1) My Libra horoscope really smacked me in the face today: “An important person, someone who acted as your touchstone, no longer figures prominently in your life. This is a difficult adjustment for you. Make an extra effort not to turn inward as is your tendency in times of trouble. Force yourself to socialize and you may find a new friend.” It just underscores more my interest in forging more of an in-person community, as opposed to an online community.
2) Walking through the South End to the barber’s this morning, a rat ran across my path on Clarendon Street. A rat, in broad daylight! Faugh!
3) Now of course you want to know how I’m getting along with that enormous stack of books, aren’t you. Well . . . I just finished a book I added to the pile only last weekend, "Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait, which is really a brief biography with some stunning photographs. Beautifully done, and I had forgotten that her last stage role was a fictional version of my beloved Marchesa Casati.
3a) Finalmente, as of today I am within 50 pages of finishing Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, by Anne Nelson. I knew it would be heartbreaking, but when I read that one member, after imprisonment by the Gestapo, confided the names of other conspirators to an allegedly sympathetic woman in her cell — which of course led to their capture and eventual death — it was a twist of the knife.
3b) Really and truly, I had no intention of reading Barbra Streisand’s memoir. But when I saw it on the rack of new books at the Athenaeum last week, I picked it up on impulse — and I must say, it’s quite something! So far I’m up to the making of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (which I have never seen).
3b.i) But the one fact that only I, among all the people I know who are truly, madly, deeply Barbra fans (which I can’t really say I am), can geek out over is that . . . she read The Quintessence of Ibsenism in high school. Now, I know exactly what you’re thinking: Whaaaaaat?! But in college I did a lot of reading and research on Ibsen’s plays, including all the books by his British disciple William Archer, and The Quintessence of Ibsenism by George Bernard Shaw. I couldn’t tell you a thing about any of it now, but it was a serious course of study for me once, and I hadn’t even heard that title since about, oh, 1989. So, how lovely to have an uncommon common bond with Barbra!
3b.ii) The only other thing I’ll mention (and this doesn’t give anything away) is the atmosphere she creates writing about the New York years just before her discovery, years of excitement, discovery, learning, energy, enthusiasm. For a brief moment it made me wish I could be 20 again and immersed in what I remember (read: the good parts) of those years when every new fact and personality was exciting to discover.
4) Well, as that old rubber planter Tully Marshall said to Jean Harlow in Red Dust, “If it was the summer of eighteen hundred and ninety-four, I’d play games with you, sister. But life is simpler now.” At least the Christmas tree is up.