Are We Adorable? Sylvia and Me

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I am a fan of humor writing. I cackle over Cynthia Heimel’s hilarious columns (If You Can’t Live without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet?), Gladys Taber’s comical autobiographical novel, Mrs. Daffodil, and Emily Kimbrough’s charming humor/travel book, Forty Plus and Fancy Free.

The cartoonist Nicole Hollander was another favorite of mine. While looking up her Sylvia cartoons online, I was saddened to learn that she died  last April.

Hollander began to write and draw the Sylvia cartoons in the 1970s.  In those days she published them in alternative publications, but from 1981-2012 the comic strip was nationally syndicated.

The cartoon character Sylvia smoked, drank, and talked to her cat.  She had wisecracks for every occasion.  In one cartoon, a man at a bar tells her, “Face it, Syl, you need us. Can you imagine a world without men?”  She replies, “No crime, and lots of happy fat women.”  (It’s funnier with the drawings.)

In another favorite, a cat sits on her head. She says, “Sometimes I enjoy writing with a cat sitting on my head, other times not so much.”

Among her collections of comics are I’m in Training to be Tall and Blonde (1979), The Whole Enchilada (1982), Tales from the Planet Sylvia (1990), and The Sylvia Chronicles: 30 Years of Graphic Misbehavior from Reagan to Obama (2010),

I also enjoyed her comic memoir, Tales of Graceful Aging from the Planet Denial. She doesn’t mourn ageing: in fact, she thinks she is adorable in an outfit she wears to the movies. If this is denial, I want it too. Now that I am a woman of a certain age, I, too, have cute outfits to wear to the movies.

In an interview with NPR about Tales of Graceful Aging from the Planet Denial, she said, “Well, you know, I did, sort of, out of the corner of my eye notice that I was aging. And I had created a cartoon character who would age instead of me.”

Do I have a Sylvia alter-ego?  Well, yeah, I think so.  Of course Kat’s style is different. She doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, doesn’t go to the hair salon, but simply enjoys the ridiculousness of life, reads, and drinks tea.d. I can’t wait to go the movies so I can wear that cute sweater that may be a sweatshirt or a jacket: who can tell?

Trollope Online:   Do Online Book Groups Count Anymore?

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One of the highlights of the early 2000s was my membership in a Trollope book group on Yahoo.  I had read the better-known Trollopes, the Palliser series and the Barsetshire series, but had never come across his other novels.  Imagine my surprise to find he’d written at least 50 books, including a biography of Cicero.

Trollope was a disciplined writer who wrote fiction and translated Cicero for three hours every morning before work. (He was a civil servant at the post office, and invented the mailbox.) I am astonished by the consistency and quality of his prolific writing.  And I’m grateful for his inexhaustible inventiveness, because there are never enough Brontes and Austens to go around. Thank God for Trollope!

There are thousands of Trollope fans. Last year, at an online Trollope event, there was the fevered atmosphere of a comic book convention. Fans were ardent, and if there’d been merch, somebody would have made a fortune.  

And then I saw him. I thought, Wait a minute, is that irritable man Mr. Z? There was a guy named Mr. Z in online Trollope and Jane Austen groups who always made trouble. Well, it might not have been he, but he looked the way I thought he would:  unshaven, in a tweedy outfit, and was that a Renaissance Faire  t-shirt under his sports jacket?  

Things are different online these days with the development of vlogs, Facetime, and Zoom.  But  the early 2000s was a great time for written online discussions.  People didn’t write short messages, in pre Twitter/X days; they wrote thoughtful essays, often several paragraphs long.  And when Yahoo astonished us by canceling its groups, they started afresh on Ion and Goodreads.

But now we have moved on from the accessible Goodreads to the film-oriented Discord, which I found a nightmare. I joined a book group of intelligent people who met on Discord, or more like posted videos of themselves talking about books.

“Where do I write write my thoughts?” I asked.

No one knew. 

“What’s Discord?”

No one knew.

There may have been two or three written messages at the Discord book group, but it was mostly videos.

Although I tried to delete Discord from my screen – for some reason it had downloaded right from the browser into the middle of my computer screen – and it would not go away.  Put it in the trash: it comes right out.  Delete it repeatedly, it pays no attention. I gave this computer to my husband because I was so annoyed by its quirks. And he can’t get rid of Discord, either.  Somehow he has tamed and banished it to some kind of obscure hidey-hole, but it jumps out when he’s not looking.

So my advice is: Don’t discuss Trollope on Discord.  And if you find a nice writing venue for dedicated Trollope fans, let me know.

Cataloguing Mistakes:  Why Are the Humor Books in the Travel Section?

