Blogging Woolf

My goal is to post a compilation of Woolf sightings every week. But the weeks keep getting longer. This time there are 10 days between the last compilation and this one. Can this be attributed to summer time? I think so.

Scroll down to sighting #16 to read a brief about this year’s 20th Charleston Festival, which runs through May 29.

1. Facets of Virginia Woolf, The Hindu
   Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), a widely acclaimed novelist, short-story writer, essayist, feminist, critic and publisher, needs little introduction to students of world literature. Her attitude towards life and literary vision were …
2. To The River, Financial Times
   Although Virginia Woolf – the book’s guiding spirit – drowned here, Laing acknowledges that “such waterways are 10 a penny in these islands”. That doesn’t stop this local river providing an exemplar for all confluences that traverse the British Isles. …
3. The top 10 books of all time, MinnPost.com
   Virginia Woolf called this Victorian masterpiece and detailed portrait of provincial English life “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Martin Amisand Julian Barnes have both cited it as perhaps the greatest novel in the English …
4. Open thread: What are the great unread books?, The Guardian (blog)
   (“I don’t like it” is not a substantial criticism, but it is a good reason not to read it–a better reason than Virginia Woolf’s too-oft-quoted snobby criticism.) The same is true of Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest and The Recognitions, …
5. ‘Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man’ by James Joyce, TheCelebrityCafe.com
   Like his contemporaries, Virginia Woolf and Henry James, Joyce was committed to portraying the human mind as it is, and in real life, our thought process is often splintered and disjointed, not clean and straightforward the way it’s presented in …
6. Summer reading: The big list, Los Angeles Times
   Also in Sunday’s pages, book critic David L. Ulin remembers his summer reading: Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut. And Jessica Gelt weighs in with a summer reading memory of her own: Virginia Woolf.
7. Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in London cleaned, Zee News
   Tavistock Square’s other features include a bust of writer Virginia Woolf and a cherry tree commemorating the victims of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. …
8. NY Public Library turns 100, not just with books, Wall Street Journal
   Five hundred people spent the night at the library using a smartphone app to search for artifacts such as the cane found after Virginia Woolf drowned herself and the taxidermied paw of Charles Dickens’ cat. For the centennial gala Monday, LeClerc said …
9. House of Exile by Evelyn Juers – review, The Guardian
   One group of contemporaries in particular – James Joyce, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf – suffered a unique apprehension of their generation’s fate. This sombre tableau is the subject of Evelyn Juers’s enthralling book. by Evelyn Juers Juers, ..
10. Book review: To the River: A Journey beneath the Surface, Scotsman
    But the Ouse will forever be bound up with Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in its murky waters one cold March day 70 years ago. Laing’s passages about the beauty and precision of Woolf’s prose are echoed in her own use of language for the landscape …
11. Wish You Were Here: England on Sea by Travis Elborough – review, The Guardian …
    sceptical to have time to dwell on the misty light, the fading ornamental balustrades, the trim white fences orthe sopping esplanades which have been lyrically evoked by artists such as Virginia Woolf, WH Auden, John Piper and Benjamin Britten. ..
12. Tavistock Square reopened after £280000 restoration, BBC News
    … which funded the cleaning of Gandhi’s stature, also attended. Tavistock Square’s other features include a memorial to conscientious objectors, a bust of Virginia Woolf and a cherry tree commemorating the victims of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Read War and Peace at Tavistock Square.
13. Nostalgia’s vortex: Why you should just go to your high school reunion, National Post (blog)
    How it was that the potential for friendship had eluded us by virtue of … what? If we really were unchanged, then it was only the empty rivalries of youth that had been the obstacle. Virginia Woolf said that we trade youth for a sense of fellowship.
14. The girl who cried Woolf, Irish Times
    Rather than stay at home and despair, she set off to a river best known for its connection with Virginia Woolf’s suicide in 1941. The outcome is a quasi-confessional meditation-cum-travelogue of immense charm, personal observation and historical fact. …
15. Exiles from a devastated world, Irish Times
    At one point Nelly finds a parcel containing a new slip that Virginia Woolf had bought in Wertheim department store and lost on the street in the snow while on a visit to Berlin. In a cafe Virginia asks the waiter to bring her a Schwarzwälder tart like ..
16. Top writers at literary festival, West Sussex Today
    Charleston was the meeting place of a remarkable group of progressive individuals, including Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey and TS Eliot. Spokeswoman Philippa Rowson said: “The Festival was founded in 1989 …
17. What if it were ‘Mr. Dalloway’? Book covers revisited, Los Angeles Times
    How would Virginia Woolf’s feminist classic “Mrs. Dalloway” change if it were “Mr. Dalloway”? Would it be all about going to work on the day of a party? Jean Cocteau’s “La Belle et La Bête” (“Beauty and the Beast”) is transformed to “Le Beau et La Bête …
18. V V: Michel Montaigne: In defence of the human, Business Standard
    His attractions have led writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf and Andre Gide — Frampton’s Cat is a popular introduction to Montaigne’s Essays that should get the serious common reader to look into them. …
19. 10 of the best books set in London, The Guardian
    Mrs Dalloway lives in Westminster and Virginia Woolf brilliantly describes a day in her London life, stepping out on a glorious summer morning, Big Ben striking in the background. “For having lived in Westminster — how many years now? over twenty, …
20. A deep sense of kinship with Virginia Woolf, Los Angeles Times
    The book was “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf. The extended essay is based on a series of lectures on women and fiction that Woolf gave in 1928 at two women’s colleges at Cambridge University. In examining the lives of female writers, …
21. Benjamin Rivers’ Sense of Snow, Torontoist
    In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf describes a woman’s entire life through the course of events that occur in a single day. In a similar way, Benjamin Rivers’ comic Snow captures a sense of Toronto focusing only on a single street: Queen Street West. …
    

