Frankenstein Sundae, 219

The relationship between Lady Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron did not end well. The fracture would taunt and haunt her for the rest of her life—and she just could not let go of him. In the summer of 1814 she tried a surprise visit (could she get him back?), but he was out. So she took one of his books and wrote on the first page: Remember me!

When Byron returned, he was annoyed and wrote in reply a nasty couple of quatrains:

Remember thee! remember thee!
Till Lethe quench life’s burning stream
Remorse and shame shall cling to thee,
And haunt thee like a feverish dream!

Remember thee! Aye, doubt it not.
Thy husband too shall think of thee:
By neither shalt thou be forgot,
Thou false to him, thou fiend to me! 

Nasty Bryon—calling her a fiend who had betrayed her husband … hmmmm, with whom did she betray him, LB?

One of the great Byron scholars, Leslie Marchand (male), wrote a little about this in his three-volume biography—and notice his tendentious language in these selected sentences:

Caroline might have been mad at times, but she was no fool.

… in June she grew wild again and began to invade Byron’s chambers at all hours.

He felt hounded, beset by a demon who would never leave him.[1]

Mad, wild, beset by a demon—these words are hardly disinterested, and although I admire (and am deeply grateful for Marchand’s masterful scholarship), I see an old, old story here: the philandering man, the ill-used, then rejected woman who has little she can do about her situation but rage, rage against the dying of the light.

In Lady Byron and Her Daughters, Markus is able to separate her feelings for Byron as a poet (she admires his work) from her disdain for him (at times) as a human being. As I’ve discussed earlier (in my descriptions of the doings of Bysshe Shelley), the nineteenth century—like just about every other century—was not a good time to be a woman, and the women whose lives were crushed by thoughtless men (whose cruelties were sanctioned by systems of class and gender) had little they could do. So kudos to Caroline Lamb for writing Glenarvon.

But what about Lady Byron, who, after less than a year of marriage to this most mercurial of poets, discovered that she could just take no more? Markus begins her chapter about the end with this: Reader, prepare for a train wreck.[2] 

Lady Caroline Lamb

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[1] Byron: A Biography, 3 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 1: 458.

[2] Lady Byron, 31.

Sunday Sundries, 94

1. GSOTW (Good Samaritan of the Week): I was stuck near a busy intersection, could not get out into traffic; a woman stopped, waved me out in front of her. GSOTW!

2. Friday night we saw The Hateful Eight, Quentin Tarantino's most recent (and 8th) film. It's been out for a few months--gone from most theaters--and we were regretting that we'd not seen it (we've seen all the others). So I was surprised to see that the theaters in nearby Solon were offering a 6:30 showing. So off we went, joining only two other people in that particular auditorium.

If you know anything about Tarantino, you know that Buckets of Blood will tip all over you at some point--but with his work, for some reason, it doesn't really bother me: I just enjoy the journey to the Buckets so much, I guess. There were allusions to his earlier films throughout (much of Reservoir Dogs, his first, takes place in a closed room; ditto here), and I was glad that we'd seen a recent stage production of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None--because there are numerous similarities (everyone gets offed; poison, hanging, shooting in both). I don't think I've ever seen a film in which every character dies. And I mean everyone. Everyone--major, minor--whom you see alive you will eventually see dead. (Am I sick? It made me laugh.) (trailer for film)

One thing I've always liked about Tarantino: He brings back to the screen some folks you haven't seen in a long time. Here, it's Bruce Dern, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Kurt Russell, Michael Madsen, and others. Oh, and there's Walter Coggings from Justified. Nice to see him again.

Mostly talk in this film ... until, of course, the Buckets tip.

3. This week I finished Joyce Carol Oates' most recent novel, The Man Without a Shadow (2016). I loved it. But I've loved pretty much all her work since I first read her back when her National Book Award-winner them was published in 1969. I've had the opportunity to review several of her books over the years for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and I wish I could have done this one. It's the story of a young scientist, a woman, who (beginning in 1969) begins working on a research project involving a man with amnesia--a man they call "E. H." We watch her work with him throughout the years--all the way to his death and the pinnacle of her career (she becomes a very celebrated, revered researcher).

But ... Oates is Oates ... so there are ... problems. Although he can remember well up to the day of his injury (he's 37--and, in his own mind--always is), he can remember only about 70 seconds of what's been happening in his present. As a result, of course, he meets Margot (the scientist) anew, every day.

She is a lonely woman--and has a rich interior life. And Oates very soon is dealing with the issue of whose mind is, well, normal?  A relationship of a different nature ensues between them.

As always, I was so impressed with Oates' ability to inhabit the minds of so many different kinds of people. Her skill at weaving a story (it's principally Margot's point of view--but we get his from time to time, also).

