Bloomsbury Groups: Sex and Creativity

Today is the birthday of Vita Sackville-West, who is perhaps most famous for being the lover of Virginia Woolf, which made me think of that Bloomsbury group.

I remember in grad school being fascinated by the sexual relationships in that group. I've always been interested in non-conventional relationships, both sexual and otherwise. How do people fight against whatever structure their society tries to impose upon them? I'm interested in people who live in intentional Christian communities, in people who create all sorts of co-parenting relationships, in people who refuse to be boxed in by society's need to classify and sort. It probably shouldn't surprise me that I'd have been interested in the Bloomsbury group.

Now, though, I find myself frustrated in our society's need to talk about everybody's sex lives. Yawn. After awhile, I find myself feeling like I've heard everything. What seemed endlessly fascinating when I was 21 no longer interests me at all.

When I was in my late 20's, an older colleague said, "I'm bored with people's sex lives. Don't tell me about what you're into in the bedroom. Tell me about your investments."

She meant financial investments. I was horrified. I saw her as deeply repressed. Now, I understand.

However, there's still one aspect of human lives that I long to know better; we rarely talk about people's creative lives to the extent that fills my hunger. I've read book after book about the Bloomsbury group, and very few writers talk AT ALL about how the creative individuals influenced each other as individuals and as the group. To me, that's the interesting question: how do we become better artists when we're part of a group? What do we lose when we're part of a group? Do artistic groups influence individual artists differently than other groups (like, say, being part of a group of new parents or environmentalists or grad students)?

No, writers exploring the Bloomsbury group tend to focus on the sex or the upper class background of the group or any number of other things except for the art.

Let me qualify. I haven't read much about the Bloomsbury group since I finished my Ph.D. in the early 90's. This situation may have been rectified.

But I doubt it. Perhaps there's a lesson for us artists: have a boring sex life or risk having your art trivialized--at least for the first hundred years after your death.

Yes, yes, I'm oversimplifying. But many people would tell us that simplifying/making dull more parts of our lives will lead to more interesting art. Or maybe it's just that having a streamlined life will give us more time to make art. If we lose so much time to drama and turmoil, we won't have the time, space, and quiet that much art demands.

Here's a Vita Sackville-West quote (from The Writer's Almanac) for your Tuesday inspiration: "It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?"

In Which I Retreat from the World's Noisiness into Kitchen Quietness

Am I the only grown up who feels that life has gotten too loud lately?

I will now wait a few minutes, so that those of you who knew me when I was young can bring your laughter under control. I was that girl who disturbed the whole dorm with her loud rock music. I partially deafened one ear by my relentless listening to loud music through headphones.

And even though I'm partially deaf, I'm still finding modern life too loud. Some of it, I expect. I went to Best Buy, which has always been too loud, which was a shame, since I could have spent more money if I could have stood to be in the place a minute longer. I only went there because they had the printer I wanted for a cheap price.

I went to happy hour on Friday, which I guess I should have expected to have loud music. But I was the youngest one there by probably a good 10 years. Am I the only one who has outgrown my tolerance for loud music?

The penultimate loud experience of my week-end came at church, if you can believe it. Usually, the sound system at church seems to be working at half potential, which is good for me. Alas, not yesterday. Everyone seemed overly amplified. I thought I might not be able to stand it. I thought longingly of monasteries and their contemplative services.

Maybe I haven't written much poetry in the last week because I have felt increasingly jangled. I've spent more time cooking, which is good--a retreat into the quietness of the kitchen. On Wednesday, I made a recipe from The Splendid Table's How to Eat Supper, Oven-Roasted Chicken Cacciatora (page 202). Unfortunately, I can't find it online. It was so delicious that I made it again on Saturday--after all, I had left over sausage and sage and an extra bell pepper, so why not?

And it's easy, once everything is chopped. Put chicken in the 9 x 13 pan, dump a bunch of stuff on top (canned, chopped tomatoes, chopped red bell pepper, chopped red onion, chopped Kalamata olives, diced hard salami, some wine, some olive oil, torn sage leaves, some fennel seeds), throw it in the oven to bake. Yummmm.

I made it on Wednesday, because I've had a chicken leg and thigh in the freezer, the kind of leg and thigh that I hold up and wonder about the humongous size of the chicken. It seemed like a good recipe to use up that cut of meat and a chicken breast. On Saturday, I used boneless, skinless chicken breast, because that's what I had on hand. It would be a great recipe for those times when the grocery store puts chicken thighs on sale, though.

