Daily Rituals: Women at Work - Hardcover

Currey, Mason

 
9781524732950: Daily Rituals: Women at Work
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1524732958 ISBN 13: 9781524732950
Verlag: Knopf, 2019

Inhaltsangabe


More of Mason Currey's irresistible Daily Rituals, this time exploring the daily obstacles and rituals of women who are artists--painters, composers, sculptors, scientists, filmmakers, and performers. We see how these brilliant minds get to work, the choices they have to make: rebuffing convention, stealing (or secreting away) time from the pull of husbands, wives, children, obligations, in order to create their creations.


From those who are the masters of their craft (Eudora Welty, Lynn Fontanne, Penelope Fitzgerald, Marie Curie) to those who were recognized in a burst of acclaim (Lorraine Hansberry, Zadie Smith) . . . from Clara Schumann and Shirley Jackson, carving out small amounts of time from family life, to Isadora Duncan and Agnes Martin, rejecting the demands of domesticity, Currey shows us the large and small (and abiding) choices these women made--and continue to make--for their art: Isak Dinesen, "I promised the Devil my soul, and in return he promised me that everything I was going to experience would be turned into tales," Dinesen subsisting on oysters and Champagne but also amphetamines, which gave her the overdrive she required . . . And the rituals (daily and otherwise) that guide these artists: Isabel Allende starting a new book only on January 8th . . . Hilary Mantel taking a shower to combat writers' block ("I am the cleanest person I know") . . . Tallulah Bankhead coping with her three phobias (hating to go to bed, hating to get up, and hating to be alone), which, could she "mute them," would make her life "as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water" . . . Lillian Hellman chain-smoking three packs of cigarettes and drinking twenty cups of coffee a day--and, after milking the cow and cleaning the barn, writing out of "elation, depression, hope" ("That is the exact order. Hope sets in toward nightfall. That's when you tell yourself that you're going to be better the next time, so help you God.") . . . Diane Arbus, doing what "gnaws at" her . . . Colette, locked in her writing room by her first husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars (nom de plume: Willy) and not being "let out" until completing her daily quota (she wrote five pages a day and threw away the fifth). Colette later said, "A prison is one of the best workshops" . . . Jessye Norman disdaining routines or rituals of any kind, seeing them as "a crutch" . . . and Octavia Butler writing every day no matter what ("screw inspiration").
     Germaine de Staël . . . Elizabeth Barrett Browning . . . George Eliot . . . Edith Wharton . . . Virginia Woolf . . . Edna Ferber . . . Doris Lessing . . . Pina Bausch . . . Frida Kahlo . . . Marguerite Duras . . . Helen Frankenthaler . . . Patti Smith, and 131 more--on their daily routines, superstitions, fears, eating (and drinking) habits, and other finely (and not so finely) calibrated rituals that help summon up willpower and self-discipline, keeping themselves afloat with optimism and fight, as they create (and avoid creating) their creations.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MASON CURREY was born in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Currey's first book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2013. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Coco Chanel (1883–1971)
Chanel was born in poverty, raised in an orphanage, and received little formal education. Despite this disadvantaged start, she was a household name by age 30 and a multimillionaire by 40. Not surprisingly, work was her life, and the only truly reliable partner she ever found. Her unceasing dedication to the Chanel brand made her a formidable businesswoman—and, for her workers, a demanding and even tormenting employer. As the biographer Rhonda K. Garelick has written, Chanel’s staff at her Paris headquarters was kept in a constant state of “watchful anxiety.” Here, Garelick describes Chanel’s work routine in Paris:
 
While much of the staff reported to work at about eight thirty in the morning, Coco had never been an early riser and tended to show up hours later. When she did arrive, usually around one p.m., she was attended by a degree of fanfare befitting a five-star general or royal monarch. The moment Coco left her apartment across the street at the Ritz, hotel staff members would immediately telephone the operator at rue Cambon to alert her. A buzzer would sound throughout the studio to spread the word: Mademoiselle was on her way. Someone downstairs would spray a mist of Chanel No. 5 near the entrance, so that Coco could walk through a cloud of her own signature scent. . . . “When she entered the studio, everyone stood up,” recalled the photographer Willy Rizzo, “like children at school.” Then, the staff would form a line, hands at their sides, “as in the army,” employee Marie-Hélène Marouzé put it.
 
