Sunday Stack: Eclipse, Birthday, Women's Prize Reading
A longer-than-usual newsletter this week!
Greetings, my Substack lovelies. Been a hot minute since I’ve done a catch-up post, I know, and here we are in April, already a quarter through the year!
I feel I should have something insightful to say about what everyone is talking about—tomorrow’s Great American Eclipse. Some analogy of sorts related to not allowing forces beyond our control to block out our light, perhaps? As we know, I do gravitate towards the astrological connotations for such things, and I’m especially intrigued by this New Moon total solar eclipse given that it’s occurring during Mercury retrograde and in my sign of Aries. Extra woo!
With this potent Aries energy, we have the chance to make important changes in our lives that will benefit us well beyond this Moon cycle. For some of us, circumstances are such that we need to pay more attention to these matters.
Flaws in an important system in our lives reveal themselves in the wake of the eclipse, prompting us to redo or to start fresh. Something ends in order for something else to start anew. We may be called to give up something in order to move forward into a new chapter in our lives. Although the “new” may be unrecognizable, it is important to allow the necessary surrender to the unknown.
An eclipse occurs close to the nodal axis, and this eclipse is closer to the North Node of the Moon. While we’re heading into unknown territory in some ways, we have a good sense that we’re doing so to our advantage.
Major developments in the personal areas ruled by Aries in our charts are likely to occur over the upcoming months.
Here in Pittsburgh, folks are flocking northwards to Erie and Cleveland to experience the moment of totality. I’ll be in my office, workin’ hard for the money in a Teams meeting prepping for a future Teams meeting. If the proverbial they are correct, we’re to experience 97% of the eclipse. Not to be a downer but the ‘Burgh’s notorious cloudy weather tends to ruin these types of celestial celebrations so it will probably be a big whomp-whomp.
Speaking of Pittsburgh’s weather, this week was something else. We had everything: torrential rains for days, the three rivers flooding at levels not seen since 2005, snow, graupel—you name it.
It was also my birthday this week. I took a vacation day from work, as is my custom. I slept in, worked on a writing-related project, read a Women’s Prize book, listened to my Favorites playlist on Spotify, went out for my free Starbucks drink, and DoorDashed a delicious white pizza and cannoli for dinner. My birthday tarot card of the day was The High Priestess. Bring on all the intuition and sacred knowledge and wisdom and 55+ discounts in the land.
In other big news, there’s the surreal fact that the teeny preemie babies we brought home from the NICU just last week, I swear to you, are now graduating college. (I guess I need to figure out new names for College Girl and College Boy, huh?) Her graduation is first, three weeks from now; his takes place in mid-May. Thankfully, they’re not on the same weekend, something that has slightly concerned this mom of twins since…well, last week when we were in the NICU.
Our girl is in the process of getting her driver’s license. She’s coming to this milestone in her early 20s, something I’ve learned is not out of the ordinary for the Gen Z contingent. She goes to college in the city and has gotten quite adept at using the bus pass provided by her school. The Girl applied and got accepted to a program where she’ll be working in a behavioral health role and most of the jobs require a driver’s license. They’re paid and receive training and — best of all — a portion of their student loans will be paid off by the program!
There are still a lot of what-ifs regarding post-graduation life for both kids, but I need to trust that things will work out. They always do, somehow. Among the books on my toppling stacks is Young Adults in an Age of Uncertainty by B. Janet Hibbs, M.F.T., Ph.D. and Anthony Rostain, M.D., M.A.
My reading focus has been on the 2024 Women’s Prize selections. In my last post, linked below, I wrote about the Fiction longlist announcement.
Spoiler alert: I’ve yet to read any of these. That’s because on February 15, less than three weeks before the fiction longlist was revealed, we had the announcement of the inaugural Women’s Prize for Nonfiction longlist, a stunning list of 10 titles.
My recent reading includes three of these. All are five-stars, will likely make my favorite books of 2024 list, and focus on subjects I knew very little (if anything) about: Dutch art and a devastating event in 1654; Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a writer and editor who was also George Orwell’s first wife; and the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming (Scribner, 2023, 272 pgs)
"We see pictures in time and place. We cannot see them otherwise. They are fragments of our lives, moments of existence that may be as unremarkable as rain or as startling as a clap of thunder. Whatever we are that day, whatever is going on behind our eyes, or in the forest of our lives, is present in what we see. We see with everything that we are."
This is an astonishing work of memoir and art history centering on the devastating explosion (the Thunderclap) in 1654 which killed hundreds in Delft, The Netherlands and left many others injured. Among the dead was Carel Fabritius, painter of The Goldfinch (yes, the same one in Donna Tartt’s book of the same name!) and a contemporary of Johannes Vermeer, who nearly died.
