Margotlog: Poetry OUT LOUD
Along with Shakespearean Sonnets, "The Owl and the Pussycat" by Edward Lear, and "Invictus" by Ernest Henley--all great warhorses or bird/cat chariots of the p'try world, students at a recent Poetry Out Loud presentation I judged in Minneapolis gave us poems by Langston Hughes, Benjamin Alire Saenz, Edna St. Vincent Millay, the Irish poet Eavan Boland, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Dudley Randall. Over the last ten years, Poetry Out Loud has become a national "night out" for spoken word. No longer do we declaim solely from a school stage, though this is where each school starts the selection of its contestants. We carry our voices all the way to Washington.
I couldn't be more for it. Not only did I get to enjoy Khadro (I'm guessing of Somali origin) in a voice like milky silk present Mary Howitt's "The Spider and the Fly" with the simpering irony perfect for this lightly ironic enchantment, but I welcomed stout-hearted Hassan turn Benjamin Alire Saenz's "To the Desert" into a celebration of one who "taught me how to live without the rain." Now after a few minutes with Google, I've read Saenz's website biography and understand that his desert is the American Southwest, its vivid complicated border history, his own peregrinations through priesthood, service in Tanzania, graduate school in Iowa and California, and the publication of many books of poetry and fiction.
Our Poetry Out Loud presenters in what's called the Metro Central area couldn't have been more varied--some quiet and intense; others flamboyant and visceral. "You should have been in Winona," commented the coordinator of Minnesota's Poetry Out Loud: "Almost everyone spoke in subdued tones." In part she referred to the wide variety of origins and ethnicities present on our stage. Though I'm guessing, I'd place our students' recent origins on a world map with an emphasis on Africa, either directly or via their parents. Whereas Poetry Out Loud in southeastern Minnesota undoubtedly was performed almost entirely by third or fourth generation German/Scandinavians with a few Irish thrown in.
The guidelines for judging Poetry Out Loud emphatically support presenting a poem in what I'd call the "inside-out" style, meaning that the presenter absorbs each poem's complicated means--rhyme and rhythm, tone and color of language, sound and sense--and subdues declamation and theatrical gestures in favor of intense, subtle delivery. In fact, many of our Metro Central participants did NOT follow these strictures. The Africans among them come from a tradition of oral declamation. In Somalia, for instance, the history of poetry has been, until very recently, entirely oral, and poets are renown for the long sagas they have by heart, and for their ability to rivet an audience with a full-bodied, richly declaimed presentation. When you live a nomadic life, with no film or TV to mesmerize you with drama on demand, a poet must kindle all kinesthetic, oral and literary organs, dramatizing against a wide empty sky. American notions of poetry oral presentation come from a very different tradition, one in which poetry has developed internal castles of complicated associations and shades of meaning which can easily be missed in excessive dramatization.
More recently, too, we poets have been forced to find a niche separate from film and TV's often empty excesses. We tone down in order to be heard. The winner of the Metro Central competition did exactly that. She went deep inside the poems; she subdued herself to let the poems speak through her. Her voice had resonance and subtlety; her gestures were minimal. She gave a memorable performance, well within the guidelines established for the competition. But hers was not the only excellence. The second-place winner gave a vibrant performance. In her hijab and head scarf, with a vocal range more like singing than reading aloud, she breathed warmth into her chosen poems.
I'd say it's time to reconsider the guidelines, to recognize the widening experience of American poets and their student presenters. This is a change-in-the-making. I'll be watching to see what the poets-in-power make of it.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Margotlog: Flowers upon the Water
Margotlog: Flowers upon the Water
We hardly ever received messages on Isla. We had no cell phones then; nothing ever collapsed at home, except once, during our late February vacation, 2003. Then I returned from strolling to town and found that the "Office" at Posada del Mar had brought a message up to our room. The assisted living, where we had transferred my mother six months before, had called: she was in the hospital. Trembling and terrified, I gathered as many Mexican pesos as I could and returned toward town to a pay phone.
It was strange to stand with sea breezes ruffling my hair and a sandy street under my feet, while the faint voice of the assisted-living administrator told the story. My mother (three months shy of turning 95) had not been well for a number of days, pale and weak and eventually passing blood in her urine. They'd taken her to her doctor where the nurse hadn't been able to "raise a pulse." This should have been an immediate sign to send my mother directly to the hospital. But no, the nurses and soon the doctor proceeded. Here, Reader, you must forgive my anger and bitterness: these medical professionals, who professed to be skilled in geriatric care, insisted against her wishes on inserting a catheter into her bladder. What other enormities of medical interference they perpetrated I'll probably never know. But I do know what happened eventually: they sent her back to the assisted living facility, where, appalled at her weakened, almost lifeless condition, the facility called an ambulance and had her taken to Roper General Hospital.
During the five hours that she slowly expired, the two women who had taken care of her, first at home, then in assisted living, took turns sitting beside her. She died with a familiar hand stroking her hair. And she died quietly, after the intrusions of the doctor's office. The hospital had enough sense not to try and resusitate a body so clearly shutting down. When I phoned again, several hours later, I was able to talk to my sister who had tried valiantly to reach her side from Boston, but been held up by a connecting flight in Charlotte.
During that second call, I decided, without any agonizing soul-searching, that I would leave the funeral to my sister. Though we'd done a fine job of sharing our mother's care during the five years of her slow decline, we had quite different ideas about how to put her in the ground.
I had already said good-bye to Mother three weeks before, at the end of January, when I'd spent a long weekend with her. As I'd entered her room in the late afternoon, she was still lying asleep in her long afternoon nap. Sitting at the end of the bed, with light filtering through closed blinds, I saw death in her face. Her pallor matched her white hair; her features were somewhat sunken. It was as if an invisible, but palpable arm was gently reaching through the closed blinds and drawing her away. I was attentive, noting the awareness that transferred itself to me in that shrouded room. My intuition hadn't been prefigured by any "rational" thought, yet it was as clear as an certainty, framed into words, could be.
I decided not to put myself through the rigors of changing my flight and attempting to fly from Cancun, probably via Miami, to Charleston. My sister could arrange the funeral as she wished. Our mother, with her intensely practical attention to detail, had planned it all in advance.
Yet, I had to pause and attend her passage. Make some homage formed of Isla's beauty and my own sorrow. Later that initial sorrow would mount into true mourning, when for months, I would sit in the sunlit front rooms of our second floor and weep. That kind of grief whose agony cleanses our souls, that kind of grief doesn't come immediately. What I needed immediately was a pageant I'd remember through the years to follow. A ceremony of sorts when I could gather sky and sea, flowers and birds to help commemorate her life and waft her on her way.
Putting on my swimsuit, though I rarely swam on the "bikini" beach just beyond Posada del Mar, I passed through the lush green of the Posada grounds. Many hibiscus had dropped their blossoms as new ones appeared. The green grass was littered with red hibiscus. Gathering up the fallen flowers, I headed toward the beach which faced north, across the Gulf of Mexico toward the Atlantic, toward Charleston.
It was, as always in late February on Isla, a beautiful day, with billowing white clouds spiraling into brilliant blue. The water, shallow for a long ways beyond the white sand, was warm and friendly as a big dog, lapping my ankles, then knees, then thighs. Still carrying the blossoms, I lowered myself into the green depths and slowly drifted toward the north. Whether sun-bathers watched me, I do not know. I kept my eyes on the northern strip of land on the Cancun mainland, and let the water carry me. Slowly the flowers left my hands and bobbed on little and bigger waves. Some were caught and went further out toward the channel until I lost sight of them. Others like friendly stewards of my grief stayed close, bobbing and reappearing, their fuzzy stamens pointing toward the sky, their petals catching drops of water and sometimes submerging.
