not doing it...

So how do most of us,  who don't manage to spend our mornings writing and then do even 1 13th of what Virginia Woolf did in the rest of her day, get around and along? since I am about to launch (well, after a few other thises and thats) into my SimplyWoolf book, it does sweep across my mind rather a lot...

I still love getting up in the wee hours to read something or other, and then rise, both of us, read the paper and have coffee (gave up the coffee maker Boyce's cousin bestowed on us: that kind you just put a little cup thing in and try to make it stronger than it wants to be and hotter than it can be, wheeled it down to the Housing Works place I take whatever we need to dispose of, books, books, books, etc., and then take a swim in the not so far off pool, always taking something to read in case all the lanes are full, etc. That is instead of writing, of course,  and then there's living.

And there's also meeting my seminar, so much fun, on mannerism to modernism, and all the art that goes with it, how superbly perceptive are the participants in the class, heavens above.
And two pieces came out in the TLS and I enjoyed doing those, on Linda Nochlin and on a book on Motherwell, and this weekend I get to read translations of Pierre Reverdy at an art gallery where a musician has composed something on trying to translate Reverdy, sounds like a nice turnabout...
then I leave for Kalamazoo to talk on the Modern Art Cookbook, and they will prepare things from it, now that is delightful,  why ever write anything else, you say to yourself?

BACK IN NEW YORK

just to say to whomever gets this, not just that we are back in the city after the Vaucluse and Aspen (some lovely music, but goodness does it feel like Beverley Hills or something), and here I am so happily teaching in the fall, in French Ph.D. program: "Art and Text: Mannerism to Modernism" and then in the spring, in the English Ph.D. program "art and text: turns, shifts and bends" taking as a prelude Nicolas de Stael's "Bend in the road in the Vaucluse" which kicked off my talk in Portsmouth, England, this summer, and then in the fall of next year, in the Film Certificate program at the same delightful Graduate School of course, "Film and Modern Literature"  -- you know, Henry James and so on...
and that I am so glad to have 2 books coming out in Belgium this fall, one the translation in French of my "Glorious Eccentrics: Modernist Women painting and writing" with added chapters on Isadora and Kay Boyle, thanks to Anne Reynes-Delobel, who translated my seven chapters so I am translating into english her chapters, in case we can reprint the whole thing in English, and how interesting it is, not depressing, that it turns out I can't type more than 2 hours now without my fingers arthritically cramping, and that is for the first time,
like so delightfully some things are for the first time, not like Chapman's Homer or the first cuckoo in the spring or such, but all the same, sort of fun, and we went to the out of doors met performances on HD of Iolanthe and Bluebeard's Castle and then Romeo et Juliette at which all of New York must have been so we sat on the wall
and pretty soon I will think about my ebook contract for a SimplyWoolf, sounds like fun, off to somewhere just on the Hudson right now to not waste the sun

what we say...

It is feb. 13, and I expect I have to write this because I can type less and less well, and want to do an update on my blog, which rarely I write - swamped like everyone, and seeing out over it less and less well -- to say, quite simple, just that. Thinking of the ironies of everything -- how fortunate we all are who are still living in such relative ease (we are, after all, alive) -- and how from very littledom, I used to wonder over the dreadfulness of singers losing their voices after a certain age, ballerinas losing their step even earlier, thinkers growing dull of mind, and all that -- now I find this sort of funny.
Last week, I held up my left (thanks be, my LEFT hand) hand to my daughter Hilary and said: look how my two little fingers are curling over. Typing is more worrisome: I was always chaotic, and my typing and writing even more apparent than my uneven stacking of books on every free surface. But there is much I want to write and may not get to it, which is, of course, always the case for every single person I know, or just about.
Many strange things occur and you think: ah, I must write this down so as not to lose it. Like Virginia Woolf saying write it down, or like water, it flows away. (Surely, she said it a whole lot better, but nowadays I just have to SAY IT.)
Teaching: I love sitting around with a group and all talking about what we have just discovered or rediscovered. I loved my seminar on Anxieties of Modernist Representation last semester, and my Energetic Aesthetics this semester and will be delving into the kinds of Modernist processes we might examine next semester.
And my friend Marjorie Perloff is coming to speak for the Henri Peyre French Institute on March 19 on Paul Celan, and I leave the next day to do a Night Museum
What mostly is useful to write? not book reviews, I think, and probably not articles. As for books, I still long to write about my grandmother, whose grandmother kept slaves, who was herself a super painter and being and my agent says perhaps if it turns also into a memoir -- but there is such a discrepancy between her looming talent and energy and communicative personality and whatever I muster, forget the curling fingers anyway. Maybe. And so much else I long to do and write and be and love.

vermouth

I  know there is a best-selling book called something like "hello, vodka, it's Chelsea calling" -- I like vodka also,
but am liking dry white vermouth a lot also, and how nice it is there and I am here

Having just decided to take not just a semester sabbatical but a really really whole year, before the panic sets in about what in the world am I doing to do this, I think joy should set in -- I have all these old notebooks I have never looked at, I  have always wanted to write a fiction about my grandmother the painter, in paris, and I want to write on Pascal, and I want not to feel always having to rush here and there -- now will this change THAT, I don't know, but it is not a bad idea to muse upon it...

something about if you are so lucky as to live here, then do just that, LIVE here.. then when I get back after that year, I can teach my film course about The Anxiety of Representation -- about which films work with which texts, and we will read Virginia Woolf and see films about her, etc. Van Gogh and T.S. Eliot and all that -- hope it will work!

in any case, I don't seem to be doing a lot of writing when I am teaching, but I surely do love teaching, which is really just meeting with truly intelligent young people and talking with them about what we are reading, and hearing what they are doing with the reading -- I  mean that is what teaching Ph.D. students is about, I think

SYMBOLISM

What a lark, teaching symbolist poets! My seminar this week concerns  ( as it did last week also, how to stop? ) Mallarme, the most 21st century poet writing in the 19th century, blows anyone's mind... for sure. Every time you read him on Loie Fuller (as in his nigh-impenetrable essay on the Ballets) or on shipwrecks and typography (as in the major-important No Throw of the Dice will Get Rid of Chance, or any way you desire it translated), you feel as if you could shout with Virginia Woolf after reading Proust: "What is there to say after that?" Well, she continued to say a few things, and we are glad of that. 

Hedda Sterne

Ah, the loss of Hedda...I loved Hedda, and knew her for year after year, always faithful to what she cared about and to those she cared about...

She would make me dinner in her kitchen with its red stove and, before her immense wallsized painting was taken away, we would look at it together for quite a while before starting in on a bottle of white wine and a conversation, that lasted and lasted and lasted.... from Zen to Venice, from Paris to what we were reading... she read extensively, and would read whatever I mentioned or brought. One wonderful time, she had just read the copy of Virginia Woolf's The Waves I had brought her. It was like a lifetime's ongoing conversation.

She taught me so much, moral things, intellectual things, poetic things, but above all, she was there, on 71st street and in my life. She would write me when I was in France, about her dreams and her going on.

Did she go on! past 100, and  past so many others, of such lesser stature.