The Story of the Lost Child (5*)

What a propulsive read!  Elena Ferrante might just as easily have called her final volume The Godmother.  It rushed like a freight train toward its uncertain conclusion proving yet again the journey often can be more satisfying than the destination.  Lena's and Lila's complexly rendered friendship enters the ranks of my top ten literary experiences with Ferrante's edge-of-your-seat twists, set like intricate traps, her magnificent depiction of the ages of woman and her broader understanding of human nature--including how we become our parents and the mysterious bond between women and gay men, seen from the female perspective for a welcome change.

I sat listening and slowly rediscovered--but as if I were dragging it up from a deep well--the old solidarity of the time when we sat at the same desk.  Yet only then did I understand that even if I had never been aware that he was different, I was fond of him precisely because he wasn't like the other boys, precisely because of that peculiar alienation from the male behaviors of the neighborhood.  And now, as he spoke, I discovered that the bond endured.

Brava!

2020 Holidays: Best In Show

 

More Critters

More Flamingoes

More Santas

More Lights

More Cottages

More Black & White

More This & That

More Peace, Baby!

More Signs of the Times

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (5*)

 

My increasing passion for Elena Ferrante's quartet makes me wonder once again if I have a "feminine sensibility."  This series speaks to me as few books have done, maybe since I read The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, up to now my favorite novel.  Somehow, she has managed to write a feminist potboiler that thoroughly depicts women's feelings and frustrations at different stages in their lives.  Her saga also persuasively details how thoroughly the past anchors our present.  

Imagine the thrill of finally being "seen" by a man, especially one you have loved since childhood, who has articulately defended your first novel AND who stands up to your clueless intellectual husband.

Then turning to Pietro he [Nino] said: “You should leave your wife more time.“

“She has all day available.“

“I’m not kidding. If you don’t you’re guilty not only on a human level but also on a political one.”

“What’s the crime?“

“The waste of intelligence. A community that finds it natural to suffocate with the care of home and children so many women’s intellectual energies is its own enemy and doesn’t realize it.”

I waited in silence for Pietro to respond. My husband reacted with sarcasm.

“Elena can cultivate her intelligence when and how she likes, the essential thing is that she not take time from me.”

“If she doesn’t take it from you, then who can she take it from?“

********

Tell me you haven't felt like this before a date with someone you really like.

So Nino had come with his wife; I was terrified by the comparison. I knew what I was like, I knew the crude physicality of my body, but for a good part of my life I had given it little importance. I had grown up with one pair of shoes at a time, ugly dresses sewed by my mother, makeup only on rare occasions.  In recent years I had begun to be interested in fashion, to educate my taste under Adele’s guidance, and now I enjoyed dressing up. But sometimes—especially when I had dressed not only to make a good impression in general but for a man—preparing myself (this was the word) seemed to me to have something ridiculous about it. All that struggle, all that time spent camouflaging myself when I could be doing something else. The colors that suited me, the ones that didn’t, the styles that made me look thinner, those that made me fatter, the cut that flattered me, the one that didn’t.   A lengthy, costly preparation. Reducing myself to a table set for the sexual appetite of the male, to a well-cooked dish to make his mouth water. And then the anguish of not succeeding, of not seeming pretty, of not managing to conceal with skill the vulgarity of the flesh with its moods and odors and imperfections.

********

Ferrante also nails exactly why women should have absolute control over their own bodies:

Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object. 

Gator Hunt

We rented kayaks at Loxahatchee Canoeing for a five-mile tour of the northern Everglades. Here's where the trail forks. 

 

Andrew and Andy were first in the water.  Park regulations require that each kayak be flagged.

It took us less than three hours to paddle through the well-marked, circular trail.  Note the reflections of the orange flags on the very still water.

The scenery can get a little repetitive but there's also something hypnotic about paddling through the sawgrass.

Waterlilies are plentiful and pretty.

Cloud cover reduced the heat and made the excursion a lot less sweaty.

I didn't spot an alligator until nearly the end.  It ignored us completely.

A little guy camouflaged itself even better in the murky shallows.

Machines Like Me (4*)

 

I'm not entirely sure what to make of Ian McEwan's take on artificial intelligence in an alternative historical context, although he sets up his fractured premise well.