I was aware only of sending my love with the flowers toward her, as if an invisible stream flowed through the warm green water north directly to where she was. Overhead almost as high as the clouds, the zig-zag shapes of frigate birds elevated my thoughts. Gulls flew over, lazily flapping closer to the water. Gradually some of the flowers, further out in the channel, completely submerged and were gone. Others remained close, still rising and falling with the gentle waves, still keeping me company.
I must have made some sort of pact with myself--that I would swim and loll, weep and remember as long as the red tips of flowers still accompanied me. Who knows how long it took as the north tugged at my desire to communicate across the miles to the watery coast where she would be buried. Each red flower was like a small boat, an emissary, bobbing with me, moving with the gentle force of wind and waves, finally losing its contact with me and going on its own way.
Eventually the flowers had wafted too far north for me to track and it was time to return. It seems to me now, looking back, that I scooped up one or two still floating around me and carried them back to our second floor room where I lay them on the balcony rail, my last flowery homage. It seems the perfect gesture, the perfect goodbye to a woman who loved flowers to the very end of her life, who grew camellia bushes far taller than herself, which at this time of year in her beloved Charleston yard were covered with wide, waxy red blossoms, with gold crowns in their centers.
We hardly ever received messages on Isla. We had no cell phones then; nothing ever collapsed at home, except once, during our late February vacation, 2003. Then I returned from strolling to town and found that the "Office" at Posada del Mar had brought a message up to our room. The assisted living, where we had transferred my mother six months before, had called: she was in the hospital. Trembling and terrified, I gathered as many Mexican pesos as I could and returned toward town to a pay phone.
It was strange to stand with sea breezes ruffling my hair and a sandy street under my feet, while the faint voice of the assisted-living administrator told the story. My mother (three months shy of turning 95) had not been well for a number of days, pale and weak and eventually passing blood in her urine. They'd taken her to her doctor where the nurse hadn't been able to "raise a pulse." This should have been an immediate sign to send my mother directly to the hospital. But no, the nurses and soon the doctor proceeded. Here, Reader, you must forgive my anger and bitterness: these medical professionals, who professed to be skilled in geriatric care, insisted against her wishes on inserting a catheter into her bladder. What other enormities of medical interference they perpetrated I'll probably never know. But I do know what happened eventually: they sent her back to the assisted living facility, where, appalled at her weakened, almost lifeless condition, the facility called an ambulance and had her taken to Roper General Hospital.
During the five hours that she slowly expired, the two women who had taken care of her, first at home, then in assisted living, took turns sitting beside her. She died with a familiar hand stroking her hair. And she died quietly, after the intrusions of the doctor's office. The hospital had enough sense not to try and resusitate a body so clearly shutting down. When I phoned again, several hours later, I was able to talk to my sister who had tried valiantly to reach her side from Boston, but been held up by a connecting flight in Charlotte.
During that second call, I decided, without any agonizing soul-searching, that I would leave the funeral to my sister. Though we'd done a fine job of sharing our mother's care during the five years of her slow decline, we had quite different ideas about how to put her in the ground.
I had already said good-bye to Mother three weeks before, at the end of January, when I'd spent a long weekend with her. As I'd entered her room in the late afternoon, she was still lying asleep in her long afternoon nap. Sitting at the end of the bed, with light filtering through closed blinds, I saw death in her face. Her pallor matched her white hair; her features were somewhat sunken. It was as if an invisible, but palpable arm was gently reaching through the closed blinds and drawing her away. I was attentive, noting the awareness that transferred itself to me in that shrouded room. My intuition hadn't been prefigured by any "rational" thought, yet it was as clear as an certainty, framed into words, could be.
I decided not to put myself through the rigors of changing my flight and attempting to fly from Cancun, probably via Miami, to Charleston. My sister could arrange the funeral as she wished. Our mother, with her intensely practical attention to detail, had planned it all in advance.
Yet, I had to pause and attend her passage. Make some homage formed of Isla's beauty and my own sorrow. Later that initial sorrow would mount into true mourning, when for months, I would sit in the sunlit front rooms of our second floor and weep. That kind of grief whose agony cleanses our souls, that kind of grief doesn't come immediately. What I needed immediately was a pageant I'd remember through the years to follow. A ceremony of sorts when I could gather sky and sea, flowers and birds to help commemorate her life and waft her on her way.
Putting on my swimsuit, though I rarely swam on the "bikini" beach just beyond Posada del Mar, I passed through the lush green of the Posada grounds. Many hibiscus had dropped their blossoms as new ones appeared. The green grass was littered with red hibiscus. Gathering up the fallen flowers, I headed toward the beach which faced north, across the Gulf of Mexico toward the Atlantic, toward Charleston.
It was, as always in late February on Isla, a beautiful day, with billowing white clouds spiraling into brilliant blue. The water, shallow for a long ways beyond the white sand, was warm and friendly as a big dog, lapping my ankles, then knees, then thighs. Still carrying the blossoms, I lowered myself into the green depths and slowly drifted toward the north. Whether sun-bathers watched me, I do not know. I kept my eyes on the northern strip of land on the Cancun mainland, and let the water carry me. Slowly the flowers left my hands and bobbed on little and bigger waves. Some were caught and went further out toward the channel until I lost sight of them. Others like friendly stewards of my grief stayed close, bobbing and reappearing, their fuzzy stamens pointing toward the sky, their petals catching drops of water and sometimes submerging.
I was aware only of sending my love with the flowers toward her, as if an invisible stream flowed through the warm green water north directly to where she was. Overhead almost as high as the clouds, the zig-zag shapes of frigate birds elevated my thoughts. Gulls flew over, lazily flapping closer to the water. Gradually some of the flowers, further out in the channel, completely submerged and were gone. Others remained close, still rising and falling with the gentle waves, still keeping me company.
I must have made some sort of pact with myself--that I would swim and loll, weep and remember as long as the red tips of flowers still accompanied me. Who knows how long it took as the north tugged at my desire to communicate across the miles to the watery coast where she would be buried. Each red flower was like a small boat, an emissary, bobbing with me, moving with the gentle force of wind and waves, finally losing its contact with me and going on its own way.
Eventually the flowers had wafted too far north for me to track and it was time to return. It seems to me now, looking back, that I scooped up one or two still floating around me and carried them back to our second floor room where I lay them on the balcony rail, my last flowery homage. It seems the perfect gesture, the perfect goodbye to a woman who loved flowers to the very end of her life, who grew camellia bushes far taller than herself, which at this time of year in her beloved Charleston yard were covered with wide, waxy red blossoms, with gold crowns in their centers.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Margotlog: The Last Survivor
Margotlog: The Last Survivor
Sounds like a shipwreck, but in fact, the last survivor of my parents' generation, Eleanora, rides comfortably in assisted living, Dover, Delaware. She's 93, the only one in her generation with blue eyes, a rarety in Southern Italian stock, though her mother Josephine also had blue eyes and reddish hair. Ditto my sister, though her blue-green eyes don't really count since our mother added German/Swedish blueness to the family mix.
My mother, the German-Swedish snob from North Dakota, used to opine that Charles of Anjou conquored the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This would account for the occasional blue-green eyes and blondish hair in my father's Sicilian relatives. Ditto their family name: D'Anna. The "D - apostrophe" meant, according to my mother, noble birth: my father's Sicilian relatives were part of the ancient conquering tribe. We used to laugh at her behind her back. She'd clutch at straws, even flimsy historical straws, to burnish her marriage into the "boot" of Italy.
