Fighting Windmills

Posted on by gcottraux

I can’t believe it’s been something like 8 months since I’ve posted anything. Lots has been going on, but I’ve been more about making things with my hands than writing about life’s adventures. I am back in a writing mode for a while now, as I started the daily battle called NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) for November.

NaNo poster

So far I am over 10,000 words in to my first draft of the long-threatened “Little Shit” memoir (fictionalized memoir? autobiographical fiction?) that now has the working title Crazy Cat Girl, probably an easier sell than Little Shit.

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Crazy Cat Girl (me), 1972

Will I ever finish the book? Do I ever finish anything? All of my impossible dreams, me as Dona (Doña?) Quixote, fighting those windmills.

Don Quixote

Did you know that there was a female Don Quixote? In 1752, Charlotte Lennox published The Female Quixote; or, The Adventures of Arabella. Wow people with that the next time you need dinner party conversation.

Arabella

Charlotte Lennox
Scottish author Charlotte Lennox (1730-1804)

2019 has been my year of being Arabella. I started French lessons at the local adult school. Gave up when it got too hard (aka, I didn’t have time to study). Windmills 1, Arabella 0.

We foster failed again. Gorgeous, shy, sweet polydactyl Butterscotch came to us to recover from a head injury earlier in the year, and has been granted permanent resident status. He and the now grown-up Pugcat are quite the best friends. I don’t know who gets the win; I think Arabella in this case.

Butterscotch
Butterscotch, aka Bubbers, aka Bigfoot

 

I might have gotten over my fear of it hurting and entered the world of tattoos. Pugcat now lives in portrait form on my left arm. (I have yet to get good images of the actual tattoo, mainly because I think my arm looks fat in all of the photos.)

 

Puggy trio
If there was ever a tattoo worthy cat, it’s Pugcat.

 

We didn’t get a summer vacation this year, but I did get to the Thomas Wolfe Society meeting, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

 

Gettysburg, a lovely place, was quite the eye-opening experience. As a result, we ended up watching the PBS/Ken Burns documentary The Civil War. I learned so much about this country that I didn’t know. It was very moving, heart-wrenching in all honesty.

 

Burns

 

I also was honored to be selected to attend the Animals and Society Institute’s summer program at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) Center for Advanced Study. Over 20 animal studies doctoral students and recent PhDs spent a week with incredible mentors, workshopping our projects and making new friends. Including some animal ones, like the goats we visited, or the tarantula who visited us. My first visit to the mid-West, where it was hot and humid and I relearned the joy of lying in the grass under a shady tree.

 

 

The down side was living in the dormitories. Let’s just say, I’m too old and private for dormitory life.

Here is where Arabella comes in. I was so inspired by my week of studies that I rewrote my dissertation proposal, which is essentially the first 3 chapters of the dissertation. I had been through several drafts, none of which got through my committee. I was very excited about the new version, and my committee chair seemed to be, too. But I got shot down again. Pesky windmills, forever winning the battles. After a cooling down period (I do get angry sometimes),  I dropped out of school. Well, I withdrew from Saybrook with the intention of finding  spot at another university to finish my dissertation. I have high hopes for a place at Antioch University next year. So Arabella is still in the fight on this one. Charlotte Lennox did give her two volumes, after all.

arabella 2

 

But what’s really thrown me for a loop this year was the loss of a beloved litter of foster kittens. Mother cat Leah and her babies came to us when the babies were only 2 days old.

 

The kittens all had names starting with L (Liam, Linus, Lily, I forget). We renamed them. I couldn’t keep the L names straight. We named them after writers: Jules (Verne), Toni (Morrison), Willa (Cather), and Ernest (Hemingway).

 

 

Leah was a wonderful mother. The babies grew strong and healthy, keeping us entertained with their antics and enthralled with their daily changes.

 

They seemed well on their way to wonderful lives. And then a giant, evil windmill called panleukopenia virus stepped in and devasted us when the kittens were about 7 weeks old. Kittens are fragile, and their mortality rate is higher than you might think. Our hearts were broken when the decision was made to humanely euthanize the suffering babies. On a brighter note, mother Leah is fine and has been adopted.

 

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Clockwise from upper left: Jules, Toni, Willa, Ernest. Rest in peace, little ones.

