Space and Hedgehogs

The downstairs neighbours, from whom we were subletting, have gone home to the Continent. Now we are renting directly from the owners, and we have emerged from our room. The New Town flat in which we have slept, washed, eaten and quarrelled for a over a month actually comprises two stories--and perhaps 2,000 square feet--of what was once a six storey townhouse, built before 1840. Now we are the sole inhabitants and can sit downstairs.

There is a garden, too, with a pile of sticks and leaves that may contain hedgehogs. I have been reading gardening books, and one was very enthusiastic about creating these hedgehog-friendly dens. 

I have moved my centre of morning operations to the kitchen. It is directly under the room of our refuge, and it has a twelve-light window looking into the street stairwell (the flat is "lower ground floor") with a cushioned window seat.  It is much more comfortable to study here than to study on the floor between the window and the drawn curtains in our room, which I did for weeks, as B.A. slept on. 

We used to say, when we lived in the Historical House, that we would never live anywhere so grand or comfortable again. This turned out not to be true, exactly, as now--thanks to our friends, the owners--we are living in a delightful two storey flat in the New Town. Temporarily. If a surveyor finds nothing seriously wrong with the New Flat, we will move there next Monday. 

Meanwhile, we live a New Town life, and I am too frightened to look at our bank account. B.A. bought two bottles of £10 wine at Margiotta's yesterday. What was he thinking?

"It was on sale," he said breezily, and as my parents are in town, and like good wine, I just repeated my stricture that once we move into the New Flat the party ends.  

The New Flat is in a much less exclusive neighbourhood, to put it mildly. It is in a row house built for such working-class Edinburgh people whose city centre slum was about to be knocked down. At the time, the river outside the row house was dirty, the ground was brown, and the air was full of noise.  Ninety years later, there is no more heavy industry in that part of town, and so the environment is actually liveable. But it is neither the Historical Estate nor the New Town, so I will have a very difficult time maintaining my delusions of grandeur. 

Comfort comes, however, in The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary (translated into English by Alison Anderson), which is about a Parisian building superintendent, or concierge, who secretly lives for art, philosophy and fine food. She goes to extreme lengths not to allow anyone in her building--one of the most chic and luxurious apartment buildings in Paris--to find out she isn't the stereotypical Paris concierge: surly, uneducated, uncultured and dumb.   

I was not aware that there was a stereotype for Paris concierges. My friend the Economist lives in a new build in Krakow, and the management employs women to watch the door. One seemed very nice, and one seemed suspicious of my presence, much to the Economist's masculine joy. As I am 17 years older than the Economist, it seems unlikely that I could disturb the chaste soul of a Krakow concierge, but then you never know.  I am more familiar with the elderly Polish women who maintain the public loos, collecting coins in a little dish while (allegedly) listening to Radio Maria. 

But I digress. My point was that this concierge, while striving to live down to an awful stereotype, manages to have a rich interior life involving philosophy,  Russian literature (in translation) Japanese films (also in translation), and really delicious cheese and pastries. (I was concerned that she was not sharing her considerable gifts with anyone, but that is where character development came in.) 

So, although Madame Michel is an atheist French intellectual who gives phenomenology a good kicking,  The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a very inspiring book.  Madame M may tend to an architecturally and culturally snazzy building, but she herself lives in three pokey rooms.

Update: One critic pointed out that the central characters are rather nasty about others in the book. I noticed that. However, they are not nasty to these people, and personally I do not mind if incredibly rich left-wingers are trounced in fiction. I also enjoyed how the Catholic reactionaries are shown to be decent in times of crisis. I suspect many lefty French intellectuals enjoy freaking out other lefty French intellectuals by admiring (or pretending to admire) Catholic reactionaries. Look at Houellebecq. 

Terrible Translation of the Day

While trying to put my Riverdale addition to good use, I went to youtube on a fruitless quest for Polish dubbing. Poles don't do dubbing. For some reason unfathomable to the rest of the world, they prefer to have an emotionless voice reading a Polish translation over the original dialogue. I don't know how they stand it, and it's hard not to see it as part of a complicated plot to keep the rest of the world from learning Polish. Not having any geographical defences, they construct linguistic walls to keep everyone out--except, apparently, foreign wives and Antonia Lloyd Jones.

I haven't found any Riverdale episodes with Polish subtitles which makes me suspect the dubbing is happening to it, the horror. (Imagine deep male voice: O-Jaghaid-ko-ham-chay-eh.) However, I did find a clip of an interview with Cole Sprouse, and the subtitles turned "Jughead" into "Chuck Adam."

If it weren't for the linguistic walls, I'd advise unemployed English Lit graduates to learn Polish and become English-to-Polish translators because something seriously wrong is going on there.

To show friends and enemies (to whom my blog readership is now reduced) the depths of my pop culture/linguistic insanity, here is a Polish translation of "Mad World." For, to quote TV-Jughead's most iconic speech, "In case you haven't noticed, I'm weird. I'm a weirdo." Besides, you'll also see what anglophone students of Polish are up against.

Update: Naturally it is problematic to be watching Riverdale at all. I know that. Sex & the City was a gazillion times worse though.

