Remembrance of Things Past: Are we only what we remember?

The title of Marcel Proust’s famous novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, was beautifully translated as Remembrance of Things Past, until some literal-minded academic pointed out that the literal translation, the actual title, taking it word by French word, was In Search of Lost Time. And I say, Is it? Which novel would you take down off the shelf? Exactly. Sometimes literal is not the way to go; sometimes essence gets more at meaning. Today I’m all about memory.

Yesterday I went to see Marjorie Prime at the Helen Hayes Theater on W. 44th St. here in New York. The play has been around since before Covid—my friend Colleen auditioned for it when it was starting a run at Playwrights Horizons, where our playwright friend Tom saw it. That’s how they remember it—an event before Covid. The play itself, by Jordan Harrison, concerns an 85-year-old woman (born in 1977, so we’re about forty years into the future) in the late beginnings of dementia, cared for by an unseen woman named Julia, and visited periodically by her daughter and son-in-law. At the opening, an oddly stiff, handsome young man (Christopher Lowell) is talking with Marjorie (96-year-old June Squibb, who is just remarkable; I first became aware of Squibb in the movie About Schmidt, where she played a Midwestern wife to Jack Nicholson’s Schmidt and was so good I thought they’d plucked an Iowa housewife off the street for the brief but pivotal part. Sidebar: I know he was nominated for an Oscar, but I thought Nicholson was all wrong for the part—it’s one that really belonged to a less complicated actor like Paul Dooley. I digress—and yet remembering our takes on things is also part of what I’m focused on this morning.)

To keep her mother company, Marjorie’s daughter and son-in-law (Cynthia Nixon and Danny Burstein) have purchased her a Prime, an android, this one in the form of Majorie’s husband, Walter, when he was young (as she requested)—so the oddly stiff companion is stiff for a reason. A Prime can be generated into any form, to be filled with whatever memories people give it; as a result it can converse by speaking only in programmed memories and saying comforting things. The play is asking us to consider what a person is. Is our worth, our existence, dependent on what we can remember, even in facsimile, and must what we remember be in terms of other people in our lives? Should trauma remain part of our memory? When we can’t stop remembering trauma, is therapy or forgetting harder the better way? What does it mean to truly live? Ultimately, Are we only what we can remember and who remembers us? For a relatively spare play, it does bring stuff up.

I found myself this morning asking, “Why do we remember?” And more than that, is memory the essence of humanity? It’s the first day of Black History Month, and I think of Alex Haley’s historical novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976), where Alex learns about his enslaved ancestor Kunta Kinte (his name and story passed through Haley’s family over generations), when in his research Alex travels to West Africa by the Gambian River and finds a griot, a storyteller who tells the history of all the people of a village, committed to memory, once a year, and it can take up to three days without stopping to do this. But when he hears “Kunta Kinte,” and learns of his capture by slave traders, Alex knows he’s found the complete history of his people, almost unheard of for African Americans (even finding the affirmative mark of a slave on a slave schedule, let alone the name of the ship, let alone the name of the African, as I’ve learned from Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and his PBS series Finding Your Roots, is beyond rare).

In 1977, when I was 12, ABC showed Roots, a miniseries based on the novel, that galvanized the whole nation (there being only three major networks and no cable), teaching white America about real enslavement for the first time. To quickly erase (again) that powerful, historically true narrative, NBC countered by showing Gone with the Wind on television for the first time (the “television event of a generation!”), so we could (mis)remember the real story, the glory we lost, I guess. Horrifying when you think about it. And here we are. (I remember my social studies and English teacher Miss Covington glossing past Roots and gushing about Gone with the Wind, her favorite movie, telling us the whole plot—and keep in mind she (no more than 30) could only have seen this 1939 movie once, or twice at most, in a revival at a movie theater, say, this being before VHS, let alone streaming; when she taught us about the Civil War, she minced no words: the North didn’t want slavery, but they didn’t want Black people there, either. I cannot imagine what the Black kids in her classes felt.)

Thinking more about ethnic generational memory, I remember seeing a David Mamet play maybe 25 years ago, The Old Neighborhood, where a Jewish man named Bobby Gould (played by Peter Riegert, who should have won a special Tony for his master class in active listening) who in three scenes visits 1) a childhood friend; 2) his sister; and 3) an old girlfriend. In each scene he says a few words at most, and listens to each of the others talk about the past, the “old neighborhood,” partly a shared history, partly revelations about things he didn’t know. While the play massively bored the three friends I was with, I found it galvanizing—the terrific performances (Patti LuPone played the sister), yes, but mainly the premise, that so much of our time spent with family and friends is absorbed in reviewing the past, our memories. Why is that? Why do we do that? What do we gain, or lose, from that act? In the first scene, Riegert’s character is visiting a childhood friend back in the city, staying at a hotel on a business trip. His buddy reflects at one point, “I could have made it in the camps,” and Riegert says, “You can’t know that,” and the friend insists he could. And that was the first time I became aware of the weight that Jews today carry when they had family die in the Holocaust.

Roots was the first time I had been shown anything about slavery, having grown up with text books that minimized the abuses of enslavement, and in a state with a state song, “Carry Me Back to Ole Virginny,” which says, “There’s where this old darkey’s heart am long’d to go.” (It’s credited to an African American minstrel, James Bland (1878), but its roots appear to go back to the 1840s, lyrics by Edward Christy and sung by Confederate soldiers; and in either case, yikes. It was not retired as Virginia’s state song until 1997.) In other words, the truth and memory of enslavement was not part of my white Virginia memory, so here I am in my sixties only now really reckoning with it, what with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed during my first year on earth, a seeming ]course correction. Wow have I been blind.

What am I on about? History—the importance of a shared and factually accurate history, one we learn all our lives, together as a people, revised and reflected upon rationally as new information comes to light. National, personal—all the history defines us. I saw a post by a Black woman—and I didn’t save it and I hate myself—who pointed out that in her view the core issue for white people is that whites have no home. Blacks have Africa and enslavement to root them; Native Americans are the indigenous people. But whites? A culture of constant colonization and conquest, from ancient Rome to the Nordic invasions all over what is now Europe, most whites, especially white Americans, have no real homeland (this term tied to Nazis and white supremacists features on MAGA propaganda posters to bolster their deeply false and hideous American narrative). Everything for whites has been about invasion, genocide, rich man-enforced patriarchal “Christianity,” and repression of The Other to the point that we, as whites, have no roots and no shared memory beyond war and domination and fear. We whites have been trained by the rich elites to stew in hatred or resentment, say, crying on about our disrespected primacy; or, by contrast (it seems to me), we whites may live in bland acceptance of our privilege exercising little agency beyond voting and saving for retirement. How can you root in that?

So after watching Marjorie Prime, where the only value the characters seemed to place on one another was in memory—forcing one shared memory while maintaining the repression of another one, both confining—I got to thinking about memory as a kind of cage, its relation to creativity and forward motion coming into question. The white people in that play were defined by, and at home in, the past, but a murky, unsettling past, often manipulated and limited through the use of the Prime by the stories it repeated, with no clear plans for, or authentic excitement over, a present or a future. Is traveling to Madagascar the answer? (No.) At one point, the son-in-law replaces a dying Ficus tree in the house with another Ficus tree that no one pays attention to, and how is that a useful creative act? He’s the only character trying to reintroduce life into a dead space, and futile though it is, he at least is trying.

Some of the last things I did with my mom, Lynne, involved me asking questions of her life and filming her in very short videos; collecting recipes; she and I sorting a box of linen for me to take, tatting done by her aunt and grandmother. Memories through things, new stories emerging using the objects as a prime. And if we aren’t maintaining and deepening connections to our loved ones and our history, who even are we in the world?

