2023

|tcHoliday Letter 2023 ct|

 

Dear Friends…

I wrote a letter last year, but I recently discovered a cash of printouts that suggests I didn’t send many out, so I will try to get to more of you this year.  I think it might be easier to print them without all the pictures, so I will post an illustrated version* of this on-line for those who want the full visual report: https://eksxmas.blogspot.com/

 

Well, it was certainly an eventful year.  I started out with a giant creative project, a quilt with fabrics by Kaffe Fasset whose sense of color and flower designs have attracted me for years (my kitchen curtains in Pendleton were his design).

 

 

 

I got it all cut out, arranged, and started piecing before my friend and colleague Judy Melton passed in February, and I wound up organizing her life celebration in Clemson in March, where I rented a house with old and dear friends Angela Elam and Candy Buchanan. *

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Many members of the Lunch Bunch showed up, there were several wonderful brunches full of laughter and tears,  and I got to spend good time with Sue Watts and many old friends.*  Except for the people, though, I don’t miss Clemson a bit. 

 

 

In June there was another grand reunion, in Florida at the annual Virginia Woolf conference, the first we’d been able to hold in person for three years. I flew into Miami a couple of days early to spend time with my much-missed buddy Davi as well as several other members of the Brazilian contingent.

 

 

 

The conference in Ft. Meyers was smaller than usual, but very intimate. The topic—Woolf and Ecologies – was right down my alley, and I met many new, emerging scholars as well as re-affirming bonds with old friends since we’d all been zooming at least monthly throughout the pandemic.

 

I don’t ever remember feeling more surrounded by love; there was LOTS of crying – some from joy, some from sadness at missing those who we’d lost.

 

One of the people who wasn’t able to be at the Woolf conference was my friend Ellen McLaughlin, and I got a chance to rendezvous with her in Colorado in July. * 

 

 

She’d been invited by the Colorado Shakespeare festival to play King Lear, a role she’d never contemplated doing but was thrilled to take on.  I visited for several delightful days with my cousin Curtis and his family in Denver; then we went to the play and I stayed on to spend a lovely day with Ellen strolling through book stores in Boulder, comparing reading recommendations and de-briefing about her performance, which was, in short, transcendent.  I expected to see lighting strike out of her fingers during the storm scene (the play was outdoors).

 

 

You’d think I’d be tired out after three such intensely emotional trips, but my friend Josh and his partner Annette moved to a wonderful apartment in Cooper Village in New York City in the middle of the summer, and I decided to take advantage of an empty guest room and flew out in August to see if I could re-learn to love the Big Apple.*

 

I was also motivated by the fact the largest Georgia O’Keeffe show in ages was about to close at MOMA. The trip was a complete success.  Josh and I spent an entire day at the O’Keffee show, which gathered full series of early works from all over the world, public and private collections, to give an unprecedented look into her artistic process.* 

 

 For example, I had seen five or six of her Evening Star series, but she painted a total of eight, and the first one – excavated from a private collection – is a realistic version which enables you to see exactly how she abstracted and focused and exploded her subsequent versions. *

 

 

As a thank you for the free lodging, I bought good tickets for all three of us to see Hamilton – another highlight of theatrical experience.  By sheer chance it was the eighth anniversary of the show’s opening on Broadway, and so we were graced by an introductory thank you from the Man himself. Needless to say the cast and audience were wildly energized. I actually wept through much of the first act, moved by the sheer brilliance of its creativity. We wrapped up with a trip to the one Gudrun store in the US, in Soho, where I initiated Annette into the joys of Swedish design.

 

 

 

 

In late October, I flew down to Santa Fe for my annual rendezvous with Angela and her husband Z and my cousin Marie.We had made ambitious plans at Judy’s celebration for a house party, but were foiled by Covid. Both my cousins and Candy B got hit just in time to have to cancel, but Candy sent her daughter Hannah and her very pleasant boyfriend Clayton, and we had a terrific time initiating them into the land of enchantment. 

We were blessed to spend several nights partying with Preston and Deborah Duwaynie, listening to Preston tell stories about Hopi Kachinas and soaking in their Zen sweetness.* 

 

 

Went to a terrific show in Albuquerque comparing O’Keeffe’s Work with that of Henry Moore*

 

In between all these travel adventures, I also managed to accomplish quite a bit of “work”. *

Finally finished “Zinnas,” my 98^th essay on flowers in Virginia Woolf.  The Herbarium is now complete, weighing in somewhere over 170,000 words, about twice the size of the usual academic monograph. https://woolfherbarium.blogspot.com/ I made the decision to just leave it on-line as a public service and have now completed my proposal for a book that examines Woolf’s flowers chronologically – a more conventional and concise approach. I’ve sent it out for comment from friends and plan to submit it in the new year.  I also revised my paper 2022 on Woolf’s association of white roses and mulberries with Shakespeare for the conference anthology and submitted my 2023 paper on Woolf’s critique of the blooming metaphor for publication.  For the 2024 conference (at Fresno) I am contemplating orchids and hermaphroditism in Woolf by way of Darwin.

 

Having made all those trips, I am extra happy to be home for several months.   

I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my supposedly environmentally efficient but frustratingly cranky heating system, so the house is cosy and warm.  I’ve accumulated the right clothes for Seattle rain and so have kept up my good walking routines.  I’ve been reading/listening to a lot of books (I belong to Goodreads and post my reviews regularly on FB).  I began last year by re-reading David Copperfied by Dickens in preparation for Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (which I thought was wonderful), and it set me on a year-long trek through a good deal of Dickens; eventually I devoured eleven novels—only four more to go.  I find Dickens particularly satisfying during these times of outright chicanery, political wheel-spinning, capitalist excess, and unbridled self-interest.  Trump is a character straight out of Dickens.  It gives me some sardonic comfort that human folly has been so much the same for nearly 200 years.  I also read a good deal in history and politics, especially having to do with indigenous Americans.  On my cousin Curtis’s recommendation, I devoured Charles Mann’s 1491 and 1493, about the Americas before and after Columbus; Gynn’s Empire of the Summer Moon and Dunbat-Oritz’s An Indigneous People’s History of the United States taught me more than I really wanted to know about the Comanches and the iniquity of the US Government. Retreating further into the past, I went on a brief tour of classical topics, inspired by Madeline Miller’s enjoyable Circe, and rounded out the year reading a bunch of political commentaries by very smart women: Heather Cox Richardson and Rachel Maddow on the left and Cassidy Hutchinson and Liz Cheney on the right.

 

For the last month or so I’ve thrown productivity rather to the winds and have just been enjoying myself.  I gave a fun Christmas Party with all the usual festive treats plus a couple of successful new recipes using a glorious new Nordic Steel tea cake pan.*

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And I’ve been going to a plethora of movies. But I am now getting ready to settle back down into a more regular schedule and try to write a couple of hours a day, read a couple of hours, and continue walking.  I’d like to go back to the quilt, but both my sewing machines have jammed themselves.  The Woolf conference will be in Norway in three years, hosted by a friend who is a print maker.  She has challenged me to make 98 woodcuts to match the 98 flower essays.  I’ve done about 12 of them,*

but need to finish shredding about five years of financial records before I start littering the TV room with wood chips again.  The solstice has turned and the days are already getting longer,

 

 

so my energy levels are rising and there is more light to do things by. I know, however, that by February it will be hard to fight back against the usual seasonal affective disorder, so I am planning my first excursion to LA, to visit my friend Syd Cross.  I’ll go to Fresno in June, and hope to squeeze in another NYC trip as well. 

Much love and best wishes for a creative new year,

Elisa