THE (NOT SO) NICE ITALIAN GIRLS & FRIENDS
talk about our fascination with dolls
Thursday June 10th, 7pm
Lola’s Commissary, 634 Church Street
Featuring:
Diane Bracuk
Beatriz Hausner
Lian Medaglia
Giovanna Riccio
Michelle Alfano as emcee
and music by Tom Garrett
For more info: notsoniceitaliangirls.blogspot.com
Posted in Events, General, Michelle Alfano
Edith’s War by Andrew Smith (Axiom Publishing Co., 2010) 380 pages
In Edith’s War, Andrew Smith sensitively and deftly shifts from the present day somewhat strained relationship of two brothers named Will and Shamus Maguire traveling in Venice to the secret history of their mother Edith during WWII when countless Italians, some born in England, were interned as enemy aliens. I was lucky enough to read this book in manuscript form before it was published.
The Liverpool born brothers could not be more different. The eldest Will is taciturn, cold and unsociable. Shamus, a few years younger and now living in Canada, is gentler, sensitive but obviously a bit cowed by his older brother’s volatile personality.
Shamus is still mourning the death of his partner Luke. Will is divorced and seems embittered by his life. Both men seem emotionally adrift. They spend the day reminiscing (and bickering), taking in Venice and awaiting their mother Edith’s visit. Family life was an emotionally stilted and unpleasant memory for Will. Shamus has a less angry recollection but is still intrigued by the speculation of the true relationship between his parents Edith and Joe (whom both brothers refer to by their first names).
The two generations are bound together by their connection to Italy and it turns out Edith’s romantic past is much more complicated than they know.
Far from being the cold, prim fish that the brothers presume Edith to be, she has had a tumultuous emotional and romantic history in Britain during WWII while husband Joe was off to war and she was pregnant with her first child Will. While Edith lived with her mother-in-law and brother-in-law she became friendly with the Baccanello family next door.
Anna and Gianni Baccanello have three sons Carlo, Paolo and Domenico and a close relationship with the Maguires. There is a sweet and understated attraction between Edith and the eldest son Carlo who lives with his wheelchair bound wife Isobel.
This attraction becomes more intense when all the Baccanello men are interned as aliens and possible threats to security by Churchill’s orders once Mussolini declares war on England in 1940. This reflects a true historical event that few in the West know about (I certainly did not). Edith, intelligent but politically apathetic, is galvanized into aiding her neighbors when the the men are interned and then ordered to be transported overseas for indefinite incarceration on The Arandora Star.
On July 2, 1940 the ship, which held nearly1,200 German and Italian internees, was torpedoed by a German submarine U-47, and 800 men were killed or drowned. Carlo survives this harrowing experience as does the youngest son but other family members do not.
Even though Carlo survives, his ordeal is not over as he is then shipped to an internment camp at Woolfall Heath. Some historical detail about the camp from “Wartime camps in Huyton”, BBC Liverpool:
The camp, first occupied in May, 1940, was formed around several streets of new, empty council houses and flats and then made secure with high barbed wire fencing. Twelve internees were allocated to each house, but overcrowding resulted in many sleeping in tents. Initially the camp was only meant to hold the internees until they could be shipped to the Isle of Man. However, largely in response to the torpedoing of the transport ship ‘The Arandora Star’, with the loss of nearly 700 people, the deportations ended.
Brave, resourceful Edith stands up for the Baccanellos against British authorities and struggles largely in vain – even combating her bigoted brother-in-law and the suspicion of neighbors and friends in their small village. But she makes a fateful choice which will link her to the Baccanellos forever.
It reminds me that we often lose sight of what our parents were before they became our parents – their acts of courage, their youthful passions and sometimes transgressions. They were (are) as passionate and hopeful as any of us.
In the present day, the Maguire brothers bicker and piece together bits of forgotten family history in Venice. They meet an enigmatic stranger named Armando Belli who captivates Will. He carries a cigarette case which intrigues Will and triggers a long buried memory about the presence of Carlo Baccanello in his early life. Without saying too much to spoil the plot, a secret resides in Edith which we learn of only at the very end.
The scenes set in WWII are compelling and meticulously recreate the atmosphere of fear and paranoia which plague the two families under siege by both the German bombardment and English racism and xenophobia.
