Gothick

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An Engraving of a Scene from Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho

Not too many years ago, I would have laughed to scorn the works of Mrs Ann Radcliffe and indeed the whole 18th century gothic novel. Since then, I have undergone a change of heart: I no longer eschew melodrama. Instead, I recognize that there are degrees of quality in the works ascribed to it and that it is a legitimate genre. To date, I have read four of Mrs Radcliffe’s five novels, having only The Sicilian Romance (1790) and a number of shorter works to read. I have just finished her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) and found myself loving it.

Originally, I thought of the 18th century gothic novel as a failed attempt to create a horror novel. But then, in the closing paragraphs of Athlin and Dunbayne, its author explains what she is trying to do:

Virtue may for a time be pursued by misfortune,—and justice be obscured by the transient triumphs of vice,—but the power whose peculiar attributes they are, clears away the clouds of error, and even in this world reveals his THRONE OF JUSTICE.

In other words, unless there are numerous dank abbeys and castles in her work, there is no hint of the supernatural. She comes close to it in her most famous work, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), but is too devout an Anglican to fall prey to such dubious flimflammery. (That didn’t stop Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto (1764) from going whole hog, but then he was undoubtedly less devout, being a wicked Whig politician, and earl, and man about town.

The edition of The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne which I read was published by Oxford University Press and contained a superb introduction by Alison Milbank on the subject of Mrs Radcliffe and the gothic novel. That didn’t prevent OUP from butchering her last name (by making it Millbank). Sic transit gloria mundi.

Physical Therapy

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Working Those Shoulder Muscles

For six weeks now, I have been in physical therapy—two sessions per week—to work on the muscles sidelined by my broken collarbone in June. I have clearly made strides. Only two problems remain:

  • I have difficulties reaching across my body with my right arm to my left armpit.
  • My shirt is never tucked into my pants, as my right arm can’t do the tucking in on the right side.

One negative aftereffect is that the many exercises I perform have resulted in a low level of pain as my muscles attempt to adjust.

I can see myself doing some exercises even when Medicare stops paying for my therapy. I might even buy a pulley like the one above, although I will by no means look so cute as the young woman in the above photo.

Will I ever be 100% back to normal? Perhaps, but I rather think that some problems will remain. In the past, I broke my right and left shoulders. To this day, these two fractures affect my ability to raise my arms high, should I ever want to do so. Perhaps I will always wear my shirts on the outside of my pants. Perhaps my left armpit will always be slightly stinkier than my right armpit.

Life goes on.

Ultimately Unknowable

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Ukrainian/Brazilian/Jewish Author Clarice Lispector

As much as I like her work, I think that Clarice Lispector is ultimately unknowable. Then why do I like her? Is it that I like living in her somewhat troubled (but ultimately sane) mind for several hundred pages? Her main character in <b>The Chandelier</b>, Virginia, is undistinguished. But she draws me in and makes me care for her. Her strange family, especially her brother Daniel and sister Esmeralda, her on-again off-again boyfriend Vincente—don’t really exist as persons outside Virginia’s field of vision, but Virginia, on the other hand, exists in spades.

At one point near the end of the novel, Lispector writes:

She’d always observed in old people something that couldn’t be summed up, that wasn’t exactly lack of desire, or satisfaction, or experience, ah, never experience—something that only the imponderable living of all the incomprehensible instants of sleep and wakefulness seemed to grant. So strange and imperceptible were the power and fecundity of the rhythm. Nothing would seem to escape the the continuous sequence, the intimate spherical movement, inhaling, exhaling, inhaling, exhaling, death and resurrection, death and resurrection. Anyway everything was the way it was, she thought almost brightly, almost cheerful—and that was meaning her deepest sensation f existence as if things were made of the impossibility of not being what they were.

As I read the book, I felt mesmerized, inhabiting for a short while the brain of a likeable woman, of no particular intellectual attainment, but of an honesty that never fails.

