Another set of emails ultimately from the work of the 1% where I happen to work came into my box: workshops for distance and hybrid (even phonier) courses prompted this diary. I went looking on my timelines in facebook to re-read what a few friends had said. At first I could not find them. Facebook selects what they want to show on my timelines. This topic of distance learning not important?
So I gathered a few of the meaningful comments to respond to here again. An early May diary:
May 15, around 3 in the afternoon: :I just submitted all my grades. It's over for another semester. I'm relieved. I regret not teaching summers any more as once upon a time I did enjoy it: it was then I got some more advanced (junior level) general lit courses but no more. The people controlling public universities are determined to destroy the humanities insofar as this is possible. So too libraries, so too accredited teachers. Rien a faire."
A friend, let's call her Alice, responded: I believe that higher education, as we knew it, is going ton be gone within 10 years, replaced by online certification, no liberal education except for the very wealthy.
Me: Well that's an interesting belief in the sense that it follows the direction we are going in. Where I've been teaching now since 1989 I realized (this past term) about 1/2 of the required sections in the English department are these distance arrangements. They are phony in the sense of teaching the students anything. A new development is the hybrid: this is a pretense where half the meetings are still set with supposedly half "online". I know from experience that the super-expensive privately supported small liberal arts school and ivy league type schools (high priced0 are still offering a liberal arts education for a sizable number of students who might want it.
But won't the people running the colleges charge as much? You pay as much for a distance course as a face-to-face one where I teach -- unless you mean (I had not realized this) that colleges will shrink or disappear. However it's very hard to make any set of institutions go away once bunches of people inhabit and are dependent on them for their living.
Alice: This is not a belief but a prediction based on students' inability to sustain these enormous debts & colleges' refusal to give up so many expensive administrators
Elaine: I have been thinking the same as Alice for some years now. Now in fact the humanities faculty at my school is in the process of "shrinking," since budget cuts are met through attrition. The distance ed model is easier to fund because (1) it sells computers, servers, etc. and computer companies want to develop this market; (2) when some of the functions, e.g. quiz grading, are assumed by software, and teacher-student interaction can be time-shifted, one teacher can potentially teach many more students (I know an instructor here who was assigned at one point to teach two distance sections on top of her regular load!). It is also morally appealing to administrators because it reduces professors to standardized "content providers." If your last Shakespeare professor just retired, why not just buy into an online course that will certify students as having studied Shakespeare (even if it never satisfies the need to study Shakespeare that drives them to sign up for a course with a live professor
Me: So what we -- or you and Alice are saying -- is while the bottle will be left standing, what is poured through will be quite different. I agree. And it's not the first time. But will the bottle be left standing at all? If say you don't need a brick-and-mortar place that's large, why not shrink that? I suppose Alice is saying the bottle itself will go. Then the social experience of college life for most will go away -- and that is so valuable, so important. A student need not live away from home to have it. Again opportunities for leaving your original place in society and finding yourself a more suitable one, another identity which fits you will severely diminish. Do you think the price will necessarily fall? (as people come to their senses and see what they thought they were buying -- upward mobility -- is not the case at all. We are painting a dire kind of scenario. They are making hybrid courses where I'm teaching: the phoniness is to pretend that the "class" on line is somehow happening with an equivalent valence; it's not; it's just teaching one half the time. By the way what I meant is that people running the composition department are attempting to control the content of my courses so as to erase humanities content, the discipline altogether. I'm not going to do it. I know Yvette was made miserable at Buffalo by her many distance courses; she was so isolated. She felt suicidal one term. She learned much much less and she didn't even make any acquaintances.
A propos of Alice's comment: into my box comes a stipend of $200 to learn how to do distance and hybrid sections of English, which will now be expanding just as I'm typing .
Alice again: When online learning was first developed, I had a dean that decided we would do it RIGHT. Classes were kept to 12 students, and we all had to show up in a chat room once a week for three hours. My class was in Poetics, and together with the students, I explored the relationship between the web and poetry: websites, online readings, e-poems. They gave class presentations using Powerpoint, responded with questions. It was unbelievably exciting, and the class grew so close, mostly Haz Mat majors in Ohio, but students also from all over, various time zones. They knew my personal life a bit and we had correspondence and supportive emails all round. That lasted about 3 years till the dean was fired, the classes up to 25-50, no chats, just the asynchronous, and inherent orders (never by memo) to pass everyone. Anything can be taught well or not, but the conditions many of us are put under now are impossible. Sorry to go onl.
