Under the Sign of Sylvia

Distance learning courses: the reality and why the hype; welfare analogy

Fri, 25 May 2012 12:31:34 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

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

Art-o-matic: Susan La Monte

Fri, 25 May 2012 11:35:49 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

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

New routs

Tue, 22 May 2012 14:44:41 GMT

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

What to do next less of a problem: my Trollope film paper published nearly as is!

Sat, 19 May 2012 02:33:48 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

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

Tariq Ali's Street Fighting Years

Thu, 17 May 2012 12:37:48 GMT

Dear friend and readers,

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

The problem of what to do next?

Sun, 13 May 2012 17:52:42 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

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

Mother's Morning Song

Sun, 13 May 2012 12:01:17 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

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

More on Romney's character: a thug-bully: "atta girl"

Sat, 12 May 2012 11:59:25 GMT

Dear readers and friends,

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? he and a group of other young men threw another young man (gay) to the ground and with a scissors cut off his hair. Then he took it upon himself to heckle the gay young man in class when he'd tried to speak. Romney would shout: "atta girl!" 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

Maurice Sendak dies

Wed, 09 May 2012 11:39:29 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

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

Elizabeth Badinter, The Conflict

Tue, 08 May 2012 17:07:41 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

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

The murder of Kenneth Chamberlain

Sat, 05 May 2012 11:24:37 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

On my my main Wordpress blog I wrote about the murder of Trayvon Martin and linked it to the sudden outgrowth and acceptance of lawless murdering of people through stand your grounds ("shoot first") laws; I likened these new laws to the acceptance of lynch mobs so prevalent in the US throughout the 19th century and into the 1930s where mobs of (white) people instead of going to court to try someone accused of a crime simply hung him (or her). It was transparent ploy to act violently by one group of people who had the power and privilege to on other groups of people or individuals helpless against them. The transparent pretense is the person with the gun killing the other person is afraid for himself and is acting in self-defense, and has the right to decide on the spot he (it's always a he) is in the right.

I am not alone in expressing outrage and horror and desolation and fear at what this meant. The murderer, Zimmerman, was finally taken into custody, arrested after weeks and weeks of delay, and will now be tried but since he has been let out on bail, the way the case is talked about in the media, it seems that the man will go free and not pay for this crime since the powerful in this society want to have such "laws" (permission for ordinary citizens to kill). The laws have spread because the National Rifle Association and ALEC (a reactionary powerful group) have sent lobbyists with big bribes and pressure to pass them across the US in states where groups of people are wedded to the gun culture. They want not only to own guns, and hunt animals, but the right to use them against other people.

But it seems that even this kind of transparent pretense was not necessary for Kenneth Chamberlain. A black man in his sixties with a bad heart, he was unlucky enough to have a battery-operated device around his neck which was to alert medics if his heart began to fail. Alas, he rolled over in his sleep and a group of police were sent to his apartment. He became (rightly) very frightened and would not let them in. They -- none of them black apparently -- became indignant and broke down his door. When he would not kowtow to them but persisted in trying to get them to leave his apartment, they tasered this man with a heart attack going on. They stun-gunned him. When this apparently made him hysterical, they killed him. Shot him dead. It was alleged he had an axe at first, but it appears the police had the axe or crow bar to break down the door. It was alleged he had a huge knife; now it seems he terrified (?) the police with a butter knife.

I watched the video and listened to the tape of Chamberlain trying to protect himself from the police. I heard one police officer yell "nigger" on the other side of the door as he let Chamberlain know they were determined to get in. I heard the phone calls to the officers who told the phoning medic to mind her own business (they were taking care of it). I heard the man's sister put off as she tried to offer to come to help the man. The 60 year old man was in his underwear and looked like he was shaking. There was no weapon. I heard his cries and pleas. He never did cry "mercy" because probably they would have laughed.

Chamberlain's son and his lawyers have tried unsuccessfully to get these police officers indicated and arrested for murder. They have now failed. We cannot know the evidence that was presented to the grand jury which declined to indite but it is common apparently for juries to refuse to indite police, I remember the Rodney King incident where there was a video of the police beating this man mercilessly and the jury inured to the video after a while, did not convict. It was an all white jury, King was black,and the officers black.

The supreme court has now said police arresting someone have the right to strip search that person (humiliate, terrify, tie down even if there is no evidence of any crime. They are acting in self-defense and against terrorists is the excuse.

At the time I did not understand the significance of the incident where a black professor, Henry Gates, was arrested in his own house by a police officer who said he had the right to because he suspected Gates did not have the right to be there, because Gates resisted arrest. Gates would not kowtow right away. He at first did not produce papers showing he owned the house. Apparently a woman had seen Gates having trouble with his key getting into this fancy house. The wikipedia article I linked in says both Gates and the officer were equally responsible for the incident almost leading to the maiming and worse of Gates. This is like when Yvette was in school and was bullied I was told she was equally responsible for somehow inciting the bullies.

Now I do understand. As a black man you are in grave danger in this US country from the police (and the huge imprisoning system and its Draconian laws increasingly set up to fill prisons with long-term prisoners, mostly black because private companies want to have people in their prisons to justify their fees and they handle these people by the torture of solitary confinement). And an ordinary citizen you are in danger because the supreme court, the ordinary courts, and the norms at large allow police can do anything they want to you too (man, woman, child), if they claim self-defense. I include children because increasingly punitive school norms are emerging which give very young child no second chance if they somehow disobey or displease an authority figure or break a rule deemed important by the authorities. They can be suspended automatically and thus hurt (lose out on school work, be made to feel bad about themselves, ostracized).

I have had the personal experience to know of a disabled person who was bullied by a cop because the person was so upset that she almost was run over by a car (she jaywalked); when the car swerved and did not kill her, the people in it got out to express distress not anger. When they saw the police officer growing irritated with the person because she did not produce the "right replies" right away, they fled. Luckily she is a small white female and was just "warned" aggressively, left to be frightened .She does not drive because of two others such incidents with police officers who pulled her over and bullied her for going too slow. Occasionally news stories tell of how police were exonerated by their conduct to a disabled person and the person rightly put in prison or on probation because they were "difficult," threatening. Actually put in prison too.

Sylvia

The real problem with marriage

Fri, 04 May 2012 13:26:45 GMT

Friends, the real problem with marriage is once Person A marries Person B, Person A despises Person B. After all, Person B has married Person A. It shows just how desperate Person B must've been. It's like when a club accepts you .... Sylvia

May Day

Wed, 02 May 2012 03:01:04 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

Just finished watching Amy Goodman's newshour and reading and watching on line the news of this May Day. I listened to Chris Hedges, author; Amin Husain, editor of Tidal magazine and a key facilitator of the Occupy movement; Marina Sitrin, author of "Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina" and a member of Occupy’s legal working group; and Teresa Gutierrez of the May 1st Coalition for Worker and Immigrant Rights.

I leant how drones work. A drone is a precision missile sent by a flying object. It cannot murder someone individually. What it is is a bomb sent to blow up a house where some targeted person lives. In his journalism Samuel Johnson said, that if people could learn to fly, they would soon be killing one another from the sky. That's what happened in WW1. And this is what we've come to. The US bombed huge areas of Vietnam, and now the US wipes out house by house.

