News of the (whoops! past two) Week(s)

We were all set last weekend to spend a night at the sand dunes in west Juab County, but reports of freezing nights scared us off, despite John pish-poshing our pampered city-ness. So instead we met up in SLC for the afternoon before Chris' All-State Choir concert at the tabernacle. Rob, Betsy, Ethan, and Amy came with us to Temple Square and surrounds to look at the flowers and the new construction at City Creek. In the end the flowers were a bit scanty, having just been pulled up for the spring bulbs to be set (I presume), but the visit was still fun.

We spent some time in the two visitors' centers. When Betsy asked Ethan who this person was, he shouted, "JeeJee!"

John was very civilized and appropriate...

..until the urge for a nap overwhelmed him...

...below, in the most public spot in Salt Lake. "Would you lie down on the steps of St. Peter's Cathedral in the Vatican?" I said to him. "Or on the floor of the Taj Mahal? This is just the same." He is shameless.

It was fun to spend time with the kids.

I think maybe my pretty new blue and teal scarf was not quite as cool as I thought it was. No, the scarf is OK, it was the rest of me. Sigh.

Betsy, Ethan, and Snoopy. Snoopy has his own sign. Ethan talks and talks, orally and with his hands (ASL). Maybe we'll learn sign as he does.

Ethan and Auntie Amy:

Rob at one of the new fountains next to Deseret Book at the new City Creek development. While there we saw John's new book (one of a collection of essays on Fathers).

Betsy, Amy, Rob, and Ethan skipped out on the concert, but that was OK because we got to sit by Liz and Alan
and Tana and J.Lynn. In fact we ate dinner before the concert at the nearby JBs with Tana, J.Lynn, and Shane, who was also singing.

They wouldn't let us take photos during the concert, so this one was taken beforehand, and about a third of the choir is missing. J.Lynn took pictures and video during the afternoon practice session, however. Here is a video of part of one of their songs. Pretty impressive!

J.Lynn took this photo of Chris. Liz and Alan's Frost is bottom right.

We did our writing group the next day at Charlotte England's cabin. I took my camera but forgot to take photos. We have been participating in the writing group for twenty years now.

This week was my first chance to swim since surgery (since a long while before that, actually. A side effect of endometrial cancer is that you're not so comfortable swimming). Anyway, it was great! I don't know why the pool is so underused in the evening, but there have only been four or five other people in the pool whenever we've gone. I think it has helped get me off my metabolic plateau. I've now lost 41 lbs. Even though my blood sugar is still above normal, it's much better than it was right after surgery. We'll see how it progresses. My blood pressure is usually between 110-125/70-80. I went to visit mom and dad at the farm on Friday and all we talked about was medical stuff. I am now officially Old.

Several of us, including Sergene, went to see RED on Saturday. Extremely silly. I've still got a crush on Bruce Willis though. Then John, Sergene, and I went to see The Magic Flute at BYU. Here for your listening pleasure, is the Queen of the Night.

Bushman's Joseph

I'm reading Richard Bushman's Rough Stone Rolling biography of Joseph Smith Jr., and making rather heavy going of it. I'm only on about page 120, so my impression may not be entirely fair.

I've always been irritated with and suspicious of Joseph Smith, for unclear reasons (to me) that go beyond the ask-for-your-best-friend's-wife-as-a-spiritual-test and marry-14-year-old-girls problems that preceded institutional polygyny. It's odd that Joseph bothers me so much when Brigham Young, who was an absolute tyrant and much more objectively offensive, doesn't push my buttons. So I am interested in learning about the real Joseph and getting a feel for who he actually was. Unfortunately, reading Bushman is like walking uphill into a strong wind of adulation, as he lays out briefly the non-believer's case for a naturalistic explanation of events and then immediately counters it with long passages expressing how amazing, surprising, and miraculous Joseph's accomplishments (and personality) were.

