astrobravo

I’ve been enjoying Dorothy Lathrop’s books so much that I checked the university catalog to see if they had any other books by her, and discovered that she illustrated a book of poems by Sara Teasdale! Teasdale has been one of my favorites since we read “There Will Come Soft Rains” in high school, so of course I had to give it a go.

I’m working my way through the book slowly, a poem a night. I ought to save this one till next October, but I haven’t the patience, so here it is.

Late October
By Sara Teasdale

I found ten kinds of wild flower growing
On a steely day that looked like snowing:
Queen Anne’s lace, and blue heal-all,
A buttercup, straggling, grown too tall,
A rusty aster, a chicory flower–
Ten I found in half an hour.
The air was blurred with dry leaves flying,
Gold and scarlet, gaily dying.
A squirrel ran off with a nut in his mouth,
And always, always, flying south,
Twittering, the birds went by,
Flickering sharp against the sky,
Some in great bows, some in wedges,
Some in bands with wavering edges;
Flocks and flocks were flying over
With the north wind for their drover.
“Flowers,” I said, “you’d better go,
Surely it’s coming on for snow,”–
They did not heed me, nor heed the birds,
Twittering thin, far-fallen words–
The others through of to-morrow, but they
Only remembered yesterday.

I have returned from a weekend of dissipation in Bloomington! We visited FOUR local bookstores, during which book-shopping spree I bought:

Used copies of Gary Paulsen’s The Cookcamp and Ngaio Marsh’s Singing in the Shrouds, both from the public library.

Used DVDs of Chernobyl and the Ruth Wilson Jane Eyre for myself, plus Brideshead Revisited and season 3 of the 1960s Batman for a friend (who will be therefore enabled to return my copy of Brideshead Revisited)

Mary Stolz’s Ready or Not, which has simply gorgeous endpapers (would any of my fellow Stolz fans like a crack at this book after I’m done?)

And Knight Owl and Early Bird, a birthday present for my niece, whose birthday is not until March, but who am I to turn down an opportunity to support the Book Corner? (I’ll probably also buy her a picture book from my beloved Von’s.)

We also hit up Goods for Cooks, which tragically did not have my beloved dark chocolate hobnobs, but I DID buy a sieve and a garden herb themed dishtowel and a bright springy oven mitt. (I liked to have seasonal dish towels, oven mitts, napkins etc; an easy way to decorate for the seasons.) In between the sieve and the potato masher I got for Christmas, I feel rich in kitchen ware.

And we went to my friend Becky’s house to hang out with the dog and three cats and the baby, who gave us the grumpy Churchill face for about half an hour before deciding that we were all right and toddling over to the coffee table (with the help of her baby walker) to pick up one of our shortbread cookies. To eat it? No. Just to hold it. An interesting texture perhaps.

And then Caitlin and I went back to her place and watched a couple Poirots and ate more cookies, and then I went to bed and read The Cookcamp, a short memoir about the time he spent with his grandmother as a small child when she was working at a road-grading camp, companion piece to Alida's Song and The Quilt. Sweet and poignant if you enjoy a childhood memoir.

Then this morning I drove home and began rewatching Chernobyl. (What a good show! Already watched two episodes and only paused with difficulty to make dinner.) A most successful visit.

Sometimes in one’s literary life one simply wants to suffer, and when this urge hits, I know where to turn: Émile Zola, the 19th century French naturalist writer who paints brutally frank pictures of people in extremis.

This time around I read Thérèse Raquin, Zola’s breakout hit which was anathemized in French literary journals as “putrid,” a “sewer.” If you’ve read any nineteenth century English or American novels, which tend to portray the entire field of French literature as a putrid sewer, you know that Théresè Raquin must be something really special.

Actually I thought Thérèse Raquin ends up pulling its punches in a way that Zola’s later novels don’t. Yes, the main characters behave abominably, but in the end they also suffer terribly for it, which has a moral neatness that you don’t necessarily find in, say, Germinal.

At the beginning of the novel, Thérèse Raquin is living a life of quiet desperation. Married to her sickly cousin Camille, she works all day in her aunt’s haberdashery, and her life seems likely to continue in exactly this dull routine for fifty years until she dies. Until one day when Camille shows up with a friend in tow: the healthy, vibrant Laurent…

Thérèse and Laurent begin a passionate affair. But when it becomes logistically impossible for the affair to continue, they hatch a plan: they’ll kill Camille! Then, after a suitable amount of time has elapsed, they’ll get married. (This is one of the great scenes of the book. They never entirely spell out that they have a plan, only comment wistfully that, after all, accidents do happen… but gazing meaningfully at each other the whole time, both knowing that accidents can be orchestrated.)