When I look at Minnesotans and their powerful resistance to authoritarian rule, I am struck by this happening collectively and also in winter. Garrison Keillor used to begin his weekly Lake Wobegon monologues on NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, “It’s been a quiet week up in Lake Wobegon, my home town out on the edge of the prairie. It’s been cold this last week.” That natural bond between Minnesotans in their landscape was ever and remains the relentless cold, the snow and ice (followed by the muddy springs, hot summers, and the short growing season). Anyone who is brave enough to move from Europe, let alone Somalia, to that unforgiving winterscape would need good neighbors immediately; and it’s that culture that appears to have bound all these people to one another—winter warriors—in an essential goodness and clarity.

My sibling text thread all week has been filled with photos of snow, including a video of my Virginia brother Jeff walking on top of snow, so thick is the ice still.

Dispatch from North Carolina, where three of our six siblings live, with humor.

Virginia just set a record for the most days in a row below freezing—a totally unnatural thing, so yes, Herr President, this is a result of global warming—and I’m thinking that it’s winter above all seasons that makes us reassess, remember, and also be present. Winter is never boring, even if it’s exhausting. Winter does not forgive. You can never let up, chopping wood or shoveling snow or suiting up to keep warm. Sometimes you have to wait for the melt. But waiting is for the old, the Marjorie Primes of the world, and only then if they are looked after. The rest of us still have to get to work.

New York City, in my first decade, always looked like this from December to the end of March. I’m out of practice navigating the street, crossing obstacle courses of walking paths, walking with heartiness, but we all share it and roll with it. And it’s a comfort.

It’s history, people. It’s all about history. Let’s never forget this time, whatever happens, wherever we go from here.

And celebrate Black History Month. Learn all you can. As the snow deepens, as ICE expands, deepen and expand yourself.

Michael Armstrong: An Appreciation of a Teacher-as-Learner

Reflecting on the nearly ten years now since a dear teacher died

I’m writing an appreciation for a professor today, one who died in 2016, and whose life work was the elevation in adult minds of the worthiness of a child’s imagination. I started thinking of Michael Armstrong last night, without realizing it had been ten years, because I was remembering again how his work with children changed my own thinking about what gets lost as we “educate” our kids, to say nothing of how we are destroying all hope for their lives in America.

It’s what’s happening to the children in 2026 that is really killing me, the horrors of the kidnapping and no doubt sexual abuse and rape happening to brown children in American concentration camps at the hands of ICE. I know I’ve said this, but I finally realized that the reason Republicans never batted an eye as Sandy Hook was because as a party, I fear they do not see children as anything other than commodities, “resources” for war, toys for sex, punching bags, slaves for labor. It’s nothing I could ever have imagined until the Epstein Files. I think most of us still can’t. This evil simply should not be.

I’ve excerpted/edited for this post a letter I wrote to Michael’s widow, Isobel Armstrong, another of my favorite teachers at the Bread Load School of English (and the poetry scholar to whom A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession is dedicated; as of this writing, she’s still going strong in London at age 88). (Note: I’ve removed last names of friends, for example, but kept the spirit.) Writing appreciations is becoming a habit.

March 27, 2016, Easter Sunday

A bowl of magic stones from my travels.

Dear Isobel,

Of course I was just devastated to learn about Michael. And the first thing that I thought to do was to call Mark (who was kind enough to supply your email address last week), and then, of course, Anna (and we are sorry that we’ve lost touch with Ellen). Because that is Bread Loaf, isn’t it? Immediately reaching for community, to share the experience, seek out that support. And Michael was a searcher, a seeker—the finest model of teacher-as-learner I have met. The loss for you and your children is unimaginable, and no letter can assuage it, I know; but I wanted to share some memories with you and tell you something about Michael’s importance in my life.

First off: if I remember correctly my first summer at Bread Loaf, Michael came halfway into the term, co-teaching with or taking over a course for Jimmy Britton and Nancy Martin; and George had you for Romantic Poetry and was quite intimidated by you. So I think it was my first summer, 1990, that Alvin Kernan came to Bread Loaf to give the Elizabeth Drew Lecture on his book, The Death of Literature, to be published that same year. (Or it may have been the summer of ’91, after publication.) That lecture hit me and really got me thinking: Kernan was charming, a good speaker, and so sure of himself—his dismay at deconstruction, his perceived bastardization of the Canon, with a capital C, by the inclusion of women and minorities, etc. (as I heard him), had done, he said, irreparable damage to Literature, and now Academe was the lesser for it; nay, not lesser, but destroyed—something like that. I listened intently and then left and went directly to Jean’s room. She had skipped the lecture but let me recount it to her, and gradually I grew furious in my retelling, pacing, outraged, incensed. A day or so after, someone set up a panel discussion, pitting the traditionalists against the deconstructionists in Barn 5: Al Kernan, John Fleming, Walter Litz, Ed Lueders (who later confided to George, Jean, and me that really he wasn’t on any side) on one side (those are all I recall); and Michael, you, Dianne Sadoff, and others on the other side. People attended, but not as many as I thought should: And the moment I remember clearly, the one that completely transfixed me and corrected my self-doubt in the world of Bread Loaf was a moment when Kernan or Litz or Fleming explained that students were in school to learn an author’s intention in the text at hand, no more, no less (something like that), and this new teacher (to me) from Britain, Michael Armstrong, fairly flew across his desk and declared, angry to the point of spitting, “If YOU tell ME there’s only one way to read a text, I’m going to tell YOU to go to hell!” I was galvanized by this display of passion, especially given the self-satisfied air and calm of the Great White Men of Academe. You, Isobel, leaned in, putting a hand on Michael’s shoulder, and began in that arrestingly beautiful English voice of yours, “What Michael means, …”. I have to confess, in that moment I fell in love with the Armstrongs.

And yet I was afraid—you were both so fiercely intelligent, seeking, and knowledgeable, that I felt I needed to work up to you before taking your classes.

In the summer of 1992—when I decided to try Oxford because Anna, who was teaching at the American School in Turkey, was going there—I got to know Michael. Anna and Ellen were taking Michael’s class (I was studying Virginia Woolf with Jeri Johnson), and Michael was the only one of the professors who dined with us in Hall every morning. We four sat together, generally; one of the first mornings we did—diving into our toast, tea or coffee, and cereal—Michael caught my eye, and Anna’s, and Ellen’s, and declared in an “important” voice: “You know, jam is for the lower classes; marmalade is for the upper classes.” He paused significantly before demanding, “And by ALL MEANS pass the MARMALADE!” I collapsed with laughter. Michael showed only a little grin. Now I was less afraid, of course; and also, all summer, Anna and Ellen couldn’t stop talking about how much they were learning from him.

And so it was that the summer of 1993, I decided, would be my Armstrong Summer: I would take Michael’s class, Narrative and the Imagination (I think it was called) and your class, Women’s Writing from the Margins (or in my typical Malaprop-tinged description to Jean, who was also taking your course, “Women’s Writing ON the Margins”—sending Jean into a fit of laughter). My Malaprop-risk notwithstanding, it was perhaps the decision that saved my academic life: and now I have to tell you something rather personal, but it all connects to Michael in the end.

In the summer of 1993, I was in the midst of a profound depression—the worst of my life up to then, and even up to now, and suffice to say from a myriad of causes—and I really had no idea how I would get through my studies. I could not stop sleeping. Sometime in the second week, my roommate sat me down: “I know it’s not my business, but every time I come into the room you are sleeping….” She was right—and it was lucky I didn’t have a single room. As a result of this intervention, I made the decision to do all my reading, writing, and thinking outside my room—but it had to be in a PUBLIC area, so I didn’t nap. I chose the large Victorian sofa in front of the fireplace in Davison Library. I was there so often, in fact, that on seeing me enter through the door, people sitting on the sofa would get up! “No, no,” they would say when I begged them not to leave, “this is your office.” There was another “office” in the library—on the second floor, by a certain window: Michael’s. Everyone knew that was where Michael Armstrong sat to study and read all day long—a model scholar.