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If you are looking for the humor writer Emily Kimbrough’s Pleasure by the Busload, you will be surprised to find it in the travel section.

Kimbrough is best known for Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, co-written by the actress Cornelia Otis Skinner. This comic memoir recounts the two Bryn Mawr roommates’ adventures on a trip to Europe.

Much as I love this book, I find their separate volumes of humor columns even more charming. Skinner and Kimbrough both pursued writing careers, and though Skinner has more fans, I prefer Kimbrough’s slightly more down-to-earth writing.

I am especially a fan of Kimbrough’s Forty Plus and Fancy-Free.  Before a trip to Italy, Emily and her friend Sophy enroll in an Italian course at the Berlitz School.  Sophy is fluent from the first day, rolling her r “like Caruso… on the stage of the Metropolitan,” while Kimbrough’s own delivery ” had been uncompromisingly Muncie, Indiana.”

To shelve Kimbrough’s books in the travel section seemed to be a catalogueing mistake.  But sure enough, Pleasure by the Busload, an amusing account of her trip to Portugal with the aforementioned Sophy and other friends, was next to a humorous travel book by the columnist Art Buchwald.

In Portugal, Sophy has rented a Volkswagen Microbus, which Emily mistakes for a delivery truck. No one had told her it would be as big as a trailer.  “… the step from ground to floorboard was a span well over three feet, not possible to accomplish in a tight skirt except by raising it to sufficiently to to allow one’s knees full play.  I was to learn this never failed to charm the Portuguese within eyesight to a rapt scrutiny of the procedure.”

The men are expert oglers both in Portugal and Italy. In Forty Plus and Fancy Free, there is ogling, whistling, and possibly pinching. The women call out that they are grandmothers, but this doesn’t stop them.

Very young grandmothers, I would say!

Dr. Literature:  Should We Diagnose Fictional Characters?

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Here’s a question for your doctor:  Should you diagnose fictional characters with imaginary illnesses?

CLUNK! 

You lay down your head.  Did you know that Caroline Helstone in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley had anorexia?  No, nobody did.  Sure, she is thin, but a fellow reader diagnosed her with an eating disorder because she was “languishing.”

“Maybe she just needed a day in bed,” someone else in the group said wisely.

I mean, I’m languishing, too. I flip through my books listlessly, because I only want to read the Brontes.  I don’t ever want to read anyone else again. And there are only seven published novels by the Brontes:  four by Charlotte, one by Emily, and two by Anne – hardly enough to last a month and a half.

Oh, yes.  Let me pass on that Emily’s Wuthering Heights is a veritable mental hospital.  Lo and behold! Ups, downs, love, betrayal, tantrums, nervous breakdowns, vengeance, hanging a dog from a tree, depression, bipolar – I can’t keep up with the diagnoses.  Fascinating, but can you believe I used to think this was a romantic novel?  I miss those days.

“Catherine and Heathcliff are bipolar for sure,” a psychologist said authoritatively.

Finally!  A doctor! Can she cure them?

But please, take away our other friend’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Everything with her is a gynecological illness that could be cured if you did your own pelvic exam.

I love Esther Summerson in Dickens’ Bleak House, an  angelic woman who is kind, helps the poor, makes her friends laugh, and gently gives good advice in such a way that it seems to be their own idea.

But alas! I am human, not a darling fictional character.  The angels are all in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and The Bishop’s Wife.  In Wings of Desire, an angel falls in love with a trapeze artis, and tumbles down to Earth to be human with her. In The Bishop’s Wife, Cary Grant the angel is here on Earth to help the bishop, but he falls in love with Loretta Young, the lovely bishop’s wife. Cary is charming and takes Loretta Young skating, and still she doesn’t fall in love with him. Poor Cary!

I LOOK angelic these days. I am sure of it.  If the light is dim – I am the soul of angelic beauty. I And yet I don’t get assigned to work in Heaven with Cary Grant,  who by now surely is an angel and could be my mentor. 

I can only be an angel at book group.

Depression & Rage: “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and “Wuthering Heights”

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It may seem unlikely that Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther influenced Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: he wrote a confessional novel; she wrote a Gothic novel, as did her sisters, Charlotte (Jane Eyre) and Ann (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall).

But Goethe’s novel, an international best-seller, must have influenced the Gothic writers, as did Daniel Defoe’s confessional novel, Roxana, published in 1724, the rowdy, rollicking confessions of a-deserted-wife-turned-courtesan. How could the Gothic writers, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, Horace Walpole, the Brontes, Jane Austen, Sheridan Le Fanu, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Emily Bronte not have read Young Werther?

