Briallen Hopper English and Divinity

The Books of Summer 2012 (to be updated May thru August)

May 21:  Randy O. Frost & Gail Steketee, Stuff:  Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (2010)

This was a moving and revealing read.  I’m working on two summer projects on hoarding— a review essay and something longer— so I’ll save most of my thoughts, but I will say that it’s quite clear that I have the mind of a hoarder, though thankfully not the apartment of a hoarder.  I’m mostly grateful for this quirk in my frontal lobe, since it means that all my lost loves and stories are fixed and tangible even as beloved worlds and selves recede into the past, and as the academic diaspora moves my friends where I can’t see them. 

May 18:  Marjorie Hillis, Live Alone and Like It (1936)

I grew up with this book, which among other things introduced me to a variety of visions of self-creation and strong-minded women.  It makes sense that it was recently re-issued by Virago.

Live Alone is the Now, Voyager of self-help.  The best parts are the case studies:  ”Twenty years ago, Mrs. R was a young and rather gawky young girl who lived in a small Southern town and read fashion publications surreptitiously. … [Now] she goes in for Schiaparelli clothes, Frankl furniture, white pottery, and elegant though slightly effeminate young men.”  Bliss.  But this is merely one of many possibilities.  The important thing is just to make something of yourself, make friends, make the most of your apartment, go into sexual situations “with dignity, with a little humor, and without any weeping or wailing or gnashing of teeth,” eat well, drink well, and manage your money. 

In short:  “You can live alone gaily, graciously, ostentatiously, dully, stolidly.  Or you can just exist in sullen loneliness, feeling sorry for yourself and arousing no feeling whatever in anybody else. … Everybody feels sorry for herself (to say nothing of himself) now and then.  But anyone who pities herself for more than a month on end is a weak sister and likely to become a public nuisance besides.”  

May 17:  Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger (2009)

I read The Little Stranger all at once over a long sunny afternoon.  It takes Sarah Waters years of research and hard work to write a book, which is just as well because if she wrote faster I would be racing through a new novel every waking hour.  

I have lots of thoughts about TLS.  All history is a ghost story.  The English country house is like the American plantation, haunted and haunting, and it must be visited again and again from those outside or underneath it (Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwen, Alan Hollinghurst, Sarah Waters, and the vengeful dead).  The Henry James book that wasn’t cited in reviews, but should have been, was Washington Square.  All history is the story of the material dilapidation of physical objects, and occasionally of their temporary salvage and restoration.  

From Live Alone and Like It (1936) by Marjorie Hillis

There is no limit to the things you can do inexpensively in New York, if you’re sufficiently up and doing. Have you, for instance, ever been to the movie house way up-town where twenty-year-old pictures are shown, knee-high skirts and all, and elegant prizes are handed out, especially on Saturday nights?  Have you ever been to a Yiddish theater, with its really fine acting, on the lower East Side?  Or to a Spiritualist meeting on the upper West Side?  Have you ever been to the Flea Circus, or played games with a nickel for stakes on Broadway? (Have an escort for the last one.)

Have you hunted up the little French boarding-house-like restaurants where gourmets gather and dinner costs next to nothing; or the Italian restaurants, or Spanish ones, or Russian, Turkish, or Armenian ones where food is both cheap and good?

Have you heard the finest New York organists play on Sunday afternoons, or the Russian Orthodox Cathedral choir sing, or been to the poetry symposiums at Saint-Marks-in-the-Bouwerie?

Have you tried the swimming pools at the Y.W.C.A., or skated in Central Park, or joined a Public-Speaking Class?  Have you ridden back and forth on a Staten Island ferry late on a winter afternoon, when lower New York sparkles across the harbor from every high window, like a theater backdrop?

Have you spent a spring Sunday out at Bronx Park, when millions of tulips or iris are in bloom and more kinds of lilac bushes than you knew existed?  Or been to the Bronx Zoo, where even a grown-up should go once or twice?  Or lunched beside the seals on a summer day when parasols dot the terrace of the Central Park cafeteria?

Have you walked across Brooklyn Bridge on a cool summer night, or across George Washington Bridge in the autumn when the Palisades are brilliant red and yellow?  Have you been to Chinatown, or to a concert in the Park or in the Stadium?

