VCCA still

What a horrid idea, leaving here next week -- indeed, I see why the sign on the way out says "to the real world," because this is anyone's idea of a sort of utopian community, without the nuttiness there can be.I am reading Susan Cheever's terrific and funny and brilliantly-styled American Bloomsbury, and delighting in the nuttiness of the Concord folk back there, in the times of Emerson and Margaret Fuller, Thoreau and Ellen Sewall, Melville and his impassioned everythingness. I love, absolutely LOVE reading about Bronson Alcott (his chosen name, better, to be sure than Amos whatever it was), and his setting up of Fruitland, where he didn't want to take
1) milk from the cows
2) eggs from the chickens
3) wool from the lambs
so they lived on
a) water
b) bread
c) fruit

but then,  as someone said to me at lunch (witty group here), what if the trees  started withholding their fruit, and the wheat, etc? anyway, they moved back to Concord.
This book is full of people moving back to Concord and moving away and moving back, especially Hawthorne... and of the Margaret Fuller catastrophe... drowning all that brilliance and that dark hair...

so all day you get to do whatever you do in your studio, which also has a bed (what?) so you can take naps or think or whatever you usually do stretched out, and then you can take talks, and have some leftover something for lunch  and meet for supper and that is about it. Nice it.

Amazing, being in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, 16
 gorgeous days when even the cellphone does not work -- you know, as in, you can call friends and husband and all that -- and you just might have email IF you are lucky and in your studio, where you
hole away directly whenever you can...
If I were (oh, that would be delightful, but am not) a fiction writer, I'd call something
No Signal from the Mountain
because THAT is where the only power comes from, very remarkable
what is more so is being
Surrounded by truly non-ego driven creative types -- my goodness, I did love being at the Getty for 8 months and at Bellagio twice, and once again for a conference, but this is different: cows, horses,
and that is it
trying to write a memoir (not a momoir, as in being a mother, but a plain old memoir) of and in the voice of my grandmother the painter
what alife: Worpswede, where she had a rather delightful time with Otto Modersohn, the widower of Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died in childbirth a year afteer my grandmother arrrived -- she lived with my grandfather and 3 children in Bremen, 15 kilometers away... and had left her first baby with a nurse and her husband to go study at the Academie Julian back at the end of the nineteenth century,
for 6 months, with a friend painter from Savannah, but still, all that and then settling down in the then small town of Wilmington, N.C., rising at 5 every morning to paint and then being a society hostess...
WHOA!
So how to write in someone else's voice... I am of course reading painter Paula's journal, and hope to find journals of other woman painters,and here are some right around me now...

Goodness, N.Y.

Don't know how anyone keeps up with the news , you know, print version even, and does any work at all...
such fun to Tweet and glance at Facebook and here I am on a year's leave, as in sabbatical, thinking I'll just
blog and tweet and face and walk in the park maybe
however, am going to a writer's colony, VCCA in Virginia, to see what that one is like -- a year at the Getty
was very yearish, and both full months at Bellagio were very full, so I don't really know what 17 days will feel like, hoping to think about thinking about perhaps writing a memoir of my grandmother, painter and all that, in Worpswede near Bremen, Germany,  and Provincetown and Linville, in the mountains of North Carolina and the small town of Wilmington....
but back to NY, where, I gather, there can be and will be ads on subway cards and stations -- now, I love it in paris when, say, poetry takes over a whole metro station, or art, or something worthwhile, but ads? ah, the economy, stupid
and today we celebrate the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street -- the ghastly undoing and wasting and destruction of the people's library -- and how it spread... I loved being on a panel at the Modern Language Association in Seattle last year with Tom Mitchell who drummed out an Occupy beat...