Author: Kat

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Colette’s The Shackle: A Feminist Predecessor of Fifty Shades of Grey

Renee Nere et Jean, illustration from 'L'Entrave' by Colette, Editions Mornay, Paris, 1929 (w/c on paper)

Renee Nere et Jean, illustration from L’Entrave’ (The Shackle) by Colette, Editions Mornay, Paris, 1929

Men don’t read Colette.

If you do, let me know.

Whenever I write about Colette, women chime in and comment that they love her work.  Of course I have no way of knowing if these commentors are really women, but I assume that most of them are.  All the stats collected by WordPress (and one thing I like about WordPress is that it limits the available stats, protecting our privacy to an extent) will not tell me if you are male or female.

At a dinner party one night a couple of male friends let me know how much they dislike Colette.  They began to discuss French philosophy and literature. When the name Michel Foucault came up, I practically put my head down on the table.  Women hardly ever talk about Foucault.  I had never been to a party where people talked about Foucault.  I have never read Foucault.  I will never read Foucault.

Then the discussion became a little more general.

Red-faced from bicycling in the sun and bored because I had gone half an hour without speaking, I suggested that Colette was one of the best French writers of the 20th century.  One man declared that her books are overwritten.  Another said they were too simple.  Another said he had disliked My Mother’s House in French.

And so I helped the women clear the table.  It is not that I gave up:  I just didn’t want to argue.

The Shackle ColetteI reread Colette’s The Shackle today partly because this is my Gal Lit week, partly because this erotic novel is short, and partly because it is a feminist predecessor of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy.  (N.B. I read 50 pages of Fifty Shades of Grey, and found this throwback S/M novel about a submissive virgin and her sadistic billionaire lover not only execrably written but actually sad:  self-respect is not a priority for heroines in chains and handcuffs).

Renee Nere, the narrator of Colette’s autobiographical novel, The Vagabond, is a strong, intelligent heroine who, after her divorce, gives up writing to work as a music hall mime.  In the sequel, The Shackle, Renee has inherited money, quit her job, and gone on vacation to the Riviera.  The novel begins with her seeing her ex-lover, Max (“Big Ninny”), strolling with his wife and child along the Promenade in front of her hotel.  She is not exactly jealous, but she is aware of her sexual frailty.  She had not imagined him married.

Renee loves her solitude but finds it hard to be alone.  She spends most of her leisure with friends she has met in the hotel:  a couple, Jean and May, who have a violent sexual relationship, and Masseau, an opium addict.  Renee herself abstains from both sex and opium.

Renee knows more about May’s sexual relationship with Jean than she wants to.  May comes to Renee’s room frequently to tell her about the latest “three o’clock…grand beating up.”

Look at that,” she said abruptly, thrusting her downy arm under my nose.  “That’ll be black tomorrow.”

I examined, with the proper interest, two yellowish-brown bruises cricling each of May’s arms like bracelets.

“The filthy brute!” she muttered, not without deference.  “And, you know, he ruined my dress, a dress that cost fifty louis–all because I felt in a lucky mood and I wanted to go and play at Monte Carlo.  He’s going to find out what it costs him, that dress!”

Thirty-six-year-old Renee considers twenty-five-year-old May very young and silly. At the same time she is aware that their fighting, which goes on in public as well as in private, is an integral part of their sex life.  When May moves into her own room after a fight, Jean admits his attraction to Renee; Renee wretchedly flees to “chaste Switzerland.”  Four days later he and Masseau track her down; Renee and Jean take the train to Paris.

Colette’s description of the consummation of their relationship in Jean’s house in Paris is both erotic and humorous.  Renee admits she likes a little bit of bullying.

Then I… reserved my strength to fight him off, for he had begun to overwhelm me; he was climbing round me, paralysing both my arms.  He made himself purposely heavy, he made himself as clinging as a tenacious weed.  I could not get up or even uncross my legs; I struggled conscientiously, half-pushed over backwards, supporting myself on one arm and muttering under my breath:  ‘This is idiotic…this is really too idiotic’ until my simple, female sentimentality suddenly burst into that resentful, indignant cry: ‘You don’t even love me!’

She finds it restful to give in to sex.  She enjoys but is also annoyed by his mastery.

Arrogant, completely assured of his triumph, he displayed a barbarous contempt of methods.  Hair, skirt, fine linen were all rumpled and crushed together as if he had not time to undress me.  It was I who muttered, in shame:  ‘Wait!’  It was I who undid buckle and ribbon and removed pins that might hurt; it was I, lying on my back on the carpet, who made my slightly bruised body a cushion for Jean.

