McGrath names names both current and in the past, disguising others. I wasn’t surprised not to read about the agent I worked for in 1979-1980. The one-woman show, plus business manager, plus me, Gloria Safier Agency. My blank memory will protect some names, but Gloria cannot be disguised.

Recently, over dinner with friends in a Charlottesville restaurant, my story of this stint “in publishing” came tumbling out, David pitching in. The four of us were laughing. A literary agent who didn’t like literature! The girl from the provinces!

1979

I met my husband David Izakowitz, raised in New York, in the hinterland of Ithaca; we were both in graduate school, and were soon living together—he moved into my room in an apartment on Buffalo Street. After our second year, complete with my M.F.A. in fiction his M.A. from the Department of Drama, Cornell University (he decided to take that degree and not go on for the PhD, the academic market already sinking), we moved together to New York City. I would write fiction and work in publishing; he would write plays and work as a dramaturg or otherwise in nonprofit theater. We stayed with a friend on the Upper Westside to go forth and hunt for one apartment and two jobs. It was exciting and hopeful. I resented a mentor saying out loud that she worried I would go off and support my husband’s career. David did stick with his plan longer than I did.

Somehow I got an interview at Rolling Stone (a tale for another occasion) that made it plain as plaster that I was not running with that pack. But the job I rather quickly found, through a mutual friend who was moving on to be an editorial assistant at a publishing house, was as assistant to Gloria Safier, using my clerical experience, presumably my literacy, and my admitted need to start somewhere. Gloria paid me in part through the $25 checks that authors included with their unsolicited manuscripts. I was supposed to refer good ones to her. Bear in mind that I had been reading Faulkner and Woolf and studying with Harold Brodkey and Alison Lurie; I liked John Updike and Cynthia Ozick. What Gloria wanted was another Tom Harris, Black Sunday, 1975 (a poster of the successful 1977 film was on the wall in the office). Who? I always avoid immersing myself in screaming plots, in plots where a blimp blows up a stadium during a Super Bowl. Gloria made a great Hollywood deal for Tom Harris after the debut novel was only moderately successful.

So. I am twenty-five years old, just moved to NYC with my boyfriend, and commuting from our tiny Yorktown walkup to Madison Avenue and 61st. Perfume and furs on ladies who lunch on a cross-town bus. David has found work at Playwrights’ Horizons. Our two incomes, proud of them as we are, don’t go far beyond rent and food and transportation and some student loans; we get a lot of free tickets for shows that are in previews, from his office and from mine. Most evenings we work at our writing at the kitchen or the living room table with our manual typewriters.

I don’t clearly remember the building itself or which elevator stop I got off. You turned left out of the elevator and left again to walk a long, flourescent-lit hallway lined with other office suites. Gloria Safier Agency was behind a locked wood door with a tall glass window, the bottom of the frame low enough to see most of the hallway.

My reception desk is in the wide vestibule of the suite, facing the door with my back to a wall that has two doors into Gloria’s high-windowed office, which extends much of the front of the building, above Madison Avenue. To my left as I sit at the reception desk, there is a windowed office for a two-person enterprise distributing European films. I remember the man’s name, let’s call him Baron Carpenter, a man from somewhere in the South, and Gloria’s partner, a short, dynamic, butch woman (I’m racking my brain to remember her name, let’s call her Iris) run this concern. I am isolated and sometimes idle in my dark part of the office. I consider trying to write one of the romance novels that a friend is producing, where there has to be a kiss at sunset in chapter three. I like bantering with Baron, who is handsome and blond. It takes months before it occurs to me that he is gay. It takes longer before I put together that the films imported are not just B but X, and usually from Italy. Now I think they were probably Italian exploitation films, hot in the 1970s.

I have an ally, the reassuring business manager, keeper of the contracts and loyal to the explosive people and dog(s) in the suite, who occupies the final room in the suite, to my right as I sit at the reception desk. The room, with ranks of filing cabinets, is like an annex of time before World War II, with a brick wall outside her window. I don’t recall seeing her arrive or leave. Hers is another name I can’t recall; a native of Staten Island or Queens. She explains that she has to wear orthopedic shoes, showing me her bunions and bent toes. She ruined her feet wearing the high heels that were the fashion before I was born. She is an orderly but soft person, reminding me faintly of my great-aunt, silky floral dresses, glasses, good manners. But she smokes.

My job includes answering the phone, taking messages when Gloria is out, typing correspondence, taking in and sorting the mail. Tuli, Gloria’s poodle, hears the mailman before he appears at the beginning of the hall, and barks and springs and yaps and scrambles until I open the door to take in the packets and letters. This racket often makes it impossible to take a message on the phone.

One day I answer the phone, “Gloria Safier’s office.”

“Ethel Merman!” A New-York-accented woman bellows.

I bethink me and say, “This is Gloria Safier’s office. Ethel Merman is not here.”

“Ethel Merman!” Gravelly and nasal. Translated: what planet are you from?

“Of course. I’ll put you through.”

I am one of the 15 people in Manhattan in 1979 who aren’t sure who Ethel Merman is. A name, some idea of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

I feel lost in the woods of The New York Times; everyone here seemingly reads it cover to cover in no time. I have gay and lesbian friends, remember reading feminist books and editing and producing an issue of The Ithaca Women’s Anthology. I sort of know abstract expressionism, performance art, jazz, contemporary dance, and other cool things from college and graduate school, but I am utterly ignorant of Gloria’s clients on soap operas.1 My Ithaca clothes are not up to the big time of Manhattan streets, and it’s expensive to even buy a toothbrush. But I’m sure I can smell promise or hopelessness in the slush pile, even as my own stories get, at best, a personalized rejection from the journals I send them to (by mail, with self-addressed stamped envelope. Reading the queries and sample chapters, I gain more and more respect for writers of successful genre fiction. Nothing near a good murder mystery or spy thriller surfaces at this office.

So many want to write and are so very bad at it. I’ve suppressed any memory of the letters I wrote these writers for Gloria to sign. It felt like stamping on a plant—maybe a weed but it has a right to grow—each time.

By springtime, I had requested a longer manuscript from one writer, and shared it with Gloria. After she read it, she sullenly told me it was no good. “What did you see in it?” I had written notes about the realistic narrative about a married couple—decades later, it is a blank to me except that the style, characters, and situation were interesting. There was no chance of a car chase in it.

On Fridays, I had to go downstairs and feed quarters into the parking meter so Gloria and Iris could make their pre-rush-hour getaway in her Mercedes. When Ruby Keeler came to visit Gloria and wanted a milkshake, I went down the elevator to the street to get it for her. The Christmas season meant helping out with an elaborate system of expensive gifts to be given and received. I learned a bit about how serial and foreign rights worked, but hardly apprenticed as an agent. After months, I lost some of my reflexive obligingness. Knowing me, I probably got accustomed enough to retort or disagree with something Gloria said. I failed to hide my annoyance at the job.

About a week after she turned down the submission I recommended, Gloria called me into her office with its tall windows over the avenue.

“I think this isn’t really working out,” she said. She told me she would lay me off, not fire me, so I could apply for unemployment insurance. Surprised, a little wounded in my pride, I was fine with this way out. A few more weeks and David and I were planning to return to Cornell to spend a second summer teaching in a writing program for high schoolers—the program where we had met the year before.

Before my last day, I overheard Gloria’s loud telephone voice, “I need to find an assistant. Do you know anyone? I don’t care what college or whatever she went to. I just need someone with street smarts.”

I collected the weekly insurance in a dreary downtown office, and again registered for unemployment when we returned upstate, telling them, “I am looking for work as a writing teacher.” The job I was already hired to do at Cornell for the summer.

“Riding? We don’t really have a lot of stables…”

I interviewed at Dutton for an editorial assistant position for the fall, but after another summer of teaching, I thought, I know I hate sitting in an office year round. Publishing doesn’t pay well, the top jobs are for men. We moved to be nearer other friends, on the Upper Westside: a bigger apartment with a roommate, in the Bertha, 111th between Broadway and Amsterdam. So close to Columbia, it made sense to take their typing test, and I got a better-paying part-time job in the college admissions office. If I was to be a writer, I needed more time to write. Agents and editors (Toni Morrison excepted) don’t have spare hours to produce excellent novels because they are too busy reading other people’s work and networking deals. They carry around manuscripts on evenings and weekends.

Over the years, I’ve thought many times about the first year in New York, and the second year when I worked part-time at Columbia while applying to PhD programs. More than once I’ve started but never finished a work of fiction set at Gloria Safier Agency.

What I didn’t get, I’d like to know

I can’t find a picture of Gloria anywhere.

I found the New York Times obituary, “Gloria Safier, Agent for Writers and Actors,” October 10, 1985:

Gloria Safier, a longtime theatrical and literary agent, died yesterday at her apartment in Manhattan. She was 63 years old.

Born in Cleveland, Miss Safier grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1939.

The daughter of a movie distributor, she had show business in her blood at an early age. ‘’I was raised on Variety instead of Mother Goose,’‘ she once said. ‘’My arithmetic was the grosses in Cleveland.’‘ At age 17 she worked as a $25-a-week press agent for Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, eventually moving to Hollywood, where she served an apprenticeship with the agent Myron Selznick, her cousin.

….

Her clients eventually included Mary Astor, Diane Cilento, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Constance Ford, Arlene Francis, Robert Shaw, Elaine Stritch and Gloria Vanderbilt. In 1959, Time magazine described her as ''Broadway's leading agent and one of the most remarkable operatives in the 10-percent business.''

….Miss Safier became a literary agent about 15 years ago. Her clients included Sumner Locke Elliott, Tom Harris, Susan Isaacs, Lee Israel, Ethel Merman and Liz Smith.

I was sorry to think of her dead already so long ago (my daughter was about eight months old and we were living in Hoboken when Gloria died). Sixty-three is so young.

I knew “Safier” wasn’t her birth name. She objected more than once that David’s family hadn’t changed theirs: “like Susan Isaacs.” Come to find out, Ethel Zimmerman became Ethel Merman. One branch of David’s cousins did come up with Ingram, which sounded plainly English to them. Izakowitz, the Americanization of Izakowicz, sounded stupid to Gloria. The obituary says she was survived by her mother surnamed Shumofsky. The obituary makes no mention of Gloria’s partner—they lived together on Lexington Avenue, I believe, and in the Hamptons.

Google AI told me Gloria’s agency was at 667 Madison Avenue, NY, NY 10021 in 1979. I doubted it was 667 when I inspected Google Street View; the building is sleek and fronted with glamorous Madison Avenue stores under high arches, with several setbacks to its full height of 25 stories; its interior features echo surrounding 1920-30s office buildings. My memory is of a more 1920s, lower, dark building at this site, the east side of Madison Avenue with a small lobby.

I searched again for ‘Gloria Safier’ in the New York Times TimesMachine and found a 1976 article about real estate that allows dogs at work (Virginia Lee Warren, “Can a Poodle Find Love…9-to-5…”). Yes, the agency was in 667 Madison: “Poodles Tuli and Daisy escort Gloria Safier, a literary agent, to work and read scripts while she is out to lunch. (So Miss Safier says.)” In my day, Tuli alone came to the office and practiced her frenzied soccer-play leaps and head butts.

In the day of landline telephones, before Starbuck’s, before the current building was built in 1987 (two years after Gloria’s death), the location did indeed have an aura of decades before. There was a tailor on a lower floor of the building, who brought the garment with the re-sewn button back to Gloria’s door—something that struck me as quintessentially New York. I had worked for a year in an old building in downtown Chicago, as part-time office manager for a nonprofit—nothing in Chicago felt like an old movie, or made me buy footwear I couldn’t walk in.

Searching further, I come to an article reporting on a party when I was about four and a half years old, a celebration of twenty years of Gloria Safier Agency at a place called Brown’s: Time magazine, “Broadway: 10% for Glo” [no byline] Jan 26, 1959

“200 showfolk packed into a tiny Manhattan restaurant…The guest of honor: slim, chic, tough-talking (“Let’s get the squares out of here”) Gloria Safier (pronounced sapphire), Broadway’s leading woman agent and one of the most remarkable operatives in the 10% business.” Elaine Stritch sang a song in praise of the bounty of the agent nicknamed Glo.

“Safier thrives ($50,000 last year) on warm, personal friendships. ‘The nicest agent in the business,’ says Theatre Guild Director Lawrence Langner.”

“Gloria has never married or come close. Her interest in ‘my people’ takes up so much of her time that last year she opened a restaurant called Brown’s on Manhattan’s 61st Street” to have a place for them to hang out.

Lost City 2009 (a blog)

Where to Eat in Midtown, circa 1959

New York City - The Broadway Beat
( Originally Published 1959 )

BOTH ON AND OFF THE GAY WHITE WAY, WHERE SHOWFOLKS LIKE TO DINE AND PLAY

[a long sequence of paragraphs about various famous or less famous places]

Brown's, at 132 E. 61st St., might be called a splinter of MICHAEL'S PUB, having been opened by Gloria Safier, a highly successful actor's agent who was one of the original backers of MICHAEL'S and still owns a piece of it. BROWN'S, on the site of the recently vacated Le Vouvray, is also suggested by a London pub of that name. Its tasteful decorations are by Irene Sharaff, theatrical designer (The King and I, etc.), who is making her bow in this department.

I haven’t found a picture of Brown’s, yet. Irene Sharaff looks nothing like Gloria’s partner I call Iris. I wonder if she knew Truman Capote through her client Gloria Vanderbilt.

What I wish for Gloria is that she had lived to see her client Tom Harris triumph with The Silence of the Lambs. That movie I did see.

Digging Words

The English word for florilegia is anthology (antho, Greek for flower), which is based on the idea of plucking passages and putting them in your ‘commonplace’ book. Commonplace didn’t then mean tried and tired. It meant compiling excerpts in a shared place. See my experience of finding an incidental notebook that combined deep study of Anne Spencer, the poet who died in 1975 (I could have known her), and a drafted poem about straightening my teeth. But commonplacing could be purposeful as self-help toward an informed life. Emma Woodhouse and Harriet Smith are semi-purposeful in their cliched practice of it in Austen’s Emma. I see a gold mine in the University of Leeds library’s collection of nineteenth-century commonplace books.

Dear Wikipedia1 says:

In medieval Latin, a florilegium (plural florilegia) was a compilation of excerpts or sententia from other writings and is an offshoot of the commonplacing tradition. The word is from the Latin flos (flower) and legere (to gather): literally a gathering of flowers, or collection of fine extracts from the body of a larger work. It was adapted from the Greek anthologia (ἀνθολογία) "anthology", with the same etymological meaning.

Etymon in turn comes from etymos, which means “true.”—Merriam Webster

Now we know. I should say I know more about words and literature and even encyclopedias than about contemporary art or botany, by many miles.

Art Flowers, on the Move

Having caught the bug of plants at the Ashmolean In Bloom exhibit in Oxford and tracked floral themes through Croatia, in early June at the Venice Biennale I noticed the work of Abbas Akhavan, Iranian-born artist who lives and works in Montreal and Berlin. Akhavan transformed the Canada Pavilion into “a monumental Wardian case - a 19th-century innovation for transporting plants across the globe” (copied from my picture of the wall text). The pavilion became a greenhouse for descendants of the ancient species of water lilies native to South America and renamed for Queen Victoria: Victorian cruziana was displayed “in the Crystal Palace during the 1851 Great Exhibition in London” (wall text). Seeds from Kew Gardens were germinated in Padua before being settled in the pavilion while the Kew Waterlily House “is closed for renovation” (wall text). The piece is entitled Entre chien et loup (2026), meaning twilight when you can’t tell the difference between a dog and a wolf. It was delightfully confusing in the pavilion.

The theme of transported, displaced art flowers, symptoms of imperialism, brought me a surprise as I am compiling this commonplace or anthology post: another piece by Akhavan, this one in the Tate Modern just a few days after we came to London from Venice: Study for a Monument. I took a picture of the wall text to read later but I was taken with the spectacle of enlarged bronze or charred floral pieces spread on white sheets on the floor, facing the windows gazing North across the Thames toward St. Paul’s on a rainy day.

Yes, Akhavan, though born in Tehran, is researching the botany of present-day Iraq through the institutes of the United Kingdom.

Our visit to the Tate Modern was brief; we met up with relatives, two adults and a very young child, in the Turbine Hall, so didn’t see special exhibits. The museum’s open rooms showcasing the collection, where I found Study for a Monument, are different every time we go.

I don’t remember anything from visits to Kew Gardens when we lived in London when I was fifteen, but this summer, we had just been there the day before we visited the Tate Modern. No water lily to be seen at Kew. Lots of rain and chilled wind. The Palm House was restored by 1988 and re-opened by the Queen Mother on 6 November 1990. I loved it more for the rusty glamor of the iron and glass building than the trees, I admit. It reminded me of the Crystal Palace, for the good reason that it was built in 1848. The renovation, according to Copilot, is to make it “the world’s first net-zero heritage glasshouse.” I hope they don’t have to get rid of the period cast-iron.