Flawed human beings. Dark secrets. Skillful and surprising writing. Joyce Carol Oates.

4. Some final words: Interesting words from my various online word-of-the-day providers.

• Amaranthine  \am-uh-RAN-thin, -thahyn\  adjective (dictionary.com)
  1. unfading; everlasting: a woman of amaranthine loveliness.
  2. of or like the amaranth.
• handraulic, adj. Pronunciation: Brit. /hanˈdrɒlɪk/,  U.S. /hænˈdrɔlɪk/, /hænˈdrɑlɪk/ (OED)
  Etymology:Formed within English, by compounding. Etymons: hand n., hydraulic adj. <  hand n. + -raulic (in hydraulic adj.).
   Chiefly Brit.
    Of motive power: provided by the hands or by human energy; (of a system, device, etc.) operated by hand as opposed to automatically or by machine.
• macrosmatic, adj. Pronunciation: Brit. /ˌmakrɒzˈmatɪk/,  U.S. /ˈˌmækrɑzˈmædɪk/  (OED)
  Etymology:Formed within English, by compounding. Etymons: macro- comb. form, osmatic adj. <  macro- comb. form + osmatic adj. (see quot. 1890). Compare microsmatic adj.
   Zool.
    Having a well-developed olfactory apparatus or sense of smell. Also fig.

The Wayward Wind

It was very windy in northeastern Ohio earlier this week. Our cedar fence creaked; decorative items hung on our outside walls blew off; our old house groaned--and we hoped that he/she would hold on, just a few more years ...

We were driving home early on Thursday evening (St. Patrick's Day)--the wind reminding us that if it wanted to, it could sweep our car off to Oz--when an old song sneaked up out of my memory and demanded prominence. It was "The Wayward Wind." I sang a few bars for Joyce, who said she did not remember it. I could not remember who had sung it (I thought it was Anita Bryant; I was wrong), so Joyce dug out her portable memory (iPhone), googled the song, found the singer: Gogi Grant. (See pic.)

Joyce also found a YouTube clip of a much older Gogi singing "The Wayward Wind" to a very grey audience. (Link to clip.)

YouTube also offers a recording of her doing the song in 1956, the year of its original release. (Link to 1956 clip.) While Joyce ran the recording on her phone, I sang along. But Joyce said she still did not remember it. She'd been too young, I guess.

"The Wayward Wind" held the #1 spot for a bit--and ended 1956 as the 5th best-selling record (45 rpm!). The other performers in the Top Ten that year?  Elvis occupied three spots, the others by Nelson Riddle, The Platters, Lex Baxter, Kay Starr, Dean Martin, Doris Day. A different era, eh?

I see that the single was released in April 1956, the end of my sixth grade year at Adams School in Enid, Oklahoma. I was already listening to the radio then (portables had become available!) and was learning to like Elvis (despite my parents' disapprobation), Bill Haley & the Comets, and others. What I did not yet know was that my Oklahoma days were coming to an end: Dad had accepted a job at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio, and we would move in August, ending my Oklahoma idyll.

But "The Wayward Wind" went with me. It became a standard at the soc hops and dances at the Hiram School--and I'm guessing (though I can't positively remember) that I danced to it when I had my first date in the fall of 7th grade--a Hiram School dance (each class sponsored one--can't remember which did the one in the fall).

Back in the car last week ... things got weird when Joyce looked at some Google findings about Gogi Grant. Her real name was Myrtle Audrey Arinsberg--not a name to attract an agent or a recording studio--but was "Gogi" better? I learned that "Grant " came from her agent, "Gogi" (rhymes with Yogi) from RCA. There you go. Marketing.

But the strangest news Joyce found? Gogi Grant had just died. At age 91. On March 10, just a week before the northeastern Ohio wind blew her song back into my life on the way home from an errand. (Link to obituary.) I hadn't thought about her in a half-century. And now I can't stop ...

Frankenstein Sundae, 218

The biographer, Julia Markus, teaches English at Hofstra, and, based on this book alone, she is very well qualified to teach the subject! Although she is an advocate for the women in her book—justifiably so, in my view (see above)—she writes neither with bitterness nor disdain but with a patent admiration for Annabella and for her daughters, especially Ada (about whom, more later). She also writes with grace and with an eloquent ease that will invite rather than repel readers. Yes, her book rests on a foundation of scholarship—sturdy scholarship—but it is an attractive, artful edifice that rises above and even, at times, makes you forget what lies below.

She begins in London, 1812, where the nineteen-year-old Anne Isabella Milbanke (she used the name Annabella) has gone to stay for the nonce. (At this time, Byron was 24.) She was born, well off, in 1792 (making her five years older than Mary Shelley), was a “prodigy in math and languages,”[1] and so beautiful that she had a stable-full of suitors, all of whom she pretty much sent packing.

