The Lucretius Club, or Why We Don’t Drink out of Teacups

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So I’m 23 years old, and I’m trying not to drop my teacup, because the professor’s wife might come home, and how to explain our illicit tea-drinking club?  I was a nubile blonde back then, no, a nervous nubile blonde, he said fondly, and despite our difference in status, we enjoyed our Lucretius-translating tea parties.

For the first time, atoms were clicking around in my head. Lucretius adored atoms, and I began to understand physics.  Incredible, isn’t it?  what poetry and Epicurean philosophy can teach you.

The prof always offers milk and sugar.

“No, thanks,” I say.  I can balance a cup of tea on the saucer, but not the spoon.

He and I were sort of friends, sort of buddies, really.  We talked in the conference room about what novels we were reading until an irate professor ordered us to go to the lounge so he “could think.” My laid-back prof recommended  Rosellen Brown and Barbara Pym, while I urged him to try Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Andre Dubus.  

Reading was our passion: that was our bond. While waiting at the reserve desk for the return of a scholarly journal on reserve at the library, I devoured the short stories of Raymond Carver and John Updike in The New Yorker. The library inevitably had only one copy of the journal with the assigned article, so I sometimes had to read the entire New Yorker.

But the Lucretius club was the highlight of the semester. Our bubbly casual chats about philosophy, broken up occasionally by literary analysis, bridged the gap between student and professor. In retrospect, he was a charming older man, though I took his charm entirely for granted. When you’re young, everyone is charming to you, because you see the world more kindly.

The memory of those rattling china tea cups remind me of Lucretius and his atoms.  I drink tea in mugs these days – they’re more stable, and hold more tea – but I might take out the old china in homage to this long-dead brilliant professor.

History or Memoir?  The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas

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Perpetua and Fecilitas

First, let me say that The Passion of the Saints Perpetua and Felicitas (Passio Sanctarum Perpetuae et Feliciatas) is not a  memoir.  Yet Passio has many aspects of a memoir, tempered by the history of the Christian martyrs, and the pagan myths that were a part of Roman culture. 

This short book, written in Latin in the early third century A.D, is regarded as the most important, and certainly the liveliest, of a genre known as the Acts or Lives of the Saints. Vibia Perpetua is the heroine, a Christian martyr who wrote a vivid account of her life in prison before her death in 203 A.D.  She and five other Christians were sentenced to be killed at the games in Carthage in a fight with wild animals.

Perpetua’s narrative occupies seven very short chapters.  We learn that she is honeste nata, liberaliter instituta, matronaliter nupta (well-born, liberally educated, and a married woman). She is also a mother.  Her sentence would be revoked if she denied that she was a Christian, but she will not retract her statement.

Perpetua’s father is nearly mad with grief.  He longs to save her from prison, and he begs her to return to her family:  himself, her mother, two brothers, an aunt, and her baby.  At one point he attacks her physically, hoping he can drag her out of jail by violence.

Perpetua remains calm, and tries reasoning with him.   Below is my literal translation of their very brief but logical dialogue from the Latin.  The Latin appears beneath my translation.  

“Father, I say, do you see for the sake of argument this dish lying here, or is it a pitcher?  And he says:  I see.  And I say to him:  And can it be called by another name than what it is?  And he says: No.  Thus I cannot say that I am other than a Christian.”

Pater, inquam, vides verbi  gratia vas hoc iacens, urceolum sive aliud?  et dixit:  Video.  Et ego dixi ei: Numquid alio nomine vocari potest quam quod est?  et ait:  Non.  Sic et ego aliud me dicere non possum nisi quod sum, Christiana.

The Christians did not compromise. Heads down, is what I would have advised in that pagan age.  But Perpetua and her five companions, including her pregnant slave,  Felicitas, are determined to be martyrs.

Her father continues to try intercede,. He reminds her about her baby, who he says is starving without her. Perpetua is allowed to have her son with her in prison for a time, though eventually her father must take him back. She worries about the boy’s nutrition, and that her breast will be infected from not nursing.

Perpetua also has visions. In one vision, she sees her unbaptized brother suffering in hell.  He died at age seven of cancer, and now he is doomed to stand in a pool, yet never reach the water that will sate his thirst.  (This is a common motif in Greek myth, though I hardly think Tantalus has a connection to her brother). But Perpetua’s constant prayers for her brother save him, and she sees him happily drinking water (baptism?).