"The present is the frailest of improbable constructs.  It could have been different.  Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise.  True of the smallest and largest concerns."

In this novel's present, further computing discoveries by Alan Turing, who evades his mysterious death by cyanide poisoning, lead to the development of extraordinarily lifelike robots branded Adam and Eve and this telescoping assessment of man's diminishing place in the world:

"Once we sat enthroned at the center of the universe, with sun and planets, the entire observable world, turning around us in an ageless dance of worship.  Then, in defiance of the priests, heartless astronomy reduced us to an orbiting planet around the sun, just one among other rocks.  But still we stood apart, brilliantly unique, appointed by the creator to be lords of everything that lived.  Then biology confirmed that we were at one with the rest, sharing common ancestry with bacteria, pansies, trout and sheep.  In the early twentieth century came deeper exile into darkness when the immensity of the universe was revealed and even the sun became one among billions in our galaxy, among billions of galaxies.  Finally, in consciousness, our last redoubt, we were probably correct to believe that we had more of it than any creature on earth.  But the mind that had once rebelled against the gods was about to dethrone itself by way of its own fabulous reach.  In the compressed version, we would devise a machine a little cleverer than ourselves, then set that machine to invent another that lay beyond our comprehension.  What need then of us?"

Typical of McEwan's twisted wit, his protagonist wishes he had gotten hold of an Eve but uses his Adam to ensnare his love interest in a relationship that's the least of his complications.  The Brits also have suffered a humiliating defeat in the Falklands War with casualties and a national response with strong parallels to America's 9/11.  In other words, the world is topsy turvy but recognizable; only human foibles have remained constant.

"Our age could devise a passable replica of a human mind, but there was no one in our neighborhood to fix a sash window although a few had tried."

As much as I enjoy reading McEwan and his resurrection of a gay man who never has quite gotten his due, Machines Like Me suffers from a surfeit of thematic complexity.  Ray Bradbury's short stories stimulate thought-provoking goosebumps more succinctly although perhaps not quite so tragically.

The Story of a New Name (5*)

The second part of Ferrante's engrossing Neapolitan quartet is very, very intense.  Ferrante presents marital rape explicitly enough for even a Neanderthal to vote for conviction in a jury trial.  And while it would take somebody with far greater psychological insight than me to explain why a remarkably intelligent adolescent girl would choose to lose her virginity with an older man who once molested her, her deeply disturbing act rings true nevertheless.  I love spending time with Lila and Lenu in an interior world where men play second banana for a change.

Election Day

 

Long lines on the Upper West Side prevented me from voting early but I only had to wait half an hour at 6:50 a.m. on Election Day to cast my ballot for candidates on the Working Families and Democratic Party lines.  If I'd gone later in the day, it would have been even less crowded!  New York City's Board of Elections--who disenfranchised me in 2018 by claiming that I wasn't registered to vote--has some work to do.

Martin Eden (5*)

My knowledge of Jack London extended no further than The Call of the Wild so learning that another of his novels pretty much functions as the key to understanding Susan Sontag's ambition sent me to this autobiographical novel.  His life of an adventurer turned self-educated writer and philanthropist did not disappoint and will resonate with anyone who ever has received a publisher's rejection slip--or tasted fame.  But Martin has the last laugh if you ignore the book's ending which I'm certain is the reason it isn't more popular.  After all, there aren't many classic novels that masquerade as an intellectual bodice-ripper and London's purplish prose demands to be read aloud.  Now a major motion picture--in Italian, no less!

Susan Sontag: Her Life & Work (5*)

OK, I'll admit that until I read Benjamin Moser's superb if somewhat controversial biography I was more intrigued by Susan Sontag's skunk hair-do than impressed by her erudition.  Like many people, I knew she was the iconic figure of the 60s who defined camp but I didn't appreciate how fully she inhabited the zeitgeist of the last half of the 20th century.  For starters, she and Andy Warhol fought to a draw in a peculiar cultural battle of the bands--Depth vs. Surface--but Sontag's biographer tells the much better story, hands down.  

"If praise and prosperity brought out the worst in her, oppression and destitution brought out the best. If she could be haughty in New York she was kind in Sarajevo.  There she put her body on the line and bore witness and earned universal respect, but none of that answered the difficult question she posed: of what she, either as an individual or as a symbol could actually do to help."