And it is easy to see Goethe’s influence on Bronte’s wild prose. Both Werther and Bronte’s Heathcliff pursue women who are off the market, so to speak.. Werther dances all night with Lotte and then learns she has a fiancé. Lotte is flirtatious with Werther, but shifts her attention to her fiance Albert when he returns home from a business trip. From here it is a downward trip for Werther psychologically.

On the other hand, Bronte’s Heathcliff is madly in love with Catherine, his childhood playmate and presumed adolescent lover. But In the kitchen of Wuthering Heights, he overhears Catherine say that Heathcliff “is more my self than I am,” yet she plans to marry wealthy Linton, for the comfort and, as the housekeeper thinks, because she can control him.

In Book 2 of The Sorrows, Werther is depressed and has suicidal thoughts. He writes to Lotte: “..this broken heart has often thought of – killing your husband! – or you! – or myself!…” He turns his repressed rage and violence against himself. Ironically, Lotte gives him his suicide weapon, Albert’s pistols. Albert insists that she hand them over – he has no fears for Werther – and though she is fearful she not protest.

Heathcliff’s primary mood is rage, and he seeks revenge, even after leaving Wuthering Heights and coming home rich. Catherine is still at the center of his life, and his contact with her at Linton’s house is passionate, in the style of Albert and Lotte’s, though Heathcliff and Catherine obviously have sexual feelings for each other. He sees Catherine a few times against Linton’s wishes, and again before she dies in childbirth. Later, Heathcliff goes so far as to dig up Catherine’s grave, only to discover that she has not decomposed. Is she a bit of a witch?

Both Werther and Heathcliff are torn up by decisions made by women. Heathcliff’s rage and depression inspire him to destroy everyone Catherine loved, while Werther destroys himself. Both men are involved in complicated triangles.

Two harrowing narratives, both frame stories, and though Werther is stable compared to Heathcliff, both are full of rage. The novels are written in different periods, but linked by a long lineaage of confessional and romantic Gothic literature. Werther’s love would seem realistic, if he could have let it go. But Bronte caps every character’s weirdness with Heathcliff, who I hope was not based on Branwell, he brother, though I have read that he was.

Brontë vs. Austen: “Emily” and “Sense and Sensibility”

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You know there’s something wrong with the culture when you find a movie on Netflix about Emily Brontë.

The notion horrified me.  But maybe…? I’m desperate for a good movie.

I did not watch the entire 2-minute trailer, but it resembled a Jane Austen film:  twirling, laughing, emaciated sisters, bonnets on and bonnets off, Emily alone with a man….  Good God! 

And you see, there’s this:  Emily would not have been a movie-goer.  She and her sisters were writers from childhood and would have written or directed their own movie if they’d wanted one.  Branwell preferred drink and opium to writing after a certain point, so he might have gone to the movies – on drugs!

If you don’t want to watch Emily, and I definitely don’t, you can see the latest adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. I watched only part of the trailer but noticed the following:  the actresses wear their hair loose, instead of up, and the film has a non-Austen sexualized atmosphere:  sisters confiding in bed, having pillow fights, and then strangely cuddling in bed, getting out of bed to take walks in a ravishing landscape and, in Marianne’s case, meet her beloved, and Elinor barely touching her boyfriend’s hands, an intensely sexualized moment .  It is mostly a bonnets-off movie! I’m all for sex and bonnets off but I want the book more.

“Will there never be an end of Austen and Bronte films?”  asked my soulmate.

“Never.”

I will wait to watch Sense and Sensibility on Netflix.

Toxic Masculinity or Toxic Femininity?

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How many times can the phrase “toxic masculinity” be used in a sentence?

I never use this phrase: there is as much “toxic femininity” as “toxic masculinity” in our culture – and you’re kidding yourself if you deny it.

Recently, at a lecture on 19th-century English literature, I heard the phrase “toxic masculinity” several times.  Oddly, an aging male scholar used it. And, because I’m a Doris Lessing fan, and she denied she was a feminist, and because I want nothing to do with feminist quacks, I have lost the feminist ideals that defined me in my youth. I always wonder, What is the context? What is the source? Or when a man uses the phrase “male toxicity,” is it because he is afraid not to kowtow to women?

Look at female politicians. (They don’t mind being looked at.)  Like male politicians, a number of them are hawkish and unreasonable.  In some states, not only have female governors signed bills into law that ascertain everyone and anyone can carry a gun, but they have waived gun permits, and lowered the age for gun ownership. 

And they say that it is preferable for everyone to carry a gun, and that armed teachers will stop school shootings. As soon as women get political power, they copy the men.

And so if we must use the phrase “masculine toxicity,” we must add  “Toxic femininity” too.  Can you imagine a woman using the phrase “toxic femininity?” No, because it is sexist, for both sexes.