This book is politically relevant today as it reminds us that the perceived enemies within our midst are often the pawns of horrific historical circumstances beyond their control. And before we assume that this is a phenomenon confined to other nations, let’s remember that the exact same situation happened with Japanese-Canadians during WWII. My own mother-in-law, who was a child younger than my daughter, and her whole family, were interned at Lemon Creek.
Closer to our own time, think of the Muslim-Canadians wrongly accused and incarcerated today. We are doomed to repeat these mistakes unless we are vigilant. And this book helps us remember that.
Posted in Fiction
The Boy in the Moon by Ian Brown (Random House Canada, 2009) 295 pages
Deservedly, it was recently announced that Ian Brown had won the Charles Taylor Prize, a non-fiction award administered by Charles Taylor’s widow, Noreen Taylor, and which was once the richest prize for non-fiction in Canada.
This was a difficult read. Not because the writing is not good (it is, exceptionally so) but because the topic is so disturbing to me as a mother and any other sentient being on the planet.
I was even more disturbed to learn the severe nature of his son’s disability. Walker has Cardiofaciocutaneous Syndrome or CFC, described as “an extremely rare and serious genetic disorder“. The condition is complex and very disturbing to contemplate – the difficulty of it, the suffering involved for the little boy, the things the family must have experienced while he lived with them – he now resides in a group home with other handicapped children.
I had no idea how difficult this boy’s life was and consequently what the family experienced. Walker Brown was born a few months before my own daughter in 1996 and was five weeks premature (as was my daughter). That sent a shiver down my spine. I kept picturing myself as the mother, as the parent of this child. The somewhat selfish yet typical thoughts that Brown had about marriage, children and about disabled children fluttered through me too when I was young. You cannot imagine yourself dealing with these adult responsibilities and/or travails in a rational manner yet parents do, we all do.
The reader intensely experiences the range of emotions Brown feels: grief for his boy’s suffering, guilt for the seeking of relief from this difficult situation, rage at one’s fate and dashed hopes for the child, fear at what the future holds for him, for himself as a parent, anger at the lack of foreseeable change, anger at the lack of answers. One description of a sleepless night spent with Walker who is often in pain, or uncomfortable, or just restless, is gut wrenching, exhausting, just in the reading of it. Imagine living it, year after year. I simply cannot.
He captures the chaos of emergency rooms visited, the tenderness and joy of the most private moments with one’s child, the brief illusion that everything will be normal, that medicine will help, that one day things will be “fixed” somehow, the parade of specialists with unsatisfying answers.
This sort of intense emotion and constant worry takes it toll between husband and wife:
Weeks go by without any real contact between us – and then we fight, perhaps to force some connection. The evidence of Walker’s demanding presence never changes, the household stigmata of a disabled kid: the mangled window blinds … the endless piles of laundry that self propagate like jungle plants … the avalanche of potions and lotions and syringes … all of it. With this chaos besetting us at every turn, would it be to much for him (for her) to put the fucking milk away?
There is a tender, slightly disturbing, moment where Brown observes his wife gently flirting with a man at an office Xmas party, whom he knows is attracted to her :
And how can I begrudge her that moment of friendship and freedom and even flirting, that other intimacy, after all she’s been through; how can I begrudge her some elemental attention, the frankly adoring gaze of someone fresh and new … I nurse a drink, and I wonder what she does when I am not around. I know she wonders the same about me. Mostly we forgive each other. Walker taught us how to do that.
Once Walker is placed in a group home (and how excruciating that decision is) Brown is determined to meet other CFC children in Canada and the U.S. The total of diagnosed cases of CFC in the world number in the mere hundreds.
But his assessment of the other parents he meets is refreshingly honest. They are not saints but he does admire many of them. Some he seems to imply are deluded in the belief that they have been sent special “angels”, that they are following God’s will in caring for their disabled children. A non-believer himself, still he understands why some may try and understand this twist of fate through that religious lens. And yet others he believes, with a slight air of annoyance, are unrealistic in their expectations of what the government and society may do to assist them:
On hellish days the mawkish sermonizing about angels and specialness felt like rank self-delusion, the work of anxious cheerleaders desperate to justify themselves to a cynical highschool … It’s hard to think of Walker as a gift from God, unless God was a sadist who bore a little boy a grudge.