Cultural Adventure of Rip Van McWinkle

If you want to be a popular blogger--which I used to be, relatively speaking and within my niche, five years ago---don't  close and open blogs and hop around like I do. However, if you want to write publicly but feel that you are somewhat under the radar, feel free.

It's not entirely an illusion. Words on the internet are as plentiful and frequent as rain on Glasgow. After twenty years of falling, the accumulated words are a vast, unplumbable ocean. Even a targeted Google search by a friend or foe would bring them to the edge of the murky rock pool that is twelve years of my own online writing.

While I was an undergraduate, I lived in a student co-op house for a memorable year, and on the floor below mine was a plump M.A. candidate who read James Joyce and smoked dope. Still overly impressed by graduate students, I mistook Oren for an oracle.

"History," he pronounced during one of our rare conversations, "is text."

A lifelong diarist, I thought those were the truest words I had ever heard that side of campus. They continued to sink into my brain, even when, two or three years after I left the house, Oren said they were complete nonsense. Hadn't I noticed how much dope he had smoked?

Yeah, but traditionally pagan oracles were usually stoned one way or another, wern't they?

Many years later, possibly after I met B.A., I understood that history is also cultural artefacts. I wished I had done a better job, as a diarist, in describing the material objects that would differentiate the 1970s from the 1980s, the 1980s from the 1990s, and so on.

One of the problems, perhaps, is that one does not know which fishes to catch in one's diaristic nets. (How did I know in 1985 that I would want to recreate it in words in 2015?) And then, of course, I gradually lost interest in pop culture, at first lagging behind, but then ignoring it completely. This may be normal for adults, especially childless ones. In 1985, I could had a good idea of the Top 10 hits of the given day. In 2018, I have no idea at all, unless "Believer" by the [Something] Dragons is still there.

I know about "Believer" only because of "Riverdale", and I know about "Riverdale" only because a disaster befell the Historical House and B.A. and I were temporarily rehoused in a flat furnished with Netflix. And being prone to sudden obsessions, I have binge-watched "Riverdale" and gone online to read what other watchers think of it.

Suddenly I feel like Rip Van Winkle, woken up to a new world. Those who were babies when I fell asleep to pop culture are now grown up and writing in a strange jargon, often with a brutal frankness that is crudely obscene. They trade in a host of references to television shows and movies that I have never heard of, let alone watched. I have discovered that Facebook is "for old people", and I suspect blogging is, too. History is no longer text (if it ever was) but digital photographs, digital films, digital music.

This is why, by the way, I stopped giving advice to Singles. My hermeneutic was that human nature doesn't change, and so my experience as a Single adult in the 90s and 00s could be helpful to Singles now. However, I am no longer sure about this because I know that constant attention to digital culture--bathing in music and images and hieroglyphic text speak--rewires the human mind, making the human brain physically different from that of the human being who works by hand, reads, chats to acquaintances in his favourite brunch cafe, and occasionally puts a record on a turntable.

To paraphrase the Buggles, Tinder killed the internet star.

I know also that the very powerful people who direct the digital culture are deliberately trying to change human nature, to bring about the "equality of outcome" that Jordan Peterson is so afraid of.* They seem to think truth is not what is, but what you make it, and they are determined to make truth what they think it should be. This is extremely frightening.

Digital culture preaches a message of tolerance and respect for difference, but only those  differences that are compatible with its own overarching worldview. On "Riverdale", Jughead is corrected for "telling a story that is not his to tell" after he writes indignantly of the massacre of the Native American tribe who used to live where Riverdale is now. But on the most recent episode of Riverdale, yet another character has been dragged against her will to a Roman Catholic home run by Roman Catholic nuns, this time to undergo conversion therapy.

Dear Hollywood, dear Entertainment Industrial Complex, you're performing conversion therapy on us.

I am caught up on all the episodes "Riverdale", and will do my best not to think of it again until Thursday, when the next episode reaches the UK, via Netflix. I'm kind of amazed that, here I am, in synch with a contemporary, still-developing artefact of American pop culture.

Although in the UK, I watch mostly boring television with B.A. (mostly cooking shows and "Sherlock" when it appears), being plugged into something mainstream aimed at, and performed by, American Millennials feels really different. Although "Riverdale" has distracted me from objectively more valuable pursuits, I feel strangely awake.

Riverdale Outrageously Appropriates My Culture

Poor Addicted Seraphic 

This morning I took to the internet to find out if other people are have my substance abuse problem, the substance being "Riverdale". It was a relief to find it described as a "phenomenon" and discover that college kids leave clubs in time to get back to the dorm to watch it. Also a relief: the average age of viewers is 42.

Various entertainment writers ponder why the show is such a hit amongst todays TV-adverse teens, but so far none of them mention dopamine-induced-by-rapid-editing-and-music. But among the various theories is that the "Riverdale" writing team reads internet commentary by fans on the series and tailors their writing accordingly.

Once again I should point out that "Riverdale" is not a show you want influencing your children. Possibly you should be 42 before you watch it, or at least old enough not to compare real-life love interests unfavourably to Archie and Jughead.

Critics seem most disturbed by the astonishingly horrible (but creative!) punishment Jughead and the under-18 wing of the Southside Serpents mete upon the gang's super-crooked female lawyer. However, I think it very unlikely that the vast majority of today's children are ever going to be tempted into such scenarios. They will, however, have to cope with a world that worships sex, and all the teenagers in Riverdale worship sex: ordinary sex, same-sex sex, dressing up in costumes sex.