There are other visions, one of them involving a bronze ladder, the description of which is fantastic,  bordering on magic realism. In another vision, she is turned into a man, and must fight a terrifying Egyptian.  If the Egyptian wins, he will be allowed to kill her, and if she wins, she will receive a green branch on which golden apples grow. (Again, the golden apples are a mythic element.)

Perpetua is he star of the book, but her Christian slave, Felicitas, is connected to Perpetua because both are mothers.  Felicitas gives birth to a daughter on the road while traveling to the games. The men, too, have interesting stories, but I was most interested in Perpetua.

After reading widely about Perpetua, I realize that almost nothing is known for sure. It is all based on conjecture, even the date of her death.  Nonetheless, it is fascinating and moving, whether you’re interested in memoirs or lives of the saints.

Lawrence Durrell’s Discrete Voices:  “The Alexandria Quartet” & “White Eagles over Serbia”

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It is hot, it is muggy, it is dusty, and if it is not quite Alexandria, the smouldering summer in the Midwest post-Climate Change prepares you for Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quarter.  This neglected 20th century masterpiece is told in four novels, Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea, each named for a titular character.

Durrell was a brilliant poet, a translator of Cavafy, a humor writer, and a novelist.  His mesmeric style in The Alexandria Quartet is lush and poetic.  He intended the quartet to be read as one novel, though it can also be spaced over a long period of time. For a satisfying Durrell reading experience, head for that cafe with whirling fans on the ceiling and order an espresso.  No, air conditioning would be cheating.

Durrell mines his experience in Alexandria for the colorful characters, the derealization in the shimmering heat, and the intricate politics and conspiracies. The narrator, Darley, a novelist, is Durrell’s alter ego: he has “escaped” Alexandria and is living on an island, where he is writing about Alexandria. In the first volume,  Justine, Darley describes his love affair with Justine, a siren with a tragic past who sleeps with everybody. The other titular characters in the quartet are Balthazar, a doctor and a mystic, Mountolive, a diplomat who becomes Ambassador of Egypt, and Clea, an artist who is a shrewd observer of humanity.

If you don’t like luxuriant prose, you might want to try Durrell’s White Eagles over Serbia, a taut thriller set in the Balkans. Metuan, a spy, burned-out after an assignment in Malay,  is determined to retire and spend his leisure going fishing.  But Dombey, his boss,  entices him to accept the assignment: he can go fishing in the mountains of Serbia, where he is needed to investigate the murder of the former agent. Metuan, who knows the Serbian languages, will impersonate a peasant. And he takes his fishing rod.

Beautiful, spare writing and a good spy novel. It reminded me slightly of the actor Anthony Quayle’s Eight Hours from England, a brilliant novel set in the Balkans during World War II.

N.B. Peter Stothard, former editor of the TLS, is the author of a fascinating book called Alexandria. He visited the city, looking for traces of the past, but no Cleopatra, and certainly no Lawrence Durrell.

Like Mother, Like Daughter:  Cake Wars

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Our Mother’s Cake Wars

“Morituri salutamus te!” my mother muttered in the car on the way to Devil’s Lake. (That’s what the Roman gladiators said when they entered the arena: “We who are about to die salute you!”) She’d studied Latin at the Catholic school across the street from our church before it was converted into an elementary school. However, she sent us to public schools. “The public schools are really better.”

Mom was a good fighter. And, indeed, the barbs, digs, snottiness, and gentle feminine quarrels were about to begin in the aptly-named Devil’s Lake, which was so cold that only devils could survive there, or so they said.  Mom had vowed three years ago that she would never make this terrible trip again.  Dad insisted on bringing us kids, and she would not let us go to those wild parts without a chaperone. 

“Here we are,”  she said as we pulled up in front of a dismal bungalow on a bare treeless street. Mom refreshed her lipstick in the rearview mirror, then smiled a fake smile that told those who knew her, “Beware!”

There was a cake war in Devil’s Lake. The aunts had been getting ready for days. Mom was not a baker. She bought an angel food cake at Hy-Vee for this occasion.  “It will be the best-looking cake there,” she predicted.

She still stung from last time when the aunts patronized her for bringing a Duncan Hines cake.  The aunts had made their cakes from scratch, and though they were lopsided, like something I might make, and the Duncan HInes cake tasted better, they were intense about cake.

But this time the aunts did not thank her for the angel food’s cake. Instead, they offered to teach her to make homemade.

“No, thank you,” she said, and gathered up her purse.

