I am delighted that it is Proms season once more, and that I realised it this time right before it started, so that I have been able to listen to some of the broadcasts on the BBC website. I don't really understand instrumental music -- I often can't even recognise repeated themes, much less hear the differences in various interpretations of a piece -- but I enjoy listening to it, and keep hoping that with enough exposure my brain may eventually develop the proper neural pathways for real appreciation. Thanks to my husband (who grew up in a very musical family) I'm at least able to tell if I'm not enjoying something, which is a start!
Vocal music, fortunately, is another story, and thus I'm currently listening to last Saturday's performance of Haydn's Creation oratorio and loving every moment of it. What a gorgeous, gorgeous piece; I must get my own copy.
I finished quite a few books this week -- more on that in my next post -- and am still slogging through the Sinclair. Every time I think I'm going to give up on it in frustration I hit a chapter that I really enjoy, only to bog down again 10 or 15 pages later due to the exceptional unpleasantness of the heroine. The library will want it back soon, though, so I'd best get through it this weekend! There are entrancing books on the English Civil War awaiting me, as well as those aforementioned novels by unknown (to me) early 20th century authors. New authors are always so tantalising...
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
currently reading: still more Bagnold & Sinclair!
I'm still working on the Davidson, which is interesting and dense and going to take a while. Meanwhile, I'm reading...
A huge stack of novels are on my horizon, mostly by authors I've never heard of before, but the Sinclair is slowing me down!
- Enid Bagnold: A Diary Without Dates -- I've been meaning to read this forever, and I finally picked it up. I don't plan to go on a huge Bagnold spree, this will be the last for a while, but oh it's interesting. There are some tonal similarities to The Happy Foreigner, but it's definitely it's own thing. Non-fiction.
- May Sinclair: The Helpmate -- Sinclair always seems to write with such a didactic agenda, and this novel is so far no exception. Just what is the agenda here, though? Something about true spirituality, true companionship, versus the workings of the ego and the sort of pride that makes a person judge others. I know from her WWI work (this is earlier, from 1907) that she was very into Freud and psycho-analytic thought... I wonder just when that happened? Yet another call for a biography, as all I really know about her real life is that Charlotte Mew was fonder of her than she was comfortable with.
A huge stack of novels are on my horizon, mostly by authors I've never heard of before, but the Sinclair is slowing me down!
Bagnold, Sinclair, and a Dorothy Whipple surprise
Lying in front of the fan on Tuesday afternoon I tore through both the Bagnold and Sinclair I mentioned in my earlier post, as well as a novel by Dorothy Whipple that was just too appealing to ignore.
May Sinclair's Superseded was a very short book (ah, shades of the Provincial Lady), taking a rather pessimistic view of the "Woman Question." Superseded suggests that most women will be destroyed by competition in a labour market, and that education merely unfits them for experiencing the emotional side of life as wives and mothers. As it was published with another short novel in a volume titled Two Sides of the Question I can only assume that the other half of the novel gave the other half of the argument.
The focus of the book is Miss Juliana Quincey, an "old maid" teacher at a school for girls. At forty-five Miss Quincey's emotions have never been truly engaged, and she expects little from her thankless students, her fault-finding aunt, and her critical peers. The Head of the school would love to replace Miss Quincey with someone younger and more intelligent, which poses some of the tension in the book, but the real conflict comes as she encounters for the first time both a man and a woman who treat her with kindness and respect. Her stifled emotions blossom into attachment to each of them, but the environment she's in is unforgiving of emotional development in a woman of forty-five. It's a painful book, probably all too realistic for its time, and made me grateful to be living in urban Northern California where a woman is never too old to discover herself.
Enid Bagnold's The Happy Foreigner was an entirely different experience, and to be honest I'm not really sure what to make of it. The prose is beautifully vague... perhaps impressionistic is the right word? Despite the novel being entirely from the perspective of Fanny, the young Englishwoman who goes to France to drive for the French Army immediately after the first World War, I never really understood who Fanny was. Bagnold details Fanny's immediate emotional reactions to events, but never describes her past or her hope for the future, which gives the novel a very dream-like sense to it. I see the art in that, the way that a woman after the war might feel like all she had was the present, both past and future irrelevant, but it meant that I was never able to connect with Fanny emotionally, and thus I didn't really care what happened to her.
Now that I think about it, the title is even more appropriate than I realised; Fanny really is the happy foreigner, the woman whose past does not haunt her, whose future does not trouble her, who can visit a devastated, desolate France and then leave again, seemingly untouched by the experience. How much of that was Bagnold's own self, and how much a wish for integrity so complete that she is completely unscathed by the war? Perhaps I should find a biography of Bagnold...