I saw some heartening photos of the different demonstrations around the US and wished I were at one of them. A rare group of police marched alongside Occupiers in San Francisco. For the most part the police were roughing people where they could, menace, threaten, obstruct. I loved the sign "Fuck the Police". I saw nurses for patient care, people uptown for legalizing immigrants, demonstrations near Madison Square Garden, Bryant Park, up and down Wall Street, around the country. One for making the wealthy and corporations pay their taxes and a fair share too. Banks had barricades around their doors and huge cement buildings. Good to see.

I was sent these today:

How the Oakland, California poliice treated their fellow citizens who are trying to get better pay for all

A good moment in Meridian Park, DC -- a May pole dance

Bogota, Columbia -- man rescuing an injured boy

I so rejoice that all these people came out -- for decent living conditions for all, decent wages for every single person and/or family and friend group on this earth, for health care for all, for humane living spaces appropriate to human communities. For liberty. For the right not to be murdered in your house. I'm with them heart and soul.

Sylvia

A needle artist

Tue, 01 May 2012 13:43:56 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

As I decide what to wear these days, knowing I will be going out much less (now that term time is over), and change my clothes until I'm in that endurable outfit which is right for the weather (not easy in Virginia) and looks okay on me so that I can not cringe too much when I look in the mirror, I remember when I was a girl how my father would needle me over such behavior. The mocking tone, the ridicule. What fuels a desperate kind of rage is the sense of what I fool I was to have been so shamed, anger at myself for not turning to him, and saying, bastard, what's it your business. And remembering how many years such shaming controlled me when I was dressing.

His needling of me was an important factor in my anorexia. And yes when I wrote a couple of short stories, age 15, he was deprecating at best. A mess of mediocrity I was, could do everything a little and nothing very well. Like him. A close friend for a year (age 21 in Leeds) marvelled at this use of alliteration to put me down.

I am angry at my self for not speaking up and countering many such incidents. "What a dog!" to a actress on TV (the center of _Jewel in the Crown_). Was it her function to please his eye?

If only I had thrown these things off decades ago,
Sylvia

_That dog_: he ran away; women without men ought to be out there working from Day One

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:11:16 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

For May Day:

That's right. Italicized. It's Romney's Achilles' heel. Romney's real self, his dog knew. How he treated his dog. Apparently it did no harm to Bush fils that he murdered a young woman on death row and laughed in public at her pleas to him. But it does harm to Romney. Also that his wife never worked a day in her life for a boss who was to give her money for it. I vow to start making blogs on both of these.

The man without a heart. The woman who lived an utterly privileged existence and Romney seems not to know it. Of course she does and preens himself on it. On his keeping her. What he's sure all women who had not got a man to support ought to be out of the house and working for money no matter how little, with their children with no mother to care for them from Day One. Day One is the day she gives birth. Children of women without men don't deserve mothers.

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

Translations

by Adrienne Rich

December 25, 1972

You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she's a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter ~
bringing food to our famine

or the satellite
of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call
from a phonebooth

The phone rings endlessly
in a man's bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She'll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy
and will in her own way ,
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this w:ay of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political

***********

When they arrived in Canada, the dog ran away. Who would not? let us all run away from this "businessman" and his obedient wife.

Sylvia.

Reading at night; why we read what we read: Graham, Scott, Austen, Trollope, Crabbe even

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 03:22:31 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

In two days teaching is done. What is the hard thing for me -- though paradoxically I often enjoy it, am exhilarated, it's a strain, an ordeal -- will be over until very late August. And then just one section for the fall, one I've taught many times before. The admiral used to insist it was not over until he finished the finals, read and graded papers. But then he sat there so sternly watching them. I don't.

And in the meantime: the last couple of nights I've been able to read and I remember what I read during the next day. The book has been Winston Graham's Demelza, and so I plan to go on -- maybe up to the 12th novel. It's a true delight to my mind to be able to lose myself in these books at night. I want to return to blogging about them but am not sure where to begin as I made a false start on the movies and would have to say erase a couple and begin again. I could do it.

My real desire is to try to write a fiction out of these, personating Elizabeth, the tragic heroine who dies half-way through -- and go to Cornwall for a holiday with Jim.

Hayle Estuary, Swans

On the subject of what we do read and blogs, I got a lovely letter from a good friend a few days ago and when I told him I told him I am now thinking of trying The Antiquary he wrote about Old Mortality as follows:

"I am now on Old Mortality which for me is one of his greatest books. It is amazingly relevant to our times as it contains these devastating portraits of religious fanaticism. The interesting thing is how Scott makes these fanatics human. He was as we know a deep-dyed reactionary but still manages to explain, and have a limited degree of admiration for, the Covenanters. He manages this partly by being deeply disapproving of the Government/State forces so he can have two 'wrong' extremes with his hero placed as a rational man in an impossible middle; the hero then ends up on the rebel's
side because of his romantic (small r!) motives, which of course are (in Scott and his time) acceptable. But it is as a portrait of what drives men to horrible deeds (the murder of Archbishop Sharp) and to rebellion which is so powerful. It ought to be compulsory reading for all who pronounce on Islamic fundamentalism but I suspect the vast majority would dislike this reminder of Christian fundamentalism! You would probably be fired from an American university for even making the comparison! (I refer to the story I saw on your FB of the Porfessor who has been suspended). In any event I feel Scott is near the height of his powers in this book. Of course I also love it because I know and love the area in which it is set so well ..."

To which I replied:

Old Mortality is one of Scott's masterpieces; you make me want to re-read _The Antiquary_ and maybe I will. I agree with your assessment. Do you know Francis Hart's Scott's Novel; the plotting of historical survival. It's a good book on Scott: unlike you thought Hart does not tell the full truth about what is shown to us about Scott, only the more upbeat point of view with the other slightly obscured. He has Scott a liberal and teaching us tolerance but within this frame it's your insight he shows. W/o tolerance we are at another's throats. I did finish my biography of Walter van Tilburg Clark -- you would like it. he was a decent man (like J.L. Carr another writer I did this term). Clark in Ox Bow Incident shows us that the only way to stop one of these violent fanatics is literally to murder him. The man gets himself in charge of a lynching gang and the only way to stop the thing form going forward would be to kill the man. Our hero (a man of compromise) cannot get himself to do this: it might be his high principles, but he feels it's that he hasn't the guts and also would hate himself for murdering someone to stop him from leading group murders. And this time if he succeeded, he'd be put in jail (by the others) and another man take his place. I don't know why I found The Antiquary so good last time so would go back to it to re-explain it to myself ...

We also discussed Crabbe and the paradoxes of reading him. FWIW, Austen could and probably did read each of Scott's novels as it came out and that means she would have read Old Mortality and Antiquary (1816 both) so that's part of my motive. I had returned to Crabbe partly because Austen said she could/should have been his wife because they were so alike in fundamental spirit.

It struck me that I've never written a blog on Scott's work -- so many on the Poldark books and other of Graham's work and the mini-series. (None on Crabbe.). I have told how I own 44 books on or by him catalogued at Library Thing (because I own these),. If you are part of library Thing you can look at this senseless page (there are many pages that make no real sense on Library Thing as people are now allowed to catalogue books they do not own and there is no disambiguation of editions): it's pictures of some of the covers of these books from any edition that comes up first.

