Gubbinal

What would you do?

2009-10-31T13:27:00.002-04:00

What would you do if you knew that a child molester was out there, walking around, free, celebrated, almost famous? Would it make any difference if the child was 13 and not 6? Would it make any difference if he had taken this teenager and set up an apartment for her and established her as his mistress? Would it make any difference that she was his baby-sitter and not a girl he grabbed off the street?

What if his colleagues were complicit. "She seemed young," one said, "but certainly did not talk like a 14 year old. I just assumed she was an undergraduate."

What if you spent decades -- really decades -- trying to get people to listen to you. And the child molester's wife continued to bitterly insist that the babysitter, the 13 year old, has been the seductress, the one to blame, the one that had stolen her husband?

What if many of the eyewitnesses were dead? These eyewitnesses would be professors in the History of Art Department at Yale University during the late 1960's and very early 1970's?

And would if matter if the wench were dead?

Go ahead and look him up: Professor Donald Preziosi. He's had a distinguished career at Yale, MIT, SUNY/Binghamtom, UCLA--he's won many prizes. He's written a slew of books. Born January 12, 1941.

How many other girls has he seduced? What about since he became a so-called "feminist"?

Who would you defend? The powerful and famous professor or the teen-aged girl who killed herself because her "Poozie" abandoned her?

Would it make any difference if this crime was attributed to the "swinging sixties" and its excesses by Professor Preziosi?

I've been seeking justice for 35 years. Seeking to get the laurels off the head of this child-abuser and rapist.

Sometimes name and so-called reputation can cover up a multitude of crimes.

Who are you going to believe?

Sciatica City

2009-10-17T09:45:00.002-04:00

Sciatica City is a bleak and solipsistic place. It reminds me of Billy Joel's "Allentown" or Mrs. Gaskell's Manchester. Sciatica sounds more intriguing than it is. Images of forsythia or the scion of a wealthy family come to mind. But it is more like sciolism.

Yesterday I took my pretty girl, Mrs. Palmer, to the Vet. She needs to consult her cardiologist in a couple of weeks. The Gen Pop here has been fairly stable.

19th-Century Bachelorettes

2009-10-03T20:44:00.004-04:00

The local newspaper just reviewed the new film "Bright Star" referring to:

"19th-century bachelorette Fanny Brawne".

I cringe. I gasp. I fall upon the thorns of this skimpy newspaper and bleed (especially since it's decided that arts coverage should be all Dan Brown almost all the time).

19th century bachelorettes are friends of mine! Think of Jane Austen; Emily Dickinson, Anne and Emily Brontë. George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett were "bachelorettes" for quite a while.

I wonder if the movie depicts one of those rose ceremonies?

The Lost Key Soars

2009-10-01T13:30:00.004-04:00

I've been abroad, adding to my collection of cathedrals.

And I saw La Boheme: I am always overwhelmed by the business of the lost key and the burned out candle in Act I. The most mundane exchange of banalities is interrupted by a sudden and passionate soaring of compelling urgency: the characters do not yet have the words to express their passion and longing: so we hear:
Mimì -- Oh! sventata, sventata!
La chiave della stanza
dove l'ho lasciata?

Rodolfo
Non stia sull'uscio; il
lume vacilla al vento.

and so on briefly as Mimi repeats "Importuna è la vicina..."

This little duet appears right before the much more famous "Che Gelida Manina" and "Mi chiamano Mimì" and is quoted again in the final act. It's motif encapsulates much longing and a certain inevitability. Aren't we always talking about candles and keys when the important stuff is also happening...people dying, falling in love, having children.

I think of Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts".
I think of the magisterial "Sarabande On Attaining The Age Of Seventy-Seven" by Anthony Hecht. I am younger than Hecht, yet the "cinerous blur and smudge in which we live" will undo me. The only salvation is to return to the garrets of 1860 or the fresh poetry of 1798 or the work of Capability Brown or Grinling Gibbins.

Sympatico people

2009-08-01T17:11:00.003-04:00

One of the things I enjoy about blogs and the Internet is that you can find people who might otherwise remain strangers forever. As people lament the proliferation of tweets and twitters and the people who have over 2000 intimate friends on face book, I have found people who keep amazing blogs about topics that please and amuse me.
Before the Internet I didn't personally know anyone who was interested in fountain pens or in knitting. Now I do!

