[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Is it birthday season where you live?

Lord, we have a passle of them going on right now. August is supposed to be the most popular month for U.S. births, but the bleed into September is more Romanov than slight. We’ve had four in the last two weeks with three on deck and that’s just in town immediate family that, though Catholic, doesn’t have a single nuclear branch that wouldn’t fit in an modest Protestant preferred sedan.

Statistics say your family clustered as much as ours, so Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Skip out of work early and enjoy the afternoon/kick off the weekend early. It’s probably your birthday. Treat yourself. If it’s not yours, take a moment to wrap a present and sharpen a suddenly dulling cake knife. Maybe try to figure out why grade school kids shout “Eat more chicken” followed by an ever changing litany after the birthday song. (How do they know each week’s new variation? Those who aren’t parents of small children will have no idea what I’m talking about but kids add to the birthday song – my nephews from Albuquerque in sync with the kids here in Birmingham because they somehow know even though it changes from week to week, water park pavilion to pizzeria long table. They’re like druids receiving unwritten arcana.)

First, a little verse.

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I thought about doing this week’s POETS Day about one of the Bloomsbury Group because I have a knee jerk dislike of them and I was feeling snarky. They were mean cool-kid gatekeepers. Nepotism involves relatives. Cronyism describes promoting friends. For the Bloomsbury clique I need a new word; one for promoting the person you’re having an affair with to make your spouse take notice and prove how cosmopolitan he or she is by sleeping with that person too, before, as a couple, dropping the promotee and pretending neither ever had anything to do with that middle class climber. I feel like the word should also convey mocking laughter in the direction of Roy Campbell. Nasty little hive of lit-rury hornets.

Wikipedia has a decent list of Bloomsbury members, satellites, and associates. You have to do a little digging to find out who was discarded for getting too clingy, but it’s a handy reference. What caught me was the few listed after the sentence “writers who were at some time close friends of Virginia Woolf, but who were distinctly not ‘Bloomsbury’.” T.S. Eliot was mentioned. Good man. As was the Campbell wife seducing Vita Sackville-West. Good story. I’d never heard of Katherine Mansfield, but she was listed among people of interest with the good sense to be distinctly not “Bloomsbury,” even if Vita was at the very least more than Bloomsbury-adjacent until she became a middle class climber. That’s despite Vita’s being a brilliant gardener and real-deal inbred baroness.