I did write about John Sutherland's biography where Sutherland exposed Scott's truly vicious ruthless behavior as a powerful man in the upper class with a central job and ability to influence who was hired on journals and who got to write and what was said (responsible for people being destroyed in their careers) and his mean cruel behavior to his brother for marrying for love when Scott wanted all to sacrifice to family aggrandizement that meant him. But never on that dreadful course I took with Edgar Johnson (all the arrogant man did was read his falsifying book on Scott) nor on the novel and criticism of Scott, on why Scott is so central, unavoidable for literary studies of his eras and the 19th century.

A paradox I've spent such time reading Trollope (all his texts but the extensive journalism and even there I've read a bit and put it online), and even Austen who is finally narrow sexually in her conscious life, writes book with on such a narrow slice on experience literally within such a circumscribed class.

I long to return to Scotland because of all my reading, the lake district similarly, and now Cornwall is my yearning. With Trollope I yearn to visit Australia and New Zealand for real. I used to want to go to the highlands because of Johnson and Boswell's travel books.

Wm Tuner, Scotland

Not to omit the Lake District from Radcliffe and all the romantics.

Wm Turner, Buttermere, Lake District

Come to think of it I've not written blogs on Johnson, only the one paper for the Johnson newsletter. And to some he's a mad-dog reactionary Tory and women who are intellectual are as strange as dogs on their hind legs. There I can tell myself that's Boswell quoting and re-contextualizing. Still no one has refuted Boswell, no one did then.

Well, not Graham, at least there I've got a real liberal and yet yet

Why do we read what we read? Why read? no better way to pass the time. Nothing anywhere gives me the companionship I feel no matter how much this is a product of my own mind. When we are with others, we kid ourselves too and hide and a lot of people I've learned are utterly performative. You reach people at their best, well those who write with integrity, compassion, insight, genuine information. Why read at night? and how one must work to find spirits to be with in worlds they create we can bear to be in and how finally this has to do with 1) what books we can reach. I read Scott and Austen originally because the books were there in my father's library. 2) what courses we are allowed to take. 3) what other people we meet read. I've been able to branch out, reach real women's books that help for the first time, someone like Winston Graham because the Net is here and so I come back to the Internet once again and this blog.

I have to make a plan as of Wednesday. A modus vivendi has to be evolved. New routs.

Sylvia

Coping

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 11:28:01 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

Roundhay, Leeds -- John Atkinson Grimshaw -- it does look like this only not in autumn, in late summe with the northern lights

In the last few weeks I've become aware that I'm back to a state of aloneness. It's a kind of awareness, probably brought on by my now having few conversations on the Net with people on listservs. I post to listservs but get few replies and of these only a few are friendly. On Austen-l in particular of the few responses I allow myself to read it's common to find them subtextually hostile (what I write is "amazing" and where do I get such ideas from -- a way of deriding and dismissing what I write as ridiculous because "way out"). I've learnt from painful experience not to respond to these either. This means I post to listservs in the same spirit as I write on blogs: a kind of public meditation, a keeping of notes which I'm sharing with a few others who may read them.

I also have fewer conversations off-list too. I used to have a number of regular correspondents (too many), online friends (never too many), most of whom I developed from contacts on-list. Sometimes this would be developed by meeting the person outside the Net -- say in a conference, or I"d travel and meet someone or a couple of people I had been very friendly with off-list. These meetings were among the more gratifying of my experiences. As the world turns and people grow more weary of, and disillusioned by this new form of communication, people turn away here too. And I am better off not to indulge in fantasies or experience alienation or performative presences. I do read other people's blogs (usually late at night and intermittently, at intervals when I have the strength or longing or awake brains for it), mostly again friends, and each day go over to facebook sometimes as much as several (say 5) times a day to see what's happening or what's being thought by my circle of friends and acquaintances there. Twitter is less satisfying as it's very impersonal and what is to be gotten there is the occasion URL by someone to a genuinely interesting or informative or insightful essay. I follow only a few people (maybe under 20) and to tell the truth, the few essays I've been treated to this way come from Amanda Vickery whom I am said to "follow." I share these with people on facebook or the Women Writers through the Ages list.

I find this aloneness hard to cope with at intervals, but especially late at night. I endure continually a kind of low-grade depression; the way I cope is work. Like Mr Trollope who quotes Macbeth on this: "work physics pain." I've met so many people who tell me that when they are depressed they can't work. It may be their depression is more of a crisis type. Mine is just this basso continuo (or bassa continua) and nowadays it's combined with an awareness I have a number of Aspergers Syndrome traits. I'm too old to be diagnosed and don't know that I could check two problems in all six categories, but I can click a number in three of them. I now know that was the meaning of my identification with Anne Finch and especially how I named my book on her after one of the poems she used as preface to her unpublished manuscript book:

Pleasures, and Praises, and Company with me
Have their Just Vallue, if allow'd they be;
Freely, and thankfully, as much I taste
. . . .
If they're deny'd, I on my Selfe can live
Without the aids a cheating World can give
When in the Sun, my wings can be display'd
And in retirement I can have the shade.

Someone who dislikes me on Wompo told me early on my tone is "grim." It was an accusation but true enough (though not said because it was true). She's too bright to pull the shallow "lighten up" that I used to hear years ago on other listservs, so resorted to this.. Probably the years of correspondences come from the difficulty I have on coming up to Finch's ideal.

Recently too another obstacle to my way of coping is I can't read at night. Or not much. Sometimes not blog. So I've become a faithful follower of Amy Goodman (Demoncracynow.org) and dwell slowly in favorite mini-series. Just now I'm making my way slowly through Downton Abbey, the second season.

Last night I also listened on the radio to the earliest of the Liszt musical pieces from Annees de Pelerinage (the journey to Switzerland) and read an old county book, Suffolk Scene by Julian Tennyson. Tennyson offers the reader his deeply felt personal observations on the county he loves so much, muses on aspects of its culture, on the physical place, its local history and provides real photographs of real places plus older illustrations.

John Constable, Stoke-by-Nayland, from Suffolk Scene by Julian Tennyson

Tennyson includes sections on Constable, Gainsborough, Crabbe. I read a lyric by Crabbe I had never come across before

Yes, I behold again the place,
The seat of joy, the source of pain;
I t brings in view the form and face
That I rnust never see again.

The night-bird's song that sweetly floats
On this soft gloom-this balmy air,
Brings to the mind her sweeter notes
That I again must never hear.

Lo! yonder shines that window's light,
My guide, my token, heretofore;
And now again it shines as bright,
When those dear eyes can shine no more.

