…for a few days. She will blog from there.
UD has bought a new pair of binoculars for the occasion (Chincoteague/Assateague is famous for birdwatching) and will try to do some birding/photography.
This is the same thing UD saw this morning as she walked home along the CSX tracks from the Garrett Park post office.
An all-Herzog train!
First thing: As my morning train to campus pulled out of Metro Center, a man’s voice reached us from the platform. GO TRUMP!
Walking to my first class: A middle-aged couple in full Trump regalia (enormous Trump hats, red white and blue clothing with Trump written on it) strides by, excited and happy.
Walking from my second class: At one of the campus intersections, a green vintage car rolls slowly along with Trump’s name in big letters on most of its surfaces. It is softly tooting its horn.
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I’m a little early for my second class, so Ashley (Fulbright student from China) and I sit on a bench and chat. One of my colleagues comes by and says with dread What are you doing tomorrow?
Staying home in Garrett Park. I’m thinking of taking up knitting.
I feel as though I should be there, at an opposition rally or whatever… I asked [another colleague of ours] what he’s doing tomorrow. He said Hiding under the bed.
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Gatherings up and down the Foggy Bottom Metro platform that evening of Bikers for Trump — skinny sunburned guys with long blond hair and arm tattoos and skinny jeans with key chains and handkerchiefs spilling out of them. Mucho legible clothing with gun, patriotic, and Trump-love messages.
Economizing, in UD‘s world.
The [$23 million] home [Jeff Bezos has just bought in Washington DC] is expected to be an East-coast pied a terre for the family — allowing him to avoid hotel bills.
… for ol’ UD. Sick as a dog with bronchitis plus, she lies abed and watches bits of snow settle on the garden. The world in the new year continues to shower UD with wondrous tales of serial plagiarism and quarter billion dollar football expenses, yet she can’t quite gather her thoughts about it… Whereas her efforts not to gather her thoughts about the upsetting political situation in her country are thwarted by unsettling and unignorable forms of protest. UD knows she has to draw some deep breaths and dive into everything again, but at the moment her lungs are weak.
Rita Kosofsky was about to be 95 years old.
Here are the remarks UD plans to make at her memorial event.
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I must have been fifteen years old when I entered the Kosofsky house in Bethesda for the first time.
During that first dinner, Rita was quite openly interested in how well or poorly I spoke. To this day, I remember how self-conscious I felt.
After dinner, without any preliminaries, Rita ushered us all into the living room, gave each of us a copy of George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, and started assigning roles. She herself was Eliza Doolittle, and she relished every awful sound that came out of her character.
On the walls of Rita’s daughter Eve’s bedroom were colorful sheets of paper on which Eve had, with a careful hand, copied out lines from poems that she liked. I remember standing in front of one of these pieces of paper and reading its lines over and over, trying to understand. It was a song, from a Shakespeare play. This was the first stanza:
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun
Nor the furious winter rages;
Thou they worldly task hast done
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
I registered the fact that this was a poem about death – about a calm acceptance of death after a challenging life well-lived – but I was too young to know – to realize – its deeper resonances.
Years later, when I encountered the same verse in a novel that Rita knew well and loved well – Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway – I was old enough to understand why Clarissa Dalloway is haunted by that morbid verse, even as she goes about her ordinary, busy, day, buying flowers, arranging a party, being caught up not in death but in life.
Like Clarissa, Rita was at once full of life and profoundly aware of the deeper resonances that always accompany us. Indeed Rita was physically much like Clarissa – a birdlike woman who seemed fragile but who was actually intensely and strongly alive: sociable, chatty, cultured, well-traveled. Rita remained at a very high pitch of vibrancy until late in her life, even as her aesthetic – rather than spiritual – sources kept her mindful of what lay beneath the busyness.
Rita was an expert on the short stories of Bernard Malamud; but the primary way I will remember her is as a guide to many many people in how to be a serious literary intellectual. Hundreds of gifted students at Walt Whitman High School owe a great deal to her.
Rita’s own children were linguistically gifted, and they were incredibly fortunate to have been born to a person who was herself a lover of language and literature. I remember something her son David told me about Rita. She’d had to have some medical procedure or other, and had been put under some form of anesthesia. She told David that she woke from the procedure aware that the entire time she’d been under, pages and pages and pages of novels she’d read had flowed through her mind. One after another these white sheets had arisen, covered with words.
Throughout the young lives of their children Rita and Leon (with whom she shared a passionate love) took every opportunity to read to them, to discuss stories and poems and plays, and to encourage them in their own early writing efforts. This was a house bursting with books, paintings, and records, and busy with outings to readings and the theater. Throughout her long life, Rita’s open-hearted artistic enthusiasms never dimmed.
Back in Eve’s bedroom so long ago, I scanned the final stanza in Shakespeare’s famous song:
No exorciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing ill come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renownèd be thy grave!
… helps organize a group of artists and intellectuals looking for ways to resist hate crimes in America.