Leafing Though

Reading is a curious thing. It takes much more time than, say, watching a TV programme. It also offers much less immediacy, since when watching TV you see the characters that in reading you have to make up in your head. It's an isolated and isolating activity.

And yet we do it. You're reading this right now, for example. And if you are, you chose to, rather than doing something like talking to a friend, which would

seem a much more enriching activity. And not only do we do it, but we talk about it, and not only do we talk about it, but sometimes we are interested to hear about it even if we haven't done it. O.M. was telling me last night that she'd been reading Catherine Millet's new book, and even though I haven't read it and she didn't tell me the plot (which I already knew, from reading articles about it), I wanted to know what she thought of it. B. wrote to me from Russia telling me he'd enjoyed Our Man in Havana: I haven't read it, but I quite like Graham Greene and, although I have no plans to read Our Man in the near future, I was interested to hear that someone I liked had read a book by someone I'd liked. In that case, it was partially because I now will make a mental note to read it, but it was also because just generally I like to know if you're enjoying the book you're reading or not.

What is it that makes reading so enjoyable, I wonder? And what is it that makes it for some people, in a world where there are many other options besides reading books, a thing they still do as a matter of course? You get drawn into other worlds, certainly. And you have to do some of the drawing yourself, which I really think is part of the attraction: you envision the characters and the situations, and so you're more interested and invested in them. But at the same time there's the fact that the author is doing a good deal of the work - most people have favourite fictional characters, for example (the man who appears in Markheim, for me, or Henry Tilney, whom my friend K and I decided in college would be the perfect husband, and for whom I've always maintained a residual fondness), which suggests some authors do especially good jobs of creating characters, or at least that character - and the fact that that work is being done, and an experience offered to you, is very soothing. Certainly this passive reception is a large part of the attraction of reading, but so is the active reception. And then there's the thinking. I don't just mean the thinking about larger issues that a novel might raise - I mean even just the simple act of going back over the plot in your mind, thinking about what the characters have done and what you've particularly liked.

Following on from that, as I've said I'm currently reading Tender is the Night. It's certainly depressing, yet...I like it ("I like it; I like it"). Essentially, I like

Fitzgerald's writing very much. I sometimes think that I pay a lot of attention to the way in which literature is written - the use and placement of words and the effect those have on tone or weight - because I'm a writer myself, but really it's probably just something that's happened as I've got older. In any case, Fitzgerald is very good in this way in Tender: he deploys words to effect extraordinarily well. Also, he's a very keen observer of human emotion, and a very good comprehender of it. For example, the main character, Dick Diver, is deeply attracted to the young Rosemary Hoyt, but even as he embarks on an affair with her - or wavers toward doing so - he retains his belief that his wife is the most beautiful woman he knows, and that they are deeply and necessarily bound to each other. His desire for Rosemary is fresh, but his love for his wife is deep, and seems (at the stage I've reached, anyway) to outweigh his desire. Yet his desire pulls and haunts him. Fitzgerald clearly comprehends that and how that this might be the case, and not only does he comprehend it, but he portrays the feelings vividly enough that the reader accepts them (understanding them is a different story).

There's a really marvellous portion of a chapter, in which Diver is haunted by a description of an at least sensual encounter Rosemary may have had in a train compartment: he imagines a request to pull down the curtain, eagerly granted, and the question, "Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?", becomes a refrain he can't get out of his head. It comes to him in several different situations, and with several different metaphorical meanings, in the next couple of chapters, and one gradually comes to see the way in which lust - or at least an utterance that inspires lust - can become a kind of warning against itself: "the curtain" gradually, metaphorically, becomes the veil that Diver draws in front of his desire for Rosemary, or his tendency to imagine her in this arousing situation, so the words that indicate arousal themselves become a warning against further arousal. Very well done on Fitzgerald's part.

Yet the book has very little apparent style, or perhaps it might be better to say very little apparent idiosyncratic style. All that Fitzgerald deploys stylistically seems designed first and foremost to give reader clear access to the situation and the characters' experience of it (not that this always works, I hasten to add, and some plot developments seem very odd. There are some bits I don't get at all). And thinking about this in the kitchen tonight while I was making my milk, I thought that perhaps that's the sign of a great prose writer: a great prose writer makes style secondary to the desire to communicate his or her world. Which is not to say the style need not be apparent, or even foregrounded. But the goal is always to make it do service to the communication, so that even overt style is used for a purpose, a purpose of clarity.

In any case, as the woman in the play does not say, You've a way with you, F. I'm sure I like it.

