Movies of Uplift: Luxor — Oliver Sacks his own life — Dig: Et in Arcadia Ego

Hana (Andrea Riseborough) examining a temple (Luxor, 2020, directed scripted Zeina Durra, 2020)

Oliver Sacks His Own Life (biopic, 2019, Ric Burns directed, using Sacks’ book of the same title)

Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) and Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) in sunlit landscape contemplating excavation (Dig, 2021, directed Simon Stone, scripted Moira Buffini from John Preston’s book)

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve been very fortunate in the last week or two because (without doing this deliberately) I’ve seen three excellent recent movies (actually four, see Even the Rain, 2011, in comments), all of which are thoughtful, quietly passionate, with genuinely interesting content, landscapes, story — all providing a true uplift. I write this blog to tell those of my readers seeking some respite from anxiety (COVID morphing into more deadly or infectious variants, not enough vaccines, the economic future. people hurting economically, and trying to self-isolate) you need only go to your computer and it’s a couple of clicks and a nominal sum away.

I don’t want to overdo this as I think of what most popular movies are, but I begin to wonder if there has been an effort recently — given the continued misery (see above) — to produce films where characters persist in hoping amid nearby or coming carnage (middle eastern wars, WW1) or the neglect of the agonizingly mentally disabled) or their own inner demons and distress. It really is a coincidence that just now on PBS, an excellent re-make of the movingly comic All Creatures Great and Small, has been airing, coming over your cable from PBS for the last five weeks. But maybe not that the era the film-makers are drawn to is just before or after WW1

James Herriot (Nicholas Ralph) treating Strawberry, the cow (ITV, 2020, now on PBS)

I watched Luxor and Oliver Sacks His Owe Life as assignments in a weekly movie-class, where we watch movies online at Cinema Art Theater (supporting our local art movie-house). We are in our second week of four, all current movies. Luxor and Sacks are $12 each for 3-4 days of potential watching.

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What a relief is Luxor.

Hana with the newly re-found Sultan (Karim Saleh) at the hotel bar

It’s such a quiet movie, people hardly speak. The sexual acts that occur — several times, Hana, once with a stranger she met at a bar, Hana more than once with Sultan) are off-screen! There is no overt violence in front of us. Hana has returned to Luxor where she spent a joyous time with Sultan (throes of first love) 20 years ago. She is suffering from PTSD after years of surgery, practicing medicine the worst war and refugee places you can imagine — the Syrian border is mentioned. Unexpectedly she finds Sultan is now living there; he too returned, to do archaeology for the Eygptian gov’t (to please nationalists, for tourism). The story is we watch her slowly seem to get better, to come out of herself. Towards the end after she dances at a bar and comes back to her room in the hotel with Sultan, she bursts into hysterical shattered crying. To find tranquillity you have to allow the passions some release.

Like Celine Siamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, it’s oddly devoid of dialogue — some people in life do talk a lot … but not this pair of lovers. As you go through her experience with you, you (or I) find therapy yourself.  At one point Hana visits a fortune-teller with the hotel owner.  It is also at core a romance, with two people who once knew each other, coming together again (like Linklater’s Sunrise, Sunset trilogy) with beautiful photography of this city left off the beaten track of commercialism, power, and today not even getting heavy tourism. It’s an Indie , the director is a woman who has made other movies of a similar type it seems. Roxana Hadadi writes a fine favorable detailed review on Ebert. It gains its denser power by the significance of the temples, the history of lives lived in squalor and hardship, the profound irrationality of people caught in their statues

The small diurnal transient lives considered against this backdrop, which lives are nonetheless precious and everything to those living them — this perception embodied is replicated in The Dig of Sutton Hoo below.

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Self- or group-reflexive still – during the course of the movie we met the living people now making the film and friends to the dying Sacks, as well as those no longer living (through older photos and Sacks narrating

His Own Life is the title of Sacks’s last book.  At last, out as a gay man, he owns his life.  And now he tells it. I’m a reader and teacher of Sacks’s books and essays as was Jim (our library of Sacks’s books) and I’ve taught several them (Hearing Voices, A Leg to Stand on, Migraines) and xeroxes of chapters and essays from others and periodicals (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, the New York Review of Books), and I thought I knew a lot. This film taught me I knew very little about the man’s full life (Jewish boyhood with physicians for parents, 3 other brothers), his character, how he grew up in England, how his mother rejected his homosexuality with abhorrence and then silence about it.

Oliver Sacks as a child.

What a sexy young man he was — when he left England, after having gone to the best private schools and then Oxford, for San Francisco & then Greenwich Village, NYC

Oliver Sacks, 1961.

His colleagues at first sidelined his work or fired him (when he accused their punitive methods of cruelty), his going on drugs, a slow and agonizing flowering when he got a job in a Bronx clinic where he was able through insight, drugs, compassion to bring catatonic people back to life. His literary success and then social through giving talks in prestigious places, his success as a doctor finally brought the psychiatric world round enough to appear to accept him.

I did not know he was homosexual and had to hide this most of the time. I was startled to see how heavy he was at one time. To watch him risking his life in crazed motorcycle riding. He is presented as living a more or less chaste life until his last years when he fell in love and his last partner, Bill Hayes, is in the film. The film narrator attempts to explain his methods, and his clinical work is done justice to as well. Among the witnesses is Jonathan Miller who describes Sacks at Oxford. Owen Gleiberman has written an intelligent review of the film, conveying the deeply humane nature of the man that also shines out in the film.

The film omits a few things about his career itself:  he was a wonderful storyteller  — a writer.  And central to is professional success without the support of academia was to have had the abilities of a novelist (in effect). His chapter stories are little novels where he has himself through his writing understood his patient or alter ego better by talking/writing to the reader.  To be sure, all these are based on years of clinical work (which work is not respected by the highest academics who prefer the theories that arise from abstract thought and research).

Very important: his real thrust was low tech (see especially Migraines). He contextualized and understood phenomena in history, e.g., the deaf in Hearing Voices where they were idiots for centuries and suddenly were people like you and me after the 3 Enlightenment philosophers invented sign languages.   The last thing he resorted to was a operation (see Migraines especially), and drugs were only applied after long talks and getting to know and understand a patient.  This is not appreciated by the medical establishment, supported as they are by the pharmaceutical industry & astronomical prices for surgeries.

As Oliver Sacks’s homosexuality made him for a long time an outsider in society, so his deeply humane methods, and his choice of approaches which are not prestigious (or as well paid) .  Sacks’s storytelling,  abilities as a brilliant writer as much as a clinician, neurologist and psychologist made him the hero and explorer and man we should be grateful to.

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Dig is a pastoral movie with much sun over the peaceful green fields of southern England

The Dig. I loved almost every minute of it, and although I realize the novel from which it is adapted, departs from historical accuracy, invents personalities and characters, I’ve a hunch it’s the sort novel I will find comfort and strength from (I have bought a copy from bookfinder.com). I gather the movie is getting a big audience; the subject is one long known, one which does attract a popular audience when set up in a museum to be a spectacle of gold: the Sutton Hoo burial grounds, the ship, its treasures, the Anglo-Saxon history.

Rory Lomax (Johnny Flynn) in the sun — many of the characters in Dig and Luxor are photographed in the sun

With Peggy Piggot (Lily James) by a left-over wall — your conventional romance trope

As with Luxor, and (on TV) All Things Great and Small, the photography is beautiful. One does not wonder why so many Anglophilic novels are set in the southeast. The acting very good: Ralph Fiennes, as Basil Brown, the “amateur” archaeologist, superb excavator, hams it up a bit with his accent, but when he is gone from the screen is when the film begins to fade and lose strength of emotional will and understanding.  He, together with the owner of the property, Carey Mulligan, as Edith Pretty, who catches the note and behavior of the upper class woman with her sense of privilege, have found the buried ship and its treasure together. She defends him only slowly from the ambitious academics, but it’s she who saves his life when the excavation collapses over him; she tries to invite him to dinner but he evades what might have been a very painful experience for both; nonetheless, they form a strong bond in the film. At one point he leaves the site because he is treated so rudely, condescendingly by those with degrees, but he is persuaded back by his wife, May (Monica Dolan) on the grounds that has he been doing this all these years for these people’s praise? At its end, she says she will be sure he will be recognized. Intertitles in the final credits tell us the Sutton Hoo material first arrived in the British Museum 7 years after Edith’s death; and then it took a long time for Basil Brown to be properly credited, but he and Edith are both central names on the exhibit today.

Our two central actors are ably supported by Johnny Flynn, as Rory Lomax, who I first saw as Viola in the all male Twelfth Night, and does have this charisma-charm; & Lily James, as Mrs Margaret (Peggy) Piggott, who falls in love with him (James has been superb as Juliet in Shakespeare’s play, Cinderella, & Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice & Zombies). Rory Lomax is Edith Pretty’s brother who is going off to WW1 as a RAF and we and he and everyone knows the danger and death rate high.  Peggy Piggot is the wife of the one of educated by degree team who is also homosexual and has married her in a cover up ,and continually rejects her body and companionship. Like Brown, she is not professional, has no degree, but knows a great deal, and she comes upon a jewel first (fiction can do this).

One of the film’s pleasures is its staunch egalitarianism. Again, the seeming ordinary man is our hero, and he is almost pushed off his site; but his wife persuades him to accept the snobbery and sidelining by the official professionals who at first treat him like a servant whose services they must endure but control. But after all he is not ordinary; the caste system erases people not born with money and rank, irrespective of their deeper talents.

Fiennes was believable as the older man whose partly orphaned son is attracted to him — they look at the stars through Brown’s telescope together. When Mulligan presented the reality of a personality of a upper class woman of the era, now widowed, she shows a hard edge, and assumes of course that her servants should serve her hand and foot. The love story of Rory and Peggy is conventional, but I did not find it detracted — it done from the DH Lawrence point of view, which roots the attraction of the two people to their deep time alone at night in the natural world all around them (a tent, behind a garden wall).

It rains; the women with the famous archaeologist from the British Museum (Ken Stott)

It themes includes death — Mrs Pretty visits her husband in his grave; she is discovered to have rheumatic heart disease and physically deteriorates during the film. Her young son is desolated when he sees this, and cannot save her — as he tells Mr Brown. Then we get this wonderfully delivered speech by Fiennes-Brown about failure: how we fail all the time, have to accept it, and just try to fail better. He got near Robert Louis Stevenson’s axiom. The boy clings with admiration to Mr Brown.