My final Tuesday novel was High Wages by Dorothy Whipple, and oh it was a pleasant surprise. I rarely find a book I can just sink into without my terrible page-counting habit interfering, but this was one. The heroine, Jane, makes her way in the world through determination and intelligence, discovers her avocation in selling clothing, and manages to make a vocation of it. She is shown as paying for her success, both through hard work and difficult personal relationships, but the overall tone of the novel is so optimisitc that I never doubted for a moment that Jane would make it through. Objectively speaking the novel has plenty of painful and depressing moments, but I still finished the book feeling pleased with the world and convinced that Jane would be all right. This is the fourth of Whipple's novels I've read, and they've neatly divided up into two which were heart-rending (Someone at a Distance and They Knew Mr. Knight), and two which left me happy -- this one and The Priory. It makes me nervous to read a fifth, since my all rights it ought to be another upsetting one!
May Sinclair's Superseded was a very short book (ah, shades of the Provincial Lady), taking a rather pessimistic view of the "Woman Question." Superseded suggests that most women will be destroyed by competition in a labour market, and that education merely unfits them for experiencing the emotional side of life as wives and mothers. As it was published with another short novel in a volume titled Two Sides of the Question I can only assume that the other half of the novel gave the other half of the argument.
The focus of the book is Miss Juliana Quincey, an "old maid" teacher at a school for girls. At forty-five Miss Quincey's emotions have never been truly engaged, and she expects little from her thankless students, her fault-finding aunt, and her critical peers. The Head of the school would love to replace Miss Quincey with someone younger and more intelligent, which poses some of the tension in the book, but the real conflict comes as she encounters for the first time both a man and a woman who treat her with kindness and respect. Her stifled emotions blossom into attachment to each of them, but the environment she's in is unforgiving of emotional development in a woman of forty-five. It's a painful book, probably all too realistic for its time, and made me grateful to be living in urban Northern California where a woman is never too old to discover herself.
Enid Bagnold's The Happy Foreigner was an entirely different experience, and to be honest I'm not really sure what to make of it. The prose is beautifully vague... perhaps impressionistic is the right word? Despite the novel being entirely from the perspective of Fanny, the young Englishwoman who goes to France to drive for the French Army immediately after the first World War, I never really understood who Fanny was. Bagnold details Fanny's immediate emotional reactions to events, but never describes her past or her hope for the future, which gives the novel a very dream-like sense to it. I see the art in that, the way that a woman after the war might feel like all she had was the present, both past and future irrelevant, but it meant that I was never able to connect with Fanny emotionally, and thus I didn't really care what happened to her.
Now that I think about it, the title is even more appropriate than I realised; Fanny really is the happy foreigner, the woman whose past does not haunt her, whose future does not trouble her, who can visit a devastated, desolate France and then leave again, seemingly untouched by the experience. How much of that was Bagnold's own self, and how much a wish for integrity so complete that she is completely unscathed by the war? Perhaps I should find a biography of Bagnold...
My final Tuesday novel was High Wages by Dorothy Whipple, and oh it was a pleasant surprise. I rarely find a book I can just sink into without my terrible page-counting habit interfering, but this was one. The heroine, Jane, makes her way in the world through determination and intelligence, discovers her avocation in selling clothing, and manages to make a vocation of it. She is shown as paying for her success, both through hard work and difficult personal relationships, but the overall tone of the novel is so optimisitc that I never doubted for a moment that Jane would make it through. Objectively speaking the novel has plenty of painful and depressing moments, but I still finished the book feeling pleased with the world and convinced that Jane would be all right. This is the fourth of Whipple's novels I've read, and they've neatly divided up into two which were heart-rending (Someone at a Distance and They Knew Mr. Knight), and two which left me happy -- this one and The Priory. It makes me nervous to read a fifth, since my all rights it ought to be another upsetting one!
Thursday, July 16, 2009
self-indulgence, Du Maurier, Goudge
As anticipated, a Wednesday filled with appointments does not leave much energy or clarity for writing. But things got done, and it's hard to complain about that!
