R- did a presentation on bloomsbury for class this week – sent around some big photos of the house at charleston, I think.  Here’s a group of people joined together by art, desire and political beliefs – by aesthetics and life in those protective niches, those marginal spaces where the Different Ones can thrive.

It was a memory, of the house where we lived so many years ago. When we painted everything, when we made everything beautiful. When our own art mixed with that of the “greats” and we spent our days surviving and our nights drinking, our paintings and poetry reaching up into the sky in a haze of smoke.

In these majestic enclaves all is normalized. We wouldn’t think twice at extravagance and decoration; we ate bread straight from the oven and wore faux diamonds. The beauty flowed from our fingers into typewriter keys and down paintbrushes, shaping a dream. We were going to make a difference. The world would become more truthful because of us. At least, our world was truthful.

We never accepted the world we were given. We transformed it. We made it our own. Had I known then about bloomsbury, I would have known what ghosts were with us.

I’m writing a paper on Edith Wharton and came across the above phrase which I think is fascinating. It appears in the context of Wharton’s criticism of women getting university degrees at the expense of expertise in this, the complex art of civilized living.

Now we look at the Real Simple and the Martha Stewart and the endless run of how-to-live well and right magazines and somehow, there is this aesthetic domestic life all neatly packaged to appeal to the working professional woman with a university degree. This complex art has become increasingly complex and prescribed – every aspect of domestic life is quantified and qualified until we start to believe that operating without an ideology is dangerous… operating without a plan is just plain stupid.

How to live in a civilized manner? Is it aesthetics, the quality of workmanship and the visual effect of the objects you are surrounded by? Is it the political or moral truth of your life, that you harm none with your actions or live by an agreed-upon code? When we say “Civilized” we seem to mean a manner or way of treating our cohabitants, or we mean a lifestyle associated with another social class… I’d like to add to this that Civilized also mean exercising the electoral power and engaging in the discourse of citizenry.

I’m trying to prepare a presentation on ETA Hoffmann’s The Sandman for tomorrow night’s class. There’s a lot there. In the story, there’s some major themes to be sure… and i’m having a lot of trouble figuring out how to narrow my presentation so it is remotely meaningful and actually sparks discussion instead of leading to stunned silence as usual. So in the interests of Narrowing, I’m putting some of the particularly toothsome thoughts down here instead of in my presentation.

1. Free Will – who has free will in the story? Nathanael feels he is controlled by Coppola and has no free will at all. He accuses Klara of having none herself because she refuses to subordinate her rationality to passionate art.  By virtue of being an object, Olympia has no free will.  The father is controlled by Coppelius and there is another man referred to who had made the eyes.   On mechanism – Nathanael is mechanical and has machine-like predictability in his triggers and reactions. Is he a machine? Is the reader a machine?

2. The magic spyglass that turns machine into human and vice versa, an addictive technology able to transform the

3. Klara’s domestic future.

4. The family dynamic, the home invasion, the mental invasion. Coppelius invaded the home and the mind.

more to come…