Have you visited the great markets in the very early morning and seen the carts of green and yellow vegetables, and gold and scarlet fruits, and the stalls of various foods and drinks of every nation?

Do you use the Public Library nearest you— and really know how much it will do for you if you ask it to?  Have you heard the six greatest preachers in the city?  And been to lectures by some current celebrity?

Have you visited the American Wing at the Metropolitan and the Musuem of the City of New York?  Have you sat in the top balcony at the Opera, and haunted the cut-rate theater counters till you got cheap seats for at least two or three of the best shows in town?  (Monday nights, for instance, you’ll find them.)

Have you been to one prize-fight, and one radio broadcast, and maybe one burlesque?  And what about the free art exhibits?

These are only a few of the things you could do on a factory-hand’s salary.  If you’ve lived in New York a year, and done even most of them, you haven’t been bored.

My sister Kat writes:  ”So my Great-Aunt Margie just died at a very old age. She is too much of a personality to sum up, but I will say one big thing that I learned from her: it is possible to be a snappy, snarky, bossy woman and still have a long happy marriage. Even if it takes three tries to get there.”

I saw my Aunt Margie and Uncle Gil when I went home in January.  They were somewhere around ninety and had been honing their vaudeville banter for decades— a kind of Ma and Pa Kettle routine of affectionate exasperation that was their primary mode of communication.  It involved a lot of eyerolling and interrupting and talking about each other in the third person right in front of each other’s face.  ”Would you believe it, this crazy old man thinks that he’s still young!”  ”I can’t get her to stop talking for one dang minute!”  ”Why he ever thought that was a good idea is beyond me!”  Margie was snippy and Gil is a softy, but he gave as good as he got.  

Margie made quilts.  This was not a hobby— it was more of an involuntary continuous movement, like a heartbeat.  Gil makes things out of wood.  Their little backyard is full of rustic brown birdhouses like a field of mushrooms.  The inside of their tiny house is full of quilts, or would have been if Margie weren’t always giving them away.  Both Margie and Gil gave away everything they made almost as fast as they could make it.  

They lived in a part of Tacoma that people in my family have been living in for over a century.  Margie and her mom and grandma and daughter and a couple of her sisters all lived in East Tacoma for some or all of their lives, in little wooden bungalows with linoleum floors.  When Margie and my grandma and their sisters and brother were growing up there during the Depression they had a cow and a vegetable garden and fruit trees (pie cherry and Gravenstein apple).  When I was growing up fifty years later many neighborhoods away, that same yard, my great-grandma’s yard, was a tangle of overgrown blackberry bushes, and we’d all go pick berries there and come home purple and prickled.  Nowadays the house is gone and East Tacoma is known for pho and gangs.  The first suggested google search for East Tacoma is “East Tacoma crime.”  As the internet informs me, “East Tacoma is still pulling itself up by its bootstraps, but can be a part of town worth venturing into.”   

My sister Liese writes:  ”Got news today that my great-aunt passed away. She was the oldest in my Nanny’s family, and even though we weren’t very close, she made a big impression on me. She was always making things and seemed like she never ran out of energy. Over the years she made hundreds, if not thousands, of beautiful quilts that she would donate to children. She’d gone through a lot in her life, but she picked up the pieces, pushed through and continued doing what mattered to her without apologizing for it or taking shit from anyone. There are a lot of strong women in my family, I definitely want to be remembered as one of them. RIP Aunt Margie”

Margie was a teenage mom with a short-lived shotgun first marriage at a time and in a family where that was a scandal.  The story I heard was that when Margie’s father first heard she was pregnant he was stunned and had to go outside; he couldn’t even speak or stay in the room.  But it was always clear that he and the rest of the family were going to stand by her and help her.  She named her daughter after him:  Dana.  For a while they all lived together in the tiny house, my great-grandparents and their five kids and Dana, and Dana played with her Aunt Amie, Margie’s baby sister, who was about her age.  

Margie and Dana were seventeen years apart and best friends.  They had more than their fair share of trouble, sickness, divorce, and housefires, but through it all they stayed strong and kept quilting.  