One of her cousins was Lady Caroline Lamb (1784–1828), who had her own torrid affair with Byron, an affair whose volcanic heat (and later arctic coolness) she recorded in her novel about their relationship, Glenarvon (1816)—the very year of the “Frankenstein summer.”[2] It’s a tale chockablock with such sentences as this one: … suddenly she started as if shuddering on the very edge of perdition, in the dark labyrinth of sin—on the fathomless chasm which opened before her feet.[3] I’d have to say that Glenarvon could stand on the shelf with Fifty Shades of Gray and their ilk—differing only in that Caroline Lamb’s century (and class) prohibited the sort of gleeful naughty detail available to E. L. James, et al.

I began reading Glenarvon in April 1999, when I was on my “Mary Adventure” in Europe. My train reading. And hotel reading. Here’s something I wrote on April 17:

I just hit p. 100 in Glenarvon, a novel I’m enjoying more and more as I proceed. No wonder LB was attracted to Caroline Lamb: She was intelligent, witty, talented, fearless—all qualities doomed, finally, to repel a man in the 19^th century (and the 20^th & 21^st, one suspects).  I laughed aloud a few times at the witty prattle of these people w/ too much money and far too much leisure—no wonder there are revolutions in the world! Glenarvon (LB) himself has yet to make his appearance, and I’m getting eager to meet him through CL’s eyes. 

---

[1] Ibid., 7.

[2] (London: Everyman, 1995).

[3] Ibid., 155.

Yes, another volume of doggerel is on the way

Today or tomorrow I'll be uploading to Kindle Direct yet another volume of doggerel (Fearsome Mania), most of it posted previously on my blog Daily Doggerel (and/or on Facebook). I'll let you know when it's available for purchase ($2.99--the lowest Amazon allows for such things).

Here's the Foreword to the volume ...

Foreword

And now … yet another volume of doggerel, almost all of which has appeared on my blog, Daily Doggerel (http://dailydoggerels.blogspot.com/), and/or on Facebook, where I have many friends who find it quite easy to pretend that they’ve read these pieces. A great thing about Facebook—the slick ease with which you can lie by liking.

I had a couple of themes for Fearsome Mania: (1) poems about the words we have for all our many mania (e.g., bibliomania—a madness for books), (2) poems about the words we have for all the fears we have (e.g., bibliophobia—a fear of books!). Actually, I don’t have a poem for bibliophobia, a grievous oversight that I will one day have to correct.

Might as well be right now:

His fear of books is so complete

That when he saw one, he would Tweet:

“This book is making me perspire—

It’s time to toss it in the fire!”

(By the way, his Tweet is considerably below Twitter’s 140-character maximum. And we’ll not comment on his thoughtless notion of tossing the book in a fire when he’s already perspiring.)

You will be grateful to learn that I wrote far fewer poems for -mania and -phobia words than there are -mania and -phobia words. Based on the vast number of them, we can only conclude that we are one wacko, scared species. We can also conclude that we seem to insist on having a word for everything—an insistence, in this case, that I found very pleasant, for I didn’t have to scratch around for ideas for doggerel. I found some depressingly long lists on the Internet.

Appended to these two major sections of Fearsome Mania is a section I’m calling “Wolferel.” Doggerel, as you know, is so-called “light verse” (i.e., most of it sucks—but it can be amusing); wolferel (a word I am now offering for sale to the Oxford English Dictionary and others) is doggerel with pretensions. They are related critters, wolves and dogs, and wolferel is related to doggerel—just a little more serious, maybe even deadly. Wolferel attempts to enter the Kingdom of Poetry but doesn’t quite make it. (It howls just outside the gates.) Just as a dog can look like a wolf (but isn’t), a wolf can look like a Warg (but isn’t).[1]

Anyway, I enjoyed writing these pieces. I usually do them right after lunch over in the local coffee shop, the Open Door Coffee Co. (Hudson, Ohio), which is where I slouch in an easy chair (unless some Evil One has stolen my place), boot up my iPad, consult my list of words, and see what bounds into the room—a dog, a wolf, a skunk. I tried to eliminate most of the skunks from this collection, but who knows? Some of them can look quite canine, especially when you want them to.

