Thoughts on London:
I had such a pang of missing my grandmother as the plane landed at Heathrow on Wednesday morning! The last time I was in London was for her memorial service (here was a brief excerpt from the "memoirs" I made her write which very much gives the flavor of her personality, and here were a few comical excerpts from various letters she sent me in the last few years of her life) and it really was as though she would be waiting for me in Highgate with tea and toast and clean sheets on the bed upstairs. My hotel room was very much like the bedroom I stayed at in their last house, too; something about the feel of the sheets and the faintly lavenderish smells and the under-the-eaves-ness of it...
The conference was super-enjoyable--really interdisciplinary in the best possible way--this fascinating paper on Tannhauser's dilemma and rational choice hermeneutics stood behind a lot of our discussions, and our host had an altogether delightful paper on this occasion about why Elsa asks Lohengrin the question despite the fact that it assures her a bad outcome--wonderfully appealing stuff! And we also had what must be described as the most heavenly Vietnamese-inflected meal imaginable at Bam-Bou (hmm, did not realize that the building once housed Ezra Pound's Vorticists, I wonder if that is apocryphal?)--though I skipped the other conference dinner due to exhaustion and a fit of the hermits.
I am still reproaching myself for not finding time to swim while I was there--the first place I'd researched in advance had changed hands and no longer had a day-pass arrangement, and by the time I figured out that the Tottenham Court Road Central YMCA was an even better option I kind of didn't have time to fit it in (I will swim there next time I'm in London though, it looked great--fifteen pounds for a day pass including pool and health club, plus some kind of week-long thing in the region of forty-five pounds--not cheap, but worth it). However I did have two very decent runs in Regent's Park. It is amazing how many fewer people run in London than in New York! Though of course this really isn't a "destination" park for runners, too small, you would only go there if you were living in the area & it's not a particularly residential neighborhood I suppose... Fortunately it is so easily findable from where I was staying on Gower Street that even my negative sense of direction couldn't get me lost....
NB Regent's Park as well as being altogether to my taste period-wise--those beautiful houses!--and full of childhood memories of feeding the ducks & eating ice lollies also makes me happy because of the Hundred and One Dalmations connection--you know, the Dearlys live in a little house by Regent's Park because Mr. Dearly is a financial genius and solved the problem of the national debt and earned a life-long exemption from income-tax and a free house to live in--needless to say if you have not read that novel in living memory I highly recommend it--and here's a chance to clear one of the other things that's been taking up space on my desk waiting for me to post, a wonderful passage from a very interesting book we read with the British history reading group a couple months ago, Deborah Cohen's Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions.
Cohen writes well about Ambrose Heal of Heal's Furniture (also right round the corner from where I was staying) and the "modern tendencies" exhibitions he introduced, but here's the charming part, which sent me off to read a biography of Dodie Smith & contemplate her taste for dalmatians:
The best publicity of all, however, was the example provided by one of Heal's own employees. Long before she racked up successes with One Hundred and One Dalmations and I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith was the manager of Heal's toy department, and, as her diary reveals, Ambrose Heal's mistress. The success of her first play, Autumn Crocus, brought Smith a flat to suit her 'very decided ideas' about home decoration. Decorated entirely in black, white, and silver, the flat represented the very latest in stage-set modernism. Its walls were bare of pictures; the few ornaments allowed, black glass flower vases and silver candlesticks, fitted the bichromatic colour scheme. The reporters who visited her in the top-floor flat marvelled at the happy synchronicity between the woman-'a modern phenomenon'-and her dwelling. Hers was a 'flat without a past', a spare assemblage of modernist items purchased to suit the rooms, with no family heirlooms to spoil the effect. Each room (including the bathroom) had a telephone. In place of the ubiquitous Victorian aspidistra, Smith cultivated cacti, plants that 'in their obliging habits are suited to the long absences of their owners which are part of modern life'.
I had intended to offer a few thoughts on novel-reading while traveling, but I think I must put that in a separate post since this one's got so long, and instead give you a page of pictures scanned from Valerie Grove's excellent Dear Dodie: A Life of Dodie Smith (the decor in these ones isn't particularly modernist)...
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