With impeccable research, a wealth of knowledge, and gorgeous prose, Laura Cumming brings what little is known of Fabritius’ life to the page alongside other more famous mid-17th century Dutch artists, such as Rembrandt. As a parallel narrative, she writes of her deceased father, also a painter, and what art has to teach us all about time.
“But a person in a portrait does not age, even if the painting does. The picture removes the person from time's harm and fixes them in the moment; and so it does for me. I never go to a gallery and think that these people are dead and gone, no matter how long ago they were depicted. The painting fuses the person in the moment and that moment somehow includes me, and you, and everyone to come. Here he is now, Carel Fabritius, and so he will remain; the artist appearing in and as his own painting.”
Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder (Knopf, 2023, 464 pages)
There’s so much to say about Anna Funder’s exceptional biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a writer and editor who married Orwell in 1936. If you, like me, never heard of her, that’s not accidental. Many of Orwell’s biographers—and Orwell’s own writings—don’t mention Eileen. While he wrote, she did everything else, including editing his books, managing his literary affairs, caring for numerous animals, following him into a warzone, living in appalling conditions, and working full-time so they could eat.
Quite simply, Orwell owes everything to Eileen. He was a total ass and she was a freakin’ saint to put up with him. Funder gives her reader countless examples of this: during a bombing in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell went out to dinner instead of checking on whether Eileen was even alive; he was disrespectful and emotionally abusive; there are numerous first-hand accounts instances of him having affairs and “pouncing” on other women; she sacrificed her health to save money. Funder’s aim wasn’t to “cancel” Orwell but it’s impossible to come away from Wifedom liking the guy. Moreover, she says, Eileen’s erasure is symbolic of a force greater than one misogynist; it’s the patriarchy at work, the ironic manifestation of Orwell’s concept of “doublethink,” as seen in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
“Patriarchy is a fiction in which all the main characters are male and the world is seen from their point of view. Women are supporting cast – or caste. It is a story we all live in, so powerful that it has replaced reality with itself. We can see no other narrative for our lives, no roles outside of it, because there is no outside of it. In this fiction, the vanishing trick has two main purposes. The first is to make what she does disappear (so he can appear to have done it all, alone). The second is to make what he does to a woman disappear (so he can be innocent). This trick is the dark, doublethinking heart of patriarchy.”
The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie (Knopf, 368 pages, 2023)
If not for more than a bit of serendipity, we wouldn’t have this fascinating book. Sarah Ogilvie stopped by her former workplace, the Oxford University Press, to say goodbye to coworkers before leaving the U.K. While there, she made a final visit to the archives and opened an unassuming box. It contained James Murray’s address book—a meticulous record “of the names and addresses of not just hundreds but thousands of people who had volunteered to contribute to the [Oxford English Dictionary].”
From across the globe, these Readers (over 3,000) were responsible for reading selected works and sending in “slips” of paper with words suitable for inclusion in the Dictionary. The address book was like a bullet journal of its time with personal notations, correspondence, books read, and was the gateway for Ogilvie and her own team to begin tracking down the people and their stories. Doing so took eight years.
“I was thrilled to discover not one but three murderers…Karl Marx’s daughter, a President of Yale, the inventor of the tennis-net adjuster, a pair of lesbian writers who wrote under a male pen name, and a cocaine addict found dead in a railway station lavatory.” There were also suffragists, explorers, a female archaeologist, and a guy named J.R.R. Tolkien. The Dictionary People is a fascinating account of their lives and contributions to our language and world.
On March 27, the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction shortlist was revealed and of course I watched the announcement live. The photo above was taken from my computer, and while I don’t envy the judges the task of narrowing the ten longlisted books down to six, I’m disappointed that Wifedom or The Dictionary People didn’t make the cut. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to give them some attention here — not like my little Substack makes up for it, but they are truly books that deserve a wide readership. I’m going to continue on with the list and will share more updates as I read on.
Hope you all have a great week!
Thanks for sharing these Melissa- The Eclipse is one of those things that reminded me of the times I was younger and my folks told me NOT to stare at the sun (and I did it anyway). But the beauty of seeing something that lights everything up completely covered (and yet there's still plenty of sunlight for the world not to be dark) was amazing. Hope everything is well in Pittsburgh? :)
As usual, I really enjoyed this. I did love the bit about College Boy and. College Girl graduating soon. It really does seem like it was last week that they came home from the NICU. I never heard of Eileen O’Shaughnessy before. She must have been a saint. What an amazing woman. The other book reviews were equally interesting. I learned a lot from your writing ❤️