greetings from the left coast

Like several other people on my reading list, including osprey_archer (post here) and troisoiseaux (post here, I was compelled by the premise of I Leap Over the Wall: A Return to the World After 28 Years In A Convent, a once-bestselling (but now long out-of-print) memoir by a British woman who entered a cloister in 1914, lived ten years as a nun, decided it wasn't for her, lived another almost twenty years as a nun out of stubbornness, and exited in 1941, having missed quite a lot of sociological developments in the interim! including talking films! and underwire bras! and not one, but two World Wars!

Obviously Baldwin did not know that WWI was about to happen right as she went into a convent, but she does explain that she came out in the middle of WWII more or less on purpose, out of an idea that it would be easier to slide herself back into things when everything was chaotic and unprecedented anyway than to try to establish a life for herself as The Weird Ex Nun in more normal times. Unclear how well this strategy paid off for her, but you can't say she didn't give it an effort. Baldwin was raised extremely upper-class -- she was related to former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, among others -- but exited the convent pretty much penniless, so while she did have a safety net in terms of various sets of variously judgmental relations who were willing to put her up, she spends a lot of the book valiantly attempting to take her place among the workers of the world. And these are real labor jobs, too -- 'ex-nun' is not a resume booster, and most of the things she felt actually qualified to do for a living based on her convent experience (librarianship, scholarship, etc) required some form of degree, so much of the work she does in this book are things like being a land girl, or working in a canteen. She doesn't enjoy these jobs, and she rarely does them long, but you have to respect her for giving it the old college try, especially when she's constantly in a state of profound and sustained culture shock.

Overall, Baldwin does not enjoy the changes to the world since she left it. She does not enjoy having gone in a beautiful young girl with her life ahead of her, and come out a middle-aged woman who's missed all the milestones that everyone around her takes for granted. She does, however, profoundly enjoy her freedom, and soon begins to cherish an all-consuming dream of purchasing a Small House of her Very Own where she can do whatever the hell she wants whenever the hell she wants. After decades in a convent, you can hardly blame her for this. On the other hand -- fascinatingly, to me -- it's very clear that Baldwin still somewhat idealizes convent life, despite the fact that it obviously made her deeply miserable. She has long conversations with her judgmental relatives, and long conversations with us, the reader, in which she tries to convince them/us of the real virtues of the cloister; of the spiritual value of deep, deliberate, constant self-sacrifice and self-abegnation; of the fact that it's important, vital and necessary that some people close themselves away from work in the world to focus on the exclusive pursuit of God. It is good that people do this, it's spiritual and heroic, it's simply -- unfortunately -- the only case in which she's ever known the church to be wrong in assessing who does or does not have a genuine vocation after the novice period -- not for her.

Baldwin is a fascinating and contradictory person and I enjoyed spending time with her quite a bit. I suspect she wouldn't much enjoy spending time with me; she will keep going to London and observing neutrally that it seems the streets are much more full of Jews than they were before she went into the convent, faint shudder implied. At another point she confesses that although she'd left the convent with 'definite socialist tendencies,' actually working among the working people has changed her mind for the worse: 'the people' now impressed me as full of class prejudice and an almost vindictive envy-hatred-malice fixation towards anyone who was richer, cleverer, or in any way superior to themselves. Still, despite her preoccupations and prejudices, her voice is interesting, and deeply eccentric, and IMO she's worth getting to know. This is a woman, an ex-nun, who takes Le Morte D'Arthur as her beacon of hope and guide to life. Le Morte! You really can't agree with it, but how can you not be compelled?

On the first weekend of January genarti and I went along with some friends to the Moby-Dick marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which was such an unexpectedly fun experience that we're already talking about maybe doing it again next year.

The way the marathon works is that people sign up in advance to read three-minute sections of the book and the whole thing keeps rolling along for about twenty-five hours, give or take. You don't know in advance what the section will be, because it depends how fast the people before you have been reading, so good luck to you if it contains a lot of highly specific terminology - you take what you get and you go until one of the organizers says 'thank you!' and then it's the next person's turn. If it seems like they're getting through the book too fast they'll sub in a foreign language reader to do a chapter in German or Spanish. We did not get in on the thing fast enough to be proper readers but we all signed up to be substitute readers, which is someone who can be called on if the proper reader misses their timing and isn't there for their section, and I got very fortunate on the timing and was in fact subbed in to read the forging of Ahab's harpoon! (genarti ALMOST got even luckier and was right on the verge of getting to read the Rachel, but then the proper reader turned up at the last moment and she missed it by a hair.)

There are also a few special readings. Father Mapple's sermon is read out in the New Bedford church that has since been outfitted with a ship-pulpit to match the book's description (with everyone given a song-sheet to join in chorus on "The Ribs and Terrors Of the Whale") and the closing reader was a professional actor who, we learned afterwards, had just fallen in love with Moby-Dick this past year and emailed the festival with great enthusiasm to participate. The opening chapters are read out in the room where the Whaling Museum has a half-size whaling ship, and you can hang out and listen on the ship, and I do kind of wish they'd done the whole thing there but I suppose I understand why they want to give people 'actual chairs' in which to 'sit normally'.

Some people do stay for the whole 25 hours; there's food for purchase in the museum (plus a free chowder at night and free pastries in the morning While Supplies Last) and the marathon is being broadcast throughout the whole place, so you really could just stay in the museum the entire time without leaving if you wanted. We were not so stalwart; we wanted good food and sleep not on the floor of a museum, and got both. The marathon is broken up into four-hour watches, and you get a little passport and a stamp for every one of the four-hour watches you're there for, so we told ourselves we would stay until just past midnight to get the 12-4 AM stamp and then sneak back before 8 AM to get the 4-8 AM stamp before the watch ticked over. When midnight came around I was very much falling asleep in my seat, and got ready to nudge everyone to leave, but then we all realized that the next chapter was ISHMAEL DESCRIBES BAD WHALE ART and we couldn't leave until he had in fact described all the bad whale art!

I'm not even the world's biggest Moby-Dick-head; I like the book but I've only actually read it the once. I had my knitting (I got a GREAT deal done on my knitting), and I loved getting to read a section, and I enjoyed all the different amateur readers, some rather bad and some very good. But what I enjoyed most of all was the experience of being surrounded by a thousand other people, each with their own obviously well-loved copy of Moby-Dick, each a different edition of Moby-Dick -- I've certainly never seen so many editions of Moby-Dick in one place -- rapturously following along. (In top-tier outfits, too. Forget Harajuku; if you want street fashion, the Moby-Dick marathon is the place to be. So many hand-knit Moby Dick-themed woolen garments!) It's a kind of communal high, like a convention or a concert -- and I like concerts, but my heart is with books, and it's hard to get of communal high off a book. Inherently a sort of solitary experience. But the Moby-Dick marathon managed it, and there is something really very spectacular in that.

Anyway, as much as we all like Moby-Dick, at some point on the road trip trip, we started talking about what book we personally would want to marathon read with Three Thousand People in a Relevant Location if we had the authority to command such a thing, and I'm pitching the question outward. My own choice was White's Once And Future King read in a ruined castle -- I suspect would not have the pull of Moby-Dick in these days but you never know!