At 93, Eleanora has outlived all that sillyness as well as all the relatives in her generation: my father and his three brothers (her first cousins), her two sisters, and my mother who married into the family. Not surprisingly she's also outlived her adorable, tiny, blue-eyed mother Josephine, who took the unprecedented step of leaving her husband and coming to live with her two daughters in Washington, D.C. Women like Josephine, born toward the end of the 19th century, especially Italian, family-clad women, didn't usually walk out on their husbands, but Josephine had grit. She transferred her clothes in small packages to her middle daughter near Pittsburgh, then one day bought a train ticket to Washington and never returned. All this happened when I was growing up in South Carolina, so removed from my father's relatives in Pittsburgh, New Jersey and Washington, that I didn't quite grasp what was going on. Talky Italians though they all were, they kept quiet about family troubles. Only now, when I sit opposite Eleanora in her little apartment or chat on the phone, do I hear the details.
If the choice were left to me, I'd nominate Eleanora herself as having the saddest, most vexxing yet the most jolly life. She was happy enough as a girl, growing up a few blocks from my father and his raucous, well-managed family. She enjoyed vigorous teen years as a jock before such a word was ever used for a girl. "You'll find Eleanora on the basketball court or behind the candy counter," teased her high-school principal. She loved chocolate then and now. She also told the family doctor who delivered her youngest sister (this means Eleanora must have been all of five years old) that no, thank you, she did not want to be a nurse. She planned to be a doctor just like him.
It's just possible this might have transpired--her family had money enough to send the oldest daughter to college--but Eleanora met Dick from a Pennsylvania Dutch family when she had a summer job in Harrisburg. They married, Eleanora became pregnant shortly after Pearl Harbor, and Dick was drafted. Her baby, born a few weeks after I was, died within a month. In the difficult delivery, the obstetrician had used forceps which crushed the baby's head.
With Dick drafted and sent to Okinawa, Eleanora moved back to Pittsburgh to live with her parents and took a part-time job in a department store. Dick's letters came infrequently: he didn't know if he could kill anyone, he wrote; then after many battles, he confessed that he had: the cries of buddies dying in the jungle drove him to mad revenge. He hoped she would forgive him. Eleanora and Dick were deeply Christian people: "Thou Shall Not Kill," said one of God's ten commandments. It wounded them both that war had forced them into such horrors.
One day in May 1945, shortly after the war in Europe was over, Eleanora took a streetcar across Pittsburgh to visit a friend whose husband was also still fighting like Dick in the Pacific. While she was gone, a stranger drove back and forth in front of the family home. As Josephine looked out the window, a stranger in a fedora got out and rang the bell. He had a telegram for "Mrs. Blumenstine." Josephine looked the man in the eyes: "Is he dead, or pray God, only wounded?" The man shook his head. "Don't leave her alone," he advised. "Make sure someone is with her until you're sure she's through the worst."
"When I came home near 11, I was surprised to find my sister and her husband and little boy there," Eleanora recalls, "as well as the neighbors from next door. My mother opened the door. All she had to do was look at me and hand me the telegram. I didn't have to read it. She put her arm around me, but I didn't cry, not immediately. Instead I went straight into the living room and turned a photo of Dick and me to the wall. My mother stood beside me: 'No,' she said. 'You have to get used to it.' And she turned the photo around. For an hour I walked up and down outside with the neighbor, a friend of mine. Who knows what I said or did. I guess I was in shock."
There was no body to bury, no evidence of Dick's death. Only the report that his ship had been hit, and many on board were killed. It took her years to fully acknowledge that he was never coming back.
A few years later, friends urged her to find work in a hospital. "You wanted to be a doctor. Perhaps you'd feel comforted by hospital work?" Though a generation older than most other nursing students, Eleanora applied to a nursing program in Pittsburgh. The admitting matron was very impressed with her. And so, with the promise of a single room--"I'm not a girl anymore," Eleanora explained--she began studying, graduated at the top of her class, and so took up what became her adult profession: health education, working for the American Cancer Society among other organizations. When her youngest sister Sadie and she moved in together and Josephine joined them, they created a family unit that sustained them until Josephine died at 94 and Sadie recently at 85. They all welcomed visitors from South Carolina. My father and mother who'd been their friends in Pittsburgh brought my sister and me to visit Cousins Eleanor and Sadie and Aunt Jo. With these loving, teasing women, my father relaxed into his best self; the talk was loud, silly, and continuous. A little wearing for those of us used to my mother's Nordic quiet. But we all loved Aunt Jo, Sadie and Eleanor. They were our closest relatives on my father's side.
Now, talking to Eleanora, recounting the old stories again and again, the sad and the silly, the deeply troubling and the highly political--Washington got in their blood; Sadie worked for years in the Office of the President--I feel embraced and welcomed into the fold. Not a lost sheep or a black sheep, but fully part of the woolly, sometimes blue-eyed, but mostly dark-eyed herd. Eleanora's power of speech carries us along: she has the Italian gift of gab. And for many, a gift of longevity. To look at her, you'd never guess she was edging toward 100.
Sounds like a shipwreck, but in fact, the last survivor of my parents' generation, Eleanora, rides comfortably in assisted living, Dover, Delaware. She's 93, the only one in her generation with blue eyes, a rarety in Southern Italian stock, though her mother Josephine also had blue eyes and reddish hair. Ditto my sister, though her blue-green eyes don't really count since our mother added German/Swedish blueness to the family mix.
My mother, the German-Swedish snob from North Dakota, used to opine that Charles of Anjou conquored the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This would account for the occasional blue-green eyes and blondish hair in my father's Sicilian relatives. Ditto their family name: D'Anna. The "D - apostrophe" meant, according to my mother, noble birth: my father's Sicilian relatives were part of the ancient conquering tribe. We used to laugh at her behind her back. She'd clutch at straws, even flimsy historical straws, to burnish her marriage into the "boot" of Italy.
At 93, Eleanora has outlived all that sillyness as well as all the relatives in her generation: my father and his three brothers (her first cousins), her two sisters, and my mother who married into the family. Not surprisingly she's also outlived her adorable, tiny, blue-eyed mother Josephine, who took the unprecedented step of leaving her husband and coming to live with her two daughters in Washington, D.C. Women like Josephine, born toward the end of the 19th century, especially Italian, family-clad women, didn't usually walk out on their husbands, but Josephine had grit. She transferred her clothes in small packages to her middle daughter near Pittsburgh, then one day bought a train ticket to Washington and never returned. All this happened when I was growing up in South Carolina, so removed from my father's relatives in Pittsburgh, New Jersey and Washington, that I didn't quite grasp what was going on. Talky Italians though they all were, they kept quiet about family troubles. Only now, when I sit opposite Eleanora in her little apartment or chat on the phone, do I hear the details.
If the choice were left to me, I'd nominate Eleanora herself as having the saddest, most vexxing yet the most jolly life. She was happy enough as a girl, growing up a few blocks from my father and his raucous, well-managed family. She enjoyed vigorous teen years as a jock before such a word was ever used for a girl. "You'll find Eleanora on the basketball court or behind the candy counter," teased her high-school principal. She loved chocolate then and now. She also told the family doctor who delivered her youngest sister (this means Eleanora must have been all of five years old) that no, thank you, she did not want to be a nurse. She planned to be a doctor just like him.
It's just possible this might have transpired--her family had money enough to send the oldest daughter to college--but Eleanora met Dick from a Pennsylvania Dutch family when she had a summer job in Harrisburg. They married, Eleanora became pregnant shortly after Pearl Harbor, and Dick was drafted. Her baby, born a few weeks after I was, died within a month. In the difficult delivery, the obstetrician had used forceps which crushed the baby's head.
With Dick drafted and sent to Okinawa, Eleanora moved back to Pittsburgh to live with her parents and took a part-time job in a department store. Dick's letters came infrequently: he didn't know if he could kill anyone, he wrote; then after many battles, he confessed that he had: the cries of buddies dying in the jungle drove him to mad revenge. He hoped she would forgive him. Eleanora and Dick were deeply Christian people: "Thou Shall Not Kill," said one of God's ten commandments. It wounded them both that war had forced them into such horrors.