            — Daniel Dyer, March 15, 2016

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[1] For those of you unacquainted with Wargs, they are giant (evil) wolves created by J. R. R. Tolkien. Here’s a link to more. http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Wargs

Frankenstein Sundae, 217

I’m going to take a wee break here to do a little section on Lord Byron’s wife, Annabella (my wife’s mother was Annabelle), a section based (virtually entirely) on a new book I recently read, Lady Byron and Her Daughters, by Julia Markus.[1]

Although I ended my intensive (obsessive? maniacal?) research on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein a number of years ago, I’ve still tried to read the most prominent works that have appeared, works that deal with her—or with others in her circle. There’s no way to read it all: Scholars who dig into the lives of Mary, Bysshe, Lord Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and the others in her circle are relentless in their pursuits, and all I can do is stand nearby in wonder at all their excavations.

But I did want to read this book, mostly because I know very little about Lady Byron—just that their marriage (January 1, 1815) was brief, that Lord Byron’s life was so overpoweringly interesting (in ways negative and positive) that some of his biographers have neglected Lady Byron somewhat—some even portraying her in unflattering, even black light. What appealed to me as well—it was just about a year and a half after their wedding (their marriage over) that Byron, in the summer of 1816, rented the Villa Diodati overlooking Lake Geneva, the villa where Frankenstein would be born. He had already impregnated Mary’s step-sister, Claire Clairmont  (as I’ve written about earlier).

I began reading Lady Byron on January 19, 2016, finished it on March 12. I’m not really a slow reader (eight weeks to read a 321-page book!); I was just reading numerous other things simultaneously—and trying to figure out how I would work Lady Byron’s story (or pieces of it) into my narrative about Mary. I still haven’t figured that out. But I’m going to write about the book a bit in the next few posts and, later, will prune and replant what I am certain will be a bush far too leafy.

---

[1] (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015).

And Then There Were None

In my "Sundry Sundries" this past weekend I neglected to mention/discuss the Great Lakes Theater Festival's production of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, which Joyce and I saw on Friday night at the GLTF's venue, the Hanna Theater in Playhouse Square.

We've been GLTF subscribers for quite a while--and I used to take Harmon Middle School kids down there (later in my career) to see productions--Shakespeare and others. The productions are generally solid (a few exceptions, some of which I've blogged about), professional. This was was no exception. It had a very strong cast--mostly GLTF veterans, about half of whom have been with the company for more than a decade. No weak links. Nothing even close. Gorgeous set. A large room, lots of windows upstage with a view of the sea (with sounds of sea birds as the lights came up.)

The play is--duh!--a murder mystery, but the mystery is not so much about who is committing the murders but about how he/she does it. (No spoiler alerts--I will not reveal anything.)

My problem was this: I didn't care who got killed--or who the perp was. All the principals are fairly unsavory, and the one who comes closest to being the "moral center" is the murderer himself/herself.

The story: A group of ten people--each unknown to the others--gathers in a pretty snazzy house on an otherwise uninhabited island, all at the invitation of a person no one seems to know very well. And then, yet another guest arrives: Death. One by one they all begin to fall (in one imaginative way after another), and one by one a collection of toy soldiers on the mantle diminishes with each murder. We begin with ten of them; with each death, one somehow disappears. (I was watching and could not see how this was happening.)

The toys accompany a sing-song, nursery-rhymey (dark) poem--see below:

Ten little soldier boys went out to dine;

One choked his little self and then there were Nine.

Nine little soldier boys sat up very late;

One overslept himself and then there were Eight.

Eight little soldier boys travelling in Devon;

One said he’d stay there and then there were Seven.

Seven little soldier boys chopping up sticks;

One chopped himself in halves and then there were Six.

Six little soldier boys playing with a hive;

A bumble bee stung one and then there were Five.

Five little soldier boys going in for law;

One got into chancery and then there were Four.

Four little soldier boys going out to sea;

A red herring swallowed one and then there were Three.

Three little soldier boys walking in the Zoo;

A big bear hugged one and then there were Two.

Two little soldier boys sitting in the sun;

One got frizzled up and then there was One.

One little soldier boy left all alone;

He went and hanged himself

And then there were None.

—Frank Green, 1869

The murders all fit in some way with the rhyme.

This is, of course, all pre-cellphone. There is no "regular" telephone on the island, and the weather cooperates with the plot--the daily supply boat cannot sail, cannot arrive and bring help.

In England, Christie (1890-1976) originally published the novel in 1939 as Ten Little Niggers (that's right--just five years before I was born--amazing). In America, the title was changed to Ten Little Indians. It sold millions of copies and is, in fact, one of the greatest bestsellers of all time. And then the conversion to the latest title (And Then There Were None). There have been a few films. (Link to IMDB) And as I write this, there is another adaptation running on Lifetime ( Link to trailer) I'll probably stream it one of these days. It's gotten great reviews.

We enjoyed the GLTF production--admired it--even though, as I said, all the characters are deeply flawed. More so than the rest of us. 'Nuf said ...