Me: The same here. Or the same process. When the general education literature courses (surveys) were abolished and replaced by theme courses supposedly aimed at less prepared students, there were meetings and documents prepared about how careful teachers would be to make these new replacements genuinely relevant. Within 2 years, they were dumbed down or used by faculty to set favorite often inappropriate texts with sophisticated themes.That's why 6 credits of this is no longer required and you can use substitutes from other departments. The hybrid & distance courses are described as tremendously labor-intensive but everyone knows better. Students take them to punch a ticket. I know that face-to-face contact makes students work harder because they have to see you; there's nothing like a sit-down in class exam or presentation in front of a class to concentrate the student's mind.
Coda, from Anne: .Yes it's so horrible life online and yet the people in these colleges want to go the distance way. Anne again: it's all so true. Sadly, it drifts down even into "classroom" classes--my son because he has a 3.0, was able, as a high schooler last summer, to take a class for free--he took intro to sociology. It met one day a week instead of the two it was scheduled--for day two the students took a weekly on line test that was auto graded. He got an A with very little effort, no need to develop critical thinking skills and very little human interaction. It was depressing to me.
Reply: Look at analogy in the destruction of welfare:
What you are saying is what the other two said. What interests me is how many of these things start with false hopes put before us which people seem to believe in.
Today the only the only safety net -- or help -- for the poor is Food Stamps. Aid to Dependent Children destroyed. It was touted as getting women jobs, not being dependent. People seriously said this; Clinton claimed it; fools on line asserted to me this was what was done, yes a little pushing but all to good. A week after Clinton signed the bill, his education secretary resigned in protest. Now he's written a book showing how the actual rules said grants (small) would go to states and states could use the money as they please. Within a year, no more welfare.
How much do the hypocrites realize while they are hypocrites what they are doing? Some, a lot. The patsies who work for them too. The world of made up on (as Swift said) knaves and fools and those who are forced to turn away, as a minority.
Sylvia
On Wednesday afternoon it was the Admiral and I went to our local yearly vast art show, Art-o-matic. Each year in May a group of people organize themselves, rent a building already empty (easy in this continuing depression for the 99%) and fill it with art. The choices are self-selected and the result is a huge outpouring of art. In the evenings there are local bands playing on the various floors, some bars and coffee places where there are poetry readings. We go for at least an afternoon, sometimes in time for a rock show, but as they are super LOUD we don't usually enjoy them. I do love pictures, all sorts, as well as art photographs.
Susan LaMonte, Cody Soaks up the Sun (not at art-o-matic but on LeMonte's website): Silverpoint
Alas, each year the art has gotten worse -- this year it was very poor. There seems to be a fashion not to manifest any art abilities but put ghastly cartoon like scribbles on walls.One person who had some good paintings semi-realistic had a sign apologizing for herself. I am intensely sympathetic with the politics of most of the artists, but they are not making art for anyone but their tiny groups or themselves - for the most part. I feel bad to say this as the women (it is mostly middle aged women) work so hard to put this together and look so eager and expectant into the spectators' faces for confirmation of uplift.I couldn't give it. It is not that they are inferior to so-called professionals. We saw the same kind of art filling the Whitney several years ago, and there it was even worse because more money was available to individuals. The Corcoran has shows filled with this pop art: often it has words in explanation because the art does not speak for itself.
Inside out by Susan LaMonte
But here and there were some good art. I didn't take down enough names. There the pictures had a real price. There was a man who made modern look dinosaur sculptures out of wire and these were on various floors. One artist we saw I can share is Susan LaMont. So on our groupsite page is the image of one of the several pictures she had hung: We are here:
We are Here
Today's world, where we have to live and make do and be with others because our world has been built this way by others. It's any city, any cafe but really NYC and somewhere where there's a city college campus The stance is the same as Inside Out: the POV (like a movie) is from deep inside looking out through a glass.
Vivid colors, strong forms, meaningful psychological scenes and presences. She also is a strong idealizer:
Early Morning in the Dunes, again not in the exhibit -- I love it for the colors and the longing (Landscapes)
I'll put a write about a few others artists over the next couple of days. I have a list of names and see if I can find images for other of the artists we saw.
P.S. It's now summer. I know it because the air-conditioning went on by itself. That's right. A new turn: sometime last summer the Admiral and I took to setting our thermostat at 78 and putting the air-conditioning on. When the temp in the room the the gadget is in goes about 78, the air conditioning goes on. It went on today at 7:34 am.
Sylvia
Dear friends and readers,
This is the first time in years I have no schedule, no deadline, no places I must take someone else or myself. It's an odd feeling. Perhaps the last time was when we first moved to Virginia and I was so displaced. I was not alone then though: I had Caroline, aged 2 and 1/2 or so. Now I have the Admiral here with me, but it's not the same kind of relationship at all at all.
With the elimination of the felt need I had to do justice to my work on Trollope film adaptations in the scholarly academic or published way, I've been able to let myself float. Look about and see what I am doing and what to do and follow that.