One day in May 1945, shortly after the war in Europe was over, Eleanora took a streetcar across Pittsburgh to visit a friend whose husband was also still fighting like Dick in the Pacific. While she was gone, a stranger drove back and forth in front of the family home. As Josephine looked out the window, a stranger in a fedora got out and rang the bell. He had a telegram for "Mrs. Blumenstine." Josephine looked the man in the eyes: "Is he dead, or pray God, only wounded?" The man shook his head. "Don't leave her alone," he advised. "Make sure someone is with her until you're sure she's through the worst."
"When I came home near 11, I was surprised to find my sister and her husband and little boy there," Eleanora recalls, "as well as the neighbors from next door. My mother opened the door. All she had to do was look at me and hand me the telegram. I didn't have to read it. She put her arm around me, but I didn't cry, not immediately. Instead I went straight into the living room and turned a photo of Dick and me to the wall. My mother stood beside me: 'No,' she said. 'You have to get used to it.' And she turned the photo around. For an hour I walked up and down outside with the neighbor, a friend of mine. Who knows what I said or did. I guess I was in shock."
There was no body to bury, no evidence of Dick's death. Only the report that his ship had been hit, and many on board were killed. It took her years to fully acknowledge that he was never coming back.
A few years later, friends urged her to find work in a hospital. "You wanted to be a doctor. Perhaps you'd feel comforted by hospital work?" Though a generation older than most other nursing students, Eleanora applied to a nursing program in Pittsburgh. The admitting matron was very impressed with her. And so, with the promise of a single room--"I'm not a girl anymore," Eleanora explained--she began studying, graduated at the top of her class, and so took up what became her adult profession: health education, working for the American Cancer Society among other organizations. When her youngest sister Sadie and she moved in together and Josephine joined them, they created a family unit that sustained them until Josephine died at 94 and Sadie recently at 85. They all welcomed visitors from South Carolina. My father and mother who'd been their friends in Pittsburgh brought my sister and me to visit Cousins Eleanor and Sadie and Aunt Jo. With these loving, teasing women, my father relaxed into his best self; the talk was loud, silly, and continuous. A little wearing for those of us used to my mother's Nordic quiet. But we all loved Aunt Jo, Sadie and Eleanor. They were our closest relatives on my father's side.
Now, talking to Eleanora, recounting the old stories again and again, the sad and the silly, the deeply troubling and the highly political--Washington got in their blood; Sadie worked for years in the Office of the President--I feel embraced and welcomed into the fold. Not a lost sheep or a black sheep, but fully part of the woolly, sometimes blue-eyed, but mostly dark-eyed herd. Eleanora's power of speech carries us along: she has the Italian gift of gab. And for many, a gift of longevity. To look at her, you'd never guess she was edging toward 100.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Margotlog: Female Flesh
Margotlog: Female Flesh
It's a truth universally acknowledged (to borrow an opening from Jane Austen), that female flesh is used to sell the work and sometimes even the reputation of an artist. Case in point: at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, a show opened yesterday called "Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting." The keystone works, two companion pieces by Titian , 1488-1576, based on Ovid's "Metamorphoses." At the height of his career Titian was given a commission by King Philip II of Spain to paint whatever subjects he wanted; for this, the artist would receive a yearly stipend. The arrangements were unprecedented: a mark of Titian's preeminence and the king's appreciation of his work.
Perhaps the best known of Titian's canvasses for the king is "The Rape of Europa," in Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. I remember it from dim-dark college art history, when the bull (Zeus in one of his many seductive guises) yearns back at Europe flung across his back, as he hoofs it off through the foam to Crete. This was one of Zeus's more gentle seductions: hiding among her father's herds, he became the object of her affection, his horns twined with flowers, her hand caressing his flank. What I love about Titian's depiction of this "rape" is its diagonal composition--bull and dame speed off across the lower right, while a huge swath of canvas is given over to luscious seascape with two nymphs hovering above.
Titian's Europe is fully clad in diaphanous gauze. Not so Diana and her nymphs in the two works at the MIA. They sit, lounge, bend, stand completely nude, hardly idealized, heavy-bottomed, round-tummied, small-breasted northern Italian women. No doubt art historians would applaud this tendency toward physical realism. In both paintings--Actaeon surprising Diana and her nymphs in their bath, and Diana banishing her nymph Callisto for becoming impregnated by Zeus in one of his many disguises. In both canvases, the huntress Diana and her nymphs provide a frieze, shot with light and shade, motion and sensuality, of female flesh. Reportedly, Mark Twain is supposed to have quipped, too salacious for any setting but a museum.
Why do they make me squeamish? I'm not at all put off by Titian's "Venus of Urbino" in the Uffizzi, or by Manet's 19th-century French take off--"Olympia"-- both women with cool, poised and looking right atcha gazes. Both self-aware, in command of their nudity. In fact, they are regal. "Tamper with me if you dare." But there's something in the two Diana works that disquiets me. Perhaps the veil of incident is too obviously a ploy, a scrim of myth over what is in reality a display of female meat for the private delectation of the "male gaze." But I think there's more to it. In both, Diana will render harsh judgment on Actaeon and Callisto for challenging her supposed chastity. She'll turn Actaeon into a stag who will be hunted down and killed by his own hunting dogs. "Aw, Mom, I didn't mean to stumble on your female revels. Gimme a break! It was all a mistake." But Mom is cruel and relentless.
Ditto even more pathetic Callisto, whose vow of chastity in the service of the hunting queen is breached by Zeus's even more powerful wiles. In this painting, Diane is draped across the right side of the picture in frontal display, while poor Callisto, writhing in the rather smirking grip of other nymphs, goes down to banishment. Her pregnant belly with its huge umbilical depression sags like a sack of grain. Titian has made her ugly, her tortured face cast in agonizing shadow. Those of us who identify with women, their history and fate, find this reprehensible. There's a terrible and rather disgusting double message here: the nudity for male delectation; the cruelty of the queen, a tease to male viewers, suggesting other life-moments when they, too, have suffered from female rejection. It's a classical version of sado-masochism.
Many artists in their old age reach deep into the human dilemma for some of their greatest works. Rembrandt's "Lucretia" in the MIA permanent collection is, for me, the most potent example. Creating these Diana canvases in the few decades before his death, Titian may also have intended to plumb the human psyche and its murky depths. Apart from their superficial lusciousness, these two works roil up questions and disgust. And admiration of a kind.
It's a truth universally acknowledged (to borrow an opening from Jane Austen), that female flesh is used to sell the work and sometimes even the reputation of an artist. Case in point: at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, a show opened yesterday called "Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting." The keystone works, two companion pieces by Titian , 1488-1576, based on Ovid's "Metamorphoses." At the height of his career Titian was given a commission by King Philip II of Spain to paint whatever subjects he wanted; for this, the artist would receive a yearly stipend. The arrangements were unprecedented: a mark of Titian's preeminence and the king's appreciation of his work.
Perhaps the best known of Titian's canvasses for the king is "The Rape of Europa," in Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. I remember it from dim-dark college art history, when the bull (Zeus in one of his many seductive guises) yearns back at Europe flung across his back, as he hoofs it off through the foam to Crete. This was one of Zeus's more gentle seductions: hiding among her father's herds, he became the object of her affection, his horns twined with flowers, her hand caressing his flank. What I love about Titian's depiction of this "rape" is its diagonal composition--bull and dame speed off across the lower right, while a huge swath of canvas is given over to luscious seascape with two nymphs hovering above.