Et in Arcadio Ego; death is in The Dig shaped by the film’s consciousness of long time, and that each individual is part of some long range cycle seen in the buried ship. We are in an ancient cemetery. Planes going over (RAF) soon to be replaced by the brutal Germans with their bombs. All this is in Luxor too: war and carnage, the irrational temples. Sacks is dying and has been deprived of deeper companionship of a lover most of his life. The dialogue is realistic, well done. For detailed full reviews see Sheila O’Malley on Ebert. Also The Guardian, Mark Kermode, better than usual because he’s reviewing a better film.

Fiennes’ presence helps make The Dig

Riseborough pitch perfect in silent grief

Playing piano, being filmed in His Own Life; his papers just below — there are no online photos of his patients (Jim used to feel that there was a voyeuristic element in his books)

Ellen

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Literature & art about dogs & animals & JR Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip as a Bloomsbury take

No these are not dogs practicing social distancing ….

I’ve written a companion piece to my blog on cat stories, cat pictures, and a literature about cats: I make the case that dogs have been used and depicted, especially in fiction and legend as examples making a strong case for animal rights, their animal’s consciousness as somehow equivalent to people … Stories about dogs are focuses in the development of feelings and arguments on behalf of abolishing cruelty, respecting animals as we would want to be respected …. The second half I go into wonderful later 19th century novels, stories for children, and then recently a new breed which is non-fiction meant for adults, not sentimental sometimes with the dog as POV — from Woolf’s “Gypsy, a mongrel,” to Auster’s Timbuktu (about a dog living with a homeless man who is dying, both of them poignantly worried about the near future), to Garnett’s Lady into Fox, and finally Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip and the wonderful animated film.

A photograph of Ackerley’s female German shepherd, Queenie, re-named Tulip in the memoir

What strained and anxious lives dogs must lead, so emotionally involved in the world of humans, whose affections they strive endlessly to secure, whose authority they are expected unquestioningly to obey, and whose mind they never can do more than imperfectly reach and comprehend. Stupidly loved, stupidly hated, acquired without thought, reared and ruled without understanding, passed on or “put to sleep” without care, did they, I wondered, these descendants of the creatures who, thousands of years ago in the primeval forests, laid siege to the heart of man, took him under their protection, tried to tame him, and failed — did they suffer headaches? — from Fierlinger’s animated masterpiece film My Dog Tulip

Dear friends and readers.

Here is a companion piece to my Cat stories, cat pictures, cat poetry: there is a literature of cats (no those cats are not practicing social distancing), though the two do not quite correspond. In cat stories I tried to single out what distinguishes the way people write about cats, especially when the cat is your pet, from the way they write about pets and animals in general, some quality and feeling evidenced in the stories (as admiration for them in situations where it’s a question of endurance, understanding, something that provokes resilience, resourcefulness, a stalwart demeanor, at the time time as having the tenderest fondness for them as adorably affectionate). I also cited scholarly studies of art and poetry about cats.

In this blog I am not going to single out a dog’s or dog traits because so far as I can tell stories about dogs, photos, art do not marvel at this animal nor have I to hand (because I have not read) a history of the depiction of dogs (I think it would be long). Instead I mean to make the case that they have been used and depicted, especially in fiction and legend as examples making a strong case for animal rights, their animal’s consciousness as somehow equivalent to people. I think of how Montaigne wrote of a dog coming to a crossroads, and having to decide which was to go next, “the dog discourseth to itself thus … “. Stories about dogs are focuses in the development of feelings and arguments on behalf of abolishing cruelty, respecting animals as we would want to be respected. Why? because they publicly, shamelessly love us, yearn for us, are faithful, hard-working, constant, single-hearted, incorruptible. They deserve rights …

An ancient Roman mosaic

I begin with the earliest part of human history: non-human animals often pictured on caves, usually ones people hunted, religious rituals where animals signal aspects of humanity people want to develop, admire, increase, and so ingest – where the earliest dogs are pictured as companions, fellow hunters, with men as the leader of the pack. Unlike early cat pictures, these are about human beings: people using animals to define themselves, caring about animals insofar as they relate to us, aid us, are our friends. The second early manifestation I’ll mention is an opposing kind: satire, the beast fable, Aesop’s fables which are satiric classical stories: you reduce people to animals to expose us. Chicken Little an American story, the ant and the grasshopper (I’m with the grasshopper and think the ant a self-righteous prig), fox and grapes – many many of these, all with morals, sometimes ironic. Are any of these about dogs? One 18th century anomalous novel is: Francis Coventry’s Pompey the Little, or the Life and adventures of a Lapdog. It is a bitter send-up of humanity, a variation on the “it-story” so favored by semi-pornographers of the era (stories where a sofa tells all, a necklace), except (significantly) the dog is given a consciousness, becomes narrator and will worry human-like questions, for example, is a dog property? is owning a dog wrong? Alas, Coventry never takes this far enough to be an abolitionist of slavery. The form of beast fable, Aesop tale (as in the brilliant poetry of La Fontaine) did have a resurgence in the 18th century, but its concern is not non-human animals but people.

It’s when you begin to find depictions of a dog saving people, of their attachment to us, and ours to them, we begin to see the turn taken towards the development of animal rights — Edward Landseer made a career out of this: if you click, you’ll find as many pictures of people with horses as dogs

Attachment (1892) – he was a foremost animal painter in the 19th century, specializing in dogs

There is more than a core truth about this focus: it is the center of Ackerley’s brilliant 1956 My Dog Ackerley — continually Tulip fixes our hero with her “anxious bright eyes.”

This is also the core of the 1970s poignant also somewhat comic tale by Paul Auster, Timbuktu about Mr Bones, who loves his master dearly, accompanies Willy G. Christmas, a homeless mentally disabled man everywhere, with his (the dog’s) heart-breaking because Willy is dying. Willy’s mission is to find an English teacher he last communicated with shortly after leaving college, who encouraged and respected him: they are seeking out a 20 year old address in Baltimore in the hope she will take Mr Bones in, for Willy fears for Mr Bones’s life and spends much time warning him to stay away from “shelter” people. Meanwhile Mr Bones has gathered there is an afterlife called Timbuktu and Mr Bones fears he will not be able to get in.  What Auster does is imitate the state of mind he imagines that a homeless person must know — loinliness, aimlessness, coming near death through accidents, alienation — and mate that to Mr Bones’s faithful loving state of mind. Half-way through Mr Bones dies (in a half-dream sequence) and Mr Bones is on his own: we are into a (to me) deeply engaging picaro narrative invested with extraordinary depth.  The dog tried to kill a pigeon in order not to starve but does not know how.  Eventually he feeds on thrown away ice–creams, garbage. Just before taken in by a boy (first adventure) he begins to howl. Piercing unforgettable moment.

I think of how I’ve watched a psychiatrist succeed in communicating with a withdraw child by taking out an animal puppet who is reminiscent of a dog. Not threatening. So early on in children’s literature (in Dickens, as in the disabled Barnaby Rudge and his raven), there is deep camaraderie in a child and his or her dog — and animals are made to talk.

Barnaby and his Raven by Fred Barnard

By the later 19th century when fine literature for children emerges beautiful tales: usually the animal is badly oppressed or abused and child loves her and the animal the child: so Anna Sewell about cruelty to a horse in Black Beauty (often a horse substitutes for a dog, or vice versa), or Wilson Rawls on two faithful loving dogs and a boy (Where the Red Fern Grows – socialist really, pro Indian). A Canadian early classic, Margaret Saunders’s Beautiful Joe about a real dog who endured terrible cruelty – as many non-human animals do.

Behind this a history of people in the Enlightenment first valuing non-human animals for themselves, keeping them as pets, companions, and legislation for animal rights – they are still owned by people and people have complete control. Earliest legislation on behalf of the dreadfully badly treated horse. People don’t want to hear what happens to make a horse race. Kathryn Shevelow’s book For the Love of Animals traces the rise of the animal proection movement memorably. We have not solved the problem of stopping human beings being cruel to animals for fun, torturing animals to madden and terrify them. No rooster was born with a steel spurs in its head (as Winston Graham’s Demelza tells Ross Poldark in Poldark) — Graham’s books manifest a real identification with and concern for all animals’ vulnerability.

For longer than the last half-century, a specialty in animals studies is the woman scientist who goes to live with a group of animals to study and observe them — from Jane Goodall’s wonderful books about her 30+ years with chimpanzees, to Diane Fossey with gorillas, Birute Gildikas with orangutans, and lesser known, Sy Mongomery’s several studies, e.g., Walking with Great Apes. Women are willing to give up their ego and identity to be with the animal. Sooner or later, they take on the role of protector.

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This was what I found myself developing when I sought to introduce the peculiar take of the Bloomsbury circles when they came to write memoirs of pets and about animals — as context for Ackerley’s peculiar memoir. As usual, they took angles that led to new insights — or so they tried to. They wrote wrote pro-animal imaginative literature for adults that is not sentimental. Or they try not to be. It is not instructional: Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes books about the nature of dogs and how you take of them, ditto for cats. You don’t read My Dog Tulip, or Francis Power Cobbe’s The Confessions of a Lost Dog, Woolf’s Flush, a biography; or David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox or the recent Paul Auster’s Timbuktu (see above) for advice on how to take care of your dog. All of them are about us too, about our nature, and how we are aligned to, closely related to animals, they are critiques of us, our society through the animal’s life and personality alongside of and observing us.

The earliest edition of Flush: A biography resembled the layout and picture of Cobbe’s dog and book

Earliest version of this comes before the Bloomsbury 1910 date:

by Francis Power Cobbe, an important suffragette, who was among the first to try to stop useless and cruel animal experiments, especially vivisection, the use of animals for experiments; her slender novella anticipates Woolf’s Flush, and I would be much surprised if Woolf had not read Hajjin’s story. The Confessions of a Lost Dog include being taken in by a very genteel controlled single lady, and both have as the central incident how the dog is kidnapped held up for ransom, mistreated and nearly killed. Because that happened a lot in Victorian England. Cobbe also wrote non-fiction, “The Consciousness of Dogs” (Quarterly Review), then “Dogs I have Met,” which dogs have sometimes had very bad times (boys’ careless cruelty, eminent scientist’s’ deliberate torture, a man who kept a rat pit in Paddington and aristocrats shooting pigeons sprung from traps).

