All "My Brilliant Friend"! All of the Time! Plus the Diary Project

[mallorys_camera]

The first three episodes of My Brilliant Friend: Season 3 are as excellent as Season 1 was.

It is 1968, and Sessantotto is erupting in the college towns of the North, Pisa, Bologna, Padua. In the South, recovery from the devastations of World War II are finally underway, and telephones and televisions are becoming common household appliances.

In the U.S., in Berkeley, I too was participating in political marches—against the Vietnam War, in favor of People’s Park.

Once I was babysitting Alicia and decided to take her to a protest.

We got tear-gassed—and I can remember dashing madly across Sproul Plaza pushing her stroller.

I didn’t have a clue about the things we were protesting against, of course.

It was just fun to be out on a sunny day with other people my age singing If I Had a Hammer and screaming, “Fuck the pigs!”

Better than the best rock concert you can possibly imagine.

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Also started reading the novels.

Here’s a passage close to the beginning of Chapter 1:

Adults, waiting for tomorrow, move in a present behind which is yesterday or the day before yesterday or at most last week: they don’t want to think about the rest. Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.

I can attest to the truth of that because I have very vivid memories of my childhood.

Most people don’t. Or claim not to.

But among the people who are unashamed to remember their childhoods, a certain mythology develops, their childhood memories are the Iliad or the Odyssey, and Ferrante captures that very, very well in the opening chapter of My Brilliant Friend. The HBO series captures it very, very well, too, and I think that’s what gives the series its extraordinary emotional punch.

###

Anyway, I really cannot surrender myself totally to My Brilliant Friend for another day because I simply have too much to do.

And one of those things is transcription.

Long-time readers may recall The Saga of the Diaries: How when I closed down the Monterey house, I took the 20 or so volumes of my paper journals and shut them up in a storage unit, and then, how in 2021, I finally became brave enough to fly to California and deal with that storage unit. I threw everything away! I loaded everything into a UHaul that Ichabod had specifically rented for a trip to the dump.

I felt a vast relief.

I was free of the past.

But then a weird thing happened: The UHaul got stolen.

And then an even weirder thing happened: Ichabod had packed some of his own things into that UHaul that had been in my storage unit, including his Stanford diploma, which he'd intended to take back up to Ukiah. And someone had found the Stanford diploma—along with my diaries!

They had been able to trace him through the diploma. And he, of course, knew where I was.

Here is what the diaries looked like when the person found them:



Clearly, my diaries are the malevolent Chuckie-doll of diaries!

Never mind that I hate them, and I hate the person who wrote them—they have a mind of their own, and they will not be rebuffed or ignored.

So, I will be transcribing them. Volume by volume. The contents of the volumes are in chronological order (of course.). But the volumes will not be in any particular order.



9 July¹

A peaceful moment between invasions…²

Sweet peas in the vase on my desk, Albioni on the stereo, a room w/a view. The view is of a garden, I planted the garden myself. A garden will teach you better how to cherish the small specifics than all the Zen review courses ever packaged.

Said goodbye to Michele³ a couple of nights ago w/something of a pang—certainly the closest thing to genuine emotion that I’ve felt in quite some time. Who knows when I’ll see her again… If I’ll see her again… My soul registers a real loss. From the first, I was extremely drawn to Michele far beyond what the social circumstances of our acquaintance were prepared to authorize. I have such little confidence these days in the drawing capacity of my own featured attractions, that I never speculated that the pull might be reciprocal. Michele was such an adventuresome soul, such a quintessentially free spirit: I celebrated the archetype in the many dreams of her I was always too busy-worked to remember once I had fully awakened from them.

She was (she is) one of those women who are beautiful w/out being the slightest bit pretty; her looks so different from the standardized surveys of female attractiveness that you had to be something of a standard deviate yourself to appreciate them. She reminded me of the heroine of the “French Lieutenant’s Woman”⁴—one of my favorite novels.

I liked her so much that the liking was awkward so that finally I avoided her as often as I sought her out. That constraint, at least, was reciprocal or so it seemed: however animated our banter and eye contact was around other people, a deux we were pointedly guarded. And it was only in parting—the hug she made me was one of great warmth, tenderness, and yes, some regret—that it occurred to me that Michele, too, might have been shielding herself from the intensity and ambivalence of the attraction.⁵

_______

¹ No idea what year this was. 1986? In the next entry in this volume I mention being pregnant, so it must have been 1986, and we were living on San Lorenzo Street in Berkeley, close to the Berkeley/Albany border.

² Note my peculiar love for ellipses back then. I suppose I thought they were evocative.

³ I have no idea who Michele was! I cannot remember her in the slightest.

⁴ Wait! What? The French Lieutenant’s Woman was one of my favorite novels in 1986? No-ooo-ooooooo!!!

⁵ Clearly this was a Sapphic attraction! Up until my first marriage, I was sexually active with men and women alike. Actually, preferred women sexually, but there was a certain something they lacked partner-wise, not enough polarity, I guess. Also, I very much preferred the dreamy, drifty, clandestine nature of my female dalliances to the brisk daylight and normality of same-sex couplings today. I suppose I’m the only person in the world who regrets that loss.