Colette doesn’t take herself too seriously, and I much prefer her lyrical eroticism to James’s porn.

The novel is not just erotica: Renee also explores her fear to commit to a serious relationship. Although Jean wants her to move in with him, she finds solitude at her hotel a relief.  Anyway, they rarely talk.   Can a healthy relationship be based on physicality? she wonders.

Renee is also haunted by age:  her skin is no longer as beautiful as a young woman’s, i.e., as beautiful as May’s, her chin is no longer so firm, and she fears that Jean’s seeing her at her most imperfectly disheveled  will extinguish his love.  I find her vulnerability touching and very realistic

And so what will happen with their relationship?

You’ll have to read it to find out.

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“Gal Up!”

Woman reading clip art vintageThis is Gal Lit Week at Mirabile Dictu.

What do I mean by Gal Lit?

It is a feminist thing.

Gal Lit embraces many genres.  It can be pop or literary women’s fiction that doesn’t get widely reviewed, a biography that falls out-of-print, or simply a book that doesn’t make The New York Times “Summer Reading” list.

Ideally fiction helps us identify and empathize with the problems of different kinds of people.  This year I have tried to read almost gender-blind:  male, female; who cares about the sex of the writer if the book is good?

Naturally I recognize elements of myself in my favorite women’s novels.   I am not a pantomime artist, nor do I have any dramatic talent, yet I  identify with Renee in Colette’s The Vagabond: I imagine myself chatting with her Music Hall Friends, walking the bulldog, Fossette, and her exasperation at the persistence of her fan, “Big Ninny.”   When I read Willa Cather’s tragic novel Lucy Gayheart, I understand the disconnect between living in Haverford, Nebraska, and Chicago. Lucy’s passionate devotion to her music in Chicago sets her apart from her friends in Haverford, and the depression that follows the death of a musician she loves is inexplicable to them.

Last year I read 68.5%  books by women and 31.5% by men.  This year, oddly, gender equity has struck.  I’m astonished to find that 44% of the books I’ve read so far are by men.  Perhaps it is related to my reading more reviews more carefully from a wider variety of publications, instead of just skimming book news and book gossip in Publishers Weekly and The Guardian.  (Usually I am better informed about the e-book price-fixing lawsuits than is strictly necessary for the common reader.  It’s far, far better to read reviews.)

I do like to declare a week of Gal Lit occasionally, even if there’s no reason, even if it’s just because it’s the second week of July, and what else do I have to do this week?  The post-feminist generations won’t have the faintest idea what I mean when I say I haven’t noticed significant changes for women  except in the workforce, and that I believe women have moved sexually backwards, judging from the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey and Twilight.  Reading  Gal Lit can strengthen our understanding of the direction of our lives.  Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest books, Sheila Ballantyne’s short stories and novels,  and Erica Jong’s novels still have much to say to us.

As Erica Jong says in Parachutes & Kisses.

Things were tougher now, however, because the girls had more things to do, heavier responsibilities.  Babies to raise and incomes to provide.  Isadora’s generation of affluent Jewish girls from central park West had liberated themselves, she often thought, right into being as burdened as  the black women who took care of them in Central Park when they were kids.  They had to earn the bread, bear the babies, and at the same time pretend to their wandering studs that they were merely courtesans, hungry for love….The men hoped from flower to flower, and the women, having insisted on their right to be superwoman, now had that firmly thrust up their asses (or upon their breaking backs).

Please tell me about your own favorite Gal Lit.  And, just to get started, here are two Gal books I’ve very much enjoyed.

book-atownofemptyrooms Karen E. Bender1.   Karen E. Bender’s A Town of Empty Rooms. I wrote here:   “Bender’s poignant novel (is) about a Jewish family who moves from New York to a small town in the South,… After her father’s death she has a mini-breakdown and steals $8,000 worth of jewelry on her boss’s corporate charge card.  Fired from her job and blacklisted, she moves with her husband, Dan, and two children to Waring, North Carolina.  Everywhere there are signs like:  If God Is Your Co-Pilot, Switch Seats.  They are one of 100 or so Jewish families in town, and Serena is drawn to religion when she drives by the Temple.  But Dan, who doesn’t want to be viewed as Jewish, longs to be accepted and won’t go ro Temple.  He becomes a Boy Scout leader.”

The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke2.  Birgit Vanderbeke’s graceful novel, The Mussel Feast, translated by Jamie Bulloch.  I wrote here:  The mercilessly observant teenage narrator, her brother, and mother await their father’s return from a business trip.  The mother is preparing a feast to celebrate his much-vaunted dream of promotion, which is expected to coincide with the trip.  And so Mum prepares a mussel feast, though she doesn’t much like mussels. The narrator dislikes mussels, too…  Time passes, and their father doesn’t come home. …They begin to drink the wine, and as the hours pass, they get drunk.  Gradually they express their hatred for the father.”