(Pregnancy, by the way, is a mysterious thing that just happens to the occasional girl, like being pooped on by a pigeon flying overhead.)

Sex as Religion

In Riverdale sex is a religion with excellent ecumenical dialogue between most of its branches. Sex without love is a-okay, if that's your thing, but the attitude of Riverdale's heroes towards actual prostitution remains ambiguous. The old-fashioned kind is considered extremely icky, whereas internet stuff is, somehow, merely edgy. Darling Betty, who is supposed to be the Good Girl, is drawn to the dark cult of stranger sex, as long as it is just online.

(Is a passionate relationship with the tortured leader of the Southside Serpent Under-18's not enough? Dear heavens.)

But for some reason, which I still cannot comprehend, the writers of ""Riverdale" have decided to introduce a rival religion to sex, without actually daring to underscore its formerly famous ethical objections to sex between anyone but the married.  That rival religion is, of course, Catholicism.

It is, however, Catholicism as few Catholics would recognise it.

In Season One, we see flashes of gold crosses on Betty and Betty's mother and, of course, an outrageously stereotyped--verging on a hate crime--Catholic home for unwed mothers and juvenile delinquents, complete with some nuns in post-Vatican 2 habits and others in pre-Vatican 2 habits. One gets the sense, however, that Betty and her family are not themselves Catholics. It's just that Catholics cornered the local homes for unwed mothers market twenty-five year years ago.

In Season Two the treatment of Catholicism becomes utterly ridiculous. We have the Latino Lodges to thank for this. Oh, and The Godfather, naturally.

1. Disrespect for the Queen of Heaven

First, when Veronica's mother goes to church to pray for a friend, she directs her gaze not towards the Blessed Sacrament or a crucifix, but to the worst statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary I have yet seen on television. The statue has big white eyes that I would find comical had I no love whatsoever for the BVM. As it is, I am aggrieved. Nobody would paint eyes like that on a portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr., so why is it okay to portray any Catholic saint, let alone the most important Catholic saint,  that way?

2. So, like, our Sacraments are sacred, you know? 

Second, when Veronica's parents decide she should be confirmed, it becomes immediately apparent that the writers have absolutely no idea what a Roman Catholic Confirmation is supposed to look like. It's as if they saw some Puppet Masses on Youtube and, while tossing the puppets, retained their spirit.

This could be why Veronica's Confirmation features a tailor-made white dress instead of an alb and Josie of Josie and the Pussy-Cats singing "Bittersweet Symphony" mid-way through Mass.

Reducing the Sacrament of Confirmation a Latino coming-of-age ritual is itself offensive, but this is mildly mitigated by the fact that in Latin America and the USA, Confirmation often is reduced to a Latino coming-of-age ritual.  However, there is no getting around the really horrible scenes around Veronica's reception of the Sacrament of Reconciliation and the Blessed Sacrament.

I fast-forwarded through most of Veronica's bizarre Confirmation Mass because I just couldn't bear it. Her Confession was horror enough. First, you would think that she might have mentioned all the premarital sex she'd had, but no. Mustn't frighten the audience by suggesting for a single second that there might have been something wrong with it. She doesn't go much into her Mean Girl past, either. Veronica's idea of sin is having disrespected her gangster parents a few times. She made a much better confession to Betty in Season One.

But what is seriously awful is that Veronica asks the walking stereotype Monsignor Murphy for counsel, and he refuses to give it to her. He just slaps her with a bunch of Hail Marys and Our Fathers, sketches an absolution, and that is that. From any Catholic point of view, this is outrageous.

And then Veronica takes Communion and rejects Satan, etc., etc., and a golden light LITERALLY shines on her from above.

3. Catholics as Superstitious Butt-covering Hypocrites  

Third, before Veronica's Confirmation, she has a sort of hen party with her female relations, who talk about how they depend on their Catholic faith for hope that their criminal husbands come home alive and to assuage their consciences for all the bad stuff that they do.

To quote the entire generation of North Americans Millennials, that is just SO offensive.

I cannot imagine how one attempts to convince the writers of "Riverdale" not to reduce the religion of over one billion people worldwide, whose rituals are not a secret and can be seen anywhere, to an offensive cartoon.  I am hoping that amongst the social media movers and shakers, there are devout Catholic fans who write "Come on, guys. Don't do that to my religion."

A Modest Proposal

Maybe Father James Martin, SJ, could stage an intervention, which is a mind-boggling thought, but when I think about it, he's the celebrity priest Hollywood is most likely to have heard of, isn't he?  And "Riverdale" is just weird enough that I can imagine Father Martin making a cameo appearance.

And to get the writers' attention, here's for the Google search: "Riverdale appropriates my culture."

Delicious Lies

Does not happen now.

Why do some of us become obsessed with television shows? I am asking this assuming that other people get obsessed with television shows. The secret of my advice-giving success is the insight that my mind is probably only about 10% unique and the rest of it can be classified as Human Female, and therefore things that work for me might work for other Human Females, 90% of the time.

