lady friends

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington is a celebration of unstereotypical womanhood, the freedom of aging and the power of friendship. I reviewed it here. I loved it, loved the experience of sharing it, loved the avenues of research it led me down. I especially loved Carmella, the narrator's best friend, and her easy relationship. I never realized that, while the narrator was the author's projection of herself as an impossibly old woman, Carmella had a real-life counterpart as well: artist Remedios Varo.

The women were both artists. They were both muses to cranky Surrealists. They both ran from the war and ended up exiled in Mexico. They were both held against their will--Carrington in a mental institution, Varo by the French police. They both had spectacular, hard lives, and probably found some comfort in the partial reflection of that reality in one another.

I learned about Varo in the great essay, How To Be Old: Two Women, Their Husbands, Their Cats, Their Alchemy, by Carrie Frye over at The Awl.* The essay focuses on the biography of the two women, how they intersect and how their friendship appears in each's writing, mostly The Hearing Trumpet. I called Carrington's language in that book "precise [and] pulsing;" Frye calls it "a kind of glissading bumptious kangaroo splendor." That assessment endeared her to me, along with her assertion that the writing in The Hearing Trumpet seems to impart the desire to make people happy, instead of to impress them.

All of this is to say that I want to read more of Varo's writing and see more of her amazing art. You should read this essay and follow what it makes you want to do.

*(But why is the title of the page "A History of Cat-Loving Women?" That is the worst.)

Reading House of Fear & Tales from Down Below by Leonora Carrington

This book, as I've mentioned before, seems to be the only borrowable copy of Leonora Carrington's fiction in the five boroughs that is not the delightful The Hearing Trumpet. The collection is made up of several short stories and a memoir of her time in a Spanish asylum in the 1940s. The memoir section, dictated in French, three years after her incarceration, is called Down Below or Notes from Down Below. Let me say here that there is no question that Carrington suffered from mental illness. Reading Notes from Down Below reminded me of a lost summer I spent in the company of someone going into a manic phase and how that could have easily slid into psychosis. Even though I have no connection to the mystical and religious figures that populate her delusions, it's the kind of reading that gives me a growing sense of dread because it makes me feel a little crazy too.

Besides that effect, and despite the actual illness that it depicts, this memoir also gives a good picture of what it was (is) like to be a creative person, to create towards sanity, in a uncreative world. This quote breaks my heart with truth: "I gave little thought to the effect my experiments might have on the humans by whom I was surrounded, and, in the end, they won."

To the left is a map, a drawing made of the boundaries of Carrington's prison. It shows how hard she was trying to make a story out of the terrible things happening to her. It freaks me out with its details--the same reality as the clandestine cigarettes and paralyzing injections, but not the same at all.

How others view her sanity or insanity is totally informed by her femaleness, and this comes through in how she is treated and mistreated. Everybody just wants her to be quiet, maybe get better, maybe not. I wish I had some more quotes for this, but the library police were breathing down my neck... The second section of the memoir, all about the time shortly after the institution, is shocking in its clarity about the concessions one has to make for safety in wartime and how shitty it is to have a family that cares more about propriety than your health and happiness. There is much more to say about Notes from Down Below—it demands a reread some time when I can think about it more.


### The stories in the collection were not as interesting to me as the memoir. They play with dimensions and time, as surrealist fiction does, and nothing is as it appears. Horses appear over and over. Everything has many adjectives odd attached to it, but all come off as flat and juvenile. I wish I could get at more of her later fiction. Why must I to be constantly thwarted by my monolingualism?

i am a house

After much crybabying-around I changed my password for the BPL and went a-holds-placing. This weekend I was rewarded with two books instantly on the hold shelves for me, proving yet again that I am either a resourceful lady sleuth or simply so out of step that I get what I want when I want it. (A good strategy for the urban brunette with many needs).

I walked and walked this weekend with Lynne Tillman's new collection Someday This Will Be Funny. The first story that I opened to, “The Way We Are,” is exactly the thing, my coping and not coping and living. It is also a story about going to the movies in another country. I am dipping in and out of the book, rationing it while I cook foods and clean corners and plan. To distract myself, I ran to the aforementioned shelves and got Haunted Houses by Tillman (1987) and seemingly the only freely had, non-library-use-only, non-The Hearing Trumpet copy of Leonora Carrington's fiction in English in NYC—The House of Fear. I took one of the houses, the haunted one, with me on the train and almost missed my stop because, really, who wants to get off in Midtown when you've got a good book and a seat and possibilities?