And lo and behold I'm beginning to see some routs emerge. I'm finishing reading Catherine Anne Hubback's The Younger Sister, a continuation-sequel of her aunt Austen's Watsons, which I began during my review of the Later Manuscripts of Jane Austen, Cambridge ed, Todd and Bree, I will plunge into Bad Tuesday -- a complication of secondary reading (including biographies), Austen's novels and letters, as I check through my calendars and material on letters. I start this every day after morning posting (letters, postings, proscrastination, reading other people).
Later afternoon, early afternoons I'm making room and keeping up some every day with the Poldark novels and/or films. . I'm reading Lily Tuck's biography of Elsa Morante, but not in an orderly regular way, often late at night or after supper. ; I have to make room to read Morante's novels in her Italian. I decided that I was not doing the Poldarks right. I read them too far apart and am remaining in the same state of confusion, not really having them richly concrete in my mind, so I've decided to do it differently. One hour a day and keep the films in tandem with the books and consult your notes and outlines as you go. Otherwise you'll not get a handle on it and nothing can come of it (as good writing.) Can I try to read Italian at night? I'll make the experiment. Never can tell :)
I'm also finding room for a first shared read, Trollope's Kellys & OKellys. We are hoping to read George Moore late in the summer. I put upcoming books on my three listservs, a couple of which other people have expressed interest in, e.g., Charlotte Smith's The Young Philosopher and Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies (Anne Boleyn book).
Late at night movies and the news. Tonight I watched DemocracyNow.org, the Chicago demonstrations on the weekend, her Monday show and tonight. I was so moved,especially by the Veterans throwing away the vile medals and ribbons. Each of the groups so truthful and earnest, good people everywhere. Then on late Sunday night when the Vets left the police came and began to beat the hell out of all the people left. Yes. What is it with people who become police? I've begun to send her money, $50 the other day to help this news-show carry on.
Fridays I will work on my website
Beyond that there is no order as yet - and really after the mid-morning, afternoon and later afternoon routs, it's not much order. I have thoughts about women's fiction, historical novels, biographical fiction about women (books to read, ideas of what to do for Elizabeth's story, a possible sequel to the Poldark series). I'd like to try novels like Davis's A Meaningful Life (half-joke alert).
Blogging has to remain spontaneous and catch-as-catch can.
But I feel I am reaching something of a schedule and (to me) creditable goals/modus vivendi.
And not omit the Admiral; tomorrow afternoon he and I will go to a local huge art show, Art-o-matic; on Thursday afternoon an HD opera in Bethesda, Peter Grimes. He is practicing reading aloud from Joyce's Ulysses: we are going to participate in Bloom's Day (June 16), 3 different events across the day.
I put this here to have it in front of me
Sylvia
This blog might also be called Narcissa since I conceive it as autobiographical at root: my writing and reading life, seasonal happenings, my political thoughts, spontaneous outbursts. It's a record for me to recur to to remember, to situate memories, to make plans, to try to understand all sorts of things. How do I know what I think until I see what I say? Writing is my way of understanding my mind and thus coping. I am aware of how small and petty or self-absorbed my difficulties might seem in comparison to the troubles of the world and many other people. I say this once for all to apologize to anyone who bothers to read it.
This is a continuation of my struggle to organize my literary work.
So, good news: I finally got myself to read my essay as published in Bloom and Pollock's Victorian Literature and Film Adaptation and am intensely relieved to say it's close to what I wrote originally, a shortened version of the first paper I wrote. The published essay contains just about all that I had about the Pallisers (see my website), including the analysis of the two episodes and central scenes, and the relationship of the Pallisers to two of Raven's best mini-series, a slightly briefer version of the comparison of the Pallisers to Plater's Barchester Chronicles, and a choice of scenes from the other three important films since (Malachi's Cove, The Way We live Now, He Knew He Was Right) to show how ironically closely transposed scenes from Trollope are just about consistently altered from his original meaning while semi-invented brilliant scenes from where the narrator had been peculiarly brilliant in his irony kept close to Trollope's meaning. The published title is a variant on the title I originally proposed, "Intertextuality in Simon Raven's The Pallisers and Other Trollope Films. The filmography I labored on is published, plus most of the bibliography and a number of the longer notes are there (quoting Raven, describing details of the Palliser films compared to Trollope's novels, giving unknown intertextual background to Barchester Chronicles). Now having read the paper I know that all the cant theory (which was a distressing embarrassment for me to read and think someone might believe that I had written it) was after all not interwoven into my work, that the inappropriate (to me absurd) title was after all not used, and some generous person supplied in a style close to my own (plain, a talking style) a new introduction, brought forward my thesis, subdivided the sections by headers which did make everything much easier to follow and read, and put my general definitions of types of films and general comparison of Raven's Trollope to the other three writers' (Herbert Wise, Alan Plater, Andrew Davies) into further notes IN fact this new introduction is a slightly cut down or summery version of what I originally had plus one of the three paragraphs on Raven brought forward for a second paragraph and then into my thesis. Far from having to feel ashamed, mortified, and frustrated helplessly hurt at what happened, I'm proud of my paper and proud to see it in this volume which has a number of super film studies.