Part of my 10% uniqueness is a terror of mathematics, so don't quote me on those percentages.

I don't want to guess at how much the 90% of Human Female Mind is identical to that of 90% of Human Male Mind. Obviously there are similarities, but there are clearly differences. Interestingly, although men abuse drugs more than women do, apparently, women get addicted to them faster.

But I am not a scientist, so I will abandon any pretence at clinical-trial type objectivity and go with my gut. In short, I think the success of "Riverdale" is tied to its idealisation of the teenage years. It's not just the rapid pace, emotional zig-zags, palpitation-inducing blasts of Imagine Dragons' "Believer," and Archie's chest.  I admit I think those things have a lot to do with the dopamine surges I've been experiencing.  Well, not Archie's chest, which should have its own zip code. Tooooo alarming. But, really, it's the glorious chance to rewrite in our heads the ghastly experience of being teenagers.

First of all, very few of us were that good-looking as teenagers. Not only did we not look like Betty, Veronica and Cheryl, the boys did not look like Archie or Jughead. What we looked like, and what the boys who actually "liked" us looked like, was a source of great pain. Therefore, it comes as a great relief to identify with godlings from Mount Olympus (or wherever Hollywood found them).

Second, very few of us were that clever. Well, few of us were as clever as Jughead, Betty and Cheryl Blossom, who, though criminally insane, is rocking a 4.0.

One of the iconic moments of the show (and not just for me, I have discovered) is when TV-Jughead (who is 10% Original Jughead and 90% smouldering coal) appears at Betty's bedroom window at the top of a ladder and says, "Hey there, Juliet. Nurse off-duty?

Okay, TV-Jughead is 15-going-on-16 when he delivers those immortal lines. In real life, 15-year-old-boys do not say things like that. We wish they did, but they didn't and don't. At least, not in my experience. Although I was at an all-girls' school, I arranged to be around teenage boys when I could, and no, they were not making clever allusions to Shakespeare.

Incidentally, Beloved is Betty's favourite book ever, and while I was so sick on Tuesday I wondered if never having read Beloved meant that I was a Bad Person.

Jughead, age 15/16, is writing a novel, and his model is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, which I haven't read either. When I was 15, I wasn't attempting to write a novel.  I was writing Star Trek fan fiction. On the other hand, I also wrote an extra scene for Romeo and Juliet as an English class project, and a dialogue between Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the suitability of Raymond Souster's poetry for study in my Catholic school.  My enthusiasm for literature was tempered by a deep, frowny suspicion for anything overtly erotic.

Jughead also makes allusions to Jean-Paul Sartre, which makes me wonder if we are supposed to believe that he (15/16) has actually read Jean-Paul Sartre.

In the interests of separating delicious lies about teenage life from the plodding truth, I now invite readers to tell me what you were reading and writing by choice when you were teenagers, specifically between the ages of 15 and 17, if you remember in that much detail. I did read Sylvia Path at about 13, I suddenly recall. It's not out of the realm of the possible.

Oh, and also: did you ever ride a motorcycle, as either driver or passenger, as a teen? Your humble correspondent did not, although she came close at the age of 27 when she got lost on Capri and a 20-something mechanic gave her a ride back to civilisation on the back of his Vespa.

Did not happen then. 

I have a theory that the writers of "Riverdale", being writers, identify with TV-Jughead because he IS a writer, and therefore have made him, not Archie, the real star of the show. That they have given him a tattoo, a motorcycle, and the crazy blonde is surely evidence of this theory.

Roger Scruton on the Tyranny of Pop Music

I am sure I should understand this a lot better than I do. Some people can listen to music the way most people can read books. B.A. can. My brothers can. I can't. Alas!

The Egos of Wannabe Poets

I was at a Polish poetry translation workshop today. Whereas the organizers and presenters were terrific, I was bored by the egos of fellow workshoppers. Of the 18 of us, only five were male, and guess who did most of the talking?  And one of them, during the introductions, needed to opine on "Christian mythology" and how he assumed it was "still imposed" on Poland. For all he knew, the poet could have attended noon-hour mass before arriving at the poetry centre or had a keen devotion to Our Lady of Częstochowa. Mr Sixty-Eighter (complete with white hair pulled back in a ponytail) obviously hadn't heard that Poland was born and baptized simultaneously.

Suddenly I remembered why I gave up going to writers' groups. There's just too much "I", which is why I may give up blogging eventually. The very word blog or "web log" assumes a first-person narrative, so blogging can encourage rampant self-regard. Me, me, me. I, I, I. Margaret Avison advised me not to write in the first person for ten years. Alas.

The wonderful thing about a language group, in contrast, is the point of the group is never "I" and what "I" wrote, or what "I" think but the language itself. It is difficult to speak the foreign language, but everyone tries and is even relieved when it is someone else's turn to talk.

One of the chaps in the workshop was in love with the fact that he could speak Polish. He was a terrible warning to your humble scribe. In fact, I may have tried to show off my own shaky grasp of the piękny język, were it not for him. Instead I asked questions and talked about Polish might best be translated for a North American audience. Thus, I learned something. Of course, I learned more by keeping quiet and listening.