A Floral Tribute to Firsts

Back in Venice the week before Kew and the Tate Modern, in the central pavilion of the Giardini (Gardens) where an international selection of artists and works are curated, I had noticed many works that evoked plants. I walked through the warehouse-sized rooms, enjoying the way the series melds into each other with quirky assemblages echoing street memorials or encampments, hybrid post-apocalyptic creatures, ingeniously varied textiles, plants, minerals, some video (which I bypass restlessly) and traditional art media. Our museum-director friend told us the exhibition captured Koyo Kouoh’s wonderful curatorial vision. On the far wall of one of the halls, I immediately recognized Toni Morrison, painted upon a wall as if alive. Well, larger than life-sized. So I went over to see why. It has taken me some time, in person and the past few days with my iPhone and laptop, to ‘collect’ this as one installation, and I like it the more I invest attention in it.

I took several pictures, again of botanically correct enlarged flowers, this time the study for a monument was not like burnt black silhouettes (Akhavan) but like Technicolor glass and resin made to look like porcelain or brass. Like the Akhavan, this signals disregard for scientific purpose; the red magnolia has odd pendants from some of its petals that end in symbolic eyes. The online guide has better images than mine, but mine have the ‘punctum’ of I was there.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons Anatomy of the Magnolia Tree for Toni Morrison and Koyo Kouoh (2026) is a monument in floral form.”

That is the first sentence of the English side of the wall text, which continues:

Eight tall panels hold portraits of Morrison, the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, and Kouoh, the first African woman to curate the Biennale Arte, while seven sculptures in resin and glass express forms of the magnolia, the iconic flower of the American South. Anchored in Black women’s solidarity, the work holds its subjects in relation across disciplines, generations, and geographies.

Getting the Nobel Prize in literature as an African American woman was a first, and curating the World Cup of contemporary art in Venice as an African European woman was a very recent first. Kouho died at age 57 of cancer, before the exhibition was fully planned. A team interpreted and completed what she would probably have loved.

I failed to experience the ambient music that accompanied this monument. Campos-Pons, born 1959 in Cuba, and the composer Kamal Malaak, born 1962 in Philadelphia, live and work in Nashville. These are not young artists; they are honoring deceased icons. I collect collections of eminent women, which in part this piece is. Notice that Kouoh appears to wear a hooded cape and a switch that could become a flying broom. The branches and vines seem to intertwine through both women’s hands across to the final panel on the right, where the fruit is tight pink, open ruby red, and dried, three stages of life from top to bottom. Look again and see the feet of the “First” Black women in their spheres: both Kouoh and Morrison, looking confident, clever, happy, perch on branches with their subtle talons.

Campos-Pons’s painted panels are visibly hand made and upbeat, invoking folklore, murals, children’s book illustrations. The suggested taxonomies of reproduction or plant life—reminding me of the glass botanical specimens in the Peabody Museum at Harvard and similar enlargements at the In Bloom exhibit in Oxford—chime with the composite works nearby. Many of the artworks critique extraction and collecting even as they rather tenderly retro-fashion the forms of natural science. The anthropological object gazes and talks back.

Furies beating in the dark heart of a flower

The magnolia’s parts seem to have evolved from enlargements by Georgia O’Keefe. Flowers may be iconically female though they teach us in school that the sexual parts are both there. In Anne Spencer’s “Lines to a Nasturtium: A Lover Muses,” the flower is a sort of vagina dentata or carnivorous flytrap, but the intersexuality of nature is also present. The first five lines:

Flame-flower, Day-torch, Mauna Loa,
I saw a daring bee, today, pause, and soar,
Into your flaming heart;
Then did I hear crisp crinkled laughter
As the furies after tore him apart?

The poem’s two stanzas, eleven and fourteen lines respectively, vary rhyme schemes (often couplets like the first two lines above) as well as line length with “beating, beating” meter. Watching the sublime flower’s interactions that slay a bee and terrify a bird, the speaker (musing lover) insists on limited human perceptions: “some dread sight, and dafter/ Than human eyes as mine can see.” A miniature volcano Mauna Loa pulses beneath and the human is too large and unwinged to dare to explore. Yet even the nasturtium’s dread beauty pales before the lover’s dark beloved, “her hands like, how like, brown lilies sweet.” The beating “furies” in “her fire-lit heart” “flood” the lover’s senses when he remembers their embrace. The Browningesque subtitle presumes the lover is a man in the tradition of the gaze. But there is also global scale, “human eyes” rather than man’s, in this erotic blazon by a Black woman poet to a Black woman, muse perhaps, “her eyes a rising star.”

In valiant effort/hope of clearing both my bedside and study, I came upon a black hardcover notebook, orange endpapers and edging, with UVA DATA SCIENCE in white on the front cover. This is free merch for a relatively new school and building at the University of Virginia. For a year or so, the Digital Humanities Certificate (graduate) was housed in that school.

How had I used this notebook before? It has a few pages of notes from research about Anne Spencer (1882-1975), Harlem Renaissance poet, born in Virginia, lived in Lynchburg; her papers are at UVA and in 2024-2025 I had the joy of participating in a library exhibit about her life and work.

And I find a couple of pages of drafty memoir written as poetry. The first page is headed: Rosh HaShanah 2024/ 10/2/24 and I recognize my impressions of having my teeth straightened as I was turning seventy. I edited this piece of writing today (July 7, 2026).

Teeth

[The line breaks or spacing vary from my preference when I preview this for a small screen device—an iPhone plays a major role in this story, which I called in the notebook “My Year of Living Statistically.”]

Activities of Daily Living

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

For fifty years
I let myself imagine
the forensic eye that saw
     my skeletal jaw
and said, "Mid-West, female, no braces.
    Flouride, but lots of fillings..."
This would be long after I am gone.

All my advisees have perfect teeth.
In classes of four years they bring
   to my office their hopes, plans for Commerce School,
   and their St. Peter's circles, columnar
   astounding whiteness agreeing
regardless of race, creed, or color.

In secret, I loved my top front teeth,
    just like my father's and his farming grandparents'.
My in-laws, when we were newly wed,
    let me know my only flaw
    was the upper right canine.
Dentists saw no problem. My parents
    abhorred braces unless absolutely prescribed.
In early motherhood, I declined 
the insulting advice to straighten for mere aesthetics.

Well after my kids left home--
     heirs of non-bovine rows,
     their sweet, orderly teeth needing nothing--
I had to let the latex hands and drills
    dredge the canals of roots,
    pull the wisdom teeth, and crown.

Zooming, COVID era, I got sick
    of my hodgepodge clusters 
   closeup in the frames.

II. 2024-2025 Fifteen Months of Invisalign

"Why now?" my daughter asked.
"Why would you," my colleague wondered,
    "want one of those normative 
                smiles? Piano keys?"

Aligners, no longer like the front grille of a car,
     give you hidden process.
At home, the app and adjustable frame
    form your new habit for self-care
with smartphone.

They give you a beautiful
     personal trainer
     ambiguous ethnicity but very young, 
sleek as a mink,
     an orthodontic optimist, she/her.
This promptress of immortal patience
     befuddles and comforts with rites, points,
     praise, badges, encouraging chats.
A game of solitaire that smiles and speaks.

Talks you through: 
Retract your lips and cheeks, 
face the mirror with your device,
   rotate this grimace
   to scan.
"You can now remove your aligners."
When the scans with and without plastic sheaths
match to the intended mm change,
"You can now move on to your next aligners."
Advances you prepaid
   to week 22, to week 23.
It's doing something that improves.

Half a year of weeks and the goal
   recedes. They mold new denture sets, 
adjust the plan,
   survey anew the gullies and the bluffs.   
The molds retrain the troops enough
   but can't make a plateau. Knolls,
a skyline.

Nearing the end, the transparent fitted arcs
     are just echoes of my teeth, 
     like a butler's or trusted retainer's.
"People are more attracted to a natural look,"
    the doctor says. He's good, I see his
   practice donating orthodonture 
   to refugee and single-mom kids.
"You could have them filed down
    if they bother you," 
    says my sister-in-law, who venerates
    what doctors can do,
after warmly praising my straightened teeth. 

I've always loved my smile, to be honest, 
   and it looks better now in pictures, 
and it's still mine.
I hadn't foreseen when I signed on to the plan:
      I wear a guard in my mouth 
      for the rest of my sleeping life.

Self-Help Is on My Fractal Mind

[This heading is a link to one of my posts about self-help.]

I have plenty of other notebooks about Anne Spencer, who was an activist, gardener, librarian, wife and mother as well as poet. This lightly used notebook’s juxtaposition of the Spencer material with a holiday writing episode about Invisalign recurs in this post. But while we’re on these subjects: teeth and portraits. I notice that none of the photographs on which the Harlem Renaissance postage stamps are based shows a glimpse of anyone’s teeth. Generally, before improvements in dental hygiene and quick photography, sitters for portraits kept their mouths closed, as traditions of painted portraits had done. This has been studied, of course, and a decent summary of the history cites some serious sources.1 The most famous photographs of Spencer have her gazing thoughtfully or slightly smiling, with the exception of what may be more candid shots with her husband Edward and grandchildren in the garden at 1313 Pierce St. in Lynchburg. You can see one of these photos of Spencer smiling openly in the wonderful notice of a documentary by the Garden Conservancy, in their online magazine, GardenCenter: "Earth, I Thank You: The Garden and Legacy of Anne Spencer" will premiere Jan. 21, 2026.” The trailer; the documentary is available from the website of the Garden Conservancy.

Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović (1883-1962)

This is a companion piece to “The Stones of Croatia,” June 17. An outtake, in fact, as that post got unwieldy.

A Meta-Note: My readers are benefiting from the Road Scholar tour of Croatia that we took in May, “Island Hopping.” They (ten dozens of souls signed up for this) may also experience a lot of hopping if they open and read these posts. I conceive the Substack series (with some irony as surveillance is everywhere) as ‘Writing without Surveillance’: a place to try things out, the main guardrail being that it is public. My year (since June 2025) of experimenting with Substack’s possibilities—linking to other pieces, placing images with the text, adding participation in a network of Substack folks, and so on—has been a lifeline for me. But my readers might tell you that some of the kits that I send out, the beads and the string for assembly at home, aren’t always easy to put together yourself. My brain does the stringing and the bead-making, and I don’t make it simple or easy for me either. I am charmed by making the beads (unmatching pearls?), but there’s no harm in some effort at matching, at making the pieces easy for the user to thread.

Connections in the Threads

I’ve put this post in my Substack’s section ‘My race and place.’ It could also go with the ‘Statues…’ and the ‘Travel, Museums’ sections.

I’m remembering “American White Girl, 1960s-1970s” from last October.

See also Richmond, Indiana 1 and 2, about a year ago this month, in part:

I was just as interested in Indians [as in playing cowgirl Annie Oakley with a costume and toy gun]. Disney movies played their part. I once got a group of neighbor kids to pretend we were all an Indian tribe, upstairs in the bedroom I shared with Richie in early years, but it was mine alone then, and we were supposed to do a dance in our Indian costumes, which, somehow, included the girls wearing skirts with no underwear, and doing the can-can? Is this somehow Native? I knew this was risqué but have no memory of getting in trouble for it, or of it getting out of hand.

We found flint arrowheads in our vegetable garden.

Across the back alley was my little boy friend, nothing romantic, we were age 5, and sometimes I went over there to play. He always wanted to play war, and this was not, I realized then, a great game for a leading female role. I wanted to be a soldier too, and he insisted I had to be a nurse. I wondered why it was always the Civil War. Now I wonder which side he saw himself on.

Another context for this post is my decades of work on collections of the life stories and portraits, and on tourism to the homes and graves, of cultural heroes. These heroes often personify a national tradition. I wrote a book about the books and museums commemorating where authors lived—as mentioned in my post in March, 2026, Touring Wuthering Heights. Politicians, artists, musicians as well as writers, women as well as men, may get house museums, sometimes statues, often plaques. The cities and the countries use these markers to articulate pride. Actually, many cultural figures played for other teams: lived and died elsewhere; defied their upbringing; can’t be made to fit into a narrative (or exhibit or celebration) of unified progress over 250 years or thousands.

In a post (July 26, 2025) focused on books in a series, Famous Biographies for Young People (New York: Dodd, Mead, as of 1967), I referred readers to this theme in my work:

[this] kind of package for role modeling [is pervasive over centuries]…I called it “self-help history” in How to Make It as a Woman, a way for people to share in the …induction of young identities into mutual improvement.

I invite anyone to consider the current President’s churning efforts to mess with monumental federal buildings and displays, including his annotations of presidential portraits in the Presidential Walk of Fame in the West Colonnade of the White House, and the proposed garden of national heroes, which I wrote about in October: Heroes for America: Ranking and Forgetting in Public.

Could We Get Past Nationalism and Wars Waged on Differences?

I have an itchy, anxiety-dream feeling about nations these days. Daily dismay. Like they’ve discovered a tumor in my gut, the Strait of Hormuz. After cutting off the circulation in my limbs in Gaza and South Sudan. I’m not writing here about the Venice Biennale, but again, the idea of nations predominated in the early twentieth century when they built the national pavilions in the Giardini in Venice: fairs and exhibits and leagues competing under the aegis of peace, progress, and mutual understanding. This summer, I more than once asked why artists must represent their nation. Virginia Woolf in 1929 questioned whether women have a country. Patria chiming with patriarchy.

This summer’s World Cup has shone some lights of hope, even though I am not a good watcher of sports on TV. I get tense, and I’m sad for those young men in the Bosnia and Herzegovina team defeated by the US team July 1, 2026. It delighted us to bring home shirts with the Croatian uniform number 10, Modrić, for our grandchildren. And I’m seeing the lighter side, the cheering fact that few of the teams have only one passport per player. Soccer/football being truly international, many players grew up abroad from where they were born, and now they might be opponents of old teammates when they return to play for their country of origin. Birthright is at stake; we need to be wise about the porousness of birthright (a right absurd to deny). But identity isn’t fixed at birth. Moroccans who grew up in the Netherlands, excelling in football, now play on the Moroccan national team, speaking Dutch as well as French. Diasporas re-sort for these unifying conflicts across hemispheres and time zones; media and fandom seem to flout political borders and erase the real combat of war.

The Whereabouts of the Croatian Hero, Ivan Meštrović

Tour guides in several places we visited in Croatia proudly locate the sculptor Ivan Meštrović nearby: he was trained in Split in the Dalmatian stonework tradition as well as abroad, lived in Zagreb and Rome. Probably he is controversial with some today; he was pro-Yugoslavia and admired the Serbs and then was endangered in World War II by the Ustaša Croatian fascist movement.1 The truth is, nationality is a tenuous claim for almost anyone of note in the whole vicinity of the Adriatic.

I was startled to realize that a pair of equestrian statues in Chicago were by Ivan Meštrović.

Every girl adores a nude warrior? I would see the two immense bronze Indians (as we called them) on horseback when riding toward the magnificent cliffs of Michigan Avenue, looking up from the windows of a car my mother or father was driving.

Notice the Field Museum pinned on the map. I loved that museum’s 104 bronze statues by Malvina Hoffman, The Races of Mankind (1933), anonymous but individualized, exhibited not far from dinosaur bones.2 I didn’t know much about anthropology though Chicago was a center of it—learning more in my twenties and thirties (1974-1994) to question the Mismeasure of Man (Stephen Jay Gould).

Wikipedia now informs about the equestrian Native American men:

The Bowman and The Spearman, also known collectively as Equestrian Indians,^[1] or simply Indians,^[2] are two bronze equestrian sculptures standing as gatekeepers in Congress Plaza, at the intersection of Ida B. Wells Drive and Michigan Avenue in Chicago's Grant Park, in the U.S. state of Illinois. The sculptures were made in Zagreb by Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović and installed at the entrance of the parkway in 1928.

Note that this decade, the 1920s, saw statues erected in many US cities, often representing Confederate heroes, even in cities not part of the secession. Note that Charlottesville, Virginia’s summer of hate, August 11-12, 2017 (we were there, though not personally in the deadly) was sparked by a movement to take down statues of Confederate generals, erase the Lost Cause narrative written on the neighborhoods of Black residents in this small city under Jim Crow.

The fund for public statuary in Chicago came from a lumber magnate, Benjamin Ferguson. The riders have no weapons in their fists; these were never present in Meštrović’s design, but Daniel Burnham’s original design for Chicago’s park approach was to counterpoise an Indian with a Buffalo Bill white man.3 These facing, poised, muscular statues (unlike Hoffman’s) did not profess to refer to actual Indigenous men or horses; there is no distinction to locate a nation that occupied the great lakes or the southwest curve of marshland that was filled in to create Chicago’s lakefront. In 2021, the issue of removing white supremacist public art came to this city as elsewhere; the Chicago Monuments Project decided not to remove the Bowman and the Spearman.4

Not having seen many westerns, I didn’t see battle when I saw the athletic arm-spans of a man about to throw a spear and another about to launch an arrow—they seemed instead like the lion and the unicorn of Britain, essential virtues poised to defend, to guard the gate of this vast city. I loved the straining muscles of the men’s limbs as much as I thrilled to the horses. They certainly aren’t attacking the traffic; they might be contestants in a contest of might. Special gladiators never doomed. But of course that glamor had much to do with the conspiratorial narrative of the dying Indian—there were no such real people anywhere around here.