Then hurry from this place away!
It gives not now the bliss it gave;
For death has made its charm his prey,
And joy is buried in her grave. :

This morning I was strengthened by Colm Toibin's essay-review of Julian Barnes's Sense of an Ending where he quoted Larkin. Toibin suggests that Larkin's poetry has influenced English letters after him. I liked especially when Larkin writes he wishes "desperately for qualities/Moments like this demand, and which I lack." It is "somewhere becoming rain". Among my favorite poets are 18th century women, one, Charlotte Smith, also from the south, Sussex, but I'll choose this one for this morning:

From Mary Wortley Montagu who did not give way except off stage:

Philosophy could calm the Poet's breast:
But oh! what cure for those who wish in Vain!
What Lesson is it must restore my Rest?
Let others court the mightly Idol Fame;
Let all the World forget Clarinda's Name,
I could lose all that Avarice requires
Of all that Beauty that the World admires,
This only greife I cannot bear or cure,
The firmness of my Soul gives way,
Some pitying Power behold what I endure

The mornings have improved because at along last the light is there by 6. This morning I could make out objects and the cats' forms by about then. I'm not exiled, not in poverty and pain (as was Lady Mary), but do know" the damage" inflicted by sham, derisive words, ostracizing, by knowing myself not to have "qualities/Moments like this demand, and which I lack."

I regret to say I must go now. Two bouts of 75 minutes. I'm showing the concluding scene of Small Island (Paula Milne/John Alexander with Ruth Wilson as Queenie), we talk of the book (with four short talks over the hours), then me on serial storytelling shall tell them of inescapable identities, and my own disillusion when I came to England: a naive dream of a place I had made an identity out of out of books, and how the characters in the book mature this through hard experience -- we'll discuss gender, race, class, money. Then an hour and one half wait to see and talk to a student. I must be mad to agree to this, but last time she came and she really brought her writing and we had a genuine session where I may have taught her something useful.

It does help me to write about these things. It's a form of reasoning with myself.

Sylvia

A new computer; seasonal Library book sale; summer plans

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 03:29:23 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

Perhaps I should use this diary blog to record the day I got a new computer at last. We bought it about a week and a half ago when my 5+ old computer began to rattle; it was the fan or something more ominous. I had been finding that I was overloading the computer with my saved movies and sometimes it would just freeze up. Not too comforting.

The good news is that while I'm struggling a bit to get used to new icons, more complicated applications (with many more things in them I can do), to re-establish my passwords and usernames on my favorite sites, for the most part this transition has been easy. I have tremendous amounts more of storage room, including a black box for extra storage; the pictures on my screens and the TV are much much clearer; it's now easy to play itunes and use that ipod. Maybe my Luddite tendencies have been overcome -- though much has yet to be learnt.

This weekend we also had our bi-yearly library book sale in our Northern Virginia area at the George Mason Library on Little River Turnpike: booksellers and book lovers and readers come from far and wide to this potlatch to patronize it for four days. Often I've come away with real treasures, quite a stash. I have such a rich library now it's hard for me to find new things I want and this time I was aware of how I can no longer read much at night. So I bought less, but did come home with two Victorian treasures: a facsimile reprint of Dickens's Nicholas Nickelby from the original instalments. This book really never existed before this because when the installments were printed they were saturated with such ads, but when the first volumed editions were published, the ads were not there of course. In this one we see the ads, the pictures, all the printing stuff that surrounded Dickens's text. It includes a long essay by Michael Slater on the composition and monthly publication of the book accompanied by yet more illustrations and pictures connected to the book, either heads of the characters, or other paraphernalia. Plus immediate context on what Dickens was doing, letters between him and Wilkie Collins at the time. All for $7.

And A. N. Wilson's The Victorians which looks equally educational and very readable. The Wilson book is beautifully produced, sewn, good papers, lots of photographs and illustrations again.

This rare sketch by Canaletto of a gentleman and lady from the back comes from this gathering:

(as will be seen I've not managed to size this one down -- still learning -- yet it is so pretty left larger, no?)

People will say no that's not rare; we see all sorts of such figures in these large panoramas. That's the joy of such a panorama, to pick out the people doing their ordinary things in the midst of life and activity with the vast sky their shelter and order and peace imposed by the perspective and often the larger activity or place painted. Yes, but this is a large sketch, just the lord and lady alone without the paraphernalia.

It comes from the same book I got at that Library book sale I spoke of yesterday morning. As I said, I got picture books. One for the 18th century filled with "vedutas" -- views, beginning in the mid-17th century through the early 19th, with the emphasis on the place of origin, Italy. The first painters were often Dutch. So many artists in it and it covers the period into the early 19th century with French and English painters; lots of Canaletto and his peers of course, and dream landscapes, but many relatively unknown from odd places; all with ordinary people doing their thing within them: Giuliano Briganti, The View Painters of Europe. An early reaction to the vanishing of the religious perspective. Also a book of photographs, sheerly just photographs of the Lake District so I can dream about that until 3-4 years from now when we go for 2 weeks in the summer.

One book, the old-fashioned kind of biography begun by Strachey and his set (Virginia Woolf), the picture analysis which is not big on facts or daily doings. Geoffrey Scott's Zelide of Madame de Charriere is a famous one; Strachey's savage Eminent Victorians, Woolf on Frye. This is John Harold Wilson (who wrote of the theater): A Rake and His times: George Villiers 2nd Duke of Buckingham. I hope to get to it before the next 20 years :) An early Farrar Strauss and Young book.

With Downton Abbey in mind (and how hard it is to get a genuine book on the upstairs people of this hous): Amanda Mackenzie Sutart: Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt. It looks a serious biography, very fat. It comes with a blurb from Francine de Plessix Gray which gives me pause as Gray is so reactionary but she can write and recognizes what is decent biography. I peeked in and it's actually a mother-daughter story. And The Provincial Lady Goes to Russia; or I visit the Soviets. In the 1930s. I recall Alison Light saying the Provincial Lady was far more a depressive and socialistic than people realize. I didn't know she wrote travel books.

Two weeks to go for this term. I've done it: no teaching this summer and am teaching just one section in the fall, one I've taught before. I'll miss more students and fear I won't be varied across the year. But the gain in time, energy and accomplishment at home (I hope) will be worth it. Putting in for social security in the fall too. Ross Poldark (book and mini-series) went over very well, and now Andrea Levy's Small Island too - with students really liking the funny parts. Very much enjoying talk with Christy about later 18th century novels and memoirs on ECW, and Trollope19thCstudies we seem to be having group reads once again. Am joining in on Inimitable-Boz a bit. I don't get to my TBR pile of women's novels though nor Showalter's Jury of her Peers.

I'm about to write my review of Todd and Bree's Later Manuscripts of Jane Austen, the study of which has taught me a lot. The onto "Bad Tuesday" in Austen, infamy in Sophie Cottin (if I can manage it -- I'd like to get into some real French reading again), with a reading of Darnton's The Devil in the Water. I was into Italian for my paper on Ann Radcliffe and profited much from the different perspective. And this summer I will make new pages for my website where I'll gather my foremother poets, my Poldark series, a new Downton Abbey series. Who knows even get back to A Place of Refuge which I must re-see. And send out a good version of my Trollope film adaptations to Literature/Film Quarterly.

In the evenings just now blest with an ability to read Graham's Demelza. The Admiral found a week where optimally we can see a number of plays and operas, rent the landmark place in Vermont, swim in a nearby lake, there's parks nearby to walk in, restaurants. It just outside the Berkshires, say a half hour's drive. Then two days in NYC (take out one to see my mother) and the other two go to the Met museum, Central Park and if any friends can endure us visit.