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Let Me Be Brief

O. and I have a kind of ongoing game or joke in which we identify very short sentences, spoken by the other, that contain whole sad stories: so far O. is the winner, having once uttered the sentence, "I used to have that watch, but it broke." What a story of tragedy that sentence seems to hide! Today at lunch, however, I discovered that exactly the opposite can happen: "I lost my room key," my FTT said, "but then I found it again." What a narrative of joy that sentence contains! First the fear that the key is gone forever, with the attendant irritation at the hassle and fee incurred, then the happy discovery that none of that will be incurred at all, for the key has been found! All that joy in eleven words.

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Lord Farrow Never Wore a Bag over His Head

When I was in Marks and Spencer today, I suddenly remembered as I was going up the escalator (and staring at a really nice bag [that's it there]. Actually, as I noticed it I was surprised that I noticed it while I was remembering what I was remembering, but then I realised it was a very nice bag, after all) something S. said when I told him about my meeting with Mr. Fallen this summer, and how I had said, "I'm sure they didn't notice," when Mr. Fallen remarked that he'd managed to fool people into believing he knew more than he did. S. said that he believes that people only say that kind of thing because they want you to contradict them: it's a kind of cheap way of getting a compliment.

I didn't think he was correct at the time. Then, I thought it was actually a way of pre-empting other people's similar remarks: if you get in first, they can't hurt you. And I still believe that. But these days I also believe (as I think I've believed before, because I have a vague memory of doing so), that it's a way of getting yourself used to the facts. I think Mr. Fallen's life had shown him he couldn't be that smart or knowledgeable - after all, everyone around him was getting jobs and having success, but he wasn't, so what conclusion could he draw from that? - and he was reminding himself of this truth in order to come to accept it, and thus not be hurt by demonstrations of it. I thought of this because as I was wandering through M&S I was reflecting on the large amount of clothing that I own, and that my salary has enabled me to buy. It enables me to do this because, as a single person, I don't have the expenses of someone with a family, or even with just a partner. And I was reflecting to myself that my future would hold an equally large amount of clothing, because as an undesirable over-the-hill woman I would continue

to be single. And then I thought that S. would say I was saying that to be contradicted, but that I wasn't: I was saying it, as I say it to myself at least once every day, and often say it aloud to other people, because I think it's wise to get used to the truth.

Incidentally, however nice that black velvet bag is, it isn't as nice as this bag, which has the added attribute of wit. So if I don't have to go back and rot away the rest of my life in Otherhome, maybe I'll actually be able to buy this bag, thus spending some of my lavish single cash. If you must be unwanted, at least you can be unwanted and well-accessorised!

My friend L would say we should put that on a pillow.

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Let's All Keep Calm

From the literally ones of responses that have poured in, it appears that there is concern that people may be defriended. Chillax: no one is going to be defriended.

Today I had my very last set of supervisions for this term. I still have Study Skills supervisions, but no more with my regular students. How irritating it was, then, that my last supervision should turn out to be with my least favourite student of this cohort and my most favourite, simultaneously. My least favourite student is a young man whose abilities as a literary critic are, let us say, in directly inverse proportion to his pomposity. He is very pompous. My favourite student, by contrast, is very quiet, but when he does speak he is always right on the money. My least favourite student is disappointing enough on his own, but having him in a duo with my most favourite student was something like having an inferior diamond on a piece of showroom velvet, then putting a first-water diamond next to it: the first diamond was just bearable when it was alone, but now it's impossible to turn a blind eye to its flaws (although I'm guessing that in that metaphorical (well, similical) situation you wouldn't want to put up your hand repeatedly at the first diamond and say, "Don't speak! Now, go ahead, second diamond" -- although maybe you would. I'm not a gemologist, so what do I know?).

I am sorry to see this term go. I liked pretty much all my students, and my very favourite (from a different cohort) I liked very much. He had a sense of humour, and you could see him actually,

physically struggle with interpreting literature. When he was leaving the final supervision last Friday he gave me a little extra smile, and I was quite flattered, until I stopped and had a look at myself shortly afterward in Boots and realised that all my red lipstick had come off, leaving me with only a bright red lip line, and that my hair was MASSIVE. So I'm guessing the appreciation was merely intellectual. Or perhaps he thought I had deliberately modelled myself on Mrs. Rochester (on the right, there - we were doing Jane Eyre), and he was admiring my themed look.

Incidentally, none of my students in those supervisions recognised Mrs. Rochester as a symbol of potentially terrifying female sexuality and repressed womanhood. This reading has become so commonly accepted in the States that it's now simply understood, not to say banal. So I was very surprised indeed.