Before the Internet I had limited options for reading about books---book reviews and critical books--now I can read about what many people are reading. The internet has given me more people I care about: some whose blogs I read may not know that I care.

I remember back when Thomas De Quincey wrote the impassioned "The Glory of Motion," from his longer work, "The English Mail Coach". His words are vivid and exciting and I can only quote them only briefly (elipses are my editing):

"These mail-coaches....are entitled to a circumstantial notice from myself–having had so large a share in developing the anarchies of my subsequent dreams, an agency which they accomplished, first, through velocity, at that time unprecedented; they first revealed the glory of motion: ....
through the conscious presence of a central intellect, that, in the midst of vast distances,of storms, of darkness, of night, overruled all obstacles into one steady coöperation in a national result. To my own feeling, this post-office service recalled some mighty orchestra, where a thousand instruments, all disregarding each other, and so far in danger of discord, yet all obedient as slaves to the supreme baton of some great leader, terminate in a perfection of harmony like that of heart, veins, and arteries, in a healthy animal organization."

DeQuincey writes about speed and the speed of the Internet is impossible for me to guage. Much as I love tangible and palpable letters, pieces of paper, skeins of yarn--it is through the Internet that I find people with whom I can be both virtual and in some cases tangible.

I cherish my pen collection, but the majority of the people I now write to were people I somehow "met" on the Internet!

Bryn Mawr Book Shop

2009-07-27T13:56:00.003-04:00

Synchronous with my mother's death was the closing of the Bryn Mawr Book Shop where we spent many hours together, picking up used books. We found years and years worth of old St. Nicholas magazines there. Our local Bryn Mawr graduates donated vast collections of Victorian and Edwardian children's books--even today I am not certain that is is not 1896 or 1911 or 1873.

My mother took us to libraries and book stores constantly. Our house was filled with good books and she read aloud to us. Poetry could throw her into ecstatic trances and if there was something a bit theatrical and performative about it, she really did love the poetry. I learned early on that poetry mattered; that the stakes were high in books as in life.

"The Domestication of Death"

2009-07-27T13:38:00.004-04:00

When it was first published in the late 1970's I was very impressed by The Feminization of American Culture by Ann Douglas. Her chapter on "The Domestication of Death" helped me to understand my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother and their morbid cult of death (most of their sentences concluded with the plaint: "he (she, it) died in my arms!"

And now I carry on the tradition. I think that death is forever; that it's the end of sentience. And yet I have spent the past year intoning to myself (and not to others): "My mother now knows what is is to be dead in September", "My mother has the feeling of being dead on her birthday", "My mother knows what it's like to be dead for Christmas".

Such thoughts will not scan, of course. But they are ubiquitous. July 28th is the last day left in the year which she has not experienced as "dead".

I know that to ascribe "knowing what it is to be dead" or "the feeling of being dead" is simply one way to keep my mother alive.

I've been dreaming about her a lot.

Last night I dreamed that my family was watching James Gandolfini on television---it was possibly "The Sopranos" but I'm not certain about that. They were oblivious to the Python--a huge one. It was about 25 feet long and as thick as a pig and it planned to devour us all. Only the cats and I felt alarm.

The python probably represents death or disaster; the strong man who might be able to prevent it (James Gandolfini) is confined to the television set, and all fiddle happily whilst Rome burns....except for the sentient cats and the ever-worried neurotic, me.

Henry Louis Gates

2009-07-22T17:44:00.004-04:00

I have been reading a lot about Henry Louis Gates. Many news stories have "comments" areas where readers are invited to contribute their opinions. And what I am reading disturbs me deeply. Too many of the comments by far are hostile to Gates. One expects, of course, some nutburgers out there. But the hatred and rancor astonish me.

Gates is my age--quite precisely---and I also have a front door that jams and is difficult to open. I know that if I were in the identical position he was in that I would feel absolutely and totally violated by the police and the situation. It's my house. I can prove it. I am shocked that a surly neighbor has called the police in mid-day. I've just tumbled off a very long international flight, been ushered slowly through customs. I need my sleep. I need to change my clothes and decompress.

But it would not happen. My neighbors would never call the police on an old white woman engaging in precisely these behaviors. The police would probably approach me in a less rebarbative manner. And I would still be very tetchy, sarcastic, and not on my best behavior.