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Bicycling with Janet, Who Is Reading Aristophanes

A Rails-to-Trail bike trail.

On a Rails-to-Trail bike trail.

This trail is almost hypnotically flat. It is almost pretty.  Prairie grass grows on either side, and though the steel windmills in the background intimidate, they are our ecological future.

My friend Janet rode the trail with me today.  There are two reasons for this.  One is she lost her mind.

Her long-distance boyfriend flew in to visit on the Fourth.  While we sat in the back yard trying to glimpse the fireworks (we saw nothing), he asked if she still intended to go on the six-day cross-state bike trip they signed up for last spring.

I sipped iced tea. I was riveted by this scene.  I knew she didn’t have a bike.

“Of course, I’ve been riding with Kat, haven’t I?”

“Um-huh…” Somewhere between um-hm and huh-uh.   I went into the house to get the pitcher of iced tea.

Today she borrowed one of our bikes.  She bought some gear, so much gear, a cycling computer, heart monitor, a headlamp, and special sunglasses.  She has two weeks to train.

IMG_2545After 10 miles she sat down on the side of the trail and ate a protein bar.

“God, this is terrible.”

“Drink a lot of water.  And it’s really better to go slower.”

Biking is dull. It’s just hours of riding, eating, riding, eating, riding, and eating again, because you need fuel.

We were famished when we finally reached a small town.  The store was closed.  Everything was closed.  We found three pop machines, two of which were out of order.  While we huddled on a bench under an awning sharing the one Diet Coke we had coaxed out of the machine, she revealed her second reason for needing to talk to me. In her Classical Literature class, she is reading Lysistrata, the play where the women withhold sex as an anti-war tactic.  She hates her professor.

lysistrata aristophanesJanet and I are former hipsters.  We love Lysistrata.  She is surprised her aging hipster professor (whom I remember vaguely) dares in this day and age to say, “Lysistrata is a play about f—–g.”

I burst out laughing.  Yes, this is probably not allowed in the 21st century.

He also gave a lecture about the customs of ancient Greeks.  He said all Greek women had dildos and carried gigantic leather penises through the streets.  “I think he meant at festivals and plays,”  I said.

I am a Latinist, not a Hellenist.  In my Aristophanes class we read The Clouds and The Frogs.  The professor skipped Lysistrata altogether.

Janet’s prof also said some of the best translations of Greek and Latin poetry are by writers with no knowledge of the languages.  When one student protested that this was ridiculous, he said, “Some people look ridiculous when they take their clothes off, others look great.”

That student complained to the department chair..

Well, yes, this is 2013, not the Summer of Love (1967), so people are shocked.  He is unconventional.  Some of what he said was obviously misunderstood.

“Do you like the class?” I asked

“Moderately.”

He’s retiring next year.

She lies down on the sidewalk and says, “How am I going to ride 468 miles?”

“Maybe not do it?”

Her computer told us we had ridden 12.5 miles.  We turned back.  Altogether we rode 25 miles.

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Fourth of July

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–Declaration of Independence

Cars are lined up and down the street.

People are drinking and smoking in their back yards.

Some will go see fireworks later.

Some will twirl sparklers.

The nail salon sign says, “Close 4th of July.  Happy Independent Day.”

I barely think about the Declaration of Independence.

All men are expected to read Thomas Jefferson or biographies of Thomas Jefferson.

All women are expected to read Laura Ingalls Wilder (a children’s writer).

I read aloud parts of Reporting Vietnam (Library of America) to the English class I taught.

“They lied to us,” said General Westmoreland.

There were some Desert Storm vets in the class.

There were men and women who had served prison terms for drug possession.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wouldn’t have gone down well with these students.

9/11 burned while I was teaching.

We didn’t know what had happened.

My boss, upset about the jingoism, dropped one knee to the floor and pretended to cock a gun.

“I served in Vietnam,” he said.

He used to play in a band.

I was never in a band.

I once dated the manager of a band.

Bands define us.

I don’t remember the “Star-Spangled Banner.”

I dropped one knee to the floor and recited, arma virumque cano

It’s an anti-war poem.

If I see another Civil War artefact on Antiques Road Show, I am turning off the TV.

I have never been to Gettsyburg.

There are many military crosses in the cemetery.

The U.S. went to war in 2003.

I dropped a friend who watched it on TV and thought it was entertaining.

