VSC 2

January 5, 2010

I was trying to come up with a good title, and was going to call this 2nd night, etc, but it’s really the 3rd night here of the 2nd full day. So, VSC 2. I think i’ll probably start just numbering the posts. I don’t think i’ll be able to do them every night once I really start getting into the swing of things.

Which I sort of am. But I’m imagining that by tomorrow or Thurs., i’m really going to feel more at ease.

Meeting so many wonderful people. So many names; I used to be so good with names. I mean, I could (and still can) tell you that Eve Arden played a small role as Patsy Dixon in the 1941 movie “Ziegfield Girl,” or that Gloria Grahame was the supporting actress Oscar winner in 1952 for “The Bad and the Beautiful,” or that the little boy in “The Poseidon Adventure” was played by Eric Shea so why is it i’m not able to remember the names of people I meet anymore?

Anyway, today met more– artists, photographers, writers, from all over. One woman, a painter from Korea, told me she had never been to the USA before this trip.

The woman who has the studio next to mine, Louisa, works with archival letters/documents (I believe she got her degree in this). We talked about Words in Air the book of letters from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, and she told me she brought with her the book, The Letters of Robert Lowell edited by Saskia Hamilton, then after dinner (Tuna steaks, brussell sprouts, potatoes) when we all returned to our studios she lent it to me. Dinner is lively but noisy and she was telling me about the first paragraph of the book but I couldn’t hear very well. So of course after she gave it to me I looked at the first paragraph.

It’s the first paragraph of a letter that was written in 1936 when Lowell was at Harvard “College” as it says. The letter is to Ezra Pound and here’s the first AND second paragraph:

A-12 Wigglesworth Hall

Harvard College

Cambridge, Mass.

May 2, [1936]

Dear Mr. Pound:

I have been wanting to write you for several months, but haven’t quite had the courage to until now. You will probably think that I am very impudent but I want to come to Italy and work under you and forge my way into reality. I have no right [to] ask this of you, yet let me try to describe myself and explain my desire.

I am 19, a freshman at Harvard, and some relation, I don’t know  what, to Amy Lowell. All my life I have been eccentric  according to normal standards. I had violent passions for various pursuits usually taking the form of collecting: tools; names of birds; marbles; catching butterflies, snakes, turtles etc; buying books on Napoleon. None of this led anywhere, I was more interested in collecting large numbers than in developing them. I caught over thirty turtles and put them in a well where they died of insufficient feeding. I won more agates and marbles than anyone in school, and gradually amassed hundreds of soldiers; finally leaving them to clutter up unreachable shelves. I could identify scores of birds, at first on charts, later it led me into nature. Sometime overcome by the collecting mania I would steal things I wanted. At 14 I went to St. Mark’s and never mixed well or really lived in the usual realities. At one point I became very strong but never got very far in athletics because I didn’t think in terms of the necessary technique. I was proud, somewhat sullen and violent.

Can you imagine? He wrote this to Ezra Pound! It’s like me, writing to, oh, I don’t know, Jeffrey Eugenides and saying, can I hang out with you?

I do love his descriptions of his violent passions for various pursuits. Rather endearing.

Ok, tonight I’m actually going to hang out with some of the writers and other artists at a local pub.

Today’s photo is of one of the Painting Studios here at VSC called The Church, because, well, it is a converted church.