Especially in the early 1960s, as I approached age ten or eleven, I had read liberal-minded books humanizing the people who preceded Europeans, and I was no longer a horse (fantasy at age six or so), I just wanted to own and ride one. And I would pretend to be the chief of my own tribe. There was no fun, no future in being a squaw. I invented a sort of cuneiform alphabet and recruited some friends to be braves, and made a hatchet out of a stone, leather strips, and a stick. We rode our bikes and explored the Wooded Island behind the Museum of Science and Industry (South of the map detail here) and buried hatchets in our small backyard. As I recall, I was very serious about this. Not once suspecting that it was redface minstrelsy, though I was aware of the gender bending.

Native Genius Honored in Its Own Country

But in the era of Croatia’s status as independent nation and EU member, they will mention achievers in their birthplaces where possible. The splendid city (and island) Korčula claims Marco Polo (ca. 1254-1324) as native son, with a museum in a building said to be his birthplace, though Wikipedia cites many sources affirming that he was born in Venice. Dalmatia and what is now Croatia were dominated by Venice at bewildering intervals around Polo’s lifetime. I got the impression from a brief comment by a guide, pointing at a sign and statue, that Rudjer Josip Bošković (1711-1787), born in what is now Dubrovnik, invented the telescope or something similar about measuring the earth. But this Jesuit physicist didn’t invent the telescope and is declared to be Italian (died in Milan). This kind of emigration should put to rest all birthplace superstition, but it never will; it’s an ancient way, much relied on in world religions. So, Republika Hrvatska (which we call Croatian Republic) is entitled to its pride in its emissaries.

The beautiful harbor town, Cavtat, which was the old city (“Civita Vecchia”) before Ragusa before Dubrovnik, now has a fresh trompe l’oeil mural featuring famous men, anonymous gossiping women and a cat (by artist Filip Mrvalj and his brother).

The painter Vlaho Bukovac, painted at his easel in the mural (not shown), has a curious house museum nearby. Born in Croatia as Biagio Faggioni (1855 –1922), he elaborately frescoed and ornamented his parents’ house, set off as a sailor, studied art in Paris, tried stints in Peru and California, and figuratively traveled in miscellaneous fashions of the Salon in Paris—to judge by the collection in his museum, fiery images of Dante’s Inferno, Renoir and Sargent sorts of portraits, nudes, a few landscapes, a nightmare family portrait. In the 1890s, he was the sage of Croatian art in Zagreb.

Baltazar Bokošić (1834-1908) is the gentleman with the cane; he also gets a white seated statue on the waterfront of Cavtat, and has a house museum in Cavtat that is more library/archive than exhibit. Educated at several European institutions (PhD, LLD) and based for years in Vienna, for a time he served as librarian in the Slavic department of the Vienna Imperial Court Library. His expertise on the history and traditions of the South Slavs gave him a renown comparable to leading historians of the United States in its first century. He considered ethnic legal customs to be an archive of ancient traditions, and used his ethnography to establish a code of property law for Montenegro, later serving as that country’s Minister of Justice. The two Cavtat-born men, living in Paris, Bukovac painted a portrait of Bokošić in 1892. I glean all this from my laptop in Charlottesville, having never heard of either of the mural’s cultural heroes.5

That afternoon we climbed the cemetery hill to visit the beautiful Račić family mausoleum designed by Meštrović (1923)—lanky, woeful saints like columns tiptoeing the air, with a host of jolly angel faces dotting the domed ceiling. I liked this more than any modern building I saw in Croatia (by modern, I mean 1800-present).

The mausoleum in Cavtat is a fine modern take on classical architecture. Something in the designs also struck me as familiar, like gargoyles around the neo-gothic campus of the University of Chicago. I walked past Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House on my way to school—interest in stained glass in the era of electricity. The architectural and art schools blending on the plains of the Midwest.

It delights me to think of Meštrović as a professor at Syracuse University in New York State, and finally, at Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana. He died in South Bend, but he is buried in the Meštrović family mausoleum, near Otavice, Croatia.

Our Friend Al, aka “A-One”

In Europe in May (after the first heatwave and before the one at the end of June), we read that Education Secretary Linda MacMahon referred to A1 (pronounced A One) in a public meeting in April. She must never have listened to anyone she talked to or to the news the past five years—politics, education, economics, Trump’s Inauguration, data centers are all alert to this data rush. This is the same person who accepted nomination and appointment to a federal department that she thought should not exist.1 My guess is, she read the speech someone wrote for her. Reading it, yeah maybe you see the I as a 1. Or admittedly it could be an l (el). But “lntelligence” is resisted as I type. Some 396 million French speakers around the world would refer to l’intelligence artificielle; l’IA, pronounced Lee Ah. MacMahon graduated from East Carolina College in 1969 as a French major, though as she joined the Connecticut State Board of Education in 2009, she claimed it was a degree in education.2

So, we can be sure that this Cabinet member is well suited to help resolve the US crisis of education (including the decline in number of humans reading anything in print). In the musical chairs of Trump’s minions, MacMahon doesn’t have much time to catch on. I hear that a start-up that was hired in 2024 to implant an AI chatbot, Ed, to serve the LA Unified school system, as well as Miami-Dade Schools, filed for bankruptcy in September of that same year.3

The comments board members made in favor, in the press release of the agreement for Ed, sound like predicted generated bits: while there’s “…no substitute for the human connection – particularly the personal guidance of our teachers – our students deserve 21st century tools”—no need for me to cite the person saying this, since it’s not one person’s fault.

The three of us traveling in England, Croatia, and Italy in May and June were absolutely innocent of investing millions of taxpayer’s money in such schemes, or reaping any hedge funds or bits of coin. Amongst ourselves we decided ‘A-one’ was too much effort and sounded like you can’t have all the children be above average, so we chose something neutral but anthropomorphic, not ‘Ed’ but ‘Al.’ “Ask Al,” we would say to each other when anything, almost anything came up. It gave first-rate help on some details of the Biennale in Venice, for example.4 A polymath factotum living in that system of wires known as the Interwebs. It’s actually one of my nicknames. An alternative to saying “Hey Siri,” or “Alexa.” “You can call me Al.” Maybe Al looks more like Amalgam, pictured above?

I know, it’s a pleasant surprise when Al doesn’t make things up. It/he/they did pretty well with nearby restaurants, though in Venice, nearby food isn’t likely also to be good and well served. Too many tourists. But I don’t want to offend our beloved Venice.

Even now that we are back at home we ‘just ask Al’ about a lot of things that used to be in the Yellow Pages or to require reading an encyclopedia. Since I was delegating to my husband to do the searching, I was slightly surprised to realize he was using the AI Mode button on his Google app on his iPhone. As I write this, I glance at the prominent button in the upper right of the Chrome browser toolbar: “Ask Gemini,” with its symbol like a sparkly puncture, a small curved pink-blue diamond. I write this down just so the Monster Ingester of the Future (MIF) that will mash up all Substack posts and journal entries worldwide will have good data about how we did it in the late spring of 2026.

Can’t You Write?

At the Arsenale, after we were almost incapable of walking any more, I saw these hazard helmets afloat in the water berth (was this a shipyard?) not far from the Cave statue I nickname Al. I had to walk closer to the edge to take a picture (not shown because I like this angular image better) of the face sides of these staring heads with streaming hair, the tip of their noses at water level. Why are they lurking? They look powerful but also not free to surface or hide, not individuated.

Next thing, a man in security-guard clothes is rushing out of a door in the building along the low hill behind me, and suddenly a security-guard woman bursts out near me, shouting in English, “Can’t you write!” Gesticulating.

I never saw, even though she pointed off to the right of the picture I share here, the single sign prohibiting what I did.

My friend quickly corrected the woman: “read!” She shrugged, sure that fury and insult were her right, her high ground as Venetian security, never mind that she hated bothering to get the English words straight. Just today, some lady fell on the bed of rocks beside the water bank, just here. This time I did look where she was pointing.

OK, I didn’t fall. I wasn’t going to fall, having not stepped near the aimless, not-art rock hazard. The very-green water smells. I remembering saying almost nothing, moving away, thinking, I can write. Laughing afterwards. The whole point of the Biennale is to snoop into things that might be part of the exhibit, might not. Attractive nuisance is the very game the nations are playing. The fifteen orange heads look like trolls once you see their faces, but you have to trespass in order to see them. If this was a performative moment, it was no fun for the guards.

It would have helped if I had known what I can read now: this installation was part of Irish artist Alice Maher’s presence at “the 61st Venice Biennale, as part of In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. Maher’s 1996 water-based installation, Les Filles d’Ouranos, has been specially reconstructed at the Gaggiandre,” according to an article on Ocula by Aoife Murray with the byline 5 May 2026, Venice. The fifteen bouy-like heads are meant to refer to the birth of Aphrodite/Venus.

OK. I don’t want to go off on my rant about art that depends too much on the wall text or artist interview/statement. Because Maher does create works one is really curious to inspect more closely, that look alluring from a distance as well (see also Sibyls at the Biennale this year), even without their title or explanation. Obviously, I misread, didn’t look for, a submerged feminist critique of myth, having no clue about the artist in situ. Orange helmets in the Arsenale water had a masculine vibe to me.

If You Want Something Done Right…

DIY? No, I don’t hide under a macrame blanket and only talk to people in person. I’m a digital-humanities person since this century began. One benefit of this is that I can understand most of the words that the tech folks say (English). I’ve learned a lot from philosophers, sociologists, statisticians, economists, media studies, and computer science folk in regular meetings and lectures about neural networks, machine learning, generative AI. This “black box” is getting more powerful and alarming; it’s not a hobbyhorse at MIT anymore (see, I was alive then). Agentic AI Can Complete Whole Courses. Now What? (Inside Higher Ed). Meanwhile, for a couple of decades, I’ve collaborated with full-time library tech people, and I don’t hear them trumpeting “vibe coding” and the bots imbedded in all of our software.

Predictably, in every sense, I have been roped into one of the many competing strands of response to AI at the University of Virginia, like other institutions scrambling to catch up. See Al’s problems in my image at the outset: Nick Cave’s Amalgam (Mediation). I chair a subcommittee of the Provost’s AI Teaching and Learning committee (not to be confused with the parallel committee, Research). We call the committee AI AI or AI². Has the Turing test been passed? Everyday some student getting a B- is chortling “yes.”

So much human writing and reading is going in to trying to figure out what will become of us in a world of AI’s ubiquity. A few notes here.5 But I want to conclude this post with a bit of some possibly obsolete writing that so far has led to nothing: an amalgam of a bunch of reading I did a while ago. The genre is satire, manifesto, and conference abstract. That’s what I mean by “can’t/won’t you write?” “If you want something done right…” Go for the slow effort. I agree with Heather Hax, "AI and Critical Thinking, The Threat of Frictionless Higher Education,” Academe special issue, Spring 2026: AI in the Corporate University.

Here is my abstract for a conference CFP (I ended up declining the acceptance that came belatedly):

The Most That Has Been Thought and Said: A Satire of Speed in Writing and Research

Hua Hsu, in “The End of the Essay” (New Yorker [July 7 & 14, 2025]) invites us to look at AI as “an intervention in how people choose to spend their time.” The commercial premise is that a compression of your own time expands their money. As educators and writers, humanist faculty must resist the premium on speed and object to the idea that our process is onerous, to be delegated or cut. The quick fix contradicts the aims of literature/art and education. This paper presupposes concerns about AI highlighted by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna, The AI Con: generative LLMs are “synthetic text extruding machines”; and by Katherine Bode and Lauren Goodlad (2023), and Johan Fredikzon (2025) in Critical AI. The issues include bias and distortion, exploitation of labor and intellectual property, and environmental footprint. Generated AI texts, apart from convenient summaries, may pass, but a reader usually detects nonsense hastily predicted or recklessly aggregated. James Gleick warns of the evisceration of knowledge in the hands of utterance generators, discourse predictors: “one side of the communication does not have meaning” (NYRB July 24, 2025). While there is promise in agent-based “deep research” tools such as Perplexity or Undermind, these save effort to begin or organize research or writing, not for the originating, unpredicted combinations and insights entailed in creative and scholarly non-fiction, where facts and truth matter and style should have some vital difference from the norm. The humanist must encourage humor and skepticism, play and adversarial inquiry, not only to overcome “hallucinations” and the “epistemological indifference” of the AI models, but also to train ourselves and students to recognize the “performance capacity” of machine intelligence—the known limitations of an apparatus that strives to impress us as human-like (Goodlad, “Humanist in the Loop,” Critical AI April 1 2025 3 [1]). Writing may become what Matt Kirschenbaum has called “grey goo” when models are trained by models. Like slow food and idling thought (not aimed at nearterm payoff), our play with and defiance of AI will take time and vigilance.

Pučišća…that’s where we were brought one morning in May. In Notes on my iPhone I wrote “puchishcha, pronounced.” On the Road Scholar “Island Hopping” tour (eleven days) of Dalmatia (the southern coastal rim of Croatia), we visited the island of Brač for two days. We arrived the first day by early ferry from Split and our bus took us to Pučišća, where we visited the Stonemason School (Klesarska Śkola, founded 1909). Students admitted to the school (about fifty per year) have the honor to learn the hard way: using tools as they were in Aristotle’s day.1 The student guide showed us blocks of stone that had been boulders 600 hours ago; each student has to make a block and then must devote months to painstaking removal of further segments to reveal the sculpted shape. They let us use a mallet (see the tools on the table pictured below) to hack at a block. I felt the indirect impact on my forearms and neck, and watched for the tiny drift of mineral flakes that yielded after several blows. How hopeful to imagine a figure latent in the rock! The guide explained, “This is not art.” Though isn’t there “art” in engineering, aesthetics in architecture? They work from stencils and models, and learn to fulfill specs for restoring very old buildings. Graduates of the school may go on to use the latest power tools better, drawing on the ancient methods, than if they started with the modern shortcuts. No AI shunning of time and effort here.

The limestone of Brač, “veselje,” has a scintillating whiteness. From the quarries it made its way across the Roman Empire, later to Venice, and to Austria and Hungary (parliaments in Vienna and Budapest). In their turn, these powers left their inscriptions and figures in the ports and piazzas. Guides mention that Croatian limestone was used in the White House, in parts that I hope resist being Trumpled.

We bought various souvenir gifts made of stone in the stalls near the harbor, and enjoyed the quiet of the little town, removed from traffic and tourist crowds; flowers in the shade of walls, children playing in the local school yard.

This won’t be a thorough travelogue like Rebecca West’s lasting book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. In the 1930s, she knew the region well and wrote a massive, intricate book that I still haven’t finished, reading it as slowly as poetry in some parts. Getting to see sides of Croatian islands between Split and Dubrovnik will help me make more sense of the history of the Balkans and Europe. Croatians want you to know, intensely, that the 1990s battles were not Balkan wars but a civil, inter-ethnic war. Rebecca West saw what fueled the two world wars, as she foresaw the disaster of Hitler’s rise and (I read her as anticipating) the combustion that would follow the end of the fiction of united “South Slav-ia,” Yugoslavia. The tourism today is focused more on ancient and early modern history, on lavender and olive oil as national essences, on scenery and sports, on Croatia as a member of the European Union, tolerant and progressive.2

I had expected Diocletian’s Palace, in Split, on our first morning of the tour, to be a highlight. They have excavated, reconstructed or accounted for most of the magnificent complex, the Roman Emperor’s combined retirement residence, garden, and military base (third century CE). Much of the original is embedded in buildings that reused the stones; shops and Airbnbs seeming to melt into the thick fortress walls. Nothing commonplace about ruins of this age. Yet the crowds and an unimaginative guide somehow dulled it for me. The limestone came from Brač, as the emperor had come from the region himself.

Instead, what I remember most strikingly after a few weeks have passed is the shaping of anonymous stones. I never saw so much stone in my life. (There is a town called Ston, on the Peljesac Peninsula near Dubrovnik rather than the island of Brač, known instead for ancient salt farming and fortress walls.) In Brač and some parts of the islands we saw, to get anything like a field, stones had to be excavated, pried up, lifted, and piled.

I asked aloud, “How do you tell the difference between a field and a quarry?”