I’m in the third generation of sister-heavy families:  I have four sisters, and my mom and grandma each had three.  In each generation the sisters have defined themselves in relation to each other, and in Margie’s generation you could characterize the sisters by what kind of quilts they made.  Their mom, my (Great-) Grandma Luretta Spencer, was a practical quilter, whipping together simple nine-patch quilt tops out of old floursacks, using old woolen blankets for batting, and hastily tying the layers together with yarn (which strictly speaking isn’t quilting at all).  For Grandma Spencer, making quilts was thrift, not self-expression.  She got her domestic joys from baking bread and reading Harlequin romances.  I was never allowed to go near the bookshelf at her house; my mom didn’t approve of romance novels and was afraid I’d get hooked, but apparently it’s genetic.  Grandma Spencer’s love of romance fiction lives on in my sisters Kat and Joey (Johanna Luretta).

Nine Patch

Margie was Grandma Spencer’s oldest daughter and her quilts were works of art.  You could imagine a state-fair blue ribbon on any of them.  This was typical of Margie’s relentless and formidable skills.  Margie didn’t just run up cotton housedresses and baby clothes on the sewing machine:  she tailored coats, complete with linings and interlinings and turned tweed buttonholes.  And her quilts weren’t just pieced together from scraps.  Unlike her mom and sisters, but like her daughter, Margie favored applique.  She sewed fabric shapes onto squares of whole cloth instead of sewing scraps together to make patchwork.

Patchwork began as a kind of thriftiness, but applique was always about art.  Applique is a fancier form of quilting because it requires more whole cloth and fewer leftovers.  It was traditionally used for wedding quilts and friendship quilts, album quilts and heirloom quilts, worlds removed from Grandma Spencer’s improvised covered blankets.  Patchwork quilts are all about making patterns from right angles and straight diagonals, but with applique you can cut fabric in any shape.  You can use pieces too tiny for patchwork, and you can cut asymmetrical pieces with curvy lines.  Everything is embellished with embroidery.  And unlike patchwork, which you can always cheat and do on the sewing machine, applique is done by hand.

Baltimore Album Quilt

Margie’s sister Helen sews as beautifully as she gardens and Margie’s sister Amie makes decorative modern quilts to match her spic-and-span 1960s house.  Margie’s sister Yvonne, my grandma, is somewhere in between Margie and her mom, much closer to Margie in her aesthetic sense and compulsive creativity but without the commitment to microscopically even stitches that required Margie to rely on a magnifying glass to maintain precision.  My grandma mostly does patchwork and she loves her scraps.  When I was growing up her upstairs bathroom was given over to her fabric hoard, with a tub overflowing with color.  I would go diving in the bags and shelves of fabric and I salvaged some 1940s sundresses I wear to this day.  My grandma often had ten or twenty quilts going at once, often in traditional patterns (Log Cabin, Jacob’s Ladder), some pieced by hand, some by machine, but she handquilted everything.  For my college graduation (it was going to be my high school graduation, but she missed the deadline by a few years) my grandma made me a quilt in the Grandmother’s Flower Garden pattern— a thousand tiny hexagons— starting with some leftover 1930s blocks and supplemented by blocks we sewed together.  She quilted it in fits and starts over my high school and college years and signed it on the back in pink thread.  She made it big enough so I could sleep under it with my husband, who is as imaginary now as he was then.  I sleep under it every night.

Grandmother’s Flower Garden

Margie and her three sisters all lived in or near Tacoma almost all their lives.  As the bossy and sometimes aloof oldest sister, Margie wasn’t necessarily present at their sisterly lunches of peanut butter sandwiches and stove-top coffee at the kitchen table.  But she is a tart and irreplaceable part of this first batch of Cistern solidarity, a full participant in a female world of love and ritual that involves swapping plant cuttings and sewing patterns, telling each other about children and church rummage sales, and maintaining a steady sense of self and home as husbands age and change and pass away, and as children and grand-children and great-grandchildren scatter and drift like dandelion seeds.

Aunt Margie’s legacy is her snappy, snippy domestic bliss, her survivor’s strength which lives on in her survivors, and her quilts.  My grandma’s email telling us about Margie’s death ends with quilts: “Dana took Margie’s bed out of the bedroom, and she and Larry will take their choice of quilts.  A lot of the ones Margie had given her were ruined in the housefire.”  Things are only things and everything; moth and rust and fire destroy them, but death cannot overcome them.