Michael Armstrong was awarded an endowed chair the summer of 1994, and I and other former students decorated his library desk (“so embarrassing”). We refused to take down the Ben Franklin Hardware Store frou-frou until he posed for a photograph by LO’H.

That summer, for some sadistic reason of his own, Michael assigned the class Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, all three volumes. I was utterly flummoxed by those texts. One afternoon, I heard loud footsteps flying down the library stairs, and turned to see Michael rushing toward my sofa-office: “Lisa! May I share something?” Please do! “I’ve just discovered something! I think I may have figured out something in Ricoeur!” He read a passage, and then he offered me his interpretation. I have no idea what passage it was, or what Michael said, or I said, but it was the shyness Michael showed that affected me; and I flashed back to the passionate man who announced to the most eminent Ivy League English scholars in America, “If YOU tell ME there’s only ONE way to read a text, I’m going to tell YOU to go to hell!” Michael was searching, too: He confessed later that summer that the only reason he’d assigned it was to try to figure it out. How wonderful is that? (I still dip into my Ricoeur volumes from time to time; I pick up a little more every year.) That connection, made almost daily, further incentivized me to keep to my sofa office and thus pass my courses.

The library sofa was a fortuitous choice for another reason: on Michael’s “reserve shelf” to the left of the fireplace sat John Berger’s A Fortunate Man, which Anna loved, and which Michael recommended to me. Despite all the other reading I had to do for both your classes (and not only was I a slow reader, but because of my intense 3-prep teaching schedule and three-shows-a-year life as a drama director, I could never get more than one and a half books read before the start of Bread Loaf), I read the entire book in a sitting on that sofa—one of the most marvelous reading experiences I’ve had, linking—so unexpectedly, but isn’t that Bread Loaf?—all the reading I was doing in both of your courses. A miracle.

And here is where I want to thank you both, Isobel: mine was not a dazzling intellect, as you know; and so, not being intellectually vain as a result, I was the person who happily opened every book talk. There is nothing more unnerving to me than a room full of silent students, so I said the first thing. (It was the astonishing students like Jean and Maggie who said the apt thing—the only thing worth hearing, but not until the end of class. Who has that kind of time?) You and Michael so very graciously indulged my need to start things off, however feebly, and never shamed me or made me feel foolish. I felt I was free to discover and to seek, and that summer of 1993 was perhaps the most fulfilling of my life as a student. Thank you so much for sharing your gifts.

A side note, Isobel: My friend, Hasan, who is a super in my neighborhood including part-time in my building here in Queens, New York City (where I’ve lived since 2003), just stopped by and shared a story that timed perfectly with this letter: He has been driving up to Poughkeepsie, NY, every night for the past three or four months, to visit his Albanian mother, who is dying, slowly, in a nursing home. He cannot bear the thought of her alone at night, and so he goes to sit beside her in her room, where he checks on her, or naps in a chair, or gives her a sip of water. They emigrated here (illegally, of course) from communist Yugoslavia back in the 1980s—it could be a movie. She speaks no English. Hasan, who is 62, is very sad, of course, and so tired. Last night, the floor nurse was being followed around by two little children—a niece and nephew, 3 and 4 years old, and of course they chatter, cheering Hasan very much. The little girl walked over to the bed of an old woman who shares the room with Hasan’s mother, and asked simply, “Why are you sick?” Hasan began chuckling. “Why are you sick?” she asked again. The old woman said, “I’m old. Too old. I don’t want to be here.” The little girl turned to her aunt, the nurse, who was trying to shoo her away, and said, “Why don’t you let her leave?” And Hasan began laughing, tears coming out of his eyes. “It hits you,” Hasan said, “like a cannon, right here,” pointing to his chest, “the way a child sees! And then the little girl, so cute my god, she said, ‘What do you eat? Where is your food?’ And she is accusing—you can tell—the girl look at her aunt, the nurse. And the nurse looked so guilty! Because this little girl sees this old woman is so sad. The old lady say, ‘How old are you?’ And the girl hold up some fingers. So sweet!” Hasan tells me this with tears in his eyes even as he laughs. “And I’m sitting there,” Hasan finishes, “thinking—cursing all the politicians of the world, wanting to give the White House to this little girl, let her clean up the world mess!”

And hearing this story, the first thing that came into my mind was Michael’s sharing of the stories of very young children. I thought instantly of “The Sparkling Star,” which I hadn’t thought of in years. I read the story to Hasan, and we teared up; so sweet. There is simply nothing like the unfiltered language of young children, and it was Michael who taught me to pay attention, to listen to children seriously when they speak and write.

THE SPARKLING STAR

One night I was in bed and I thought that it was a little bit hot. So I ran over to the window and opened it. In flew a star that was sparkling. I stood back and just looked. Then I started to stare very badly. Then the room went dark again and the room was the same. Because when the star flew in it just lit up the room. But now the star looked strange up against my spotty and stripy wallpaper. It was also multi-coloured, it had every colour of the rainbow. The star was glittering and sparkling worse than ever. It looked just like a very very precious jewel or diamond. I walked closer to the star. Suddenly it changed multi-coloured like my wallpaper. Then it started to flicker different colours. Now it blended in very very well. It looked like it was overheating. It flickered in time with saying Help Help Help. I thought it must be like a fish. Because a fish cannot go on land for a very long or it will die, and a star has to stay high in the sky. But if it is on the ground it will die. I was a little bit scared. But I closed my eyes and picked up the star and threw it out of the window.

~ Lydia, age 9, from Children Writing Stories by Michael Armstrong, 2006, p. 99,
McGraw-Hill UK

(See also: THE MAGIC STONE in the same collection.)

I used “The Sparkling Star” in my teaching for years, had hundreds of copies…and of course, in the past two hours of scouring the two remaining boxes of my life in education—one from my 15 years in the classroom, and the other filled with bits of Bread Loaf—not one copy could I find, but I do have Michael’s book. I did find, believe it or not, notes I made from your fabulous Barn lecture on glass, in the summer of my senior summer of 1994—information that helped inform my final Chaucer paper, which I also discovered. Oh, dear.

One wonders why we keep such things, especially moving from place to place—and then we turn over the old stones and find out. Just now, I opened my inscribed copy of Michael’s Tolstoy on Education, in which he wrote: “Keep on finding & re-finding the magic stone. August 3, 1993”. Over twenty years ago: It hardly seems possible. I remember Michael reading “The Sparkling Star” at Gilmore that first summer—one of the best readings I heard there. And here I am trying to re-find that particular touchstone.

Anna and LO’H, our senior summer at Bread Loaf, 1994. The book’s title is an apt one. We still talk about Michael’s teaching. Really.

Isobel, please know how much Michael was loved, will always be loved, by every student whose life he touched. Please know how loved you are—and how the privilege of seeing your marriage, as well as your scholarship and teaching, was one of the joys of being on that mountain each summer.

Much, much love, and best wishes always,

Lisa O’Hara, Class of 1994

[End letter.]

Another memory, as a sort of coda: There was a professor I knew at Bread Loaf who had an air of self-importance that I found odd in that setting and more than a little silly. I was having lunch with several friends one day, including David Huddle. As this self-important professor walked past our table, one of my friends commented, “I just don’t like him; he thinks he’s the smartest boy in the room.” David instantly looked up. “Well, that’s ridiculous. Everyone knows the smartest person in any room is Michael Armstrong, who doesn’t know it himself.” So many reasons to love David.