In other news, I engaged in snotty one-upmanship with a man on match.com. He contacted me, and I contacted him back. His initial e-mail was widly extrapolatory of my profile, and I wrote back asking him how he'd got these impressions. He responded by saying we should talk on the phone, and I wrote back saying I felt uncomfortable talking on the phone to people I don't know (true), so I would like us to continue to communicate via e-mail for a while (of course I should have cut this all off after his initial e-mail, but, hey, I'm desperate). He then wrote back an e-mail in which he basically flat-out stated I was a weird for not wanting to talk on the phone, insulted the study of Wordsworth (??), told me I was naive, and informed me that I had missed out on something great by refusing to get to know him.

Now, I know it's fruitless to engage with the lunatic, and that there is nothing to be gained from such engagement since the lunatic always think you are the lunatic, but I have been low, and I think I just wanted to feel I was superior to someone. Or to feel that I was in some way worthwhile. Or...who knows. Anyway, I wrote back and corrected his spelling and grammar. Was it petty? Yes. Did I derive any long term satisfaction from it? No. Was it pleasing for three hours? Yes. And that's enough for me.

Boy, I certainly am going to have lots of stories to tell my fifteen cats when I'm old.

And in the final bit of news, I had coffee with Mr. Cielo yesterday (chillax! again. It wasn't a date. It was a hanging out. Although I'll give him credit: he managed to keep a conversation going for one and a half hours with someone with whom he apparently has zero in common). After this coffee (which, as the previous parentheses demonstrates, showed me how little we had in common), in a fit of temporary Idon'tknowwhat (defiance mixed with desperation, I suspect), I invited him to the dinner party I'm throwing on Sunday to honour Pearl Harbour Day (it's my favourite holiday). And he accepted! But everyone else there is a close friend of mine, and they all know each other! Now it will be me, a bunch of close interwoven friends, and Mr. Cielo! To whom I have nothing to say! Argh.

And lastly, BF sent me this poem, saying it made her think of me and this blog. I like it very much, so I thought I'd reproduce it here.

Who Is Now Reading This?

May-be one is now reading this who knows some wrong-doing of my past life,
Or may-be a stranger is reading this who has secretly loved me,
Or may-be one who meets all my grand assumptions and egotisms with derision,
Or may-be one who is puzzled at me.

As if I were not puzzled at myself!
Or as if I never deride myself! (O conscience-struck! O self-convicted!)
Or as if I do not secretly love strangers! (O tenderly, a long time, and never avow it;)
Or as if I did not see, perfectly well, interior in myself, the stuff of wrong-doing,
Or as if it could cease transpiring from me until it must cease.

—Walt Whitman

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The Okay Looking and Darned

When I heat my milk to "very hot," if I put my nose very close to the milk and inhale, I can smell the smell I remember from when my father used to buy us powdered milk while my parents were separated. Before he mixed in the water, the granules out of the packet smelled the same way. I suppose in the heating process the milkness separates from the water, so I am smelling the beginning of the powdering process, perhaps.

You will notice that I am back to making my own hot drinks.

I'm currently reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. I remember when I first started going out with Irishboyfriend I read The Beautiful and Damned, and I became deeply depressed. In fact, I think The Beautiful and Damned may be the most depressing book I've ever read. Uch, I wandered around gloomy for at least a week. Fitzgerald is interesting: clearly, he was able to see the desperation and hollowness at the root of the privileged Jazz Age lifestyle, yet he wasn't able to stop living that lifestyle until circumstances forced him to. This ability to see clearly in others the very foolishnesses that you yourself are enacting seems to be a more common life paradox than I supposed, though.

In any case, Tender is the Night is also depressing. Thanks, F! I don't remember The Great Gatsby as a laugh riot, but I also don't remember it as all that lowering: nonetheless, it would seem that I ought to stay away from Fitzgerald novels, because I am now depressed. Although obviously we can't blame TitN for this with certainty (also, the short stories are not at all depressing).

Certainly, circumstances round my way are a bit gloomifying lately. For one thing, talk about tango seems to be taking a larger and larger role. Not tango itself: just talk about it. This is sad, because I like talking about tango to some degree, but now things have got to the stage where anytime it's mentioned I feel myself tensing up and all the joy leaking from my heart. It reminds me of that scene in Remington Steele where Laura and Mr. Steele go to Mexico, and every band that comes by at dinner plays "Guantanamera." "Guantanamera" is an enjoyable song, but you don't want to listen to it at dinner every night, especially repeatedly: to make the simile a bit more apt, Carlos Gardel is a fine singer and his tango songs are moving, but if he simply burst into song every time I sat across from him at dinner (which would admittedly be pretty extraordinary, because he's dead), I would soon choose not to sit with him, and I would grow to dislike his songs greatly.