I need to write a poem or two this week. I need to get back on track. I need to keep working on soothing my jangled nerves so that I can hear myself enough to write.

More on Poetry Book Trailers

This week, I've been seeing lots of interesting blog posts on making a poetry book trailer. Kelli Russell Agodon posted her book trailer here and then wrote a post on the making of the book trailer. She promises follow up posts, and I'm looking forward to them.

Diane Lockward has shown amazing industriousness and completed two book trailers (for the same book) for us to compare. If you go to her blog post, you can watch both and decide what you think. I commented over at her blog, so I won't say anything about my preferences here, so that I don't influence any virgin eyes.

In the coming week, I hope to return to the interesting process of making these hybrid creations. My spouse was home on Wednesday when I shot lots of photos, and he said, "What, exactly, are you going to do with these?"

I showed him Sandra Beasley's animated poems, Kelli's book trailer, and the wonderful animated version of Billy Collins' poem "Forgetfulness" (my spouse's favorite). He said, "You're making music videos!" Yes, in a way, we are. I think in the best poetry collections, all the poems hang together to make a larger whole, just as in a CD, the individual songs create something bigger. One animated poem can promote the book, as can a book trailer. How cool to have these resources that even the most untrained of us can master.

The Muse Who Does Her Own Work

Today is the birthday of Lady Augusta Gregory. You've never heard of her? What a shame. Without her steadying presence, we'd have likely never heard of William Butler Yeats.

Yes I know, you might argue that Maud Gonne was the muse of Yeats. Perhaps. It fits with our idea of a muse, after all: a beautiful woman who haunts your visions for years or decades with her inability to love you back in just the way you love her.

Excuse me for a moment while I go vomit.

Maybe muse is not the word that I want for Lady Gregory. She served to inspire Yeats, to push him in directions he might not have otherwise gone. She had already done a lot of work in the field of folklore when she met Yeats, and the two of them probably accomplished more together than they would have alone. Without their work, those tales and customs and perhaps even those languages might have been lost forever.

Her work in establishing the Abbey Theatre and supporting Irish playwrights is most inspiring to me. She wrote plays herself, some 20 plays, which doesn't include the plays of others (including Yeats) that she helped revise; some scholars would tell you that she deserves co-author status. Her folklore fieldwork helped her to rewrite the language of the peasant characters to sound more authentic.

Of course, any artistic movement, particularly one in the performing arts, requires money, often lots of it, and Lady Gregory had plenty to contribute. What a wonderful legacy, as the Abbey Theatre still survives.

I often dream of having a huge chunk of money and the kinds of groups I would love to support. I often think of artistic colonies that I would create. I dream of scholarships for deserving students. I make a promise to the artistic gods that I would be wise and create a lasting legacy that would continue to support artists long after I was gone.

Did Lady Gregory and Yeats know what they were in the process of creating? I doubt they thought about it much. They had their passions and they followed them with verve and commitment. May we all be that lucky!

Shooting Fabric

Kelli Russell Agodon's book trailer and post inspired me yesterday to get ready for another round of experimenting with videopoems, even though you would be fair if you pointed out that I wasn't through with my last experiment. I wanted to keep experimenting with Movie Maker, while I still remembered what I had done, and I'm working on a weekly art project series at my theology blog (go here, here, and here to read/see more), so I decided that next week's project would involve a stanza of a poem. Yesterday, I set about taking photos that would work with the poem.





The poem talks about God as a quilter, so I needed pictures of quilts, pictures of fabric. Luckily, I have plenty of fabric and quilts on hand (the above shot is a close up of a quilt that I pieced and quilted entirely by hand--below you'll see a larger picture of the whole quilt, but I love this close up--look how the stars glow!).

As I took photos, I thought about book trailers, and I thought about my newer book length manuscript, which I've titled When God Switched Fabrics. So, I decided to take some photos that might be useful for a book trailer.

Here's the larger quilt (the detail is above):

Here's another close-up shot of some of my fiber art. Several years ago, I made a piece a week. I'd put down a piece of cloth, cut smaller scraps of cloth and arrange them on the large piece, scatter other types of fiber (yarn, ribbon) across, and put a see-through fabric on top. I sewed the whole creation together, often with a glittery thread. I also experimented with beads.

I had a fun afternoon, taking lots of pictures which may or may not be useful some day. What a great development is the digital camera! If I'd been working with traditional film, I'd have shot through over $30 worth of film. Or I'd have been so cautious I wouldn't have tried my more experimental shot and been so delighted with the results that I pushed further.