The last time I saw Michael (and Isobel and David, too) was at Bread Loaf ca. 2005, on a visit, my last. He plunged into our reading lives. “Have you read Calvino’s Invisible Cities?” he asked. My eyes wide, I said, “Michael, I have, I bought it when I first moved to New York City!” Michael gave me that impish grin, “Of course you have,” he said. It felt like being anointed.

And here is hoping you, dear Reader, have good teachers and friends to appreciate in your lives, that you have the magic stone energy to promote the imaginations of children, the lives of children, and value all the good people. With thanks to all our teachers. Save the children.

Why read literature? It beats drugs, and it makes us human

On this MLK Day in the year of our lord 2026, where only 16% of American adults read for pleasure and 40% of our nation’s children do not know how to read at all, not even their own notes from the board—it’s just symbols on a page to them—we really have to figure out a new world order. I’m thinking about reading today because my friend Steve just sent me The Uses of Literature, a collection of essays by Italo Calvino, ca. 1982, with a specific reference to part 2, “Why Read the Classics?”

Reason number 6: A classic is a book that hasn’t finished what it has to say.

Books are old friends, and we need our friends. With that in mind, I found myself shelf haunting (after a morning of chopping up ice and salting my co-op front sidewalk, followed by navigating lethal ice patches in two different directions for two sets of store runs—and those “ice” references can mean so many things now ) in my own library. Lots of associative tasks all around—ideas for little collages, fumbling into art materials I had no idea I even had, pulling out volumes to peruse. Interesting, luxurious really, to spend time off on a frigid day in a sick-ass national moment in memory of one of the best of us just letting my mind wander.

For example, I rediscovered this book, a gift from friend Tom Corbin in 2016—how is that ten years ago? This led me to learn more, again, about William Morris and his wife Jane Burden Morris, where I rediscovered a painting I used in an acting exercise ca. 1983, wherein I posed as and had to bring to life the character in the painting, as I felt her, and then participate in a class “interview” as this character. Harrowing.

Blue Silk Dress (Jane Morris) 1868, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), Society of Antiquaries of London

Revisiting this painting (like a classic book, it’s never finished talking to us), I find I would like to hold this pose until 2029, but failing that dream, would like to suggest that we teach all our little ones to meditate in lieu of overstimulating them. I am so serious. Meditation and quiet, followed by reading, followed by walks in nature. Couldn’t school just be that for a few years? Starting now? Life is precious. Time is short. Quiet is a gift. I mean, look at her.

Sending love, quickly, because I have reading to do before the day is done, and one more walk in me, too.

Miss O’

The Woman Mind: A stroll in our political landscape

When I got off the 7 train in Queens last night around 11:45 PM, damp and chill after a wintry weather day (I’d gone into the city to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway last evening with a friend visiting from out of town, and all I could think during a scene showing Death Eaters, was “Oh, look, ICE,” but everyone else was just super excited that the grown up Draco Malfoy was being reprised by the movies’ Tom Felton—he was delightful), I crossed the boulevard to a bodega to pick up pita chips and hummus for a late night snack (the show was three hours long, dinner was five hours before). Inside the bodega were an assortment of loud males: one older white guy, very Queens working class; two Black guys around 30-40 years old; and a younger Hispanic guy. They were guys, if you know what I mean—you rarely see guys on television or in movies anymore, and I think this is a shame. Gym-cut, professionally groomed, and models of the self-care craze, actors today really have a hard time being interesting, but they do attract some chicks and the agents, and it’s all about the bucks.

Behind the counter was a young Middle Eastern cashier/manager (not really a guy type, more composed and elegant) staring at this one talkative Black guy standing by the white guy. I found my chips, my hummus, and when I went up to pay for them in this cramped deli area, I was barely noticed by the cashier; you could see that the talkative guy was either on something or off meds, was too-calmly ranting about something, and would not be talked down or moved off topic. I put my purchases up on the raised counter, but the cashier/manager kept his eyes fixed on the talkative guy; the old white guy was trying to be a casual peacemaker, but the cashier/manager said, “I don’t want to talk to that guy anymore,” his eyes wide, a little frightened, because that talkative guy was clearly this close to exploding, and the other two customers were really confused; they all seemed to know each other but it didn’t matter. I managed to get the purchase acknowledged, paid cash, tried to say, “I don’t need a bag,” but the stuff was being bagged on autopilot, eyes never on me, and I simply took it and my long-coming (but correct) change and booked it out the door and up the street.

By the way, for the men reading this, this is what it’s like for women to live in the world all the time: because there is never not a threat of imminent violence, we have to stay vigilant; if we aren’t the targets of violence at a certain moment, it’s because we simply don’t exist (I can promise you not one of those men saw the old lady buying hummus) or there are other women experiencing violence somewhere in the vicinity. Even when women aren’t consciously thinking, “I’m about to raped,” we can’t walk down any street by day or night, or enter or leave our cars or homes, without knowing “this could be the day.” Renee Good’s murder is one of a string of these inevitable events; the officer will face no consequences (unfortunately for us the decent, the martyr role won’t stick, as Good was not only a woman but a liberal activist and a lesbian, and so America on the whole is okay with her murder).

Back to the bodega: if there’s an emotionally charged dispute of some kind going on, not even with yelling—and not one of these men registered the imminent threat except the cashier/manager, who has seen this too many times, no doubt, and me—all any woman would want to do is escape this. Guys (straight, I’d qualify) are, unfortunately, almost universally unteachable when it comes to these situations if they don’t have high level empathy already (in my limited life experience).

These males in the bodega were at once too blind, too self-involved, and too emotional to figure a way out of whatever this situation was, a situation which suggested at worst drug-addled paranoia, at best bruised ego, rather than any actual injustice. Petty stuff.

This morning, I happened on a post by a woman whose voice I’ve come to value deeply, a fabric artist named Orsola de Castro, who speaks sense on all matters of patriarchy, and today’s post seemed to dovetail with my late-night Queens bodega experience, by way of a totally different subject: AI. This has to do with temperament not just of “guys” up there but of educated “men” in suits. Patriarchy has a common thread of blind ego.

Male inventors, de Castro notes, have pushed women to the margins in the AI field, thinking (dubious word) that they can just throw money and ideas and tech at AI and it will naturally sort itself out, which is beyond stupid. Women are natural teachers; men are not. I’ll let Ms. de Castro explain:

(Meanwhile, as I type this, Microsoft Word keeps popping up to offer to “rewrite” my creative work for me, figuring some male tech guy’s coding can read and render my thinking better than I could. It’s not only tragic; it may in fact prove our annihilation as a species on this planet. This is not a digression.)

And women’s safety as well as freedom comes down to bodily autonomy and human (male) respect for that. In another post, Ms. de Castro uses pop music woo songs to discuss a view on ballad writing to bed women, that all that came about because patriarchy—not women, but patriarchy—put women in towers, in chastity belts, valued virginity over sensuality and then tied themselves, the men, into knots because they had no access to us women. And who’s fault is that?

By extension, as we sit by and watch these out-of-control U.S. patriarchs with no imagination or empathy or real intelligence whatsoever make scorched earth of our geopolitical alliances, we know the women were and have been right about everything—Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris the most recent big examples: men on the whole are too emotional, too limited, too narcissistic, too greedy, too short-sighted to be in power. And the women, as leaders, would have acted with thoughtful decision, which is not to say perfection. No one is that. But women don’t fight the system, they dismantle it and rebuild it. See Jessie Cae on Instagram:

Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA), the most recent example, was no sooner sworn in than she acted for the good of all, as per her office.