Deer, Wildcats, Tigers & Bears

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One of China’s greatest writers of prose and poetry was Liu Tsung-yuan. Here is Red Pine’s translation of one of Liu’s tales:

Deer are afraid of wildcats, wildcats are afraid of tigers, and tigers are afraid of bears. Covered with long shaggy hair and able to stand upright, bears possess exceptional strength and are capable of killing people. In the south of Ch’u there once was a hunter who could make all kinds of animal calls with his flute. One day he took his bow and arrows and his firepot into the mountains, and he made a call to attract deer. He waited, and when a deer appeared, he started a fire, then he shot the deer. But when a wildcat heard the deer call, it came too. The hunter was terrified and pretended to be a tiger to frighten it. But when the wildcat ran off, a tiger appeared. The man was even more terrified and pretended to be a bear. The tiger disappeared. But a bear heard the call and came looking for a mate. When it saw the man, it grabbed him and tore him apart and ate him. It turns out that those who rely on external aids instead of developing what they have within themselves invariably end up as bear food.

Prove That You’re You!

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To Prove I’m Legit I Don’t Wear Hoodies

The ultimate fly in the ointment of technology is the prevalence of hackers. In a way, it’s the ultimate challenge for the technically gifted, especially if there’s a chip on their shoulders. All they have to do is create a false identity and run with it. After all, does there exist a piece of software that can’t be hacked?

Today I received an e-mail from one of my medication suppliers. It was encrypted in such a way that I could not make head nor tail of what it was trying to say. I telephoned the corporation that sent me the e-mail and discovered they were just trying to tell me they were trying to contact my physician.

Did that message require special security? Would the hacker have made off with any personal information for which the corporation would be liable?

The answer to both questions is NO. Apparently, some low-level techie fell in love with an obscure bit of security software and decided to use it for everything.

In the beginning, computers were so much fun. Then all the twisted baddies began to emerge, and companies went overboard on forcing users to prove that they are themselves. Passwords had to be incredibly long and complicated, incorporating upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters. One had to use a password manager—and they, too, became too complicated to use.

On my desktop, I maintain a passworded Excel file for 146 programs and websites. Am I protected? Not really, because I’m not that fanatical about updating it every time I’m asked to provide a user id and password. I can understand the jokes about users whose password is “Password” or “12345.” Users are just not able to keep up.

In the end, who suffers? Everybody.

Haggis

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Haggis, Neeps, and a Wee Drappit of Scotch

When I first visited Scotland in 1976, I had my first taste of Haggis at an Edinburgh restaurant near Waverley Station. From everything I had heard, it was disgusting stuff—the innards of a sheep stuffed with oatmeal, onions, suet, and various spices. Imagine, to my surprise, that I was familiar with the taste. It was almost identical to Hungarian Hurka sausage, which was similar in every respect except it was made from pork and not sheep.

Here is Scottish poet Robert Burns’s tribute to Haggis, a poem that is quoted on Burns night in celebrations around the globe.

Address to a Haggis

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great Chieftan o’ the Puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe or thairm:

Weel are ye wordy o’ a grace
As lang’s my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin wad help to mend a mill
In time o’ need,
While thro’ your pores the dews distil
Like amber mead.

His knife see Rustic-labour dight,
An’ cut you up wi’ ready slight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like onie ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin, rich!

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an’ strive:
Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive,
Till a’ their weel-swall’d kytes belyve
Are bent like drums;
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
Bethankit hums.

Is there that owere his French ragout,
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
Wi’ perfect scunner,
Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view
On sic a dinner?

Poor devil! see him owre his trash,
As feckless as a wither’d rash,
His spindle shank a guid whip-lash,
His nieve a nit;
Thro’ bluidy flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread,
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He’ll make it whissle;
An’ legs, an’ arms, an’ heads will sned,
Like taps o’ thrissle.

Ye Pow’rs wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o’ fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratfu’ prayer,
Gie her a Haggis!

Burns’s lowland Scots dialect may be strange to American ears, but the poem’s vitality somehow carries it along.