Flush was a present from Sackville-West; and Woolf’s book is a researched biography of both Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her dog, from a dog’s point of view insofar as Woolf could do it. There are letters, documents, and Woolf is brilliant at not overstepping so that the dog somehow understands others the way a dog might (not through language). I taught the book as a canonical modernist biography. To this I have added (for the class I’m teaching) from Woolf’s The Complete Fiction, a touching short fictional memoir,

“Gypsy, a mongrel,” about Tom Bagot’s memories of a dog he loved, whom he tried to kill and could not (because of the way she looked into his eyes and grinned), who was a burden, bothering the cats, getting into mischief, but then falling in love (it seems) with a pedigree male, Hector, and when Hector was removed (as too much of a burden) so pined for him, that she disappeared one day in search of him. The retrospective memoir begins after Gypsy has vanished and is by turns poignant and funny.

Woolf had a dog who one day just disappeared.

Then there’s Bunny or David Garnett’s (yes he is Constance Garnett the translator’s son) Lady Into Fox.

It is a chilling book (not horrifying in the way of Kafka’s Metamorphosis where a man wakes up one morning to find he’s become a cockroach in body). One morning the narrator’s wife wakes to find herself become a fox. The first thing Garnett has to do is kill two perfectly fine dogs lest they kill his wife — we feel these as murder. She is regarded by all the world as vermin, as there to be killed. Gradually her eyes and whole demeanor become less and less human woman, more and more a fox as she mingles with other foxes, has a liter. Our narrator tries to become fox-like too Doesn’t work. He is not accepted. The book has a tragically felt ending.

It is sometimes printed with Garnett’s The People in the Zoo (in this one you see the original origin of animal literature in the satiric beast fable.)

So to come to Ackerley’s comic masterpiece; he might be said not to practice so much as to undermine the dog memoir. It is a love story, the story of his devotion to his female German shepherd whom he wants to have full life – not to miss out on anything, and that means for him, mating, sex, pups. As told it is surely a man’s idea of what sex is, and the obsessiveness of the quest (and graphically told failures) reveal Ackerley’s purpose as also to make fun of heterosexual sentimentalities about sex and marriage (as well as homosexual ones). As in portrait biographies, we also learn as much about Ackerley as Tulip. The humor is exquisite: it’s a matter of language and tone: our narrator is every so polite and impeccable, very dignified in the language he chooses; also startling and inventive: he began to think he had an “undoctorable dog.” He shows the cruelty indifference and urge to master and make others bend to your will in how many owners treat their ever so yearning dogs. I began to realize how many dogs might be emotionally abused.

Here is Dean Flower from the Hudson Review:

As he put it in his autobiography, My Father and Myself, “peace and contentment reached me in the shape of an animal, an Alsatian bitch … [who] entered my life . . . and entirely transformed it”:

She offered me what I had never found in my sexual life, constant, single-hearted, incorruptible, uncritical devotion, which it is in the nature of dogs to offer. She placed herself entirely under my control.

From the moment she established herself in my heart and home, obsession with sex fell wholly away from me. The pubs I had spent much of my time in were never revisited, my single desire was to get back to her, to her waiting love and unstaling welcome. So urgent was my longing every day to rejoin her that I would often take taxis way, even the whole way, home to Putney from my London office, rather than endure the dawdling of buses and the rush-hour traffic jams in Park Lane. I sang with joy at the thought of seeing her.

Here is the language of a man in love, for the first time and irrevocably. The scales fell from his eyes. This was love, as he had never understood it before. He does not voice it so directly in My Dog Tulip, choosing rather to dwell on his own innocent confusions and anxieties—a con firmed bachelor of refined tastes at the center of London’s literary life, driven to care for a creature who cared so utterly for him. For Ackerley, loving Tulip (whose actual name, Queenie, was deemed too prosaic for the book) meant understanding her desires, her emotions and charac ter, her spiritual as well as her sexual and excretory nature, her myste rious and essential beauty as well as her irreducible dogginess. Inevi tably, that led to some comic incongruities, which Ackerley skillfully played. … Recent admirers too have commented on Ackerley’s excessive, perhaps ironic use of Renaissance sonnets as sources for these bursts of eloquence:

Her ears are tall and pointed, like the ears of Anubis. How she manages to hold them constantly erect, as though starched, I do not know, for with their fine covering of mouse-gray fur they are soft and flimsy; when she stands with her back to the sun it shines through the delicate tissue, so that they glow shell-pink as though incandescent. Her face also is long and pointed, basically stone-gray but the and lower jaw are jet black. Jet, too, are the rims of her amber eyes, though heavily mascara’d, and the tiny mobile eyebrow tufts that set like accents above them. And in the midst of her forehead is a kind of Indian caste-mark, a black diamond suspended there, like the jewel on the brow of Pegasus in Mantegna’s Parnassus, by a fine dark thread, no more than a penciled line, which is drawn from it right over her poll midway between the tall ears . . . her skull, bisected by the thread, is two primrose pools, the center of her face light gray, the bridge of her nose above the long black lips fawn, and upon each a patte de mouche has been tastefully set.

But here again the language of love is unmistakable. The elaborate anatomizing, the fine penciling and drawing, the chiaroscuro, the classical allusions and chiasmus (“are jet . . . Jet are”) all attest to the lover’s devout gaze. What may be harder to see is that Ackerley had no wish to be witty or extravagant in passages like these, least of all ironic. He put all his art and heart into them. Yet many readers were disgusted nevertheless. Why did Ackerley have to focus so relentlessly on feces and urine; or in the chapters concern ing sex, i.e., his efforts (all failures) to find Tulip a mate, why did he have to dwell on vaginal lubricants and penile stimulation and the odors of a bitch in heat? The answer is at least threefold: (a) nothing—again —is by love debarred; (b) the problem is with humans, not dogs; and (c) Ackerley chose that means to demonstrate something fundamental about love and sex. As to (a), Ackerley earnestly sought to understand the facts of canine sex, on Tulip’s behalf. He consulted her most trusted veterinarians, but also dog breeders and other self-professed experts, plus all the books available, and learned that the process of “marrying” two dogs is not simple or straightforward, and that a great deal of ignorance, misinformation, and mystery still surrounds it.

On the film, from “One man and his dog,” The Spectator (V315, #9532, 7 May 2011, p. 48 — no author cited)

a labour of love, the visuals mesh with the words perfectly and capture all the various moods, from melancholy and autumnal, to comic and skittish. The film comprises nearly 60,000 drawings hand-drawn digitally (that is, on to a computer), and are just so lovely, like the best ever watercolours come to life … Tulip has her foibles. Tulip can be flirtatious one minute and fiercely possessive the next. Tulip can be infuriating. Tulip sometimes earns herself a biff on the nose. But, all the while, Ackerley marvels at her every detail, rhapsodising not just about her beauty and constancy, but also her defecations and urinations. There isn’t a bit of Tulip he doesn’t find fascinating, or isn’t curious about. Occasionally, the animation leeches into black and white pencil sketches where Tulip appears half human wearing a little skirt and holding court. … The film, like the book, does not directly address Ackerley’s loneliness and homosexuality and childlessness, but it is there in the chinks … It’s marvellous, probably the best dog-flick you are ever going to see, based on the best dog-lit you are ever going to read. What more can I say?

There are three levels of cartoon:  beyond the beautiful colored pictures, which dissolve at the edges and turn into black-and-white satirical exposures of the less than admirable passions and impulses driving the characters, which turn into lovely lines of classical gods (now archetypally psychoanalysing).

Once again here is the vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/264796405

Ellen

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The Bloomsbury Novel: a summer syllabus for an online OLLI at Mason class

Mecklenburgh Square (in the Bloomsbury area), by Margaret Joliffe (1935)

For a 6 week summer course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: Wednesday mid-day, 11:45 am to 1:15 pm,
June 24 to July 29
Zoom, Virtual Classroom
Institutional location: 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va 22032
Dr Ellen Moody

Online at:

Description of course:

This course will examine novels & art included in the term Bloomsbury through the fiction of four of the novel writers: we’ll read E.M. Forster’s Maurice; J. R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip; Virginia Woolf’s short fictions taken from two books: The Complete Short Fiction (which includes Memoirs of a Novelist) and The Death of the Moth and other essays; and Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent. Bloomsbury books (non-fiction, biography, essays, poetry) are written by people who belonged to an amorphous early to mid 20th century creative group, associated with a specific area in London, who were friends and associates, or whose works were printed at the Hogarth Press. The group lasted a long time, going through several phases, and left a rich legacy in books and people writing in alignment with the original goals and aesthetics, political and economic and social ideas. Thie works produced by this group are splendidly interesting, different, quirkly, at an angle from the mainstream, critiquingit, and remain strongly influential until today, are in various genres, often subversive and original texts. You don’t forget them. There are good movies to watch for Maurice, My Dog Ackerley, & All Passion Spent. I ask everyone before class to read E.M. Forster’s “What I Believe.”

Dora Carrington (1893-1932), The Mill at Tidmarsh (her most famous picture)

Required texts (in the order we will read them):

E. M. Forster, “What I Believe,” Online at http://spichtinger.net/otexts/believe.html or https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/what-i-believe-by-e-m-forster (if you want to buy, it’s reprinted in Two Cheers for Democracy. Harcourt, Brace, 1951; rpt. many times)
E.M. Forster, Maurice, ed., P. N. Furbank, introd., notes by David Leavitt. Penguin 1971; rpt 2003. ISBN 978-0=141-44113-9.
J.R. Ackerley, My Dog Tulip, introd. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. New York Review of Books classic, 1999. ISBN 978-1-59017-414-2
Virginia Woolf, The Complete Shorter Fiction, ed., introd. Susan Dick. Harvest book, 1989. ISBN 978-0-15-621250-2 (this contains the whole of Memoirs of a Novelist).
————–, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. I will send the whole book by attachment. It used to available at an Australian University of Adelaide site and is still on an Australian Gutenberg site:  http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks12/1203811h.html. It exists in book form: The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Harcourt, Brace, 1970 ISBN 0-15-625234-1
Vita Sackville-West. All Passion Spent, introd. Joanna Lumley. Virago 1982; rpt 2011. ISBN 978-0-86068-358-2.