Brown searches for a possible way of life for his son as they both age. He visits L’Arche, one of a series of homes for the disabled in France, founded by Jean Vanier. He is pleasantly surprised by the joy and warmth he finds there, not because the residents are different than the many disabled that he has encountered but the manner in which they are treated, the beauty of the home and the location.
He muses that perhaps the “purpose of the intellectually disabled like Walker might be to free us up from the stark emptiness of the survival of the fittest”.
The most upsetting section was Brown’s contemplation of suicide or the possible death of both himself and his child. The horrifying possibilities … it is an almost unbearable admission of what we might be driven to do in such moments of intense suffering.
I appreciated that he does not shy away from the word “disabled”, that he does not appear to be trying to change what is the reality of Walker’s situation with a politically correct fabrication. This has always rankled me about the disability rights movement. Some thoughts (not my own) about the “correct” usage of words to describe people with disabilities here.
I wish that every parent could read this book and then thank their lucky stars that their biggest perceived problem is a kid who won’t eat her vegetables or perhaps talks too much on her cell phone. I know I did when I finished the book.
I will leave the last word to the author: When Walker was an infant … I spent part of every day furiously wishing that a test had been available … Now that I know Walker, I am relieved there was no such test … Because on his good days, Walker is proof of what the imperfect and the fragile have to offer; a reminder that there are many ways to be human …
Posted in General
Valentino Assenza has been a published poet and spoken word artist for over the last decade. He has performed at many of the Toronto venues, and performed at many venues, and festivals across Canada. He has published four books of poetry, and is currently promoting his latest book published by Lyricalmyrical Press called Make Our Peace With Rattlesnakes.
Desi Di Nardo has had many publications in North American and international journals and anthologies. Her work has been performed at the National Arts Centre, featured in “Poetry on the Way” on Toronto’s transit system, and displayed in the Official Residences of Canada. Desi’s book of poetry is called The Plural of Some Things published by Guernica Editions.
Luciano Iacobelli is a poet, playwright and visual artist. In 1986 his first play, The Porch, was staged in Toronto. In 2000 he founded Lyricalmyrical Press, a grass-roots publishing company specializing in handcrafted chapbooks. More than eighty books have appeared under this imprint, many by very young writers whose work he has nurtured throughout his career as a creative writing and literature teacher. Author of seven chapbooks, The Angel Notebook, his first full-length poetry collection, was published in March of 2007 by Seraphim Editions.
Nyla Matuk’s first book of poems, Oneiric, was published in 2009 by Frog Hollow Press. She has contributed journalism on architecture and literary topics as a freelancer to the Globe and Mail, and numerous magazines. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the literary journals Event, Room of One’s Own, Descant and twice in the Alphabet City anthologies.
Lina Medaglia is a teacher, a peace activist, and a crisis counselor for abused women and children. Her writings have included a libretto for a three-hour feminist musical called Casanova, the lyrics for a progressive country album, and two albums of political rock. At the age of eleven, Lina immigrated with her family to Toronto, from a tiny mountain village in Calabria. Her first book, Demons of Aquilonia, is a fictional autobiography based on her family’s struggles with ‘passing,’ or reinventing identities for the purpose of survival and overcoming. Lina lives and works in Toronto with her family.
Giovanna Riccio was born in Calabria, Italy and grew up in Toronto where she studied philosophy at the University of Toronto. Her poems have appeared in journals, magazines and newspapers, including the Eyetalian, Poetry Canada Review, CV2, Tickleace, and Italian-Canadiana. Giovanna completed her first manuscript, Strong Bread, earlier this year and is in the process of getting it published. Her dramatic monologue, Vittorio, will be published by Lyricalmyrical Press in the spring. She has recently retired from teaching and is working on a new book of poetry.
and as emcee:
Michelle Alfano is a Toronto writer and a Co-Editor with Descant. Her short story “Opera”, on which her new novella Made Up Of Arias (Blaurock Press, 2008) is based, was a finalist for a Journey Prize anthology. Her fiction and non-fiction work has been widely published in Canada in major literary publications, and has also appeared in the U.S. She will be featured in a forthcoming documentary on the passengers, and the children of the passengers, of the Saturnia, an immigrant ship which transported thousands of Italian-born immigrants to Canada in the 1950s and 60s and which will be featured on OMNI-TV. You may find her writing at alitchick.blogspot.com.