“Male dominance” doesn’t quite have the witch-hunting tone of “male toxicity.” In general, I feel more attention should be given to language, because words can trigger violence against both men and women.

New vs. Old:  Does Anyone Read “Middlemarch”?

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Long books intimidate the modern, scattered reader.  In the “By the Book” interviews in The New York Times, writers often admit that Middlemarch is the great book they haven’t read.

Has no one read Middlemarch? I have the opposite problem. I love Victorian novels, and admit, not to be snobbish but because it is true, that I have read Middlemarch three times. 

I had hipster mentors, a married couple who read Middlemarch aloud to each other in Europe, and they inspired me to read Middlemarch when I was 17. I was already a classics junkie, but they certainly expanded my syllabus. On my own, I read a lot of German literature in translation, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, and Peter Handke. But I read anything and everything.

And honestly, I feel I must read Victorian novels or die. I have read two and a half new books nominated for the Booker Prize this year, one of which made the shortlist, and they’re fine, but I doubt I’ll read any more of them. I’ve read half of The Vivisectors, a beautifully-written longlisted novel, but I look at it with dread when I see it on my bedside table.

All because I need to read classics.  Some of you will get this. Homer to Virgil (The Aeneid is a homage to the Iliad and the Odyssey),  Petrarch, Milton, Keats, Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, Dorothy Parker, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Barbara Pym.

Any of these books are fine for me, but perhaps it is Middlemarch time again. It’s a comfort book!

A Few Notes on Petrarch’s Sonnet 6: Apollo Loses the Race

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As a Latinist, I fell in love with Petrarch after discovering Sonnet 6, a reworking of Ovid’s Apollo and Daphne myth (Metamorphoses, I.452-567).  Petrarch’s sensitive Apollo describes his “insane desire /to chase the lady who has turned in flight… /(and) flies off ahead of my slow run for her.”   The “slow run” is a breathless allusion to Ovid’s Apollo’s comic speech, “Run more slowly, I beg you, and moderate your flight:  I myself will run more slowly.”

In a race of slow runners, Daphne and Laurel “win” the race. But Ovid’s Apollo and Petrarch’s Apollo’s paths diverge significantly. Ovid’s coarse Apollo, rather adorably obtuse at first, is angry when Daphne continues to run away from him. He is an outraged celebrity: doesn’t she know who he is? (She does.) On the other hand, Petrarch’s sensitive Apollo struggles to control his desire, but the reins and all control are snatched away from him: “I am left there in harness of his lordship/ as he against my will rides me to death.” And instead of Laura, he finds the laurel whose “bitter fruit… afflicts rather than comforts someone else’s wounds.”

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we also see the woman’s point of view. Daphne, a virginal follower of Diana, metamorphoses into a laurel tree after she begs her father, a river god, to change the form that has caused her distress. But Apollo still possesses her: he declares that she is his, and that the laurel will reward poets and winners of games. Still, Daphne comes out the winner, or that’s my interpretation. She and Laura both are inaccessible to men.

My edition of Petrarch, alas,  had no footnotes. But this sonnet fascinates me: a brilliant take on the famous myth.

Okay, What about My Social Life?

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Okay, I’m a social failure.  I DID NOT KNOW THAT THE BUFFALO BILLS WON A FOOTBALL GAME AGAINST THE LOS ANGELES RAMS ON MONDAY. While the TV was on I hid in the bedroom reading my favorite book, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette.

I do not watch football, and yet the Bills are a part of my life.  I do not have a Bills t-shirt – yet – but it’s a matter of time. A few years ago I was on a plane to London with a group of Bills fans called the Bills Mafia, who were going to watch the Bills play the Jacksonville Jaguars at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Well, I’m not a sports fan. I have attended professional baseball games, but am distracted by issues of spilling a Diet Coke on the person next to me or the state of the public restroom.

One time I got to sit in an excellent seat behind the baseball wives, because I was an FOBW ( Friend of a Baseball Wife), who was a mere acquaintance actually, but very sweet.  I interviewed her and her family – embarrassingly, I cannot remember their names – but this was a kind gesture I will always remember.

Why do I resist the call of baseball?  It is the intellectual game, I hear. But the only game I liked in gym class was field hockey, and that’s because I got to be the goalie, who had very little to do except stand around and read magazines, and block an occasional ball, which I could almost do without looking up from my magazine.

I dislike sports, which was allowed for women of my generation. We took long walks, bicycled and avoided any sport that involved throwing a ball.

“If you’re having good sex, you don’t need to watch sports,” I say to the sports fans who litter the living room with chips packages and beer cans.

Because who has to pick up the chip packages and beer cans? Well, to be fair, it’s not me. But I do think they could skip a Bills game for a date with their wives/girlfriends/husbands/boyfriends.