Format: lecture and discussions

June 24th: Defining Bloomsbury philosophy, ethic, describing the aesthetic. “What I believe.” We will begin Forster’s Maurice
July 1st: Forster and his posthumous novel, Maurice.
July 8th: Pro-animal literature & Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip. Read also for this day Woolf’s “Gypsy, the Mongrel” (in Complete Fiction) and “Sporting Party.”
July 15th: For this week read Woolf and her “Mysterious Case of Miss V,” “The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn,” “Memoirs of a Novelist,” “The Widow and the Parrot” (all in The Complete Fiction); then “Art of Biograpahy and “Professions for Women” (from Death of a Moth). I’ll tell of Andre Maurois’s Aspects of Biography.
July 22nd: Experimental fiction & feminist poetry: Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth,” “Twelfth Night at the Old Vic,” “Street Haunting,” “Thoughts on Peace During an Air Raid” (from The Death of the Moth), then Woolf’s “Kew Gardens,” “The String Quartet,” Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street,” “Nurse Lugton’s Curtain,” “Uncle Vanya,” “The Shooting Party,”  from Appendix C, “The Dog,” “Ghosts,” and “English Youth” (in Complete Fiction). I will send by attachment poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, & Sackville-West.
July 29th: Vita Sackville-West, her life, scholarly editions & biographies, poetry and All Passion Spent.

James Wilby as the ebullient sincere young Maurice

Hugh Grant as the hardened self-depriving older Clive

Recommended: 5 movies

All Passion Spent. Directed by Martin Friend. Screenplay Peter Buckman. Perf. Wendy Hiller, Maurice Denham, Harry Andrews, Eileen Way, Phyllis Calvert. 3 part (hour each) series. BBC, Masterpiece Theater, 1986. On YouTube. Delicate gentle comic poignant masterpiece of a TV series.

Carrington. Directed by John McGrath. Screenplay Christopher Hampton. Perf. Jonathan Pryce, Emma Thomson, Rufus Dewell, Samuel West, Penelope Wilton. Le Studio Canal, 1995. It’s literally accurate in some ways, but it panders to myths about the Bloomsbury people. Grim, with a caricature of Strachey.
Maurice. Dir.James Ivory. Screenplay Kit Hesketh-Harvey Perf. James Wilby, Hugh Grant, Rupert Graves, Phoebe Nicholls, Simon Callow, Ben Kingsley, Judy Parfitt, Denholm Elliot. Merchant-Ivory, 1987. Available as Prime Video on Amazon. Fine mostly faithful movie.
My Dog Tulip. Animated artistic Film written, drawn, edited by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger. Voices Christopher Plummer and Lynn Redgrave. Produced by Howard Kaminsky. Axiom, New Yorker film, 1999. It is available as a Vimeo if you keep searching for it. A masterpiece of tenderness, comedy, strongly pro-animal rights.

https://vimeo.com/264796405

To the Lighthouse. Dir Colin Gregg. Script Hugh Stoddard. Perf. Rosemary Harris, Michael Gough, Suzanne Bertish, Kenneth Branagh, Lyndsey Baxter, Pippa Guard. BBC, 1983. Online at YouTube. Brilliant combination of Woolf’s novel of the same name, aspects of her family life, and filmic versions of her novel techniques.

Other online texts: by Woolf
Granite and Rainbow (contains “The new Biography”)
To the Lighthouse

Available as complete, unabridged audiobooks:

E. M. Forster, Maurice, read by Peter Firth for Audiobooks. MP3. 978-1531874155
J. R. Ackerley, My Dog Tulip, read by Ralph Cosham for Audiobooks. MP3. 978-1441786401
Vita Sackville-West, All Passion Spent, read by Wendy Hiller, for Cover-to-Cover. Audio CDs. 978-1445801582 (hard to find, out of print, but just inimitable beautiful poignant funny)

Recent edition

General Studies, life-writing, other Bloomsbury and connected people:

Beard, Mary. The Invention of Jane Harrison. Cambridge: Harvard, 2000.
Brennan, Gerald. The Face of Spain. Farrar, Strauss, 1956.
Cavafy, C. P. Poems, ed, trans. Avi Sharon. NY: Penguin, 2008.
DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her life and work. NY: Ballantine Books, 1989.
Edel, Leon. Bloomsbury: A House of Lions. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1979.                 Gerzina, Gretchen. Carrington: A Life. NY: Norton, 1989.                                           Johnstone, J. K. The Bloomsbury Group: E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey. Noonday Press, 1954
Moffatt, Wendy. A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster. NY: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2010.
Power, Eileen. Medieval People. 1924: NY: Harper Perennial, 1963
Raitt, Suzanne. Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Oxford, 1993.
Shone, Richard, ed. The Art of Bloomsbury: Roger Fry, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant. Tate Gallery, Princeton UP, 1999.
Summers, Claude J. E.M. Forster. NY: Ungar, 1983.
Rosenbaum. S. P. ed. The Bloomsbury Group: A collection of Memoirs & Commentaries. All sort of essays by many Bloomsbury people. Rev. Toronto Press, 1995.
Rosner, Victoria, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group.  NY: Cambridge UP, 2014. Covers ground by typologies, themes, perspectives.
Sackville-West, Vita, ed. Mary Ann Caws. Selected Writings of Vita Sackville-West. NY: Palgrave, 2002.
Spalding, Frances. Roger Fry: Art and Life. LA: Univ of California Press, 1980.                         Stansky, Peter. On or About December 1910: Early Bloomsbury & Its Intimate World. Harvard, 1997.
Wade, Francesca. Square Haunting: Five women, freedom and London between the wars. Faber & Faber, 2020.

A few of my blogs:

Thinking about biography: Andre Maurois’s Aspects of Biography
Upon first reading Virginia Woolf’s
Death of a Moth”
Virginia Woolf’s Flush as canonical modernist biography

Bridge over the Allier c.1933 Roger Fry (1866-1934)

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In this time of tribulation …

A gothic style heroine warily slides into Oscar Wilde’s parodic Canterville Ghost

I have carried on reading E. M. Forster. The classes I was to teach are cancelled because I was not up to teaching (?) online — anyway, among other things, I haven’t got a webcam or microphone in my PC and have been unable to figure out how to access and use my the (I am told) in-built webcam and microphone in my Macbook pro laptop. I’ve taken this enforced staying home as an opportunity to develop more fully the projects I was on, and read some books, watch some movies I’ve been longing to get to.

Well now as long as I don’t become ill, I can. One night I watched all of Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 Hamlet, the one where he omits not one word, including all of the slower ceremonial scenes, and it takes 4 and 1/2 hours to watch. The strong emotional affect of this production depends on sitting there continuously all that time. But before I embark on sharing just some of what I’m trying to lose myself in I thought some inspiriting writing that bears full scrutiny might be in order. What better then then Forster’s famous “What I Believe”?

A Hogarth Press penny press edition, it seems to me Forster expresses the quintessential outlook of the Bloomsbury circle at its best; he chose it as the pivotal essay in his collection of his World War Two broadcasts to the British nation, Two Cheers for Democracy. The opening section, as he says, “‘The Second Darkness,’ concentrates on the war … subjects such as Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Liberty, the Censorship … the climate political … [with as a] conclusion … “though we cannot expect to love one another, we must learn to put up with one another. Otherwise we shall all of us perish.” The “climate” of the second section” is ethical and esthetic,” opening with “What I Believe,” and then going on for 3/4s of the on “the arts” as “an antiote against or present troubles and also as a support for our common humanity.” We move from “Anonymity” and general topics like “Not listening to music,” “Does culture matter?” to lots of specific works and authors, e.g., “our second greatest novel,’ “A whiff of D’Annunzio,” “Virginia Woolf,” “Forrest Reid” (a wonderful collector of beautiful 19th century illustrations, minor novelist), Mrs Miniver,” to finally “places” like “India again,” “Ferney,” “London is a muddle.”

So, what does he have to tell us since he “does not believe in belief”? The problem is this (the mid-20th century) is “an age of faith” (it still is in 2020), and “tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough,” they appear to be “a flower, battered beneath a military jack-boot.” So where does start, what’s the central core of what matters to him: “personal relationships” he says. He knows psychologically, there is no such thing as a firm single unchanging self, “we don’t even know what we are like (Alexander Pope said something like this in his “Characters of Man”), what we may be. But practically we can and do recognize ourselves, remember our past, can say love A, little as we may know him or her. Here it is not a matter of drawing up and sticking to a contract, but “a matter for the heart,” something more or more despised today.” You are deluding yourself, such feelings are middle class luxuries .He has been urged instead dedicate yourself to a “cause,” but he “hates the idea of a cause,” and here comes the most famous utterance of this book (wait for it)

if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

Who are in the lowest rungs of hell? Brutus and Cassius who betrayed their friend. Forster says “down with the state,” which he knows “means that the State would down me.”

Which brings him to Democracy, which he says is just “less hateful than other contemporary forms of government.” “It does start from the assumption that the individual is important,” and “all types are “needed to make a civilisation.” Says he

The people I most admire are those who are sensitive and want to create something or discover something, and do not see life in terms of power, and such people get more of a chance under a democracy than anywhere else.

For democracy allows them liberty.

Democracy also allows “criticism.” What he loves about Parliament is “it is a talking shop.” It is a place where one can expose abuses, and “its chatter gets reported widely.”

There is a dilemma, though: all societies rely on Force, and while we are being “sensitive, advanced, affectionate and tolerant” (he sneaks in three more words, the first three), force comes along, knocks us on the head and can throw us in a “labor camp.” Now we get to the active crux of the matter: we must do all we can to contain, control, repress force, which appears to be violence on behalf of serving someone or some people’s appetites for prizes, or on behalf of getting the money that can buy things. Admittedly money and prizes are not brought up as words in this essay but elsewhere Forster says we must do all we can to get round money, to keep it from being an object. The aim — what he believes, how he lives — is to snatch our time, our life, what is meaningful to us in being alive, during the intervals when force is not in control. He admits that just then was “such a difficult moment to live in. Implicitly the reader (his listeners) know that violence, force, and as he says in the next paragraph “Great Men” are in control; hero-worship seeks them, and such an “unmanageable’ man “is an integral pat of the authoritarian stock-in-trade.”

At this point I thought of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, also Simon Weil’s translation of the Iliad a Poem of Force, and Uprootedness her commentary on it — both profoundly anti-war, profoundly against “the money motive,” “the vanity motive” (I am remembering Woolf), against cutting people off from their roots in local groups of people, recognizing humane obligations. Other of the writers of this era, socialist (Leonard Woolf, J. B. Priestley, Orwell), French and German existentialists, the Bloomsbury group (George C Moore, Maynard Keynes). But here Forster veers into his peculiar POV: he says he believes in an “aristocracy” not of power, based on rank and influence, but an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky.” They are found in all classes and everywhere, between whom “there is a secret understanding when they meet, representing the “true human tradition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos.” Thousands “perish in obscurity” (think of Eliot’s Dorothea in Middlemarch). He names no one and prefers such a type “should not be an ascetic one.” You should not thwart your body but enjoy it; still he does not “insist on this:” “This is not a major point.” Authority seeing their value tries to use them, but they “slip through the Net and are gone.” “Their temple, as one of them remarked [Keats], is the Holiness of the Heart’s Affection.” Their kingdom “the wide open world.” He think as long as such people exist, the experiment of life “cannot be dismissed as a failure.” These “decencies” it does seem (a tragedy) cannot “be translated into public affairs,” for power makes people go “crooked,” “dotty.”