Today I am going out with my wonderful friend Carl, whose conversation is always so stimulating that I end the day with a much expanded TBR list, not to mention piles of ideas for writing. After lunch I plan to do the Very Important Errand of taking a bag of books rejected by the first-line bookstore to the second-line bookstore in the hopes that they will keep them, and incidentally checking their shelves for books by Elizabeth Goudge and Daphne du Maurier that I don't already have. I am perhaps being foolish to collect such piles of both of these authors without really knowing what I'm getting into, but so many people with tastes similar to mine like du Maurier -- and I did adore Rebecca back when I was 15 (and have been meaning to reread it since) -- so I'm indulging in the fun of collecting. With Goudge it's a somewhat different story; I loved Linnets and Valerians but found The Valley of Song too twee -- and had no idea that she wrote for adults -- so when I stumbled across some of her adult novels visiting my in-laws in San Diego I had to scoop them up, and now even without having read them (yet) I really want more.
Tueday turned out to be a marvelous reading day in which I tore through a three novels, but that will have to wait until later, or else I shan't be ready when Carl comes to pick me up!
Today I am going out with my wonderful friend Carl, whose conversation is always so stimulating that I end the day with a much expanded TBR list, not to mention piles of ideas for writing. After lunch I plan to do the Very Important Errand of taking a bag of books rejected by the first-line bookstore to the second-line bookstore in the hopes that they will keep them, and incidentally checking their shelves for books by Elizabeth Goudge and Daphne du Maurier that I don't already have. I am perhaps being foolish to collect such piles of both of these authors without really knowing what I'm getting into, but so many people with tastes similar to mine like du Maurier -- and I did adore Rebecca back when I was 15 (and have been meaning to reread it since) -- so I'm indulging in the fun of collecting. With Goudge it's a somewhat different story; I loved Linnets and Valerians but found The Valley of Song too twee -- and had no idea that she wrote for adults -- so when I stumbled across some of her adult novels visiting my in-laws in San Diego I had to scoop them up, and now even without having read them (yet) I really want more.
Tueday turned out to be a marvelous reading day in which I tore through a three novels, but that will have to wait until later, or else I shan't be ready when Carl comes to pick me up!
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
reading right now: bagnold, davidson, sinclair
I am always reading four or five books at once, usually a mix of non-fiction that's going slowly and poetry or drama that's going really slowly, and fiction that's going quickly... although sometimes the fiction slows to a crawl and the non-fiction is brisk.
Right now the books are:
Both Sinclair and Bagnold are authors I learned about from some combination of Nicola Beauman's A Very Great Profession and Nicola Humble's The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism, two books I have read over & over again for their insight into a sort of fiction I discovered by accident & now adore. But my stumbling across women's middlebrow fiction and/or interwar fiction is, I think, a tale for a later post.
Right now the books are:
- Enid Bagnold: The Happy Foreigner, my own copy in its 1987 Virago Modern Classics edition. It can be hard to find Virago books in the US, so I was delighted to come across this at a used bookstore. It's about an English female driver for the French army right after WWI, based on Bagnold's own experiences, and is so far a mix of fascinating and frustrating; I love the content, but the style is often so vague that I feel like I'm not quite understanding the book. But I'm only about 1/3 through, so this may improve over time.
- James Davidson: Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens, which E. loaned me at least a year or two ago but I'm only just getting around to. I'm only 10 pages in, but so far it's a fascinating look at the Athenian preoccupation with sensual pleasures. I tend to forget that the ancient Greeks were breathing people, not just Victorian images of white marble, but I think this book is going to go a long way towards correcting that.
- May Sinclair: Superseded. From 1906 and thus requested from the library, this is one of her earlier novels, about a minimally competent middle-aged teacher at a girl's school who is, as the titled indicates, superseded by the younger, smarter, more competent generation of women who have had better education and more encouragement to develop their intellects. I'm not sure I'm going to like this, but it's pretty short so I see no harm in finding out!
Both Sinclair and Bagnold are authors I learned about from some combination of Nicola Beauman's A Very Great Profession and Nicola Humble's The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism, two books I have read over & over again for their insight into a sort of fiction I discovered by accident & now adore. But my stumbling across women's middlebrow fiction and/or interwar fiction is, I think, a tale for a later post.
brief biographical update
I am such an explainy person. It's impossible to launch into writing about what I am doing without writing about who I am right now; it just feels far too rude. Not when other people do it, mind... when other people do it I enjoy the puzzle of piecing together the biography from the books and knitting and opera and food and pictures of lovely scenery. But it feels very uncomfortable to do it that way myself.