Posted in General
What is this New Moon hysteria, you may well ask. The four books of the Twilight series are a genuine worldwide phenomeon and many people are engaged with the series, not just teenagers. A great many femmes d’une certaine age have long devoured these weighty tomes. I was recently sucked into this cult when I went to a friend’s book club gathering and was told that every single one of the educated, accomplished women in that group had read the entire series.
That floored me … what was going on? What was I not getting about this series of books? My experience had been limited to my then 12 year old daughter’s devouring of the series. But I do credit Meyer with finally getting my once reluctant daughter to read on a consistent basis with the sort of hunger and passion that I had always hoped she’d feel for books.
Admittedly, New Moon should have been called “my best friend’s a werewolf and … my ex is a vampire”. I will not recap the entire plot in Meyer’s second book in great detail. You are either on board or not. The train is leaving folks … I know I will not be able to persuade non-believers.
Okay, the general premise is enormously silly, I will grant you that. And yes, I sometimes hide the book when guests come over. And, oh, alright, when I leave the house with a book I rarely take this one in case people see what I am reading on the subway … and yet, and yet. Ms. Meyer is on to something. She captures teenage angst so well. She captures desire and the loss of a loved one exceptionally well. Because it is a sort of death, the end of a relationship, especially if it is your first love.
I found that while I read the book I was doing what I often wish readers of my own fictional work wouldn’t do, wondering: “Did this happen to her? How much does it reflect her own experience? Did Meyer lose someone close to her – how does she understand this depression that envelops Bella? How does she understand that pain so thoroughly?”
Meyer sets the stage early when Edward Cullen and Bella Swan are watching a production of Romeo and Juliet for a school assignment and Edward claims that if Bella died he would try and kill himself by approaching the Volturi in Italy (more on that later). Soon after, a violent incident involving Edward’s family convinces him that Bella is not safe around the Cullens and the Cullens realize how dangerous it is to be around Bella with the risk of exposure should their true identities be revealed. They leave Forks, Washington suddenly and Edward leaves Bella. Quickly. Painfully. Brutally. It will be as if I never existed, he says. The phrase rings in her ears for months.
The book is, for nearly three quarters of it, a dark, bitter chronicle of Bella’s depression and her efforts to deal with the situation. Bella thinks miserably: “One thing I knew … was how love gave someone the power to break you. I’d been broken beyond repair.”
She is utterly lost and sinks into black hole which she barely recovers from. The grief stricken Bella impulsively tries to approach a group of boys in town whom she thinks (mistakenly) might have almost attacked her the year before had Edward not thwarted them. Meyer uses a heavy handed metaphor about Bella now being like a zombie in a horror film. Indeed, that would be good description for this condition in that you don’t feel that you are in control of your emotions or actions and are pursuing a course of action which leads to disaster and possibly death.
The focus in this book is on her relationship with her best friend, the sweet tempered Jacob Black, who becomes a werewolf during the course of the novel. This leads me back to an earlier thought I had about the fear Meyer evinces about teenage boys: they are sometimes violent, feral, uncontrollable.
Is this an anti-sex message as some have contended or a harsh truth – aren’t boys more volatile at this age? It’s an apt symbol for the intense mix of hormones and sexual desire during the teenage years. Jacob can barely contain himself after the “change” to werewolf which all the boys on the rez will eventually experience. Is this a metaphor for boys being unable to control themselves sexually as well?
There is an enormous importance placed on the chastity of youth in the Mormon faith which Meyer practices. One source I consulted stated that “The doctrine of this Church is that sexual sin—the illicit sexual relations of men and women—stands, in its enormity, next to murder.” Hence, perhaps, Bella’s chaste relations with Edward and then Jacob. Great passion yes, but sexual expression, absolutely no. Hence, the danger that sexual desire represents.
Here, in the West Side Story Jets vs. Sharks style showdown (which in itself is a modern spin on the original Romeo and Juliet story), the werewolves, which include Jacob Black and the Indian boys of the Quillette tribe on the La Push rez who serve as protectors of the tribe, square off against the vampires. Initially they are the “bad vampires” Laurent and Victoria but then also possibly the “good” vampires, the Cullens. The vampires must stay off the rez and refrain from killing humans which both Laurent and Victoria refuse to do.
At one point Bella openly muses what if rather than die, Romeo simply left, leaving Juliet with Paris, the man her parents wanted her to marry – would she have married Paris? Would it be possible to love another?