We've even made a start on making some pretty spots in our garden, and fixing a few things in the house -- found a man who will do medium size jobs!

Sylvia

Out pussycats cannot be said to enjoy gardening ...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:12:38 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

At least not of the noisy variety. We have carried on our intermittent efforts to improve our garden -- flowers, flower beds, doing something about the hedge (the admiral wanted it pulled out) in front of our screened porch. Last week a man with crew came and took down an ill tree in the back; aging, (ominously/) bent, no longer producing more than a few feeble leaves, it was (we felt) time -- as it was also, Caroline pointed out to us, threatening the back of the house.

It was very noisy I was told. (I was out teaching at GMU.) The cats were upset. This time, the girl, Clary, more than the boy. She hid in some deeper place and did not come out until a couple of hours after they left.

Did you know cats have bad dreams? Ian was nervous all afternoon and later when he fell asleep, he yipped and yipped and Clary either was laying intertwined with him or came over to him, laid her paws all around him and licked away.

Today a man with a huge yellow machine that makes the ground quaver came to the back and removed the stump. When the chips went flying and a couple hit the house, we felt noises under the back of the bed which is pushed against a wall that is that back wall near where this tree used to be.

He is gone now. Clary came out at one point when Jim talked gently at her, but looking round and listening headed right back again.

They are not keen on the quieter types either. I had (I hoped) instructed the man I pay to mow (by three phone calls) to remove that hedge and weed under a small baby maple in the front of our garden. Last week he also had the men trim the hedge beautifully and then I weeded myself. I called again and asked for mulch to make three flower beds and asked if they would weed a mess that has grown up in a corner of the yard near the upside down tree they took away two weeks ago. Well he had them come and further trim that hedge and mulch it, re-shape the maple so now it could be photographed for magazine and mulch it, and yes weed the mess in the back. The cats didn't like that much either. They didn't hide though, just kept a low profile.

Snapped when he was not looking and no one gardening anywhere. Yes that's Richardon's Sir Charles Grandison in paperback next to him. He is too big to sit on Richardson's Clarissa the way Clary still can.

Sylvia

A somewhat thwarted Trollopian afternoon: -- at the non-races in a meadow

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 23:49:15 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

Global warming strikes your hardy crew once again. Our Jaunt for the day not as Jaunty as it sometimes has been.

Today was one of the two (twice yearly) point-to-point races that occur in Loudon county on two large ex-plantations, one in the spring (Oatlands) and one in the fall (Morven Park). It's said that the local hunting groups cannot hunt because it's time for the foxes to breed, and during this season time, these groups put on a show for themselves and others. They take horses they have bred to race, hire jockeys and race them over the course of an afternoon. We last went to Oatlands for a meet (as it's called) in April 2010, A Trollopian Sunday Afternoon.

Hablot Brown (Phiz), Can You Forgive Her?: Edgehill meet

Unfortunately, this time was not as much fun or interesting or exciting as the previous times.

We did have our gourmet picnic lunch bought from Whole Foods, washed down with champagne. We did sit and relax in a large great green meadow under a tree and we did have a couple of good races. But therein lay the trouble. Only a couple. Most of the time we were watching non-races. So to speak.

Usually the meet has a race every half hour and for the most part at least 4 horses run. This year only one race had more than 3 horses, one around 3. All the others had either 3 or 2 or (ludicrous) 1: when there's one the horse just needs to walk part of the course and is declared the winner. Of one of these 2 horse races, the two went out of sight and one of the horses "pulled" and threw his rider, so it became a spectacle of one horse having really to do all the prescribed rounds. Then when it was over, not only did a Vet have to be sent, but some sort of examiner as the thrown jockey accused the winner of pushing him or his horse off-course.

Before each race, the custom is to bring all the horses into the paddock. To parade them round and round. This year there was hardly any of this. They came out late and were hardly there at all to watch. There was also less reason to watch closely as there was no bookie. He was sadly missed by us at least. It's not that the admiral likes to lose money (he says the guy is a thief), but that when you bet you become involved. The bookie standing there attracts a crowd, many of the people betting watch the horses with personal interest: which one should they bet on. They read the pamphlet's information on each horse, but they also look at the particular animal. While this is going on, people talk to the jockeys and owners and stable people. Hardly any of this happened.

I saw some young adults I thought were maybe jockeys watching the races from the meadow. I asked one young man if he was a jockey. He looked it: short, thin, yet muscular and dressed in tight pants and t-shirt with strong leggings around his knees. Yes he said; he was irritated because he had come for nothing. He was told to come and he would be paid for the race for the day. (So this is the way some jockeys are paid.) When he arrived, his horse was "scratched" (from the list). So had the others jockeys been -- two young women.

What happened? I asked another man, older, with binoculars, whom I found myself standing with in the meadow. He told me (I have no idea with what reliability) that the winter's mildness had led to a very hard ground and this made it harder for horses to run. Their hoofs were troubled and there were blacksmiths called for, vets. Global warming, that's what? The bookie didn't show up because he knew the horses would be scratched. The admiral said the bookie does not take bets unless there are four horses in a race.

On the way there we were jolly and talking a lot. The drive used to be through lovely unspoiled countryside; now just the last couple of miles or so are that way. Most of the land until near the plantation is now under development (as they say). Malls are springing up; housing developments with houses beginning in the $500,000's (!). Developers will not build small houses and to afford such monstrosities as they are willing to build one must buy far out from DC. A centripetal force is set up as people drive long hours to and fro and are in their communities only at night and in the morning and weekends.

I was thinking to myself still about Trollope as a Silver fork novelist and thinking that for all my protest against it, here was I connecting these point-to-points with Trollope.

John Everett Millais, Orley Farm, Monkton Grange (a meet),

The admiral reassured me, not. We were not the people in the expensive tents on one side of the meadows where individuals and groups can pay in the couple of hundred for a group and proportionate for a family. Those were the hunting groups, the silver forks. No we were more like Jorrock in his Jaunts -- taking time off from the city to join in for $5 a head. As were all the other people in the middle of the meadow with us.

I remembered then that it was only for two short intervals of Trollope's life that he kept horses and could take a horse to a hunt. For most of his life he got up on his days off work when they coincided with a hunting day; after the 37 years at the post office, he had only to take a day off from writing novels. He left at 4 am in the morning on a train to wherever. Once there he rented his horse. In his pro-hunting sketches he describes people who rent as below in class those who own but welcomed fully. In the novels such people are to the side and whenever a novelist named Mr Green joins in (a name Trollope liked to use for himself in his short stories), he is a clutz, falls off his horse, may be laughed at. Nonetheless, Trollope argues that one function of the hunt is to bring people of all classes together. He was not speaking as the aristocrat running the event but the man from the city allowed to join in. He does not show this but other novelists show the people coming along for the day have pretensions rather like the commercial men Trollope parodies in in Orley Farm.

Millais, Orley Farm: "There is nothing like Iron!"

Yet I'd have to say it's true most of Trollope's readers would probably identify him with the horse owners, horse-hunt people because those are the heroes and heroines of his novels that he presents going hunting. Like Austen he writes of characters above him in class.

