Still we missed much I know. Then the ill-fated Mil Nicholson of Our Mutual Friend. Sometimes the book felt stillborn and if it had not been for Sandy Welch’s brilliant film, I would have gotten nothing out of it; with Welch I did feel I reached the pith and electrifying core of the book. I do think Dickens was tired or made a wrong decision to recuse himself as narrator for his characters in this novel are not sufficiently rich in imaginative thoughtful subjectivity, to carry the book.

Just now I’m into David Case reading Bleak House; if I’ve heard or read this one before, I forgot a lot of it and again the problems in it (and there are a number as in all Dickens’s books) are counteracted by Davies’ film. Next up will be Juliet Stevenson (what a treat) reading Gaskell’s Mary Barton.

So I’m not doing too badly, you see. Probably though since from here on in I’ll be relatively rarely in my car, I won’t be posting all that much on my reading since much this coming summer will be in the 18th century and surrounding Austen (I mean at long last to do a full paper on Bad Tuesday).

I do try to read at night and have managed over the past couple of months to return to Winston Graham’s Poldark novels and have read at a leisurely pace (when I could) his Ross Poldark, Demelza, and now Jeremy Poldark. I’m finding these books reward re-reading and I’m seeing new rich elements in them I had not realized before. I know there are older tapes of these read aloud, but nowadays a reading must occur on MP3s as CDs to be listenable to for me in my car and affordable.

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So let me take time out to say here that I’m relieved and delighted to be able to say that for a second time Ross Poldark, No. 1 of this historical novel series, went over superlatively well. Last year I was so nervous going in on the first of the 3-4 days set aside for this (like other) books. But I got what were undoubted two of the best talks I had all term. This time a talk was given on the treatment of Demelza versus the treatment of Verity which got the whole class discussing these characters, their scenes, issues involved. I was startled to see a student I fully expected not to show, not only turn up for the talk, but bring a thoroughly marked up book. A fourth had gone through the mini-series and put on scenes for us to watch and then directed our attention to the book. She didn’t have a real thesis, but her choices were such, it left us a lot to talk about.

Ross (Robin Ellis) talking to Pearce (John Baskcomb) at the opening of the first episode; the young man just returned … (Part 1, 1975-76 Poldark)

It’s a tribute to the 18th century too. The last speaker (in my other class) was just chuffed to find feminist talk/discourse in the 18th century — and “by a woman” said she amazedly. She found a passage by Anna Barbauld’s niece, Lucy Aiken. I did have quotations from both Paine (Rights of Man) and Wollstonecraft (The Rights of Woman) ready. Several said how they felt there was not the resolution at the end that they wanted; that they were just beginning, hardly in medias res as they closed Ross Poldark.

When Ross first sees Demelza at the fair: she is being beaten (Part 2, 1975-76 Poldark)

Graham catches the reader with his slow drawn appealing characters we believe in and identify with. There is this intensity of concern with the characters; Graham is in them and utterly involved with their fully imagined situation. This fourth time round I see that the core of the novel which dominates it is a continual intimate delineation of the two central personalities melding and not melding together in an early phase of their marriage.

I’ve read on to Demelza and finished it last night for a fourth time. Ross Poldark incites a riot over two ships coming into and wrecked on the shore and a savage mob action ensues, a Walpurgis night to match the splendor of the night catching pilchards. The last two times round I really didn’t read slowly or carefully enough to see that indeed the hero is presented as psychologically half-crazed over the failure of all his schemes, the death of this baby daughter, the abysmal poverty around him closing in, and the enfeebled wife who to free his sister, Verity, unknowingly brought this on them — she was loyal to the individual not the group, a no no for which she is harshly punished. Nor that there are striking Jacobin sentiments given him at the same time. The book rewards re-reading in the light of the other books.

Demelza (Angharad Rees) says he has become her whole life, she loves him for all he has done (Part 3, 1975-76 Poldark)

Winston Graham will be one of my continuing projects for a long time to come.

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So all this is to explain why I’ve not been posting on books here of late and or when I have it’s been retrospective (as in my Praise of Colm Toibin). I’ve fallen back on operas, movie-going or watching at night, what I’ve read and watched with my students (my lecture notes turned into blogs). And Downton Abbey — beloved older mini-series too. Now I’m ever hoping to do better and if I can muster up the energy to make sense of the morning notes I took on the above books or from my morning posts this summer, or find something new or genuinely interesting to say about what I have managed at night or in Jim and my coming summer activities (we are going to go to plays, operas, the Fringe festival again, the occasional lecture, dramatic reading aloud), I will. Spin offs from my later day-time routs will come in here too. In my brief discussion of Ross Poldark and Demelza I’ve given an example of what I hope to be able to do on occasion on reading-as-life.

Ellen