Creations that Long to be Mediocre

Over at The Writer's Almanac, I read this quote from Ira Glass (of National Public Radio fame), who celebrates a birthday today: "It's hard to make something that's interesting. It's really, really hard. ... Basically, anything that anyone makes. ... It's like a law of nature, a law of aerodynamics, that anything that's written or anything that's created wants to be mediocre. The natural state of all writing is mediocrity. It's all tending toward mediocrity in the same way that all atoms are sort of dissipating out toward the expanse of the universe. ... So what it takes to make anything more than mediocre is such an act of will. ... That feels exactly the same now as it did the first week of the show."

What an interesting idea, that the natural state of all writing is mediocrity. I wonder if I agree.

I know that it's hard for me to do substantial revision. I might write a free verse poem, and then play with turning it into a sonnet or some other poem with more form and structure. I might start on a poem, which might spark an idea or image that takes me in a different direction. I might make several failed attempts before I'm happy. But once I have a draft, that's likely to be the finished draft--unless I have an editor who makes suggestions.

Often, I follow those suggestions, but I find that I often like both versions equally. I rarely have a moment when I revise and revise and revise and the revision is clearly better to me. It may be because I'm too close to the work.

I wonder if it's because I've been teaching for 22 years, and I've always tried to be the kind of teacher who offers encouragement, who rarely says, "That's horrible. Throw it out and start over." I've always prided myself in being able to find some kind of spark even in the most terrible mess of a rough draft. Perhaps that carries over into my own writing.

I've noticed that with my videopoem from last week, as each day goes by, I'm more resistant to tinkering with it. Things I saw as faults (like the fact that the word otherworldly is hard to see) I'm resistant to change. I'm rationalizing: the word looks otherworldly as it is, so why change it?

I suppose I should take Ira Glass's words to heart and be on guard against mediocrity.

Back to Blogging, Bleary and Achy

I had a whirlwind week-end. After seeing Archbishop Tutu and staying up very late, we got up very early to hop on a plane to D.C.

My sister turned 40 on Saturday. At Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law suggested that we fly in for a birthday surprise. I had said that I doubted we could do it, but when I saw very cheap plane tickets, I decided it was a sign. We bought the tickets, my brother-in-law set about arranging a surprise party, and we all worked very hard at not blabbing.

It was phenomenally successful. She was completely surprised again and again. And she was remarkably able to recover from the shock and have a good time.

Then, early yesterday, we got on a plane back. It all made me feel very cosmopolitan and grown up. And tired.

How do authors do book tours? I guess they either have stronger constitutions than I do, or they get used to it, or they're not trying to hop from city to city and hold down a job.

I always feel like it takes time for all my parts of myself to catch up with me when I fly. Of course, when I drive, I'm painfully aware that all my parts of myself are with me and in great pain.

I do love having time to read. These days, the main time I read a novel is when I'm travelling. I wonder what that says about me?

I read Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's latest, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. It's about an academic who almost accidentally writes a bestselling book that defends atheism, and it's fully of witty and profound observations about academia, religion, and relationships. Here are some nuggets:

The main character, Cass Seltzer, reflects: "Now it's all gone unforgotten, and minds that have better things to think about have to divert precious neuronal resources to figuring out how to knock some sense back into the species. It's a tiresome proposition having to take up the work of the Enlightenment all over again, but it's happened on your watch. You ought to have sent up a balloon now and then to get a read on the prevailing cognitive conditions, the Thinks watching out for the Think-Nots. Now you've gone and let the stockpiling of fallacies reach dangerous levels, and the massed weapons of illogic are threatening the survivability of the globe" (page 1).

Cass becomes famous after the publication of his book, and is surprised to find out that everyone is so much nicer to him: "If only everybody could be famous, we would all be effortlessly altruistic" (page 10).

Cass' girlfriend is extremely gifted and beautiful: "The imbalanced distribution of natural gifts seems unfair because it is; and people will always try to make things fairer by giving grief to the gifted" (page 32).

A crusty, old liberal artsy professor says, "What are the so-called exact sciences but the failure of metaphor and metonymy?" (page 171).

These quotes only give a sense of the wonderfulness of the characters, the exquisiteness of the descriptions, the movement of the plot, and the delight of the reading experience.

Now, back to my regular life. I must spend some time today trying to remember what poems I had planned to write. I must think about the grocery store. I should do some laundry. I'll think longingly of all the works of fiction that wait for me to read them.