 

We grieve. I am just at the point of writing about it, partly because as I do my daily writing for NaNoWriMo, I realize there is so much I am still working through from my life, including grieving for what seemed like the loss of childhood and for my mother, who has been gone for 10 years now.

I had been throwing myself into art projects. One of my favorite places on earth these days is Etui, at 2518 San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. I would take every single class offered there if I could, and sleep in the shop in between! Plus owners/teachers Alice Armstrong and Bethany Carlson Mann, are 2 of my favorite people!

etui logo

I started a tunnel book project in memory of the 4 kittens. While it can get me emotional, that’s not a bad thing, and I am in a group of incredibly supportive and loving people in the Books, Boxes, and More class. I haven’t completely finished the book, and it’s hard to photograph, but the making of it has been surprisingly healing.

 

 

Some other fun art projects I’ve started and actually finished this year include my first attempt at basketry, wax flower crowns, and crepe paper fruits and flowers (quince fruit box pictured below). I find making things with my hands, whether it’s art, crafts, food, whatever, very therapeutic. Expensive hobbies, but maybe cheaper than therapy? Maybe…

 

But I am not letting the panleukopenia derail our fostering more than necessary. For a while, we can only foster adult cats with vaccinations and healthy immune systems (in case any of the evil panleuk virus lurks in unseen places in the house). Meet Daisy, our 8-year old house guest who needed a break from shelter life!

 

Daisy
Foster-cat-in-residence Daisy.

 

Is there a lesson in all of this? Keep your head up. Keep following your dreams. And if I’ve left you with the Robert Goulet version of the Man of La Mancha song Impossible Dream, which I mainly remember from the Jerry Lewis yearly muscular dystrophy telethons, my sincerest apologies.

 

Believe me, there are endless versions of this song available. But if I am going to make this up to you all, I need to leave you with a truly good one. I love Tom Jones, I used to wish Andy Williams was my dad, Brian Stokes Mitchell won a Tony for his performance, you can never beat Frank Sinatra, I love the idea of a Liberace version, but it’s really hard to find a version that isn’t cheesy, overly dramatic, or just plain icky. I am partial to this rendition by the late Glen Campbell, who I’ve developed a new appreciation for in the last few years.

 

“The Impossible Dream (The Quest)”
(Mitch Leigh, Joe Darion)

To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow,
To run where the brave dare not go.

To right the unrightable wrong,
To love pure and chaste from afar,
To try when your arms are too weary,
To reach the unreachable star.

This is my quest,
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless,
No matter how far.

To fight for the right
Without question or pause,
To be willing to march
Into hell for a heavenly cause.

And I know if I’ll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will be peaceful and calm
When I’m laid to my rest.

And the world will be better for this,
That one man scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage.
To fight the unbeatable foe.
To reach the unreachable star.

Get out there, battle those windmills, make the world a better place!
Peace and hugs.

The word soup in Thomas Wolfe’s refrigerator

Posted on by gcottraux

If you have ever met me or read my blog, you know that I am not a tall person. And I’m okay with that. Thomas Wolfe, on the other hand, was not a small person. I assume he was okay with that. Tall people come across with a sense of authority and power to us shorties. I am 5′ 0″. Wolfe was 6′ 6″.

Tom and me
Due to budget constraints, the “life size” Wolfe is only 6′ 0″. The actual life size me is 5′ 0″. Add 6 more inches difference. He was really tall; just sayin’.

 

I’ve always kind of known about Thomas Wolfe, mostly from the book title You Can’t Go Home Again (published posthumously in 1940) and the romanticized view of Southern writers that an avid reader who spent her childhood in Georgia can’t escape.

EGcoverCan'tGoHome

 

After watching the film Genius, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer A. Scott Berg book Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978)  and writing about it, I have continued reading and researching into the life of Thomas Wolfe.

 

I loved the film, but after my recent sojourn to Indianapolis for the 39th Annual Meeting of the Thomas Wolfe Society, I have even more questions. (And I’m buying yet more books. Running out of places to put them all!).

 

What was interesting to me is that so many dedicated Wolfe scholars and readers had some negative reactions to the film, which we watched together at the Indianapolis Public Library as a part of the weekend. Author Berg, on the other hand, who spoke to us to a standing ovation at our closing banquet, was pleased with the film. And I still love it.

