John Crowley's LJ (RSS Feed)
12-11-2007, 01:01 AM
LAst night in the other realm - trying to read aloud a poem by Yeats to my writing students -- long Whitmanesque lines and nothing like any Yeats poem -- fo r some reason I thought it relevant, but I was having a hard time reading it (because, of course, I was making it up as I went, I mean in the First Realm) -- and realizing I was making sort of a mess of it and they wouldn't get it anyway. Oh dear. But I DID have the sense, which I only rarely do, of actually perceiving words on a page.
Reading the Millay biography. Now Vincent (as her family -- mom and two sisters -- call her) has graduated from Vassar and gone down to postwar Greenwich Village. Gradually Mom and all the sisters come to visit or live. What a clan. What a movie this would make. Vincent (after at least one passionate affair with a Vassar classmate) has sex with Floyd Dell, editor of The Masses. They spend a few nights platonically (but nakedly) sleeping together, and then one night... She tells him thereupon "I shall have many lovers".
Later she comes back to the apartment to tell her sister Norma (who was in bed) "without any conversation that i can remember... that I had this little piece of flesh between my legs,and that I should rub it back and forth. And when I can't stand it any more, then I should keep rubbing. I'm sure it was Floyd Dell who taught her that." (Not the Vassar friend?)
More beloved than loving, so far, though intensely seductive (in a wonderful 1900-ish way) toward men, older men, editors, older rich ladies, anyone who can help her or that she thinks interesting. She's seduced me, but hey I'm easy.
The 20s Provincetown Players scene (they were in NY on MacDougal Street that winter) was another venue. She wrote and starred in her own play, and she and mom and sisters all sang an eerie accompaniment from behind the scenes to O'Neill's Moon of the Caribees. This 20s theatrical scene was one I was very familiar with in my high school years -- their works, the designs for their plays, the designs for programs and ads, filled the books about Theater that I then compulsively read. I never could tell if they were sort of contemporary or had happened long, long ago. But here are people showing up and courting Edna or talking about her or in the theater or eating 60 cent dinners with her whose names I know -- Alfred Kreymborg, Susan Glaspell, Rollo Peters, Lawrence Langner. And Millay's own wonderful play Aria da Capo -- I did it as a puppet show back around 1960.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/73411.html)
Reading the Millay biography. Now Vincent (as her family -- mom and two sisters -- call her) has graduated from Vassar and gone down to postwar Greenwich Village. Gradually Mom and all the sisters come to visit or live. What a clan. What a movie this would make. Vincent (after at least one passionate affair with a Vassar classmate) has sex with Floyd Dell, editor of The Masses. They spend a few nights platonically (but nakedly) sleeping together, and then one night... She tells him thereupon "I shall have many lovers".
Later she comes back to the apartment to tell her sister Norma (who was in bed) "without any conversation that i can remember... that I had this little piece of flesh between my legs,and that I should rub it back and forth. And when I can't stand it any more, then I should keep rubbing. I'm sure it was Floyd Dell who taught her that." (Not the Vassar friend?)
More beloved than loving, so far, though intensely seductive (in a wonderful 1900-ish way) toward men, older men, editors, older rich ladies, anyone who can help her or that she thinks interesting. She's seduced me, but hey I'm easy.
The 20s Provincetown Players scene (they were in NY on MacDougal Street that winter) was another venue. She wrote and starred in her own play, and she and mom and sisters all sang an eerie accompaniment from behind the scenes to O'Neill's Moon of the Caribees. This 20s theatrical scene was one I was very familiar with in my high school years -- their works, the designs for their plays, the designs for programs and ads, filled the books about Theater that I then compulsively read. I never could tell if they were sort of contemporary or had happened long, long ago. But here are people showing up and courting Edna or talking about her or in the theater or eating 60 cent dinners with her whose names I know -- Alfred Kreymborg, Susan Glaspell, Rollo Peters, Lawrence Langner. And Millay's own wonderful play Aria da Capo -- I did it as a puppet show back around 1960.
(Original Post) (http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/73411.html)