New Moon does keep you in suspense awaiting the couple’s inevitable reunion and concludes with a Romeo and Juliet-like plot twist which compels Bella to go to Italy to save Edward from self-destruction in seeking out the Volturi, a group of vampires that he seeks to provoke so that they might destroy him as he vowed in the early chapters.
Despite the novel idea of accident prone Bella potentially saving anyone, there remains the ever present image of the powerful male who comes to the rescue of Bella – suicidal Bella cliff diving and then being miraculously saved by Jacob, Bella amidst the Volturi protected by Edward, Bella torn between two powerful, macho males – Edward her love and Jacob her best friend. And this is how it ends with Bella trying to reconcile the two boys with the now new threat of the Volturi returning to claim her some time in the future.
For Eclipse, book three, I am hoping there will a moratorium on the following verbs: gasping, chortling, chuckling, gawking, eye rolling, gaping. Again, can a sister get a competent editor please? It’s young adult fiction – that doesn’t mean it has to be sloppily written and/or edited does it?
Also verboten please: the coldness and beauty of the vampires, how solid and marble-like they are; the perfection of Edward’s face, his voice, his scent, his everything; the “russet” colour of the Indian folks’ skin. Indian folk come in all shades thanks to Europeans’ thoughtful invasion of their lands and near destruction of its peoples even on a reserve the size of La Push.
Posted in General
Reading at the Toronto Womens Bookstore
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Readings with
Free Admission
For more information please go to:
Posted in General
Bright Star directed by Jane Campion (Australia, 2009)
John Keats died at 25 a few years after my beloved Jane Austen in 1817 thinking that he was a failure as a poet. Today he is seen as one of the greatest Romantic poets of our time. Bright Star tells the story of the love between Keats and Fanny Brawne, a young girl of fairly modest means whom he courted for three years and was engaged to before his death. “Bright Star” refers to the name of a poem that he wrote for her.
When Australian director Jane Campion (An Angel at My Table (1990), The Piano (1993), A Portrait of the Lady (1996)) introduced the film at the Toronto International Film Festival last month (looking like a gracefully aging hippie with her long blondish grey hair worn loosely and her simple clothes) she said the film was like “a door that opens slowly”. It is a slow, quiet film but I like Campion’s style. She understands desire, and passion, and can allow for quiet moments of great emotional power in her films.
Keats (Ben Whishaw last seen as Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited in 2008) is depicted here as a serious minded and struggling poet, physically frail, and deeply involved in the care of a younger brother who eventually dies of tuberculosis (as did their mother). Whishaw, usually thin, appears like a gaunt shadow of his self with a pale complexion and long shaggy hair, looking quite the Romantic ideal.
Fanny (the lovely Abbie Cornish) is portrayed as a frivolous, flirtatious girl obsessed with fashion who makes her own clothes. There is a sly joke here somewhere because Fanny’s clothes, at least at the start of the film, appear garish and a bit loud for the Regency fashions of the early 19th c. At the beginning she is dressed in bright poppy reds with big ostentatious collars and big ruffles. As she evolves as a woman, so does her style. Later, she appears more graceful and subdued in rich reds and blues and purples.
Keats described her thus to his brother George in his letters: “She is not seventeen – but she is ignorant – monstrous in her behavior flying out in all directions, calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term Minx – this I think not from any innate vice but from a penchant she has for acting stylishly. I am however tired of such style and shall decline any more of it.”
Despite his initial antipathy they fall in love – they are thrown together a in a series of circumstances when they share a portion of the same rented house – she, with her widowed mother, brother and sister and, he, with fellow poet Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), a rude, acerbic fellow who, one suspects, is half in love with Keats himself based on the stridency with which he attempts to separate the two lovers.
Gossip and Keats’ illness push the couple into an engagement despite her mother’s reservations because Keats has no means of making a living. But he is too ill to remain in England for another winter. His friends arrange for him to travel to, and live, in Italy. Unfortunately, their romance ends there as Keats dies in Italy of TB.
Beautifully done, quiet and subtle and intensely romantic.
Later I read that Fanny married but always concealed her relationship with Keats, which appeared to be largely chaste, a secret from her husband, and only revealing the truth to her three children. After she and her husband died, her children sold Keats’ letters in the 1870s. You may read more of their story here.