I am not keen on the last paragraphs where Forster talks of finding a “saviour of the future.” We don’t need a savior; there cannot be one. But at least he does not believe such people will be in charge permanently or while in charge without breaks; will ever get to “order” our inner lives (to order which, it seems, Love is a central value).. For him, for us, for me too, living is a crucial matter of gaining time now and again to explore “the universe” and “set” a mark in it “worthily,” say in odd moments when Force seems to be looking the other way, where your works may be seen as a “trivial by-product to be scrapped as soon as the drums beat and the bombers hum.”

So this is not a hopeful or future-oriented treatise. He suggests Christians think their creed will fix the world’s mess, but he thinks Christianity’s appeal today comes from “the money behind it, rather than its spiritual appeal.” His “faith” has a small f,and is saying what he thinks while speech is comparatively free; it may not be free much longer.” He ends with his context: “liberalism is crumbling all around him.” Writing this essay has helped him not to be ashamed, but see other people are “equally insecure. It’s this time under the shadow of “the dictator-hero” he is living, but as an individual as all are, and as such all slipping away from the Net as best they can. Each of us is born, each dies, separately, so there is limit to the power of Force.

In another blog, my political one I wrote of how to recognize COVID-19, what it is, how to try to do to avoid it, offered kindly words and song, but here I have offered a philosophy of life, debating central old basic questions, how to be yourself, how to be good. Wendy Moffat thinks the center of his novels is “the search of each person for an honest connection with another human being.” What choices unlikely characters for heroes and heroines make.

So I’ve distracted myself and I hope you too, gentle readers. I had put in for a summer course, something I was going to call

The Bloomsbury Novel:

This course will examine a wide range of novels & art covered by the term Bloomsbury through three texts. We will read E.M. Forster’s Howards End, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent. None are long, one very short. Bloomsbury novels are recognizable as written by people who belonged to this amorphous early 20th century creative group, or were printed at the Hogarth Press, or belonged to Roger Fry’s artistic groups. Closer to the time if classes are not canceled for the spring, I may substitute Maurice for Howards End. This subgenre is splendidly interesting, many thoughtful highly original texts of powerful art. There are three superlative movies for Howards End & All Passion Spent, (and if the substitute is made) one for Maurice from which we will view clips.

Roger Fry, Brantome — I know it exists in color, and in black-and-white loses its radiance; nonetheless I like shades of grey, white, black in this image

They are also recognizable as having Forster’s creed in some way, as re-inventing genres (Andre Maurois’s Aspects of Biography). I may not get to teach this one because I am not sure I am fit for on-line remote access what’s called teaching — we do not know when this pandemic will lose its clutch on us.

All is uncertainty, and now we must live with uncertainty, I offer E.M. Forster’s essay to keep in mind.

Ellen

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Dark Waters: on the poisoning of our environment, or hard deaths through chemistry

Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) after listening to Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp) attempts to investigate the poisoned farm land, water and miserably dying animals

Dear friends and readers,

The word gratitude refers to a feeling of thankfulness and obligation to a specific person who has done something for you, with the implication causing the person significant sacrifice. Robert Bilott had no specific individual in mind, not even the seemingly mad ignorant impoverished West Virginia farmer who with another neighbor barged into Bilott’s office with cardboard boxes of papers and gruesome evidence of abnormal frightening deformities in local fish and animal life. But when Dupont reneged on a bargain to admit fault in a case-action suit and pay an enormous sum, Bilott (after the shock) went on to fight individual case after case, with bigger and bigger money damages until the company relented, and, using  formula that avoids conceding guilt, paid a huge fine, and agreed to clean up in (alas limited) designated ways. The actor Mark Ruffalo and the director wanted to thank this “dogged Cincinnati lawyer” and tell his and the story he managed to convey to the public.

According to Todd Haynes (director) and Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan (script-writers)’s movie, Dark Waters, as Robert Bilott gradually and against considerable obstacles (the company provided a room filled with boxes filled with papers for Bilott to study first, the reluctance of Bilott’s own lawyer firm, to say nothing of Dupont and other involved corporations, scientist teams, gov’t agencies, brought before the courts and then a large public the truth that Dupont knowingly for decades continued to market PFOA after they discovered it, together with a complex of other non-regulated substances, were poisoning the water supply and blood stream of people coming into contact with their products. In this case one of the products being marketed was teflon on pots, which the public seemed to be able to remember and grasp. As with the movie, All the President’s Men, we see the long hard slog that begins with tiny ambiguous but troubling evidence, the difficult gathering of hard information, the many meetings with all sorts of people in all sorts of venues, many of whom don’t want to know about this. This movie has something the previous muck-raking movie lacks: it shows the cost to Ruffalo in his private life that years takes, and it shows something beyond a single criminal syndicate (under Nixon in effect): the allowing of crucial poisoning of our environment and bodies by corporations, bought up gov’t agencies, ruthless and indifferent individuals. We also see the gaps in the law that permit unregulated substances to be marketed.

Don’t miss it. Go see it — the more people watch, the more agencies and corporations become wary of an informed pro-active public.

A scene where the farmer Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp) explains to Bilott what he is seeing

It’s also an absorbing movie, very well done — no idiotic action-adventure, no excessive violence to lure us (apparently this lures) in. The thriller element (the genre the movie is advertised as) is small. The movie is rather a protest movie, an expose in the manner of Chernobyl, only done in a way that enables it to play to large audiences in movie-theaters. At one point Bilott gets scared because he’s told to park at the bottom of a many floored garage to go to a confrontation meeting with a group of corporate officials. His is the only car way down there. As he returns to his car remembering the angry faces he contended with, he begins to feel scared, and the film hesitates as he hesitates before turning the key in his car — we and he fear he will be blown up. In fact he was just experiencing the way the ordinary people is treated in the heavily reserved and charged-for garage spaces beneath corporate buildings nowadays.

Sarah Bilott (Anna Hathaway) comforts her husband — he is very weary — she defends him as someone who is not a failure except if you use a false definition of what is meaningful success in life

It is not a brilliant original indie film: production values are high (it’s a presentable high quality commodity product) so we get beautiful or horrible looking landscapes, city scenes for codas. The presentation of Bilott’s wife, Sarah (Anne Hathaway) is done in a heavily clichéd manner: her middle class assumptions, and behavior, the three sons, the home, her protests are out of Donna Reed. There is also too much cliché in the presentation of the wretched impoverished people of West Virginia and other places, all down-trodden and when not quietly virtuous, angry sullen (sometimes at Bilott for not producing quicker results and money while they are losing jobs). It’s forgivable — if you showed the truth of average lives (a lack of coherent pattern), people might not come or critics could chose to complain about this or that subsidiary point and the main themes of the movie be lost. When there are wins in court, the presentation of Bilott and his wife is somewhat sentimental. But real hard life is immersed in sentiment; we just don’t show it on cue. And Mark Ruffalo (known for his roles in Kenneth Lonergan films) carries most of the weight of the film. We meet various people along the way who have lost their jobs upon being whistle-blowers; people with cancer; people who have had deformed children; the deformed baby all grown up now and working in a gas station as an attendant.

The Observer gave the movie a rave review (Rex Reed). Other reviews are more qualified, in The Washington Post, Michael O’Sullivan basically praised the movie for not pretending to be what it’s not; it is a clearly informed passionate outrage machine. In Variety, though, Owen Gleiberman demonstrates that this is not your “usual” protest movie but original in a stunningly real way (the slow building court case): you do really feel like these are situations you have been involved in or know people who have been. Common Sense Media, Jeffrey Anderson breaks down the different elements into a “must see.”

I thought of Flint, Michigan (no official has been put in jail as yet, not one); a movie I saw a few years ago about  an attempt to put water under the control of corporations in a Latin American  country; cancer-poisoned places everywhere. Among sobering thoughts was the realization today since Trump and the criminal syndicate he is putting in place everywhere (his sycophants, patsies, profound reactionaries), Bilott would not even have gotten to first base. He had to begin with the EPA. He also had to have wins in courts with fair judges. The movie urges on us the necessity of removing Trump and his corporate bough; taking out evangelical-fanatic patsies from US offices; work to begin to reverse the calculated putting into power in courts with reactionaries and thugs like Kavanagh (as judges). Agencies there to help the public are run by people who mission in life is to destroy their effectiveness (appointees downsize refuse to allow employees to do the job they are supposed to.

It is scary in the sense Elena Nicolaou says (Entertainment): at its close, the inter-titles remind us that this stuff is in the blood of 99% of all of  us, and our animals too. I thought of my unknowing pussycats.

****************************

See this Intercept article by Sharon Lerner, the Case against DuPont: it includes a video by Tennant showing the continual contamination of the waters near his and another farm discussing how the state gave permission to DuPont to unload this poison into the state’s water streams. The article tells of other individuals who fought the company and how the company fought back, using among other things a statute of limitations. Joe Kiger, a Parkersburg elementary school gym teacher and former field coordinator for the AFL-CIO, was central to Bilott’s case and an actor playing him is in the film

Papers, fine print, using laws and courts against people are central methods of large corporations; they also pay individuals off.

Ellen

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The literature & movies made about Culloden & its aftermath

Inside the Culloden museum …

As brevity is the soul of wit, I hope for once to please here that way. Over on my Austen reveries blog I told of my months of effort towards a paper on Culloden and the highland clearances as a crossroads of existence for so many: and that I finally focused on Naomi Mitchison’s masterpiece of a historical novel, The Bull Calves, written over 1941-47, set over two days in June, 1747, not far from Inverness, and the 1994 indie movie, Chasing the Deer, which adds a moving human story and the beauty of Scotland and another sophisticated interpretation of what was Jacobitism: well, I delivered said paper in a session on Jacobitism: Then and Now, at the recent EC/ASECS conference at Gettysburg, and have put the paper on my site at academia.edu.

Here it is: At this Crossroads of my Life: books & movies about Culloden and Its Aftermath.

Do read it, gentle reader, and if you have time or are so disposed, send comments, suggestions, thoughts for future reading and watching.