Secondly, one of my friends is engaged in behaviour I dislike. Even worse, one of my friends is engaged in behaviour I deeply dislike. Usually I try to balance behaviours I dislike against my overall liking for the person, and I can often make space for the disliked behaviour in the larger whole. In this first case, that's becoming increasingly difficult, and in the second case, it's not possible: that behaviour is not just morally unpleasant to me personally but is also being performed in the face of plain evidence that my friend would not like it if someone were doing the same in return. That is, it is not just morally unpleasant (a debatable label, since the only morals that count here are those of the participants) but also illogical and, well, stupid. Stupid in that it reveals my friend to be considerably less reflective and even just sensible than I had thought. So people are being hurt (I know), people are behaving badly (I think), people are not being respected (I believe), and people are behaving ass-ishly (I must admit). Yet I love my friend, and to cease to hang out would cause my friend puzzled pain. Yet I don't feel right making some grand pronouncement, because the disliked behaviour has already been going on for some time.

That one causes me to heave a heavy sigh.

Then, I had a saddening therapy session today. I dislike therapy sessions in which I want to cry, because I consider it shaming to cry in therapy: I don't like to cry in front of other people in the first place, plus I'm there to do rational work on myself, plus my problems are essentially inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, and I'm not going to compound the self-indulgence of going to therapy by self-indulgently crying. So the session was upsetting because I nearly cried. But also, of course, it was sufficiently upsetting that I nearly cried: it's hardly heartening to say to someone aloud that all the evidence suggests that you'll never find a partner, then enumerate the evidence (can you enumerate evidence? or is it evidences?) that suggests that, then admit that you're depressed because no one cares for you specially, then admit in the end (even if you've known it before, and the therapist has, too) that you have no self-confidence and many reasons to believe you're unpartnerable (although I think the stuff after "and" should come under the above enumerated evidence[s]).

I think I'm just going to have to accept that when I look back on my life I will see here a long period in which I was deeply unhappy, with that unhappiness very occasionally interspersed with happiness. And I think I'm also just going to have to accept now that I am now deeply unhappy, and have been deeply unhappy for two or three years. I can't fix this or alleviate it, so I think I'm just going to have to think of it as something I'll endure and then get past. The therapist today suggested that we take a moment "to respect that unhappiness," which if you don't pay attention sounds like one of those crawly New Age things certain therapists say, but if you do pay attention perhaps does something important: it seems to me that it might suggest that that unhappiness is a temporary condition, & hence one that has to be acknowledged rather than accepted.

I also think, as I have had occasion to think before, that perhaps I should just stop being friends with many of my friends. It would certainly make my life easier. I think (as I have had occasion to think before) that I should try to locate some people of my own age and be friends with them. But the difficulty there is that everyone sometimes acts irritatingly, so how am I to say that my new, more age-appropriate friends would not eventually act as upsettingly as my current friends?

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Pruderie Anglaise

One day last week I was discussing with some people at the lunch table the fact that I'd been trying to persuade B. to stay. One of the people was a friend of a friend, Mr. LaMosca. He knows me, but he doesn't know me very well (and I don't like him much, although he may not know that). He said to me, "Vespertina, why don't you share your love with B, if you know what I mean?"

Now, here we have what I find a strange situation. What I did, I believe, was say nothing, or say something like, "I'm not going to do that." What I wanted to do was say, "You're revolting." What I now think I should have said, and wish I had said, was, "How dare you? You scarcely know me. How dare you make such a grotesquely inappropriate remark to me!"

But the second thing I felt was a kind of amazement at Mr. LaMosca's remark. When did it become all right for us to make remarks

about quite intimate matters in a casual public way? I'm going to bet that my father didn't tell any of his women friends that he had a thing for seeing two women together (even if he did). I bet my mother never had a friend say at lunch, "If I don't get laid soon I'm going to be really depressed," as if she were saying, "If they don't serve croutons with the salad again soon I'm going to be really depressed," as a friend did at my lunch table the other day. I don't want you to say those things in front of me, because I don't want to know those things about you. My sex life is my business, not because sex is bad, but because that life is MINE, not yours. If I want to have sex with my friend to entice him to stay (which, although I'm not entirely sure, I believe qualifies as a low-level form of prostitution), that too is my business. If I talk about sex on this blog, and about my sex life, it's because when I write I conceive of this as having no audience, or at least an audience that will never meet me, and so these are in a way private utterances (yes, this is how I think while I write, although when I'm not writing I know that's not the case).

It seems to me that in some curious way we've lost a sense of perspective, or of awareness, so that the ability to recognise situations in which it's inappropriate to say something has eroded, as has the sense of whom it's inappropriate to say them to.

