This and That.

Subject: Headlights

There are fewer than five months until the election, an election that will
decide the next President of the United States . The person elected will be
The president of all Americans, not just the Democrats or the Republicans.
To show our solidarity as Americans, let’s all get together and show each
other our support for the candidate of our choice. It’s time that we all
came together, Democrats and Republicans alike. If you support the policies
and character of John McCain, please drive with your headlights on during
the day. If you support Obama, please drive with your headlights off at
night. Thank you and God Bless

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I don’t read books as much as I would like these days, [I don't do a lot of things!] but one novelist I can re-read any time is Penelope Fitzgerald. Julian Barnes [a writer I like almost as much as PF] has written an appreciation of her and her work.

Like her personal manner, her life and literary career seemed designed to wrong-foot, to turn attention away from the fact that she was, or would turn into, a great novelist. True, she came from a cultured background, having one father and three uncles among the multi-talented Knox brothers, whose communal biography she later wrote. Her father was editor of Punch; her mother, one of the first students at Somerville College, Oxford, also wrote. Penelope was in turn a brilliant student at Somerville: one of her finals examiners was so astounded by her papers that he asked his fellow dons if he could keep them, and later, apparently, had them bound in vellum. But after this public proof of distinction, throughout what might for anyone else have been the best writing years of her life, she became a wife and working mother (at Punch, the BBC, the Ministry of Food, then in journalism and teaching). She was 58 by the time she published her first book, a biography of Burne-Jones. She then wrote a comic thriller, The Golden Child, to amuse her dying husband. In the period 1975-84 she published two more biographies and four more novels. Those four novels are all short, and written close to her own experiences: of running a bookshop, living on a houseboat, working for the BBC in wartime, teaching at a stage school. They are adroit, odd, highly pleasurable, but modest in ambition. And with almost any other writer you might think that, having used up her own life, she would – being now in her late 60s – have called it a day. On the contrary: over the next decade, from 1986 to 1995, she published the four novels – Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels and The Blue Flower – by which she will be remembered. They are written far from her obvious life, being set, respectively, in 1950s Florence, pre-revolutionary Moscow, Cambridge in 1912, and late 18th-century Prussia. Many writers start by inventing away from their lives, and then, when their material runs out, turn back to more familiar sources. Fitzgerald did the opposite, and by writing away from her own life liberated herself into greatness.

I have recommended her to many people, some like her and some not which tells me something about both types, though I put it down somewhat to her ‘Englishness’ and how well that translates to people whose mother tongue is not English however proficient they be in its use. The best comment I got from someone who liked her was, ‘She says so much with so little’.
Another old friend, now ex due to differences over Bush, America etc. asked me once for a recommendation for her reading circle, so naturally I gave her PF. Neither she nor any of her circle liked her. They are all highly educated people so I can only assume that she [PF] didn’t fit their received ideas as to what makes a good novel. As Stephen Leacock said on someone receiving their PHD, he has now been pronounced full and has no need to learn anything else for the rest of his life. The friend, by the way, was Danish and female.

If I encourage anyone to give her a try or if anyone reading this has read her I’d be most interested to hear what you think about her novels.

The article ends thus:

Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route-maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. And their structure and purpose may not be immediately apparent, being based on the tacit network of “loans, debts, repayments and foreclosures” that makes up human relationships. Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does; except with a greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in The Beginning of Spring, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says “There are no accidental meetings”. The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and the movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is. Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels are pre-eminent examples of this kind.

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I missed July’s tree pic, here it is a little late.

I should take a rainy day pic for Aug since it was just announced that it’s been the wettest summer here in Toronto since records have been kept. Strange but nice, no too hot and humid to breathe days, no watering lawns, everything green and it reminds me of England!

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Oregon, one of the socialist paradise States, couldn’t afford the $4000 a month treatment for a woman suffering terminal cancer but they did offer to pay for assisting her suicide should she so wish.

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I can’t remember if I posted this before but I just love this 12 year old girl singer from the Britain’s Got Talent show.

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