Cecil Beaton, Continued.
Cecil Beaton, after Sargent. The Three Graces.
[And is it just my imagination, or do these ladies seem a trifle calculating, somehow?]
Gentle Reader,
Try for a moment to conceive of my amazement yesterday when I received the following cryptic message:
"Urgent. Please don't publish as comment but reply via email. Were you my Fifth Grade Teacher at ________ School in Manhattan in the late 70s? Signed __________."
Needless to say I obliged and replied to the query in the proscribed manner. And though constrained in some aspects, I can report this much here: my answer was in the affirmative. Apparently, as our correspondence progressed and the details emerged, my Blog had come to the attention of the Lady contacting me as she was attempting to supervise her daughter's homework with an eye to "child-proofing" the young student's laptop [Can you actually do this? Does the Internet have a Parental Control? Will my Time Warner cable box remote activate it?].
In any event, why the child had stumbled on my Blog is not of importance here (except perhaps to imply a certain refinement and taste on her part!). The far more difficult question for you, I'm sure, is how it's possible that I could be old enough to have been an educator in the late 70s, thereby having a former student old enough to be married with offspring. I wondered this too, since by my own calculations I would have been in Fifth Grade myself at the time, not teaching it. Life, however, is full of mysteries; this 'Wrinkle in Time' (a book they dearly loved back then) clearly being one of them.
Well, my correspondent the Lady, now grown up and with a computer literate and savvy teen in the house, had paused over the young scholar's shoulder long enough to catch sight of yesterday's post with its detail of Sargent's famous portrait of the Wyndham Sisters, [See below] whereupon she shoved her progeny out of the way with a gasp of sudden recognition ... and the rest, as they say, is history. She was compelled, she relates, to read on, scrolling backwards through the entries and piecing together here and there the odd biographical detail which would lend credence to her theory that I was in fact that same Mr. X at the Y School for Girls ... and so on. I could not deny her satisfaction in her quest to know the truth, such as it was. A point comes in our lives, as you know, when it appears we have done so many things, and so many things have been ascribed to us, that to argue issues of strict veractiy is pointless, don't you agree?
I must add here, though I have agreed to respect her privacy, that she has in the intervening years done well for herself, moving now among her several homes in various locations around the world and with the option to use (though she chooses not to) a title conferred upon her by marriage. Yes: a student of mine a Countess! I want to shout to the world -- HISTORY GIRLS! Suddenly I am either [I can't decide] a proud arthritically bent old Jean Brodie with a dowager's hump, or an enormously obese and ancient Mr. Chips -- and that's figuratively speaking of course, as I am without question still very much in my prime. But to say more... no, however great the temptation, however weak the flesh...
And so, as I have been wont to observe so many times in these pages, what a Small World it is. With luck and the Lady's permission, I hope to be able to share perhaps a little more of our re-acquaintance. Her daughter seems an especially lively and plucky creature, at least as far as one may infer from her own spritely emails. She is definitely NOT one of those young persons with her nose buried in the latest Harry Potter! In fact, her current reading list seems to derive from recommendations she's discovered here and in my Links listed above, which would suggest a reading ability far in excess of her years [NB, Conrad and Mencius, Roman, et al: she quoted Ulysses to me!]. Soon she'll be telling the rest of us what to read. And I have promised to pass those recommendations along to you.
Here's hoping I don't regret such a promise!
And PS (Starker Donnerschlag): Ingmar Bergman, Tom Snyder, Michel Serrault. J L says it would have been better if the third one could have been Zsa Zsa.
[And is it just my imagination, or do these ladies seem a trifle calculating, somehow?]
Gentle Reader,
Try for a moment to conceive of my amazement yesterday when I received the following cryptic message:
"Urgent. Please don't publish as comment but reply via email. Were you my Fifth Grade Teacher at ________ School in Manhattan in the late 70s? Signed __________."
Needless to say I obliged and replied to the query in the proscribed manner. And though constrained in some aspects, I can report this much here: my answer was in the affirmative. Apparently, as our correspondence progressed and the details emerged, my Blog had come to the attention of the Lady contacting me as she was attempting to supervise her daughter's homework with an eye to "child-proofing" the young student's laptop [Can you actually do this? Does the Internet have a Parental Control? Will my Time Warner cable box remote activate it?].
