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

[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...