Susan Cooper, Margery Gill

In the last few days, in between (and often in place of) bouts of grading, I've been rereading books of my childhood that arrived with all of my other stuff - Puffins that are now loose-leaf after dozens of readings and too many years of having their glue nibbled away by book lice. I've been going back through Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising pentalogy, though missing out The Dark is Rising itself which deserves to be read around Christmas and with full and undivided attention.

I'm reading the last one, Silver on the Tree, now. On this reading, I find I especially like the leitmotif of travel in time on the wave of other people's emotions, memories and desires. It comes up first as Will asks a Roman soldier in rainy Britain about his home, and unleashes a tide of nostalgia and desire:

"... the hills silver with olive trees and terraced for the vines, with the grapes filling out, now..."
The homesickness was a throbbing ache like physical pain, and suddenly Will knew that the answer was here in the air, in this moment of simple unprotected longing with a man's deepest, simplest emotions open and unguarded for a stranger to hear and see. This was the road that would carry him.
Here now, this way!
He let his mind fall into the longing, into the other's pain, as if he were diving into a sea; and like water closing over his head the emotion took him in. The world spun about him, stone and grey sky and green fields, whirling and changing and falling down into place not quite the same as before, and the yearning homesick voice was soft in his ears again; but the voice was a different voice.

There's something particularly effective about the idea of finding passages opening up through such raw desire - empathy given magical potential, yearning made malleable.

None of the books were illustrated except the first, Over Sea, Under Stone. I found in it this picture which I had forgotten was there:

It's a picture of Jane as she stumbles upon an old guidebook which will help in the quest, and hears Mrs Palk coming up to call her to lunch. A vague mental image of it has accompanied me through my life, but merged with illustrations from an entirely different book, Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess.

The picture above is of Sara's first encounter with Ermengarde after her fall in status, when Ermengarde is shocked by her change in looks. When Sara has first been told of her father's death and has been sent to change, she is described as follows:

She had put on, without Mariette's help, the cast-aside black-velvet frock. It was too short and tight, and her slender legs looked long and thin, showing themselves from beneath the brief skirt. As she had not found a piece of black ribbon, her short, thick, black hair tumbled loosely about her face and contrasted strongly with its pallor.

The point of including this is just to say that the illustrator in both cases is Margery Gill, who seems to be responsible for good numbers of the pictures which shaped my childhood imagination (I suspect Meet Mary Kate, from even earlier in my life, was also illustrated by her, though I can't check since I seem to have left that one behind), and that she seems to excel particularly at young girls with long slender legs sticking out from under short skirts. I love the stance she has given Jane in that first illustration.

I tried looking Margery Gill up online, since I was sure lots of other people would have commented on her or posted other pictures - so many of us must feel like she illustrated our childhoods - but there is surprisingly little out there. I did discover, though, that a film of The Dark is Rising has been in the making. An alarming thought, especially if I reread that quotation from A Little Princess and then remember what a travesty has been made of it in the various film adaptations up to now.

Car question.

On Sunday morning, after I had pulled myself from bed and driven down to that too-early final, I crunched my wheel against the kerb while parking and broke one of the struts of my hubcap. Or is it a wheel trim? I don't know. But here is my question. What are those things for? Do they have any purpose? Do I need to replace it, or can I just ignore it? I tried looking it up on Wikipedia, but it didn't help. Wikipedia tends to be most useful when you know the answer already - or at least when you have a good idea of how the answer is going to look, like recognizing a demon which has taken on human or animal form.

Sock foundlings and stuff.

Someone has dropped a sock on the way out of the laundry, which is in the basement in our stairwell, and some other well-intentioned person has picked it up and placed it on the post at the end of the banister. It is a nice gesture, but pointless - the sock will almost certainly still be there in two or three weeks' time. Like lambs rejected by their sheep-mothers after they have been handled by humans, socks seem to become all too easily estranged from their owners. This one will just have to make its own way in the world as best it can.

This morning I had to give final exams at 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. My least civilized finals times yet (what kind of university holds finals on a Sunday morning?), and made worse by my downstairs neighbour who had a loud party into the early morning. Actually, his friends are loud even when they visit during the day - their standard conversation seems to be carried out at a bestial male yell (odd, because he seems quite pleasant and articulate himself). They sometimes come round to watch sport, and that way I get to share in every goal or near miss (goal? run? something else? I have no idea. It always sounds as if they are watching dog-fighting, but I have to suppose it's baseball or American football). At 3:30 this morning I finally went down and asked them to be quieter, but it didn't help at all.