Bringing in the warm part of the year, and it's been much hotter this past March than it used to be ...

Sylvia

A lasting effect .... what do we read for, what does our reading do to us?

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 17:46:13 GMT

Dear friends,

A lasting effect -- what we read for & what our reading does to us. Do people realize the popularity of Hunger Games and this money-making hit movie (for the day) comes from teachers in the US (and elsewhere) using a "Dorothy Canfield Fisher" list of prizes and on it is this book. I found an old bad dream in a diary entry and thought about it in terms of this teacher's essay, a class discussion we had this week, and a couple on listservs.

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

I found this prose-poem on Reveries under the Sign of Austen for December 4, 2010; it was marked "hidden," and was never published. I'm putting it in public so as to contextualize it by my life as a reader:

I awoke & found I had been dreaming a happy dream, an experience I long for that cannot be. Odd, I continued to be happy. Is this what people feel when someone has died & in their minds they dream of meeting again to do what they used to do togidres. But my heart was beating hard, & I thought it was not good for me, so I arose, went where I could put on a light, and turned to read.

Nighttime, having take a pill to sustain sleep, E.M

Vanessa Bell, The Artist's Daughter

******************************************************
To wrench myself away from my dream of longing I had turned to read:

A teaching experience: In an article I had assigned the teacher showed (unconsciously indicting herself) that teachers choose from lists of books which win prizes or are cited by prestigious groups (right now it's the Dorothy Canfield Fisher award and this and last year's winners included Collins's Hunger Games) without knowing what's in them or what's the agenda of the organization or its funding -- at least the teacher never once said why she thought this list produced good experiences or what was literally the content or themes: it was filled with quotations from students: "the author did a good job of characters;" "it was amazing;" "it was really sad." She also admitted hidden injuries of all sorts happen in dividing classes up and giving them reading-level appropriate books. Kids are stigmatized according to how well they decode a book and the moral inferences they can gather. She says that social identity and relationships are really what's fueling what's happening but all the actions she does in class ignore this. (She's not to blame; unless she teaches to a test she'll be fired.)

In the class when we discussed this essay I was startled to discover that in the two classes a preponderance of students raised their hands and said they chose to read what they did as teenagers to be on the same wave length as their friends! as part of a social identity.

A favorite book in fourth grade

I never did that until I got on the Net and joined reading grouips. When I was in grade school, I became aware one day (I don't remember how) that most children around me read nothing much. I was startled, shocked. Somehow I managed to ask my 3rd grade a teacher about this and she told me (when I also asked) why we read these simpleton dull books and said at home I was reading Nancy Drew and The Secret Garden -- that most of the children in the class read nothing outside the class and what they did read it was really at the level of the books we had in class (Dick and Jane type). I have not forgotten this awakening.

My students were talking about their teen years when they said they read what others were reading - now many do read nothing. Well then too I had no idea what others were reading. I did know their favorite movie star was not Ronald Colman and made it a sort of joke to myself he was for me and I was alone in this across the city maybe, but I never extrapolated out about what that meant.

Ronald Colman, Lost Horizon

Returning to here and now and my classroom of students today: I asked the class: How about the child who uses books to escape others? how about different reading levels? This way of looking at it ignores the child who does read much better than the others as well as the child who reads poorly. It ignores the class the children come from, their parents, what they see in their home. It pretends there is one norm and that's right. Not different social psychological identities.

Afterward in both classes a couple of students came up to thank me for talking as I had that day.

****************************
I had turned to read:

The written dream above comes out of my anguished experiences of family life; over on Wompo as a result of threads about Adrienne Rich and her career success, privileged origin turned to "career risks" (how this morphed into this one cannot trace visibly) insisting really how the role of mother was so wonderful. After detailing harrowing ordeals trying to bring children up, support them, and yet write and read and live as an individual the examined fulfilled life, several have said they'd "do it all over again in a minute" (or a phrase like this), meaning they would not change their basic reaction or the past much. I can hardly think not at all. They all showed how they were forced to ignore their children, or husband or someone who was calling on them for attention, care, selflessness.

My reaction is bare hard simple words because I don't want to be fictitious at all, which I now I rather think was what was happening, people were speaking out of a social situation:

I don't know that I would relive the past exactly as I did it. Of course it's useless (as in the proverb) to cry over spilt milk, but, like many, I still regret much in the past. It's ever "knowing what I know today" but then we can't get out of retrospective. Many, perhaps most autobiographies are written out of a sense of compensation, loss, a need to create an identity against or justifying what was. I don't know that I would do it differently because I'm still the same person in some fundamental ways.

I'm moved by the stories of writing in the interstices. I did that too. One real motive for my translation of Vittoria Colonna's nearly 600 poems was they were short, sonnets, I could do one at a time, a little bit at a time even. It was feasible. Ditto Gambara's.

Yes I kept my door shut when I got a room of my own in my house. Today I have no daughters at home (at least during the day) but I do keep my cats out. I feel bad about the cats too, but I do it.

Looking out my workroom window one winter: what I could see that day from an angle

They had called the thread "career risks" and persisted in this. I tried to substitute enemies of promise but it did not find favor.

Another objection to this header of "career risks" on wompo is women's careers look quite different from men's. The minimum criteria for a woman must be different or we must eliminate say Emily Dickinson and many other foremothers and present women too. The header does suggest an equivalence between writing great poetry and having a successful career. What do we mean by successful career? Are they the same thing? I wrote:

In the 1940s a famous book was written by Cyril Connolly called The Enemies of Promise and what he discussed beyond the pram in the hall (which it seems got in men's ways too) and time-consuming making a living, was what crippled the spirit.

What are the enemies of promise? What leaps to mind for me are public conventional ways of reacting to individuals in their specific contexts which wither and frighten and silence ... Reputation, the need to keep a reputation ... that sort of thing ... who are you writing for, what is expected of the writing itself. Do you think it's your duty to cheer people up ... what is the task of the poet?

*******************
Lastly,

A question my classes and I discussed and we also discussed on Trollope19thCStudies is: what do we read for, and what does our reading do to us -- that matters to us. I had asked which book by Dickens people thought his greatest or was their favorite; failing that, what was his signature book, the one they thought that most epitomized the way his genius was seen. Just at that moment all three criteria produced Little Dorrit.

I found myself drawn to someone who cited Barnaby Rudge using the criteria of a "lasting effect." What book has a lasting effect on someone. If by somewhat changing the course of one's life insofar as our activities are concerned is meant, for me, it might be Trollope's The Vicar of Bullhampton which led me to find the first Trollope listserv, join, and eventually start leading group reads. In a number of central ways it resembles Dr Thorne, the first Trollope novel and book I consciously read as by Trollope.

My favorite Trollope and those I respect most are odd ones, short stories mostly ("Journey to Panama, Spotted Dog, Aaron Trowe, Why Frau Frohman Raised Her Prices") (See Trollope's short stories). I thought last summer maybe Trollope's signature book should still be The Last Chronicle of Barset, but signature books mirror their own times too, so I guess the contemporary ones which were recently filmed are the ones: He Knew He Was Right and The Way We Live Now. I know though when someone asks me, Which Trollope should I read first, I say The Small House at Allington or Can You Forgive Her? followed by Phineas Finn.