It's sort of like the anti-Mormons, who want it both ways: Joseph was an uncultured, illiterate, incurious country bumpkin and a machiavellian evil scoundrel who perpetuated an unbelievable fraud. Bushman emphasizes how Joseph simply couldn't have known this or invented that, but then goes off into raptures about what an incredible genius he was. It's like fighting my way through a swarm of hallelujah-humming bees to try to see the real man.

Maybe I need to get further along in the book. Right now I find myself rolling my eyes and slapping the book shut just a little too often.

Devon's New Book

I skyped with Dave and Devon yesterday, and they showed me her new book. And her next book, based on her dissertation, will be finished by the 1st of September and published next year. Dave said he'd bring us a copy when he comes to visit at the end of the month.

Internalized Misogyny

Talking to Amy and analyzing the interesting and multivarious personalities in the fam, and I remembered a thought experiment that my 1977 women’s studies class introduced me to—“how would you be different if you were the opposite sex?”—an interesting question (but not what I’m doing right here, although I think I might be a lot more like Dave). So my thoughts ran in a well-worn pattern: No non-gay (or otherwise non-traditionally gendered) man I’ve ever met has considered this question. Because male = normal human whereas female = other, yada yada [insert traditional second wave feminist rhetoric here—“second wave” meaning “straight white educated middle-class older”]. Why does that equation/non-equation resonate so closely with my experience? I thought to myself. Because when I was very young, I answered, I read omnivorously from Freud and Jung to Hemingway to Vonnegut to Dostoyevsky to Dickens to Mailer to Joyce, amazed at their insights into the human condition, and my “click” moment of consciousness raising was when I began to notice (at probably about 13 years old) the occasional statement such as: “women are not like us,” or “the female experience is diametrically opposite what has here been described”*, or the even more obvious and simple absence of women from the awareness of these great thinkers except when sex was concerned (an absence painfully and blatantly apparent after the moment of that "click").

Which was as far as I had gotten until now. Pain—so how am I human then?—and profound alienation from the Enlightenment culture and the canon and so forth that I loved, that I was steeped, soaked, and buried in, because dang, when Freud talks about defenses against anxiety, I get it, gut-deep, and when Melville talks about the whale coming up from fathoms below the boat, and even when Hemingway looks with male eyes at his lover’s pregnant belly and then out at the hills like white elephants, I get that as well, even at 13 or 14, because I am human too. It was my feminine protest—that great phrase Freud invented meaning (to him) resentment at not having a penis, but which really means envy of all the advantages and power in this culture associated with being male.

But all these years I never really took it to the next level. It felt like simply too much injustice to deal with—I wanted to point at the sexism and keep pointing until it was finally, adequately, acknowledged. Or I took these men’s unconscious subjectivity and bias too seriously, at face value, and couldn’t move beyond it.

Here is my recent 51-year-old emotional insight: In reality, these great thinkers were describing the human (inclusive) condition, under varying circumstances (and “male” was not always the most important one), and therefore their insights were/are applicable to me, because, although female, I am human too. Their sexist blind spots are regrettable, but totally and completely understandable, given the era(s) in which they lived. I don’t have to be wounded by them anymore. I’m not being betrayed. Their sexism--that is, their belief that men were human and women were "other"--is not much different than Joyce being Irish or Tolstoy Russian, and I can look at it, acknowledge it, and move on. I don’t have to believe it anymore.

That's the weird thing that I didn't know, and just barely realized. I believed it for too long.

*not that these are actual quotes, but similar ones wouldn't be hard to find

Reagan Worship

I have always been bemused at the idea that Ronald Reagan was one of our greatest presidents. I lived through that era, and remember a very different reality than that promulgated now by our right wing friends. Here is a review of Reagan and the Eighties that seems a lot more accurate to my memories.

I [Heart] Austen

OK, so now you know I've been surfing the net all afternoon instead of working on case notes and novel revisions. But I really like this. Check it out, English majors. It's an early valentine.