I taught some anti-war poetry.

It doesn’t take much to impress people.

I question how independent I’ve ever been.

I barely made a living off my liberal arts education.

It took me years to realize I would never make as much money as my husband.

Love and relationships have been more important to me than money.

Most of us have married.

Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Doris Lessing and Erica Jong have made very little difference.

Most women have children, but very few of my friends do.

You are supposed to do everything if you are female.

Some of us had to read and write.

We couldn’t do everything.

When the waitress told me she was joining the Army, I felt numb.

pro patria mori?

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Anniversary

I reminded my husband that it was our anniversary.

“What made you think of it?”

Slightly incredulous:  ‘The date.”

Two days before the fourth.   Okay, now we all remember.

I get roses on Valentine’s Day, nothing on our anniversary.

No words can describe the tenderness wedding comic bookI bought us an anniversary gift of a new novel, Andre Aciman’s Harvard Square, in case we run out of things to read.

Often we go to a restaurant to celebrate, and often it’s Red Lobster, but last night we ate a delicious salad with poached chicken, veggies, apples, and feta cheese in front of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.  (I was the chef and sous chef.)

We got married at the County Courthouse on a hot July morning.  I finished a freelance story an hour before the ceremony, not having the sense to tell the editor it was my wedding day.  Then I hopped into a skirt, a summer top, and sandals, and we rushed downtown, stopping at a copy place to fax my story before heading to the courthouse.

At least twenty couples crowded into the courtroom and sat on wooden seats like church pews.  Most were moderately dressed up, the women in dresses, the men in suits or button-down shirts and khakis; only one woman wore a wedding gown.  Judge Ralph J. Perk, Jr., the son of the Mayor whose hair caught on fire in 1972 , officiated over the group wedding.  (“That’s Ralph Perk, Jr.” we all whispered. “The son of…”) Did anyone know him for who he was himself?

There was something sweet about the wedding.  You concentrated on the words; there was not a formal party.  Everybody was happy; it’s not usually like that in court. We were one another’s well-wishers. So many people getting married!

Did  Judge Perk read out our names as he pronounced us man and wife?  Not that I remember.  There were too many of us.  But maybe.  My husband thinks he did, but he doesn’t remember, either.

Now, by the authority vested in me by the State, etc., I pronounce you to be husband and wife and extend to you my best wishes for a successful and happy married life together.

So charming! Just the words.

Some would be happy; some would have regrets and be back in court for a divorce, but for the moment everybody was thrilled.

Married in our thirties, in a photo booth on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland,

Photo Booth, Ocean City, Maryland

The judge announced at the end that he only had time to be photographed with one couple per “session.”  He picked the cutest, youngest couple in the room, and his “assistant”  (bailiff?  what was he?) snapped the picture and gave them the Polaroid. Not that I had a camera, but I remember feeling annoyed, because, well, weren’t we the cutest couple?  Okay, so what, we were in our late thirties, maybe our faces were pointy now, maybe we would never be VERY young again, but it didn’t seem right that we weren’t photographed with the judge.

We didn’t have our camera with us, so we have no wedding picture.

A few months later we took the pic above in a photo booth on the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland.  It’s kind of dark, and was my face really that pointy? But at least we’re smiling and kissing!

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Andre Aciman and Others: School Days in Literature

I enjoy novels about Yale, Brown, Princeton, the Seven Sisters schools, Oxford, and Cambridge.

But I never read novels about Harvard.  I don’t know a single person who went to Harvard.  It is the Ivy League school I consider the most elitist.

aciman-harvard-square-203x300So I am very surprised to find myself spellbound by Andre Aciman’s new  novel, Harvard Square.  It is beautifully written–I am going slowly because every word and sentence are so perfectly balanced–and it is possibly a classic about outsiders.  I’ll let you know when I’ve finished.

The narrator, a Jew from Alexandria, Egypt, is spending the summer in Cambridge.  He is lonely, has failed his comps, and his friends are gone.  He hangs out at Cafe Algiers, where he meets a contentious, politically aware Arab cab driver.

The narrator tells us:

Cambridge was a desert.  It was one of the hottest summers I’d ever lived through.  By the end of July, you sought shelter wherever you could during the day; at night you couldn’t sleep.  All my friends in graduate school were gone.

As he becomes more involved with Kalaj, the two of them earnestly discuss women and Paris, their favorite city, so very far away from Cambridge, and he becomes even more detached from Harvard. He reads and rereads seventeenth century lit for his comps, but he doesn’t believe he’ll pass. Does he like books at all?  Does he like many books at all, he wonders?