Of the women who spoke, I spoke a fair amount, keeping in mind how ego-jostling is contagious. Good moderators must be able to keep this within bounds, and fortunately ours did. It helped, I think, that the poet was actually there, and so was the indisputable leader of the pack. At least if there was some "Look at me! Look at me!" going on, it was directed at the poet.

The best poets-in-English I have met are humble people who are more interested in the world than they are in being heard. They are also incredibly interested in poetry for itself and so are eager to listen to others, more eager to listen than to speak. I once asked a woman I met at theology school--a woman whose poems were regularly published in the most prestigious Canadian journals--if she ever went to Spoken Word or open mic events, and she never did. 

Meeting Polish poets is a different experience altogether because they are presenting and reading in what is to them a foreign language environment. They usually give the impression that they are on a fun holiday, and that having any English-speaking readers-listeners is a jolly surprise. If they have an ego, none of it is bound up in their facility with English. They read what their translator wrote, and their audience listens in respectfully and claps.

Afterwards a fellow Polish-language enthusiast and I took off for a drink. We ended up having coffee and cake in my favourite hipster café. and while we were there another workshop participant approached to say she had enjoyed our contributions. She is a English-to-Polish translator, which we found very interesting. She said very little during the workshop. Indeed the young, female students of translation said almost nothing. This does not mean that they had nothing to say, of course.

The Unexpected "The Unexpected Professor"/Brideshead

I have finished reading The Unexpected Professor, which challenged many of my ideas, but was nevertheless quite enjoyable if, ultimately, unconvincing. I am all for grammar schools and merit over the inherited privilege of the children of the rich, but he lost me when, on page 310, he admitted to having had Anglo-Saxon made optional for first-year Oxford students of English Literature. Not only does this seems like an outrageous dumbing down of Oxford and of students of English Literature, it is a posthumous slap to  the woman who so kindly praised his Viva examinations: the great Anglo-Saxonist Dorothy Whitelock.

I was named (in part) for Dorothy Whitelock, and my father began his career as an Anglo-Saxonist, so perhaps I am taking this too personally. On the other hand, when I contemplate my rich, crazy, agonized year at the Graduate School of English at the University of Toronto, the courses I did that seemed the most scholarly and least subjective were those in Anglo-Saxon. 

(I am suddenly reminded of the superiority of Christian Latin to all other classes when I was attempting a PhD in Theology.) 

Starting a serious study of English Literature without Anglo-Saxon strikes me as ridiculous as beginning a history of Canada with Confederation in 1867 or of the United States with the Declaration of Independence or of Scotland with Kenneth McAlpin. 

Anglo-Saxon is English without the French; it is the source of our most basic everyday language--house, roof, child, kin, sheep. It tells the English and Lowland Scots who we are, deep down in our cultural cells: not French but Germanic--and Christians, to boot. Those of us who have forsaken Christ worship not Venus on vendredi but Freya on Fridays. Chaucer's English is a linguistic compromise with a foreign oppressor. Wyrd bith ful araed.

The other revelation to which I strongly object is a disbelief in objective standards for art. Benedict Ambrose is tremendous well-read in the philosophy of aesthetics, and I am not, but even I know there is such a thing as "techné", or craft. 

I am willing to believe that anything anyone puts together deliberately for display is "a work of art", but not that it cannot be dismissed as trite, cheap, or even a bullying, exploitative demand for attention. I am also willing to believe that "conceptual art" is art, for any expression of a new idea is a creation. However, you can sign a urinal only once: you can paint the "Coming of the Magi" any number of times, and when you do, training, hard work and technique really matter. 

Thinking about Brideshead Revisited again--whose attitude toward Oxford and privilege Professor Carey indirectly and  unconsciously condemns--I see it as a paean to Youth, written by a man who was so desperately unhappy when he left Oxford, he attempted suicide. Its nostalgia and us-against-Hooper snobbery is so potent that it sets up the too-young reader to look upon university not as an apprenticeship to professional life but as a superior social club where one lives one's best days. 

Charles Ryder, as much as any girl going to Franciscan U. for the M.R.S., goes to university not to be trained in a discipline but to fall in love. He becomes a painter in spite of, not because of, his Oxford education. The same can be said for Sebastian Flyte and all their friends. Charles' cousin, whom we are invited to mock, and Charles' former pal, whom we drop when Charles does, actually enter into college life instead of using it as stylish backdrop for their social lives. In terms of the realities of university training, Brideshead Revisited is Animal House for the bookish. (Be sure to cite me when you quote that)

That said, it provides excellent lessons in sensitivity to surroundings and celebrates the ardours of youthful friendship. Anthony Blanche recites "The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock" through a megaphone, and sometimes when I was an undergrad I drank deeply of the vine and strode through the St. George St campus declaiming the same poem with my best friend. I also founded an all-female poetry club: we met in each other's rented apartments, drank a lot, read a lot of poetry, annoyed a shared ex-boyfriend. Some of us were pro-life Catholics (including two ex-Muslims), others were deep-dyed pro-choicers: we all thought of ourselves as feminists, naturally. I admired the dappled sunshine, pouring through leafy trees, by day, and I wrapped myself in the electric-starred darkness by night. Brideshead promised aesthetic experiences for those who sought them, and I found them. 