I wonder if some of these hillsides were vineyards; wine-making in this region predates the ancient Greeks. Most of it looks like semi-unpaved pasture partly reclaimed by low-need trees. Scars of millennia like terraces in Tuscany. I also thought of English hedgerows, human-land-ceature collaborations. So little regarded; this was just the wild source for many of the stones of Venice. Each grey welt or wrinkle is dry stone, the walls without mortar. These marks register a bit like tree rings, a proxy for years of human hours. Miles of this made us tired on their behalf. At some villages, there was a stonework business not far from a cemetery, the materials prepared as needed.

Croatian farms flourished during the later nineteenth century as suppliers of the grapes that France and others lacked with the spread of grape phylloxera. When the blight came to Croatia in the early 1900s, many agricultural families were ruined, and many migrated across the Atlantic, including to the US: Pittsburgh; Napa Valley and the rest is Sideways. In a little museum, we encountered a young man and woman from Chile who consulted the curator to trace the woman’s ancestry in that village.

Museums and tours try to recreate or record past folkways, old methods, artefacts. The recounting of and adherence to old methods surfaced not only in the Stonemason School. We had demonstrations of old ways of making olive oil and raising oysters. Once a leading producer of olive oil as well as grapes, Croatia has been overshadowed by other countries.3 We videoed ourselves replacing a mule or a man pushing the crossbar of the millstones to grind the olives into pulp in heavy truck-tire-shaped hemp sieves; it takes muscle to stack these sieves and lower the press on the stack to yield the best of the oil. Is all of our “cold pressed, extra virgin” olive oil what it says? Look for dark containers and labels with place and date of origin (like vintage). Mechanical presses and steam and adulteration yield more to sell, but betray the ancestral hard work. Here tourists again are reaffirming a national practice, superseded but essential (more than one sense), as in the solemn, pricey tea ceremonies in souvenir shops in China.

Adriatic vista. Not much different than in Homeric times. The road you see is paved, two-lane, and a vital cross-island route. The bus took us to the summit of Brač, the highest point among the “thousand islands.” It was hot for May, and the trees and underbrush were green but the air felt dry, as if part of Spain (Extremadura) or the American West, sage-brush mountain scrub, had migrated near sea-level.

We came midday to a rambling hill farm where they served an ample outdoor lunch. The meats and vegetables had been roasted under metal domes in a large stone fireplace, the wood fire burned down to coals and ash. It was a beautiful farm (as in the turquoise door high in the stone wall). I wandered off to watch the gleaming goats skitter away, the cats stay put in the sun. I took pictures of the abandoned residential buildings, like famine houses in Ireland. Stone roofs gone, beds growing fungi, rusted iron furniture.

The Ashmolean Museum exhibit , In Bloom, is colorful, scented, and exotic in the sense that we learn of the interdependence of empires and the trade in plants. There were the obvious topics of tulips and roses manias, of cabbages and kings. Then I learn to my shock how recently irises became a possibility for nostalgia for one’s mother’s garden in childhood. The very daffodil that inspires Wordsworth and the millions of children ever since is no native or ancient British plant. I can’t forget being in the Lake District in August, 20 years ago, gazing at a garden that commemorated Wordsworth alongside other tourists. An East Asian man, tourist of literary sensibility or at least instruction like myself, asked me in puzzlement, “Where are the daffodils?” I kept the hilarity to myself as I explained their season. But, laugh’s on me, daffodils are an import like china or tea.

We were in luck arriving at the brand new White Box, Schwarzman Center, Oxford, when a curator, a young woman perhaps from Poland, could guide and explain to we three. This is one of the largest data viz walls I have ever encountered.

My admiration to Refik Anadol for beauty and sublimity, the intimate and colossal, that doesn’t require a gallery talk or pamphlet to explain it. But its audience can be botany mavens, historians, data wonks, anyone who loves a multicolored flower bed and kaleidoscopes. I have colleagues in English, digital humanities, and archives who would love this Large Nature Model display.

Began this post earlier in May and I have been encountering representations of flowers and real ones in various settings in the meantime. Everywhere the fiction of simultaneously blooming species brought from edges of other climates.

May 13 picture: Paolo Porpora (1617-1675), Still Life with Flowers in an Urn, Butterflies, and a Snake, About 1650s. Compton Verney, Warwickshire.

Always willing to notice exhibits as encounters between presenters and visitors, I took a picture of what is placed beside this painting in the gallery. Can’t you just imagine dipping your nose toward the beaker of the warm South, pressing the black bulb? And encountering some sort of sting, some scent of mortality.

During these florid travels, I have become convinced that I have no more ideas and can hardly write. This will certainly pass, and I was glad to come back to see this draft of a post waiting in my almost unused iPad.Watch these pages for some frequent brief samplings of the experiences we had in Croatia and Venice as well as England.

Credit: from Monte Burke, “Could A River Runs Through It Have Been a Hit Today?” New York Times April 20, 2026

If you have memories of the Robert Redford movie (1992)1 or the book from back in the day (first edition, April, 1976), I recommend reading Monte Burke’s well-turned article, which quotes appropriate people about Norman Maclean, the career and the man.

When I knew Norman Maclean (1902-1990), especially in the 1960s, he seemed old to me; now I’m at the time of life he was when he published his beautiful book, and I feel suspicious of generalizations about “the old.” He wrote a classic novella followed by a second elegy to young men and the West, Young Men and Fire, published posthumously. His voice was a growl through slackening lips, but he was sharp to notice a young person individually or to express any outrage with added Dickensian or barroom flourishes—against those who mishandled his books; against effete elites. During his years teaching at the University of Chicago, before his wife Jessie’s long illness, he was robust and ready to wrestle with anything. I noticed him most in the mid-1960s, when I was in middle and early high school and Norman would come over to our house before Mom, Dad, he, and I drove out to one of the forest preserves on the western fringes of Chicago for a long, talkative walk (warmly wrapped against wind and cold). He kept a thermos of tea and whiskey in the car, for when Dad drove us all home.

Credit: Leslie Strauss Travis, “Norman Maclean Teaching,” University of Chicago Press (Wikipedia)

“How’s the poet?” he usually asked me first thing, a kind of peer-to-peer check-in. I shared my collections of poems with my father and allowed them to be shared with Norman. I quailed. My work, though I loved the little things, was never grownup- league in my eyes. Being in training from a tomboy to a girl (or heroine; see Northanger Abbey), I was self-conscious.

“It’s coming along.”

“Keep it up.” It was kind coaching: you’ll get there. I liked Norman, short and dressed like a woodsman, who never playacted the way grownups do when encountering kids. He was a great talker, and though I’ve always had an overworked radar to detect self-centered monologues, his streaks had the listener in mind and left openings for teasing. As Rebecca McCarthy, who remembers Norman from when she was sixteen, writes in her biography of Maclean, “his mind and sense of humor remained youthful, and his curiosity buoyed him.”2

Where have all the readers or literary metaphors gone?

Monte Burke in the New York Times article linked at the top of this post relishes the fiftieth anniversary of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. It was a sleeper hit and the first fiction issued by the University of Chicago Press, having been “snubbed by the publishing literati, deemed unmarketable.” Could anything like Maclean’s lyrical novella, a hit among fly fishermen, succeed with so many readers and become a popular movie if it came out now, fifty years later? Today may be “a perilous time for male readership of fiction”; less than 28% of men read books, according to one estimate, Burke observes. Anecdotally, my corner of Substack seems abuzz with complaints about the degeneration of style, quality, prestige, and sales for literary fiction. (OY’s Substack: “The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction,” June 14, 2025, challenges the evidence of decline, questioning the NEA data that only 38% of Americans read literature.)

Norman’s younger colleague, my father Wayne Booth, also a Western-raised transplant at the Hutchins-inspired U. of C., outlived him by fifteen years. Booth finished an autobiographical work just before he died in 2005: My Many Selves: The Quest for a Plausible Harmony (Utah State University Press, 2006). It too had been passed on by several publishers, including his home, the University of Chicago Press. Near the end of a chapter entitled “A Would-be Novelist Mourns,” I found, using the index, a mention of Norman Maclean as an admired success at what he himself had wished to do. Booth has been describing a lifetime of attempts to write for a non-academic audience, realizing that his ornate satirical fiction or essays were unintentionally but “aggressively elitist—unintelligible except to the narrowest of audiences,” with Joycean wordplay and allusions. This unsuccessful and often unfinished writing Booth regards as another split among his many selves: rarified creative writing contradicts his lifelong teaching as “the prophet of clarity” and accessibility in writing as in teaching (232). This is an old cultural divide, he realizes: a tension between literary difficulty vs. “‘plainspoken’ style.” The long history of the style choices is a long history of attacking bad audiences, as when Somerset Maugham in 1938 resented having to write plays that were intelligible to the uneducated.

I’m looking at this passage in Wayne Booth’s mixed-mode memoir because he ends it by celebrating Maclean’s capacity to hit a rhetorical sweet spot, giving pleasure to a wide audience without sacrificing literary excellence. But first, Booth offers a great example of overdoing literary style: Eudora Welty (1909-2001), who might be seen as a regionalist like Maclean.3 I remember my father avidly reading paperbacks of Welty in our house. But in Many Selves she is the opposite of plainspoken clarity, page upon page of similes and metaphors. Example: “a house appeared on its ridge, like an old man’s silver watch pulled once more out of its pocket” (Welty, Losing Battles, Booth 233). Booth is tempted to take out his “revision machete” on Welty. Maybe you, the reader, are bored with the plain style of his life narrative? He could rewrite the opening sentences of the book to suit.

Continuing from Welty and his own memoir’s style, Booth is reminded of “a memory of how Norman Maclean hyped up A River Runs Through It. A former student of his, by then a top cat at Yale, responded to Maclean’s trembling request for advice about a stinky draft with, ‘It’s gotta have more metaphors.’ So Norman went back through the draft, sneaking in metaphors as if he were brightening the river scene by planting flowers along the bank” (italics in original; 234). Mom and Dad were part of the extended group of people reading or hearing drafts of A River Runs Through It and its travails in a quest for publication; the drama of Norman’s second career was a group improvisation.

Part of Booth, one of the many selves, asks if he should “crawl along humbly in [Maclean’s] path, like a dachsund feeling crushed by his master’s curse, and…” (ellipses in original 234). A joke about too many similes (in Welty style). Anyone can go overboard with tropes. But Maclean, teacher of Shakespeare and the Romantics, succeeds in a middle way, a book that spoke plainly and plangently to many about a United States that was not East Coast or long settled or genteel. Even the Chicago side of Norman’s story about his brother Paul, a murder in the mean streets, is written out of the novella, placing Paul’s death in Montana. Yet to make the reader see in color, you need the flowers of speech.

The rage of the bereft

In the spring of 1970, my family and Norman coincided in London in times of mourning, we for my brother’s death in July, Norman for his wife who had died of esophageal cancer at the end of 1968. Norman had been in and out of hospital for his heart condition (he never stopped smoking).4 According to McCarthy, in early 1970 Maclean was hospitalized for months of mental health treatment. In the spring, Norman came to London, and I remember we saw him at our apartment in Putney. There were walks in parks, milder than the frigid Chicago plains; Mom remembers taking him to Kew Gardens, where you paid to rent a chair on the lawn and Norman embarrassed her with a rude remark to one of the attendants.

My memory, across the 56 years since, told me that Norman came to London for a long period to constantly lean upon my mother, a psychologist who often was a mainstay for the wounded. Part of the time he was in London, Dad was in Italy at Bellagio (Rockefeller Foundation); I remember talk of “Villa Serbelloni,” though that is now a spectacular hotel. Mom helped to calm Norman down and dealt with his obliviousness. I had a tape in my head of watching a naked Id writhing in pain, sloppy and moaning, and of my blazing anger. It seemed to me, at 15, that it was hard enough to be a teenager alone with numbed or processing parents, and how dare someone else come along and rage like King Lear!

In McCarthy’s biography, the kid’s angle is wrong in the main points, though my parents are part of Norman’s London story. He was staying in a bed-and-breakfast near where Gwin and Ruth Kolb (Chicago English Department friends of Macleans and Booths) were on sabbatical in Chelsea. It was the Kolbs who were watching over Norman, who was in London for a few weeks only. When one day he didn’t show up, they contacted Scotland Yard, and he was found wandering in a fugue state. The Kolbs reached out to my parents and the four of them decided Norman should be put on a plane back to Chicago, where he was treated for depression in the psychiatric ward of Billings Hospital (162-63).

Forgiving

I was sad, anxious, and solitary in England; I never saw my school friends on evenings or weekends. But I loved to be in England where I already had earlier memories of the coal odor breathing up out of Tube station, the muddy-fingered greengrocers speeding the vegetables you ask for into twisted paper, calling you “luv.” We went to theater and concerts and museums, I enjoyed our trips to Sussex and Devonshire and York; everything was still interesting and about me. I was writing poems with secret vanity and keeping up a correspondence—airmail letters—with friends in the US. It must have been so much worse for my parents, having lost their 18-year-old son in a car accident, having to face the fragility of a body they had raised, of their own aging bodies. I think my sister had a harder time than I (still under the parents’ wings), although she thinks I had a harder time. She had just graduated from college, and after a few weeks of all four of us in the small Putney flat, she rented a room in a flat with a woman who worked in publishing. We were all in the same stew of grief but I empathize with being just twenty and figuring out how to start life without a brother. She was planning to train to be a teacher.

My jealous possessiveness of my parents, who were not collapsing and drowning their sorrows, added to my unforgiving reaction to Norman in London. Disgust and alarm to see a grownup fling himself into woe. I doubt anyone noticed my reaction, though my parents wouldn’t have hidden their response to Norman from me.

I see that McCarthy and the people she interviewed have already put out there Norman’s grudges, illnesses, heavy drinking, the inconsolability of the widower unhinged. While I was away in college (1972-1976), I lost track of Norman personally even as his book was growing famous. I learn from McCarthy that Norman began to take swipes at my father and others associated with the English department and press at the University of Chicago, including writing a letter to my father insulting him for not taking his side against Morris Philipson, the press director (Mom and Dad were close to the Philipsons). When I was sharing a draft of this post with Mom, she said Norman always saw something tribal, for or against, almost the same words that McCarthy has my father saying, about Scottish clan warfare. But soon, Norman resumed regular walks with Wayne and Phyllis Booth.5

Mom recently recalled visiting Norman one summer at his place in Montana, as they were heading to their Utah cabin. Norman took them out in a rowboat on Seeley Lake and attempted to teach them fly fishing. Mom recalls being instructed to picture the landscape as a clock face with the fisher in its center: swing the rod and pause at 2 o’clock; swing and pause at 10 o’clock (a quick Internet check indicates different opinions about the times and the whole metaphor).

Dad exclaimed, “But Norman, we haven’t caught any fish!”

Norman scoffed. “You’re not gonna catch fish in a lake!” Mom figures that they were in open water because they were going to get their lines caught in any trees or underbrush.

There was value in learning the art regardless of edible reward or boasting rights. You know you’re never going to get good at it—try to learn it for the love of it.6

Writing while not in place, not one self

This week, I was reading an interview of Percival Everett by Ayize Jama-Everett (not related), February 4, 2023, reprinted in LA Review of Books 15th anniversary issue, 2026. They are discussing stories that Everett wrote in Paris about Wyoming. Jama-Everett asked about “us[ing] fishing as an entrée to the West.” Everett replied: “there’s a history of that: Norman MacLean’s [sic] A River Runs Through It (1976); River Why (1983) by David James Duncan…that’s my relationship to the West: fly-fishing and horses” (44). From sea to shining sea, there have long been Black hunters, fishers, cowboys, and there was never true terra nullius for homesteaders to claim.

Wayne Booth shared some of Norman’s attachment to the West of childhood. His career required a move east. He wrote The Rhetoric of Fiction mostly in Indiana and London. In 1961, Chicago became his base. But from 1968, portions of his books were written in an A-frame wood cabin in the Utah mountains, beside a creek surrounded by national forest, not far downstream from Robert Redford’s resort, Sundance (initial home of the film festival). For Norman, place, the outdoors, was catalytic. My father loved to hike and exclaim about the intense mountain flowers along the trail, always more magnificent than he’d ever seen, every year. Utterly different writers, Norman and Wayne both should be understood as “Chicago School.” Self-myth-making makes any autobiographer an unreliable narrator.

With Good Reason is a long-running nonprofit radio program. Jim Phelan hosts Paley (the text) and me for an episode of a podcast that has been running monthly for over four years from Project Narrative at Ohio State University.

I give a longwinded introduction because I have a lot of reasons to be glad we were reading and discussing this story, and there is always more to be seen in it. You can listen now, or read a bit further here beforehand.

Jim Phelan and Alison Booth, episode 54, Project Narrative podcast, Grace Paley, “A Conversation with My Father”

Gallows humor

Almost anywhere in Grace Paley’s short story, “A Conversation with My Father,” you could find a gem of what the father in the story thinks are missing the point or taking an easy way out: “jokes.” “When will you look it in the face?”