Titian's Europe is fully clad in diaphanous gauze. Not so Diana and her nymphs in the two works at the MIA. They sit, lounge, bend, stand completely nude, hardly idealized, heavy-bottomed, round-tummied, small-breasted northern Italian women. No doubt art historians would applaud this tendency toward physical realism. In both paintings--Actaeon surprising Diana and her nymphs in their bath, and Diana banishing her nymph Callisto for becoming impregnated by Zeus in one of his many disguises. In both canvases, the huntress Diana and her nymphs provide a frieze, shot with light and shade, motion and sensuality, of female flesh. Reportedly, Mark Twain is supposed to have quipped, too salacious for any setting but a museum.
Why do they make me squeamish? I'm not at all put off by Titian's "Venus of Urbino" in the Uffizzi, or by Manet's 19th-century French take off--"Olympia"-- both women with cool, poised and looking right atcha gazes. Both self-aware, in command of their nudity. In fact, they are regal. "Tamper with me if you dare." But there's something in the two Diana works that disquiets me. Perhaps the veil of incident is too obviously a ploy, a scrim of myth over what is in reality a display of female meat for the private delectation of the "male gaze." But I think there's more to it. In both, Diana will render harsh judgment on Actaeon and Callisto for challenging her supposed chastity. She'll turn Actaeon into a stag who will be hunted down and killed by his own hunting dogs. "Aw, Mom, I didn't mean to stumble on your female revels. Gimme a break! It was all a mistake." But Mom is cruel and relentless.
Ditto even more pathetic Callisto, whose vow of chastity in the service of the hunting queen is breached by Zeus's even more powerful wiles. In this painting, Diane is draped across the right side of the picture in frontal display, while poor Callisto, writhing in the rather smirking grip of other nymphs, goes down to banishment. Her pregnant belly with its huge umbilical depression sags like a sack of grain. Titian has made her ugly, her tortured face cast in agonizing shadow. Those of us who identify with women, their history and fate, find this reprehensible. There's a terrible and rather disgusting double message here: the nudity for male delectation; the cruelty of the queen, a tease to male viewers, suggesting other life-moments when they, too, have suffered from female rejection. It's a classical version of sado-masochism.
Many artists in their old age reach deep into the human dilemma for some of their greatest works. Rembrandt's "Lucretia" in the MIA permanent collection is, for me, the most potent example. Creating these Diana canvases in the few decades before his death, Titian may also have intended to plumb the human psyche and its murky depths. Apart from their superficial lusciousness, these two works roil up questions and disgust. And admiration of a kind.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Margotlog: Hawaii, Dreaming
Margotlog: Hawaii, Dreaming
After more years in snow country than I care to count, I'm not surprised that, mid-February, green rises at the back of my mind like an ancient ship coming over the horizon. In fact, I've never approached Hawaii by ship, only by air. Then huge cloud castles plant themselves over the islands, and from the airplane window, the shadow of our tiny plane, reflected on billowing white, promises that we've left all grounded white behind.
Lihue airport, on Kauai, the most north-western of the Hawaiian islands, greets with open arms--scarcely a wall to be found. In open-air, we exit the plane to waiting areas fringed with hibiscus and flowering trees. The air is moist and dark, for we almost always arrive in the evening after changing planes in Honolulu. Just as the smell of wet earth used to greet me in Charleston, the first sign of home, so stepping off the plane in Lihue is a gift to the cold-starved nostrils. Finally we can breathe deeply and sweetly again.
We've stayed several times in Honolulu, in high-rise hotels not far from bikini beaches and a huge mall almost as imposing as the Mall of America. Once we ventured as far south as possible to the leeward side of the "big island," where bed bugs bit Fran our first night. We had arrived again in the dark; the hotel, a huge monster on the water, barely remembered us. Stuck in a room with filthy windows and scum on the woodwork, we should have been warned. But Fran was exhausted. Slipping between the sheets, he drifted off, scratching as he went. Still awake, I looked over at his sleeping form. There crawling across the sheets were flat, almost translucent bugs. I high-tailed it off that bed, tried to rouse him, couldn't, and spent the rest of the night draped over a few chairs. The hotel management wasn't nearly so contrite as they should have been, but eventually capitulated and moved us upstairs to a very clean room with a view of the Kona harbor. No wonder we keep returning to Kauai.
What is there not to love about this beautiful, rather lazy island? Here is my list of favorite locations and events:
* the eucalyptus canopy descending toward Poipu. Even in the dark, the huge trunks and interlaced branches create a tunnel of leafy splendor
* chickens everywhere, or as history dubs them: "Red Jungle Fowl." One of the immigrants attached to the Polynesian settlement centuries ago, the Polynesian rooster struts with incredible aplomb, its iridescent dark green tail feathers shaking like a pompom from its reddish arched back; and a huge red comb crowning its head . The hens and chicks scuttle across the highway. Cars stop. It's the Hawaiian version of "Make Way for Ducklings." Visiting Spouting Horn, where a jet of spray is forced through a hole in the volcanic rock, we patrol the parking lot and find five chicken nests scattered under the shrubbery. The little "peeps" are beautifully and almost universally mottled cream, soft orange and white. Of course I have to crumble saltines left over from lunch to watch them race over and greedily peck, peck, while Mama Hen keeps watch. Just as there are chickens galore, so too cats.
* sunsets. Staying as we do in the southern Poipu area, the sun sets to our right across a placid or roiling ocean. We don't have far to walk to the shore from a little cabin rented from Ellie, a transplant from California. Splendid rays pierce thin clouds and shed a persimmon and pink glow over the waves. "Red sails in the morning, sailors take warning. Red sails at night, sailors delight." This ditty from childhood proves relatively true: we bask in the glow which like all tropical sunsets ends quickly. Then there are stars.
* history. I have more interest and tolerance for historical minutia than Fran; he has a better memory. We visit the history museum in Lihue each time we come to Kauai. Our first time, a retired geography teacher led a tour. Thin, gentle and Chinese-Hawaiian, he recounted his family's story as part of the Hawaiian pageant--they had arrived to work the Dole pineapple fields. Later strolling about Poipu after pizza at a favorite almost-outdoor restaurant, we located the little town's version of a history site: outdoor sheds open on one side, where we traced various enterprises from Chinese barber shop to sugar-cane processing plant to missionary settlement whose original church from the 1850s still holds services. A huge monkeypod tree leaned its enormous branches over a stream: the site of an early mill and company store for quasi-indentured Chinese workers.
My own research placed an early silk-growing plantation nearby where Libby and James Jackson Jarves, the subjects of my on-going novel (right now called Fire Around the Moon) were exiled from Honolulu in the late 1830s. They built a straw hut, she furnished it with packing boxes, a cast-off sofa and pots and pans borrowed from various missionary families. After the birth of their first child, a son named Horatio, the couple took a tour of the island and spent considerable time with former Queen Deborah Kapule, whose checkered history included having the higher royalty in Honolulu "steal" two of her husbands, reduce her to prison, and eventually reinstate her on Kauai as a check against revolt from other, disaffected royalty. The Jarves silk plantation failed spectacularly--drought, cold, and leaf-eating spiders killed the mulberry trees. Thousands of cocoons, with no leaves to eat, had to be destroyed. It was the beginning of genteel poverty for the Jarveses.
The list of Kauai's charms could go on: birds from huge albatross to tiny indigenous honey creepers, hard to find because they live high in the mountains and feed off scrubby ohia trees. Waterfalls and canyons to rival the Grand Canyon. Vistas out to sea that include sometimes whales. Beautiful Hanalea Valley, where "Puff, the Magic Dragon" hangs out, green as green can be. That's the green that still beckons across the ocean. I'll go again. But not this year.