However, swimming about in aesthetic experience is not enough to achieve good art, as I discovered when I tried to write funny stories. My mistake was to try to write about Catholicism and lampoon Catholic feminism instead of writing prose about the student world I was living in. It's a pity, for my landlady, the late Mrs P, could be the basis for a great comic character. 

Mrs P was very suspicious of her upstairs renters, and I eventually discovered she feared catching AIDS from us via the house plumbing. In short, she thought we were the most awful sluts, but eventually she discovered that I was a Nice Catholic Girl and, after some tragedy in my personal life which I have since forgotten, she tried to comfort me with dry little Portuguese biscuits and a photo album of life back on Sao Miguel. I have rarely spent such a boring afternoon.

But to return to The Unexpected Professor, John Carey has considerable writing techné himself, and so I heartily recommend reading this autobiography and look forward to grappling with What Good are the Arts?

The Sublime and the Ridiculous

I have been suffering from a persistent toothache, and to comfort myself for this morning's agonized dash to the dentist's chair, I breakfasted at the café where B.A. and I sometimes have brunch.  I brought with me Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes, my companion when I woke up, in pain, at 3:05 AM.

De Waal is a famous British artist; his trade is in beautiful things. It seems a little unfair that he can write as beautifully as he can cast pots, but as The Hare with Amber Eyes captivated the world of letters in 2010, I was not surprised. Moreover I was shaken, at 3:15 AM, by Yagani Soetsu's suggestion, paraphrased by de Waal, that some objects "express unconscious beauty because they [have] been made in such numbers that the craftsman had been liberated from his ego" (Preface, 3). Could this be applied to writing? Is the secret of de Waal's literary masterpiece a liberation from ego?

When I walked into our brunch café, however, I was thinking only about my toothache--now eased by ibuprofen--and my breakfast. B.A. usually has a "full Scottish", and as I have become a meat-and-eggs devotee, I was looking forward to ordering one myself. I made straight for a table near a window--but not the one in the window, as it could seat six--and was surprised by an obese Englishwoman who greeted me loudly and as if she owned the place. (It turned out that she did .) Startled, I returned the greeting, sat down and examined the menu. When I had ordered my breakfast from the Scottish waiter, I reopened my book.

"One sunny April day I set out to find Charles," writes de Waal.

What beautiful simplicity to that sentence. It frees the author to write a longer second sentence, which he does: "Rue de Monceau is a long Parisian street bisected by the grand boulevard Malesherbes that charges off toward the Boulevard Pereire."

Two verbs make the sentence dynamic, and the conceit that a boulevard "charges off" to another gives the sentence extra force. It itself charges off to the splendidly descriptive third sentence: "It is a hill of golden-stone houses, a series of hotels playing discreetly on neoclassical themes, each a minor Florentine palace with heavily rusticated ground floors and an array of heads, caryatids and cartouches." 

Having set the scene in April, then in a section of Paris, and then on one sloping street, he focuses on a single house: "Number 81 rue de Monceau, the Hotel Ephrussi, where my netsuke start their journey, is near the top of the hill." 

The Hotel Ephrussi has a thrilling neighbour: "I pass the headquarters of Christian Lacroix and then, next door, there it is." Beat. "It is now, rather crushingly, an office for medical insurance."

The paragraph thus ends with a beautifully comic touch that reminds me of Mordechai Richler, in part because de Waal's art-collecting ancestors were Jews, because Canadian Jewish humour is self-depreciatory, and because this is a story about a Jewish family. The Ephrussi family, which originated in Odessa, followed the Rothschilds in setting up branches of themselves in the great capitals of western Europe and becoming as rich as they could. Terrific displays of wealth were a way of asserting their intentions with the unfortunate side-effect of antagonizing their new less-wealthy, non-Jewish, neighbours.

"Well," shouted the owner of the café to her companion, "she's f******g JEW!"

She was talking about a friend who loves Turkey and is always running off to Turkey and managed to do quite well (socially and financially) in Turkey until the friend's son admitted to their Jewishness and then some deal or other, business or social, was doomed. The loud stream of gossip reached me in the rue de Monceau as I waited for my breakfast and became inescapable when my breakfast arrived. Surprisingly, the speaker's companion was male and, if I am not mistaken, a business contact of some kind. Even more surprisingly, for Edinburgh, the speaker spoke with a strong Liverpudlian accent.

My breakfast was a masterpiece of the short order cook's art: soft cooked mushrooms, two halves of a broiled tomato, two sausages, two rashers of back bacon with darkly golden crispy edges, a large spoonful of baked beans, a disk of black pudding, a circlet of haggis. There was no toast, as I had requested, and the dish was not at all greasy. The coffee was black and hot and strong and good.  I put down my book to give breakfast my full attention--or so I thought.

"I told her that if he disappeared, I would hunt her down and kill her," brayed the cook's employer.  As I ate,  I was in some discomfort lest my hostess, as I suppose she must have been, might accuse me of eavesdropping on her conversation with the salesman. Recently I read that the elderly, irascible Graham Greene once denounced a young man in a Capri restaurant for listening to his opinions on Henry James; Greene had apparently noticed the young man had stopped turning the pages of his newspaper and so embarrassed everyone very much by loudly remarking on it. This woman was so loud and so aggressively unselfconscious, she sounded more than capable of such behaviour. Thus, once the immediately danger of staining the book with egg, tomato sauce or bacon fat was past, I took it up again.

