“Orlando”

From The Writer’s Almanac:

“It’s the birthday of writer Vita Sackville-West (books by this author), born near Sevenoaks, England (1892). She started writing poetry at an early age, and by the time she was 18 she had written eight novels and several plays, some of them in French or Italian. She was beautiful, more than six feet tall, with dark, heavy-lidded eyes. She fell in love with several women, some of them her classmates. When she was 21 she married a diplomat, Harold Nicholson, even while she was in a passionate affair with another woman. She said of Nicholson, “Our relationship was so fresh, so intellectual, so unphysical, that I never thought of him in that aspect at all […] Some men seem to be born to be lovers, others to be husbands; he belongs to the latter category.” For his part, Nicholson had his own share of lovers. Despite their unconventional marriage, Sackville-West and Nicholson remained devoted to each other for the rest of their lives, writing each other daily when they were apart, and raising a son together.

In December of 1922, when Sackville-West was 30 years old, she met Virginia Woolf at a dinner party. Eventually, they became friends, and then lovers. Sackville-West was the inspiration for the main character in Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928). In 1927, busily working on her novel and jealous of Sackville-West’s affair with a woman named Mary Campbell, Woolf wrote her a letter:

“Suppose Orlando turns out to be about Vita; and its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell) — suppose there’s the kind of shimmer of reality which sometimes attaches to my people … Shall you mind?”

Although she is best remembered as the inspiration for Orlando, Sackville-West was a successful writer in her own right. She wrote more than 15 novels and 10 books of poetry, including The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931). For the last 15 years of her life, she contributed a weekly gardening column called “In Your Garden” to the Observer. She wrote the columns just to make money, and even called them “beastly,” but they are considered classics of garden writing and still widely read today.

Her father was a baron and she grew up at the family estate, the Calendar House, a Tudor mansion in Kent with a long history. The Archbishop of Canterbury had lived there until King Henry VIII took it away because he wanted it for himself. The Calendar House has 365 rooms, one for each day of the year.

She wrote, “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?”

March 9, 2021

Alphonse Mucha: “Médée”

Armed Liberty

From FB:

“The bronze Statue of Freedom by Thomas Crawford is the crowning feature of the Dome of the United States Capitol. The statue is a classical female figure with long, flowing hair wearing a helmet with a crest composed of an eagle’s head and feathers. The helmet is encircled by nine stars. She wears a classical dress secured with a brooch inscribed “U.S.” Over it is draped a heavy, flowing, toga-like robe fringed with fur and decorative balls. Her right hand rests upon the hilt of a sheathed sword wrapped in a scarf; in her left hand she holds a laurel wreath of victory and the shield of the United States with 13 stripes. She stands on a cast-iron pedestal on a globe encircled with the motto E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one).The Statue of Freedom does not wear or hold a liberty cap, as would have been expected in nineteenth-century art. The knit cap provided to freed slaves in ancient Rome had been adopted as the symbol of liberty or freedom during the American and French Revolutions and was usually shown as red. The Statue of Freedom’s crested helmet and sword, suggesting she is prepared to protect the nation, are more commonly associated with Minerva or Bellona, Roman goddesses of war. The history of the statue’s design explains why she wears a helmet rather than a liberty cap. A monumental statue for the top of the national Capitol was part of Architect Thomas U. Walter’s original design for a new cast-iron dome, which was authorized by Congress in 1855. Walter’s first drawing showed a 16-foot statue holding a liberty cap on the long rod with which a slave would be symbolically touched during a ceremony bestowing his freedom in ancient Rome.American sculptor Thomas Crawford sculpted a graceful figure in a classical dress wearing a liberty cap encircled with stars, holding a shield, wreath, and sword, which he said represented Armed Liberty. It was sent to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who was in charge of the overall construction at the Capitol. Davis objected to the liberty cap, the symbol of freed slaves, because “its history renders it inappropriate to a people who were born free and should not be enslaved.” Davis suggested a helmet with a circle of stars. In response, Crawford designed a crested version of a Roman helmet, “the crest of which is composed of an eagle’s head and a bold arrangement of feathers, suggested by the costume of our Indian tribes.” This third design was approved by Jefferson Davis in April 1856.”

Goals

“I Tip My Hat To The New Constitution…”

From FB:

“Pete Townshend and the 1959 Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins hollow body guitar he used to record “Won’t Get Fooled Again” given to him by Joe Walsh. Townshend said it was the loudest guitar he’d ever played. Which is sayin’ somethin’….”

“It Tolls For Thee…”

“Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear. It is only missing it that’s bad…”