After more years in snow country than I care to count, I'm not surprised that, mid-February, green rises at the back of my mind like an ancient ship coming over the horizon. In fact, I've never approached Hawaii by ship, only by air. Then huge cloud castles plant themselves over the islands, and from the airplane window, the shadow of our tiny plane, reflected on billowing white, promises that we've left all grounded white behind.
Lihue airport, on Kauai, the most north-western of the Hawaiian islands, greets with open arms--scarcely a wall to be found. In open-air, we exit the plane to waiting areas fringed with hibiscus and flowering trees. The air is moist and dark, for we almost always arrive in the evening after changing planes in Honolulu. Just as the smell of wet earth used to greet me in Charleston, the first sign of home, so stepping off the plane in Lihue is a gift to the cold-starved nostrils. Finally we can breathe deeply and sweetly again.
We've stayed several times in Honolulu, in high-rise hotels not far from bikini beaches and a huge mall almost as imposing as the Mall of America. Once we ventured as far south as possible to the leeward side of the "big island," where bed bugs bit Fran our first night. We had arrived again in the dark; the hotel, a huge monster on the water, barely remembered us. Stuck in a room with filthy windows and scum on the woodwork, we should have been warned. But Fran was exhausted. Slipping between the sheets, he drifted off, scratching as he went. Still awake, I looked over at his sleeping form. There crawling across the sheets were flat, almost translucent bugs. I high-tailed it off that bed, tried to rouse him, couldn't, and spent the rest of the night draped over a few chairs. The hotel management wasn't nearly so contrite as they should have been, but eventually capitulated and moved us upstairs to a very clean room with a view of the Kona harbor. No wonder we keep returning to Kauai.
What is there not to love about this beautiful, rather lazy island? Here is my list of favorite locations and events:
* the eucalyptus canopy descending toward Poipu. Even in the dark, the huge trunks and interlaced branches create a tunnel of leafy splendor
* chickens everywhere, or as history dubs them: "Red Jungle Fowl." One of the immigrants attached to the Polynesian settlement centuries ago, the Polynesian rooster struts with incredible aplomb, its iridescent dark green tail feathers shaking like a pompom from its reddish arched back; and a huge red comb crowning its head . The hens and chicks scuttle across the highway. Cars stop. It's the Hawaiian version of "Make Way for Ducklings." Visiting Spouting Horn, where a jet of spray is forced through a hole in the volcanic rock, we patrol the parking lot and find five chicken nests scattered under the shrubbery. The little "peeps" are beautifully and almost universally mottled cream, soft orange and white. Of course I have to crumble saltines left over from lunch to watch them race over and greedily peck, peck, while Mama Hen keeps watch. Just as there are chickens galore, so too cats.
* sunsets. Staying as we do in the southern Poipu area, the sun sets to our right across a placid or roiling ocean. We don't have far to walk to the shore from a little cabin rented from Ellie, a transplant from California. Splendid rays pierce thin clouds and shed a persimmon and pink glow over the waves. "Red sails in the morning, sailors take warning. Red sails at night, sailors delight." This ditty from childhood proves relatively true: we bask in the glow which like all tropical sunsets ends quickly. Then there are stars.
* history. I have more interest and tolerance for historical minutia than Fran; he has a better memory. We visit the history museum in Lihue each time we come to Kauai. Our first time, a retired geography teacher led a tour. Thin, gentle and Chinese-Hawaiian, he recounted his family's story as part of the Hawaiian pageant--they had arrived to work the Dole pineapple fields. Later strolling about Poipu after pizza at a favorite almost-outdoor restaurant, we located the little town's version of a history site: outdoor sheds open on one side, where we traced various enterprises from Chinese barber shop to sugar-cane processing plant to missionary settlement whose original church from the 1850s still holds services. A huge monkeypod tree leaned its enormous branches over a stream: the site of an early mill and company store for quasi-indentured Chinese workers.
My own research placed an early silk-growing plantation nearby where Libby and James Jackson Jarves, the subjects of my on-going novel (right now called Fire Around the Moon) were exiled from Honolulu in the late 1830s. They built a straw hut, she furnished it with packing boxes, a cast-off sofa and pots and pans borrowed from various missionary families. After the birth of their first child, a son named Horatio, the couple took a tour of the island and spent considerable time with former Queen Deborah Kapule, whose checkered history included having the higher royalty in Honolulu "steal" two of her husbands, reduce her to prison, and eventually reinstate her on Kauai as a check against revolt from other, disaffected royalty. The Jarves silk plantation failed spectacularly--drought, cold, and leaf-eating spiders killed the mulberry trees. Thousands of cocoons, with no leaves to eat, had to be destroyed. It was the beginning of genteel poverty for the Jarveses.
The list of Kauai's charms could go on: birds from huge albatross to tiny indigenous honey creepers, hard to find because they live high in the mountains and feed off scrubby ohia trees. Waterfalls and canyons to rival the Grand Canyon. Vistas out to sea that include sometimes whales. Beautiful Hanalea Valley, where "Puff, the Magic Dragon" hangs out, green as green can be. That's the green that still beckons across the ocean. I'll go again. But not this year.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Margotlog: From Shoulder Pads to Crinolines and Cinched Waists
Margotlog: From Shoulder Pads to Suburbs and Beyond - Part II
World War II, and the enormous expansion of transportation and manufacturing necessary for the United States to "tool up," brought the country out of the "Great Depression." But what to do once peace arrived and there wasn't as great a demand for ships, planes, bullets, tanks? Looking back through the pages of Life Magazine and various histories of the era, I'd say three equally enormous changes occurred between 1945 and 1960. Under President Eisenhower the United States' coast-to-coast superhighway system was built along with the cars to speed across it. What later came to be called the "military-industrial complex" ramped up pre-war spending on armaments to meet new threats: the Korean War and the Cold War with Russia. And finally American household and teen consumerism blossomed into a hugely lucrative bouquet.
Now that we've experienced a second (or is it a third) economic plunge, we're not so dismissive of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents whose saving ways were formed by the Great Depression. My mother carried to her grave (she died in 2003 at almost 95) habits formed by the lean years of the 1930s: saving string and rubber bands, old sheets, her daughters' cast-off, pointy-toed flats, and never throwing away food that couldn't be coaxed into yet another casserole. I used to scoff at her: I who grew up in relative affluence, tutored first by Life Magazine's post-war emphasis on business that catered to leisure (count the number of liquor and cigarette ads in Life after the war), speed (ditto the two-page spreads for family cars and even family air travel), and home-making made easy. Father was always in the driver's seat after the war; men were always in charge of business; and women in the homes were cosseted and pampered as if they were the new American queens. Item: Electrolux ad in Life, Nov. 10, 1952: three drawings of a permed, lip-sticked, nail-polished dame, each with a slogan: "Touch no dirt!" then "Breathe no dirt!" then "See no dirt!" No surprise: Electrolux is a vacuum cleaner. But we don't see the product. We see the pristine, housewife. The new American post-war home was a castle commanded by a queen who didn't have to lift a finger.
Glamor in the living room: a console TV picturing Lucille Ball's wide-eyed insousiance, and outside the "box" a couple lighting up Lucky Strikes. Glamor in the bedroom: drawings of various negligees on curvaceous female bodies, with an emphasis on "nylon." Nylon, a synthetic fabric, created during the war as a substitute for silk in parachutes. One of my favorite post-war Life ads hangs a parachute on the left side of a bedroom, and a lovely wife in flowing negligee on the right. The message couldn't be clearer: Look what "The War" has won for us!