The father, a retired doctor experiencing heart failure, asks his unnamed daughter, a writer, to write a story like the great Russian writers he remembers. She produces a bare outline about a mother and son in their neighborhood, and he is incensed.

“You misunderstood me on purpose. You know there’s a lot more to it. You know that. You left everything out. Turgenev wouldn’t do that. Chekhov wouldn’t do that. There are in fact Russian writers you never heard of, you don’t have an inkling of, as good as anyone, who can write a plain ordinary story, who would not leave out what you have left out. I object not to facts but to people sitting in trees talking senselessly, voices from who knows where …”

“Forget that one, Pa, what have I left out now? In this one?”

“Her looks, for instance.”

“Oh. Quite handsome, I think. Yes.”1

The father has just objected to another Paley story, “Faith in a Tree,” in which Faith Darwin, protagonist of many Paley stories, perches in a tree to listen and watch her neighbors in the playground below.

So the daughter tries to nourish him with details he asks for to make the characters seem real: family background, education.

Jane Austen makes fun of the appetite for such nuggets of gossip, for inside scoops of other people’s lives, in Pride and Prejudice, when the rumor mill of Meryton vicinity tries to describe the eligible bachelor who has rented the great house, Netherfield: he wore a blue coat and rode a black horse. But what is his character, and how will that affect Mrs. Bennet’s girls? That we must read on to learn.

The joke on the profession of writing, at the heart of Paley’s story, is that readers put faith in the writer’s arbitrary choices of details, even though “there’s a lot more to it” and “invention” is a “responsibility” that can’t help leaving most things out. The father can’t stand “an unadorned and miserable tale.” The realist tale with the details, the second version inside Paley’s short story, ends with the mother’s sorrow. The father believes in that closure. The daughter doesn’t settle for the lonely tragedy, seeing hope in community rehabilitation.

Credit: LiteraryLadiesGuide.com

I hope, like me, that you love preposterous as well as smoothly realist fiction; I hope you’re tickled by the gently grim humor of this story, which is, as I say in the Project Narrative podcast, entertainment while dying.

Have a listen from the link here, when you have the leisure, or take it on a walk as you might an audio book. Imagine trying to write a story on demand to please someone who is in grave physical shape, who can’t reach oxygen by himself. The podcast asks guests to read the text aloud, and though it doesn’t take many pages in a printed book, it is longer to experience than flash fiction, certainly. Shout out to Jacqueline Doyle and flash.

Jim Phelan and Alison Booth, episode 54, Project Narrative podcast, Grace Paley, “A Conversation with My Father”

In Paley’s story, the narrator (similar but not identical to Paley herself) gives in because she has agreed not to upset her ailing parent. She takes more time and produces the inner tale, again about a mother who becomes a junkie to be close to her son and his generation, and who remains addicted after he becomes a health nut and leaves her behind.

The dying father’s response is to harp on the end, the end, a “tragedy.” The writer likes to give characters the hope of possibility, which we have while living: the heroine is a forty-year-old, good looking woman with the “education” of experience.

“She did change. Of course her son never came home again. But right now, she’s the receptionist in a storefront community clinic…”

Credit: Understanding Animal Research

I still have a visceral sense of prickling feet on one’s hand as one holds the tail of one of these unique living creatures.

About a dozen years after the events took place circa 1967 (ok, this story is autobiographical fiction), I lived in an apartment with my boyfriend and a woman friend, all of us in New York City after Ithaca: “515 West 111th St./ Apartment 3C/ New York, New York 10025” carefully typed like a quatrain in the lower righthand corner of the cover page of one copy of the story. We had mice. We had roaches. We had no AC. It was between Amsterdam and Broadway, not far from Columbia, and I had a part-time job at Columbia in the admissions office, and then worked for a Chemistry professor as a “word processor” for his grant applications. The other part time, I was writing stories and sending them out by mail. I wasn’t afraid of the occasional mouse nor did I get flustered when a few roaches crawled on my clothes when I was at the kitchen sink—there were just too many of them. The only thing that creeped me out was the very dead mouse that had been compressed several layers down in our pile of old newspapers—I don’t think we planned to recycle them, was recycling an option in 1978-1979? Anyway, we had a pile of newspapers and the general conditions of The Bertha (as the apartment building was called) meant a smell of dead mouse didn’t alert us to look.

I want my readers to see the outline of a metal paperclip on the first page and a fainter trace on the last page. The handwritten “She” in blue ink, and the Wite-out or Liquid Paper (see my previous post, “Auto-Complete”).

For the rest, click on the pdf from a scan from a typescript of the 15-pp. text.

Note: it was a self-education today to move this ephemeral paper typescript into a more portable but proprietary and thence ephemeral medium, scanned image files; thence to pdf, and thence as a link here. How lasting a link from a Substack page may be, I don’t want to predict.

I spare you the summary of the document that the AI agent kindly offered to prepare for me.

This is a current pair of my own glasses. Warby Parker, made in China. My very latest are almost frameless, but I like the options, and I like very much how glasses similar to these look on my sister, for instance.

As to why I’m looking at corrective lenses, a personal timeline of glasses, I like the
biographies of things. And I’ve already posted about Glasses 1. Glasses are one of the daily objects that make or break your spirit for the day: where are my/is my ___? Try singing the lyrics to my “song,” “Chasing Glasses,” to the tune of Norah Jones, “Chasing Pirates” (2009, from her fourth album, The Fall), which has a surreal YouTube video. The best part of the song is the effect of a pounding heart: chords pulsing:

1 2 3 4 _ _ - - 1 2 3 4 _ _ - - as if everyone is doing tick tick instead of tick tock; when the offbeat snare joins in on the ‘three,’ you really feel the sinking echo in the following hyphen bumps. Duh duh duh duh duh duh / / duh duh duh duh duh duh / /

Now that I’ve passed that ear-worm on to you, it’s not what I wanted to write about here.

Timeline of Frame Styles

I recently assembled an automated slideshow (timed to change every half minute or so) of photographs of my mother for her 100th birthday party in March, 2026. I noticed a century of changing fashions in women’s eyewear. I don’t want to put these personal pictures on this social platform, of course, but it’s tempting.

When I got married in 1982, I was wearing contacts, and my sister’s eyesight didn’t call for glasses till later in life. In 1982, Mom wore large squarish lenses in tortoise-shell style plastic frames spanning from brow to cheekbone—the vintage glasses from the disco era, sometimes named Joan Collins or Lynda Carter style.

By around 1989, in a photo of Mom as grandmother to my little kids, I’m wearing glasses that remind me of hers in the 1950s: large lenses in an oxen-yoke, plastic-tortoise-shell; Mom is wearing large-lens gold-wire-rims; a version of these recur throughout the 1990s. In a photo with her father, my grandfather, on his ninetieth birthday, they are both wearing the large lenses, his with thicker, tinted plastic frames. For a couple of decades, contacts were my main outlook during the day; glasses were for home relaxation.

In 2009, someone photographed my sister, me, and Mom on her couch in the apartment she has lived in since 2005. Mom’s eyewear hasn’t changed much. My sister has taken on wire-rims. And I have a thin rectangle across my upper face, an Italian design in purplish-red plastic.

By 2014, I see that I persisted in a horizontal-frame plan; I recall they were slightly shiny metal in shades of aquamarine. In these years, except when she is wearing sunglasses on some hike or other, my mother (in pictures) looks as if she might not be wearing glasses at all.

The birthday party was a special gift from my daughter, the event planner (from NYC to Durham, NC): the amazing Events by Emily company. She arranged Nicole Skeffington’s terrific catering, Niche&Co, TaylorLynnStudios (detail above), and wonderful flowers.

In the photos, my millennial daughter is wearing frames named Tobias, shown above. Warby Parker and other online purveyors favor personifying the styles. My sister is wearing a pair of glasses like those in the first image of this post. I have donned glasses with nearly invisible frames—only now I realize they are like those Mom wore for the decades before and after 2000.

The celebrated centenarian, instead, wears a nice pair of softly rectangular glasses that make very little statement about a cultural decade in this bicentennial year (see Jill Lepore March 2, 2026, New Yorker): comfortable and matter-of-fact rather than spacy or sly or startling or superpowered: frames and temples of a subtle combination of white and black and teal. These are not “vintage.” They really suit her, as did every frame she has ever worn. I couldn’t find any images of these glasses online, so this is a detail of an outdoor family picture of her, about four years ago.

New Frontiers of Corrective Lenses

The 100th birthday celebration has made many folk happy including Mom—it pleased all the senses, with about 85 guests and a string quartet of friends playing. But our Very Strange Epoch marches on, dispelling any personal satisfactions with the daily signs that the Departments of Justice and of Defense aka War have lost their minds, while universities are diving into AI before they notice the signs saying this is the shallow end. Yes, I’m on one of the university’s many committees re AI.

It’s not news that smart wearables are leading us into the “Internet of Things,” augmenting our reality, making anything “Meta.” In the world of disability, there is some good news in affordances such as reading your email or a document aloud to you. I had dismissed Google Glass (circa 2013). But one afternoon earlier this month, I was driving in Virginia with public radio on, and two people were discussing the use of AI glasses for elderly and dementia patients (I had just been to the Lighthouse with my mother in Chicago to explore devices for her eyesight). And the next day, we ran into a friend who was attending a concert with his hearing-aid AirPods and his Meta glasses (for reading the program). I can picture the helpfulness of these devices.

Identity-neutral (supposedly), black rectangles—a style that endures. (Most of my search results for Meta Ray-Ban AI Glasses showed young men.)

In July, NIH reported on AI-assisted smart glasses in a way that raises alarm:

Google’s Verily Life Sciences has launched the four-year Project Baseline, which aims to recruit 10,000 participants to integrate data from wearable devices and genetic testing, with the goal of predicting emergencies such as strokes and seizures.

How will you feel with your little attribute-character, devil or angel or talking pet, sitting in your ears advising you? Or recognizing people for you (like “Gary” [Tony Hale] on VEEP)? Or feeding you lines to spare you the Prufrock social failure? Right at this moment I am enjoying the reflection of my own azaleas in my neighbor’s porch windows, which might confuse a bird or an image-recognition bot and would not be included in an assistive description, but for me now, needs not a scintilla of augmentation.

The image credit says a lot: Brontë Adventures.

I had a blast doing this interview on the public radio program With Good Reason, with host Sarah McConnell. The episode is called “Touring Wuthering Heights,” Aired on over thirty stations.

The interview was timed for the new film. I still haven’t seen Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights—for various reasons, I’ve only been to one movie in a cinema in 2026! Something must be done about that. But you will have your own opinion of this free adaptation. Fidelity to the book isn’t my main criterion, for Austen, or Mary Shelley, or any author. See Clueless (dir. Amy Heckerling, 1995).

Of course, there’s no substitute for reading the book. But bring on the amplifications, the complements. Read an author’s biography, short or long. Explore their setting (their times and places). I am a fan of “writers’ shrines and countries”—and you can do this as an armchair reader of “homes and haunts” books. But why not act on this impulse to visit the places where films were made? You who care about the Brontẽ sisters: go explore Brontë Country for yourselves. Be sure to realize how overlaid everything is with generations of false replicas: photographs of Ponden Hall as if it were truly Thrushcross Grange, or the ruin, Top Withens, as the remains of the real Wuthering Heights.

Top Withens photographed around 1900. Wikipedia sharing an illustration from a 1923 biography of the Brontës’ father, Patrick, by Alice Law.

The ruin that stands there now makes it perfectly clear to attentive readers of Emily Brontẽ’s single novel that the farmhouse where Catherine, Heathcliff, and Earnshaw are abusively raised has a different layout than Top Withens. The Brontë Society put up a plaque to get rid of the popular falsehood, but walkers still stand looking at the shapes of rooms perched high on the moors, imagining what they remember of the novel. I’ve done it myself. Analogies IRL don’t have to be any more exact than adaptations. The ruin connects me with generations of Brontë pilgrims; no relic ever has to be a true fingerbone of a saint if enough people have blessed it.

Brontë Country—a graveyard and the windswept moors

When I began research for my book, Homes and Haunts: Touring Writers’ Shrines and Countries (Oxford University Press, 2016), in the new century, I was attracted to the then-new spectacle of websites and online 360 degree tours of tourist sites and museums; fascinated by the worldwide business (and academic field) of tourism. I realized that the idea of places called Brontë Country or Hardy Country was beyond a century old. I tied it all to the rise of modern literary studies in colleges and universities, my profession, and what Deidre Lynch calls Loving Literature, since the eighteenth century. I’ve taken the trail that beckons in the images above. As a kid, I followed my family around on cultural pilgrimages and I’ve always had memories attached to the spirit of houses.

Chapter three of Homes and Haunts,“Ladies with Pets and Flowers; with Graveyards and Windswept Moors,” includes sojourns with the Regency writer Mary Russell Mitford; Victorian novelist and biographer of Charlotte Brontë Elizabeth Gaskell; a bit of Virginia Woolf'; and the sister novelists of Yorkshire themselves. I wrote that readers “perform” the personalities of authors and characters “beyond the page and into the world of houses and travel…. Kinds of weather and flora and fauna, wild or domestic, set the scene as schematically as any theatrical scenery” (102). In the section “In Haworth with the Brontës,” I contrast the storm-tossed vibe with the pleasant narratives and illustrations of Mitford’s accounts of her undramatic walks with pets and flowers in a village not far from Austen’s Chawton: “The amiable pet spaniel in Mitford’s cottage would not survive long amid the animals in the Haworth Parsonage, Thornfield, or Wuthering Heights: the massive dogs of brooding or violent masters, including Emily’s Keeper, Rochester’s Pilot, or Heathcliff’s unnamed bitch who attacks Lockwood” (144).

In part due to the classic literary biography by Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), tourists began in the 1860s to take the journey to a corner of remote Yorkshire (far from the metropolis London). They regard the Brontës’ home, Haworth parsonage, as:

almost unrelievedly Gothic; it both incarcerates the sisters and keeps people out. It sits in a storm-ridden cultural desert that is at the same time a bog of decay: the effluvia of the graveyard mingling with contaminated drains leading somehow to the early deaths of the mother and six children and villagers and cattle besides, in a calamity of biblical proportions. Here, the menacing figures, usually, are the men of the family. Though some biographers took the part of father or brother, many accepted Gaskell’s extreme version of Patrick Brontë as the father who burned the girls’ finery and fired pistols out of the door; or of Branwell Brontë as the failed genius dying of drink and betrayal by his married mistress. The Gothic atmosphere is enhanced by the Brontës’ own writings. The juvenilia—romance serials in minute script—described by Gaskell in 1857, purchased by Clement Shorter from Charlotte’s widower Arthur Nicholls in 1895, and studied by scholars such as Fannie E. Ratchford from the 1930s–60s—have made the parsonage resemble an E. T. A. Hoffmann Nutcracker Suite world .^[1] The father’s gift of toy soldiers that inspired the sagas of Angria and Gondal has a fairy-tale fatality not unlike the gifts brought back from Liverpool by Mr Earnshaw—a broken fiddle, a whip, and Heathcliff. Beside the uncanny house, indeed ominously close, is the graveyard. As Simon Goldhill has recently recalled, from [Harriet] Martineau’s obituary of Charlotte onward the vision of the sisters buried in Haworth churchyard has become established myth, although Anne was buried at Scarborough and Emily and Charlotte were buried in the crypt.^[2] It was irresistible to envision three graves exposed to the elements like those at the end of Wuthering Heights, as Matthew Arnold does. The difficult, short, brilliant lives seem to lure pilgrims who want a share in the suffering, but also to enjoy a community ritual of honoring the dead.

I could go on—go read my book. This post is merely a complement to it and to the radio episode linked here.

Were They Geniuses?

Sarah McConnell’s question during our prep conversation before the recording session pointed me to reread passages that couldn’t have been written by your average novelist then or now. Critics often avoid the mystifying term, genius, because it implies something innate and divinely-gifted.

Yeah, I think the three Brontë sisters’ pages rock. Both their parents had written for publication. The four surviving children of this brilliant, promising, but struggling family spent their childhoods learning from their university-educated father who had been a teacher, reading current and past prose and poetry of all sorts, and practicing literary style and the exertions of heated imagination. Their drive to create made them intolerant of ordinary entertainment, although as a male, Branwell could frequent the pub. Both Emily and Branwell tended to fail at education or work (as teacher, as clerk, respectively); Emily’s homesickness was intolerable (I imagine panic attacks). The girls were apprenticed, in a way, to the housekeeper, and it would be false to suppose they hated to do domestic things. It’s also misleading to repeat anecdotes of how old-fashioned they looked when they came out of West Yorkshire to attend school or meet their editor and London literary figures. They had to rework any clothing till it wore out. Their dresses were meticulously made of silk. Charlotte enjoyed fine clothing when she could afford it, and some items survive. I compare how I enjoyed sewing my own clothes and baking bread in my teens and twenties, optional making rather than necessities.