This does change my summer, or to put it another way, what I need to do now with Trollope, what I can do. I had been thinking I just had to spend time somehow or other re-vamping all I had written of the film adaptations of Trollope's novels enough so it differed from whatever had been published in this volume so I could send it to Film and Literature Quarterly or some such periodical. No need now. I may yet want to publish an essay on Davies's films separately but that would not be in a Trollope paper but as part of my Austen book or a paper simply on Davies's as a startling genius of film adaptation for TV. Not that mine is needed as Sarah Caldwell's books go very far: I just think more could be said about his romances which she admits she scants as (she says) she does not favor romance. Here though I've made blogs (e.g., his 1984 BBC Diana, elegiac romance, spy thriller the complex heroine) so no hurry. if someone really want to read about Davies's treatment of romance, it is available on the Net on my website. Just google for it.
So bear with me as I lay out what is ahead; it becomes much easier for me to see my way and evolve a plan and new routs.
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So next up is: The Important or Bad Tuesday in Austen and then A Place of Refuge: The Sense and Sensibility Films and The work is intertwined. The thesis I came up with comes out of the work I did on the Austen letters and I have to return to Austen herself to hold the book together. I will finish reading Hubback's The Younger Sister to see what it reveals about what was intended in this repressed book, what is true about Frank and Jane and then go on to the novels and letters. I am right about her relationship with her brothers, about her love for Martha Lloyed, and the pattern of Tuesdays however inexplicable simply there. I know it is -- I found another Tuesday in these mid-career unfinished books and began to find references to the badness of Tuesday as a day to be gotten over around Letter 70. The Unknown Austen. I have to read more of her more immediate relatives' documents and lives. Read some more biography and (hard to believe) yet more of the criticism.
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I've answered my question about publication La comedia e finita. These two things and then no more. Well, reviews when they are fun I could try for a published paper on Trollope's original illustrations or the Graham Poldark novels, but it's not necessary. I've thought of a way I can get myself to write a paper on the illustrations: thanks to my kind friend, Eleanor, I joined Sharp and in two years they will have a conference in Philadelphia. I could try for a proposal again (book illustration in Victorian era) and then when I've done put the paper on the Net.
Remember Yvette's comment: if she had had to think about publication when she wrote her novels, she would not have done it. If I had thought it was necessary to publish my poems while writing them, I never would have. I didn't do it for that
Today I came across on Facebook and on Wompo two threads showing people just obsessed with publication. That's what they write for. In both cases there would be no or tiny amounts of money at best, small runs of books probably (good thing).
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Now I have time (starting next week I'll weave it in) to work on my website and make a region for the foremother poet blogs in one place; a region for the Poldark blogs in another.
I'll begin the actual work on the paper for EC/ASECS in later August but as part of the above, put the proposal on my website too: 'Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me!': paranoia in the writings of Charlotte Smith, Anne Radcliffe, Mary Brunton, and Sophie Cottin
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A little known photo of Elsa Morante in her forties with a then favorite cat
So now I can see my way towards reading at night for pleasure and alternating reading for the above projects with older interest that few people I know seem to share with me. Elsa Morante's Menzogna and Sortilegio after I finish the biography by Lily Tuck. I hunger to read more women's novels about the central aspect of women's existence: female sexuality.
The Elsa Morante desire is what's left over from my years working on Italian sonnets by Colonna and Gambara: to teach myself to read Italian I read a lot of Italian and discovered the greatness of Italian literature during, just before WW2 ended and the era directly afterward.
I'll be able to make time for two threads of reading and discussion. I've made a start on Trollope's Kellys and OKellys; after that on Trollope19thCStudies I and one other person will try George Moore's Esther Waters and A storyteller's Holiday. Then we'll see. On EighteenthCenturyWorlds I and one other person are going for Charlotte Smith's A Young Philosopher and/or or then Walter Scott's Antiquary.
The weather has been beautiful. Cool air, warm sun, breezes, low in the 50s, high in the 70s. Jim will soon be going to a practice session for the amateur reading aloud of Joyce's work by the local Irish community on Bloomsday and then we'll have that new experience to try.
Sylvia
As I've already expended myself on a blog this morning and have a few postings I want to write before turning to my day's reading, this is a quick recommendation: Tariq Ali's Street Fighting Years. Read it. The 2004 introduction alone makes it worth it.