Posted in General
Posted in General
This will include readings by Association of Italian-Canadian Writers whose works include socio-political messages of all kinds, and anything that foregrounds the Italian-Canadian community’s social and political concerns. The event will be hosted by Michael Mirolla and Maria R. Spina and will include:
Michelle Alfano
Rita Amabili-Rivet
Elettra Bedon
Nino Famà
Elvira Truglia
The Blue Met is the world’s first multi-lingual literary festival – and the best five-day literary party there is. In 2008, Blue Met gathered about 350 writers, literary translators, musicians, actors, journalists and publishers from Quebec and from all around the world for five days of literary events in English, French, Spanish and other languages.
For more information please go to:
http://bluemetropolis.org/
Posted in General
We had a long and involved discussion at last Sunday’s Descant meeting about upcoming themes for future issues. One co-editor suggested a theme along the lines of communications and incivility, the erosion of the personal and public space (an idea which obsesses me a bit I must say). I think that was the gist of the suggestion. This conversation carried over into drinks at a bar down the street after the meeting.
I cannot say it isn’t maddening to have a friend or colleague peering at their Blackberry, cellphone, PDA, or what have you, during a meeting, social or otherwise, or that I haven’t nearly lost my mind asking my daughter J to put away, put away, please put away, the cellphone, DS, Macbook, etc … she is using when company is over, during dinner, while practicing her guitar, etc …
Listening to complete strangers discuss the most intimate or unsettling details of their lives to friend, boyfriend or sister on the streetcar ain’t my idea of fun either. And I fear that I will soon become one of those old, sour-faced ladies who will bellow to some apple cheeked but oblivious youth on the subway: “COULD YOU PLEASE TURN DOWN YOUR IPOD??”
But although a curmudgeon at heart, I feel we rail against a stronger foe than ourselves that cannot be beaten, indeed, should not be beaten.
Secretly, I do sometimes wring my hands thinking, “Why can’t people send handwritten letters any more instead of e-mails?” To my mind, e-mails are as a characterless and ephemeral as the dust on butterfly wings – who will save the e-mails that we send to each other a hundred years from now?
“Why don’t we read more newspapers?” I sometimes wonder. The great newspapers are being diminished and destroyed, page by page, column by column, every day for readers who favour getting their news on-line. Guilty as charged because that’s what I do now for the most part aside from the occasional Globe & Mail or New York Times.
“Why can’t X just call me instead of tweeting or writing on their Facebook page or sending me a text or an e-mail?” But I am part of that problem too …
“Why am I getting my political news from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Bill Maher’s Real Time rather than Peter Mansbridge or Brian Williams?” I sometimes think guiltily. I really do have these thoughts and that’s just … sad.
I will attempt to answer these questions: We now have access to modes of communication that are seen to be more relevant, faster, exciting, interesting to utilize. Not necessarily superior mind you, but more relevant, faster, exciting, interesting …
The new technology is like a tsunami and there is no point in saying … I really wish I wasn’t in the path of that tsunami. I really wish we had been better to the environment and then maybe this wouldn’t have happened. You are in its path, it has now reached the balcony and the roof – it’s here now so how shall we deal with it?
Despite moralizing and hand wringing, we cannot compel people, especially younger people, to use modes of communication or media that may seem outdated, un-user friendly, not ecologically sound, uninteresting.
I love newspapers but I don’t subscribe to one anymore.
I love my library of books but I have definitely reduced my purchase of them now sometimes resorting to borrowing from lending libraries and friends and weeding out my library at home (I have images of my kid cursing me when I pass away and she has to dispose of all my books and such).
I am a bit of a news hound but am I listening to respected news anchors on the CBC or network television? No, I’m guiltily watching Jon Stewart on the Comedy Channel or Anderson Cooper on CNN or reading the Globe & Mail on-line.
When compelled to do something that one finds somewhat distasteful but necessary (as in engaging with the real world – as irksome as that may be to some of us) do as Lady Alice Hillingdon, wife of 2nd Baron Hillingdon, did in 1912.
When speaking of the need to fulfill her husband’s unsolicited desires she wrote: “I lie down on my bed, close my eyes … and think of England.” The original quote, possibly apocryphal, was a bit more graphic than this but you get the message.
Think of the phrase “Think of England” as the future, and that this is the technology that I will need to navigate the new world with. Pretending that the world has not changed or should change to your liking won’t make you more adapted to it. Only a bit sadder …
Posted in General