 

genius poster

 

 

One of the complaints from the group about the film was the casting of Jude Law as Wolfe. Law, in my opinion, did a wonderful job, but he’s not anywhere close to 6′ 6″ and 250 plus pounds. But what actor would be close to that without being some former wrestler or football player of dubious acting ability? Law is better looking than Wolfe, but it’s a movie. I can look past that!

tom and jude

 

The book had been considered for films for many years, according to Berg. At one time, Paul Newman was slated to play Max Perkins. And at another, Tim Robbins wanted to play Wolfe. That I can see, in his younger days.

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A young Tim Robbins, who is 6′ 5″.

One thing to keep in mind is that the film is based on a book about Max Perkins, the editor who wrangled with Wolfe and served as a father figure to him in many ways. In the book, next on my to-read list, Perkin’s relationships with 2 of his other writers, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, are also featured. It’s not a biography of Wolfe.

perkins writers

In speaking about the casting of Jude Law, Berg said that in the interviews he did for the Perkins book, it was mentioned that when Wolfe first appeared in Perkins’s doorway at Scribner’s, Perkins saw, in his mind, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Berg sees Shelley in Law’s countenance. Of course, we don’t have photos of Shelley to get an accurate idea, but there are portraits.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

My imagination was totally captured by the images in the film of Wolfe writing as fast he could, using the top of his refrigerator as a desk, sheets of paper flying through the air as he filled them with words. I imagine the inside of his head as a swirling word soup. Mine often is like that, but my word soup tends to stay soupy and muddled, whereas Wolfe was able to put the words into such beautiful creations. If we were working in a restaurant, I would be the dishwasher and Wolfe would be the executive chef, the genius who I admire and emulate. Or maybe Wolfe would be the Chef de Cuisine, doing the work of making the delicious soup, and Perkins would be the executive chef, at the pass making sure the plates are perfect before they go out.

word soup 1
Word soup ingredients.

 

This leads to the burning question, can a refrigerator be used as a desk? Remember that Wolfe was 6′ 6″ tall. A typical 1920s-1930s refrigerator was probably just over 5″.

 

You can buy such a vintage refrigerator today if you think it will help you become a writer.

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Being who I am, I had to test this out. My home refrigerator is 5′ 10″ tall. For me to use it as a desk, I have to stand on the kitchen counter next to it.

fridge writing 7
No worries; I sanitized the counter after I was done.

 

fridge writing 4
At 6′ 6″, Wolfe could probably even use a modern day refrigerator as a desk if he really wanted to. It wouldn’t be a good ergonomic choice.

 

One of my favorite papers presented at the meeting was by Paula Gallant Eckard of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. She is the author of the recently published Thomas Wolfe and Lost Children in Southern Literature (2016).

 

There is a common thread of a sense of “lostness” in much Southern literature, especially in regard to children. Eckard discussed, among other contemporary writers, Kaye Gibbons (Ellen Foster, 1987) and Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones, 2011).

 

salvage and jes.jpg

 

Other highlights: the charming performance by the Indiana University Kokomo Players of “Wolfe’s Wanderlust: Scenes and Music from His Life and Fiction”

and the amazing table centerpieces created for the banquet, each based on a theme in Wolfe’s life.

 

Everyone I met was warm and welcoming. I arrived a bit anxious about going into a meeting of scholars with relatively little knowledge. I needn’t have been. They are all eager to share Wolfe with the world and bring him back into the canon of American literature alongside his contemporaries Fitzgerald and Hemingway. He died so young; who knows what legacy he might have left behind.

Speaking of young, the first person I encountered going to register for the conference was my new friend Savannah Wade, from Asheville, North Carolina. Pay attention to that name, she has a bright future ahead of her. I was so impressed with her varied interests and thirst for knowledge. When I was 23 years old, I wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to get on a Greyhound bus alone and head to an unknown city to meet with anyone! I felt so grown up doing this at age 55. Savannah, now, I can picture writing a work of genius using a refrigerator as a desk. And I can see that she has ways with word soup that I can only dream of.

Savannah
Savannah

And now I must go and dust off the top of my refrigerator. It’s the first time I’ve seen the top of it in a while!