I am trying to write fiction, I am writing fiction, really for the first time these days. Since I've returned from Vermont I feel excited about trying new stuff, about failing and failing and finishing thoughts. It is distracting and fun and awful. When I feel like talking I talk too much and when I don't will stare at you all spooky. Don't worry, don't worry, don't worry, my mind is elsewhere.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

The Hearing Trumpet was ohmygod 100% fucking amazing. I've been in this mode of reading about repressed and oppressed British ladies in surreal circumstances, and that describes this book, but only superficially. The main character, Marian Leatherby, is really old, living in a Mexico-type land, hanging with her outrageous and wonderful friend Carmella and essentially enjoying herself despite deafness and neglect. "Every week brings a certain amount of mild enjoyment; every night, in fine weather, the sky, the stars, and of course the moon in her season. On Mondays, in clement weather, I walk two blocks down the road and visit my friend Carmella." Marian's useless son ends this quiet life and puts her in a home at the urging of his terrible, also British, wife. How terrible to be in such a lush land and surrounded by prune-faced Brits! In the home, run by unsurprisingly avaricious and suspectly religious twits, Marian meets up with several other old ladies, all of whom are interesting, if not all benign. Conditions at the home degrade until Christian mysticism, murder and good, old-fashioned collective action shake things up, then down, down, down.

Besides just stewing in the wonderfulness of Carrington's sentences and delighting in her weird, but not one-dimensional characters, what I liked most about this book were its portrayal of old age as a high-stakes adventure where one's past is more than dead weight and friendship as not only a superficial past time, but a lifesaving relationship. I would trade all the snow in Lapland for a friend like Carmella...

Despite all I've said, subtlety reigns in this book. Marian is a mild and mostly passive observer and she tells this story with a sweetness that may distract from the author's absolute dissection of ideas of propriety, femininity, the body, human worth and the past. Her reality is not questioned by the book, though throughout the story several people deem her "senile" or vice-ridden or mad. If you read the intro to the book, or any other biographics on Carrington, it becomes clear why this theme is so important, but I urge you to wait until you've read the book and not let the facts fuck up the fictional truth.

I wish I could show you more of Carrington's writing, but the book has gone back to the library and Google-Booking around for quotes is agitating. Perhaps if everybody who reads this buys a copy from Exact Change we can pressure them into reprinting more of her work.

Still loving The Hearing Trumpet. I will be finished soon and was ruffled by the fact that unless I want to spend tens of dollars to buy a copy of her older work, my only other options for reading more Leonora Carrington is one copy of one book of hers in the BPL. Will somebody please, please reprint her other works?

While researching my reading options for Carrington, I looked more into the catalog of Exact Change, the publisher of the copy of The Hearing Trumpet that I am reading. They publish a ton of stuff that I am interested in, including the recent indie craze, Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. I am thinking of picking up that and The Death & Letters of Alice James: Selected Correspondence by Alice James and The Heresiarch & Co. by Guillaume Apollinaire. If anybody has any suggestions, let me know.

***

A few nights ago, B came home very late. He went to his computer and, through my sleepy haze, I heard the sound of files being transferred at a rapid pace. What could he possibly be doing after a long night of sport and jazz?

Turns out, he was blogging.

***
Oberlin College has a 97-item online mail art collection. I was very excited about this until I actually looked at the collection. What is really available on the internet is basically a catalog record, with uninteresting and barely helpful object metadata exposed and only a thumbnail image available. Some entries have links to biographies of the artists and postal data, but the tiny representations of the pieces make it useless for anyone not able to make it to Oberlin to check out the physical collection. (But do check out the very good collection overview to learn about and see more mail art).

I am spending a lot of time thinking about digital collections right now for school. Mostly I've been thinking about what putting a collection on the open web means. How much do we need to take into account the needs of the remote, and possibly casual, use when thinking about displaying metadata, offering quality representations of works and driving users to physical locations? This is a frustrating question for me. I believe that researchers should be doing the research, but I also think access is vastly improved the more data about an object is attached and available. And if your objects are visual, you've gotta have good representations--otherwise I really don't see the point of putting more than an excellent finding aid on the open web.

What do you think?
(via Letter Writers' Alliance)

Brothers, lovers & British women

Abandonware by An Owomoyela on PodCastle is an excellent SF story about grief, siblings and powerful love. Owomoyela captures so much about the experience of a "shrinking family," the strange, painful tension between the roles of child, adult and sibling and the strange rituals required for "moving on." I don't believe in moving on exactly, more like moving through, but this story was a nicely wrought piece of sibling fiction.

Here's an interesting interview with Owomoyela at Fantasy Magazine.

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The other blogger in my house finally posted something! If you like music and blurry pictures, you will love this mega post.

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Because I lost two awesome books in a row, my subway reading dwindled to reading those eerie "Does NYC need church?" ads and NY Post headlines. This was not sustainable, so after a very long class I went to the library on campus and checked over their paltry fiction section for something to distract on the ride home. At first nothing seemed to grab me from the college-bookshelf collection, but then I saw Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet. It was a nice edition and looked intriguing. I'm loving it so far with its wise and anarchic old ladies and precise, pulsing language. I can't wait to dive back in. That's one of her amazing paintings on the cover. After I finish the book I want to find out more about her art.