Tariq Ali, from 2006, teaching in Imperial College, London
The key insight in the opening is what has been done since the 1960s is to make every job precarious, every single economic arrangement dependent on temporary circumstance. You make each basic need and support dependent on money ultimately coming from some institution which is corporate in structure. You develop a reserve of employees rendered docile by the permanent threat of unemployment. You render obsolete pension rights as a given to stand up in court after decades of an individual work. The reserve army exists at all levels, even the mangers near the top and also for some at the top. It's a structural brutality at the core of all arrangements. Marriage imitates this. And of course the re-distribution of wealth and opportunity and education through the tax codes and social agencies (say schools) supported by the tax system is simply unacceptable.
If you think of what has happened since the 1970s in many western "democracies" you will see this is the policy made pervasive everywhere.
The Occupy movement, the Arab springs, all the street protests over the last two years are a desperate attempt on the part of this 99% to try to change things, but they have arrayed against them a fearful lot of military power in ruthless police, an increase of lawlessness called law (you just re-rig the laws to permit the powerful authority to do as he pleases after defining the situation), as in strip searching an innocent person without a warrant, and calling peaceful demonstrations (say in Chicago coming up) support of terrorists.
In the introduction he honors several people, Edward Said, Paul Foot, Abdelrahman Munif. He talks of his concern for women and quotes thinkers but there is no woman among any of those cited. He talks about his years at Channel 4 (before Thatcherism) and how he writes for the New left Review to help support himself. He does originally come from a privileged group of Pakistani people. At the close of the book there are a couple of "open letters to John Lennon" exposing the naivete of this young man's stances.
More when I've read more.
Sylvia
In the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Mrs Donnelly (Maggie Smith) tells her servant girl that the problem of her existence once she was retired had become, "What to do next." This is my problem too. How to organize my time or existence might be another way of putting it. What should I do with the existence I've got left. Turning away from teaching is not my first heart-break over my teaching I assure any reader of this blog. It's just another blow.
Second, I like to post to listservs in the morning and write letters to friends, to have what I can of a social life on the Net. Right now on one list a tiny group of people have agreed to read Trollope's Kellys & OKellys and after that George Moore's Esther Waters and A Storyteller's Holiday (Alfred Nobbs). That's it. Not too much. I don't belong to any local book clubs. I've never been able to join one. I don't give Trollope up altogether this way. I don't feel this aloneness so much. I cheer up.
So what to do with my hours, my life in a sense. First, I have trouble doing any work at night. At night I do enjoy doing blogs. And these come out of what I do on listservs and readings I do myself. Here I can enjoy myself over Gaskell and Oliphant, costume drama film adaptations and poetry and other loves. These help get me through the night. I don't go to sleep so early when I manage to do them so I can sleep my 5 hours in a row. They occupy the time. Absorb my mind so nothing else gets in.
This leaves say 8 hours a day (give or take -- there's eating, morning tasks, sometimes shopping) when I don't go out with the Admiral or Yvette; or (less regularly) visitings, shoppings with Caroline, or some other function, like once or twice a year say (conference) or rare meeting with a friend in this area. Holiday? travel. Even less often.
Looking at it I have three projects that are large:
The Trollope film paper on the Pallisers and other films, turns out to have needed a lot of work, or at least some. But when I finally got myself to read the Victorian literature and film adaptation volume, I discovered that after all more of my paper was kept than I had been told would. It seems to be some version of my longer good paper. (This reminds me of when I was asked to review a book in Italian on Italian women epistolary and life-writers and produced a good review; the man suddenly insulted me and said it was enormously too long and he didn't want it. I first wrote a shorter version but that would not do either. I then discovered he wanted his graduate student to write the review. Months later I saw a shorter verions of the first good paper had been published!) So I'm not sure what there is to do.
Since it's apparent to me no one wants my papers at Victorian conferences or for their periodicals, I would have to try Literature/Film quarterlies. That's a limited kind of thing but I could try just that. If I failed to be accepted, I could just put the thing on the Net and that would be that. Come to think of it there are some journals still not limited to periods and my paper might find a place among these.
Anway what sits before me are my two versions and a third (re-framed by someone else) published.
A Place of Refuge: The Sense and Sensibility Films are also a lot of work. There might be some interest in a Jane Austen film book but I know I have a strong tendency to write very academically and in a welter of detail that I'm told no publisher wants. At least not from me. I did come up with a thesis at last for a whole book. This by my close reading of half Austen's letters. I've 5 chapters: intro on Austen's S&S and Montolieu's Caroline de Lichtfield and a chapter each on 71, 83, 95, and 08 S&S and 00 I Have Found it.