Aciman writes so gorgeously that I began to remember my university days, which, as Aciman’s narrator knows, are better when you look back than when you are there.  Here is a list of books about “school days.”  Please add your favorites!

brideshead revisited waught1. The long, langorous first part of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, set at Oxford and about Oxford, is my favorite university novel ever, and I know it’s yours, too.  Charles Ryder meets Sebastian Flyte one night when Sebastian, drunk, puts his head in the window of Charles’ first-floor digs and throws up.  The next day he apologizes with flowers; Charles begins to spend his days with Sebastian, eating strawberries, drinking wine, learning about art and decoration, and never thinking about work.  Sebastian is a Catholic, his family is very rich, and when Charles visits Sebastian at Brideshead, Sebastian fears he will lose his friend.  Sebastian does poorly at Oxford and his mother wants him watched:  Charles must take sides.

Tea at gunter's Haines2.  In Pamela Haines’ charming “middlebrow” novel, Tea at Gunter’s, Lucy, the narrator, occasionally accompanies her mother to Gunter’s, an old-fashioned tea room in London.  Her mother reminisces with her ex-fiance, Gervase, who was mentally shattered in the war, about Patmore, the estate where they grew up.  Later, when Lucy attends secretarial school, she has very funny adventures with the eccentric teachers.  She also meets Julia (think Sebastian’s sister in Brideshead Revisited), and before she knows it, she is involved in a whirlwind of aristocratic parties.

braided lives by piercy3.  Marge Piercy’s Braided Lives.  Much of Piercy’s remarkable novel is set in Ann Arbor, where the brilliant heroine, Jill, who grew up in Detroit, attends the University of Michigan in the 1950s with her blander cousin, Donna.  Later, in New York City in the 1960s, Jill becomes a radical, and must face the repercussions of needing an abortion before Roe v. Wade.

On my next two lunch hours I see a doctor a day.  Each gynecologist examines me, painfully, and tells me I am pregnant.  I try out my routine, including telling each of them I will kill myself.  They tell me they can call the police; they tell me I must have the baby; they charge me one ten dollars and one fifteen; they lecture me on morality.  I am late back to work both days.

night-and-silence-who-is-here-pamela hansford johnson4.  Pamela Hansford Johnson’s  Night and Silence Who is Here? is one of the  funniest academic  satires I’ve ever read.  An English playboy is offered a job at a New England college where he spends most of his time foraging for food, as there are no stores or restaurants and he can’t drive.  He is also determined to do no work.

foxybaby5.  In Elizabeth Jolly’s Foxybaby, the middle-aged heroine, Alma Porch, a writer, takes a job teaching drama at a “Better Body through the Arts Course”–an arts program with dieting– at an obscure college in an abandoned Australian town.  Very funny and strange.

6.  Charlotte Bronte’s Villette.  Lucy Snowe, the narrator, teaches at a girls’ school in Brussels in the 19th century.  She doesn’t attract the man she is in love with, but does fall in love with another man.  This is Bronte’s best book:  the realistic Jane Eyre sans Rochester.

ann-veronica h. g. wells penguin7.  Vance Bourjailly’s Now Playing at Canterbury.  A group of professors put on an opera at a Midwestern university.

8.  H. G. Wells’ Ann Veronica.  Ann Veronica, a biology student, seeks independence from her father and runs away to London, where she finds work in a biology lab to support herself, becomes involved in radical politics, and falls in love.

9.  Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.  Classics majors commit a crime.

Tam_Lin_by_Pamela_Dean10.  Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin.  Pamela Dean’s novel Tam Lin, set at a small college in Minnesota in the ’70s, is a whimsical chronicle of an undergraduate education.  Part college novel, part offbeat fantasy, it is A Midsummer Night’s Dream crossed with  Donna Tartt’s The Secret History–with a dash of the ballad Tam Lin.

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In Which I Read Thomas Hardy & Play Scrabble

Mayor of Casterbridge hardyThis weekend I reread Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge.

Hardy’s six most dazzling Wessex novels, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure constitute a beauitfully-crafted chronicle of rural and town life.  Hardy’s lyrical style is so elegant that many years ago, when a famous writer asked me who my favorite writer was, I absent-mindedly said Thomas Hardy.

Our grandfathers liked him, he said.

I was mortified.  You can’t tell a famous writer you like Thomas Hardy.  You have to like William Gass or Georges Perec.

But who writes more beautifully than Hardy?

The Mayor of Casterbridge begins:

One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot.  They were plainly but not ill clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had accumulated on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now.

The opening is evocative of a tale, almost of a fairy tale, or a long narrative poem:  “”not ill clad” (litotes),  “the thick hoar of dust,” “a disadvantageous shabbiness.”

