Recent reading

[troisoiseaux]

Read Paul by Daisy Lafarge, which is mostly a contemporary coming-of-age novel - a recent college graduate on a gap year in France finds herself stuck in a cycle of toxic relationships with older men - but also a reckoning with the legacy of French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin by way of modern AU. Weirdly, the third book I've read this year that uses an AU of a historical figure/event as a launching point to... do entirely its own thing? (The other two were Natasha Pulley's The Bedlam Stacks, which did not need to be a fantasy AU of Clements Markham's 1860 cinchona-smuggling expedition to Peru, and Heather O'Neill's When We Lost Our Heads, which probably also didn't need to ask "what if the French Revolution happened in 19th century Montreal and was about feminism?" to tell the story it wanted to, but I'm glad it did.)

Read Agatha of Little Neon by Claire Luchette— also a coming-of-age story, of a sort. In 2005, a young nun begins to question her vocation after her small order's parish in upstate New York goes bankrupt and they are reassigned to a "tuckered-out town" in Rhode Island to run a halfway house and, in her case, teach at an all-girls Catholic school. A slim, muted novel - I finished it in one afternoon - and lovely in its treatment of unloveliness. I would describe it as tender or earnest, but neither feels exactly right? It left me feeling like I'd just had a good cry, although I hadn't actually teared up.

I'd originally picked up The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship by Roger Friedland and Harold Zellman back in February, but abandoned it after the first chapter; I'm not sure what changed between then and now, but I gave it another shot and I'm absolutely devouring it, in a "car crash you can't look away from" kind of way.

Reading about the cult that Frank Lloyd Wright's wife Olgivanna* was in before they met made me wonder if I (or, possibly, the followers of self-declared mystic George Gurdjieff) was being pranked. These are actual quotes regarding Gurdjieff's philosophy:

"'Ass is projector for understanding all other parts of a person,' [Gurdjieff] would say. 'Ass is root.'"

"There were, [Gurdjieff] explained, twenty-one grades of idiot. ... There were ordinary idiots, true and false hopeless idiots, compassionate idiots, squirming idiots, square, round, and zig-zag idiots, swaggering and enlightened idiot."

I also found myself wondering if the "guru" in Edith Wharton's Twilight Sleep was based off of Gurdjieff; a quick search brought up a couple of academic papers making the same connection, so I'm counting that as a yes.

* This was the woman who convinced Stalin's daughter Svetlana to marry the widower of her own daughter Svetlana in order to finance the Taliesin Fellowship (which was itself basically a cult) after Wright's death, btw. (x)

Comments

[sovay]

This was the woman who convinced Stalin's daughter Svetlana to marry the widower of her own daughter Svetlana in order to finance the Taliesin Fellowship (which was itself basically a cult) after Wright's death, btw.

Whaaaaaat.

[troisoiseaux]

Basically, iirc*, after Svetlana Alliluyeva defected to the U.S. in the 1960s, Olgivanna reached out and convinced her to come to Taliesin and then pressured her into marrying the guy who had been previously married to Olgivanna's daughter (also named Svetlana) and was now her second-in-command at Taliesin, which I guess got even cultier after Wright died and Olgivanna took over running it. It was not a very happy marriage for the second Svetlana; I suppose I will find out through this book how it was for the first...?

* from Rosemary Sullivan's Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva

[lunabee34]

Oooh interesting. Was the cult the financial grifting sort?

[troisoiseaux]

Gurdjieff's cult? Yes, in the sense of "getting people to pay him to teach his weird philosophy/choreography," although it didn't appear to be a wildly successful grift; he basically opened franchises in the U.S. after his 15 minutes of profit fame in Europe dried up, but the trend didn't last much longer in the U.S., either. The book focuses more on the mysticism and controlling aspects of Gurdjieff's cult— he was big on manual labor and faith healing and weird dances and this bizarre exercise where he commanded everyone to freeze in place and they had to do so, no matter how painful the position or how long he made them hold it; this once involved flinging themselves off the stage at one of the group's public dance exhibitions.

Frank Lloyd Wright's cult? Yes, 100%, absolutely a financial grift. He opened Taliesin ostensibly as an architecture school, made students pay more than Harvard's then-tuition rate, and then had them doing farm labor and construction work to build the school (because all of the actual workers he'd hired left when he didn't pay them!) instead of actually teaching them anything.

[lunabee34]

Oh wow. I didn't know anything about either of these situations. This is fascinating in a people are horrible kind of way.

[sabotabby]

Weirdly, the third book I've read this year that uses an AU of a historical figure/event as a launching point to... do entirely its own thing? (The other two were Natasha Pulley's The Bedlam Stacks, which did not need to be a fantasy AU of Clements Markham's 1860 cinchona-smuggling expedition to Peru, and When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill, whose question of "what if the French Revolution happened in 19th century Montreal and was about feminism?" probably also didn't need to be asked, but I'm so glad it was.)

This is such an odd subgenre. I wonder if it's a Thing.

One of my mom's ex-boyfriends is an architect who lived on Taliesin for awhile. It sounded like a weird combination of "kind of a cool commune full of smart people" and "absolutely a fucking cult," at least based on his description.

[troisoiseaux]

This is such an odd subgenre. I wonder if it's a Thing.

I currently suspect it's more of a "if I had a nickel for every time, etc., but it's weird it happened twice thrice" rather than an actual Thing - especially since, while Lafarge's and O'Neill's were both published this year and have not dissimilar themes, the Pulley was from 2017 and both a different genre/theme? - but I stumble across a fourth, I will have to reclassify??

One of my mom's ex-boyfriends is an architect who lived on Taliesin for awhile. It sounded like a weird combination of "kind of a cool commune full of smart people" and "absolutely a fucking cult," at least based on his description.

Wild! That's definitely the impression I'm getting through this book, yeah.

[oursin]

On the one hand, Gurdjieff, weird as hell, WTF...
On the other, some very impressive people got taken in, or were at least influenced by him and his thought, so, maybe there was something there, though maybe see also other mystic cults of the same era, e.g. Theosophy, which attracted people who one does not automatically put into the box of 'gullible fools'.

[troisoiseaux]

In one of those odd "hear a song for the first time and suddenly you're hearing it everywhere" coincidences, I only heard of Theosophy and Helena Blavatsky for the first time last week, so it was wild to then immediately encounter another reference to it in this! (I guess Gurdjieff was part of a splinter group of Theosophy before he got enterprising and started his own, shall we call it, Group With Eccentric Philosophies...?)

This is an area I don't know nearly enough to comment on, but it does seem to be coming to my attention with odd frequency over the past few months. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[luzula]

Weirdly, my mom has recently started listening to Gurdjieff's music, which she somehow came across on Spotify. I knew nothing about him before that, and she certainly is not into the cult stuff.

[troisoiseaux]

HIS WHAT IS ON WHERE

[luzula]

At least I think it's the same person? She did say he was some sort of religious figure, as well.

[troisoiseaux]

It is! I looked it up, and it appears that over the past couple of years, someone's been recording albums of music Gurdjieff co-wrote in the 1920s with a composer that was one of his followers? Huh. The things one finds on the internet...

[chelseagirl]

I briefly dated a guy who was into Gurdjieff mysticism. In the 1990s. It was . . . odd.

[troisoiseaux]

o___o

[ethelmay]

Another connection that always blows my mind is that Elizabeth Enright was Frank Lloyd Wright's niece.

[troisoiseaux]

Six Degrees from Frank Lloyd Wright is the new Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon, but the answer is always one or two because apparently he knew every at least mildly famous person in the early to mid-20th century??