So they drown Camille on a boating expedition. No one suspects them, they wait for a year and a half, all is well.

But then they wed. And once they’re together… well… they discover that they’ve accidentally orchestrated the world’s most horrible OT3: Théresè, Laurent, and the ghost/hallucination of Camille’s drowned corpse, always with them whenever they’re alone together.

This book was apparently viewed as a horror novel in the 19th century and it retains that horrifying power: the inescapable waterlogged green corpse of Camille, which lies between Thérèse and Laurent in bed at night and floats in the corners of their bedroom and sits at the table with them whenever they’re alone.

However, this does make the novel in some ways less brutal than Zola’s later fiction. Even though Thérèse and Laurent are never arrested, they suffer unceasingly for their crime, tormented by their own minds. Zola is at pains to assure us that Théresè and Laurent definitely don’t feel remorse for their killing, that they wouldn’t care at ALL if it weren’t for the fact that they were suffering continual visions of the man they killed, but since they are suffering these continual visions and in fact kill themselves in the end in order to escape this continual torment… I mean, does it really matter if you don’t call it remorse if it works pretty much exactly like extreme remorse?

On the other hand, Zola is cruel enough to give Thérèse’s aunt a paralyzing stroke, and after she’s paralyzed and unable to speak, she realizes that her beloved niece and her niece’s equally beloved new husband in fact killed her son. Once they know that she knows, they give up all pretense and start screaming at each other about the murder every evening, and the paralyzed aunt has no choice but to sit there and listen. Nightmare fuel.

Amazing psychological horror. What a claustrophobic book. I wouldn’t call it a good time precisely, but it’s exactly the time you want if you feel like experiencing the literary equivalent of trying to claw through the wall with your bare hands.

Ahoy there, mateys! In 2026, littlerhymes and I have embarked on a Year of Sail, starting with C. S. Forester’s Mr. Midshipman Hornblower!

(This was apparently not the first Hornblower published, but it is the first chronologically, so we decided to start there.)

In this book we meet Horatio Hornblower, a cool, logical, mathematically talented all-around doofus who gets seasick on his very first row out to his new ship as midshipman. The seasickness fades but the general awkwardness does not, as evidenced in the story where a woman offers to hide dispatches in her petticoats and Hornblower is like: discussing stays? and petticoats? with a woman???? and then there’s a glimpse of her thigh WHERE TO LOOK??????

He’s also almost madly brave, as evidenced in the story where he purposefully climbs aboard a fire ship (that is, a ship that has been purposefully set on fire in order to set other ships ablaze) in order to steer it out of the harbor. Absolute madman. But it’s the logical thing to do, so calmly he goes ahead and does it.

Over the years I’ve osmosed that the Hornblower movies starring Ioan Gruffud are good and also slashy, so I decided that I might as well give them a go too. I watched the first two, then commented to littlerhymes, “These are good but they AREN’T slashy, the internet lied to me.”

“Watch the next movie,” littlerhymes commanded.

HOLY COW.

So in the first movie, Hornblower and company are on their way to a surprise night attack on a French frigate when Hornblower’s friend Mr. Midshipman Kennedy has a seizure. Unable to think of any other way to keep him quiet, Hornblower knocks him over the head, which means that they have to leave him on the jolly boat as the rest of them attack the frigate, and the jolly boat is cast adrift with Kennedy still in it.

In the third movie, Kennedy returns! Specially, Hornblower is TAKEN CAPTIVE by the SPANISH and in his very cell in Spanish prison, he finds Kennedy, who greets him “GO AWAY.”

Then Kennedy turns his face to the wall. He just got out of the punishment cell which is so small that you can neither lie down nor stand up, and he can no longer straighten his legs, and he wants to die.

Naturally Hornblower tenderly nurses him back to health, which involves gently smoothing his lustrous hair from his brow. (The production team clearly threw realism to the winds with the lustrous hair, as I feel strongly that Mr. Midshipman “so depressed he’s trying to starve himself to death” Kennedy would probably not be bothering to comb his hair or indeed shave and would therefore have a beard like Santa Claus.) It does NOT involve climbing into bed with him to warm him with his own body heat, but I feel sure that fanfic has filled in this gap, and if it hasn’t (or even if it has) I might need to commit a little fic for the cause.