Something there is that doesn’t love the thought of a woman in power, even from other women, until they see a woman in power and she’s good at it. (Note: Kristi Noem is MAGA’s fantasy of a woman in power, in that she has none, but does the whole sexy swagger fantasy thing for the public at the altar of the Top Dog.)

Another post I saw on Instagram today had to do with what happens when a clueless patriarchal institution reaches out to take a pulse and is freaked by the response, their own work coming back to smite them:

Here’s real power, and power to the purpose: The key is providing what is sustainable. “Sustenance is the root of sustainability.” We have to stop “the eighty men in the one bus” with all the world’s money and return to the politics of caring. According to Vandana Shiva:

“Non-sustainability is violence against the earth,” Shiva says, and when the men’s only response is, “We’ll move to Mars instead,” I want to send them NOW.

Sending love on a rainy cold Sunday in New York during the revolution,

Miss O’

Screenshot

David Huddle: An Appreciation

A letter of gratitude for my friend and writing teacher

In July of 1991, writing professor David Huddle brought recently-published Allen Barnett to the campus of the Bread Loaf School of English, where I was a graduate student in my second summer. In 1990, Barnett’s debut collection of fiction, The Body and Its Dangers and Other Stories, was a critical smash; but a year later, Barnett was dying of complications from AIDS, a disease that features in his stories. David Huddle, a popular professor who taught the courses American Short Story and Fiction Writing, hosted an evening in the Burgess Meredith Theater on campus so that we all might hear Barnett read from his book.

The brown suit Allen Barnett wore, I remember, dwarfed his fragile body; as he took to the lectern, he said sincerely into the microphone, “I hope I don’t die while doing this.” He was not being histrionic; he would be dead in less than a month upon returning to New York City. I found the story he chose to read, “Snapshot,” devastating, and his reading was just beautiful. I still hear it in my mind. What struck me as much as Allen’s reading was the gravity, kindness, care, and sincere admiration that David showed in his introduction of Allen, his enthusiastically urging us to buy the book, and the way he showed Allen around the campus, that tender care at a time when AIDS freaked out many Americans.

The day following the reading, I found myself in Barn 5 (we literally had our classes in rooms annexed to a barn, and it was great), a basement area where there was a special seminar going on about literary theory, or something related. I’d sat in a desk in the back, the old-fashioned kind, ca. 1970, for the kids out there:

Professor Huddle and Mr. Barnett walked in, David guiding Allen’s elbow, and took desks right in front of mine. I leaned in, “Mr. Barnett, I want to tell you how much I loved your reading.” And David Huddle, a professor my grad school friend George had had for American Short Story in 1990, and now Jean had for Fiction Writing, whipped his head around and said, “Where did you get that accent?” A lifetime of living in Virginia even with parents from Iowa had given me some Southern.

“Yes,” Allen Barnett said, turning painfully, carefully to look at me, “where did you get your accent?”

“I’m from Virginia,” I explained.

David said, “I’m from Wythe County,” and I said I’d gone to Virginia Tech (also in Southwest Virginia), and taught in Appomattox. It was old home week. I know I said words, and heard some other words from Allen and David, but I was just astonished to be chatting with them, as if we all sort of knew each other.

That evening, I took up a yellow legal pad and I wrote a poem/letter to Allen Barnett, so clearly dying, to tell him what his story had meant to me, and even more than that, the fact that he took an interest in my accent of all things. Unwritten was, “and you are dying; how could you spend that kind of time on me?” I put the poem/letter in an envelope, with Allen’s name on it, and wrapped it in another note for David. “Mr. Huddle,” I wrote, explaining in some way or another that I wrote this letter to Mr. Barnett, and could he send it to him if he thought it was something to bother him with; and if not, just toss it.

The following Thursday evening was the weekly bonfire at Gilmore, a men’s dorm a half mile into the Green Mountains, one of the summer resort cabins that Joseph Battell willed to Middlebury back in 1920, causing the Battell-named “Bread Loaf Mountain” to become a century long (and counting) graduate English program for teachers as well as a famous Writer’s Conference. So on Thursdays, walking in the dark along the dirt road to Gilmore, you could hear the students and faculty gathering to pour a beer, sit outside, and stare into a fire (Vermont always has cool evenings) as a member of the faculty read a favorite story. It was sublime. That particular evening, still deeply sad about Allen’s fate, I sat by myself by the fire. Soon, David came over and knelt beside me. “I sent Allen your poem,” he said. I nodded. We held the space together for a few minutes, looking into the fire, and then David quietly got up and walked to greet others. I can’t remember if I learned from David when Allen died, two weeks later, but I don’t think I did.

But those few moments in a classroom and by the fire formed and sealed my mystical friendship with David Huddle forever. We never had long conversations, never spent long stretches of time together. One summer, he suggested that he, George, Jean, and I have pizza together, and thus began a tradition for us, once a summer for three or four summers, David would crank Steve Earle as he drove us into Middlebury down Rt 125 to Rt 7. I know he didn’t do that with anybody else, and we all knew not to tell anyone. It was our thing.

In the summer of ’93, my penultimate summer, I saw David at the annual summer cocktail party on the porch of Treman, a guest dorm with a kitchen that also served as an evening faculty hangout for The Eleven O’Clock Club, a legendary gathering of wits, to which I was never invited. The cocktail tradition was a rolling invitation list over the weeks, where one “dressed up,” and faculty and students could hobnob over alcohol. David, in his summer suit, walked over to me on the porch with his gin and tonic; I (a nondrinker at the time, I enjoyed a tonic water and lime, but who’s to know?) in my purple summer dress greeted him. He asked about my plans for my last summer. The rumor was John Fleming was coming up from Princeton one last time to teach Chaucer, and I needed that era of literature to graduate.

David asked, “Are you going to take my fiction workshop?” All these summers, it never even occurred to me to take a class with David. “Oh, no, David,” who always signed his most recent books for me, calling me “my sister Virginia” once. I explained that I wasn’t a writer but a drama director, George and Jean were the writers, that sort of thing. David looked tauntingly over his drink and said in his best kewpie doll voice, “Is the baby afwaid to take my workshop?” I glared at him. “Fuck you,” I said, “I’m taking your workshop.” He grinned. “Good,” he said, and sipped.

Bless that son of a bitch. Best decision I could have made. That last summer I took my two most challenging courses, challenging myself in ways I really hadn’t before, and David’s steady encouragement gave me the confidence to do it—that’s a longer story for another time.

My favorite greeting question of his, and I remember him once asking me this on his way to the tennis courts across from the library (not the best location), “How is your writing life?” David treated his students like fellow artists, and though I couldn’t be that, it helped me feel belonging.

David and I formally decided to have lunch together one day in the dining hall, and just as we’d sat down to talk, we were joined by another workshop student, a private school teacher (now the head of one of the most prestigious boys prep schools in the country) and a graduate of University of Virginia, like David. Tanned and dashing in his polo shirt, the fellow said, “May I join you?” and sat down without waiting for an answer. He immediately began schmoozing, complimenting David on a poetry reading he’d given with the likes of Donald Hall and others. David met my eye, which invisibly rolled, and I smiled; we shared this trap but it was David who was truly caught. My grin said, “You are on your own.” David’s gaze said, “I hate you.” Now that is love.