Nostalgia and Roses

We bought our play tickets at the half-price ticket booth at Leicester Square, had shamara (sp?) at a little Lebanese cafe between Leicester and Piccadilly, and took the Bakerloo line up to Regents Park to visit Queen Mary's rose garden. I took off my shoes and put on new sticking plaster (bandaids, in the British version of the common language which separates us--Mark Twain), and John had a nap on the grass. Many of the roses were still in bloom, and there was a whole new flush of late summer flowers that I've never seen there before. We walked by 221b Baker Street on our way back.

We saw the end of the run of Shaw’s Pygmalion at the Old Vic. It was a classic, well done, funny, and more similar to My Fair Lady than I remembered, except for the ambiguous ending, which I like better than the musical. Henry Higgins was great, as was Eliza Doolittle--and I’m cheering for her to marry Freddy, as soon as she is able to support him in the style to which he is accustomed.

Sitting behind us at the theatre, people with the classic toff accent complained about the Labour government, albeit from the other side (and then told silly jokes to each other as they got increasingly drunk after the interval).

August 6 At the British Library

I have never made it over to see the manuscripts at the British Library, so today while John went off to find the houses of Dickens and Johnson, I walked just up the street to see what was there. Imagine my thrill to read, in her own hand under the dim preservation light, Charlotte Bronte's final paragraphs, starting:

Reader--I married him. A quiet wedding we had, he and I, the parson and the clerk alone present.

I had a surge of fangirl insanity as strong as when Alan Rickman bumped me on the knee at the National Theatre (have I mentioned that before?)

I was paging through the leaves of a facsimile of the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, when a large Anglo-Indian gentleman said from behind me, "That can't be the original manuscript!" I dropped the page guiltily and said, "no, it's for children to look at and people like, um, me." He sighed, and said, "Did you know the manuscript came from S_____?" (I did not understand the name.) "There is a movement in S_____ to get it back. It has traveled Europe for many years, but it properly belongs in S_____." "Do you live there?" I asked, still having no idea where he was talking about. "Yes," he said. "But we will never see the book in our town again."

We pondered that fact for a moment. "St. Cuthbert is buried at Durham," he commented. "Yes, I've visited his tomb, and that of the Venerable Bede." "You saw it? At the back of the little chapel?" We spent some minutes discussing the cathedral at Durham before he walked away, the only member (perhaps) of a popular movement to return the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels of St. Cuthbert back to the town of S_____.

August 1 Farewell Dinner

I was sorrowful that as a non-Hardy Society member I was not invited to the farewell dinner in the Corn Exchange, so then decided to just ask, and they let me in! I sat next to Stanley and John, two retired bachelor Anglican ministers who live together (at Stanley’s description) in a former monastery near the Barbican [London] that was set up by a wealthy London commoner as a public school and a home for impoverished gentlemen. The public school moved away in the 19th Century, but the home for poor old men (John’s description) is still there. We discussed modern architecture and the social services provided by our respective churches.

I also visited with Patrick, a retired teacher, who on hearing I’m a Mormon asked if I am one of [my John’s] many wives. I’m always tempted to say yes, but didn’t. Stanley asked if the news was accurate about the polygamist group in Texas marrying underage girls, and when I said probably so, he was quite shocked.

At the conclusion of the dinner, the Society auctioned several lots of memorabilia re: Hardy, under the guidance of a famous auctioneer, who was very funny, and made people buy things at prices I’m sure they were not happy with. John and I sat on our hands. Miriam, a slight lady with a gray pageboy bob, told me afterward that she was surprised to see us not bid on anything. “We expect the Americans to buy it all,” she said. I‘m not sure if she approved or disapproved of that. “Not with this exchange rate,” I said. And not at John’s teacher’s salary.

