Carla Presents Jamaica Kincaid

 Jacquieʼs Email Hello Literary Ladies! How is it possible that we have reached the end of our 2023-2024 season and that wonderful mouthful of a theme, “Literature Club Topics from the Years We Were Born” or “Topics That Are Inspired by That Year or Era.” And what an eclectic collection of topics and wonderful presentations we have experienced! Thank you all for sharing your topics with such love and passion. It really has been a banner season.

“I'll read anything. In fact, I'll read while
I'm doing other things, which is
not a good idea.” —Jamaica Kinkaid

But I'm getting ahead of myself, as we luckily still have one more presentation! As has become our tradition, and a beloved one at that, Carla will be presenting at our final meeting of the year on “1934/35 Foreign Influence on American Literature: Jamaica Kincaid.” It should be a balmy 87 degrees on Wednesday, June 19th, so how lucky are we to be meeting around Christine's glorious pool? Coincidentally, this is where we held our first meeting of the year with Barbara Morrow presenting Rebecca West. That September 20th seems like only yesterday and also a lifetime ago. We will meet at noon for non-lunch al fresco, and Joanna will call you all out of the pool promptly at 1 pm to start our meeting.

And please indulge me for one final note on this year's topic. As I haven't let ANYONE forget, I will be celebrating my 60th birthday on June 19th and I imagine aging, nostalgia, and the passing of life's milestones was on my mind already a year ago March when I threw out the idea for this topic at our annual meeting. How glad I am that it was embraced for this year's theme and how fitting it has proven to be at this time of such great flux in our world order and uncertainty for the future. In looking back on the ideas that our Lit Club predecessors were examining, and thinking about the times they were living through, hindsight gives one hope that our era, too, will be looked upon with curiosity by those who come after us. I can only pray that they will be looking back on a time when cooler heads prevailed, and the possibility of our great democratic experiment once again proved the best instrument for working towards a more peaceful and just world. And as my beloved RuPaul Charles would say, “Can I get an amen up in here?”

I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday. I can't imagine anything I'd rather do on my birthday than spend an afternoon with you all, the inspiring members of our glorious Literature Club of Hastings-on-Hudson! xJacquie

Christine's Minutes In what seems to be yet another tradition, on June 19th, 2024, twelve members of the Literature Club members gathered at Christine’s pool and plunged into the water in a most literary fashion. (Sentences splashed.) A non-lunch of salads and crustless tea sandwiches was served.

The big news was that our preternaturally youthful Corresponding Secretary, Jacquie, turned sixty, on this very day. And, naturally, some of us will take any excuse for eating cake. Especially a delicious Oreo cake brought by our President.

The festivities were such that the bell was not rung until 1:16 pm.

Due to the shameless dereliction of two of our officers, there were no minutes of the previous meeting, nor was there a treasurer’s report.

There was a brief discussion of the plethora of flyers arriving in our mailboxes, full of negative political advertising, for the upcoming primaries. Much dismay was expressed.

Connie reported that 343 books were delivered to Family Social Service of Yonkers, for three separate literacy programs.

Vice-President Laura passed around the schedule for next year, in case anyone cared to name their topic.

Christine regretted the noisy helicopters traveled upstate. She regrets that she has no influence with the FAA.

Not so the case with our speaker, Carla. In the year of her birth, 1934, the topic was “Foreign Influence on American Literature.”

Carla began her program on JAMAICA KINCAID by telling us all to buckle our seatbelts, as we fly to Antigua in the West Indies, birthplace of Elaine Potter Richardson. In her air-steward persona, Carla passed around sugar-free bonbons, and described for us what we, the arriving passengers, would see. Including an airport named for the Prime Minister.