Minnesotans of the World War II generation have told me that when they married their honeys after the war, they moved into what are now "close-in" suburbs: in Saint Paul, north to Falcon Heights. In Minneapolis, south to Richfield or Bloomington. These communities existed before World War II, but they burgeoned afterwards, with track housing and manicured lawns. Their denizens? The families of "Leave It to Beaver." In the mid-1950s, my parents also moved our family of four out of the city, across the Cooper River Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina, to Mount Pleasant where they built a bungalow. Track housing wouldn't t hit Charleston until later. Though we were in what would become a suburb, our small house sat on a huge, acre lot, studded with enormous magnolias. Yet in almost every other respect, we played out the post-war suburban dream--as much as was possible given my parents' cultural snobbery and quirkiness. We had two baths--unheard of in apartment dwelling; we had a breakfast nook. No car port, but a new family car, a bright green Dodge which my father drove away every morning and brought back every night. My mother who'd worked for ten years as a librarian in Pittsburgh before her children were born stayed at home now: she sewed bedspreads; she ironed my father's underwear (I know, it sounds daft!). She volunteered as a Girl Scout leader and, with us girls, spent weeks at Girl Scout camp in the Carolina mountains. She became a crafts instructor.
Eventually with the determined efficiency that marked everything she did, my mother broke out of this caccoon and got a job, like the dissatisfied wives Betty Friedan wrote about in The Feminine Mystique (1963). Though my mother suffered none of the emotional angst that Friedan describes, her need to shed blissful suburban fakery and take part again in the real world of American work was as real as Friedan's subjects. These were middle-class, largely white American woman, often with college degrees who were side-lined by an ethos of home-making perfectionism and cosseting child-rearing. Forget the notion that whole families worked together to make a life. After the war, Father "worked," and Mother made a home for him and their children. Add to this the fact that most such families had only one car, women didn't drive, and the suburbs were far from downtown and existed only as miles and miles of nothing but track housing, supermarkets, and an occasional beauty parlor--and you begin to picture the intellectual and cultural desert these American wives were supposed to inhabit and adore.
My mother got a part-time job in the Mount Pleasant school library. Wearing my cast-off pointy toed flats, she walked to work. Years later, surgery had to correct the hammer toes created by her saving mentality. But she was busy, productive, and once again had her own money. She kept working when the family moved to the other side of Charleston, across the Ashley River. My father was fed up with the long drive from the suburbs and she was happy to graduate to work in the Charleston County Library, still walking across town after my father dropped her off. She didn't retire until she was 70, her heart in excellent condition from all that walking, and her brain as buzzing with information as ever. I consider it an American success story.
World War II, and the enormous expansion of transportation and manufacturing necessary for the United States to "tool up," brought the country out of the "Great Depression." But what to do once peace arrived and there wasn't as great a demand for ships, planes, bullets, tanks? Looking back through the pages of Life Magazine and various histories of the era, I'd say three equally enormous changes occurred between 1945 and 1960. Under President Eisenhower the United States' coast-to-coast superhighway system was built along with the cars to speed across it. What later came to be called the "military-industrial complex" ramped up pre-war spending on armaments to meet new threats: the Korean War and the Cold War with Russia. And finally American household and teen consumerism blossomed into a hugely lucrative bouquet.
Now that we've experienced a second (or is it a third) economic plunge, we're not so dismissive of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents whose saving ways were formed by the Great Depression. My mother carried to her grave (she died in 2003 at almost 95) habits formed by the lean years of the 1930s: saving string and rubber bands, old sheets, her daughters' cast-off, pointy-toed flats, and never throwing away food that couldn't be coaxed into yet another casserole. I used to scoff at her: I who grew up in relative affluence, tutored first by Life Magazine's post-war emphasis on business that catered to leisure (count the number of liquor and cigarette ads in Life after the war), speed (ditto the two-page spreads for family cars and even family air travel), and home-making made easy. Father was always in the driver's seat after the war; men were always in charge of business; and women in the homes were cosseted and pampered as if they were the new American queens. Item: Electrolux ad in Life, Nov. 10, 1952: three drawings of a permed, lip-sticked, nail-polished dame, each with a slogan: "Touch no dirt!" then "Breathe no dirt!" then "See no dirt!" No surprise: Electrolux is a vacuum cleaner. But we don't see the product. We see the pristine, housewife. The new American post-war home was a castle commanded by a queen who didn't have to lift a finger.
Glamor in the living room: a console TV picturing Lucille Ball's wide-eyed insousiance, and outside the "box" a couple lighting up Lucky Strikes. Glamor in the bedroom: drawings of various negligees on curvaceous female bodies, with an emphasis on "nylon." Nylon, a synthetic fabric, created during the war as a substitute for silk in parachutes. One of my favorite post-war Life ads hangs a parachute on the left side of a bedroom, and a lovely wife in flowing negligee on the right. The message couldn't be clearer: Look what "The War" has won for us!
Minnesotans of the World War II generation have told me that when they married their honeys after the war, they moved into what are now "close-in" suburbs: in Saint Paul, north to Falcon Heights. In Minneapolis, south to Richfield or Bloomington. These communities existed before World War II, but they burgeoned afterwards, with track housing and manicured lawns. Their denizens? The families of "Leave It to Beaver." In the mid-1950s, my parents also moved our family of four out of the city, across the Cooper River Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina, to Mount Pleasant where they built a bungalow. Track housing wouldn't t hit Charleston until later. Though we were in what would become a suburb, our small house sat on a huge, acre lot, studded with enormous magnolias. Yet in almost every other respect, we played out the post-war suburban dream--as much as was possible given my parents' cultural snobbery and quirkiness. We had two baths--unheard of in apartment dwelling; we had a breakfast nook. No car port, but a new family car, a bright green Dodge which my father drove away every morning and brought back every night. My mother who'd worked for ten years as a librarian in Pittsburgh before her children were born stayed at home now: she sewed bedspreads; she ironed my father's underwear (I know, it sounds daft!). She volunteered as a Girl Scout leader and, with us girls, spent weeks at Girl Scout camp in the Carolina mountains. She became a crafts instructor.
Eventually with the determined efficiency that marked everything she did, my mother broke out of this caccoon and got a job, like the dissatisfied wives Betty Friedan wrote about in The Feminine Mystique (1963). Though my mother suffered none of the emotional angst that Friedan describes, her need to shed blissful suburban fakery and take part again in the real world of American work was as real as Friedan's subjects. These were middle-class, largely white American woman, often with college degrees who were side-lined by an ethos of home-making perfectionism and cosseting child-rearing. Forget the notion that whole families worked together to make a life. After the war, Father "worked," and Mother made a home for him and their children. Add to this the fact that most such families had only one car, women didn't drive, and the suburbs were far from downtown and existed only as miles and miles of nothing but track housing, supermarkets, and an occasional beauty parlor--and you begin to picture the intellectual and cultural desert these American wives were supposed to inhabit and adore.
My mother got a part-time job in the Mount Pleasant school library. Wearing my cast-off pointy toed flats, she walked to work. Years later, surgery had to correct the hammer toes created by her saving mentality. But she was busy, productive, and once again had her own money. She kept working when the family moved to the other side of Charleston, across the Ashley River. My father was fed up with the long drive from the suburbs and she was happy to graduate to work in the Charleston County Library, still walking across town after my father dropped her off. She didn't retire until she was 70, her heart in excellent condition from all that walking, and her brain as buzzing with information as ever. I consider it an American success story.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Margotlog: The English Cemetery at Piazzale Donat
Margotlog: The English Cemetery at Piazzale Donatello
The Protestant Cemetery in its own Piazalle Donatello lies outside the walls in Florence, meaning that when it was first established in the early 1800s, it could not be situated on sacred ground within the city walls. Though certainly Christian, its Swiss founders were not Catholic, thus they and the dead they housed--Americans, English, Russians, Swiss--were "beyond the pale," given a rise of ground taller at one end, closer to level at the other, just outside the Borgo Pinto gate. Some old maps suggest that this odd-shaped ground was created by centuries of dumping garbage over the wall, with one side of the dump rising almost to the top of the wall.