I believe that was the only time in four summers on the mountain that David Huddle and I ever tried to hang out, and it was not meant to be. David told George, Jean, and me that final summer, when they attended my graduation, that we would lose touch, as David said he never kept up with Bread Loafers. But he’d never reckoned with us. Over the years, I sent letters and cards to him, and he sent letters and poems in progress to me, to all three of us. Facebook later became the repository of greetings. George and Jean, who had married, remained in closer contact with David than I had, even visiting him in the hospital in Burlington as he was dying, complications of dementia. I knew something was wrong a few years ago when suddenly David left Facebook, where he had actively posted bird photos, shared poetry, including his own latest publications and readings, and boasted on his family. The onset must have been swift, is all I can say. Such a loss for his wife, daughters, and grandchildren, and a great loss too to his friends, readers, and fellow writers.

So I’m sharing this today because I finally found David’s obituary—he died in October; the obituary wasn’t published until November, and by then life happened and I didn’t search. George had let me know when he’d heard. I don’t know what made me think about David today, to decide I needed to write about him; coincidentally I got a brochure in the mail for the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference just as I started typing this. Something in the air, I guess.

David’s poems, short stories, and novels are still in print. He’s one of those so-called “minor writers,” which is sort of ridiculous because his work is wonderful, and you realize these tiers, these hierarchies, are silly. What is better than David’s “ABC” from Story of a Million Years? What’s more moving and beautiful than Allen Barnett’s “Snapshot”? There’s so much wonder to find in the world, so many encounters that teach us about ourselves, that moor us in the most turbulent of times, you have to know it all counts big, however small or quiet.

Hoping you find any consolation you need for yourself today, that you might take a moment to think about the teachers in your life. Bless them.

P.S. I loved to show friends this author photo. “Here’s why I took his workshop,” I’d say. David would have choked, catching my eye. I will always miss him.

Now, Voyager

Dreams of the dead

The Untold Want

by Walt Whitman (1819 –1892)

The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,

Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find

Last night I dreamed I came out of the room where I sleep when I’m at my parents’ house, but it was my bed here in Queens, and my very aged, dead mother sat before a bright computer screen at the living room desk in the dark, her alert face blue-lit and her thin hands wildly flying over the keyboard, flying up and over the keys, eyes focused but expressionless. She was wearing a version of her blue pajamas. “Mom?” I needed to tell her she was dead, she didn’t need to do this, and I pulled myself awake. It was disturbing, seeing that tiny body, so pale and shriveled, working on a computer, which she never did, and so frantically.

I have dreams like that quite a bit since my mom died, unnerving dreams at times. And it’s easy to feel confused then, and afraid.

This evening on YouTube I caught NPR legend Terri Gross on Colbert talking about her husband’s death and a dream she had about him, in which she turned to him to remind him he was dead, and he vanished. Stephen then told Terri about a dream he had after his mom died, where he told her a similar thing, “Mom, why are you here?” and that she was dead; she also vanished. Stephen’s mother’s dream words before she vanished were, “Oh good. It’s the only way you’ll stay awake.” Terri asked what he thought that meant, and she suggested that his mother’s words meant what her husband’s presence meant in her own dream: you need to live life. By that I gather, when you admit the death, when you face that loss, you can awaken to your own life again. It was a wonderfully tender, adult conversation between two artists, two humans, one I hope everyone, somehow, can see during this horrible week. I needed it.

During their exchange, I found myself teary, and the dream I had last night came back to me. What was my mom telling me? I think my mother was telling me to write my life. Lynne had no interest in my acting, my teaching, or my writing. “That’s your thing,” she’d say. But here she was in death telling me, maybe, or showing me, that I need to keep writing, and even writing about her. Maybe it’s a better dream than first appeared, maybe. Nothing to be afraid of, and in fact quite the opposite.

As I do when it’s on demand on TCM, I watched Now, Voyager with Bette Davis and Paul Henreid for the many, manyeth time, and the feelings I have about it change over viewings and years, but whatever qualms or critiques, I can’t help loving Charlotte’s journey as Camille. Unconventionally, Charlotte Vale finds a purpose for her life, waking out of years of emotional abuse to become her own woman. Her most important moment of self-discovery comes during a renewed fight with her mother, when Charlotte is able to say honestly, “You see, Mother, I’m not afraid.” In addition to Max Steiner’s score, her guide out of the sanitarium and into the world was that Whitman quotation, presented to her by Dr. Jaquith. She can sail forth to seek and find; she can do anything she wants now. She can become. “I’m not afraid.”

When I saw the new footage today of Renee Good in her car via the “body cam” or phone of Jonathan Ross, the ICE “agent” who shot Ms. Good in cold blood in the face at least three times through her windshield as she left the scene, something became plain to me: that Renee Good, who by all accounts, including her wife’s, was nothing if not kind, “pure sunshine”—that the only thing Good did wrong was be true to her name and her Christian faith.

She was not afraid.

She said kindly to the officer, “It’s okay, I’m not mad at you.” And Ross opened fire. “Fuckin’ bitch!” he screamed.

I saw an interview with a pastor who was arrested by ICE and was asked over and over again, “Are you afraid?” “Are you afraid now?” And that (true) follower of Jesus said simply, “I’m not afraid,” and you could tell it was driving the ICE thugs to murderous rage. To what end? What do they think this rage at good people gives them?

I look at all the people posting, all the people protesting, all the people still out in their neighborhoods. We aren’t afraid. We are grieving, we are traumatized, we are experiencing all this horror together, we’ve all known loss, been visited by death in dreams, and we aren’t afraid. You know why? Because, whatever our faith or origin, we know who we are. And we are learning more all the time. We seek, we find, and it’s interesting to note that the Bible quotation as we know it doesn’t stop there. Let me close out with a little Gnostic Gospel of Thomas who said, “Seek and you shall find. When you find, you will become troubled. When you are troubled, you will be astonished, and rule over all things.” I’m not a Christian; I study all the faiths, and that feels universal to me.

I hope you have the dreams you need tonight.

Sending love,

Miss O’

P.S. A few words from Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense was published in January of 1776. This later reminder from Paine, when the rebellion seemed its most hopeless, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” via Heather Cox Richardson:

Light Wood

Finding my way in the dark

This would have been 36, 37 years ago now, in the fall, the first year I moved out to Highway 644 in Appomattox, Virginia, the little yellow house—I told you this story—and my heat source was now a wood stove. My teaching colleague and neighbor Jeanne drove me and her trusty German shepherd Ton-Ton, struggling in her final year with hip dysplasia, in her truck just barely into the woods by Nixola Guill’s house, back just behind the old clapboard church that the historical society would later that year move to a “historic village.” It was just getting on dusk, and our plans had gotten waylaid by one thing and another, but the fact was Jeanne’s family was out of light wood, and I was going to need it too, if I wanted to get a fire going properly. This is the stuff sold as “Georgia flatwood” in cabiney catalogues, but what it is is old pine stumps, the pitch of which has turned into pure kerosene. Talk about a fire starter.

I don’t know who owned the land (and no doubt we were trespassing), but the forest was deciduous, changing over from pine to hardwood. As a result, the pine trees lost light, began dying, and the place had become loaded with pine stumps. Jeanne had noticed the abundance of them in one of her walks; it was getting on the time of year she had to put the dogs in blaze orange vests and wear one herself, early hunters out illegally, too, so our trespass was nothing, what with perfectly good lightwood just going to waste.

Jeanne pointed out the wide gully leading from deep in the woods to behind the church. “That was a road at one time,” she explained; walking in the woods with a biologist and native Virginian was always instructive. In fact, my four years living in that county could not have been a smaller life or a bigger education. I’ve written about it in places, but this is about wandering through woods at dusk. We’d walk, locate a stump, take a shovel, and dig; so old was the wood that it only took a little digging and some tugging to pull the stumps up. “Smell that,” Jeanne said. Oh, yes, there’s that kerosene smell. Jeanne’d brought along a couple of large burlap sacks to fill and that we did, dragging the sacks back to the truck, as Truman Capote might say, lugging the stumps like a kill.