A lasting effect for me is probably Austen's Sense and Sensibility, first read at age 13 and returned to around 17. Austen's novel helped shape what I became by presenting an ideal self I could bond with.

Hattie Morahan as Elinor Dashwood -- a favorite still

For The Vicar of Bullhampton I meant it led me to a listserv and then I began to lead group reads and that led to a 5 years stint writing a books and many years now on and off reading Trollope. So that's a lasting effect -- to have become a sort of Victorianist and certainly a Trollopeian if numbers of books read and understood count. His books though, what I found in these, did not change me.

For me looking back it's unfortunate no one gave me the books I needed when I was young truly to help me. Had I read Reviving Ophelia in my teens I could have pointed to that; as it is, one feels silly saying I came across books that changed my outlook and thinking and feeling too when I was in my early 50s. It seems so delayed a development :) I now think too many girls don't reach the books they need in time -- or never, such books never reach them. A group of feminist books in the id-1990s changed me and have had a lasting effect ... And not just that, it deepens as time goes by. What were these? Nancy Miller's Subject to Change, Emily White's Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut, Beatrice Didier, L'Ecriture Femme, a library of female gothic -- and all made the later 18th century life-writings and novels by women meaningful to me

So, for example, at first I would have said (say 2001) that my favorite Trollope was "The Spotted Dog," now I realize that can only be if I blind myself, pretend not to see, the presentation of the wife.

Sylvia

A memory: Anthony Trollope, silver fork novelist?

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 11:51:54 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

Another memory, not formative but telling.

On Twitter I'm a follower of the post-John Letts Trollope society. His fan club in the UK plans tiaras and toff affairs consistently (expensive), cruises in summer (as much as $2000 for the week, that's exclusive of the clothes, fare to the UK); the snobbery is ceaseless. Trollope (I do believe) would have seen through these people and not come to play cards. I think of his crumpled hat, of so much of his fiction's presentation of people on the fringe of the middle class, let alone the top 10,000 as he does call them.

I asked the Admiral, Why does Trollope attract this? Letts was able to moderate it, but him gone and they are back to silver forks again. The admiral suggested I had my clue in my casual phrase. He said that enough of Trollope's novels are the closest of the mid-century Victorian "great" novelists, with readable long books, to the silver fork books of the 1820s. Look at what books are still known and discussing: Barsetshire and Palliser novels. You need only forget about 1/3 of the novels and most of the short stories. What he, the Admiral, has wondered about is why Disraeli is not picked up by such a group. After all, he was also a powerful glamorous man in himself. I responded: the lack of readability as Trollope himself says, but I remember how Trollope anathematized Disraeli and it was not just for the Jewishness. No he hated the book's moral thrusts which are sometimes genuinely political radical. Sybil has working class heroines who have sex outside marriage, drink and dance at taverns and, far from being punished, seem to be enjoying life and marry afterwards.

But my Captain countered with a memory. He asked if I remembered the one Trollope dinner we went to here in the US (it cost something like $260!). It was shortly after the publication of my book. Indeed I did. The only time in my life I've socialized with bankers. There were hot-shot lawyers at the reception. And the only time I was in the super-wealthy Knickerbocker Club. I remembered the fancy dinner with wine flowing. The speakers included N John Hall. Of course they could call on him but when I attempted to speak to him, he more or less was curt and turned away. He has spontaneously written me a couple of times, inveighing against David Case's readings of Trollope (which I love), but when I've asked him for help, he says he knows nothing beyond what's in his books and signs off. His speech was moving, a genuinely in-depth reaction to Trollope. The second was a witty MP who gave a speech that amused and went over very well; I can only recall that he referred to me as "Ellen" as if he knew me, an acknowledgement of my newly published book.

But that's not the core of the memory. It's of he and I walked away from the Knickerbocker down 5th Avenue. We were filled with wine, champagne, food. We were laughing. Dressed elegantly. I had on an evening gown I had bought for the trip to England where we went to Lincoln's Inn for a dinner at the UK Trollope society. Emerald green with thin straps. Also high heels. He had on the tux and fancy shoes he had bought for that occasion. (We did not buy new outfits for this second time in the US.) It was a chilly night and he wrapped his jacket around my shoulders. He remembered how we were walking from one club to another for at that time the Williams Club was still going.

Inside the downstairs halls are all marble and there is wide grandstair with carved bannisters leading to the second floor

(The Williams Club as a building is no more. They ceased attracting enough people to use it often enough really as a club, and so a remnant of the membership has now goes to the very fancy modern Princeton building. The whole nature of the Cultural life spilling over from Williams College is gone.)

Well, saith the admiral, this is what these silver fork people want to experience; they want this lifestyle and Trollope is their intellectual-cultural mascot. He approved. He was part of it. A site. Watching Film Adaptations is not enough. They don't count?

The admiral admitted not only had he enjoyed but it seemed a special moment. There walking so carelessly from one building (for privileged people) to another down the grand avenue leading away from the Park.

I do not remember the walk much only that indeed we walked away and were for the moment cheered and that I wrote about it on whatever Trollope list Mike Powe was hosting at the time.

It is true that the Trollope Society of NYC nowadays often makes the focus of its meeting an academic style paper from a college teacher, literary scholar in the wide area they can choose from. I do regret not living in NYC when I think of these sessions. I don't have the money it would take to get there in one day, listen, and home again. I would if I could.

Sylvia

Formative experiences

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:08:42 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

I've been thinking about my and the Admiral's political outlook and how it differs from our daughters'; more, how it differs from many people I know. Here and there I see an eye which recognizes or sees what I or he does. I do assert that the Admiral and I share an outlook quite coterminously: it may be seen in our instinctive (out of experience too) reactions to images on walls; we like and dislike the same paintings, drawings, houses.

I wondered if the one I thought his was the one that mattered. I thought so but wasn't sure. When I asked yesterday, he smiled and said oh yes.

Southampton, England. 1961. He was about 13, in grammar school, a so-called public school, one of these schools that offered fully academic programs for boys that passed the 11+ plus rich boys who boarded. It was pouring rain, cold, dank, one of these raw English days that go through your bones. He and his classmates were all dressed up in their best school uniforms. Lord Hailsham, secretary of education (aka Quintin Hogg) was due to come to the school or some such thing. The whole school was hauled out; every one was to stand to attention, alert, and salute, as this luxurious Rolls Royce glided by. They stood there for well over a half hour waiting.

Drenched. And then back.

He never forgot it. It was among the first experiences of his that he told me about the first week we met and lived together in my flat in Leeds. He told me how he hated that school. Caned three times, once subordination, once for smoking in that school uniform, and once for making his f's perversely.

Bronx, New York. 1955. Mine: I was 9. I had had a hemmorhage, bled like a pig, due to an tonsilectomy and removal of my adenoids by a doctor my father thought looked like a butcher the moment my father laid eyes on him. I woke in the night in a wet bed, laid there for a while and then maybe called to my parents. I was rushed to a nearby hospital. As I was taken in I saw in the eyes of everyone I would have to be "put under" using ether. How I hated that from the operation. Nausea. Well I ran for my life, up the stairs.