The Odor of England

From one vantage out of our bedroom window is the Dorset Cereal Factory, a handsome red brick building which engenders the only traffic on our street--Peverell Avenue East--that I’m aware of. Last night walking home after visiting the Holy Trinity Catholic church on the High Street and peeking into the rectory garden (if “rectories” are what they’re called in Catholic parishes), I noticed something giving me strong waves of joy and nostalgia--the smell of the air. John thought it might be the cereal factory, and it is a sort of a breakfast smell. I wonder what the yellow fields are across from our window. I don’t think it’s strictly wheat--it doesn’t smell like my dad’s farm. Maybe it’s just the scent of grass hay. Whatever plant or combination of plants it is (and I noticed it on the other side of Dorchester too, so I don’t think it’s just the cereal factory), it is very evocative--maybe even more so before I noticed it.

I was thinking too, how for an early bookworm like me, England is Storybook Land. The second-hand book sale in the church hall reminded me of it. The hedgerows and little fields, the narrow streets of the village, the market, the Church, the broad-faced farm woman in a skirt and wellies (even her tarty daughter with pink hair and a lip piercing), are all denizens of that land. It’s magical because I met it first in a book. The Pevinses England is just as fantastical to me as Narnia is. Even grimy, busy London is magic, from Oliver Twist to Sherlock Holmes to Mrs. Dalloway to Peter Wimsey to Rumpole to Inspector Dalgliesh. Who knows who I’ll run into next week in Baker Street or St. James Park or the Old Bailey or Whitechapel Road or Kensington SW1. A native could never have this sense of wandering into the world of Story. (Or maybe they could--maybe that’s one reason why people love Hardy so much--you can actually tramp out to look at the dairy where Tess met Angel, take a walk to see the church wall and stained-glass window she lay under and thought about noble ancestors long-gone.)

In the US a few places have that same sense of existing half in reality and half in story. Manhattan appeals to me because of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin (and the novels of S.J. Rozen and a hundred movies). Hoofing it through the West Eighties, I look up at the buildings and wonder which one has an upper floor full of orchids. Boston belongs to Robert Parker, Chicago to Sarah Paretsky, New Orleans (I admit it) to Anne Rice and her vampires. I sort of have that feeling about the Avenues in Salt Lake, since my own story is set there and exists in an imaginative Avenues overlaid on top of the real one.

But England is covered, leaf by leaf, with the pages of stories from even before I could read--Peter Rabbit, Rat and Mole, Christopher Robin, Wendy Darling and her brothers, Mr. Tumnus, Tom Bombadil, Arthur and Merlin. How fortunate I am to walk and breathe in my own body through the land of imagination.

July 30 John Delivers

Even with an early night, I needed (and took) a nap this morning after John and Linda left for the lectures. On Mountain Daylight Time we’re going to bed around 4pm and getting up for the day at midnight. I can’t tell if I’m tired from jetlag or tired from running around all day long. I must say, however, that trips with just John are much less tiring and stressful than trips with students. Maybe part of it is staying in one place for more than three days.

John gave his presentation today, on his students’ reactions to walking through Hardy country. The other presenter in his session was a Polish doctoral student from Yale, who discussed the imprinted emotional image in Hardy’s prose and poetry--it was a small group and even I made a comment (on “flashbulb memory,” e.g., where were you when you heard Kennedy had been shot. Oh right, none of you were born yet--well, I was five and in kindergarten, and all the teachers were crying and when I went home and told my mom she didn‘t believe me, and then she started crying too. I don‘t know what the equivalent would be now--the Challenger accident?)

Anyway, John discussed what happens in our groups of students with the mix of landscape, literature, group dynamics and personal stuff. It is a very potent mix. One question from the audience was, “ethically, how do you let students know ahead of time what they’re in for?” and the answer is that he can’t. Something different happens each time that is very hard to predict. We did discover the importance of frequent debriefing, even if people get sort of bored by it, and this last trip--UK07--had considerably less emotional drama (which was good, or at least safer). Anyway, it was an interesting talk and interesting discussion afterward. I decided I have a crush on Michael Irwin (I won‘t tell him that).