This is not a trailer advertisement, but a promotional reel made to attract funding for Chasing the Deer (first aired on Grampian TV)

Ellen

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Michel Agier et al. The Jungle: Calais’s Camps & Migrants

Cap Blanc Nez, looking down — the areas of the cliffs takes about 20 minutes by boat

The book

“I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.” — George Simenon

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” — Virginia Woolf

Friends and readers,

I’m back from a trip I and my two daughters, took to the shores and town of Calais, France. We had a good time in the bnb, on the beach, relaxing and exploring the immediate environment around the ancient and now modern town of Calais (deep harbor, channel port on the Atlantic), and for others traveling as far as Paris and London, and then rather closer, Dunkirk, Lille, and the two cliffs across the way from Dover. I wrote about the trip on my Under the Sign of Sylvia II autobiographical blog.

The French coast line of cliffs seen from a distance

We also read, and, among other books, Michel Agier and his team’s important The Jungle: Calais’s Camps & Migrants. There is nothing like comparison and contrast to teach us, and the history of what happened in Calais, from 1997 or so, when the British closed its borders to all but a thin trickle of migrants, until October 2016, when all the townships and encampments which had gradually developed along the northern coast of France were evacuated, and all their structures destroyed, will teach us how such a situation comes about, and what are the results of humanitarian intervention, the results of brutal obduracy and intrusion (it seems the police engage in this continually, and no one including Agier is empowered to stop them) Anyone concerned over what has been happened at the US Mexican-southwest border, wanting to understand how the situation there has come about, and what can be done in humanitarian ways (as opposed to the depraved cruelty of the US ICE agency), and what are the mixed reactions of local populations, when their organizations are not ceaselessly destroyed, the people put in prison (for say, leaving migrants plastic large jars of water).

Children being moved

The framework to keep in mind is that most borders are inventions of local gov’ts seeking to control the mobility, kinds of inhabitants, and social and economic realities of the populations under their control. Once a territory is delimited, and the conditions on the ground are such that cause displacement (war, famine, epidemic disease, poverty), large numbers of people seek to cross the borders or move about globally to protect and build prosperous (or at any rate safe) lives. Special recognized spaces (or hidden or somehow marginalized ones) spring up; exceptions from definitions of belonging (as citizenship) are used by authorities controlling law and military; and exclusions from the normal customs of life by the local population are used to frighten and drive away the immigrants. A transformation, usually urbanization, and politicization goes on within the migrant communities once they begin to thrive. As a whole, given different groups living in close proximity, they might fight or cooperate with one another in a common world, or they struggle for space, movement, rights from the authorities who might and often do treat them with violence or unjustly — though not always.

In northern France (and elsewhere or other than the US), the existence of many organizations charity, philanthropic, humanitarian, doctors, lawyers, set up precisely to help refuges, enabled cultural worlds to emerge, while at the same time xenophobic, genuinely uncomfortable and anxious local people (about businesses, schools, money, property) might be ratcheted up to become angry and want to rid themselves of the burden, and work suddenly to demolish, deport, inflict suffering on the migrants and do all they can to prevent them moving further or assimilating.

One of the emigrant camps seen from a distance

This is a larger generalized picture which in Northern France was particularized by the local culture and the cultures from which the fleeing people were come: middle eastern mostly, Syria, Afghanistan, the Kurds, peoples from the horn of Africa; and the cultures of the people who tried to help or drive them away. Agier, Yasmine Bouagga Mael Galisson, Cyrille Hanappe, Matilde Pette, and Philippe Wannesson all show a crisis and change of attitude is occurring which makes for sudden mobility, and then, depending on conditions, useful behavior that make for solidarities, accommodate world-wide movements, or criminal, violent, and desperately exploitative behavior. It seems the latter was rare; such fights as occurred were nationalistic, ethnic, religious in origin. A logic of harassment and dissuasion went on continually, and the refuges were willing to put up with bad conditions because they wanted to be allowed in, to find aslyum; they did not want to be abruptly returned from where they had fled. As border are externalized, the immigrants pile up, crowd into smaller spaces, live as blocks of people. It seems the preponderance of the migrants were men; there was one encampment which was mostly women and children (Norrent-Fontes). In places where women predominated, few were seen outside the tents or houses as a regular thing. In all places the divisions of space within the houses resembled the divisions of space in the houses from the places these people had grown up and lived in.

The contrast with the American situation is once the borders were closed, no philanthropy or even knowledge of who these migrants are was allowed, not dissuasion but cruelty, humiliation in detention, and forced deportation were the weapons used against these people. If you try to help them, you can be put in prison or shot. No social organizations have been allowed in to see the people.

Room used for religious worship, a church

The first part of the book tells of how the situations were initiated (wars, closing of borders), and specific organizations, countries, NGOs and agencies involved — as well as volunteers. Always there are volunteers. The second part tells of how the migrants spread from Sangatte to Calais, and how the term jungle(s) emerged. Maps of their places and detailed descriptions of the living conditions, and places that were built are here, as in restaurants, schools, hospitals, family and ethnic enclaves. There were “no man’s lands,” and some people lived outside the commonality. Part 3 is sociological, part 4 anthropological. What was heartening was the variety of political expression, types of action, emergence of sub-communities. Spokespeople are identified, and they mobilized themselves or were mobilized by the outside organizations and volunteers. Attempts were continually made to stop disease spreading (showers provided, food, trade in clothing).

Through it all, though, there is push-back, and right-wing larger political and economic groups, always with the police on their side (apparently ever using violence) are succeeding in destroying now this encampment, now that. At the borders everything is being done to stop the continual efforts of individuals and groups to cross illegally and legally. Chapter 5 tells of the destruction, and dispersal of the people, and how some tried to return. Again as opposed to the US behavior, gov’ts with histories of socialism and liberal democracy attempted to move people in groups to where they could assimilate, and gov’ts which represented conservative and right-wing groups, deported, imprisoned (prisons take a variety of forms) but also dispersed people. People were dumped on roads and into places with no help; when all crowded together, there was serious dysfunction.

Push-back

The authors deny that nothing is left. Memories of what happened are everywhere if not openly discussed in anything like explicit or truly neutral terms. The world is turning global because of the modes of transportation available, supranational and yet the old nationalisms are what are used to define and shape and control what is going on. If you become stateless, you are highly vulnerable. All over the world today we find camps, encampments, refugees.

The lessons for the refugee, according to Agier, is that it is possible (maybe not in the ferocious US southern border, and countries run by violent dictators, which use fascist techniques of putting huge numbers of people in isolated places, or simply massacre everyone they can) to inhabit sites. You must appropriate singly and collectively and that produces an informal and egalitarian (in its way) community. They must try to practice coexistence, and collaboration (Local networks), and form solidarities across countries as well as work with the organizations who come to help. A common world which politicizes itself (holding up posters, shouting slogans, demanding human rights) and reaches out to lawyers and the govt’s they find themselves living next to or among. Interlocutors are needed. The emergence of a common world, commonalty, a sort of commons with the different groups policing themselves (according to a “good code”) is ever precarious, with a conflict of meanings in different situations playing out.

Night-time

Some of the particulars are fascinating. Access to space and privacy is at a premium. A housing market with huts for sale spring up. Access to places could be restricted by an entrance fee. There was lots of waiting time — these were jobless people who had to line up for food, documents, shower tickets. Children were put into schools, there was entertainment in the form of team sports; British theater groups came over. Religion is show to give form and structure to daily lives. The activity of trying to cross the borders and move on also gave a rhythm to daily life. It was an unstable society of shifting identities, there were rapes, assaults, murders, destitution, and prostitution by men as well as women of themselves for food, money, shelter. But at the height of the numbers and active volunteer organizations and NGOS, pervasive attempts were made to help children and minors and other vulnerable people, to set them aside, and provide more individual attention and help.

Potted flowers for a garden

Last month I read Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots where her second section on Roots and Nationhood is about a key political issue today: how geographical boundaries when reinforced by national gov’ts become people’s identity and an excuse to exclude and despise people outside those boundaries as different and inferior. She explains or gives a history of how money and the state came to replace much more natural attachments: local, and now the familial is a desperate resort. Nation replaced religion which was seen to be powerless to help you – only controlled you – for African-Americans it was the one place to turn to. She gives history of industrialization as a building of prisons (factories) with severe limits on people desperate for a means of survival – by money. Families break up and shame is used to silence people. Taxes are a totally arbitrary imposition by one of these totalitarian nation-state gov’ts – or groups of people sometime headed by a king. People learned to hate the state but then in an odd inversion worship the very thing in concrete forms (the country) that they hate in people forms (bureaucrats) because they are deprived by people who manipulate these gov’ts for sinister ends … See my previous blog on the exhibit about global displacement over the centuries in the Phillips Collection: The Warmth of the Sun.

Shopping market

Down with fences! In Peter Linebaugh’s book, Red Round Globe Hot Burning, on Colonel Edward Despard, he writes an introduction showing a global resistance to enclosures has been going on for centuries: across land, sea, against prisons. We have ever needed to fight the repressive apparatuses of the ruling class of whatever age. We need to embrace common right and share the world together. The amount of people Trump has managed to block up if dispersed could be easily fitted into US society; had he not illegally stopped people from obtaining asylum, had he allowed the slow movement of peoples north for jobs; they would be no harm done and much good.

They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up,
And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle,
And sunk my heart into an Abyss, a red round globe hot burning
Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.
— Wm Blake

A group of volunteers

Ellen

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Factual Fictions & Fictional Facts

Scenes from the recent Poldark series, with the accent on historical accuracy

Dear friends and readers,

My last blog was partly prompted by my reading through in chronological order Winston Graham’s contemporary suspense and Poldark and historical fiction and non-fiction books; I write again quickly because I’ve just put onto academia.edu, my third essay delivered at an 18th century conference on the Poldark books. The first at an EC/ASECS (East Central subdivision) at Penn State College (2011) whose theme was “liberty,” is called “‘I have the right to choose my own life’:” Liberty in the Poldark novels, and I put it prettily on my website, where you can see the titles of the other papers, and a more plain  copy at academia.edu.

Norma Streader as Verity asking Robin Ellis as Ross to provide a place for her to get to know Captain Blamey so she can decide whether to marry him or not ….

The second at an ASECS conference in Los Angeles (2015) that (appropriately perhaps) made film making and film adaptations a central concern:  “Poldark Re-booted, Forty Years On.”

An emphasis on community

For my third I discerned five phases or perspectives. a shifting genuinely liberal humane point of view politically, shaping Graham’s Poldark novels.