By the time the dragging began, it was fully dark. You don’t think you can see in the dark, but you can. Because of the gully on our right, we knew which direction to walk in, and we also kept well to the left of the gully so we didn’t tumble in. It was cold now; supper sounded good. Do you know that feeling? And the tingle of wood smoke filled the air all around, all the stoves of the wide-apart neighbors commencing their roars. Lifting those sacks into the back of the truck, and Ton-Ton too, getting inside the cab, pulling out onto the road for the short drive to Jeanne’s driveway, I can’t tell you how alive I felt. Her husband would chop up a stump for me that evening to take back to my own stove down the road, where I’d go right after supper.

I get teary thinking about this, the exhilaration of that evening, one that felt like many hours but couldn’t have been more than one. A friend, woods, a dog, a truck, a purpose, and that dusky light, the promise of supper when the work is done. It’s all you need.

Back in my young teaching days in the late 1900s, people enjoyed their experiences without the press of photographic documentation. I miss those days.

And walking around Queens this evening, that’s exactly where my sense memory went. And I thought I’d take you on a memory walk with me, in case you needed a reminder that there is not only a way into the woods, but also a way out, even in the dark, and if you pay attention and stay present, you’ll find it.

Sending love,

Miss O’

Of It (and Over It)

When I take my evening walk about in my Queens neighborhood, and maybe I’ve written about this before—this is the age, but I sort of marvel that I’m of it.

I can’t help marveling that for a truly odd woman, odd since birth, who never really belonged anywhere or with any group for as long as I can remember (and lucky enough to find loads of friends just like me), I have still managed to make a life in a range of locations, learning through walking, greeting everyone I make eye contact with, with “Hi.” I’m not stupid, but my experience has been that as Anne Frank said in her diary, most people really are basically good.

It’s hard to feel like that today.

Trigger happy white men are freely enjoying acting our all their Nazi fantasies, their blood lust, on ordinary sweet Americans, and they know they can do it with impunity. It won’t matter if anyone is charged for the murder of the Minnesota poet/wife/mom whose van was in an ICE agent’s way, because Trump will pardon him. This is America now. Until these men rape, kill, pillage, torture, torment, destroy everything human and decent to the point of over-satiation, they won’t rest. And they won’t stop, not really, ever, because their rage is superfueled by their increasing cruelty.

I remember seeing footage of the earliest days of the war Russia has waged on Ukraine, where confused and under-equipped Russian baby soldiers pointed weapons at and were utterly baffled by old people walking out of their houses to shoo them away, like flies, and they went. That didn’t last long. Three years later, the war is no closer to ending.

America will soon be under siege, too, I guess, by its own kill-happy MAGA citizens. It’s so hard to fathom how quickly it all went to hell. And how long we will have to endure this is anyone’s guess. General Stephen Miller all but came all over himself on CNN the other night as he talked about raw power, how he had it now, and would never give up that “raw iron” he was, in his dreams, holding in his pants.

Even harder to reckon with is the fact that we have absolutely no Democratic leadership to meet this nation’s defining moment. Not even a retired military official will break protocol. Trump has zero real opposition outside ordinary citizens doing their best to keep democracy going. It’s lonely and it’s terrifying. And now, deadly.

So here I was this evening, after a half hour of wracking sobs, making myself dress well and go out into the world in search of dinner to bring home, marveling at the sky.

And I began remembering other skies, the seasonal skies of many walks, from early adolescence on, when you start going outside yourself—the wild Virginia sky of my childhood neighborhood after a hail storm; a playground sky of Biblical proportions, the light coming down from behind the clouds, as I played basketball with middle school friends; windswept blue drama during Hurricane Andrew in the eye of that storm in rural Central Virginia; half blue, half black clouds with rain to dodge walking across the Virginia Tech campus; an otherworldly dark orange sunset in Vermont during summer in graduate school; the still-light sky of London at 11 PM in summer; the perfect dusk of summer parks in Oxford; so many skies.

In all my walking in places as disparate as Woodbridge, Blacksburg, Appomattox, Vermont, Oxford, Spriggs Road, California, Iowa, London, and New York City, alone as I always am, I’m of it. Always of it. The sky never lets me feel abandoned. And so it is that I seem always to be from places, eventually, regardless of my oddness.

I’m too deeply, darkly sad to write anything else tonight.

As if on cue, my friend Tom sent me this:

Yes, they are.

I’m sending you these:

Once at the beach around midnight in Nags Head, North Carolina, a few decades back, I heard a mother, probably the same age as the Minnesota ICE murder victim, say to her eager child on just arriving, “Let’s not gather shells at nighttime. Look at the moon.” And what a moon it was.

Look at the sky. Don’t let the fucking fuckers take away your sky.

Sending love even in grief,

Miss O’

The View Beyond a Sky That Stops

Swearing to serve and protect

This New Year’s evening at 12:01 AM, newly elected New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani will be sworn into office by New York Attorney General Letitia James. I cannot recall the world watching a New York City mayoral election before, but then, America has not been engaged in a civil war since 1865, this time with a transparently corrupt U.S. president trying to break up the union, smashing it into pieces using a Bible as a cudgel.

Mayor-elect Mamdani will swear in on a holy Quran, and our treasured Under the Desk News correspondent V Spehar explains what you can say to your MAGA community as they freak out:

@underthedesknews

Following her list of all the various volumes politicians have chosen to swear in on, V asks us what we would swear in on, and there is no question that I would swear in on my boxed edition of Truman Capote’s personal story “A Christmas Memory.” I can’t imagine a more American story, centering on a young queer white boy in Alabama, abandoned by his divorced mother and being raised by evangelical relatives. The one true protection he has is his cousin, a much older woman, a bit balmy and childlike, who truly loves and cares for young Truman, known to her as Buddy.

The memory set around Christmas, from the baking of fruitcakes to the finding of a tree, couldn’t be more Hallmark on its surface, but far less shiny and much more emotionally complicated, particularly the details of abject poverty that most Americans would fail to understand today. Back then, and this was my parents’ time, being poor was nothing to be ashamed of (though what would be familiar is the forces of corporations doing everything possible to keep Americans as down as was possible and still get them into the factories and mines to work, but this isn’t part of the story).

Below is a selection after the baking has commenced (with whiskey for the soaking obtained earlier in the story from Mr. Haha Jones, a Native American riverside cafe owner who sells moonshine illegally (this being Prohibition), Capote casually revealing more complexities and hypocrisies of life in the United States).

Strangers “seem to us our truest friends.” That, to me, is a kind of American ideal, born out of the hatred too many of us experience from those closest to us. Connections to distant places, gratitude to presidents and knife grinders and passers-through equally, Indian or Black or white—all the people of their lives, accepted and shown appreciation, despite the despotic rule of the Christian relatives they try to forget. And their little dog, Queenie, is unforgettable, too.

It’s a beautiful, human story, focused on love between friends. Every year for many Decembers, my friend Barry Hoff would stage “A Lovely Little Reading” of this story, complete with fruitcake he baked himself, for a gathering of friends on the third floor of the now closed Hourglass Tavern on W. 46th Street, shuttered by extortionist rent, something we are counting on Mayor Mamdani to address for the good of all of us.

I always took for granted the tradition of swearing on a book, a bible, though I never realized I could choose what book I wanted (I hope you watch V’s video). Were you to take office, what book would you swear on?

“The only photo we ever had taken”: Truman Capote was friends with Nell Harper Lee, a neighbor, who used him as model for Dill in her novel To Kill a Mockingbird, and helped Truman do his research for his classic true crime story In Cold Blood.

