Book #13 of 2020: Alice James A Biography by Jean Strouse

My first encounter with the James family was William. As a teen I'd discovered Joe Campbell and Carl Jung and I'd just finished Campbell's The Masks of God: Complete Four Volume Set when I stumbled upon The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature . A few years later I was in a seminar on American Realistic Fiction finishing my senior year in college, and had discovered Henry James via The Ambassadors. That novel tumbled me down a decade dominated by Henry and his serpentine sentences. The most intense and delightful year was my first year at Temple U in grad school, and another seminar focused entirely on James. We read I believe 7 or 8 of the novels and a couple dozen short stories in that class.

Strouse's biography of Alice is a loving and critical examination of the James family and its social milieu with Alice its central focus. The portrait of Henry Sr. is sensitive and illuminates how a pseudo-mystical Swedenborgian with somewhat retrograde ideas about the place of women in society managed to raise up a cluster of young intellectuals who would play no small part in challenging those views. Alice grew up in a house where her dad had long regular conversations with Emerson and Thoreau and other Boston Brahmins, where the Howes and Adams family were neighbors and friends, Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells were guests, a house filled with art and literature and Transcendentalism and philosophy, a home where Abolitionism and the beginnings of Women's Suffrage were a few of the real-world topics of discussion. Henry Sr. was restless and curious and afflicted by sufficient fortune to drag his family back and forth to Europe several times on whims. He hoped to expose his young brood to as much of Western culture and ideas as he could, and to give them a strong grounding in languages.

William and Henry of course benefited substantially from this life and went on to careers in science and literature respectfully, Both are regarded as among the top tier of American writers and thinkers. And both had "obscure hurts" and regular bouts of depression and unexplained physical ailments. Alice also suffered these, and to a much more debilitating degree. But Strouse brings full attention to Alice's rich social and intellectual life despite her physical and emotional suffering, and analyzes her treatments and relationships with different physicians, and situates her in a phenomenon of upper-crusty women undergoing similar long-term and unexplained prostrations and complaints. But Alice is never merely a symbol of women born too smart and too soon into an age where their gifts had no place--women at the cusp of a new age where their options were about to flourish. Her own individual experience is brought forth brilliantly. Her relationships with her brothers--a flirty, pseudo romantic one with William, and a deep, sisterly bond with Henry Jr.-- are attentively rendered, and there is ample attention to the affects of Alice and her reality on William's psychological theories and Henry's female characters, in particular Millie Theale.

The Diary Of Alice James was preserved by her long-time friend and nurse Katherine Loring, who had copies printed for her surviving brothers and for herself, and who then had the Diary published (much to Henry's chagrin--"OMG," he WhatsApped to William. "What if Ms. Loring includes all the shit I said to Alice in confidence about folks in our circles!?"). Immediately it was a smash, and was accounted as important a document as any other James family production. Alice was revealed as much more than a sad invalid whose misery inspired her brother's medical and artistic success--she was a daring independent spirit who had a ferocity for experience and making sense of it with a voice all her own.

Kudos to Strouse, who did the research necessary for biographies of multiple James family members in order to distill down this moving portrait of Alice.

Drawing of Alice James by Henry James, Jr.

It's a matter of choice

I remember the first time I went to the Wegman's grocery in Hunt Valley, MD. I was on the way to a party at a friend's house up near the PA border and they'd asked that I pick up some cheese and crackers as I came up from Baltimore.

It took me a while to get cheese and crackers because there were FOUR AISLES OF CRACKERS. It was hard even to "see" the individual varieties as the mind shut down at the overwhelming array of colors and box-front images of crackers spilled out with cheese cubes, spreads, confections, olives. I was as flummoxed as the narrator of Borges' "The Library of Babel" at the immensity and infinitude of packages. Paralyzed by choices, unable to process the information available to make decisions, I eventually just grabbed a couple varieties at random and hit the cheese counter blindly as well. I likely brought some weird ass thyme, dried tomato, and truffle resin biscuits made from prehistoric grains.