“Untranslatable Sensations”

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Brazilian Writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

In August 2023 I wrote: “Clarice. I love her name. I love her high cheekbones and penetrating gaze. And most of all, I love the beauty of her thoughts and writings. She wrote in Portuguese, but she was born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector in Chechelnyk, Ukraine. To escape the horrors of the Civil War between the Red and White Russians, her Jewish parents fled with their infant daughter to Recife in northeastern Brazil. At an early age, it was discovered that she could write well enough to be published. And she became one of the great women novelists and short story writers of the 20th century.”

Now I am reading her second novel, The Chandelier (1944), which is strange, arresting, and beautiful by turns. Here is a paragraph. Its strangeness is very Clarician.

She was thinking untranslatable sensations distracting herself secretly as if humming, profoundly unaware and stubborn, she was thinking a single swift streak: In order to be born things must have life, for birth is a movement—if they said that movement is necessary only for the thing giving birth and not for the thing that is born that’s not right because the thing that gives birth cannot give birth to something outside its nature and thus always gives birth to a thing of its own kind and so it is with movements too—in this way stones were born that have no power of their own but were once alive otherwise they wouldn’t have been born and now they’re dead because they don’t have movement in order to give birth to another stone.

The REAL Wizard of Oz

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L, Frank Baum (1856-1919)

Lyman Frank Baum is the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) and its many equally wonderful sequels. Over the last several months, I have been reading these sequels in publication order, roughly one per month. At this point, I have read nine of the fourteen volumes, having just finished The Scarecrow of Oz (1915).

I don’t generally like books written for children, but I make an exception for the Oz books. They are brilliantly inventive, full of colorful characters, and in general great fun to read.

The Oz Books

I feel that Baum has not received sufficient credit as the master of American literature that he is. The Danes love Hans Christian Andersen; the Swedes adore Pippi Longstocking; the British admire Lewis Carroll’s Alice books; and so on.

After reading the first three or four books, I began to notice a slight diminution in quality. Baum kept creating more characters, and then attempted to bring them all together in an increasingly extended denouement. This was most evident in Ozma of Oz (1907), when not only Billina the Hen was a character, but also each of her multitudinous chicks. Eventually, Baum saw his mistake and limited his denouements to more manageable lengths. In The Scarecrow of Oz, the love fest at the end was limited to a couple of chapters.

So I suggest that if things aren’t going your way, pick up a copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and start reading it. You will feel better for it; and you will be introduced into one of the most fascinating fantasy worlds in all of literature.

Pumpkinspicemas

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Well, October is here. That scent in the air is Pumpkin Spice. It’s everywhere! In vacant lots there are pumpkin patches with towering bounce houses. Vacant stores are full of Halloween costumes and other accessories for those All Hallows Eve parties.

And when November comes, the pumpkins and bounce houses are packed away to be replaced by Christmas tree lots.

The sad thing is that, with the current economy in tatters, there are all too many vacant lots and empty retail establishments. Instead of lending a celebratory tone to the oncoming holidays, there is this grim feeling that there are too damned many vacancies.

For some reason I am unable to determine, Los Angeles is building ever more empty commercial properties, now that retail seems to be dying. Sometimes I think they should change the name of the city to “For Lease.”

All along the E Line train route that I take to go downtown on most Thursdays (not today: it was too hot again), large office buildings and apartment towers have sprung up. Is the space fully leased? Not a chance!

Life After Summer

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When I was a child, I looked forward to summer. School was out and I could play. Times have changed: With global warming, we look forward to ever hotter summers—where the heat is more menacing and longer-lasting. Today I found out there is even the prospect of rain within a few days, as Tropical Storm Rachel wheels to the right over Baja California and presents us with the possibility of several days of showers.

I feel someone stupid writing so much about the weather, But then, never before has the weather affected me in this way. I sit here shirtless to avoid sweating with a ceiling fan above me to dry me off.

When my physical therapy sessions come to an end, I look forward to going more places, no longer avoiding some valley destinations as being too fiercely hot. Even my favorite hot-weather refuge, Chace Park in Marina Del Rey, has been too uncomfortable because of a Santa Ana wind backing the desert heat westward over the Pacific shore.