It's painful for me to read all of the spins on this story: that the wonderful police were protecting the upper-crust neighborhood. Gates is guilty of being an African-American with the audacity to live in the "wrong" neighborhood.

Henry Louis Gates: Crime: Being Successful While Black.

EDITED: July 27: Gates-gate: the issue has become more poignant, more painful. There have been some excellent articles and editorials about it (Charles Blow, Stanley Fish, Maureen Dowd, Jeffrey Wright and others)but I've had to avoid coming to fisticuffs with several people over the issue.

Puzzles

2009-07-12T17:05:00.002-04:00

The New York Times today has an article about the slow death of the crossword puzzle. My mother spent a lot of time doing cryptics (craptics, as my father called them), acrostics, and diagramless puzzles. I took a special shine to the "cryptics" (craptics??) and was very proud whenever I could figure out an answer.

I'm not interested in Sudoku. I love the verbal! I want the words, the allusions, the references. I'm not interested in puzzles where a grinning picture of Doogie Hauser or Kelly Ripa beams from the center of the grid.

The Atlantic is giving up the puzzles by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon. That, to me, is tragedy. How much consolation Cox and Rathven have provided to me when I have been bereft; how often have the filled a lazy hour with a sense of intellectual urgency.

Stephen Sondheim did a brilliant collection of "Cryptics"--
You can get your own copy (used) for $343.48!

It kept me very busy and happy in 1981--my year of Sondheim cryptics!

I guess you expect me to launch into a fulmination about the dumbing down of crossword puzzles and about the privileging of the number over the word...but I am too sad.

2009-07-12T12:19:00.002-04:00

Make your own Glitter Graphics

The Unbearable Tristesse of I Pagliacci
Venice shop window, 2008

Bunnies in the Garden

2009-06-27T11:28:00.004-04:00

We tried to succour and protect some baby rabbits in the yard. They did not have much protection when we noticed them so we added a light coating of various twigs, grasses, and vines. I think that their mother made only a couple of fairly brief visits each day. Of course I was afraid that propinquity would give a human odor to the babies but I had to balance that against their being just too visible to raptors, neighborhood cats, and other potential predators. I cared a lot and talked about them much more frequently than when I had my own human babies--- I know that I must not bore people with sagas of infantine smiles or teething. But these bunnies? I felt a certain proprietary pride as if I had written a perfect sonnet.

They kept growing--about 9 or 10 of them lying on top of each other. One morning Nature suddenly blew a whistle and they all scampered away, gained speed, and were gone. We still have rabbits in the yard, but we no longer know if any were from "our" group.

You Or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr

2009-06-20T19:19:00.005-04:00

Chandler Burr is the scent critic for the

New York Times

and I have always appreciated his approach to the olfactory and the wonderful way he spins all sorts of webs of reference to perfume: for example, of "Notorious" by Ralph Lauren: "Yes, something’s there, but it’s detectable in the way that AM radio picks up ghost-like murmurings."
And what about this scintillating review?
"Perhaps the most impoverished way of conceiving of a perfume (or of describing one) is listing its raw materials. It’s like experiencing Ravel’s “Pavane” by reading the sheet music, or smelling James Heeley’s Menthe Fraîche by looking at its lab formula" in his review of "the sublime l’Eau de Tarocco,...crafted by the Ravel of perfumers, Olivier Pescheux."

When I heard Burr had written a novel, I had to get it. As soon as it was published. And how well it goes with my reading of Middlemarch! You, Or Someone Like You is a novel of ideas--how wonderful to find in a rather barren landscape of new fiction where ideas are typically as welcome as cockroaches. The novel begins as a Utopian fantasy: major Hollywood players are enticed to read John Donne, Anthony Trollope, WH Auden, John Cheeverand many others. A mother perceives her son in terms that she realizes come from Virginia Woolf's Orlando. You want to be in this woman's book club and you dream of discussing literature with Chandler Burr himself and hearing his perceptions of the special readerly but real scents of Wuthering Heights, Persuasion, and Main Street.

It's wonderful to read a book which embraces the intellect and the knowledge that great literature is a timeless guide to humans and deciphering all of your friends, colleagues, and neighbors. It's fantastic to read somebody who seems to understand Auden, Larkin, and Yeats. What makes this book a profound read, as opposed to a Utopian fantasy, is that our cicerone of literature, Anne Rosenbaum, has a crisis involving her husband and a less critical one involving her teen-age son.