The Brontë sisters needed to find a way to make a living, as the house and income of the family would vanish upon Patrick’s death (no roof over their heads or income for the relicts of a clergyman, as Mr. Austen senior’s widow and Jane and Cassandra realized). The Brontës had no capable or rich brothers, as Austen did. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne inherited only small funds from their aunt. Their book of poetry sank like a stone. The advertised school they planned to host in Haworth received no customers. So: novels, under gender-queer pseudonyms, seemed the right outlet for their talent and prospect for their livelihoods.

Even geniuses can disappear. Most novelists sink into databases (researchers are busy trying to document all the novels published per year). It’s possible that even Jane Eyre wouldn’t be on current reading lists if it had been the only novel by a young woman who died at thirty without a friend to write her biography (as Emily Brontë did). What would have happened if Charlotte had also died before she could publish more novels and reissue her sisters’ works?…Radio silence. Without the household competition for genius, without the feverish juvenilia, they wouldn’t have been ready to debut with imperishable classics. And then the controversial response to these novels, and to Gaskell’s poignant biography, only stirred more controversy and made a potent literary legend. Which in turn brought the aspiring critics of the twentieth century, not least the rising feminist criticism of women writers.

Competing and supporting each other as sisters do, they made their own writers’ colony or retreat, but Emily resented Charlotte’s drive to publish her work. Charlotte, as the executor and survivor of the family, shockingly wondered in print whether Emily was right to create the amoral, Romantic beings of Wuthering Heights. After all the Brontës including the patriarch had died, literary tastes turned more modern: for generations, Emily was granted the status of Shakespeare while Charlotte was consigned to the second tier (see Virginia Woolf’s opinions).

Should we care to keep score, I can give one measure of status and impact of these sister writers: Collective Biographies of Women, the rate of recognition, that is, how many chapters represent this person among the more than 15,000 chapters in more than 1270 books: English-language collections of three or more female biographies, mostly published between 1830 and 1940. My bibliography and database (let’s call the project CBW) feature some 8500 women in a wide variety of occupations or roles and historical contexts. Some chapters cover multiple women; chapters often group the Brontë sisters together or with other women writers.

1. Charlotte 51 chapters in CBW

2. Emily 20

3. Anne 12

Many accidents contribute to our data, but by any measure Charlotte’s imprint is remarkable even among writers, who tend to rank (in this measure of renown) with queens. Joan of Arc earns 70 chapters (the most common subject among these books), Florence Nightingale 63, Queen Victoria 62, Mme. de Staël 52, George Eliot 33, Jane Austen 30. And there is the homely, poor, unmarried daughter of an Irish-born clergyman in Yorkshire, capturing indelible attention with her hand-written pages.

Back in early days of the project, we created a page dedicated to Charlotte Brontë with her portrait.

Emily, who had no professional portrait, always appears in Charlotte’s life and vice versa—the nature of biography is ironically to show how its primary subject isn’t a solitary one. But we know so much less about Emily, and least of all about Anne, who published two novels. Be sure to read Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall! Emily is now esteemed as the author of one of the world’s greatest novels, yet the films and other adaptations mistake Wuthering Heights for a love story. Yes, it contains a transcendant passion—“I am Heathcliff,” exclaims Cathy. But kindness and domestic commonwealth have nothing to do with it. What dies in film adaptations are the astoundingly confident voices of the characters who are telling stories: Jane Eyre herself and the various narrators of Wuthering Heights, from Lockwood to Nelly Dean and various letters and recaps. The Gothic intricacy of the documents and the extension of the story to a second generation is forgotten by many fans of the movies.

Emily Ascendant

As I wrote in my Longman Cultural Edition of Wuthering Heights (2009), “By the 1920s, Emily Brontë had deposed her sister Charlotte as the supreme Brontë;…the horrific scenes and harsh language of the novel were no longer so offensive” (395). This was part of my chapter, “Regional and Popular,” in the contexts for student readers and teachers of WH, as we can call it by shorthand.

Let’s look again, for instance, at the novelist Isabel C. Clarke’s 1927 book, Haworth Parsonage, which dramatizes the personalities of each member of the family, in support of her tribute to “the three sisters who were perhaps the most striking example of what has sometimes been called the ‘group - genius’ that the world has ever seen” (282-3).

Clarke (1869-1951), who appears in CBW as the author of Six Portraits (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1935),1 speaks for her contemporaries in experiencing a visit to Haworth as an encounter with the specter of Emily most of all:

on visiting Haworth parsonage to-day, it is the frail and lovely ghost of Emily Brontë that haunts you…who possesses the narrow oblong grey house set in such deadly proximity to the churchyard. You see her, tall, erect, slender, with small head beautifully set on a long slim neck, thick dark hair and deep brooding eyes ... You see her treading the moors in company with Keeper and Flossy and little Anne. You see her walking round the dining-table with Anne’s arm clinging about her. You see her struggling with [the disobedient dog] Keeper at the foot of the stairs - an incident most of her admirers would prefer to forget because it seems to hold something of the primitive, elemental savagery of Wuthering Heights. [You think of incidents, instead, of her kindness to other animals.] You see her working at hard household tasks, ironing the linen, baking the bread….You see her going across to Branwell’s room and extinguishing the flames of his burning bed with her frail pale hands. And then a little later you see her, spent with disease, toiling up the steep flight of stairs with undiminished courage, while her hollow cough echoes eerily through the house. It is Emily, and not Charlotte, who imbues the narrow grey parsonage with a sense of unredeemed tragedy, the more intense because in life she loved her home with such consummate passion. Must we not believe that on the mornings after her return from Roe Head, Halifax and Brussels [second school, teaching position, and third school, respectively] she did literally awake, like Catherine Earnshaw, sobbing for joy? [italics in original. Catherine, in her speech to Nelly about Heathcliff, describes such joy on awaking from a dream of falling from heaven to the heath, which is her home.]

And it is Emily, who in life clung so fiercely to her obscurity, her anonymity, upon whom Fame would fain lay her brightest crown to-day. It is Emily who stands above her sisters…. The genius of Ellis Bell has been universally recognised and acclaimed. She stands alone and apart …. above all her English sisters of the pen, so that even Charlotte, the first of the trio to win fame, must needs gaze upward to catch a glimpse of that remote but supreme figure.

If you would like to be reassured that Emily was kind to animals, as Clarke certainly wished to do, ponder Emily’s meticulous images of the pets in her life, and anecdotes of her rescue of wild creatures. This 1838 watercolor of Keeper, the very dog she punched in the face for sleeping on the bedspread, is thanks to Brontë Parsonage Museum and Wikipedia (public domain).

We need these hauntings.

Notes from the excerpt from Homes and Haunts.

^[1] One of the hundreds of books in this vein: William Stanley Braithwaite, The Bewitched Parsonage; the Story of the Brontës (New York: Coward-McCann, 1950).

^[2] Simon Goldhill, Freud’s Couch, Scott’s Buttocks, Brontë’s Grave (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 66.

Chasing Glasses
	
(to the soundtrack of Norah Jones, “Chasing Pirates” and others)

I get lots of my steps
just trying to get back 
to the nearest task.
I haven’t got dressed 
and I slept in so late
I’m already stressed.

As they tell you to do,
I try breathing in sync
or humming a tune—
	constant hummer high speed,
	it’s not light notes I need—
But how can I think,
        restless elder spreading
        blinding, deafening dreading
as I check in each room
for the cold coffee cup?
       not the distant-graduated pair:
       need short-sight to change bulbs.

“Taking an indoor walk?”
my watch interrupts. 
“Yes.” Why do you ask? 
       I won’t be gone long, 
       you come too.
How long I neglect
myself and the house…
the gym, the desktop…
When will the mutter
Ever stop? Now why
not revel in clutter
offline for once?

Papers nagging aloud,
stacks of books shed a shroud,
basement dust those years deep,
the ones I wrote too.
For once I could read.
What else do I need?
A new chase begun
To find the right one:
Book, cup, glasses, person too.

You come home with the food.
Then downstairs, you're singing, 
the guitar getting stronger: 
“ooh-wee, ride me high…
down in the easy chair.”

Refrains are imperatives, prayers
or like promised buys in the lullaby
       Mamma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird
“Make me a poster from an old rodeo”

Let smart things follow—
       Apple/Claude/Alexa + tracking— 
Keep curiosities stacking,
keep happy places to wallow
whither you go looking.

“Make me an angel…
flies from Montgomery…”
I harmonize at my desk, enjoy jotting this.

Singing memory words, 
        unpredicted, 
swing high sweet chariot, 
        unscripted.

Time to stand! Dismissed.

The Narcissus and Echo myth; I see him incapable of looking away from his beautiful facsimile in the pool.

Caravaggio, Narcissus (1597–1599).

In everyday speech, everyday admonitions: “how can he face himself in the mirror?” Have a scroll through the A-Z of many quotations about the recommended moral check-in of a private self-inspection in a mirror.

The introspection of an extro-spection is a cliché theme (cliché was a term for reusable, stereotype plates for printing, saving labor of hand typesetting).

You can set your monitor to mirror your laptop screen.

Look closely at films that let you momentarily confuse the image of an actor in a mirror for the “real” character, favored during a tense or deceptive conversations, showing four images for two people, rather than the shot-countershot.

Freudian psychoanalysis led the French poststructuralist theorist Jacques Lacan to expound the mirror stage when the infant first recognizes and identifies with its coherent body, and at the same time feels alienated both from the image and from other people (the preamble is an oceanic fantasy of oneness with the Mother). “For Lacan, the ego emerges at this moment of alienation and fascination with one’s own image.”1 This is conceived as the promise and the fate for the toddler before it learns to speak.

The age of camera-phones that can turn to selfies or share photographs immediately. Talking by phone with someone is so different now than it was in my childhood, where I felt the missing gloss of nods, gestures, glances or smiles that helped account for the speech of someone unseen and how they responded to what you said.

On FaceTime or Zoom, how much of the time are you watching your own face?

A Glancing Timeline

One day when I was younger than seven, I was in Kathie’s room upstairs in our house in Richmond, Indiana. She had just finished sewing a color-coordinated outfit, fashionable spring wear for middle school in 1960 or do. I came to stand beside her as we both looked at her in the mirror. This made us laugh. It was somehow a total image seen as she would see herself.

The arrangement of mirrors to try to see reflections of the back of your head, to check your hairdo, can give you a fresh sensation of being a separate person with eyes only in the front of your head.

I think I’ve mentioned before the cognitive test I took before we moved to Chicago, as I recall, for admission to the University of Chicago Lab School (third grade). What I remember is that I saw a picture of a human standing (outline cartoon) and labeled the right of the image, “right hand,” and the left side “left hand.” To this day, I’m not good at translating my right hand to your right hand when I’m asked, as in learning a folk dance. When there is a bit of lint on your blouse or spaghetti sauce on your lip, I mirror: my right, your left, and vice versa. Speech is usually necessary to remedy the confusion.

In the 1880s house on Greenwood Avenue in Chicago, circa 1964, I loved to skip along the wooden floor through the ground-floor dining room toward the little kitchen and the backyard: there was a mirror that showed you as you approached, and I admired how my long braid swung back-and-forth on purpose.

We had a game that you had to play by watching yourself in the mirror and the reversal was just beyond my brain’s guidance of my hands. I remember playing it on the floor in my brother’s room, and he was better at it. I might have been 10 or 11, and he would have been almost exactly three years older. It was a fun game, discovering how difficult it can be to guide hands seen in a mirror, and I think this was it, though there are other mirror board games recalled by nostalgic or retro collectors.

Thank you to boardgamegeek.com.

The fairy tale has the wicked queen talking to a mirror, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”

I have some vivid memories of admiring myself in the mirror, with warmth, curiosity, vanity. Once, still a teenager, wearing a light blue shirt and a bright red windbreaker, and thinking my eyes and cheeks were glowing and colorful—not pale and ordinary.

Comments, memories, confessions about your own opinion of your looks… all welcome.

Let me share a story-within-an-essay that I delivered at the Literary Society of Washington on December 9, 2017. I gave a talk about many things that evening, and of course alluded to the comic verse about the two sentimental oligarchs of the seaside (walrus and carpenter) who entice a mass of young oysters on an instructive walk so that they can dine on them.

In that dark December of Trump’s first administration, I said let’s not talk of kings. I wrote, “I like lists or collections of images of favorite things, as the song goes, and as Pinterest is going: comforting when the dog bites or the bee stings.” Picture about 40 people in evening dress, waiting for their dinner. I didn’t have slides, whereas in the years since 2017 most of the Society’s essayists have used PowerPoint (the turn rotates through the membership about every three years).

But enough about a club many readers wouldn’t purchase the least cummerbund or shiny clutch to attend. I confess to my revolutionary friends an attachment to this venerable institution, its archives in the Library of Congress.

A year and a bit later, in early 2019, I began an edited version of the essay with a note:

The Literary Society has been around since 1874 and has gone through changes you might expect for such a society, though women have always been members. It now strives for more diversity (besides that of political ideology), and yet the form of the essay remains much what it was when the Romantics updated Montaigne. This is my first talk for the Society…. It … essays connecting my various interests, without being tailored to my career as a professor.

Two parts of the essay with a sewing theme, “Notions and Things,” follow in block quotes, otherwise this is my post now. First, a popular souvenir object (you can purchase kits on the pattern of the Brontë artifact); then the first-person tale of Sammy Singer the sewing machine (they/them pronouns): an “It Narrative.”

Brontë’s “Housewife” Kit (Souvenir)

An illustration of animated things and notions: In the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire, among many relics is a sewing case that belonged to Charlotte Brontë: a leather “housewife” or hussif shaped like a book with the title “Souvenirs.” The museum’s collection largely consists of everyday objects documented to have belonged to the famous sister writers, rather than typical period pieces. Some of the artifacts seem like meta-commentary on souvenirs or memory-objects, as the writers doodled images or diary entries or dates on materials close at hand, or sewed things into their books. The novelists and poets were also visual artists, housewives and seamstresses, teachers, letter writers, and collectors. When her friend Ellen Nussey gave Charlotte a different hussif she called “Housewife’s Traveling Companion,” Charlotte wrote a thank-you note to say that it was “a most commodious thing...it will save me a world of trouble in gathering together little necessaries,” or what we might call notions (Deborah Lutz, The Brontë Cabinet, 52).

Historical museums collect ordinary objects; a button in an archeological dig is precious. Or the relic is “typical,” provenance unknown. The Hyland House Museum in Guilford, Connecticut, shares an image of a device, about the size of a cell phone that was designed to be portable, versatile, conveniently adapted to human hands, but generally kept in a private pocket rather than signaling to thousands of followers.

Thank you to the Hyland House Museum, Guilford, Connecticut

You may recall the often-cited correspondence that Charlotte Brontë had with the poet laureate, Robert Southey, ten years before she became a famous novelist. He advised, “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life.” Stung, she laid it on a bit thick in her self-abasing reply: she strives to follow fatherly advice, to be “deeply interested” in “all the duties a woman ought to fulfill... I don’t always succeed, for sometimes when I’m teaching or sewing I would rather be reading or writing.” And we’re glad she went with her irrepressible preference.

And glad to be reminded that common sewing was less gendered before the twentieth century, in the “anybody needed sewing supplies constantly as clothes were mended rather than replaced” note from the Hyland House Museum website. My essay continues:

When Virginia Woolf visited the Haworth museum in 1904, she was disturbed by the exhibit of Charlotte’s possessions and clothing: “little personal relics of the dead woman,” continuing into our present, convey a raw feeling of the absence of a living body (“Haworth, November 1904”). We do get attached to our possessions; the sewing kits seem to be little personalities, a companion or housewife. How do you feel about your devices?

…An It Narrative might narrate an entire story or novel from the first person point of view of the Housewife’s Traveling Companion, as in: “when Charlotte first picked me up, I heard a gasp...” Today, we face robots that are going to know our every move. But we can also play with the potential of technology to refresh our physical interactions with the world. …

The Adventures of a Sewing Machine

A manuscript found in Special Collections, University of Virginia

No one can tell me exactly where or when I was born, though my surname, Singer, is beautifully inscribed in gold lettering on my solid, curvaceous, arched body. B233953 is stamped below my shining Singer Mfg Co medallion. You could call me Sammy, for Samantha or Samuel. The notched steel plate that covers my bobbin has a lightly etched list that is a kind of ancestry, I suppose: “PATENTED/ DEC. 5-1882/MAR.20-1883/FEB. 3-1885/DEC.13-1887/AUG.21-1888/SEP. 9-1890/DEC. 13-1891/APR. 7-1896.” The last three years are quite faint, and there is still room on the plate for more dates above the finger-nail shaped notch, but I guess this shows that the last time the manufacturing company was engraving on me was 1896, as good as a birth certificate. I certainly have many older and plenty of younger cousins and fraternal twins (assuming that no one else is B233953).

