The angle of a tunnel -- an invisible wall -- Hoshaufen and Posner's apprehension.  I've seen over the last year and one half that other people live this way too, but I rarely come across anyone to speak to who feels as cut off as I or will talk of it -- in books, yes, there this is more than admitted to by some, and on the Internet in letters and ( Read more... )

Dear Friends and readers,

Last night I watched the Miramax Enchanted April for a second time and had just about the same reaction I had to the first watching.  Deep enchantment until near the end when the film seemed to be a cop-out, and while I might not speak so harshly of it today, when I reread/skimmed the book I came to the same conclusion as ( Read more... )

Dear friends and readers,

A diary entry:

Coming home from the OLLI at AU before the spring semester starts (will be teaching The Poldark Novels [the first four] in Context) in DC in the middle of the day:  I looked out my car window and saw all of the Potomac as far as I could see frozen over. I recalled 1978 or so when Jim and I lived at the top ( Read more... )

Two months since I last wrote here.  I don't want to lose this space by not writing here (it's the source for many of the older pictures on Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two) so for today, a favorite poem from which I took what was my first epigraph for this blog, a list of some of the blogs I've bee writing on Wordpress, and a still from a ( Read more... )

Dear friends and readers,

One of the comments I got on my blog yesterday prompts this companion blog: "The trick is to love who you are ... "

That was a generous thing to say, and it strikes me as true (a belated response as I thought about it a little). I like the suggestion for a way into writing a memoir and maybe sometime in the 20 or so years ( Read more... )

Dear friends and readers,

This blog might also be called Narcissa since I conceive it as autobiographical at root: my writing and reading life, seasonal happenings, my political thoughts, spontaneous outbursts. It's a record for me to recur to to remember, to situate memories, to make plans, to try to understand all sorts of things. How do I know ( Read more... )

Dear friends,

I've been worrying the question when actresses as a group first found a modicum of respectability, were not automatically seen as sluts, whores, unscrupulous vagrants. I've discovered the turn began in the middle of the 19th century with with the publication of memoirs, a culmination of women of the stage leading lives strongly ( Read more... )

Dear friends,

I continue to catch up with Downton Abbey and am watching well ahead of where I've made notes, so this is a sort of spontaneous reaction to what I've seen last night plus what I read this morning about Downton Abbey at Christmas (see to take one establishment example - there is now an establishment on the Net):  Vanity Fair. I watch ( Read more... )

Dear friends,

I had an astonishing good day here when I posted my blog on Maggie Smith, Damascus, Oakland and Downton Abbey (not to omit Colonel Bogus): over 800 hits. I never had so many in any of my blogs before, ever. I did want to follow up with another posting prompted partially by thoughts of DA (mostly the result of conversation on ( Read more... )

Dear Friends and Readers,

I've explained before, but here it is again:  Sylvia Drake is a minor character, so hardly mentioned that by the end of Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers has forgotten the details she offered at the book's opening. She's the woman who doesn't make it into the movie (Gaudy Night, Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walters).  Sayers ( Read more... )