Many readers might potentially object to the nitty-gritty of it all. You may feel as if you've been suddenly shunted from the almost idyllic pastoral forest of Ardenne to the rough sea-coast of Bohemia to be pursued by a bear--in the form of religious fundamentalism. Indeed, the book does not turn away from some of the most controversial and burning issues of today. I salute Burr for not trying to soften the issues.

I would say more, but don't want to go into the plot (I read it and found it to be a page-turner without having read any reviews, and I appreciated the freshness). It's a keeper and one to re-read. Highly recommended.

Middlemarch

2009-06-10T11:53:00.005-04:00

I've been reading George Eliot's "Middlemarch" for the first time this century (I read it several times during the previous century). Indeed, I plan to inflict this novel of ideas on my students.

I'm enjoying the shapely sentences, none of which is in a hurry.

And my reading of the novel has changed! I appreciate the sensibility of Mrs. Cadwallader enormously. Dorothea really does seem to be a prig. Take your mother's jewels and cherish them! And what's wrong with a little Maltese dog?

Mr. Brooke is not merely a tedious windbag; he's like many of my friends and colleagues who live via their past experiences.

I recently read a wonderful little piece in the NY Times by VERLYN KLINKENBORG
on rereading which I heartily recommend. Take a look at it and let me know what you think! I have always agreed with Nabokov's comment that there is no reading but in rereading.

A Meme for your Indie Rock Band's first album

2009-05-25T19:59:00.003-04:00

1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random... Read More... Read More”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last words (up to four or five) of the very last quotation of the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

I like my results; Chambellay is a place in France; "out of focus" is the end of a quotation from Mark Twain. You can probably photo shoppe the picture to make it look great for your album cover.

"I've Missed You So Much"

2009-05-21T14:33:00.006-04:00

This picture was taken one year ago today.

"I've missed you so much" I say to my mother when I wake up. I read a good book, I read an intriguing newspaper article, I see a film and I think "I miss you so much!" as I wonder how I would have described it to my mother. There's a subtle shift in verb tense, of which I am well aware.

There are other people in my life, certainly. I do have other people to talk with. Yet it's not the same. I never anticipated this grief. I survived the death of a beloved sister and father when I was young. I miss them, but they don't haunt my days.

I saw the sprightly production of Cenerentola by the Met. The Met HD program is about the best new thing in my life. I've been reading: Shirley Jackson, George Eliot, Sinclair Lewis.

And plans are afoot: plans to travel to England again! A Ploughman's lunch, peut-etre, which I just recently learned was an invention of the English Country Cheese Council of less than 50 years ago. And I had had such fantasies of Chaucer and Shakespeare at The Tabard ordering "ye olde ploughman's lunche".

The Divine Comedy (Meme)

2009-04-15T16:16:00.005-04:00

"Pick an artist, and using ONLY SONG TITLES from only that artist, cleverly (preferably) answer these questions. This is harder than it seems! (Well, that kinda depends who you pick." I picked up this meme from the wonderful blog of
Lucy Fishwife

My group is “The Divine Comedy” as fronted by Neil Hannon. I didn't think about it much; I knew that they had some good song titles. I think it would be interesting to try this with another group as well.

1. Are you a male or female:

“A Lady of a Certain Age”

2. Describe yourself:

“Going Downhill Fast”

3. How do you feel about yourself:
“Snowball in Negative”

4. Describe your ex boyfriend/girlfriend:
“Bleak Landscape”

5. Describe your current boy/girl situation:
“The Booklovers”

6. Describe your current location:
“Timewatching”

7. Describe where you want to be:

"Europe by Train" or
"In and Out of Paris and London"

8. Your best friend(s) is:
“My Imaginary Friend”

9. Your favourite colour is:

“Ten Seconds to Midnight”

10. You know that:

"Here Comes The Flood"

12. If your life was a television show what would it be called:

"Bad Ambassador"
Or
“A Seafood Song”

13. What is life to you:
"The Wreck of the Beautiful"

14. What is the best advice you have to give:

“Sweden”
Or
"Love What You Do"

The Gospel According to Mom: 1934

2009-04-10T13:26:00.005-04:00

Four females live together in a postage-stamp size apartment. Mom is the oldest. She is probably somewhere between 50 and 55 years of age and has been a widow for a few years. It's her job to watch the girls while her daughter, Thelma, age 29, works as a mannequin in a department-store window. Thelma has two daughters, Madge who is almost 13 and Natalie, who is 6. They call her Thelma, since she does not want anyone to think she is the mother--after all, she looks young enough to be an older sister. So their Grandmother is "Mom." The girls sleep on the sofa and Mom and Thelma share the bed.