Sometime around 1981, when I would have been about eighty-five years old, I found myself one sunny day on a sidewalk beside the stone steps of a brownstone not far from Broadway and 111^th Street in Manhattan. I didn’t appreciate the way the moving man had grabbed me around the middle and tipped me down beside the stoop, and a paper sign was taped to my lid, five dollars. Someone put a hand on me and I lurched forward sideways.

“Oh, one of the wheels is off!” said a woman’s voice. “But here’s the missing wheel inside the drawer. It’s like my great aunt’s pedal sewing machine!”

This stranger seemed excited that I have no plug, that someone needs to sit at me as if to play a piano. They point and flex a foot on the iron plate that turns the pulley rope that turns the big iron wheel in my innards, which makes the needle rear up and plunge in and out of the cloth. I remember many long hours upstairs in the brownstone, with my lid folded out like a side table, with the panels of a garment steadily flowing toward my back, and this one-footed push-roll rhythm speeding along like a steam train fixed in place. I felt steady and busy; we were making progress. There was a well-oiled comfort in the chucka-chucka clicking, though sometimes I felt short of breath—fortunately I have two clusters of air-vent holes in my back, to let out the sewer’s warmth and sweat and my heat.

I had hopes for the woman who bought me that day on the sidewalk and moved me to a rickety workman’s rowhouse in Princeton. But I don’t think she used me more than a few times, for very small jobs, until that house resounded with the cries of a baby at any moment, day or night. After that comes a blur, as I was thrown together with boxes and boxes of books and a few pieces of furniture, and moved into another walkup building not far from a river, this time some place called Hoboken, where I had flower pots sitting on top of me, by a window near a crib. (My veneer on the lid is mottled and streaked with a lot of use for something besides my purpose in life.)

Then after stowing away for a long, suffocating ride in a huge truck, a townhouse in a hot climate with strange smells; I heard the truck drivers say Charlottesville. One more move, and I found myself in a basement in a larger house surrounded by trees, always humid. I was used once or twice to sew something of red felt or shiny black, and I heard them talking about Halloween.

One day, though, I knew that I was sentenced to a long vigil. There was a rustle of a tissue-paper pattern, slicing of scissors through cloth, but no one touched me. I heard the woman reading aloud from complicated instructions, with a girl asking questions. There was a high pitched punk-punk-punk whoosh. An electric sewing machine, while I stood motionless. We were so advanced and special. An epoch passed. I suppose I expected the worst fate that day on the Manhattan sidewalk.

After that shock, it wasn’t that bad. I didn’t have to witness it often. It was a confirmed non-stitching family, really. I accumulated mildew. The odds and ends of fabric remained in a plastic bag in my belly. Water bugs, crickets, countless spiders passed by me as indifferently as pedestrians by a building in Manhattan.

Still, for some years I was in the family room rather than the unfinished basement, because, perhaps I should have said this before—because I do have a quite handsome brown wood veneer, with carved rosettes at the four corners of a ridged decoration on my front. The real beauty is inside: hands open my lid and there’s always a gasp and a leaning forward to look at the quasi-Egyptian decorations—in feathery shades of yellow and gold—on the black machine. (This is not my vanity; I am only saying what I hear others say.) If I had my fourth wheel—somewhere in the moves or the basement abeyance, I lost it—and if someone washed off the dust and mildew and refinished my top, I would be like new circa 1896. Few upstart radio cabinets or hi-fi consoles since then were as presentable. Replacement parts might be scarce, though I hear about a market online. But I still rotate and rise and fall nicely, and I even have extra bobbins and various colors of thread in the sliding card-catalogue sort of drawer on my left inner wall. I could sew curtains for a grandchild’s puppet theatre, for example.

Here the document ends.

[We have no date for Sammy’s composition, and no one has been able to identify the paper they used, although the typewriter appears to be a 1930s Underwood standard.—Editor’s note.]

Sammy did not know that they would soon be washed and moved—next week—in the back of a pick-up truck to the Scholars’ Lab on the fourth floor of the University of Virginia Library—the digital research center that I co-direct [note: Academic Director 2016-2023]. The Makerspace is mostly devoted to 3D printing and installing arduinos, little robots with sensors, and has a couple of latest-model sewing machines. [As you approach the buzzing Makerspace, though, there is the “Text Aisle” with a homemade gaming stand, a loom, a mid-20th century sewing machine to keep Sammy company, a student-made large poetry machine, wooden cylinders guide by a crank to rotate clauses in myriad combinations—Editor’s note] I don’t plan so much to sew with the Singer. I want to treat Sammy as artists like to treat books, and create a kind of installation that comments on the antique and the cutting edge. I would like to trigger lights, music, and voiceover when anyone moves a part of this cabinet of curiosities. Could Sammy speak like your GPS in the car, to show a person how to sew on it? I am bringing this artifact as bait for the experimental school swimming around the Lab. We could create a friendship quilt of colorful squares of fabric, notions, and gadgetry.

I ordered online a replacement for the broken leather band connecting the hand wheel and pedal wheel on Sammy’s right side. The dear polyamorous but a-romantic creature is on display in the spacious corridor with a copy of their story attached to photographs and a sign on the wall. Again, Sammy is being seen but not heard—assumed, like all everyday tools except to the collector of antiques. I believe Sammy would enjoy the company of an AI chatbot, and will see to it in 2026—a fitting birthday tribute, 130 years.

The non-stitching family is, of course, a symptom of moi. I am always busy, and especially so in the Scholars’ Lab, now part of the DH Center along with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). Since August, I am no longer Faculty Director of the DH Center, bridging the two groups that have made my digital project on collective biographies of women possible.

Chances are, the self-help book or group will encourage telling your story or reading the stories of others. Another device in self-help guides is the list (sometimes of role models) or numbered steps. Short biographies and lists.

On Substack, I previously shared a poem, “To Do List,” that’s relevant, and in July I posted here about Self-Help and mutual improvement.

A quick search turns up:

This image captures part of a webpage that plainly addresses two audiences:

• “you,” who want to change your life. Do you?

• “you,” a therapist, coach, or wellness entrepreneur, who want to “grow your business fast!” Of course you do.

The list of Key Articles (bottom right of the image) doesn’t end with Self-Confidence; you can go to the site and follow their links for yourself.

Subscribe now

They warn of “fuzzy definitions” and lack of evidence, so “be careful when consuming self-help books and products.” Reader, take care here, I suppose? Note the small-print acknowledgment, under the image of piles of self-help books, that berkeleywellbeing.com is a commercial site. My post is free, though it could be seen as self-promoting.

The berkeleywellbeing.com site offers bromide lists, for example:

“Some good examples of practicing good self-help include:

• Exercising regularly

• Eating a healthy diet

• Maintaining and fostering healthy relationships

• Making sure to get good-quality sleep

• Following treatment plans and taking your medication as your doctor prescribed

• Developing good communication skills

• Practicing healthy emotion regulation

• Seeking professional mental-health support if you need it”

check, check, check.

The wellbeing.com site foreshortens the history of self-help, as if it began in the twentieth-century U.S.: first Alcoholics Anonymous in 1935, then self-help books and movements by the mid-1970s. Of course there is some truth there, but “small-group” methods for individuals with shared problems, as the site puts it, don’t spring into being from nothing.1

Self-Help, 1800s, 1980s, and Now

Sometimes people think of selfhood as timeless, universal. On the contrary, like sexuality, ideas of the “subject” or individual vary with the social structure, religion, political economy, and other factors. Here is some help understanding a history of self-help.

The American mixture of introspection and planning to improve oneself goes back to Benjamin Franklin at least, symptomatic of the Protestant ethic and the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and order, a focus on the autonomous male. Today, self-help incorporates wellness movements (diets, fitness, etc.) that are broadly associated with white, middle-class women during my baby-boomer lifetime. And yet it runs deep and wide. A younger gay man recently told me, “Oprah taught me to run my life like a business.”

Not long after the millennium, I published an article in American Literary History called “Neo-Victorian Self-Help, or Cider House Rules” (14 (2002): 284-310). Recently I went back to read it. Its response to the culture wars of the 1990s is weirdly relevant now. That warm feeling of recognizing something you had forgotten doing; something that stands up.

The article includes a history of self-help and a close “reading” of the novel and film, The Cider House Rules. It’s timely today not only because the anti-abortion movement has won a battle, sending us back to the horrific illegal abortions of the novel’s and film’s time. The interpretation is also relevant since the resurgence of white supremacist, eugenicist ideas and attacks on rights and benefits for the poor and the outsider.

Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1833-34) and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Man the Reformer (1841) helped to inspire Samuel Smiles’s international bestseller, Self-Help (1859).

As a Unitarian, Smiles was an associate of Hamer Stansfeld, who … helped to import the Unitarian-derived ideas of Emerson, including the term self-help (Tyrrell, ‘Review’ 537). Reformers on either side of the Atlantic, in short, sought a rationale for personal progress as an engine of mutual progress.

I connect self-help with “business,” as in both privacy (don’t get in my business!) and enterprise. Smiles makes plain the economic rewards for good character and striving. A best-selling self-help entrepreneur, Stephen R. Covey, author of Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, shares the belief that success follows upon the management of behavior.

As Smiles put it in 1859, “resisting present gratification for the purpose of securing a future good . . . represents the ascendency of reason over the animal instincts” (286), and in 1989 Covey wrote, “The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person” (72).

Being a civilized, proactive person and then becoming a billionaire means you must have found out the work-life balance and how to mind your business. A footnote (15 in the article) is a key objection to the self-made justification: you may be so cost-effective that you need a lesson like Scrooge. Busy-ness is no mantra for wellness.

Whereas Smiles has a Victorian drive to make the most of every minute, Covey has seen the extremes of that view in twentieth-century management principles. Against most management experts, Covey writes, “the challenge is not to manage time, but to manage ourselves”: “relationships” and “results” rather than “things” and “time” (150).

Few guides would prescribe narcissism. But the “self” in the program for improvement easily is selfish. How does one person’s gain fit into any plan for commonwealth or greater good for the greatest number?

“What begins as a tale of mutual improvement evolves to a traditional narrative of individual triumph through service.”

Since the 1980s, Gertrude Himmelfarb, William Bennett, and other conservative sages in the US have advocated a revival of Victorian values, in line with the policies of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and George Bush I and II. …

The late-century conservatives were consciously reviving Victorian values as warranty for order, with trickle-down promises for prosperity to each self-helping individual.

In 1986, “Sir Keith Joseph, Mrs. Thatcher’s mentor, brought out an edition of [Smiles’s] Self-Help to encourage the entrepreneur”; Smiles, according to Sir Ian Gilmour, became “the Victorian hero of Thatcherism” (Tyrrell, “Review,” 537–38). Himmelfarb promotes such hero worship: Carlyle as “Victorian moralist” (De-Moralization 13) and Smiles as “Everyman’s Carlyle” (166–67).”2

To be sure, the Obama era supported some of the individualism doctrine: championing people who work hard and play by the rules.

The addressee of self-help texts goes through a conversion to reject poisons and qualms, to follow a regimen toward prosperity that may be generous, but that by some invisible hand is good for the GDP. Today, some of the steps of self-improvement are expensive, pharmacological, surgical, and maximally attached to the smartphone: rideshares, door deliveries, fast-fashion looks, experiences for Instagram. The consumptive passions of attributed to housewives in consumer culture—disdain is their reward—are common to singles, LGBTQ, all ages, races, ethnicities.

Business, Mind Your Own

Excerpts of the article:

The conflation of the personal and the economic is hinted at in the word business, meaning both private concerns and commercial enterprise. …

[Self-help business tycoon] Covey’s roots are a Mormon version of Victorian self-help. He counsels the cultivation of “principles” of “enduring, permanent value” (35), a return to “the Character Ethic as the foundation of success,” …[before the “1920s swerve to … quick-fix influence techniques” (18–19).

Covey addresses genderless, raceless people of any class, yet the narratees of the book, like its narrator, are North American male CEOs of large workforces who are urged to treat their employees, like their “best customers,” as “volunteers” (58).

As Covey concedes, “reward systems” are “out of alignment with stated value systems” (143).

I admire the therapists I have worked with. And I realize that recovery and wellness programs may do a lot of good. Here, I’m speaking as the heir to generations of pressure to make the most of every day according to a plan. I believe my Mormon forebears did find communal and civic outlets for their energies and good will. I’ve read a notebook by my great-aunt Relva Booth Ross to prepare her evening classes on English literature to women in her Utah town—volunteer continuing ed.

Busy-ness is one of my fortes: I go through the day with excitement and build-up of tension, doing as a way of being. The academic’s work often takes place at home, at all hours. As a professor, the enjoyments of learning, writing, and teaching can replenish you to get through the drudgery and delays. But you can identify so much with the enterprise (universities are corporations in sheepskin clothing) that you have no time for any friends, a parent or child, exercise, tinkering or wonder.

In Dickens and Irving, the raising of children gets intermixed with money and guilt and revenge; strange adoptions or incest make ad hoc families created in old-fashioned workplaces: a forge as childhood home raised by a sister; a disused brewery (Miss Havisham’s house); the orphanage (doubling as abortion clinic) and a cider mill and dormitory for the Black workers.

Through technology we now once again live over the shop, in the cider house, in a global village. Irving would suggest that small communities devise their own rules of mutual aid in resistance to the establishment, but the aim at last is to establish the individual.

I wrote the above in the early days of the Internet. Well before working remotely, which ironically means working in intimate quarters, closely in the home. Day in day out, no separation of spheres, no clear divide of work and play, no rules about what to share with millions or with one other human being.

My Offer to Your Self-Help

There’s a reason why the media run annual stories about New Year’s resolutions. I don’t think we are a well nation.

Here’s a list of ailments. It’s not exhaustive.

• deracination (moving away, forgetting)

• dwelling in trauma or victimization (staying stuck, replaying memories)

• distraction (skimming, multi-tasking, devices as companions)

• dependency on marketing and social media to feel your wants and needs (becoming the buzz-needy consumer)

• disbelief that any of the real big dangers can be warded off (giving up on human hopes and blaming them)

Two points about the list:

1. the conditions or attitudes aren’t due to an individual’s flaws

2. the ills can be acknowledged and you can try to spend time (conduct your business) differently.

This list-making can keep you busy, distracted, presentist. I do not despair, and I can follow the great advice that I have ignored often in this newsletter: simplicity is not slacking. You don’t have to embellish with more ideas or phrases. You can’t cure all ills, certainly not in others.

As a matter of urgent business: Is it OK for me to spend time on myself and protect my spirits from the violations happening now? What about a duty to leave the world a better place? I believe in that. But we have to do it together, whenever any one of us is strong enough to join in, for some part of their time, the communal business.

Works Cited (selected)

Bennett, William J., ed. The Book of Virtues. New York: Simon, 1993.

The Cider House Rules. Dir. Lasse Hallström. Miramax. 1999.

Covey, Stephen R. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. New York: Fireside/Simon, 1989.

Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The DeMoralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. 1994. New York: Vintage, 1996.

———. On Looking into the Abyss. New York: Knopf, 1994.

Irving, John. The Cider House Rules. New York: Ballantine, 1985.

———. My Movie Business: A Memoir. New York: Random, 1999.

Smiles, Samuel. Self-Help. 1859. London: Murray, 1958.

Tyrrell, Alexander. “Class Consciousness in Early Victorian Britain: Samuel Smiles, Leeds Politics, and the Self-Help Creed.” Journal of British Studies 9 (1970): 102–25.

———. “Review of Samuel Smiles and the Construction of Victorian Values, by Adrian Jarvis.” Victorian Studies 41 (1998): 536–38.

There are plenty of histories of email; further steps in this history are visualized and explained at mailfloss.com. I speak from user experience; this is writing without surveillance, this newsletter, appreciating the commonplace.

Like water coming out of the kitchen tap, this utility is so necessary it seems natural. But it is probably a bit like blood-letting to treat illness, in the Victorian age. It intended to cure but has side-effects such as killing the patient or being a gateway to constant-comment disease. (I’m not seriously assessing the military-industrial complex infrastructure that drove neoliberal surveillance capitalism, but I’m sure others have proven that email caused Putin to invade Ukraine.) In a sense email began the destruction of the boredom we need for giving exercise to our imaginations. Instead of saving time, it was an insidious work speedup. Instead of easing communication among co-workers and friends, it destroyed the idea of free time.

I had no idea that an infrastructure that emerged in the year I graduated from high school would lead twenty years later to my sitting at a keyboard in a cinderblock office communicating with a colleague across campus, not with a phone but with text sent to an ID@location formula. You can tell by the brevity and intelligibility of my “computing ID”—three letters and a number before the @— that I have been in University of Virginia’s system since early days. A few faculty with two or three letters (no numbers) for their ID have since retired. (Through the 1990s, UVA used social security numbers for student IDs; as need arose, they assigned computing IDs that included their initials.) Now, new members of the university get an arbitrary string of letters and numbers for computing ID, making it difficult to address the right person.