Or perhaps it's just that these days I hang out with very young people, and so the sense of what should be said, and when, has yet to be worked out?

For me, personally, part of my difficulty in these situations is that I dislike people who attempt to shock or browbeat you with sex: those who make sexual remarks because they want to see you be shocked. I dislike that kind of power, and I dislike giving that kind of value to adolescent idiocy (although in the case of Mr. LaMosca's remark, I think that actually bordered on sexual harrassment). So I sit there and listen to it without flinching, even though I'd like to flinch. And also, as I've said before on this blog, I'm not a prude, and I don't want to be thought one. And I want to be someone people feel they can be honest with, or talk to if they need to, and one of the things people are shyest about talking about is sex. But I guess maybe this is a place where I should take a stand, if this distresses me so much: am I not allowed to say, "I don't want you to talk about this in front of me" or, "I find that offensive/inappropriate"? I've already started saying, "This is not a subject to discuss at the lunch/dinner table," about more general private discussions. Of course, that's taken enormous effort of will on my part, but I guess having exerted that will in one area, I can exert it in another.

I left that party early. I told everyone I had a headache, but the truth is that I left because I felt fat, and because I didn't have a partner. I felt miserable without someone, and when I looked around at all the people who weren't there with someone and who didn't seem to mind, I felt ashamed and a failure for being miserable. It thus seemed better not to be there, so I left, and now I'm glad I did. I missed out not just on having my own multifarious inadequacies thrust in my face, but on being shocked. And no doubt I would have had my sense of being a failure increased when no one else present appeared to be shocked at what shocked me.

Tonight I left the milonga early because my hip muscle still hurts, and I want to rest it. Who knows what shenanigans I thus missed there?

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My Waterloo

This afternoon I was walking down the shiny wet street when I was hailed by a voice, and looking up, discovered a fracquaintance. This is one of my favourite things that happens in

WhereIlive: I love meeting people I know by chance on the street or in the shops. I don't know if I would love this if it occurred elsewhere (the couple of times it happened in Otherhome it was nice to see the person, but I didn't have the same feeling of warmth about the meeting itself), but here it somehow gives me a feeling of belonging, of being so much a part of the community here that I meet people I know anywhere I go.

In fact, I was on the street coming from a seminar at which we had been discussing a book by my friend J. J. is the sort of scholar who has his books talked about as the topic of whole seminars (in other words, he is a famous scholar), and I wanted to go because I wanted to see what they would make of him. As it happens, they made a good deal more of him than I, because I didn't get a chance to read the extract, and I haven't read the book for years. So I must read it again soon. In addition, though, I found the seminar interesting because as part of it we got into a short discussion/disagreement about whether "history writes literature," and I've been thinking about this topic ever since.

This disagreement started because one of the men at the seminar objected to his sense that J. believes that history writes literature; he said, "History does not write literature." Now, obviously this is a tough statement to respond to truthfully without knowing what he means by "history," and in my usual articulate way I asked him what he did mean: "Do you mean, things that happen to people?" Nice. What I meant, and eventually half-managed to say, was, "Do you mean historical events?" - although what I also meant and mean is, Day to Day Events and Alterations that Arise from Historical Events. As far as I could determine (for the conversation became rather crowded at that point), Yes, he did mean that. So what he meant was, Historical events don't write literature.

In which case, I must say, I believe that history does write literature.

We are our backgrounds, surely? We are other things besides them, but we must ineluctably be where we came from and what surrounds us. I confess here that I just can't imagine how anyone could argue against this now, how the notion of a person as an untouched island can exist. And if we are our backgrounds and surrounds, then it follows logically that what we produce is, too. After all, as a product of the self, what we produce has the same influences as the self that produced it. While I wouldn't argue that literature is simply a flat reflection of history, I would argue that history influences what is written - in terms of subject matter, but less obviously, and I would argue more frequently, in terms of how it's written and how subjects are approached. Indeed, one can validly argue that without the French Revolution Lyrical Ballads would never have been written, not just because the Revolution inspired Wordsworth and Coleridge, or because it opened up society to them in ways that made plain utterance the speech of the common man interesting, but because it forced writers to focus on England, since they couldn't GET to Europe, and the notion of examining the poor of England, rather than some great European sight or theme, arose (or was suggested, or was implanted).

Of course literature also transcends history. We may be our backgrounds and our surrounds, but we're not just our backgrounds and our surrounds. But of course, as I pointed out in the only decent observation I got out in the whole seminar, that's the contradiction of literature: Literature is trascendent, and that's why we study it; but literature is not transcendent, and that's why we study it.

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