January 25th, 2011

It was striped

“‘Have you seen my umbrella?’ a hyper Jamaican woman demands.
‘No.”
‘I left it right here.’ She points where I’m sitting.
‘I didn’t see it,’ I say.
‘I left it right here. Did you see it?’ The cuffs of her jacket are frayed, buttons are missing. I look behind and under my chair, go back to Emily.

The earth reversed her Hemispheres–
I touched the Universe–
And back it slid– and I alone–
A Speck upon a Ball–
Went out upon Circumference–

‘Have you seen my umbrella?’ the Jamaican woman demands of another bottom-feeder. ‘I left it right here.’ She points at me again, and I know she thinks I’ve swiped it. ‘It was striped.’
‘I can’t see it anywhere,’ I say. ‘Sorry.’
‘I left it right here. Striped.’

– from Lemon by Cordelia Strube

August 8th, 2010

From what I read over the past week

Another literary lost umbrella(!), this time in Barbara Pym’s thoroughly enjoyable A Few Green Leaves: “It was not until she had gone too far along the street to turn back that Emma realised that, possibly in the stress of some obscure emotion, she must have taken Claudia’s umbrella in mistake for her own. And it was an umbrella of inferior quality. She wondered what the possible significance of that could be.”**

(**Update: Upon reading Pym’s autobiography, I learned this was based on an actual incident reported in her notebook, which, I think, constitutes *another* literary lost umbrella)

And then I fell into At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman, my one complaint about being that its lovely cover got a bit manky when I used it to kill a mosquito. “One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights– which in Emerson’s case expired long ago– a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer. The greater the work, the wider the ownership, which is why there are such things as criticism, revisionism and Ph.D. dissertations. I will not ask the sage of Concord to rewrite his oration. He will forever retain the right to speak his own words and to mean what he wished to mean, not what I would wish him to mean. But I will retain the right to recast Man Thinking in my mind as Curious People Thinking because time has passed and the tent has grown larger.”

Then I turned to Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (except that my copy is called Thank You All Very Much, which was the title of a film upon which The Millstone was based). “I was not of course treated to that phrase which greets all reluctant married mothers, “I bet you wouldn’t be without her now, so often repeated after the event in the full confidence of nature, because I suppose people feared I might turn on them and say, Yes I certainly would, which would be mutually distressing for questioner and me. And in many ways I thought that I certainly would prefer to be without her, as one might prefer to lack beauty or intelligence or riches, or any other such sources of mixed blessing and pain. Things about life with a baby drove me into frenzies of weeping several times a week, and not only having milk on my clean jerseys. As so often in life, it was impossible to choose, even theoretically, between advantage and disadvantage, between profit and loss: I was up quite unmistakably against No Choice. So the best one could do was put a good face on it, and to avoid adding to the large and largely discussed number of sad warnings that abounded in the part of the world that I knew.”

Next was Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind, which was beautiful and difficult, and uncannily channelling Joan Didion in spots. “‘Blackness’, as [Zora Neale Hurston] understood it and wrote about it, is as natural and inevitable and complete to her as, say, “Frenchness” is to Flaubert. It is also as complicated, as full of blessings and curses. One can be no more removed from it than from one’s arm, but it is no more the total measure of one’s being than an arm is.”

And finally, Darwin’s Bastards, which I’m not finished yet, but how (in particular), I’ve loved short stories by Jessica Grant, Douglas Coupland, Mark Anthony Jarman, Timothy Taylor, and Elyse Friedman.

Such fun. Honestly, my vacation books could not have been more perfectly chosen.

May 15th, 2006

Umbrella Update

Oh, and for all of you who were curious. It was Virginia Woolf who lost her umbrella, and in real life no less. In Volume 5 of The Diary of, which happened to be on Monday March 22 1937. “And I left my umbrella apparently in a bus.” Indeed.

May 12th, 2006

I suppose my umbrella

In Howard’s End, Leonard Bast loses his umbrella and just cannot get over it. My favourite line in the book is him thinking, “I suppose my umbrella wil be all right… I don’t really mind about it. I will think about the music instead. I suppose my umbrella will be all right”. And I do so understand, having a similarly one-tracked mind, and a special attachment to my umbrella. My umbrella is wonderful and oft-complimented, and if you were as bereft of style as I am, you would be happy to own at least one thing that invites admiration (I am fortunate to also have many pairs of red shoes). My umbrella is a Totes Novelty Supermini Umbrella that is black with ducks round its border and the phrase “Lovely weather for ducks” printed among them. I bought it at the John Lewis in Nottingham in 2003, where it cost about 15 quid, which was too much for an umbrella, and such an extragence- a department store extravagence no less- which was monumental in those days (and these, come to think of it). And to prove just how responsible, and deserving of a posh umbrella, I am, I have kept it close to me for three years, keeping it out of strong winds, dashing just in time back into restaurants where it has been forgotten and never once leaving it on the train. The duck umbrella has lasted me through English rain and Japanese typhoons, and now I pull it out for a rainy Canadian day, and I find there is a small hole in it. Wear and tear, no doubt. And it’s not yet retireable. There’s still some life in her yet, but it’s just painfully sad to contemplate the future without her.

*Along the lines of Leonard Bast-ian preoccupation, there was another book I read in the past few months in which an umbrella is misplaced to great distress. I cannot remember for the life of me which it was. Does anyone else? This is driving me a bit mad.