Anyone who didn’t like the Hy-Vee angel food cake ranked very low in her estimation. Anyone who didn’t thank her for it ranked lower. “Mom, can we take the cake with us?” we asked as we got ready to leave.

“Manners,” she hissed.

These women were at war: cake was the weapon.

The Daughter’s Cake Wars

“Morituri salutamus te!” I said as my boyfriend drove at a snail’s pace through a blizzard. This time, my mother’s favorite slogan, “We who are about to die salute you!”, was appropriate. While we looked for signs or a rest stop, I rolled down the window and wiped the snow off the windshield with a mitten.  The snow fell faster than I could wipe. Then the car broke down.

This was a letdown for my macho boyfriend, not to roll into town on his own wheels. His reticent father (in retrospect, my favorite in-law) picked us up and gave us an impromptu tour of the city as we drove through the blizzard in the dark.

However, many surprises lay ahead. I thought my boyfriend was poor, because of his shabby clothes: instead of a winter coat, he wore layers of jackets over a sweater with a hole under the arm. I’d expected to meet his warm, working-class family. But, alas, there was no warm welcome at childhood home of the love of my life. If we’d worn a mood ring, it would have been CRANKY.

The three-story house was enormous. It was in a posh neighborhood! What the…? Who were these people?

His mother barely said hello, and two of his sisters stared balefully. “I hate this,” one said, possibly after I said hello. “I know,” the other equally charming girl said. During the next 10 snowbound days they did not talk to me. I tried to make light conversation, even about books (a desperate topic, but one was an English major) but these snobbish girls just grunted, nor did they chat much to their brother.

“They ignore you because they hate me,” he said.

“I do not accept that explanation,” I said.

Several times a day we walked at a nearby park. At night we went to a hockey game, or the movies, or played Scrabble with the family: someone’s boyfriend had a breakdown because he didn’t have any letters – that is always the luck of the draw.

You get the idea: but I must tell you about the pancake war!

On a cold winter morning, is there anything better than pancakes? The family did not breakfast together; everybody got up at different times, and ate cereal or whatever; but one morning I caught my future ma-in-law making pancakes for my boyfriend.

“How lovely!” I said. “Mrs. _, I love pancakes.”

Too bad, because she shut down the operation and walked away. No pancakes for me!

Welcome to the family!!!

What is it about cakes, or pancakes, and in-laws?

Underemployed in an Alternate Life

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What would have happened if you never left your hometown?  

That’s a haunting question. In memory, the hometown was idyllic:  five bookstores, two libraries, a Jackson Pollock at the art museum, a gorgeous park with woods, and meadows with cows.

It would have been great if the town hadn’t changed, and if we were still 20 years old.  But “my city is gone,” as  Chrissie Hynde sang about Akron.  Our town has doubled in size.

People now live in the suburbs.  There never used to be suburbs.  God, we all despised the suburbs!  (Was it because of John Updike and Richard Yates?)

But if we had stayed we would not have found a professional job.  There simply were no jobs for liberal arts majors.

Here’s what happened to some of the people who stayed.  The portraits below are VERY loosely based on some of some of the lifers.

Lynn:  unemployed, agorophobic, single, still lives in her late parents’ hourse, and is now a bit like a character in We Always Lived in the Castle.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR:  Not a college graduate.

Susan: underemployed, flunky office clerk (slightly reminiscent of Harvey Pekar in his comics), reputed to be a witch and drug addict.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR (besides drugs):  Not a college graduate.

Jessie: married, self-employed, underemployed, keen on rock music, critical of the late Tom Petty’s appearance, and knows TV trivia.  I mean all of it.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR:  college graduate. 

GWEN:  married, underemployed, book club maven, sociology teacher in a high school.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR:  Ph.D. in sociology but no jobs for sociology professors.  

ANNA:  single, employed, former actor, returned to hometown to get M.D., oncologist,  columnist in local paper, and gardener. THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTORS: B.A. , M.D..

LIZZIE: marital status uncertain, former hippie, banks in the Cayman Islands, reinvented herself as a devout Christian.  THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR: no college degree.

So are you nostalgic for your hometown?

Two War Classics:   “”Reporting Vietnam” & “The Leopard and the Cliff”

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TThe first war of my conscious life was the war in Vietnam. We attended the moratorium protests, and there were daily silent vigils downtown. Years later, when I taught a remedial writing class at a college, I xeroxed an article from a Library of America anthology, Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1969-1975. To my astonishment, few students had heard of this war.

