A zero-to-sixty obsession with Katherine Angel this past week, having never encountered her work before. Just finished Unmastered and a cursory Google reveals that of course it was Olivia Laing who reviewed it in The Guardian when it came out, referring to it as “a giddily joyful book, thicketed with exclamation marks.”
Thicketed!!
I love her. I love that they are peers. I love this game of finding out that people I admire know other people I admire. (See also: endnotes in Unmastered referencing Hélène Cixous.)
This is probably the sign I’ve been waiting for, wondering what book to take when I flee to an island with no internet or cell reception next week. I’ve had Laing’s Everybody, A Book About Freedom sitting on my shelf since it came out, but for some ungodly reason haven’t cracked it. Everything else on my list is a library eBook accessible only via an iPad app and it feels deeply wrong to be reading on an iPad in the wilderness. BRING ME PAPER.
![A complex mind map connecting various names and creative works of nine people, mostly female writers.
The following themes are positioned throughout the page like nodes:
[See Me / Don’t See Me]
[Gardening]
[Queer Relationships]
[Utopia]
[Solitude]
[Fluidity]
[Rhythm]
Ursula K. (Kroeber) Le Guin 1929 - 2018
“The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" 1988 in Women of Vision
2010: Began [Age 81] Blogging
No Time to Spare (pub. 2017, HMH)
A left-handed Commencement Address, 1983 Mills College
The Wave in The Mind (pub. 2004, Shambhala)
Epigraph: “As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it, and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year.” (Woolf to Sackville-West, 1926).
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
1931 Professions For Women
“It is a very strange thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story. It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories."
"The Angel in the house"
Orlando
The Waves
1929 Room of One’s Own
Met Sackville-West in 1922
Gail Godwin (b. 1937)
1977 (NYT) The Watcher at the Gates
12 Short Stories and Their Making (2005, Persea)
Appeared with Le Guin in same publication
“A story larger than my own” Working On An Ending, 2014
"Now I do a lot of lying around. I finally I have accepted that my supine dithering is fertile and far from a waste of time"
Harold Nicolson (1886-1968) <-> Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962)
Nigel Nicolson (1917-2004)
Portrait Of A Marriage (1973)
Not to be confused with
Nigel Nicholson -> [Classics] [Reed College]
"The Bright Chimera" R. Rawdon Wilson
Olivia Laing (1977-)
Married Ian Patterson (1948) in 2018 [29 years apart!]
May Sarton (1912-1995)
(At Yaddo) "I hated all the shop talk. I'd rather see people who are carpenters, who are sailors or who work in healthy departments, because then I feel I am learning something about life."
“There is much less anguish and self-doubt. You are much more able to function freely, spontaneously, as yourself."
met Woolf in 1937](https://lucybellwood.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_5457-scaled.jpeg)