I was early on the tenure track, somewhat involved in university committees beyond my department, when I first heard that people in the business and law schools were being set up for “email”; the English department seemed behind. I had a desktop computer (Dell?) at home; floppy disks were the way to get software. To figure out how to access email on the desktop in the office I shared, I asked a graduate student, John Unsworth, who was an early tech adopter and has since become dean of our libraries, now retired. This would have been before he graduated in 1988, after the widespread growth of the Internet circa 1985 and before the surge of digital humanities. Remember the greenish glowing fonts on slaty screens. Remember how often the system or your computer crashed and your draft vanished. Whither went the messages we sent erstwhile? Ay, where are they?

Internet dial-up service in homes had its day; AOL ended its service in 2025 after 34 years. Upon this occasion, ConsumerAffairs (August 11, 2025) shared this image.

I still hear the suspenseful, wobbly screech of signing onto AOL by the modem in our basement. This sounds antique (my kids are more than thirty years beyond this era), but it is my yesterday, and I picture my son sitting on his daddy’s lap to play at the keyboard.

Experience and memory don’t obey the actual chronology of inventions. I could sing to you now some advertising jingles from my parents’ youth (use Ajax, the foaming cleanser…) because they sang them to us. I love the painstaking production design in movies or staged drama these days, gratifying our nostalgia with revisiting the old kitchen in our minds. You pick up the burrito-shaped receiver from the wall phone and dial the numbered buttons (that omit tones); begin talking as you walk into the dining room followed by the long umbilical coil of the cord. The telephone had dominated since before I was born, but it was not my happy medium. In college, we called our parents collect from the hall phone, every week or so. To meet up with a friend, we had to walk to the Commons and leave a note in a mailbox or visit their room. I’m amazed that we were able to plan travel, using paperback guidebooks—there was a 1969-1970 edition of Europe on $5 a Day—airmail, and telephone calls.

***

Email, so magical at first, has messed up my life like an addiction. It’s not that I ever hit “reply all” on something really confidential or used a private server for classified materials, and no FOIA request has incriminated me. It’s just always there, when I pause for thought. Knowing it is as safe and private as a postcard and that the university basically owns it, I still prefer to use the one .edu address even for donations and correspondence with friends, to avoid checking more inboxes. It whines like a puppy to be read, 24/7. Students can reach me outside business hours (as if academics have such). In any occupation, a response delayed till the next calendar date requires some apology. I have a habit of checking my email first thing when I sit down to my desk, worsened by the ability to read email on my cell phone anywhere I go. Maybe today I’ll receive some unexpected good news?

Emails and the specialized field discussion lists have pandered to my desire for ever more to do, more planning and follow-up, more career-decorating invitations, whether to read tenure files that leave deep piles of portfolios and no clear recollection of having read them, or to add an essay to a collection that resides largely on the press’s website rather than being invited into readers’ hands in real rooms. Why have I allowed email to tempt me into these excesses of activity?

There are pills for depression and anxiety, but as far as I know the only cure for email’s mania seems to be: 1) set an automatic reply (if you remember where the settings are) indicating mysterious whereabouts and ask forgiveness for increased response time; 2) deep breathing; 3) pay dues to join the club of people who never show up where they are supposed to be. The few colleagues in this club are rewarded by being asked to do fewer things, at least locally. The principle that I was in a hurry, always, is inseparable from my academic career during the email era.

I’ve sometimes said I wished to pile up and count all the letters of recommendation I have written—sent by email, but usually also printed out in case I lost the file. This corpus could train a bot on the data of my use of adjectives, and maybe save me time in issuing the next letter in my style. Using my fingers on a keyboard has certainly occupied hours that, in the B. E. era, would have been spent reading a book or talking on the phone. I have had carpal tunnel surgery. So much text, like spiders’ webs, twists into illegible clumps when someone decides to shut down university server space (affectionately named “Home,” “Box Sync,” and more recently, “OneDrive”) and announce an IT upgrade.

I don’t expect that email will persist well into this century, as the telegram did into the twentieth as a speedier communication tool than mail across a city or an ocean. Already, email is not a daily preoccupation for most people outside institutions and corporations. What would have been the meaning of new verbs such as “texting” to the person “emailing” in the last decade of the twentieth century? Instagram, Tik Tok—the very names tell it all. Hurry is a way of burying secrets or bypassing needs, but these new media perform sharing.

Like everyone I know, I am trying to manage the assault on attention in this presidency. Email feels like one of my safe spaces, especially with my software sorting the messages, Focused and Other. I send greetings to groups of friends or chat with family, send pictures of trips or grandchildren, return edited attachments, arrange to see someone for lunch, and realize that I am using far fewer reams of paper per year. I still have some of my hard drives and some printed emails from earlier decades. This has been a good tech memory lap, jogging memories of when the conquering medium was first charming us with its informal, energetic presence.

I always thought Picasso was a prick:
       too quick, braggadocio,
       cubist muses, lust,
       harlequins dissected, 
       squeamish bufōn.

Les Demoiselle d’Avignon. 

Well, his brutal life changed art
	in visceral gestures as a mime must.

When our kids were little, we splurged 
on a professional frame for a print,  
	you can buy them now online,
call it nude woman becoming a chair—
        not a famous one, neither cubist 
        nor Blue period—
        not a side-splitting satire on flesh and medium.

He liked it more, but that made sense.
I like it, hanging still but in our basement.
What did the kids see in this cartoon of self-embrace? 
A little much for a living room.

There’s something placating 
	in the sprained hand
couching the bowed profile with double eyes, 
her origin of the world one brush stroke
in a sweep of hips and thighs.

****

When I was little, thirty years before,
close family friends had Guernica
on the first big wall in their house. 
(Possibly it was The Three Musicians.
Prints of both, and seeing them since...)

I felt the threat of a real shambles, foreign
and for grownups who fought wars:
tails like flames, zig-zag fringes on the lights, the roof, 
as if to mean explosion or fire, 
noise where sight should be.
In the dimensions of newsprint
a skew-eyed bull, a tortured horse, 
drooped mother and child, 
downed swordsman.

****

I’ve got some nerve to forgive Picasso.
Across MoMA’s rooms, in the sculpture show
       not the one I never saw (not 1967-1968)
       but a few years ago 
the crest of a cock 
or a head bearing a boomerang nose 
seemed made to tickle or rib me.
	
Wall text spoke of his sneaking sculptures 
     to a French foundry, the Vichy regime
     still with functioning metalwork. 

Again I thought, maybe he’s just a schmuck.

But to myself, in the museum crowd,
I was smiling at clowning 
that took pleasure in sinister gestures.
 
Curiosities, twists: body after body was trying to lift
	or warp into something else
	a “vase” that would never hold flowers
	cunning spindled arms
        unusable instruments
        wired hardware for lyre and wings. 

Why would you bother with the display of wealth
in a goblet reflecting a window, moisture on grapes?
The manufacture of unheard-of shapes made fun.

I felt the joy of the girl jumping rope with her hanging feet.

I see a glint in Picasso's pathetic eyes

Not unlike the rabbit that every now and then
hides under our car, and as we pull away
holds still, fur on gravel, as if believing 
we can’t gaze back or touch or smell. 
Bravura.

Preamble

There are so many images of tangled charger cords that you hardly need me to choose one, you can just look in your own drawer.

It’s an old scandal that cords of headphones and chargers
conjugate if you leave them in the dark.

*****************************

The ice cream scoop, whitened in a few runs through
the dishwasher, corrodes in the bag of plastic flatware,
barbecue skewers, two meat thermometers,
cupcake cups and sprinkles, the murky jar of cloves
from the kitchen of the day school where your mother-in-law worked
that went whither we rented before we bought this house--

Stuff from the first remodeling upstairs migrated to this basement kitchenette

until the second “earthquake,” as Jane Carlyle called the remodeling

of her Victorian row house in London,

in our case a reverse purge of the basement upward.

Tearing out the old basement cabinets,
plumbing, mudset tiles, and three feet
of concrete floor in the center of the house.
Used to dry wall, these guys can’t believe that in
1953 anyone built an indestructible floor.

They flipped the switch of the old attic fan
and in a few minutes sucked a thick film of original walls
up over the stored cross-country skis, coolers, unglued dollhouse,
truck tubes, basinette,
luggage, paperbacks from our colleges,
almost new skates,
and the uncovered, offwhite suit he got married in.
Computer boxes, textbooks never returned,
maternity clothes that were ugly in the first place.

And below, when they were upgrading the circuit box
near the washer in the basement,
next to the basket of dressups
topped with black and silver-glitter wings,
the open brown bags from Whole Foods
filled with the Party Starts Here extras
on boxes of files from your father’s study—
dust resurfaced everything.

A time to keep, a time to discard,
a time to disregard the edges of your house
for the forgiven years, for the gleaners,
till the jubilee.

You are supposed to be writing a book about pilgrimages
to authors' houses. Which, by definition, never have a junk drawer.

You should plant the shrubs in your garden.

You decide you need the party napkins,

they can be a joke like a nostaglia mixtape:
five or six Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
three Cinderellas
eleven Hundred and One Dalmations still in cellophane.
A pile of white squares marked in large black: 40.
Folded rectangles of white, grey, green, red
and blue; some Kinko’s-colored balloons.
Some have been mixing it up in the bag,
food-stained mouths, spilled wine.

Are you keeping them for the environment?
You have plenty of room,
so which do you save now? and where?

You want to outlast any descendant's childhood?
Twenty glass vases from a Bar Mitzvah, and six foil fountains with miniature mortarboards and diplomas.

On your neighbor’s perfectly graveled driveway you see
three men weed and spray to Round Up any future weeds.

The contractor took your shovel when he left with his crew.
Maybe you can borrow one from your neighbor.

April 29, 2008

The Hands of Time

Of course, rhymes with “sands of time.” Longfellow’s poem, “Footprints on the Sands of Time,” offered as a funeral poem, by Rosy, a UK directory of funeral directors. More accurately represented by the Poetry Foundation, “A Psalm of Life.” I’m on record being pissed off that online poetry doesn’t give dates for the poems. I went further to Wikipedia to learn that it was published anonymously in The Knickerbocker in 1838; in Voices of the Night, a collection by Longfellow, in 1839. That is, it contends with grief for his first wife, dead so young, not his even more famous grief for the death of his second.

I was never made to learn this poem, growing up. In my research over the past three decades, I came upon one famous bit of it repeatedly in collective biographies of women (1830-1940), used as an epigraph or interjection in a preface; Longfellow’s stanza seven:

Lives of great men all remind us
   We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
   Footprints on the sands of time;

Biographies in sets being offered as self-help mentoring. I’m sure Longfellow was aware that footprints on sand don’t last after the tide comes in. But the next stanza imagines a shipwrecked sailor would see these footsteps and “take heart again.”

Instead of a beach, picture an hourglass. Time is falling, not running, has no feet, is trickling down. All you need to do is turn it upside down and start over.

Clock faces, oddly, have hands, one longer than the other. Sometimes three hands.

Clocking It

I must have been five or so, one day in the kitchen of our Richmond, Indiana, house, 603 SW A St.. The lesson of the moment was learning to read the large disk clock hanging on the wall by the back door. Sinks and cabinets to the left, stairs to the unfinished basement on the right. Coals and milk were delivered to the back door, if I recall; we had a coal-burning furnace. I don’t remember whether the clock was electric.

Everyone else in the family could read the clock; I was feeling picked on, again, as the youngest. I was being urged by a parent not to give up, probably Dad. To everyone else it was plain as day. It was typical for Richie, three years older, to make a point about what I didn’t know.

I had problems with the way a clock is as much as with my difficulty getting it. Who decided 12 is first, at the top? And why do the numbers count up as they run down right and then climb up in a circle to the left? I’d heard the word “clockwise,” but like the universe, it could have spun the other way (of course I didn’t precociously know that then). If you look at a calendar or think about a week or month, you imagine rows, not a circle; seasons, yes, are said to cycle, but timelines are a strong visual. I think I was indignant at the arbitrariness of this symbol-making representation of something I experienced as moving along through space and my body’s eating and going to the bathroom and sleeping and growing. Later, I was similarly miffed by algebra, as numbers, a human invention, get into statements with letters x and y, but what or why are they supposed to mean?

This German antique from the 1950s resembles my memory of our clock. Notice its helpful small two-digit numbers for the p.m.; this is a European touch, as I don’t recognize it from our 1950s clock.

Let’s say in 1959, I felt slow grasping what time you could tell from what showed on the dial. For instance “half past six” or “six-thirty” looked like the black stick fingers (why called hands?) were together pointing down. But “half past twelve” or “twelve-thirty” was like a signalman or someone pointing one arm up and tipping it slightly, with the other straight down. Where did the thirty come from? Why would the long hand on the 9 make you say “quarter to”? The clock face does not explain. Surely the grade schoolers in the house could rattle off 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 12 hours in the a.m. and 12 hours in the p.m.? Slices of a pie were formed across the day; the seconds were hidden, you had to look closely for the minutes, and you learned to say “fifteen” when one of the hands pointed to 3, the longer stick finger that is; if a short hand, it meant 3. Don’t ask about daylight savings or leap year. Four-dimensional chess? I’ve never played more than an hour, total, of chess in my life, always in the form of being shown how to.

No one called our kitchen clock an analogue clock. Digital clocks were in the future. If you had an electric alarm clock or a wrist watch in the 1950s, it most likely had a circle dial and hands. Wikipedia (and something called Bing culling a short passage from Wikipedia that led me to the article) tells me that a digital pocket watch was invented by Austrian Josef Pallaweber in 1883. In our house, I’m confident we didn’t own the earliest patented digital alarm clock (1956, when I was two). Only train and bus stations posted times in numerals. (To this day, I have to concentrate when in Europe and I read 17:54 as the train’s departure time.)

On the Other Hand: Wrist and Smart Watches

Earlier in December, after I returned home from a short visit to my mother in Chicago, I quickly ordered and shipped to her a replacement for her old wrist watch. She had a small women’s Timex, probably quartz, with gold details and a cracked leather band—she asked me to find a new band. Her watch is a lot like watches I have had, for which I have replaced batteries and bought new leather bands. But by the mid-1980s, I liked large-face men’s-style watches and had a few to choose from including Swatch colorful styles. I’m sorry to say that after several Fitbits, I have an Apple Watch, and my assorted analogue watches, including a bracelet, lie dormant in a jewelry box.

For my mother, I knew anything smart would just raise anxiety. Old people do not need bells and whistles, even when they pass the cognitive test of reading a clock face, as she easily does. Technically old myself, I have little patience for the tutorials or app, and the intrusive assistance seems designed for someone else. I didn’t think I could find a replacement band to fit her perfectly reliable Timex. But a larger face would be more readable. I found a new Timex with large face and stretch metallic band. I had her wrist measurement, and the product details seemed to fit. The smallest I could order, with the largest watch face, turned out to be too big for her wrist, so it’s going to be a return.

Jeopardy: this brand was the most popular inexpensive watch in the twentieth century in America. Answer: What is Timex?

Trivia: when was the wristwatch invented?

Did more men than women wear watches before my mother’s lifetime?

She was, as I’ve mentioned before, born 100 years ago: it will be true when our timeline arrives (the ball drops, the leaves of a calendar turn) and it is the Ides of March, 2026.

Last week, when I queried the history of watches, I for once had a guess exactly reversed.

This 1915 advert by a London company appealed to me in its effectively written patriotic celebration of a “wristlet watch” as they were then called, for the unspecified participants, “great numbers at Omdurman” and in “the last Boer War,” earning for the watch a “high reputation for reliability under trying conditions” of imperialist campaigns (deserts). The personified men’s wrist watch glows in the dark—I believe this is the radium mixture used to paint dials. I already knew about the “girls” hired to paint the watches, sharpening their paint brushes in their mouths. I highly recommend the article about these dangers by Thomas van Straaten in 2024, a kind of docu-advert on the Fratello newsletter for watch afficiandos. I don’t have any qualification to fact check this, but I got a sense of his journalism standards, and here I am on Substack consulting Wikipedia, etc.

In my online reading about the history of watches, I found that men were very late to wear watches on their wrists. By the nineteenth century, women might wear a wristlet watch or a pendant as an accessory; men of the same classes continued to have pocket watches, at times with elaborate chains. The coordinated time needed by railroads and the military drove the innovations, from springs to quartz, toward time-keeping that remained accurate instead of winding down. After World War I (and the decline of the waistcoat), civilian men of means wore watches. See the advertisement. Time is not on our side or at hand for the ordinary peaceable person.

Time being one of those essentials like food and shelter that can lead to divorce if you don’t agree (not an autobiographical statement). I will return to this keyword, here a technological memory walk. I remember a couple of decades ago writing about time and gender (inspired by Julia Kristeva on “Women’s Time”). And you know literature has a reputation as a temporal medium.