In both cases I have previously material to begin with and revise - the Jane Austen very good some of it. And I have a thesis for the whole book for A Place of Refuge. I should not cast all this aside the way I did Jane Austen among Frenchwoman. for another different project which would be:
The Important Tuesday. I tell myself this would be short and easy, but as I immediately see I need to finish Austen's letters and re-read the novels, it becomes apparently it's a big project too. One I would like to do before I die. Because the pattern is there. I know it is. What it means I know not. Even quite when she did it. The Unknown Austen. I have to read more of her more immediate relatives' documents and lives.
Now I have no special in at all among Austen studies or journals but it's an 18th century topic, a woman's studies topic, a fiction topic.
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Now a larger profound question for me is, Do I want to write for publication? it's such a hard work, for what and the people I have to deal with much of the time mysteries to me -- and I have such difficulties coming up with theses and arguments for my own work. Tell a story fine. Write a review of someone else's argument, fine. (I've half agreed for next year to write a review of Staves's Literary History of Women, 1689-1790). I enjoy them in the way I do blogs; indeed many of my blogs come out of the work I do for reviews.
Partly it's the mandarin style; partly my lack of self-esteem which makes me do too much, want to cover too much. I have no trouble making blogs :). Clearly from my experience with the recent editors of this Victorian film volume and other ones I am out of my depth when it comes to this upper middle class academic world. I don't respond to their methods of "pushing" -- because I am so started and hurt at sudden turn-rounds of bullying. I now have had several experiences where I just didn't know how to cope with these editors of peer-edited academic style journals.
Yvette said the other day to me something that echoed a sentiment I feel in my gut anyway: if she had had to think about publication when she wrote her novels, she would not have done it. When I was pushed in a way to try to publish my translated poems (Colonna and Gambara) I remember thinking over and over if I had thought it was necessary to publish these while writing them, I never would have. I didn't do it for that.
Were I intent on publication I would not give up my Trollope illustrations project on which I've a lot of stuff more than I've put on my website.
At some level I don't care. If I didn't I'd have behaved very differently over the years. I don't think life has any meaning and it's vanitas vanitatem about publication,silly. That lots of people are silly is of course the obstacle. I get respect from some for my Trollope book.
Maybe the publication on my website and blogs are the way to go in part. It's just that if I want something paid attention to it has to be in a conventionally respected place. So I must do the Tuesday paper. Of the meditated projects that's the one to get into a peer edited journal if I can. Not Persuasions. It's too Janeite, they want for most people too short papers. Some older venerable journal. Try it and if it's not put it on the Net and dismiss it from my mind. I like this sub-plan.
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I do want to work on my website;
A region for the foremother poet blogs in one place.
A region for the Poldark blogs in one place.
I have to set aside time for this. This I'm clear on.
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My proposal for my paper for the coming EC/ASECS conference is (I hope) one of those things I can do a small thing on for a couple of months starting in later August/early September. I need to put that document on my website:'Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me!': paranoia in the writings of Charlotte Smith, Anne Radcliffe, Mary Brunton, and Sophie Cottin
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Personally-rooted new desires and old:
In my mind is a desire to write something on the Poldark novels. Since they are in copyright I have to be careful. I don't know if I am capable of a sequel. I know there is no handbook but here again I'm up against the same problem I had for the Colonna and Gambara, knowing no one. This time it's true there is a website and address to write to. This would not necessarily be writing for conventional publication but something to put on the web. Elizabeth's Story. A handbook :)
A desire to return to Italian. To do the proposal for EC/ASECS would get me again readnig French novels. I did that last summer for the Mary Trouille review. I want to read Elsa Morante's Menzogna and Sortilegio. I hunger to read more women's novels about the central aspect of women's existence: female sexuality as it's treated in human societies.
Now if I make a plan, I must follow it.
Sylvia
By Sylvia Plath:
“Morning Song” by Sylvia Plath
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
***********
In honor of our shared name,
Mary Cassatt, Margot before a Window
Sylvia
Last night I heard (and checked out that it's so) another story which reveals the full character of Mitt Romney now running for US president. People's essential natures do not change that much, as in the incident where he tied up his dog for 12 hours to the top of the car while his family drove inside to Canada, and the dog complained (the story) and was then hosed down within the cage, Romney's son laughed when questioned, so here Romney at first laughed. See Romney's dog, Seamus; That Dog
It seems he and a group of like-minded thugs repeatedly harassed, mocked and attacked a gay or homosexual young man in their high school. Here is the news story
"Five people who attended high school with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney have come forward to reveal Romney bullied a student who was thought to be gay. Speaking to the Washington Post, Romney’s former classmates at Michigan’s Cranbrook School say Romney became incensed after seeing the student, John Lauber, with bleached-blond hair. According to their account, Romney and other classmates tackled Lauber to the ground and then forcefully cut off his hair with a pair of scissors. Speaking to Fox News Radio, Romney said he could not recall the 1965 incident and initially laughed when confronted with the details. He then offered a conditional apology."