Farfrae dancing with Elizabeth-Jane

Farfrae dancing with Elizabeth-Jane

Hardy creates a beautiful ring composition in this exquisite novel about the rise and fall of Michael Henchard.  At the beginning, Henchard, a hay-trusser, has come to the large village of Weydon-Priors in Upper Wessex with his wife and child to look for work:  he gets drunk and sells his wife, Susan, to a sailor.  Many years later, when he has risen in the world as the Mayor of Casterbridge, Susan, widowed, and her daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, come looking for him.  Henchard and Susan pretend to be distant relatives and keep the secret of their original parting.   They remarry.  At the height of his powers, Henchard is a farmer as well as the mayor, but envy is his downfall when his esteemed manager, Donald Farfrae, begins to surpass him.  Donald wins the affection of Elizabeth-Jane, and later marries Henchard’s former mistress, Lucetta.  By the end, we have seen Henchard working again as a hay-trusser, because he has almost, if not quite, sold his daughter by a lie.

Novels of downfall are not the kind of thing you talk about in the back yard.   My cousin the librarian, who recently broke up with her boyfriend, chats by the hour and keeps me from reading novels of downfall.  If she can’t find me in the house, she knows I am reading in my chair by the hedge of bridal wreath.

Wonder woman, when are we going to be married?

She’s just not in love with him!

My cousin cannot stand to be alone.  She is so talkative that I find it difficult to get anything done:  even if I do the dishes she is somehow in the way.  She reminds me very slightly of myself during my divorce in my late thirties.  I spent a lot of at my friends’ houses, I was very sad, and I couldn’t meet the right men:  my friends all had stories about women who’d simply put ads in a local magazine and then married orchestra conductors  etc., etc., but I didn’t believe them (nor should I have).

My cousin picked up a new man a few weeks ago, a green construction remodeler.  He is charming and sweet, but somehow we all know he is just a date.  She needs someone almost manically charming, like the super-fast-talking “internet cloud” czar, as we called him, who kept cheating on her.

“We’re here!”  She and the green remodeler have brought fried chicken and coleslaw from the HyVee.

Usually she eats at French restaurants.

We have a little picnic.

Then they bring out the Scrabble game.  They play Scrabble for hours.  They play words like zuz, an ancient Hebrew coin.  They have apparently both swallowed a Scrabble dictionary.

They also change all the values for the Scrabble letters so that everything is worth about a million points.  They play for money.  Recently I found them playing strip-Scrabble in their underwear.

“For God’s sake get drunk if you have to but you can’t sit around naked in my back yard.”

My cousin begs me to play Scrabble with them.

“Only if you let me use Latin words.”  I say this to discourage them.

They’re not wild about that, but I do allow them to double-check them in the Latin dictionary.  I practically have to teach them Latin so they will understand that the endings I put on the words are legitimate.  I am so bored that I can only stand it for about half an hour.

And then one day it’s over.

He green-remodeled her tiny house.

He wanted to move in.

She said No.

She saw her old boyfriend at the HyVee.

He was charming.

She wonders if she should get back together with him.

I say he doesn’t play Scrabble.

She says she’s sick of Scrabble.

He’s unfaithful, but I can’t say that.

It is difficult to find a good boyfriend.  Even Donald Farfrae in The Mayor of Casterbridge rushes off with Lucetta, the mayor’s former mistress; Donald is easily discouraged by an abrupt note from the mayor from walking out with Elizabeth-Jane.

“Maybe you should read some Hardy.”  Am I thinking of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, or what?

But then her old boyfriend phones her, and she looks so happy.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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Colin Farrell’s Latin

I planned to do some research in the Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa Library.

The library was eerie, the first floor under construction with plastic sheets for walls and wires popping out everywhere.

The Special Collections rooms on the third floor were closed.  It hadn’t occurred to me that they would be closed on Saturday.

It was raining so hard that I didn’t feel up to leaving the library right away.

I lounged around on the fourth floor with some classical journals.  I read a few articles and reviews.  And then I came across an article that all of you will want to read, because it is very, very funny: Monica S. Cyrino’s “I Was Colin Farrell’s Latin Teacher” (Classical Journal, Feb./March 2012, Vol. 107/No. 3).

Monica S. Cyrino, a classics professor at the University of New Mexico with an interest in film, received an e-mail from a producer asking her to write a few lines of Latin dialogue for Colin Farrell.  He was playing a vampire in  a remake of the movie, Fright Night. (The film was being shot in New Mexico because of the state’s tax breaks.)