The writer we know as Jamaica Kincaid was born in 1949. She went to British schools, where she was a brilliant student, but when her third brother was born, she was forced to leave school at 16, to help support the family. She was sent to New York to work as an au pair. She got along well with the mother of the family, as she chronicles in her novel, Lucy, but she never sent home any money. She cut off all contact for the next twenty years. After her time as an au pair, she worked for a while as a photographer, and then received a full scholarship to Franconia College in New Hampshire. She dropped out after a year, returned to New York and began writing for several magazines. In 1973 she changed her name to Jamaica Kincaid. She got to know William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, and wrote pieces for “Talk of the Town.” In 1979, Kincaid married Allen Shawn, a composer, and the boss’s son.

Most of her fiction was rather autobiographical. At the Bottom of the River, her first book, was a collection of stories set in the Caribbean, most of which had initially appeared in The New Yorker. Her first novel, Annie John, came out in 1985, describes a young girl growing up in Antigua, where a snake can lurk hidden in the basket of fruit atop her mother’s head.

Members read selections from Lucy (1990) a novel about a West Indian young woman living with a couple and their children in New York City. The author describes a first sexual experience with a delicate flippancy.

Kincaid was awarded the Pen/Faulkner Award in 1996, yet her reviews were often mixed. Some reviewers described her as overrated and bipolar, but others called her: exhilarating, compelling, unique and sublime. Michiko Kakutani wrote that she “writes with passion and conviction, and she also writes with a musical sense of language.”

We read passages from Autobiography of My Mother (1996), about a girl sent off to live with the laundress by her vain and selfish father.

In See Now Then, Kincaid dissects and excoriates the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Sweet. who live in the “Shirley Jackson house.” Based on her marriage with Allen Shawn, she does not refrain from expressing anger and pain. Their two children, named Hercules and Persephone in the book, are used as pawns between the warring parents.

Now for Something New and Different—Carla passed around Kincaid’s beautiful My Gardening (Book). Each member then randomly chose a paragraph to read aloud for our delectation. There was not a sloppy paragraph, or an un-beautiful sentence. The topics addressed ranged from Joe-Pie Weed to the evil-looking Monkshood to the relationship between gardening and conquest to Gertrude Jekyll to the fact that a garden will die with its owner.

To end our afternoon’s program, members read the short story, “Girl.” Take a series of instructions; give them to a young girl; use semi-colons to divide each instruction; keep repeating the phrase “like the slut you are bent on becoming;” tell her how to sew on a button; tell her how to cook okra; keep calling her a slut; tell the whole story of the girl’s island life in this short story that is all one sentence.

It was an enlightening program, a great way to end this season of revisiting our birth years, and a perfect start to summer.

Respectfully submitted,
Christine Lehner, Recording Secretary

Kathy Presents Lewis Mumford

 

Lewis Mumford

“The ultimate gift of conscious life is a sense of the mystery that encompasses it.” —Lewis Mumford

Jacquieʼs Email Hello Literary Ladies! A reminder that we will be meeting this Wednesday, June 5th at Carla's home to hear Kathy present on the intriguing theme from her birth year “1958/59 Fifty Years in the Realms of Gold (1908-1958)” for which she has chosen to present on Lewis Mumford, American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic, who, according to Wikipedia, is “particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture.” Unfamiliar with both the phrase “Realms of Gold” and the work of Lewis Mumford as I am, I will not deign to comment here but will leave it up to Kathy in her premier presentation to the Literature Club.

Carla will open her doors at noon for our now traditional and much loved not lunch, and I will have the honor of ringing the bell at 1pm to start our meeting, as both of our fearless leaders, Joanna and Laura, will be unable to attend. (I believe the birds of Iceland and a bunch of lawyers in Tivoli, NY are the attractions that draw them away—you tell me who will be having more fun...) Carla writes about coming to Greystone Apartments, “parking is tight, carpooling is bright!” The day looks like it will be a lovely one, so the walk on the OCA might also be a way to go.

I look forward to seeing many of you there! x Jacquie

Christine's Minutes On June 5th, 2024, eleven members of the Literature Club knew they had gone to the right place when they saw the sign reading: YOU HAVE ARRIVED AT YOUR DESTINATION, affixed to Carla’s door. Upon entering we were met with another set of exquisite Hudson River views. A delicious non-lunch, topped off with Carla’s signature clafoutis, was enjoyed by all.

