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Dancing Fish and Ammonites
by Penelope Lively - Viking 2013
Old Age
I love Penelope’s voice. Her reading and writing interest mirror mine, but she has a gardening interest where I wish she had a fitness interest. That’s just so I can get a better idea of what’s ahead for me. Ehrenreich was better in this respect. And this book is five years old now, which is significant when you are in your eighties. I would love to have an update for her at 85.
That is one of the biggest changes that seems to start after your 60s, that the rate of change/decline ramps up. You expect the next five years to be more or less like the last five years, but at some point that stops being the case. I’m guessing that 75 will be the turning point age, but that’s based on observing people who aren’t me.
P16 Yes to being happily sidelined by age. Also to constant change of our skin -- new incarnations of same self. In my view, Youth<30 Old >75
P24 The idea of story here. Beginning, middle and necessary end. Life does have that in common with story.
P27 Penelope really loves the word “solipsism”. I appreciate that.
P28 Great stuff here.
Life and Times
What a difference a couple decades make. I’m thinking of my experience of the ‘50s here. Her Egypt is my Louisville. Odd that she doesn’t mention music. For me my first decade has a very distinct soundtrack. The music and the cars being what I best recall about those years, excepting some smells and a first kiss. But it does seem like a different world, even though my then neighborhood hasn’t physically changed that much in the decades since. In many (not all) ways, I suspect a child growing up today in what was our house could have a reasonably similar experience. The greater world has changed dramatically, but my life was initially limited to our block and that hasn’t changed. She also doesn’t mention smell. Is that because it’s Proust’s territory, or is she just not sensitive in that way?
We differ when it comes to her late political awakening in college. I was obsessed with foreign affairs in high school, so a decade after her but a decade before based on age... but then I was male.
P111 “...The feminist movement was ever a middle-class movement, and there is a big divide today between the professional woman, who may well be earning the same as a man, and the vastly larger [lower class] female workforce that is cleaning offices, stacking shelves and sitting at checkouts and mostly does not...” The middle-class nature of feminism is an interesting observation. And yet it also goes against the middle-class desire to imitate the gentry in having mates that are not required to work. The movement could only have risen from the middle-class, but it goes against the interest of much of the middle-class... and of many women who are not middle-class. An interesting topic.
P128 Memory and time - I was just thinking of this Ages of Myself aspect of time the other day. My youth was conveniently divided into chapters by our moves and my going from school to school. Several years in Louisville. A semester in Denver. Several years in Boulder. Several years in Sherman Oaks. Several years in high school in Scottsdale. More years at university. The average period in a place was three years. And there were no connections to prior places. Once I left a place/school I never saw the people again, except after I left university.
I attribute my poor memory for names to this flushing of data every three years.
And then there’s the feeling for time’s duration. I give the Louisville, Colorado, SoCal, and Arizona periods greater weight than their twenty three years should warrant. Compared to my most recent twenty years, so much happened back then. And for better and worse, unlike Penelope, my parents were an integral part of those years. Penelope was largely on her own, in a very middle class English way, during her teens before forming her own family.
P128 Time again. TMM is rather like old age when it comes to the increasing speed of time’s passing.
P154 I’ve done plenty of this life review. I love the spacetime character of my life growing up, where the mid-’60s are locked together with Southern California at that time. I also love how SF has become a collage of past experiences. All the intersections where I’ve waited day after day for the bus that would take me to my then job or home again. My long ago path to the supermarket past where I knew Tillie Olsen lived. All the event venues that I now know inside out in a way the general public does not. Patches of Golden Gate Park where I’ve spent many busy and exhausting days. All the buildings I’ve watched rise from holes in the urban fabric. And the memory of things, businesses or buildings, that no longer exist. (For example remembering that the car is parked in front of where Winterland was. Or happily realizing that the Jack Tarr Hotel is really gone.)
P155 And again we are examining the self. Sounds like she hasn’t run into Korsakoff Syndrome. I wonder if I have more of the incidental memories she mentions because I’ve spent so many hours on public transport? In families there are always the things one person recalls that the others don’t. The subjectivity of memory, of what we notice at the time and recall later.
I was thinking about Slaughterhouse Five the other day so now I’m thinking about the “coming unstuck in time” aspect of memory. Proust and Vonnegut. I don’t normally think of them as having a lot in common, but when it comes to time I guess they do. You can imagine a, perhaps drug enhanced, version of Proust’s going back in time to re-experience a past event as though you were really there. If Temple Grandin retains a detailed image of everything she’s ever seen, it’s not unreasonable to think that somewhere in our brains there is a record of everything we’ve ever sensed. That you could re-experience it again as though for the first time. Of course those possible experiences would include having the measles and that nasty swine flu.
P156 Finally she talks about smell. Rosemary. Perhaps she wrote more about her youth in her previous book and didn’t want to repeat herself. I would think there would be something about food as well. It does sound like her Egypt experience was very British, but you’d think it would have been somewhat different from back in England during and after the war.
For me there are good memories around my grandmother’s cooking and my aunt’s baking during my youth. Then there were the White Castle burgers (and buns) in Louisville, the Harvey’s burgers on Colfax in Denver. Banana splits in Boulder. Abalone in Morro Bay. Steak and eggs before football games and Hamburger Hamlet for special occasions in SoCal. A few years of wonderful BBQ ribs on wax paper at a joint in downtown Phoenix before I became a veggie. Discovering Sonoran Mexican, Indian, Thai, and finally Burmese cuisines. Bread pudding!
What she hasn’t written about here is the quickening of time as you age. And this would have been the place for that. Odd. Well, she did mention it but not in the sense I have in mind, of the near future being different than the recent past.