Mom has only two specialties: Complaining and the Morbid. She watches the girls when Thelma is at work. They try to move her conversation to the ghoulish, which she relishes. It causes goose-bumps but they are easier to handle than the personal attacks, which are the "lingua franca" of the family.

Mom is irascibly and cheerfully gruesome. She could have and should have invented the National Enquirer. Her favorite word is "malignant" and her second favorite word is "corpse." Her third favorite word is "womb" and other words that feature strongly in her tales include consumption, leprosy, coffin, cancer, childbirth and caul.

Mom grew up in Mystic, Connecticut, a Whaling town. She never once walked on the beach without finding a bloated corpse.

She went to school with a lot of children who were lepers. In fact, at the end of every day a special janitor had to come in to sweep up all the noses, ears, and digits that had fallen to the floor. And mop up all the blood. See below.

Very few women survived childbirth, and if they did, then they had a "dropped womb" which they needed to pick up at night and reinsert.

There were a lot of girls in her class who were born without vaginas, so when they got their periods, which always happened in school, their mouths, nostrils, ears, and eyes would spurt out copious streams of blood.

Some girls who were stupid enough to go sea-bathing got in big trouble. Because of all the oil from the sperm whales in the ocean that would creep inside their bodies, they would get pregnant. Then they would be ripped in two giving birth to some sort of monster.

Every childbirth was a disaster. No woman ever was in labour for less than a full week; most babies were deformed and still-born, and ALL babies born in Mystic were born with a caul. Mom herself had been born with a caul and since both of her grandaughters had been born with a caul---well, you know what it means and it does not mean well.

Then there was the little boy who ate a stick of licorice and immediately turned pitch black.

Then there was the little boy who ate some ice-cream and within just a few minutes, his guts were frozen solid and then his face was frozen and then he turned into a big ice-cube and they could never melt him. So they had to bury him.

The kids in her class who were not lepers or licorice-eaters or born without vaginas, or pregnant via sperm whale always had "elephantitis" or cancer. Mom was the only one who survived Mystic intact.

There were so many deaths in Mystic and since they could only have funerals in the summer time, everyone's house was full of corpses and coffins. They had to pile them up. The still-borns went on the mantle. Some babies were so little that they used cigar-boxes for coffins. There were a lot of women who were pregant to ten full months, blown up enormously, who went through two gruelling weeks of labour only to deliver a still-born no larger than their thumbs.

Almost all men were syphalitic. Also if you were not careful you could get pregnant if you touched a surface that a man had touched. It was like the sperm whales. There was sperm all over the place "malignantly" waiting to jump on little girls.

Every house was haunted.

Thin people were cancerous or had consumption. Anyone who was the least bit plump obviously had a malignant tumor.

Sometimes Madge asked Mom how come she did not see kids with leprosy at her own school. "Just you wait," Mom replied ominously. "It's there. You can't see it now, but it will happen. Just look."

Everyday the girls hear a new story. The ending is always the same, more or less with few variations:

"She died in my arms."

"She was ripped open and died."

"He was washed up on the shore, totally black and bloated."

"My name was on his lips as he died."

"You could hardly smell the fish because all the corpses smelt much worse."

Yet Mom was not morose (except when she was complaining). Death, disease, disposal of corpses, freak fatal accidents seemed to excite her. She related her stories with gusto and always added an admonitory envoy.

Mom died when I was a toddler. Somewhere in my memory I can envision a maroon dress, but that is about as far as my brain will take me. A maroon dress and hearing the stories recycled via my mother and aunt.

Venice--Cement

2009-04-03T17:15:00.005-04:00

“Find your 5th photo file folder, then the 5th photo in that file folder. Then pass the meme to 5 people.”

I got this "meme" from the always delightful FleurFisher

It has taken me a while to respond: what do I say?
Reader, select an option:
1) Gubbinal does not know how to pick and choose from amongst her pictures and hence all of them are saved.