Sending out love and high hopes this New Year’s Eve, as I fittingly watch a Marx Brothers Marathon on TCM, the absurdity of which satire is all too contemporary,

Miss O’

Gratitude

(Even when you keep missing a beat)

How have you been? How was Thanksgiving? Mine was really nice, thanks, celebrating with friends (my age) who also lost their mom, two days before last Christmas. In honor of my mom, I made a version of Lynne’s homemade stuffing, and my dad and Jeff tried to make a version, too. Foods are touchstones. I hope you were able to make and enjoy some delicious touchstones, too, in the midst of feelings.

This year has been hard, hard, hard on far too many people on this earth and much of the world suffering is the hands of three white male power mongering thugs in their 70s (Trump, Putin, Netanyahu), and their minions, and I have this problem where I feel guilty even thinking about personal joy or grief amidst all the suffering. (As you know, I live alone for a reason.) And I’m struggling with myself, as we do. It’s funny to keep doing this at 61, but here we are.

To calm myself and try to recover a sense of why I’m alive, on the Monday for part of my time before reflection week over Thanksgiving (see what we might call “The White Blog”), I spent a day bookstore haunting, walking from W. 10th Street in Greenwich Village over to E. 2nd Street and Avenue B in the East Village (Alphabet City). At my first stop, the Three Lives & Company Booksellers, a lovely small corner door shop, I found and bought Patti Smith’s latest memoir, as well as another copy of Truman Capote’s Christmas classic in case, as the store manager agreed, “In case you need a gift in the hopper.”

Book store people get you. The same woman who rang me up helped a man whose female partner brought him in to help him take up reading as a hobby. (I had to sit with that, like reading was a rarefied activity.) He liked war and history; I wanted to recommend the Capote, but I didn’t interfere. I recently read that in the United States, only around 14% of adults read for pleasure. That really hurts me. Even my dad, Bernie, who didn’t graduate from high school, read the newspaper every day. I told you this: My mom, Lynne, bought him Travels with Charlie, and he liked it, but The Godfather was the book that hooked him. And this lack of American reading reminded me of something back nearly thirty years ago, in summer, a cousin and his wife and four kids were visiting, staying in the upstairs rooms in my parents’ small house—this was back when I was still teaching in Virginia, and my brother Pat lived there too. My brother Jeff lived in an apartment then and took the day off, and we all gathered to take my relatives into D.C. for the day. While we waited for them to come downstairs, my mom sat in her chair, my dad in his, Pat on the loveseat, Jeff in the corner chair, I in a side chair, each of us with a section or pages of The Washington Post (back when it was a real newspaper). We read. My cousin came downstairs into the little living room and stood still. Gradually, we looked up, “Oh, hey, John,” and he stood staring. I asked, “What’s wrong?” And he said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” What? “A family reading.” Though this was a weekday, we knew such times generally and all of my growing up as “Sunday.” (At Christmastime, we all listened together, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” That would’ve made his head explode.)

Patti’s memoir (I’m up to page 113, savoring it each night so as not to have it end) is essentially a beautiful love letter filled with gratitude to everyone who helped her become. And Patti (I feel I can call her that) has made videos on Substack, posted also on Instagram, and she talks about living in gratitude. I feel every word. In her latest (hyperlinked above) she talks about finishing her tour for the 50th Anniversary of Horses, which I told you I was lucky enough to see at the Beacon here in New York.

One of the first people to help Patti Smith find her voice in the early years after she came to New York at age 19 was the budding playwright and musician Sam Shepard. I remember reading Shepard’s plays in college, after he’d won the 1979 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Buried Child. I realize now that he’d only been a real voice in the theater for ten years when I first read him—that’s wild to me. He seemed so old and established. But then, when I saw Patti Smith’s cover for the album Horses, I couldn’t have known she was only 28 to my 11. She was worlds away.

In truth, I didn’t discover or really attend to Patti Smith at all until reading her memoir Just Kids. I’d heard “Gloria,” and “Because the Night,” and of course I knew who she was, had seen Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos of her, but she scared me. Sam Shepard scared me too—I designed costumes for of his two one-acts, Cowboys #2 and Red Cross, when I was in college, ca. 1984, and his writing was out there. (I was part of an acting ensemble for Savage/Love, a play he wrote with Joseph Chaikin, but we never got to perform it.) Smith’s memoir/fantasia The Year of the Monkey in part chronicles her time nursing Shepard as he was dying of ALS, spending days typing up his final book as he dictated it from a wheelchair. (I told you about his observation, “Patti Lee, we are a Beckett play.”)

Sam Shepard’s advice that has served her a lifetime. We could all take a memo.

When I read of Patti’s childhood, I feel embraced by love, recalling my own best parts of childhood. She writes like no one I’ve read—she’s as idiosyncratic on the page as on vinyl, and it’s just wonderful.

One of Smith’s childhood memories is of reading Oscar Wilde’s “fairy tale,” “The Selfish Giant.” When I became obsessed with Oscar Wilde at age 15, my mom gave me a collection of his stories for children, so I reread this particular tale the other night. I remember that I was turned off by the religious turn the tale took; but Smith spent part of her youth as a Jehovah’s Witness and took religion seriously, until she couldn’t anymore. By contrast, I grew up free from religion as a part of my life but still had questions about God. (Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret was a favorite book.) But I knew the feeling of that first book, that first story, the one that sparked the love of reading, the need to read more.

Patti Smith’s favorite story, “The Selfish Giant,” and mine, The Little House.. What’s yours?

I know, I feel, I see how important reading is—for so many reasons beyond the stuff you learn. I was thinking about my cousin’s surprise at seeing a family reading together; now I imagine it’s families scrolling on phones, and while that is not dissimilar, the act is different. Scrolling is not meditation, somehow, but something that distances people. (There’s data on this.) There’s a calmness that comes when engaging quietly with print text. Something in the tactile element and the way our brains have spent centuries adjusting to the act of reading, and even better, surrounded by some books that everyone can see on display—it’s a shared experience even when it’s solitary. It’s not about algorithms, is what I mean.

And Patti Smith is so different from me, reading her memoir reminds me that sharing the particulars of our lives can lead to universals, in that we see ourselves as human. But I can love that Patti and I share a love of something Wildean, even if mine is his whole creative life. And like me, Smith has touchstone artists—hers Diego Rivera and Arthur Rimbaud; mine Katharine Hepburn and Virginia Woolf. Their art gave us our own humanity, opened the gate, turned on a light, pick a metaphor.

It’s such a lousy time to be human right now—“lousy” is hardly the word—and yet I know I need to walk around grateful. By some miracle on Friday, for example, I found my way through to finishing a major project at work, could see my way to the end, I mean, and was so relieved, that as I took my afternoon walk I fairly floated. It’s such a human thing. Even Patti Smith makes the finishing of her tour—a 50th anniversary tour as a superstar—sound so human, and then she had a tooth seen to at the dentist, talked about moderating a talk back after the opening of the new Frankenstein and talking to Guillermo Del Toro like he’s a person, because he is, an artist like her, but a person. Creatives living their creative lives pausing at moments to scream, “Fuck Trump.” Like the rest of us.

We’re all doing our best, getting on with the work of our worlds. Loving our friends, our families, telling them that. Expressing gratitude for a good chair, a coat that keeps us warm, a hat that stays on in the wind. An orange. A book.

I’ll ruminate on all the horrors of our country again soon—I think I’m waiting for an idea of what we need to do, besides not quit. Remember was Sam said to Patti, “If you miss a beat, invent another.”

Sending love,

Miss O’

East 3rd Street, NYC, should you like to visit there.