Colin Farrell in Fright NIght

Colin Farrell in Fright Night (2011)

Farrell, who is a bibliophile (one of Cyrino’s students spotted him buying poetry books at a Barnes and Noble), thought his seduction lines would be sexier in Latin.  As he dropped onto a dance floor and whisked away a teenage girl, he was supposed to say:  “You just need a taste.  You’ll see.  It can be like a dream.”

Cyrino translates the Latin with a graduate students, and is invited onto the set to meet Farrell, but there is a lot of hanging around, and since Farrell, his stand-in, and his stunt double all wear black jeans and a black shirt, it is difficult to tell one from another.

She has just reached into a cooler to get a bottle of Evian when Joy Ellison, his vocal coach, brings Farrell over to meet her.  “Nice to meet you, love!”

My hand was still stuck in the cooler.  I yanked it out and held it in front of me, dripping wet and frozen, and for a minute I was in a state of acute aporia.  Should I wipe my soaking hand on the $300 cashmere top that I had so insouciantly donned for the day?  Or should I give my cold, wet hand to Alexander the Great?

Colin Farrell, Alexander

Colin Farrell, Alexander

Colin laughingly shakes her hand.

“You’re on set all day, right, love?  Will you be here later so we can talk about the Latin scene?”

Later they go over the sexy Latin together, and he asks her if they can reverse the last two words, so the line ends with the word somnia (dreams):  Solum necesse est sapias.  Percipies.  Par ac somnia.

“It doesn’t change the meaning, now does it, love?”

And she immediately thinks he knows Latin, because how else would he know that?

“Nah, love…They stopped Latin and corporal punishment the year before I came up…and ya see how I turned out?”

All right, now here’s what I’m thinking.  He’s teasing her!  Because, honestly, if he doesn’t know any Latin, why would he want Latin in a vampire movie? How would he know about the Latin word order?

Doesn’t this sound like a dream?

(The Latin lines were cut from the film.)

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Back Yard Books: Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks

Portrait of a woman reading by Lillian Mathilde Genth

Portrait by Lillian Mathilde Genth

I do not read beach books.

I am not at the beach.

I am reading in the back yard.

The back yard is better than the beach.

Clover, squash, bridal wreath, geraniums, tiger lilies, catnip,  peonies, cucumbers, and coleus flourish in our organic back yard.

The wind blew the umbrella off the table so I am sitting in my Adirondack chair.

Witchy and windblown, I read.

I have read several  “backyard books” this summer.  I flew through  Thomas Mann’s fast-paced 700-page classic, Buddenbrooks.

Buddenbrooks was a bestseller in its day.  It is the story of the decline of a German merchant family.

In the introduction to the Everyman edition, T. J. Reed says Mann’s complex first novel is reminiscent of the social novels of  Balzac, Tolstoy, and Flaubert.

Buddenbrooks thomas mannOne can see the resemblance between the openings of War and Peace (which I recently finished) and Buddenbrooks. War and Peace begins with a soiree where the most important people in society meet to gossip and discuss Napoleon’s war in Europe. Buddenbrooks begins with a homecoming party at the Buddenbrooks’ gorgeous house in the Meng Strasse.  The  whole family loves to entertain:  Consul Jean, his wife, Elizabeth, his parents, and their three children (who  grow up to be the main characters), stolid Thomas, witty Christian, and the mischievous girl, Tony.

Mann’s characters converse more lightly than Tolstoy’s, but his characterizations even of minor characters are superb.  Herr Jean Jacque Hoffstesde,  “the town poet, …was sure to have a few rhymes in his pocket for today…”  Herr Gratjens, the broker “was forever rolling up a scrawny hand and holding it to his eye like a telescope, as if examining a painting–he was generally recognized as a connoisseur of fine art.”  Therese Weichbrodt, the headmistress of a school, is described as a hunchback:  she “was not much taller than a table.  She was forty-one years old, but, having never set much store by external appearances, she dressed like a woman in her sixties.”

Thomas is the responsible son who takes over the business.  He is stern and inflexible, but not unsympathetic:  he cannot marry the flower girl he loves; his grain business falters when he is middle-aged;  his soophisticated music-loving wife is out of his league; their son, Hanno, is musical and sensitive; and he is very ill in his forties.

But Thomas has no empathy for others.  He tells Uncle Gotthold, who is a failure and who married a woman of a lower class:

If I had been like you, I would have married my shop girl years ago.  But one must keep up appearances….  You had too little momentum and imagination, too little of the idealism that enables a man to cherish, to nurture, to defend something as abstract as a business with an old family name–and to bring it honor  and power and glory.  This requires a quiet enthusiasm that is sweeter and more pleasant, more gratifying than any secret love.  You lost your sense of poetry, although you were brave to love and marry against your father’s will…Didn’t you know that one can be a great man in a small town?  That a man can be a Caesar in an old commercial city on the Baltic?