These days, with the wall dismantled, two streams of almost constant traffic surge on either side of this odd-shaped piece of earth. You must press the "pedestrian crossing" button to bring traffic to a halt and cross to this beautiful island of the dead, with its stands of graceful cypress, and dotted plantings of white marble.
Ring the bell at the iron gate and it sounds inside the gatehouse, a low simple building with arched entryway where horses used to draw up the bodies. Today, burials no longer occur in the Protestant Cemetery, but visitors abound; the cemetery is a monument, cared for today by two custodians, two wonderful "sisters," one Italian-born and trained, the other, Sister Julia Holloway, a British academic-turned Anglican nun, who recently converted to Catholicism. There could not be a more hearty welcome to visitors than offered by Sister Julia in her flowing grey gown with white scarf around her smiling face.
When I first visited the cemetery in the early 2000s, Sister Julia was recently arrived herself: she had worked as custodian at the Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning house, Casa Guidi, across the Arno near the Pitti Palace. Since she and her father had edited a new edition (Penguin 1996) of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's novel-like poem, Aurora Leigh, Sister Julia's association with Casa Guidi perfectly fit her passion. Now she is passionate about the Protestant Cemetery, working hard to restore the tombs and their iron-work, remove diseased cypress and have the city replant new ones.
The sloping, narrow ground of the cemetery leads the visitor away from the entry, along a wide, stepped path. The graves are ranged in irregular rows away from the main path, with those to the right on ground that drops off precipitously to an iron fence, and from there to whizzing cars. My first visit, I didn't have to stray from the core path to find two graves that stopped me in my tracks. The first was Elizabeth Barrett Browning's, standing on four small columns, presenting its side to the passer-by. There along the bottom were the initials "E.B.B" and a narrow runner of her dates: 1806-61. According to Sister Julia, the medallion profile in the center of the tomb is not of EBB herself, but a rendition of laurel-wreathed Corrine, the heroine of Madame de Stael's novel. I prefer to imagine it's the poet whose lies there.
Further up the main path, I was stopped by another, simpler grave in grey "pietra serena," the local quarried stone used by Brunelleschi and many other Renaissance artists in their serene churches--enter the church of Santo Spirito, also across the Arno, and you'll see what I mean. This tomb also has its enigmas: "Libby" was scrawled across it. Then below: "Elizabeth Russell Jarves, wife of James Jackson Jarves, Boston, died 1861." Along with the inscription was carved a pansy, flower of love and longing. Pursuing the Libby's history has fascinated me for almost a decade now: I'm well into writing a novel about her very peculiar life. But what life isn't peculiar, especially those of travelers to Florence who had the misfortune or fortune to die there and be buried in the English Cemetery?
Sister Julia has wrought enormous benefits for the cemetery since I first visited: she is working to have it declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, which it surely should be. She has hired the people called Roma, whom we in the U.S. rather too casually call gypsies, to help repair tombs and ironwork, arguing that these people, often spat-upon and burned out of their camps, are excellently trained in such repair and will do it gladly for far less than local Florentine artisans.
Not only this, but she has made the cemetery's presence in cyber space full and accessible. Her researcher's impulse to collect and document, to publish and disseminate, and her skills with loading photographs and text onto the Web--all have made the English Cemetery a presence on the world stage, which it was not at all when I first visited.
Especially for American and English tourists, I can't imagine a more restful, yet inspiring spot that standing among the spears of cypress and contemplating Florentine soil which houses the ghosts of many great writers from almost two centuries ago. Plus you'll have the charm and education of meeting Sister Julia: if a cemetery can be a classroom, she has found her academy.
The Protestant Cemetery in its own Piazalle Donatello lies outside the walls in Florence, meaning that when it was first established in the early 1800s, it could not be situated on sacred ground within the city walls. Though certainly Christian, its Swiss founders were not Catholic, thus they and the dead they housed--Americans, English, Russians, Swiss--were "beyond the pale," given a rise of ground taller at one end, closer to level at the other, just outside the Borgo Pinto gate. Some old maps suggest that this odd-shaped ground was created by centuries of dumping garbage over the wall, with one side of the dump rising almost to the top of the wall.
These days, with the wall dismantled, two streams of almost constant traffic surge on either side of this odd-shaped piece of earth. You must press the "pedestrian crossing" button to bring traffic to a halt and cross to this beautiful island of the dead, with its stands of graceful cypress, and dotted plantings of white marble.
Ring the bell at the iron gate and it sounds inside the gatehouse, a low simple building with arched entryway where horses used to draw up the bodies. Today, burials no longer occur in the Protestant Cemetery, but visitors abound; the cemetery is a monument, cared for today by two custodians, two wonderful "sisters," one Italian-born and trained, the other, Sister Julia Holloway, a British academic-turned Anglican nun, who recently converted to Catholicism. There could not be a more hearty welcome to visitors than offered by Sister Julia in her flowing grey gown with white scarf around her smiling face.
When I first visited the cemetery in the early 2000s, Sister Julia was recently arrived herself: she had worked as custodian at the Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning house, Casa Guidi, across the Arno near the Pitti Palace. Since she and her father had edited a new edition (Penguin 1996) of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's novel-like poem, Aurora Leigh, Sister Julia's association with Casa Guidi perfectly fit her passion. Now she is passionate about the Protestant Cemetery, working hard to restore the tombs and their iron-work, remove diseased cypress and have the city replant new ones.
The sloping, narrow ground of the cemetery leads the visitor away from the entry, along a wide, stepped path. The graves are ranged in irregular rows away from the main path, with those to the right on ground that drops off precipitously to an iron fence, and from there to whizzing cars. My first visit, I didn't have to stray from the core path to find two graves that stopped me in my tracks. The first was Elizabeth Barrett Browning's, standing on four small columns, presenting its side to the passer-by. There along the bottom were the initials "E.B.B" and a narrow runner of her dates: 1806-61. According to Sister Julia, the medallion profile in the center of the tomb is not of EBB herself, but a rendition of laurel-wreathed Corrine, the heroine of Madame de Stael's novel. I prefer to imagine it's the poet whose lies there.
Further up the main path, I was stopped by another, simpler grave in grey "pietra serena," the local quarried stone used by Brunelleschi and many other Renaissance artists in their serene churches--enter the church of Santo Spirito, also across the Arno, and you'll see what I mean. This tomb also has its enigmas: "Libby" was scrawled across it. Then below: "Elizabeth Russell Jarves, wife of James Jackson Jarves, Boston, died 1861." Along with the inscription was carved a pansy, flower of love and longing. Pursuing the Libby's history has fascinated me for almost a decade now: I'm well into writing a novel about her very peculiar life. But what life isn't peculiar, especially those of travelers to Florence who had the misfortune or fortune to die there and be buried in the English Cemetery?
Sister Julia has wrought enormous benefits for the cemetery since I first visited: she is working to have it declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, which it surely should be. She has hired the people called Roma, whom we in the U.S. rather too casually call gypsies, to help repair tombs and ironwork, arguing that these people, often spat-upon and burned out of their camps, are excellently trained in such repair and will do it gladly for far less than local Florentine artisans.
Not only this, but she has made the cemetery's presence in cyber space full and accessible. Her researcher's impulse to collect and document, to publish and disseminate, and her skills with loading photographs and text onto the Web--all have made the English Cemetery a presence on the world stage, which it was not at all when I first visited.
Especially for American and English tourists, I can't imagine a more restful, yet inspiring spot that standing among the spears of cypress and contemplating Florentine soil which houses the ghosts of many great writers from almost two centuries ago. Plus you'll have the charm and education of meeting Sister Julia: if a cemetery can be a classroom, she has found her academy.
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