But anyway, my term is over. I have a good few days' worth of grading and collating to get through yet, but my relief at not having to walk into the classroom at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning is immense. I'm trying not to think about January 2nd, when we start up again. (What kind of university would start classes on January 2nd? Well, the kind that would hold a final at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning, of course.)

Last Sunday my stuff finally arrived from Scotland, after being held up for a couple of weeks in California for a customs inspection (for which they charge money even if you've declared everything exhaustively and accurately - making me wonder once again what it is that my taxes here pay for other than foreign wars) and then driven up and down and across the country for a couple more weeks in a huge truck. It's nice to have things around me that make me feel less as if I'm still living like a poor student after all these years, though it creates a certain amount of anxiety too - how am I ever going to get out of here, either this apartment or this city? Anyway, I was impressed that almost everything arrived in good shape, but for the handle of a cup I never liked much anyway, a Chinese terracotta teapot that had its side staved in like a rotting pumpkin, and the handles of an enormous Japanese teapot and an antique soup plate - the latter two of which I suppose I will try and superglue. Considering how much I sent, I don't think that's too bad at all.

Reduced visibility

The instructions for the teaching evaluations I had to give this week told me that I should leave the room or reduce my visibility while the students were completing them. I like that - as if I could fade out around the edges at will, or make myself deliberately foggy.

Untapped energy

If only the heat produced by my continual irritation at things - shopping malls you can't escape from, department stores that never seem to have your very common size, crumb-scattered bagel stores apparently staffed by twelve-year-olds and selling undrinkable coffee, the land of the car, crossing a busy intersection and arriving at the middle-of-nowhere bus stop to find that there are twenty minutes to wait because it's Saturday, unrelenting sunshine, universities that close their office buildings on weekends (and your realisation of this half way through that twenty-minute wait), people waving signs at intersections (no matter how good their cause), the people beeping their horns as they pass to show their support, rottweiler owners, the beauty of shimmering golden trees wasted because you're already angry beyond recall at the day, neighbours who play their music too loud, neighbours (and perhaps this accounts for the rest of the list) who have loud parties late into the night - could be harnessed and put to some good use.

Stuff, and not going to the cinema.

Today I got caught up in stuff - those petty tasks for classes that individually should take no time at all, but which have a tendency to collect at the end of the week like fluid in an unhealthy joint, and are equally difficult to get rid of. Educational technology is supposed to make me more efficient and save time and effort, but in fact it seems to add hours of work to my week and (I suspect) makes students more dependent, creating a vicious circle.

By early evening I was desperate to unstick myself from my computer and get out somewhere. My colleague had said I should leave my grading and class work behind and go out and see a film - and I thought she was right. I haven't been to the cinema for months. I can't even remember the last time I went. Yes, I can. It was in Boulder, sometime last year. I went to see the film Babel before a party I was reluctant to go to. But when was the last time I went just because? I think it was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, when I first arrived in Boulder over two years ago.

I used to go to the cinema all the time, and never had any problem about going to see things on my own. I loved it in Edinburgh - going to see some obscure film at the Filmhouse or Cameo in the middle of the afternoon, a film with an audience of four or five people, and coming out to the shock of daylight outside when you were sure it should already be night. I saw a film called Suture. I didn't know what a suture was.

And in London, I used to go to the Sunday double bill at the Everyman in Hampstead. Or not always to double bills. I saw Magnolia there, and O Brother Where Art Thou.

These days I seem overcome by inertia, though. This afternoon I looked at what was on, and decided to go to see either Wristcutters: A Love Story at the Mayan, or Sharkwater at the Esquire. They both started at 7 p.m., but I failed to get up and leave my house on time. So then I decided to go to the 7:15 showing of The Darjeeling Limited at the Esquire, since I remember being fairly well amused by The Royal Tenenbaums (same director) in Kobe a few years ago. I still didn't manage to get up and go in good time, though, and part way there I realised I was late for a film I didn't even particularly want to see, and I filtered myself off into a coffee shop where I spent the evening getting through a pile of grading that I had, conveniently, not left behind after all.

It wasn't the most exciting way to spend a Friday evening, but it has at least reduced that horrendous pile of papers a little.

I used to have problems getting out of my house because of an invisible octopus that would wind its tentacles around my ankles and pull me back. Now it's a sluggish and suffocating quicksand (slowsand), and it isn't half as amusing.