Also, she mentioned “hospital time” but hasn’t really said if she thought that was worth the cost. I suppose, having passed out of a bad time you are always glad you did, but do you feel improved by the experience? Are there useful lessons learned? I would like to bounce the notion of “old enough to die” off her. I do like that she’s ended up a city person. Makes sense to me but that isn’t “normal” I think.
So I’m going to try her memories by decade exercise:
1950s: Summer rain on hot asphalt. Nat Cole on my first (painted, tube) radio. First kiss. 1957 Chevy Bel Air.
Early 1960s: Walking in a silent snow storm in Boulder. That folk song, “Today,” 1958 Chevy Impala.
Mid 1960s: Ozone smog. Song about umbrella and “Bus Stop” (by the Hollies! Much of the music from "Echos in the Canyon") Lincoln Continental with suicide doors.
Late 1960s: Lying on stack of hay bales under a shed during a monsoon storm. Riding a horse through the forest on a night with a new moon. “Young Girl”. First make out session. Pontiac Le Mons. BBQ ribs on waxed paper.
Early 1970s: Running around campus barefoot in the monsoon rain with Phyllis. Tracy Nelson's "Down So Low". Orange blossoms. Listening to the cab radio late at night when I could imagine where everyone was and what they were doing.
Late 1970s: September ozone.
1980s: Log fire smell camping at Yosemite. Love and sex. Snapple. Sounds from the Hearts of Space.
1990s: Hanging out on the slope with goat kids and friends. Proper heartbreak.”Fat City” among so many. “Living in Clip”.. Cancun burritos with super hot green salsa. Indian food in Mountain View.
2000s: “Pride and Joy”. Alison Krauss and Union Station Live. Smell of Gideon Pond corridors. Learning to drive on snow and ice. Burmese tea leaf salad. Climbing on the scaffolding around my building.
2010s: The satisfaction of more than surviving Hardly Strictly Bluegrass one more year the "no unsorted bag" years. Dragon Boat Races at Treasure Island.
P162 Reading and Writing
Parents’ National Education Union - I rather like her education. Of course it does reek of the English gentry. Since I am myself so self-taught, I rather like this more formal approach to a reading education. The only problem is selecting the books to read. It is possible to read a book too soon. On the other hand some of the inappropriate books I read when I was around fourteen were perfect for me. There’s history, since she writes a good deal about history, that I’m shocked I have only learned in the past year, but that doesn’t mean it would have done me much good to have encountered it earlier. One of the trade-offs of reading so broadly at university is that it precluded going very deeply into any one subject. I value the breadth of my experience and have to accept that there were periods of history or areas of philosophy or novelists I missed entirely. And when I did finally study the history of Europe between the fall of Rome and the Modern period, I was thoroughly primed for what I learned. Still, finally putting the historical pieces together in your sixth decade seems more than a little retarded.
P165-66 Amen, sister. My favorite story about growing up an insatiable reader is that I secretly, and without leaving a trace, read all the sexy bits in the few books my parents owned, not realizing until decades later that they had never read the books so didn’t know that there were sexy bits. I could have read them at the diner table. And reading, at fourteen, all of the fourteen volume official history of the US Navy in WW2 was the first indication that I could plow through literally anything.
P196
This is such a perfect book for our club. A whole chapter devoted to other books. And we overlap hardly at all. I don’t think I’ve read a single book she mentions by title except for Plutarch. The endless richness of the written word. And I’m shocked that she would have Penelope betray Ulysses for Achilles. What a tart! I got my first glasses a year before her... nearsighted pride.
Rather than pick books, I would rather list authors who have shaped my thought. Jane Jacobs, Barbara Tuchman, Sallie Tisdale, Ackerman, Annie Dillard, Gibbon, Pirenne, Barudel, Livy, Polybius, Plutarch, Xenophon, Horace, Morison, Clausewitz, Nietzsche, Persig, Vonnegut, Kingsolver, Chatwin, Austen, Anne Tyler, James Agee, Jane Austen, Sacks, Bill Bryson, Vikram Seth, Pynchon, Proust, Mann, Goethe, Dostoevsky. Also Martha Grimes, Anne McCaffery, Norman Spinrad, Dan Simmons, Armistead Maupin, and Calvin Trillin.
P219 The Jerusalem Bible - I’m with Lively on most of this, except for liking to attend services -- which give me the heebie jeebies. But what she says about reading the bible is certainly true. I don’t think my bible is King James, but I’m not sure how it differs. I also really like the very thin paper mine is printed on. One thing I like about Protestantism is that it encourages a reverence for books. I just wish it were some other book.
P234 One of the saddest things I’ve ever read was a woman regretting that when she died the stories of all her possessions would die with her. Now that isn’t true for the artifacts Lively chose to write about. But it does interest me how none of these objects are “family” objects with a family history. The cat does have a bit of a family story, but it’s not something passed down generation to generation or something that really tells a family story. Possibly Lively edited this to avoid the objects of purely family interest.
So of course I’m wondering what my artifacts would be. I have a bunch of things, either mine or from family, that I can’t bring myself to dispose of but that mean very little to me. I’m fond of my marbles, left over from elementary school (I sometimes think about my baseball cards and wonder what happened to them.) There are some interesting artifacts from around the turn of the 20th century that came from my great grandfather. There are, even more important to me, photographs taken by me in the early ‘70s for the most part. There are even a few (45s) survivors from my record collection when I was young. I also still own, but don’t have at home, some of my first computers, including the Timex/Sinclair that started it all. But these last are among the things I wish I could find a good home for.