2) Even the pavement at St. Mark's Square in Venice is worthy of note

3) It's too easy to inadvertantly snap a picture if you are walking along, marvelling the pigeons and succumbing to the 50 Euro scoops of ice cream (note that I recommend Florian much more than LaVenna--at the latter place I was charged an extra 5 Euros for the music. Florian has a classier string quartet and no "music charge".

4) That I believe in the poetry of cement!

*******

Now listening to: Mr. Hudson and the Library (too heavy for me)

Now reading: The Seamstress of Hollywood Blvd. by Erin McGraw (just delightful--she's got a great gift for metaphor)

La sonnambula

2009-03-21T20:45:00.005-04:00

Natalie Dessay brings it in "La sonnambula" as do her co-stars. It's the first time I heard the delightful voice of Jennifer Black and the first time I've seen the hunky and excellent Juan Diego Flórez. Overall, it's a delightful opera. I do tend to prefer the melodrama of Puccini to the bel canto composers, but there's something light and refreshing about their work.

This production is a bit screwy--Mary Zimmerman, evidently inspired by the screenplay for the film of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" does not really let us know when Amina and the other actors are being the characters in the Bellini opera or when they are being actors rehearsing as Bellini's characters. Are the cast and characters in a 19th century rustic Swiss village? Or are they in Manhattan today? How can we tell? What are the signals? Finally I gave up on deciphering and just listened to the music.

Other news: the Ca' dei Gatti is losing almost as bad as Barack Obama in our Big Prom Pool, I just finished Mary Barton by Mrs. Gaskell, and I saw Emanual Ax. His Brahms's 2nd illustrated exactly what people mean when they call his performances "poetic". His poetry ranges from the subtle to the audacious, but is brilliantly nuanced and elevating throughout.

Ax is a very generous spirit--he came to our city because the local symphony has been very down on its heels. He brought out the best in them and I hope that they pleased him as well.

Madama Butterfly

2009-03-19T13:36:00.005-04:00

The Metropolitan Opera's HD performances (at many movie theatres--check your local listings) are wonderful for those of us in the midst of nowhere. Madama Buttefly has always been amongst my favorite operas. I love Puccini like a berserker; I become demented with much of his music and nowhere is it so sustained as with Butterfly.

Patricia Racette is wondrous--her voice is profoundly, warmly moving; she finds out all the light and dark places inherent to Butterfly and projects them with splendid emotion amd vibrancy. Her voice is so spectacularly nuanced and her acting so convinving that the first time I saw her Butterfly I sobbed for three acts (certainly I was not the only one in my theatre sobbing---)

I returned last night to see the encore and my already strong response ascended to the Everest of emotion. Price and Elias, my former favorites as Suzuki and Cio Cio San have been surmounted by Racette and Maria Zifchak. I loved the centrality the production gave to Suzuki--she's not merely a servant but almost a soul-mate for Butterfly; the one who truly and most profoundly understands the tragedy.

Dwayne Croft sang a splendid Sharpless. As Pinkerton, Marcello Giordano played one of the biggest cads in opera. He was in superb voice and the long duet with Racette at the end of Act I was absolutely overwhelmingly brilliant.

The spare setting (as Giordano commented, there are no "furnitures" to hang onto), the costumes, the puppets (especially the son, who, with a fixed face still managed a range of emotions!), the entrances and exits were all wonderful.

The soaring, searing, surging voices of the best musical instrument in th world--the human voice--filled me with all of the best passions of art.

Butterfly has moved and astounded me throughout my life. Some people might say that it's too much of an old warhorse, too conventional, too much of a thisness or a thatness---but I say its fundamental story matched with the exquisitely beautiful music makes it more than a tear-jerker: it elicits all our emotions about love violated and abused; about death coming too early and too sadly--and about those who remain loyal while others take their pleasures and walk away.

Racette and Croft, Croft and Giordano, Croft and Zifchak, Racette and Zifchak, Racette and Giodano, Giorano and Croft--they sing together like brightly feathered birds ascending and suddenly coordinating a smooth dip to the south followed by a pinnacle of swerviness to the east...

Oh, Patricia Racette! You transfix and transmogrify....you have the voice that can launch a thousand ships of emotion and passion!

Catching Up

2009-03-06T11:43:00.003-05:00

Life, in general, has been running a marathon and I've been treading along on little feet that are weighted down by the gravity of age. I posted an entry here only a few minutes ago but that was evidently two weeks according to life in general.