Resilient Tony is probably capable of helping with the business, but her career is to be marriage:  that is woman’s lot.  She  falls in love with a medical student, but her father forbids the match; he steers her to a man who looks good on paper. When they learn Grunlich has faked his financial accounts and is in debt, she comes home and gets divorced.  Later she marries a sweet, rather eccentric, badly-educated man of her choice, Herr Permaneder, with no better result.  He cheats on her, and she comes home again with her daughter.

It is all part of the decline of the family.

Their brother, unconventional Christian, loves the theater, going to the club, and back-stage women.   He cannot work, though the family does not understand this. He feels sick most of the time.   He goes to London and South America to escape the family firm, but he never lasts long at a job. He doesn’t see the need to work when the family is so rich.  Later, Thomas cuts off his funds when he learns Christian is wants to marry his mistress.

Thomas’s son, Hanno, dominates the last part of the book:  he grows up hating school, has a musical bent, and a friend who is also artistic.  His father does not understand him.

We hope throughout the novel that the Buddenbrooks will survive.

“You’re making good progress in that,” my family said several times to oblivious me, reading.

“Uh huh.”  I didn’t really hear what they said.  It’s that kind of book.  Utterly engrossing.

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Are You Pretentious? What to Read with Your Glasses on

"Women Reading," Picasso

“Women Reading,” by Picasso

It’s hot outside.

I don’t care.

It’s summer.

We are the only people in the neighborhood who don’t have our air conditioner on.

I don’t want to be shut up in the house after the long, cold spring.

I am spending every possible free moment reading in the back yard at “our cafe table” under the umbrella.

My cousin, the librarian, hangs out here regularly since breaking up with her boyfriend.  Now she sits in my chair in the back yard, reads my beach book,  Saki’s The Unrest Cure and Other Stories, and drinks my iced tea in my favorite plastic highball glass.

I go in to refill her glass. When I come back, she says, “Kat, you are so pretentious!”

It seems she had scrolled through the bookmarks on my computer and didn’t at all like the sound of the TLS or Abebooks:  Depressing Russian Literature.

“What the f— is Rogue Classicism?”

I look at her through my glasses. Actually, bifocals.  I  wear my bifocals to read.  And to see.  “I’ve got Hulu.”

“Do you actually watch TV?  This stuff is about reading.”

I have not watched anything at Hulu for a long time. I do not admit this.

Chatting to a librarian is a bit like entertaining an N.S.A. agent.  She has now analyzed my bookmarks (reading, reading, reading!) and will no doubt post some of them hilariously on her Facebook page.

Shopping is far more important than reading, she says.   She wants to take me to the mall for a makeover (Lizzie Arden), to the hairdresser for some of that scrunchy silver stuff that makes highlights even in white hair, and find me something less t-shirty-and-jeans to wear.

Well, I’m not doing any of that.

Instead I will make a list of  What to Read with Your Glasses on.

Here are my Top Six, and please recommend some.

1.  The TLS is edited by Peter Stothard, author of my new favorite book, Alexandria:  The Last Days of Cleopatra.  For those looking for intellectual entertainment,  TLS is livelier than, say,  The New York Review of Books, which I tried in vain to “unsubscribe from” for many years.  The TLS covers a broad range of books:  it has  a classics section (does any review publication in the U.S. have that?), with fascinating reviews of scholarly books and Latin texts; many novels in translation are reviewed  among the  fiction and literature; and then there are the history books, art history, politics, nonfiction, criticism, autobiographies, biographies, and a crossword puzzle.

2.  The Washington Post book section, edited by the indefatigable Ron Charles, who also tweets, reviews, and makes satiric videos, is the best review section in the U.S.  Michael Dirda and Jonathan Yardley are the other two brilliant staff critics.  There are also many excellent reviews by freelancers.

3.   Largehearted Boy is a music blog that features authors’ playlists, articles about books, and daily downloads of music.

4.  Reading Copy is the  Abebooks blog.  It has book news, photos of beautiful book covers, occasional reviews, and book lists.

5.  Arts & Letters Daily from the Chronicle of Higher Education provides links to articles, reviews, and debates at other publications.

6.  At the Willa Cather Foundation website,  you can find Willa Cather  news, virtual tours of Red Cloud, where Cather grew up, and read back issues of  the scholarly Newsletter and Review.

I hope you have your glasses on!