Noticed this is not just a matter of verbal mockery; Romney and his gang actually took a scissors and cut the young man's hair off.
Imagine this incident for a moment. Romney perhaps in the lead. How dare this young man bleach his hair? Romney now says he did not know the young man was gay. He must've because the heckling cry hits precisely at that.
Romney later thought the better of his immediate reaction. He is no longer campaigning against yet worst sneering racist bullies (remember New Gingrich over the Spanish reporter heckling him for asking about Gingrich's behavior to his first and second wives), nor crazy lunatics. No it's Barack Obama, a civilized decent man who it's unthinkable to imagine acting this way. President Obama had just said he saw nothing wrong in all people have equal fair right to be married with all its social advantages and deeper meaning of commitment so as to have a family life.
So now he's "got to say he's sorry for it." Yes he's got to say it. He's forced to by what he wants now. Otherwise he wouldn't. He uses language quite accurately often.
So now he says it's just a prank. Nothing more. Typical kind of prank people do in high school. Well is it? Would you do this? did your friends? I remember an incident where Yvette my young daughter was terrified by a girl on the bus going home from school. The girl, envious of Yvette's long lovely brown hair, threatened to cut it off. She said she has a scissors in her bag and produced it, just a glimpse. After that I picked Yvette up from school by car. But I will say the girl did not proceed to try to cut my daughter's hair, she did not get a gang around her to do this.
Imagine for a moment were Romney black? he might have been suspended for proto-criminal behavior. (I know he would not have been in that school and we have had a glimpse of behavior in elite US schools similar to that in UK elite public schools and behavior like that of Cameron now PM in the UK.)
Do you want such a man for President of the US a responsible job where we are to act decently and justly to other people in our country and abroad? This matters, folks. The other night I saw him fawning over Scott Walker who in Wisconsin is illegally trying to deprive teachers, fire people and other unions of their hard-fought right to fight for decent wages, hours, conditions in schools, pensions; he is trying to deprive women of essential needed health care. This is the man Romney, thug-bully imposing on someone else his sexual tastes.
Sylvia
I too have good memories of reading Maurice Sendak, mostly to my daughters. The ons I recall reading most often was Chicken Soup and Rice (at once time I could recite it); the pictures I remember best are from Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen. Caroline and Yvette seems to remember the songs and story of Really Rosie best. I recall the marvelous ironic line: "my mother says we were not put here to enjoy ourselves." (My mother said something very like this to me when I was a child.) Pierre's parents couldn't take him anywhere: he was so stubborn, disobedient. It's made a joke of.
How wonderful were the pictures, how beautifully releasing:
They never hurt anyone, but celebrated ordinary life. the world was a vast house. The tone nowadays reminds me of Randall Jarrell (his Bat-Poet), only filled with humor and hope.
Many obituaries yesterday. this from Al-Jazeera tells you about his life, how his art was rooted in his Polish-Jewish culture, his memories of the holocaust, his, relatives and friend, and how he died I did not know he was a homosexual man nor how progressive were his politics:. On helping children survive childhood is here
A good book: Angels and Wild Things: the Archetypal Poetrics of Maurice Sendak by John Cech. An essay: "Fun and Games and Dark Imaginings" by John Gardner in the Children's Literature Review, Vol 17, 1989 (New York Times, 1981 p 49) . He envisioned a Jewish childhood (Jill P. May, "Envisioning the Jewish Community," The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 33/34 (Autumn, 2000 - Winter, 2001):137-151.
Sylvia
Subtitle: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women.
I picked up a copy of this the other day and started to skim What a relief to read this sanity. This blog is prompted by this distressingly lugubrious paper by an intelligent female student I just read where she has read an essay which claims 50% of women go into deep depressions after miscarriage. Since miscarriage is so common, that would mean a very sad population. I had two, the first time I was relieved (I realized I was too young after all) and the second somewhat sad, but quickly just fine. And the incessant irritation of demands that women spend even years of their lives breast-feeding. The self-righteous bullying I've endured twice in hospital: once after a C-Section being pushed into a huge room filled with victim women subjected to lectures and melodramatic films on the necessity of breast-feeding.
***********************
Despite her recent falls from grace (during last summer when she raised her voice ostensibly against an unfair press on behalf of that French politician who raped the Muslim housemaid in New York), I know that the two books by Badinter I've read thus far were both superb: on the Two Emilies (Emilie du Chatelet and Emilie d'Epinay) and on the sentimental construction of motherhood in the 18th century century (L'amour de Plus Englished Motherhood: Myth and Reality) mostly begun by Rousseau.