My darling Zoey, aged 15, has been having seizures. They are precisely the way seizures are supposed to be--the frothing at the mouth, the vigorous movement, the violent insentience. I worry that this calico girl is in for a bad time. The vet has her on a "wait and see" status--so much of medicine is, after all, "wait and see".

Lately I've reread Remains of the Day and admired Ishiguro's careful revelations through narration. I'm onto White Teeth. I'm reading Mary Barton for fun, but do not have enough time to make decent progress.

In the "Everything's Up to Date in Gubbinal City" category, I have very recently discovered that one can procure a "dock" for an iPod or other musical device. I've never felt comfortable with ear phones. The "dock" revelation has me downloading music quicker than a teenager proclaiming things to be "sick!". After two months of absolute and pristine credit card virtue, I leapt off the wagon.

My iPod Nano could only hold about 3,000 "songs" and so I had to order an iPod Classic with overnight delivery (and it did arrive in about 20 hours). In case you, dear reader, don't understand this technology, a "song" can be a movement of a symphony and therefore last longer than the 45 RPM records of my adolescence which rarely if ever sustained longer than 3 minutes of music.

Review: "A Fairly Honourable Defeat"

2009-02-20T10:53:00.005-05:00

"Good is dull. What novelist ever succeeded in making a good man interesting? It is characteristic of this planet that the path of virtue is so unutterably depressing that it can be guaranteed to break the spirit and quench the vision of anybody who consistently attempts to tread it. Evil, on the contrary, is exciting and fascinating and alive. It is also very much more mysterious than good. Good can be seen through. Evil is opaque."

I've read 25 of 26 of Iris Murdoch's novels and I have reread most of them. I started following her career when I was a teenager because my younger sister, Andrea, had a fetish about Iris Murdoch, Edward Gorey, and John Fowles. "Sister, dear," she would say, "You really must read Iris Murdoch." And I did. I read Bruno's Dream, decided that Murdoch could not possibly improve upon herself (I was young then) and reread and then read again Bruno's Dream. About ten years later, I started reading everything by Iris Murdoch. She became one of the few writers whose works compelled me to purchase them immediately in hard-cover.

I've just reread A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Murdoch's "typical" novel (although "typical" is not a good word to use for her) gives us a smallish cast of characters--8 or 9--located in the real streets of London. Like a play with precise settings and a clear specific "look" for each actor, or character, Murdoch's novels bring up "moral" issues that transcend time and place. But you can also read the novels for the thickly layered plots too.

As the novel opens the complacent Rupert and Hilda Foster celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. They have just installed a smallish swimming pool in their yard at home in the Boltons, London. Swimming pool? London? Yard? They spend some time congratulating each other on their goodness, their morality, and how Rupert turned down an honour...possibly a KBE? Hilda remarks that "'Lady Foster' would have sounded rather wll. I could have had some pink postcards printed with
From Lady Foster on them."

We soon meet Morgan, Hilda's younger sister, Simon, Rupert's younger brother, and Simon's lover, Axel, who has given Simon the revelation that it is "perfectly ordinary to be homosexual". We learn about and will soon meet Julius King, who works in the "biological warfare game" on a "kind of anthrax which resists antibiotics." Julius has had a fling with Morgan, who remains married to Tallis Browne, a person who does good deeds. Tallis lives with some roomers and his father, the splenetic and bilious Leonard. He has also taken on Peter, the 19 year old drop-out son of Rupert and Hilda.

Slowly readers learn who is really good--in terms of having the right instincts and in transcending the demands of the ego--and who is diabolical. And who can be led astray. Those characters who seem to be most proud of their moral compass find that the compass leaps around and dithers. An appeal to vanity will make most characters turn dishonest in the twinkling of an eye.

Murdoch's novels are well-plotted and the plots should not be given away because therein lie the thorny moral issues for the reader as well as the characters. Can we recognize who is good and who is demonic? We can recognize selfishness but can we say way some are parsimonious and luxuriate in self-indulgence?

Murdoch often has an "enchanter" figure--one who can manipulate and stage-manage others. A bit like Oberon, Prospero, Iago, the "enchanter" character can make young Athenians run wildly about oblivious to their own identities and he can make people believe that he's the most honest fellow about as he performs machinations that would thrill Machiavelli.