Once upstairs in her office, Chanel would set immediately to work on her designs. She refused to use patterns or wooden mannequins, and so would spend long hours draping and pinning fabrics on models, smoking one cigarette after another, rarely or never sitting down. According to Garelick, “She could remain standing for nine hours at a time, without pausing for a meal or a glass of water—without even a bathroom break, apparently.” She stayed until late in the evening, compelling her employees to hang around with her even after work had ceased, pouring wine and talking nonstop, avoiding for as long as possible the return to her room at the Ritz and to the boredom and loneliness that awaited her there. She worked six days a week, and dreaded Sundays and holidays. As she told one confidant, “That word, ‘vacation,’ makes me sweat.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937)
In her autobiography, A Backward Glance, Wharton described her life as divided into two “equally real yet totally unrelated worlds,” which went along “side by side, equally absorbing, but wholly isolated from each other.” On the one hand, there was the real world of her marriage, her home, her friends and neighbors; on the other, the fictional world she created each morning in bed, writing longhand on sheets of paper that she dropped onto the floor for her secretary to retrieve and type up. Wharton always worked in the morning, and houseguests who stayed at the Mount—the 113-acre estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Wharton penned several novels, including The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome—were expected to entertain themselves until 11:00 a.m. or noon, when their hostess would emerge from her private quarters, ready to go for a walk or work in the garden. If guests needed to speak to the author during the morning, however, Wharton was willing to receive them in her bedroom. The historian Gaillard Lapsley was one such visitor, and he later wrote a memorable description of Wharton in bed, “flanked by night tables charged with telephone, travelling clock, reading light.” She would be wearing, he continued,
 
a thin silk sacque with loose sleeves, open at the neck and trimmed with lace and on her head a cap of the same material also trimmed with lace which fell about her brow and ears like the edging of a lamp shade . . . Edith’s mask stood out sculpturally beneath it. She would have her writing-board perilously furnished with an inkpot on her knee, the dog of the moment under her left elbow on the bed strewn with correspondence, newspapers and books.
 
The “dog of the moment” referred to one of the numerous canines Wharton owned over her lifetime, which included Spitzes, Papillons, a poodle, a Pekinese, and a pair of long-haired Chihuahuas named Mimi and Miza. Dogs had been a tremendous comfort to Wharton since her earliest childhood; and when, in her last years, Wharton made a list of the “ruling passions” of her life, dogs ranked second only to “Justice and Order,” and were followed by books, flowers, architecture, travel, and “a good joke.”
Evenings at the Mount, Wharton would read to her guests from the novel she was writing, or from the work of one of her favorite authors. Although she was happy to share her writing in progress, she never had much to say about the writing process itself. A guest at The Mount recalled that “very little allusion was made to it, and none at all to the infinite pains that she put into her work or her inexhaustible patience in searching for the material necessary to perfect it.” One unspoken requirement was that she follow the same schedule each day, with as little variation as possible. As Wharton wrote in a 1905 letter, “The slightest interruption in the household routine completely de-rails me.”

Zadie Smith (b. 1975)
In interviews over the years, the London-born novelist has said that she doesn’t write every day—and although she sometimes wishes she had that compulsion, Smith also recognizes the value of writing only when it feels necessary to her. “I think you need to feel an urgency about the acts,” she said in 2009, “otherwise when you read it, you feel no urgency either. So, I don’t write unless I really feel I need to.” Even when Smith does feel that urgency, she writes “very slowly,” she said in 2012, “and I rewrite continually, every day, over and over and over. . . . Every day, I read from the beginning up to where I’d got to and just edit it all, and then I move on. It’s incredibly laborious, and toward the end of a long novel it’s intolerable actually.”
Smith has also been vocal about the difficulty of writing in a world of infinite digital distractions, and in the acknowledgements section of her 2012 novel NW she thanked two pieces of Internet-blocking software, called Freedom and Self Control, for “creating the time.” She does not use social media, and as of late 2016 she did not own a smartphone, and had no plans to acquire one. “I still have a laptop, it’s not like I’m a nun,” Smith said, “I just don’t check my email every moment of the day in my pocket.”
 
Hilary Mantel (b. 1952)
The Booker­-prize winning author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, as well as several other novels and a memoir, Mantel finds fiction-writing an all-consuming and thoroughly unpredictable activity. “Some writers claim to extrude a book at an even rate like toothpaste from a tube, or to build a story like a wall, so many feet per day,” the English author wrote in 2016.
 
They sit at their desk and knock off their word quota, then frisk into their leisured evening, preening themselves.
            This is so alien to me that it might be another trade entirely. Writing lectures or reviews—any kind of non-fiction—seems to me a job like any job: allocate your time, marshall...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1524732958
ISBN 13 
9781524732950
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
416
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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