But despite de Waal's magic,  I witnessed the end of an altercation between the sitting owner and a standing youngish female employee. I had taken off my glasses to read and so I saw only a slim body and a round, tanned, featureless face. "And by the way you no longer have a job,"  the Liverpudlian was booming.

"I wouldn't work here if you paid me," snapped the girl's Scottish voice, and the slim artistically brown body slid out the door.

"Sorry about that," said the proprietress to the salesman, or whatever he was, and when he was gone, she loudly demanded a phone book so she could call up a locksmith and get the locks changed. "Hello, Local Locksmith," she shouted down the phone.

By the time of this phone call, I had finished my breakfast but had felt the need for a little more coffee. Despite the noisy and shocking manners of three yards from me, Edmund de Waal held me spellbound in Paris. His antecedent Charles, to the disgust of his arch-enemy Edmond de Goncourt, was now having an affair with a married lady named Louise Cahen d'Anvers. They were both passionate connoisseurs of Japanese art.

"Could I please have just a half a cup more of coffee?" I asked the waiter, and the proprietress  motioned him over after he assented.

"Could I please have [whatever it was]," she said in a put-on, mock-posh accent, which I daresay was, despite the cadences, nothing like my own.

"Right away, modom," said the waiter, playing her game.

Okay, class chippiness is something I have come to expect from loud British woman who drop the F-bomb, but this was a woman I could hear from 19th century Paris complaining about competition opening up and down the street! What kind of businesswoman mocks her customers?

Suddenly, I very much regretted my request for extra coffee, and I couldn't wait to leave. Unfortunately, once my coffee arrived, it was some time before I could catch the attention of the waiter again, and by the time I finally did, the owner had loudly engaged the locksmith, loudly informed her other employees how much she distrusted the woman she had just fired, and loudly declared "and I'm taking out a contract on her, and I don't care who knows it."

This, incidentally, was after she had surveyed the two occupied tables and loudly muttered, "Everybody leave now. I want a cigarette."

As soon as I could, I threw down a £10 note and acceded to her wishes. Floreant competitores!

Edinburgh Film Festival

So I dressed up and went off without B.A. to the Filmhouse for the 9 PM showing of "Córki Dancingu", which turns out to be--well, not Polish mermaid slasher porn, but if I were a guy I'd probably have to go to confession before Mass tomorrow. The Polish lady behind me marched out, taking her Scottish date, right after the mermaid breastfeeding tableau. From the remarks fizzing behind me earlier, I gather my neighbour wasn't happy about the semi-comic musical lesbian communist cop scene either.

My favourite lines--delivered by a merman (I think)-- were "They're just humans. We're here on vacation." I shall remember this when I am also in Warsaw on vacation although not (like the mermaids) working in a strip club.

Anyway, after the fairy tale ending (not a Disney fairy tale ending), I got on the Rough Bus and soon after me a jakey (Scottish drunk) did too and then there was a barney (trouble) and some pushing and a lot of Scottish shouting and I got up and sat beside a brave man who tried with some success to make peace. He (the brave peacemaker) looked (and sounded) like either one of the Proclaimers.

Really, if you're wondering what women without children do on Saturday nights, believe me, you are better off where you are. At any rate, you are better off NOT on the Rough Bus--and perhaps several other buses--in Edinburgh on a Saturday night after 10:30 PM.

Good English

Once again, survivors of sexual assault may find the themes of this post upsetting.

It's turning into Stanford Rapist Week here on "The Historical House", showing that I too have been sucked in by the Greek Tragedy aspect of it all. However, the iconic character who has now caught my attention is that of the woman who defends a man who has done the indefensible and pays a heavy price.

The rape survivor had a lot to lose, and it was stolen from her. Now the rapist's childhood friend has lost her band Good English their gigs.  That is to say, people found out what she wrote to the judge, and they are taking it out on her band.

Her bandmates are also her sisters. There are a lot of sisters suffering collateral damage in this story. The sister of the rape survivor, the sister of the rapist, the sisters of the rapist's character reference ...

I feel sorry for Leslie Rasmussen and even more sorry for her sisters. Did she have any idea that the letter she wrote to the judge pleading for her friend would be made public? Was she only 19 when she wrote it? Yes, what she wrote about rape was stupid, but no more stupid than Whoopi Goldberg's "rape rape" remark (she was in her fifties), and WG still has a showbiz career. So does Roman Polanski and a host of his defenders. I don't think Martin Scorsese should be forced to stop making films, and I don't want Good English to be forced to stop making music.

The idea that a budding female artist has blown her chances to perform and create because she wrote a letter defending a friend really bothers me. When I was 19, I had a male friend or two who really didn't deserve my friendship. I went to great lengths to help one write his essays, and I spent a lot of hard-earned money funding the meals of the other, the leader of our gang.  It was just so cool to be around boys, you know? Good Catholic Boys who didn't pressure me for anything----except my help, my money and my support in their battles and causes. I vaguely seem to recall other boys, quieter boys, telling me I shouldn't be so generous, but did I listen? No. Loud, strong-minded women can be suckers, too.