In the shocking absence of both president and vice-president, Corresponding Secretary Jacquie rang the bell at exactly 1 pm.

The minutes of the previous meeting were read and accepted.

Our treasury still contains $427.73

Ideas for programs on next year’s theme -Letters and Diaries – were bandied about. Names mentioned were Kurt Vonnegut, Wilson and Nabokov, Madame Sévigné, Emily Dickinson, Vincent and Theo van Gogh. Lewis Thomas, Noel Coward, and others.

Kathy Sullivan, for her debut presentation, chose to revisit the 1958-1959 theme of “Fifty Years in the Realms of Gold” on account of 1959 being the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Literature Club. Kathy’s focus was on work of Lewis Mumford.

The theme’s title comes from “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” by John Keats. 

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Why Lewis Mumford? Well, for one thing, while it seemed that we had all heard of him, very few of us had actually read his work or understood his importance to American culture and architecture. But this was the man who, in 1926, set out to create the first canon of American Architecture, looking back to the very beginnings of the country.

Lewis Mumford was born in 1895, in Queens. He lived through the second wave of industrialization, and nuclear war. He died peacefully in his sleep in 1990.

Members read from Mumford’s obit in The New York Times, which hailed him as a philosopher, literary critic, historian, city planner, cultural and political commentator, essayist and perspicacious writer about architecture. (Most of us are lucky to manage just one of these occupations.) Though Mumford once said that if he specialized at all, it was as a “social philosopher.” The obit also referred to his opposition to Robert Moses’s expressway systems. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1986 by President Reagan.

Kathy explained that in his studies of cities, Mumford pioneered the method of studying the present condition and then looking for threads that would lead back to previous forms.

Kathy relied on The Lewis Mumford Reader, edited by Donald Miller, and well as Miller’s Lewis Mumford, A Life. She also found it useful to read from his New Yorker column, Skylines.

Mumford grew up on the West Side, went to public schools, and then entered Stuyvesant, where, Mumford recalled, “my interests widened, and my marks worsened.” He studied at City College but did not graduate. Instead, he took graduate courses at Columbia and at the New School.

After working as a radio technician in WWI, Lewis became associate editor of The Dial. His essays on housing and cities appeared there and elsewhere and began to attract attention. His first book, was The Story of Utopias, came out in 1922. In 1923 he was a co-founder of the RPA—Regional Planning Association of America (Note: back in the 1990’s, the RPA facilitated several meetings designed to help the village of Hastings on Hudson come up with a comprehensive plan for the waterfront. Alas, even the RPA could not fathom the insanity and inertia that characterizes Hastings’ waterfront.)

Meanwhile, Lewis married Sophia Wittenberg in 1921, and they lived in Sunnyside, Queens.

Members read several excerpts from Mumford’s The Golden Day: A Study in American Experience and Culture, in which Mumford makes the case for an American canon of writers: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Melville. He argued that because they all wrote before the social changes wrought by the Civil War, they were in touch with the core of what made Americans Americans.

For the 1939 World’s Fair, Mumford wrote the script for a film—with a score by Aaron Copeland—decrying the poor state of the cities and praising suburbia. (Thirty years later he retracted that opinion and said, “the suburb was as asylum for the preservation of illusion.”) Members saw a video of that film. We also read from “The Skyway’s the Limit,” one of his New Yorker columns.

One of Mumford’s many interests was how man was served by and controlled by technology, over time. As he got older, Mumford came to believe that a life filled with easy comforts and consumer goods required a Faustian bargain.

The more we learned about Mumford, the more we realized just how complex and all-encompassing this man’s vision was.

This was a fascinating afternoon that introduced Literature Club members to a remarkable and un-classifiable writer and thinker, a great debut program from Kathy.

Respectfully submitted,
Christine Lehner, Recording Secretary