“After the Jump:” Winston Graham’s Uses of Documented Facts and Silences.

Contemporary playing cards

I had originally intended to call it “The Poldark Novels: a quietly passionate blend of precise accuracy with imaginative romancing.” Maybe I should have stayed with this, but it’s not the topic I actually wrote on.  I wrote on Graham’s different uses of fictional facts.

The cloak that Ross buys Demelza in the 2015 adaptation

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To explain:  At the recent ASECS (American Society, 18th Century Studies) held in Denver, Colorado (a convention hotel downtown), I was one of seven people scheduled to give papers on two panels on “Factual Fictions,” one on early Thursday morning, and the other late Friday afternoon, a session I was to chair.  Both panels organized by Martin Lansverk, president of NWSECS (Northwest subdivision). In the event, in this “subgroup” as I may call it, there were five papers, three on the morning I gave mine, and two on the late afternoon I was panel chair. I have a copy of a sixth paper (a good one), and I put it in the comments. I can offer the gist of the other two papers that Thursday morning: Lee Kahan (“Edgeworth’s ‘Lion Hunters:’ Defining Character in an ‘Age of Scandal'”) traced a shift in attitudes towards what was regarded as accurate personality portrayal. In newspapers supposedly captured real people’s characters by surface portrayal, external scandal, and events; the novel was recognized as different and superior by its endowing characters with depth, subjectivity, interior motives. A gender fault-line can be seen as novelists were then often women and women it was felt were “attuned to intimate understanding.”

Maria Edgeworth by John Downman (1807)

Martin Lansverk (“Laughter and Truth-telling in Jane Austen”) found a pattern of development in Austen’s uses of humor and comedy in her books which parallel emergent and developing theories of humor and comedy in the 18th century. He described what kind of laughter we find in Austen’s novels and what kind of humor and wit is practiced in good and bad characters in the different novels. In brief, honest laughter is a sign of an ethical character; where fake laughter shows amorality (brutal laughter comes in here as well as crude ridicule). He also found a continuum which in Austen and others moves from gentle teasing and silent (sometimes ironic) smiles (Elinor Dashwood) to nervous release (Mrs Palmer) to hard aggressive mockery (bullying and sneering).

Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood (walking alongside Edward Ferrars, 2008 S&S scripted Andrew Davies)

For the two papers on Friday afternoon I can offer a bit more detail because I am myself so engaged by the artistic work of John Gilpin. Tom Hothem (“Natural Fictions: Landscape Aesthetics and the Spatial Imagination”) turned out to be a beautiful meditation on Gilpin’s moral philosophy as made manifest in his idealized picturesque drawings, watercolors and illustrations. Gilpin was reaching for topographical archetypes as truths within all landscapes. Gilpin used aesthetic rules he found in novels (like that of Fielding), his autobiographical experience and apprehension of what he imagined as well as saw. His vision took the “best materials” in order to take “possession of the heart.” The trajectory of thought here leads to modern environmentalism and conceptions underlying urban renewal planning. He showed a number of slides of landscapes, parks, built houses, which (in effect) took us to architects in Italy, England and the US — Olmstead comes out of such schools of thought.

William Gilpin, Matlock from Views of Derbyshire (alluded to in Austen’s P&P)

Jacob Crane (“‘The Algerines are Coming!’ Fakes News, Islamophobia, and Early American Journalism”) revealed newspaper sensationalism and demonization of Muslims in North Africa, actuated by understandable fears of being captured and enslaved by pirates in the waters off the shores of the US. He offered the history of real border and trade conflicts and crises becoming in public media reports of fantastic barbarity. At one point it was claimed that Benjamin Franklin had been captured and enslaved. Again we glimpsed a liminal space (which can’t easily be checked) where fact and fiction were used as arguments and rationales by colonists, emigrants; Jacob quoted specific reports by captains and others, some true or partly true and some faked.

Anne Vallayer-Costa, White Soup Tureen

I will be writing more about this ASECS, one for my Austen reveries, a paper on Walter Scott from a session on the Jacobite uprising; on Andrew Davies’ adaptation of Northanger Abbey; on the theater as a career for actors, and scene painters, and the presidential address by Melissa Hyde on professional woman painters of the 18th century (including two almost unknown women, Marianne Loir and a Mlle or Madame Lusuler), and two here, further on film adaptations of texts written or set it the 18th century (Poldark, Outlander, The Favourite, Games of Thrones, Banished) and landscape gardening, Gilpin to Frank Lloyd Wright

Marked up page of Gilpin book

Ellen

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English Lake District & Borders tour: Wallington Hall, Vindolanda & Hadrian’s Wall, Durham Cathedral & home again (6)

One of the excavation sites at Vindolanda where digging was going on

Friends and readers,

We are tonight come to the end of our tour to northern England. You’ve heard enough of moors, great lakes and mountains; poet lairs, towns and libraries, museums;  towers and, castles.  So just the central three places left: Wallington House, the “seat” of the Trevelyan family, otherwise known for their activities in Cornwall and the English court; Vindolanda, surely one of the richest sites for excavation still on-going, the name translates into white or wintry field, with Hadrian’s Wall nearby; and Durham Cathedral, our last stop before driving back to Manchester, the airport hotel, and taking that long trip home.

The reader may notice I indulge my penchant for pictures by women artists in this last blog and end on a poem in a volume put together by a poet whose work I have elsewhere much recommended, Carol Ann Duffy.

Wallington House

Thursday our penultimate day. I will remember Wallington house for its picturesque gardens, the tasteful art objects in the house, the rooms themselves got up for us as living spaces (where people played this game, or read that), paintings by family members of themselves doing things (like painting a sketch of a chapel by a mid-century female Trevelyan),

Molly Trevelyan — a self-portrait I felt touched by

the doll house room (large ones there), a vast hall downstairs with tapestries, and another with murals:

The hall itself

Three plangent scenes

The one on the far right reminds us of the human enslaved labor which made Hadrian’s Wall.

I only understood the significance of these pictures as by three Pre-Raphaelites under the direction of Pauline Lady Trevelyan and who she was when I received a reply to this blog by Jacqueline Bannerjee: see Jacqueline Bannerjee’s review of John Batchelor’s Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Most of all the stories told about the last Trevelyan to own the place and live here affirm that he was a committed labor socialist and left this house and its treasures to the National Trust. Little sayings attributed to him were everywhere: generous, egalitarian, humane thoughts.

A dollhouse so large I’m sure a three year old would try to step in

The guides were unusually friendly, and one gardener made me feel I was back in Secret Garden when he took me into his confidence over how he needs more staff with him, and tales of upkeep, a little about the family. I felt closer here because of the Cornwall connection (foolish me): I knew more about the Trevelyans than our Road Scholar guides.

Wallington Greenhouse with flowers all around

The old stables at Wallington were now a cafe, the old servants’ headquarters now an extension to look at artefacts; there is another another walk by a rivulet, and a large grassy square for tents for people to visit and children to play upon

That day we were in a town where we were in an indoor farmers’, butchers’ and all sorts of objects sold marketplace; in the square a street performer. But I did not take down the names.

Vindolanda on Friday might be referred to as chef d’oeuvre of the whole tour. It’s an excavation site, living museum, once the enormous center piece or showcase of Roman Britain from the 2nd to the 7th century AD.

The standing building, once the home of Robin Birley’s family, is now a cultural and science center, restaurant and meditation (if you can find a good spot)..

While I enjoyed the film with Robin Birley as narrator telling of his life of excavation on this site, and the thrill of finding the many plaques buried deep, which turned out to (with the help of super-technologically expert machines of all sorts) to be letters from various people who lived on this site (invitations to dine, instructions, personal commentaries, lists of all sorts),

Online photo of a famous birthday invitation

and liked looking at all the artefacts (one statue looked like a cat, until I saw it was a dog) for me the most enjoyable rooms were about the earliest excavations by the family who developed the site: this was at the end of the 18th century, a clerical scholar named Eric Birley, began it: here was this man’s desk, that woman’s find. One could follow the Birleys into WW1; there was a period of neglect but in the 1960s, new interest was kindled and now the place is crawling with archeaologists, geologists, students seeking degrees, to say nothing of tourists and sometimes local people.

Online photo of the imagined fort at Vindolanda, from a western angle

I listened to two different tour guides about the life of the people and disposition of structures out on the open plain; also just watching a large crew of people.

We didn’t have that good a lecture, but I stopped and listened to a lecturer for another group. He talked of how the Romans coopted the local people: the men were offered Roman citizenship if they worked for so many years as soldiers and as soldiers they did many tasks beyond sheer military control. We were shown where people probably slept; the refectory; where when the Roman emperor came, he stayed. The Romans remained in Britain for several hundred years, mining mostly.

So it was like learning of several layers of civilization, a palimpsest you stripped piece after piece off.

Watching a group of people dig: I did this too, on another part of the middle level of the sites.

I just loved the bookstore, which was unusually rich in types of books relating to Roman Britain, the area of Northumberland, Latin itself. I bought as a present for Izzy the second volume of the Harry Potter books translated into Latin. She had the first translated into Latin! For myself a slender book with many pictures on Vindolanda. I can’t share these as my scanner no longer permits me to put anything on the glass but a single sheet, and I don’t want to cut up my books. I have succumbed to only one from Wallington (Molly Trevelyan because it touched my heart)

We drove from there to Hadrian’s Wall in two different places. At one we could look up to the top of the wall about the height of a fifth floor apartment building along one side was a stairway with no banister, nothing to hold onto and I decided I might not be up to that without a panic attack and I didn’t want to be a burden on anyone. So I went with the careful people to a second site where we came upon the wall from the back, gently up slope to its top. So I stood there with another woman and we looked down and into the distance where we could see a body of water.

These were the days that on the way back to Otterburn we took a chance, left the itinerary of Road Scholar and stopped at churches nearby. One an ancient 12th century building, still in use — it seemed to me it would be very cold in winter.

Another was built-up, looking quite comfortable within (plushy seats, heaters, handsome decors for chapels

Late Romanesque

The last two evenings at Otterburn Castle were also especially enjoyable, pleasant for me. I knew everyone by that time, was comfortable with most, could sit by the roaring fire in the stone reception room and read my email from my cell phone. One night we gathered in a front room. People had been asked to write a poem, or tell what was the most remarkable experience of the trip. Most people did one or the other, and there were some comic and revealing verses. I fell back on quotations from travel books by poetic authors I had found in one of the bookstores we visited. There was more drinking together as there had been the first night at Lindeth Howe Hotel.