In any event, why the child had stumbled on my Blog is not of importance here (except perhaps to imply a certain refinement and taste on her part!). The far more difficult question for you, I'm sure, is how it's possible that I could be old enough to have been an educator in the late 70s, thereby having a former student old enough to be married with offspring. I wondered this too, since by my own calculations I would have been in Fifth Grade myself at the time, not teaching it. Life, however, is full of mysteries; this 'Wrinkle in Time' (a book they dearly loved back then) clearly being one of them.
Well, my correspondent the Lady, now grown up and with a computer literate and savvy teen in the house, had paused over the young scholar's shoulder long enough to catch sight of yesterday's post with its detail of Sargent's famous portrait of the Wyndham Sisters, [See below] whereupon she shoved her progeny out of the way with a gasp of sudden recognition ... and the rest, as they say, is history. She was compelled, she relates, to read on, scrolling backwards through the entries and piecing together here and there the odd biographical detail which would lend credence to her theory that I was in fact that same Mr. X at the Y School for Girls ... and so on. I could not deny her satisfaction in her quest to know the truth, such as it was. A point comes in our lives, as you know, when it appears we have done so many things, and so many things have been ascribed to us, that to argue issues of strict veractiy is pointless, don't you agree?
I must add here, though I have agreed to respect her privacy, that she has in the intervening years done well for herself, moving now among her several homes in various locations around the world and with the option to use (though she chooses not to) a title conferred upon her by marriage. Yes: a student of mine a Countess! I want to shout to the world -- HISTORY GIRLS! Suddenly I am either [I can't decide] a proud arthritically bent old Jean Brodie with a dowager's hump, or an enormously obese and ancient Mr. Chips -- and that's figuratively speaking of course, as I am without question still very much in my prime. But to say more... no, however great the temptation, however weak the flesh...
And so, as I have been wont to observe so many times in these pages, what a Small World it is. With luck and the Lady's permission, I hope to be able to share perhaps a little more of our re-acquaintance. Her daughter seems an especially lively and plucky creature, at least as far as one may infer from her own spritely emails. She is definitely NOT one of those young persons with her nose buried in the latest Harry Potter! In fact, her current reading list seems to derive from recommendations she's discovered here and in my Links listed above, which would suggest a reading ability far in excess of her years [NB, Conrad and Mencius, Roman, et al: she quoted Ulysses to me!]. Soon she'll be telling the rest of us what to read. And I have promised to pass those recommendations along to you.
Here's hoping I don't regret such a promise!
And PS (Starker Donnerschlag): Ingmar Bergman, Tom Snyder, Michel Serrault. J L says it would have been better if the third one could have been Zsa Zsa.
I beg to differ. It is simply not time for Zsa Zsa to go yet. I'm hoping to do a remake of 'The Honeymoon Killers' and would like Zsa Zsa (& perhaps her husband) to appear as a rich elderly victim of the murderous nurse.
It would be a fine ending to a glorious career & could stand next to Zsa Zsa's early masterpiece, "Queens from Outer Space". I hope you remember that one.
my love - you can INDEED block unsuitable sites with http://www.netnanny.com/ - i have heard it told that certain young men when abstaining from the (shall we say) more overt content for a period of time, use it themselves. and then, one hopes, take down that dusty Jane Austen from the shelf and renew their acquaintance with the finer moments of literature.
She mean the manhunt.com. Friend of mine is on it all ways, even day after he coming home from hospital and the serieux surgery! Take a rest! This nanny could be answer. je t'embrase, bisou bisou D
Can one quote Ulysses? The only part I know that makes the slightest bit of sense goes "No no no no yes."
> [NB, Conrad and Mencius, Roman, et al: she quoted Ulysses to me!].
Well, I was wondering when you'd get round to Bloomsday, after all--I presume that was the context?
> precociously analyzing the artistic merits of Miller's prose,
I think looking for smut is probably a more worthwhile endeavour in Miller's case.
Bloomsday yes. Sort of the last word on this site, you could say -- I'd figured on shooting my wad with some brilliant and inspired post come June 16th, if I last that long.
But really anything to lure you here for a visit -- it was your post about the man and boy on the train that did it. I'm not much linked and too new at this to do anything but make desperate passes, stumbling in the dark as it were.
As for Miller, I agree. Definitely searching for smut.