I’m not obsessive, I’m passionate (or, I’m stalking Thomas Wolfe)

Posted on by gcottraux

Can you stalk someone who is no longer alive? I’ve become entranced/fascinated/obsessed with Thomas Wolfe since I brought him up in Look Homeward, Angel, or Things Thomas Wolfe Said. I go through crushes with writers. I’ll become intrigued, learn everything I can about said writer, read everything they wrote, watch every movie made about them or based on their books, until I’ve exhausted the possibilities. Then I move on to the next crush.

I now follow the Thomas Wolfe Society on Facebook. My queue on Audible.com contains whatever they have (and as much as I like the writer Tom Wolfe, it’s Thomas that’s the subject of my interest).

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Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)
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Tom Wolfe (born 1931)

I saw a post on the Thomas Wolfe Society Facebook page about the movie Genius (Don’t Believe the Haters: In Defense of ‘Genius’), starring Colin Firth as editor Max Perkins and Jude Law as Thomas Wolfe. The post is a defense of the movie, which apparently had detractors. I had never heard of the movie (have I mentioned that rock I seem to live under?). I had to see it. Why? It’s about Thomas Wolfe, and it stars the amazing Colin Firth, handsome Jude Law, always good Laura Linney, and Ice Queen Nicole Kidman. I am not so crazy about Kidman, but in this movie her demeanor and style seem to fit the character, Aline Bernstein, a woman who succeeded in the then male-dominated world of theater set and costume design and could be said to have had a “tumultuous” relationship with Wolfe.

movie-image

I found an interesting post on History vs. Hollywood that compares the actors to the characters they played in the film. What is really interesting to me is that this is a predominantly English cast, in a movie filmed in England, about an iconic American writer from the South and the story is mostly set in New York. Dominic West, who I thought was American the whole time I watched The Wire, portrays Ernest Hemingway. Guy Pearce is a convincingly pained and troubled F. Scott Fitzgerald. Why do the Brits appreciate this literary heritage more than most Americans?

 

Fitzgerald was one of my crushes. I went through a fascination with Hemingway the man, but never got so much into his writing. Yes, I appreciate his style and way with words, but I’m not so much into his subject choices. Fitzgerald totally appeals to me: handsome and troubled with a beautiful, crazy Southern Belle wife.

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This was in my freshman year of college, and in my American Literature class with Professor Robert L. Casebeer (real name) in 1980 I wrote many a paper about Fitzgerald.

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My first attempt at college was in Ashland, Oregon, 1979-1981.

Before that, in high school, I went through a serious John Steinbeck phase. I still love his books. I admit to being a total wallflower nerd in high school. I spent a lot of time in my room, drawing and painting and reading and sewing my own weird clothes. No surprise I was never asked to the prom, much less on a date.

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John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

I’ve been through similar obsessive phases with the English writers Evelyn Waugh (Brideshead Revisted) and John Galsworthy (The Forsyte Saga).

Evelyn Waugh, Aged 26, from the portrait by Henry Lamb in the collection of Lord Moyne. Cr: Little, Brown & Co. Memo-hardcopy: 38304

Lest you think it’s only male writers that I stalk, I’ve been through my Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) phase and an Agatha Christie (1890-1976) phase as well.

 

 

I first became fascinated with Thomas Wolfe back in the 1990s. I got to Wolfe through a desire to live in Asheville, North Carolina. Musically, I was in a David Wilcox phase, and he is (was?) based in Asheville. I was also in my museums career phase, and figured there would be a job for me at the Biltmore Estate. I applied for several jobs, but it’s hard to get an interview when you live 3,000 miles away!

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American folksinger and songwriter David Wilcox
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I’d be so much closer to family than I am in California.

 

biltmore
Is it so much to ask for to live in the library at the Biltmore Estate?

And it was my obsession with Asheville that got me to Thomas Wolfe, native son.

There are so many connections I could go into–Paris in the 1920s, where so many artists and writers (the so-called Lost Generation), including Wolfe, spent time. A good account of this is Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast. And one day I will make a  pilgrimage to legendary Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company, central to that time and that generation.

feast

shakespeare-and-co-paris-bookstore

But meanwhile, I’ll be listening to the audiobook version of Look Homeward, Angel and dreaming of different times and places.

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