So as I said back in April, I'm pregnant; the baby is due in October, and we have mostly certainly reached the phase in which I can feel her kicking! She kicks a lot, and I am already besotted with her, and am just keeping my fingers crossed that everything goes well in the future. I have no reason to think it won't, mind; I'm having an astonishingly normal pregnancy, especially compared to many of my dear friends who had rough times all through. But still, there's always that knowledge that something could go awry between now & October, or during the delivery itself, and so I cross my fingers and mentally write Deo Volente after everything, which I think I picked up from an E. M. Delafield novel, but that's how I feel about it.
Also back in April we (me, husband, two adored cats) moved into a new rental home, and I am still dizzy with delight over it. After years of apartment living it's wonderful having a little bit of garden in front, which garden is currently growing many vegetables, thanks to husband's hard work, and also some agapanthus and two kinds of lavender and lanteria and two lemon bushes, thanks to previous tenants or maybe the landlords. And yes, lemon bushes, they are trees growing right up against the front of the house that have been pruned so they don't get too tall, and they have been producing massive amounts of lemons every since we moved in. It's also wonderful being in a neighbourhood that's exclusively residential, so I see people walking dogs and strolling with children and am occasionally visited by a neighbourhood cat. Inside there's more space, more closets, nicer smells coming in through the windows, and it stays cooler in summer, although my pregnant bulk is more than making up for that. All in all this is a wonderful home, and I hope we can stay here until we finally buy a place somewhere and settle down for the truly long term.
So there, now I've set the scene properly, and can actually write about books in the two or three hours before it gets so warm outside I have to turn off the computer!
So as I said back in April, I'm pregnant; the baby is due in October, and we have mostly certainly reached the phase in which I can feel her kicking! She kicks a lot, and I am already besotted with her, and am just keeping my fingers crossed that everything goes well in the future. I have no reason to think it won't, mind; I'm having an astonishingly normal pregnancy, especially compared to many of my dear friends who had rough times all through. But still, there's always that knowledge that something could go awry between now & October, or during the delivery itself, and so I cross my fingers and mentally write Deo Volente after everything, which I think I picked up from an E. M. Delafield novel, but that's how I feel about it.
Also back in April we (me, husband, two adored cats) moved into a new rental home, and I am still dizzy with delight over it. After years of apartment living it's wonderful having a little bit of garden in front, which garden is currently growing many vegetables, thanks to husband's hard work, and also some agapanthus and two kinds of lavender and lanteria and two lemon bushes, thanks to previous tenants or maybe the landlords. And yes, lemon bushes, they are trees growing right up against the front of the house that have been pruned so they don't get too tall, and they have been producing massive amounts of lemons every since we moved in. It's also wonderful being in a neighbourhood that's exclusively residential, so I see people walking dogs and strolling with children and am occasionally visited by a neighbourhood cat. Inside there's more space, more closets, nicer smells coming in through the windows, and it stays cooler in summer, although my pregnant bulk is more than making up for that. All in all this is a wonderful home, and I hope we can stay here until we finally buy a place somewhere and settle down for the truly long term.
So there, now I've set the scene properly, and can actually write about books in the two or three hours before it gets so warm outside I have to turn off the computer!
at least my fickleness entertains me
Once upon a very long time ago, in the mid-90s, I kept an online journal that I wrote in almost every day, certainly many times a week, and found great joy in doing so. Now, despite my best intentions, I forget that this blog even exists for months on end! I blame my lack of a corporate 9-to-5 (or as it actually was, about 10ish until 7ish) job; when I was chained to my desk all day every day I ended up writing in online fora as a break from doing the work I was supposed to be doing. But when I was in school I was too busy turning out masses of academic writing to blog (except for those occasional moments when I had so many papers to write I was irresistably tempted to write here instead...), and now that I am a full-time homemaker it hardly ever occurs to me to put my thoughts down, and often when it does I am busily trying to fall asleep, or chatting with my husband, or otherwise doing things which preclude putting intention into action.
Reading lovely lovely book blogs from a year ago, though (which I can do because bloglines has been patiently archiving posts for me all this time) -- that really makes me want to write, especially about my reading. I'm sure tomorrow I'll forget all about this again, or be too tired, or too hot, or too busy running errands (tomorrow is going to be a terrible day for appointments) -- but right now I feel like writing, and so here I am.
Reading lovely lovely book blogs from a year ago, though (which I can do because bloglines has been patiently archiving posts for me all this time) -- that really makes me want to write, especially about my reading. I'm sure tomorrow I'll forget all about this again, or be too tired, or too hot, or too busy running errands (tomorrow is going to be a terrible day for appointments) -- but right now I feel like writing, and so here I am.
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