 One woman asked what the Vietnam war was about. It was difficult, too complicated to answer.   The government claimed it was a war against communists in North Vietnam. We looked at the article for deeper answers. 

These days I might assign a war novel rather than reportage: it is an excellent way to understand the emotional and psychological aspects. But the best war novel I’ve read is barely known in the U.S.,  Wallace Breem’s The Leopard and the Cliff, published in 1970, set during the Third Afghan War in 1919.

Based on an actual conflict that took place in 26 days, it is brilliantly told from the perspective of a sympathetic flawed hero, Sandeman, a 43-year-old officer who considers himself mediocre, and has been left in charge of a British fort in Waziristan while Chalmers, the political agent, is away.

Sandeman is a Graham Greene-ish character, and Breem’s style is as elegant as Greene’s. While Sandeman drinks lime juice on the verandah, he daydreams about his absent wife, due to give birth to their first child in a distant town. But the message that arrives on the wire is not from his wife; it is addressed to Chalmers, a government order to retreat from the fort because three tribes are waging war on the British. 

Organizing the march is a massive task, complicated by the fact that the majority of the men belong to the tribes. Some desert, others fight among themselves, there is a murder, and a mob threatens Sandeman’s life.  Sandeman, who often meditates on his  “mediocrity,” proves his heroism by controlling the chaos, and then calculates the minimum amount of food, meds, clothing, guns, and ammunition needed on the march.

On their march through difficult terrain, the enemy outnumbers them. Many die. He keeps going grimly, mechanically, out of respect for his position in the British army. And he has been trained for this particular brand of heroism.  Other men, including his friend Wynter, have also been trained with the military attitude that they are part of a whole. 

But then Wynter dies, and that threw me into a state of unconsolable grief. Wynter is one of the likable, ordinary, mediocre men who die in war.

Earlier in the novel, Breem writes: “Francis Wynter was 29 years old.  Tall and fair-haired, with a passion for horses, hawking, and girls – in that order – he was a good officer, unimaginative but reliable.”

That is how Sandeman sees himself:  unimaginative but reliable..  He keeps marching, fatigued, in pain, almost lame, wounded, determined to reach their destination before he dies.  By God, after all the losses he will save the few.

Sandeman and his men are caught between “the leopard and the cliff,” as his friends from the tribes say. This grim, tragic, hyper-realistic novel is beautifully-written, and deserves a wider audience..

How Dickens Exposes the Perils of Legal Entanglements

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If my so-called employee had read Bleak House, would she have gone straight?  (N.B.  Who coined the phrase “gone straight”?  Did Edward G. Robinson say it in a crime movie?)

 Dickens’s masterpiece Bleak House is a satire of the  legal system. At the center is Jarndyce v Jarndyce, an inheritance suit which has gone on for decades, driving some family members mad and one to suicide.  Middle-aged John Jarndyce has withdrawn from the suit: he has seen too much collateral damage.  And he is devastated when his charming young ward, Richard Carstone, decides to quit his job because he believes there will a verdict soon and he will be rich. 

Nevertheless,  Bleak House did not teach me everything.  Here’s what I wish I’d learned: Do NOT hire a former hippie to do legal work when she asks for the job.  At the commune she doubtless baked whole wheat bread, played the lute, and made enough homemade tomato sauce to open an Italian restaurant.  But, no, even if she’s the spawn of a friend or relative – it will be a hassle to deal with her! 

It was, of course, an unwise decision to hire her. After a year, very little progress had been made. We scheduled phone conferences. We offered to assist her, and  gave her tips for finishing the job.

And then one day she telephoned Mr. Nemo at his office and wasted an hour of his time telling him I was a bad person.

“But what on earth did she say?”

“She’s a hysterical bitch,”  he said. 

I was crushed, because I had tried to help this woman.  No good deed goes unpunished, as they say.  I should have emulated Esther Summerson in Bleak House,  the sensible, charming, beloved diarist who befriends everyone and helps the rich as well as the poor, but understands that some people, like the charming parasite Mr. Skimpole, are not worth your time, and indeed cannot be helped..

A Book and a Rant: Doris Lessing’s “The Good Terrorist” & the “Nouveau-ization” of the Neighborhood

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We used to await the Nobel Prize announcement with bated breath, wondering if the committee would finally recognize Philip Roth (no), Grace Paley (no), or Joyce Carol Oates (no, but there’s still time). 

Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize at the age of 89 in 2007. She did not seem especially pleased or respectful when a reporter helped her out of a taxi and informed her she’d won it. Her reaction was, “Oh, Christ!”  (I’d remembered it as “Oh, fuck,” but I rewatched the video, and either I misheard it the first time, or it has been edited.)

Some of Lessing’s books are masterpieces; others are not quite classics. Her bleak 1985 novel, The Good Terrorist, is a compelling read, with a flat, slightly distant style, reminiscent of great journalism, albeit with dialogue. In this engrossing novel, she explores the dynamics of a group of radical squatters.

The protagonist, Alice, is an intelligent, highly-organized radical woman in her thirties who has lived in squats on and off for years.  For four years, Alice and her best friend Jasper, a gay man, have lived with her mother. When she kicks them out, Alice and Jasper move into a squat in an abandoned, once-beautiful house in London.  It is already inhabited by a group of radical squatters who dream of joining the IRA. Alice puts home improvement before politics.

What is fascinating is Alice’s understanding of how to use the bureaucratic system.  She persuades a sympathetic woman at a city agency to take the house off the “condemned” list, explains to the utility companies why they must legally turn on the electricity and water, and finds an out-of-work carpenter who makes all the home repairs, from plumbing to electricity to roofing, with the help of Alice. Alice is much more stable than most of the group – but, alas, she loses control when the the  group plans a violent action in her absence. 

A stunning book. Alice is not a likable heroine, but we at least understand how she got that way through her reminiscences of family history.

WHY WE WON’T LIVE IN A SQUAT: WE’RE SETTLERS!

 Over the years the neighborhood has changed. Whether it has gone up or down is a matter of opinion. Let me describe the problem: It has been nouveaued!  On one side, we have nouveau riche Republicans.   They fly the flag and entertain a lot:  once they blocked the street for a surreal birthday shindig. But who doesn’t love a food truck? I just didn’t feel like Chinese, Mexican, French, salmon, ice cream, or champagne cake…

And then there are the Nouveau Nouveau, an even more annoying breed. They’re a hybrid group – a cross between Millennials and Generation Z –  and their backyard is a Disneyland playground for their spoiled brats.  Thank God there’s a hedge between us!   We pray to the Soccer gods that they’ll be at soccer practice all summer!

But even worse, I’ve got to admit, are hillbillies, Moms for Liberty, gangsters, drug addicts, and scam artists…

WILL THEY MOVE TO THE SUBURBS FOR THE POOLS AND SCHOOLS?

Too Much for Humans:  The Pressure of AI

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Articles about the wonders of AI chatbots tend to end with a wedding or a funeral. A year or two ago, before I grasped what a chatbot was, I read about a man who married his chatbot. This confused me: did it have a corporeal form? And then I read a melancholy piece about a competent, successful woman who committed suicide after discussing her depression with a chatbot. Her mournful family said they had seen no signs of depression.

And then they blamed the chatbot.

I was befuddled. I barely knew what a chatbot was, so I wanted to blame it, too. But the level of hysteria in the U.S. has been over-the-top this century, and the American impulse for drama and melodrama is insatiable. The bot had advised the woman to see a therapist. Nonetheless, the family sued the AI company, claiming that the bot SHOULD HAVE REPORTED HER DEPRESSION TO THE AUTHORITIES.

This seems unhinged to me: It’s like asking the Chatty Cathy doll to say something more complicated than, “May I have a cookie?”  As the commercial said,  “Pull the string, and she’ll say a lot of different things!”  

Dysfunctional family vs. AI: there are days when I’d love to have a chat-thingy-bot, but I have too many electronic devices already to take things to the next level. In offices, like it or not, people are urged to use chatbots. According to a PEW Research Center survey, “half of U.S. adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited… Just 10% say they are more excited than concerned. Another 38% say they are equally concerned and excited.”

 AI seems particularly harmful at the college level, where students are turning in AI-generated papers without conscience. They do not experience the thrill of doing their own research and organizing a cogent thesis. And today I was disturbed to read that The Commonwealth Short Story Prize in the UK was awarded to a short story that turned out to be AI-generated. The judges, the readers, and the editors of Granta, who published the story, are devastated.

In an ad on TV, a chatbot on a phone tells a young person that he/she can tell it anything.  “Anything?” the person says.  And since that’s how it’s advertised, as a confidante and friend, it’s not surprising that the results can be devastating.