So I feel very sympathetic to Leslie Rasmussen even though her character reference for her friend included a stupid lecture on what rape is and who rapists are. If one were brave, one would argue that Rasmussen did America a favour by illustrating the dumb ideas about rape the Stanford Rapist and his high school friends grew up with.  (I note she said she could think of other people they knew in high school who might have ended up in  Brock's situation.)

Calling a 20 year old girl a "rape apologist" for a letter in which she tried to convince a judge her friend wasn't capable of rape and then blackballing her band strikes me as getting close to lynch mob behaviour. She thought her friend was incapable of rape, and she was wrong. That shouldn't wreck her life. She didn't hurt the rape survivor. The rapist hurt the rape survivor.  If he deserves six years in the state pen, then he should get six years in the state men. The public shouldn't take out their righteous indignation on a woman.

Update:  Rasmussen's statement, which has been removed from Facebook. That's too bad, as it is necessary corrective to her letter to the judge.

Two months ago, I was asked to write a character statement for use in the sentencing phase of Brock Turner’s trial. Per the request of the court, I was asked to write this statement in an effort to shed light on Brock’s character as I knew it to be during my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood when I interacted with him as a classmate and friend. I felt confident in my ability to share my straightforward opinion of him and how I knew him. I also felt compelled to share my deep concern over the misuse of alcohol that was a well-established contributor in this case. Beyond sharing my personal experience with Brock, I made an appeal to the judge to consider the effect that alcohol played in this tragedy.

I understand that this appeal has now provided an opportunity for people to misconstrue my ideas into a distortion that suggests I sympathize with sex offenses and those who commit them or that I blame the victim involved. [My Thought: But the word "directly" suggested she blamed her indirectly.] Nothing could be farther from the truth, and I apologize for anything my statement has done to suggest that I don’t feel enormous sympathy for the victim and her suffering.

Perhaps I should have included in my statement the following ideas that explain my perspective on the complexities of what may have happened. As a young female musician who has spent years (since I was in fourth grade) performing as a drummer in live music venues, clubs, and bars with my two sisters, I have had the unique opportunity to observe over 10 years of public American drinking culture and the problems that invariably arise through alcohol misuse. I have watched friends, acquaintances and complete strangers transform before my eyes over the course of sometimes very short periods of time, into people I could barely recognize as a result of alcohol overconsumption. I am currently 20 years old. I have made these observations through sober eyes. I have been repeatedly reminded by my family and coached by police to hold my personal sobriety closely and seriously because of the industry I work in and the risks to my own life that I could face as a young woman playing regularly in venues across the country where alcohol is served. [MT: This is convincing testimony against American drinking culture.]

Additionally, I have grown up and currently reside in a university town that is affected every year by the tragic consequences resulting from undergraduate students’ excessive enthusiasm for binge drinking. Student arrests, violence, injuries, and sexual assaults occur with some regularity, and I have often wondered why this culture continues to thrive seemingly unquestioned and unchecked. [MT: And so do I.]

There is nothing more sad than the unnecessary, destructive and enormous toll that
overuse, misuse and abuse of alcohol and drugs play in people’s lives, and I don’t think my effort to point this out in confidence [MT: Why did she think it was in confidence?]to a judge while commenting on Brock Turner’s character, as the sober person I knew him to be, was an irresponsible or reckless decision. [Unfortunately, due to the overzealous nature of social media and the lack of confidence and privacy [MT: It does seem that she believed it would never be made public] in which my letter to the judge was held, I am now thrust into the public eye to defend my position on this matter in the court of public opinion. Now, my choices to defer college to write and play music, to finally introduce 10 years of hard work to a national audience while working consistently and intentionally on my own personal and professional integrity, has led to an uproar of judgement and hatred unleashed on me, my band and my family. [MT: This is a little more serious than Brock's lost appetite. She didn't rape anyone.]

I know that Brock Turner was tried and rightfully convicted of sexual assault. I realize that this crime caused enormous pain for the victim. I don’t condone, support, or sympathize with the offense or the offender. I was asked by a court in California to provide a character statement as a standard and necessary part of the sentencing process. [MT:  My emphasis.]

I believe that Brock’s character was seriously affected by the alcohol he consumed, and I felt that the court needed to consider this issue during their sentencing deliberations. 

UPDATE 2: I just argued in the combox of Metro that Rasmussen and her sisters don't deserve to be blacklisted, so I shall be moderating my combox today. Naturally by defending Good English I am running the risk of being called an apologist for a so-called "rape apologist". Righteous indignation is a virtue, and the rape survivor's brilliant letter has roused America to righteous indignation, as well it might. But then there's fury roaming the world, seeking whom it may devour, looking for fresh blood, forming lynch mobs. 

How did the statements of Turners' family and friends fall into media hands? Does anyone know? Oh, so far I see that a Stanford professor named Michele Dauber was the one who posted the father's statement on Twitter. Apparently she is an authority on campus sexual assault. But are such character reference statements usually in the public domain?

The Cut credits only "a source" for the leaking of the Rasmussen letter. "A source" did real harm to Rasmussen. (The rapist's dad read his statement aloud in court.) I'm really curious about that. That strikes me as the story behind the story. Who wants to throw so much fuel on the fire that Turner's family and friends burn up too?