Quarantine in the digital age has a similar effect. Even on days when I'm working from home, I still have more time to entertain myself than typically is the case during the school year. No outdoor exercise, no trips to the beach or the shops (or extremely limited trips to the shops), no commute, no restaurants, bars, etc. And though I've managed to get a few time-fillers to consistency--push-ups and barbell exercises, tai chi, Rosetta Stone lessons in Spanish and Tagalog...a bit of blogging again, guitar playing--I am having some trouble with the amount of choice the digital age offers when I'm filling the rest of my time.

I'm about, for example, to finish the two books I'm currently reading. I have more reading time lately than typical, and I'm thinking "What should I read next?" There are a couple Henry James novels I've not yet read, and I have the Complete Henry James on Kindle for .99 cents. But look--they also have the Complete William Dean Howells--I loved Silas Lapham! Oh, look the Complete Edith Wharton. Jesus, I only read a couple novellas by her and always meant to take the plunge. What the hell should I read? I never read Anna Karenina, and wow they have all the Tolstoy. It's hard to pick when there is SO MUCH TO PICK.  And oh yeah there are those 300 free Met art books I downloaded last year...

Same with film. I can rent or stream pretty much any art house or foreign film I missed in the past and always wanted to see. I can get any schlocky horror film or any documentary about any topic. Because I have access to pretty much everything, I end up watching nothing because I can't choose. There are a few Zhang Yimou films I've not wept over yet...but there are also gaps in classic Italian and French film I'd like to close. But maybe I should re-watch Tarkovsky? Or Kurosawa? Arrgh.

Adding to the curse are the online course offerings: Harvard's free Buddhism course, and UPenn's free Greek and Roman Mythology course both sound grand. They don't offer credits toward MD State Teacher re-Certification, alas. But they sound cool. And there are SO MANY I can't just pick one.

I think of my Dad saying "Shit or get off the pot" when I get like this.

All the while I'm trying to decide what to pick to read, to watch, or the learn about, I'm listening to music streaming my entire iTunes library which consists of all the CDs I ever bought uploaded over the years and which runs the gamut from Perotin to Kendrick Lamar.

Of course, when you can't decide about something to do then you fill time with somewhat less intellectual pursuits, the most easily available of which is porn. But oh my goodness what porn do you pick? There are so many genres and sub-genres and sub-categories of kink and scenario and race and size and age and...

And yes, this post comes from a place of substantial privilege. Many don't have access to any of these things, and are stuck at home, in situations not dissimilar to those who experienced the last great global pandemic. Having too many options to learn and entertain oneself surely beats having few or none. Or, having to work with the likelihood of exposure.

Dreaming Demons

My dreams have drifted away from school and students the past few nights, perhaps because we are on 'spring break' now. But 'spring break' will be spent inside the same apartment where we sit for quarantine lock down, and from where we teach our students.

The other night I was sound asleep when I was awakened by a profound dark buzzing energy welling up from deep within. The sensation was pre-lingual and beyond rational coping or description. I can only equate this feeling to what a dog must experience when it jumps up, hackles raised, and stares at the corner or out the window at something we can't see.

I jumped up, immediately fully awake and aware in the darkness, but the buzzing feeling was still pulsing throughout my body. I became convinced there was something moving in the room, something heavy and powerful but incorporeal. There were several LED lights from devices plugged in so I had plenty of light to scan the room. Nothing. Nothing visible.

It's not the first time I've had this experience. Once when I was 10 years old I was awakened similarly and felt a heavy force sitting on my chest pressing down to the point I couldn't breathe. Then, the force vanished and I started doing violent and uncontrollable sit-ups over and over, seizing and screaming all the while until my Dad made his way to my basement bedroom. Similar things have happened from time to time--I think the most recent was in Ireland the night before our boat to Skellig Michael? That was in 1999.

Deep energies are awakening in in the Earth.

Free Art Books to While Away the Lockdown

Screenshotted from From Van Eyck to Bruegel, which I downloaded last year when the Met made it and hundreds of other art books available digitally.