Moser's seminal insights may be drawn from pop psychology--a life lived as both a child of an alcoholic and a closeted lesbian--but they also illuminate her personality in a way that Blake Gopnick fails to do in Warhol.  Paradoxically, perhaps because I knew so little about Sontag, I felt that I actually got to know her much better than Warhol even though the visual artist was completely open about his sexuality.

The two bios got me thinking:  somebody should write a play about the two of them.  Call it The Cipher and the Diva.  

"[The figure of the diva] dramatized the contrast between the person and the aestheticized person, between reality and dream: Sontag’s great theme. The diva is the dream of others. They fantasize about her, long to possess her, idealize her beauty, worship her genius, envy her wealth and fame. She is the product of a collective will – a product, like literary or political fictions, with a reality of its own."

Randy's Birthday Posse

Randy invited us to New London for "Halloween In Exurbia."  He's standing in front of his new house--almost completely furnished online--with Andrew on Saturday morning.

Don't we look a little Yankee Gothic in the back yard?  Did the neighbors--who include a Fire Batallion Commander--think we were priests?  Or attending a super spreader event?

We toured Seaside State Park, a former sanitarium for tubercular children in neighboring Waterford.  Cass Gilbert designed it in the Tudor Revival style.  He's more famous for the Woolworth Building and the US Supreme Court.

The Long Island Sound sparkled.  We could see for miles and miles.

I do loves me a weather vane.

Ophelia left behind a message inside a covered bridge.

Next stop:  Harkness Memorial State Park for a repeat visit.  

The cutting garden had been cut, but the park retained its essential charm.  Someone had left behind a stuffed animal in September, too.  Maybe it's a thing. 

Oh look!  A sprite.

We walked on the rocky beach among thousands of shells, about to be ground into sand.

After some hearty pea soup and garlic bread back at Randy's, we toured downtown New London.  The hipsters have colonized Bank Street with Hygienic Art.

Are You Experienced?

A monument near the train station commemorates the city's war dead.  It's been around for plenty of 'em.  Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale taught in New London before he became a spy for the Continental Army.  The Brits hung him at age 21.  And you thought Teach for America was demanding!

A lot of whales died in New London's heyday.

Time almost seems to have stopped inside the train station.

State Street is the main drag, with commerce old and new.

The First Church of Christ.

An historic movie theater with a wittily ambiguous marquee:  "Coming Soon:  Close Encounters of the November 3 Kind."

The pandemic has restricted business to white jacketed mannequins.

A solidly constructed library with incredible stone work.

A kitty (?) peered out from a memorial plaque across the street.

Looking back towards the harbor.

The Thames's mostly industrial riverfront hasn't been developed, perhaps because the train tracks hug it.

We meandered back to the parking lot where we left the cars.

Curtis, Randy's first four-footed visitor, was happy to see us.

I paged through Randy's collection of After Dark magazines.  Iggy Pop wasn't who I expected to find, that's for sure!

We celebrated Randy's birthday a night early with an appropriately decorated confection from You Take the Cake.

Randy enjoyed the sightseeing as much as we did on Sunday.  He hadn't been to Stonington since the last 70s, when he lived with his first boyfriend in New London.  Really, really great residential architecture--I'm pretty sure that "charming" is a zoning requirement.  Andrew thought Stepford Wives likely populated the neighborhood.

For whom do Stepford Wives cast their vote?

The Battle of Stonington took place in the War of 1812.

Randy posed with his birthday posse on the other side of that cannon, probably last fired more than two centuries ago.  Sounds like me.

I'd almost forgotten it had been Halloween the night before.  On a Blue Moon, no less

Another weather vane on a rather tall house.  Note the fancy recycling bags.

Door knockers are a thing, too.

The simplicity of this chapel is almost Puritan.

Another architecturally distinctive library!

And a lighthouse museum.

But the spear fisherman made my day.  Those are tautog he's hoisting.   They put up quite a struggle when you catch them with a pole.

Ugly, but tasty with dense, white meat.

Look closely at the left, in between the angle formed by the jetty and sand, and you'll see him in the water.  He and his buddy shot their spears in water around ten feet deep.