"Who is the boss?" "What are you afraid of?" are questions fundamental to Murdoch's novels, as they are in our lives. Murdoch can help us to see more clearly than the typical "muddled" vision we are born with---and although I have not counted up the usages of the word "muddle" in Murdoch, I don't think there's a single novel which is NOT about how we deal with the muddle of every day life.

Murdoch is on my relatively short list of novelists writing after 1950 who are well-worth reading. The first part of the century gave us a dazzling collection of writers--in no particular order--Henry James, Edith Wharton, Josef Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, EM Forster, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald--not to mention all I have inadvertantly omitted. Although Woolf would not have appreciated this comment, I wonder if being raised on a diet of Victorian novels and poetry helped these authors to have an authentic ear for the language? Some, certainly, wanted to rebel against Victorian prose. But after them, where did the novel go? To a few little isolated outposts?

Today is sponsored by the letter "J"

2009-02-13T13:08:00.003-05:00

I asked
Tea Leaves to give me a letter and she handed "J" over. The meme is to list ten things that you like inspired by that letter. So...

Typically for me, my thoughts turn to food and I've got a great one:

1.
>Jeni's Ice Creams--I particularly like the Thai Chili, the Queen City Cayenne, the Black Coffee, and the Cognac.

2. Jupiter! Aside from being one of Mozart's greatest symphonies, it's a stimulating portion of Holst's Planets Suite (the Bringer of Jollity--with the metre revised a bit for the English "I Vow to Thee My Country".

3. Mrs. Jewkes--the slatternly, ominous, vulgar character from Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. I seem to recall Pamela writing a missive home to her parents as Mrs. Jewkes was performing bondage and discipline.

4. Randall Jarrell--The American poet. Here's a brief one:
"Well Water"

What a girl called "the dailiness of life"
(Adding an errand to your errand. Saying,
"Since you're up . . ." Making you a means to
A means to a means to) is well water
Pumped from an old well at the bottom of the world.
The pump you pump the water from is rusty
And hard to move and absurd, a squirrel-wheel
A sick squirrel turns slowly, through the sunny
Inexorable hours. And yet sometimes
The wheel turns of its own weight, the rusty
Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear
Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands
And gulp from them the dailiness of life.

5. Jamaican cuisine

6. J. Herbin inks in all of their colorful beauty.

7. James Joyce--I just reread "The Dubliners" and they remain an exquisite depiction of the quiet hopes and despair of the characters.

8. "Jabberwocky" is a poem by Lewis Carroll that used to annoy me to end. How many times have I had students tell me that the only poem they like is "Jabberwocky!" But going far beyond its singular appeal to the youth, it's a very clever use of words and word forms.

9. Henry James--who doesn't feel a touch of Jamesian angst every now and then? Every ten minutes or so?

10. Tie--what comes to mind: a battle amongst Shirley Jones, Samuel Johnson, the opera Jenufa by Janacek--the poem "Jerusalem" by William Blake--and there's Jane Eyre!
and the award goes to....Shirley Jones!

Snow Days

2009-02-07T20:59:00.004-05:00

The view outside my window of a week ago has transformed itself into slush and mounds of very dirty frost. Those icicles are serious weapons!

Not much happening here aside from my enchantment at the miracles Virginia Woolf is able to achieve with depicting human consciousness. How marvelously audacious of Augustus Carmichael to request a second serving of soup at that dinner party.
To the Lighthouse is a marvel of a book.

I'm also reading The Private Patient by P.D. James. She certainly has not lost anything; this is a sharp and witty and populated as any of her earlier novels. I'm very grateful to the people who recommended new names (new to me) in mystery.

The Typealizer

2009-02-04T13:50:00.005-05:00

What kind of blog type are you? Go to Typealizer to find out. I am grateful to The Hobgoblin of Little Minds for pointing out the site.

The analysis indicates that the author of http://www.gubbinal.blogspot.com is of the type:

ISTP - The Mechanics
The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters.

***********

I am startled with this analysis. I enjoy root canals more than I enjoy "adventure and risk". I'm attuned to the demands of my belly but not much else. True, I like to avoid conflict but my idea of "fun and action" is knitting a sweater. Oh...and the bib overalls? Never. Not in my wildest imagination. I may prefer to épater with nudity rather than bib-overalls.