Illustration for the book D'Epinay was known for: Conversations with her granddaughter (1781)
Elizabeth Badinter's Mother Love is about how modern mothering is a recent construct. (I have the English version, but the book is originally in French so Catherine may know Badinter's work; Badinteralso wrote a dual biography of Louise d'Epinay and Emilie de Chatelet, the mathematician, Voltaire's mistress who died in childbirth, of a miscarriage). Badinter bases her book on studies of the 18th century, from the use of wet-nursing as a substitute for contraception and abortion, to the way women openly favored some children, openly chose to live independent lives, sending children off to schools, the lack of over affection as a necessary ideal. This was emerging but not the later 17th century. In Austen's household we
see her sister-in-law openly despise and not treat well her stepdaughter. Badinter wants to argue and does successfully how unfair oppresive and anti-women are present conditions but we can see these earlier ones were unfair oppressive and antiwomen in other ways. the key is that human nature and society is often built on social cruelties, bullingly, lying. The norms are just instruments.
Badinter's Motherlove is very good (readable, written as a narrative) and just as available in English. I have it in a paperback. It's not about childhood as such, but about mothering in the ancien regime and earlier. The point of the book is to show that the modern demand a woman take on mothering as a 24 hour a day job in which she held responsible for
the emotional health and very characters of each of her children is a very new idea. It began in the middle 18th century and she shows that it took a long time to set in. Among the people who imposed this is Jean-Jacques Rousseau who was not himself particularly balanced and as every says, himself dumped 5 or 6 children on the steps of a foundling hospital; these he get on the body on the lower class women who spent her life catering to him. Women liked him because he seemed to make them important.
The modern counterpart is Nancy Choderow's much respected book on motherhood today, showing how unfair the whole regime is, as much to children as mothers. One of women's great problems in the 20th century is that they are held responsible for what they get no help doing like mothering. Plus in fact from the time of the child's young child years the child spend formative time in school with peers, and then is let out at a time that makes it difficult for the mother to hold a job to support herself and the child. This is the subtext of Badinter's argument or her assumed context.
Her book on the two brilliant French women is subtle and compassionate, filled with insight. Unfortunately, it's not been translated into English, Neither another important one on the 18th century: what happened to 18th century ambition in even these two privileged smart women: it was stifled. Chatelet was deprived of needed learning and she died in a miscarriage. D'Epinay's great novel, Montbrillant, the equivalent in French of Richardson's Grandison was first published in an untruncated state as an autobiographical novel in the early 20th century. All she could get published and could circulate were her tales of bringing up her granddaughter humanely. I'd like to read her Condorcet an important early feminist, very rare in the French revolution.
Emilie du Chatelet
I will try to fit in The Conflict in the next couple of weeks. It looks like easy reading in the translation by Adriana Hunter. Although I was attracted to it when I read the (for today) extraordinary chapter suggesting to women that breast-feeding is a choice (not a holy occupation, not necessary after a brief time and not even then), Mothehood as stangulation, motherhood as nailing you down for life. And if that weren't enough, when you are in your 60s if you live in the US you are sometimes asked to give up the later part of your life to a woman who hasn't the money to pay for medical help, companions, independence.
I don't know if motherhood undermines the status of women -- in traditional cultures it gives them status. Id' say rather the way it's treated for many imprisons them emotionally, takes years from their lives, and deprives them of genuine central self-regard. Not all. Only those who are deluded by the incessant propaganda (which I used to think partly came out of trying to erase how dangerous childbirth still is, how much hardship is ahead), but so many are. As so many are deluded to think sexual beauty is some kind of real power.
My very favorite New Yorker cartoon: she's looking for something less empowering.
As to her book itself it is firmly grounded in realities and circumstances of today and the past few decades. As ever she is logical, insightful. She begins with the realty that as of the 1970s women had many choices -- as did men - and that some of these undermined traditional notions of not only femininity but masculinity, one of which is a man must be a father, preferably to a son. She then goes on to show how this reversion to idealizing nature and natural instincts was one reaction to this new anxiety. But she also shows how it emerged in the context of genuine disappointment for most women with the jobs they could get.
Hard statistics about how many women have babies, and the percentages within the developed countries (west). France is a higher birth rate per female than many.
Converging with this is a suspicion of technology at the same time as a reliance on pseudo-science. Women urged to get off the pill, men of course don't like contraception. Environmentalism brought in: don't use paper diapers. The masochistic impulse to have a birth with pain. The romanticization of this and the development of a role called the doula. How understandable not to want to be dominated by the male medical establishment mores.
This sets the scene.
She then turns back to the construction of motherhood that began in the 18th century the modern version of which is found in Choderow's description and show how this was revivified and reinforced by among other things the nagging over breast-feeding and guilt trips about how the mother is central in the formation of a personality when it is the whole habitas and schools and peers and father too. This is her opener.
Sylvia
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