Otterburn castle in the morning

When we said goodbye to the hotel and the very friendly staff (a family) on Saturday morning, there was one more place left for us to see: Durham Cathedral. It’s not on the way to Manchester, but we had all day so we took the detour to Durham. We did walk through a major mall in the city where we saw a good opera house, playhouse with modern plays, theater for movies, shopping, cafes and the like. Then a walk to some older buildings and onto the cathedral square.

Durham cathedral combines the function of commemorative local community place (the center of economic life in the 19th century was mining), with history museum, not only of the religious history of the church (beginning with St Cuthbert as usual), but fast forward to the World Wars of the 20th century as they affected the cathedral close and Durham,. It’s a religious site, with relics, tombs; it’s a tourist attraction and restaurant with garden, and art objects: the building encloses in it different centuries of styles, of figurines. There are tours twice a day and people hired to stop vistors photo-taking as well as answer questions about what visitors are seeing.

I was not surprised to see modern sculptures of Mary, a replica of the four monks carrying the corpse of St Cuthbert round about Northumberland until his body rested in this very cathedral, but I was surprised to see a couple of modern women artists. Even here the attempt to bring women out of obscurity continues. So there was a Paula Rego (whose work I like) imagining (from her Portuguese Catholic background) an old woman, aristocrat, with a young boy at her feet.

This time I was startled — though the images fit the grave and desperate ones of people all dressed up in other pictures by Rego. Here the faces are of skeletons, ghostly.

We stopped for tea somewhere, and then we sped down the vast highway at 70 miles an hour, reached the comfortable, but anonymous soulless hotel where we to dine one last time and then sleep. I had to get up by 6:00 am to make a plane at 9:00 am. I had made a friend of a man slightly younger than me to the point we agreed to try to travel together inside a larger Road Scholar tour group next May to Cornwall. So I’ll see more of it than I did two summers ago with a friend and her partner. After that I may stay to do research in the Royal Cornwall Museum on Winston Graham, and to London for the British library and (if I can get in) BBC archives for the scripts of the 1970s Poldark. Perhaps a dream, but my friend met me at that early hour, we had breakfast, coffee, bid one another adieu and off I went.

Adieu to Cumbria

Gentle reader, I cannot get myself to take pictures as I move through these trips, and don’t have many original informed thoughts to share, only the lectures to tell and my stenography is not what it was.  I wish I had more patience to describe, but such as I am and what I have been able to do is sincerely represented here.

I did unexpectedly have many Trollope sightings: he sets numerous scenes in Can You Forgive Her? and Lady Anna in Cumbria where his sister, Cecilia lived for a time with a husband and he and his mother visited. Langdale Pikes is mentioned more than once as a place to (he must’ve) wander[ed]:

And so another set of travel blogs comes to an end. I close with a poem by Patrick Henry (found in Carol Ann Duffy, Answering Back):

The Waiting Room

An empty coatstand in a public building, in August.
Even this is draped with your absence.
The rags of a seagull’s cry hang from it now.

Nothing is devoid of love.
How many years did I waste, listening out
for your voice?

…………… The park through a window,
swollen with leaves, smothers its coatstands well.

Thin veils of clouds, a city’s prayers,
fall away to the west. For a split second
I can see your eyes.

………………… But if I break my gaze
the gull has slipped its hook, the sea
is a long way away.

Lady Mary Lowther, A Waterfall (one of the watercolor artists whose work I saw in a library and then read about in a book I brought home with me: In the Line of Beauty: Early Views of the Lake District by Amateur Artists texts and choices by Stephen Hebron)

Ellen

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On MetroStage: Athol Fugard’s The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek

Again Mabuza and Bokkie in a soft version of the orange-red light of the play’s first act

I want to make rock flowers …
They have eyes, but they do not see us. – Nukain Mabuza

Friends,

This is to urge all those within reaching distance to hurry over to the Alexandria City theater, MetroStage to see the startlingly powerful Athol Fugard play, The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek. It tells the core experience of life of a real artist, Nukain Mabuza, who painted rocks across farmland he was paid a pittance to take care of.

There are two contrasting parts: in the first act, set in 1981, the era of apartheid, we watch and listen to a very old “Kaffir,” Mabuza (played by Doug Brown) suddenly moved by the presence of his perpetual companion, a little boy, Bokkie (Jeremiah Hasty) whom Mabuza treats with real love and concern, to have the boy under his direction paint a symbolic depiction. It is intended to project how Mabuza has been excluded from all that could have enabled him to live a life with enough money to live independently, with decent clothes (he has none), education (he has had none), shelter (he lives in a hut with no amenities), true peers — he lives dependent on the meager charity of the land’s owner, the white Afrikaner, Elmarie Kleynhans (Marni Penning). When he has finished his soliloquy and the boy the piece, she comes on stage to give a bowl of food to the child. At first she pretends friendship and concern, but when she sees that this picture unlike the others is not simply of flowers in circles, rather a coded representation of humiliated oppression, she turns nasty, insisting Mabuza erase it and replace it with flowers. When the boy defends the picture, she becomes incensed with his “disrespect” and insists the old man whip him. The old man grieves intensely when she leaves the stage.

Mabuza putting the painted images on the large rock into words for Bokkie

The young boy actor is not quite up to the wrenching emotionalism of the role, but the older one left me (and the rest of the small audience there) numb with pity and admiration for the deprived nature of his existence and his eloquence and nobility of soul. The character reminded me of Sam in Fugard’s very great Master Harold and the Boys, the only play by Fugard I’ve been lucky enough to see live (twice), only in this case the great-souled character dies a few days later and the listener flees.

Jonathan Sejake putting into words what his experience has been to Elmarie in a stage lit with alternatively white and dark light

A place of disgrace, of humiliation. – Jonathan Sejake

The concluding contrasting act, 2003, post-Mandela, comes onto the stage a young black man dressed in a suit, determined to restore the now nearly faded rock back to what it was so vividly many years before. He is Jonathan Sejake (played by Jeremy Keith Hunter), speaking a long painful soliloquy with even greater (if possible) searing eloquence about what his life has been since he fled.  Sejake is Bokkie grown up.  He went to Zimbabwe and was treated with true decency, educated, given a chance to take on a fulfulling useful job. He speaks to us and to Elmarie who now carries a loaded revolver and responds in turn for most of the act with open hatred and anger of how the revolting blacks are murdering her people, taking “their” land. He talked piercingly about a life of humiliation inflicted on Mabuza (whom she still refers to by a childish nickname). As someone who was an  invisible adjunct for decades and lives in a house once referred to as “painfully modest” in a local newspaper article about ex-President Ford’s house nearby, I identified utterly.  She “owns” the rock and refuses to give permission, but at last near the act’s end is brought to acknowledge the hurt and destruction she wreaked on Mabuza (whom she calls a childish nickname) and tried to inflict Sejake when a boy. Far more explicitly than in Master Harold and the Boys, the speech persuades a hitherto powerful white (the ambiguously shamed teenage Harold in the first play) into a change of mind or heart.

I was just stunned with the energy and masterful domination of the whole stage Hunter displayed. He gave this role his all and held me (and the audience) mesmerized. He was of course enacting a protest, ethical, upright, with an appeal so obvious to any but the most obdurate closed mind, an enactment of what is happening in the US today; alas, the problem is these closed minds are often (I have met such people) inoculated against any information or moral truth. I went to an end-of-summer picnic two Sundays ago and when I was telling of the documentable facts Mueller has been able to prove Paul Manafort’s corruption with, I was greeted with faces filled with derision, and voices which told me everything in the New York Times or whatever newspaper I read this in is all lies. The white people around this table grinned at me with glittering eyes, and I knew there was no use even talking with them, so filled with resentment and scorn were they. None of them would sit through this play; indeed they’ve never go.

All the reviews I have found describe the performance with as strong favorable words as I have: E. A. Aymer, Anonymous, Debbie Minter Jackson. The writers speak of how this is probably Fugard’s last play; he is in his eighties; as with the one other play I’ve seen, the playwright imagines the beginning of reconciliation. In previous iterations, the praise for the play is as strong.

There is little overt action in this play. The setting is bare stage with rocks with small paintings on them all around and the one big rock off center right.

The actors are posed in parallel ways in the two acts

At the back of the stage a veiled screen shows images of South Africa, we see a city, we see boys and men walking, a woman at one point, and at a moment of high emotion (as Sejake tells Elmarie how well he was treated in Zimbabwe, which she has described as a violent corrupt society) a film of Mandela as he was when he first emerged from prison and became the leader of the country. I felt choked up with emotion when I saw his image. The audience is thus shown that miracles can occur, even if (as the young man concedes) that hope that was has turned into disappointment. Life then seemed incomparably better for black people from what it was, and they had hope it would improve more.

Athol Fugard

Metrostage apparently opened in 1987 with a production of Fugard’s Blood Knot, and has staged other Fugard plays over these long years of mostly deterioration in US arrangements — with occasional successful attempts by those governing during the Clinton and Obama administrations to put in place laws, customs, agencies to help the majority of people whose interests the government is supposed to represent. Still it would be a shame worth crying about if this play is not seen by more people than I saw in the theater this past Saturday afternoon I was there (13, 2 black, 11 white). Go and tell others you know about it when you come home.

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I wish I could say that the play could have some positive effect today on the minority Trump electorate: wealthy powerful people, with their hangers-on who understand that Trump and his regime are further destroying the economic existence of the deluded white working class willing to trade the promise of a better practical existence centrist democrats held out and never delivered on for pride in their race and revenge on other vulnerable people they have been taught to blame for their plight. They represent 27% of the population gerrymandered into a fake majority by an oligarchical constitution. I don’t believe this can happen before an election which brings to power the progressive left wing of the democratic party in sufficient numbers who are honestly willing to pass effective legislation to improve the well-being and self-esteem of huge numbers of impoverished and declining groups of people all over the US. Only thus can you reform the modes of thought that have led to an intolerable situation with a lying tyrant male given almost limitless power by those willing to exploit fear, and gaps in the US government arrangements which allow undermining of all social good they can.

In the 1990s I used to assign Master Harold and the Boys to undergraduate classes and had a tape of a performance (in the form of a video casette) I would show on a TV.

A key scene in the 1982 film I used to screen: Danny Glover as Harold, Zakes Mokae as Sam (Master Harold and the Boys)

More than two decades later I am just now again adding my mite to bring some understanding to the history of the present clash of values by teaching a course to retired adults in the long 18th century I called The Enlightenment: At Risk.

Ellen

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