I still remember how I knew it was useless. Running running. Down the hall. They were so much bigger than me. They caught me, held me down and forced this cup over my face. Sickening smell, stars, headachy feel.

I woke to see my father by my bed asking the people to let me stay the night. Nope. Why not, I was so frail and he was afraid the bleeding would start again. Oh no, said they, cannot be. I can't stay because we have no insurance. No insurance card. My father offered if they would wait until morning, 8:30 am when the banks opened he'd go and get $200 cash, whatever they wanted.

Nope. They offered to get us a cab. All heart.

I remember being carried by my father out to that cab and then it goes blank.

I never forgot it. It's an intense memory to this day. My mother had nagged my father into that life-threatening ordeal. There was no need. That morning I was operated on I was put in a room with rows of other helpless children of foolish lower middle class parents. Gold star on their medical records. She'd manage it again. Two teeth pulled and 3 months with braces at exhorbitant rates. Somehow my father broke free and when the guy was procrastinating 3 months and charging us with no braces on (a rest period we were told), he demanded the guy remove the braces in a high scene -- it's so hard to go against the God-doctor -- and we left.

The surroundings in which both of us grew up. He a long narrow attached house, three small bedrooms in a row upstairs (all unheated), downstairs a railroad arrangement of front room (TV, fireplace), dining room (where the Admiral sat listening to radio) and kitchen area, in the back of which was an indoor loo (there since the Admiral's mother inherited enough to pay half as the UK gov't met the other half).

Me the Bronx, circa early 1950s. South East, Charlotte Street, over a bar. My mother pinning clothes to a line that was hung between our apartment house window and another apartment house window on the other side of the street. People i the streets poor, mad, hurrying about their business but for the young.

Last night I watched a tape of Martin Luther King, the night before he was killed. He had come to Memphis to help organization black sanitation workers. I wondered what his formative experience. "I'm not fearing any man tonight ... he cries half hysterical .

Sexual outlook is another set of experiences. I have found I can't tell mine here though I've tried and tried. It's too painful and probably will arouse very different sets of feelings from identification among many -- not that identification may be the response to the above, but I can tell them. I did find analogies when I was in my 50s (for the first time!) in Mary Piper's Reviving Ophelia; the first book to arouse them but not clearly so as to understand them and profit from the understanding, Richardson's Clarissa (age 18).

Sylvia

Some Thoughts on Traveling

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:54:03 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

From a thread on Trollope19thCStudies:

I've spent huge amounts on travel -- with the Admiral in the 1990s (when he was earning a lot). And bought stuff that's useless.

But another aspect of the CFP is how much we take away that's intangible and transformative. My feeling is to experience the latter we have to stay away for at least a few months and at a minimum get away from packaged experiences. Get off the bus, get away from other Americans, stay in the hotels the people of the country stay in (better yet rent an apartment in an apartment building filled with natives), shop in their stores, eat in their restaurants, and try to get to know a few people there.

An intended year's stay in the UK changed my life -- As in Reader, I married him (the young man I met there is now my husband of 43 years) and stayed on for another year and more. Traveling in Europe for a month or so now and again, all over the UK for 2 years between 1969 and 71, and then again mostly the UK and once to Italy (5 weeks) and twice to France (3 weeks) taught me a lot. I came back with books. The latter times I met friends who I had met here on the Net; the former times friends from university and when I was alone I just made friends (so to speak).

The problem for the US person nowadays is to go outside western Europe and its satellites is dangerous because of US foreign policy. Rightly we are seen as little atoms of a state gov't and miltia which devastates other countries to keep them safe investments for the super-wealthy and US people become targets. Who would I tell how against all this I am. I'd love to go to India but think I would find myself in bandbox. Could I really see Turkey?

I'd go to Austalia and New Zealand -- love to go there -- because of my reading of Trollope and books written by people there -- but the Admiral says it's too far and won't listen. So I probably will not get there.'ve been able to give my girls a little feel of their English background. We went to all the neolithic sites once; we've stayed in Landmark places with them. We stayed in Hampton court place the gardener's house for a week. 3 weeks in London with a friend. A week in Bath. Devonshire, a gatehouse. A 15th century manor hall in Somerset. So they have something of their originating roots genetically & culturally.

I want to go back and stay in Cornwall and return to the Lake District. I hope Yvette will come with us to some of this.

Sylvia

Dream list of what I'd teach; or A Counterfactual Blog (What if?)

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 12:37:10 GMT

Dear friends and readers,

On Trollope19thCStudies, a friend and I got into a conversation about William Godwin and he preferred St Leon to Things as They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams. On C18-l a listserv of 18th century people, members have been talking of how they assign John Cleland's The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, popularly known as Fanny Hill. I'd love to participate but have learned that when your views are not popular or usual (for me I'd never assign it to a class as I've met young women who are understandably distressed by it and also have had some destructive encounters with students over novels and films that are sexually graphically frank).

The innocent virgin from the village come to town: the employment office (from Davies Fanny Hill Alison Steadman as the brothel-madam hiring Rebecca Knight as Fanny)

But the two remarks prompted me to write this this morning:

Caleb Wiliams is the three hard-worked polished narrative; it led to Frankenstein, Les Miserables: the pursuit of the hunted one is the paradigm first seen in Caleb. I've assigned it to students 3 times and each time at least one-third of the class got through the first volume; that's over structured and abstract (rather like one of Samuel Johnson's openings), but once they get into the 2nd volume, it's like Dracula. You can watch them turning the pages in absorbed riveting reverie as they follow the intense voice of the hunted down.

I will never get to teach any course in the 18th century novel but for fun a couple of times I've made a list of which books I would assign. Using the old "heroic reading" paradigm, where students were assigned 10-11 books a term (what I experienced in Queens College, CUNY, in the 1960s), here's my list of _sina qua non_ cut down to fit the time allowed (that is choices have to be made):

Lafayette's Princess of Cleves, Defoe's Journal of Plague Year, Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Prevost's Manon Lescaut, Richardson's Clarissa (abridged), Smollett's Humphry Clinker, Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest, Godwin's Caleb Williams.

If I dared I'd put in (lesser but important historically and good reads and not too long at all), Sterne's Sentimental Journey, Diderot's Nun, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, and, if I were to go outside the fiction, to the influential and important non-fiction, Johnson's Life of Savage and the Penguin edition of Fanny or Frances Burney's Journals (an abridgement of all 20 into one not very fat volume).

The paper would be to watch the 1997 BBC mini-series Tom Jones and write about it.

John Sessions as Henry Fielding when we first see him in the meadow (near opening of the 97 Tom Jy Simon Burke, Metin Huseyin, and Suzanne Harrison.ones,

Items to regret not being able to do as geneuinely worthy or significant or showing some type of fiction as too long or too many or don't make this cut: I admit all French: Montesquieu's Persian Letters and Graffigny's Letters of a Peruvian Woman, Rousseau's Julie, the New Eloisa (Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise)

I also omit Voltaire's Candide and Johnson's Rasselas on no good ground at all, except maybe not novels, philosophical political tracts.

Sylvia