My library--some 1,800 books after the sales and donations two years ago--is in a storage unit in Baltimore. I miss all my books, but most painfully I miss having art books to take down and peruse.

But this Met Resource is astonishing, and helps ease the pain.

BTW: that angel be like "thank you SOOOOO much for social distancing and staying on lockdown!"

Book #12 of 2020:

Old Noam still marshalls all the evidence without difficulty. He still maintains his sharp, precise ethics. He paints a dire picture of current situations but never waivers in his belief that there must be hope and optimism.

This book is actually two lecture transcripts a few years apart on the same topic, with an interview with Wallace Shawn and a couple Q&A sessions thrown in. But many of Noam's best books were interviews with David Barsamian. It's a format which shows his strengths, and the choice is clear: internationalism or extinction.

Quarantine Dreams

The stress of teaching online has manifested in my dreams. Daily (nightly) I have bizarre and complicated dreams about school and my students.

Often the classroom has been destroyed and we are trying out new settings only to have students get lost or fall into crevasses, or I spend the dream encountering small groups of my students and I can't find the rest and when I do find others I lose the students I'd found previously.

The current project my students are working on will get a ridiculous additional requirement that nobody can accomplish, and I awake multiple times thinking "That's not part of the assignment" only to fall asleep again and have another anxiety dream about it again and again.

Yesterday I dreamt that my class somehow woke five monstrous giants from the distant past. These began systematically destroying civilization with cudgels the size of train cars. I guided my students to an ancient thick-walled fortification atop a system of caverns and we all got separated in deep catacombs. At one point I thought "well at least the giants can't get us here," only to see through a hole in the wall that human soldiers and police in allegiance with the giants were forming up outside to invade our bunker. I rushed around trying to find my students to guide them out before it was too late.

Sometimes the dreams are of a sort I used to have in high school: can't find my classroom, my schedule is printed in symbols I can't read, my locker with all my work is sealed shut or the combo no longer works, etc.

Strangely, however, I'm sleeping more than I have in years--somewhere around 8 hours a night. This is unheard of. I typically get 3-4 hours. Is it healthier to sleep 3-4 hours without waking, or to sleep 8 waking 3-4 times a night in a panic at some imagined stressor?

And how many more weeks/months of this will we have?

Book #11 of 2020: The Ghosts of Birds by Eliot Weinberger

Back in the mid-90s I read Works on Paper: Essays and loved it so much that I promised I would read more Eliot Weinberger. Here I am nearly 30 years later keeping that promise.

The Ghosts of Birds has a few traditional essays or reviews, but more than half of them are kind of meanderings along a topic with collages of reminiscences or snippets of ancient texts or encyclopedia entries and a bit of comment intermixed. This is reminiscent of Walter Benjamin and his Arcades Project, or Paul Metcalf's works, or maybe Charles Reznikoff's Holocaust poems. One of the traditionally structured essays in here is about Reznikoff. There is a long rumination of George W. Bush and his terrible memoir, and it was refreshing to remember days when we thought "how awful and ignorant is this President?" Others are about indigenous American poetry, or Chinese verse through the centuries, or birds and art about birds. I promise myself again to read more Eliot Weinberger, and hopefully not three decades hence.

La Ley Seca

As part of its coronavirus/COVID-19 strategy, Panama snuck a Ley Seca rule into the mix. This means no booze can be bought or sold for the duration of the crisis.

I'd heard about it happening in the provinces via the Web early this week and bought a few bottles to sock away last Monday just in case the law came to the City. But I've also been considering a dry-out myself for 2020. I haven't done one for a while, and I drink A LOT, and have been drinking A LOT for many decades. A couple months off the sauce can't hurt. (I can say that now without pain because I still have a couple bottles left, LOL).

So after I finish the current bottles of whisky and wine--likely by Sunday--I will be dry. And so will Panama. Meanwhile, I see that back home in the USA booze has been characterized as an essential business. Given what's coming down the pike based on the inaction of the Fed for 2.5 months, y'all will need a steady supply of booze just to read the news. Good luck everyone! And STAY HOME.