[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: October 20, 2008]
Last week, the eery grey mugginess still hung between us and the coming winter like a damp version of the Veil of Maya. It was still almost impossible to wear a suit and tie in the street without melting. Still, we must never give up.
To the Gant store on Fifth Avenue for an exhibition of photos by Scott "The Sartorialist" Schumann, and a silent auction of the same in support of the Children's Defense Fund.
I have displayed a link to The Sartorialist's blog on the front page of the Pink Pig since day one. It's a simple idea - essentially photos of people on the street with brief comments on their individual styles. Originally, the street was usually in Manhattan, but with success has come trips to Paris and Milan. The blog provides a cheering and apparently endless stream of visual vignettes, reassuring the reader that there are still people out there whose sense of fashion exceeds the wearing of a hipster hat and baggy pants with pockets at the knees.
The looks in the Gant show were typically diverse, and cocktail purists will shudder to learn that pumpkin martinis ("pumptinis"?) were served - along with very good tiny truffled cheese toasties.
And then...
To the Grolier Club on East 60th Street, exclusive domain of wealthy bibliophiles, for This Perpetual Fight - a meditation on the lives and passions of the Bloomsbury Group, with particular focus on Virginia Woolf. And rightly so, because, for all the verve and wit of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians - still a very good read for anyone who has at least heard of Flo Nightingale or Gordon of Khartoum - Ms Woolf's once golden circle is fading rapidly in the cultural memory.
Okay, excluse Keynes too, for economists. But George Moore? Presented here as the unlikely mentor of the group, which rather preposterously seized on his very dry Principia Ethica as a manual of modern love and morals, Moore is little read today even in academic philosophical circles. He's an engaging writer, by British philosophical standards - faint praise, I know - and he will remain an important footnote in the history of philosophy as leading the backlash against Hegelian Idealism. But his colleagues Russell and Wittgenstein are infinitely more important: the piece by Moore which should be required reading is his paper "Proof of an External World", but only as a prelude to Über Gewißheit, Wittgenstein's superior response. The Principia itself is almost unreadable, and its central claim that "goodness" is a non-natural, inuitiable property commands little support today.
Her husband Leonard Woolf survives only his autobiography - his topical political writings having long ago lost relevance; and his autobiography is read primarily because he was Virginia's husband. Similarly, Roger Fry and Clive Bell remain of only historical interest as writers on aesthetics.
So, with the possible exception of a startling nude snapshot of Virginia's sister Vanessa, almost everything of interest here relates to the one major artist in the group. Woolf fans will find numerous autograph letters and notes, part of the original manuscript of To the Lighthouse, marked-up typescripts and proofs of her work, as well as first editions, and examples of editions published by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press.
One impression I carried away was of an extremely industrious artist, with a gift for design as well as prose, and I think that's a useful corrective to the predominant idea of Virginia Woolf as a troubled soul.
At the Grolier Club through November 22.