    The cover of Benjamin Rivers' Snow

22. Thrifty Flair: Books create character and charm, yourhome.ca
    It’s easier to find what you want because Sylvia Plath actually comes before Virginia Woolf on the shelves, but if I really want something and can’t find it locally, I’ll purchase it online from an independent store. Even when you factor in the cost of …
23. Jason Reed/Reuters, The Atlantic
    Then, as an antidote to law school, I read through Virginia Woolf and George Eliot, with a sense of revelation. But Roth’s voice remains more resonant for me, a reminder that neither ideology nor the bounds of sex and gender need limit empathy, …
24. Sarah Winman – in her own words, New Zealand Herald
    Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway. Ian McEwan: Atonement. Elizabeth Bowan: Death of the Heart. Graham Greene: Brighton Rock. Andrea Levy: Small Island… I could go on! When’s your second international bestseller due? (No pressure…) Luckily, I don’t have…
25. MSO Concludes Season with Afternoon of Favorites, Atlantic Highlands Herald
    His song cycle from the Diary of Virginia Woolf earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975. Valentino Dances is an orchestral suite from his 1994 opera The Dream of Valentino, about movie star Rudolph Valentino. The suite features accordion and …
26. VIEWS: A new future for LGBT books, Windy City Times
    I wrote Winter Eyes because back in college, I was profoundly inspired by a scene in Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out. Someone asks a would-be writer kind of books she wants to write and she says, “I want to write a novel about Silence …
27. Oslo, August 31st, Variety
    After an unsuccessful morning of the Virginia Woolf variety, Anders travels to Oslo for a job interview at a magazine. Arriving early, he has time to visit some acquaintances, starting with his best friend, Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner), with whom he used …
28. Reblogged from Samuel Pepys by The Morgan: What happened to the diary?, Capital New York
    Then there are those who publish their own diaries, like the authors William Burroughs and Anaïs Nin, and those whose diaries were published posthumously, like Virginia Woolf and Tennessee Williams, illuminating their writing processes as well as their ..
29. Tough Love: Things No One Is Brave Enough to Tell Self-Published Authors, Huffington Post (blog)
    Even though Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf self-published, the stigma didn’t really lift until very recently. Suddenly self-publishing is no longer just a fall-back position. It can be a first choice. Just be sure you choose to do it for the right …
30. Oh, the Stuff Those Lions Guard, New York Times
    Also on view are the walking stick of Virginia Woolf’s that her husband found floating in a river four days after she drowned herself and Beethoven’s sketches as he worked on the Scherzo of the “Archduke” Trio. But what ties the library’s research …
31. Natalee Caple: Resisting borders, National Post (blog)
    Virginia Woolf famously wrote about how writing and freedom were linked for women because of the dematerial nature of the text. In contrast to painting, sculpting, or (in the present day) filmmaking all the materials necessary to write are cheap and …
32. Canton resident a voice for young writers, Foothills Media Group
    Crowe enjoys reading poetry by Barbara Ras, Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forche and WS Merwin, and prose by Edwidge Danticat, Charlotte Bacon, Virginia Woolf and Lydia Davis. Crowe began the mastery of her writing at the Greater Hartford Academy for the…
33. Student thrives in Merced College environment with 4.0 grade point average, Merced Sun-Star
    She once liked reading books by John Steinbeck, and then her affection turned to novelists Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway. “Fictional characters are more real than real people,” she said, laughing, outside the Merced College Library one recent ..
34. The astronaut who learned how to see, Christian Science Monitor (blog)
    When I visited him at his home in Houston in 1996, he showed me shelves filled with well-worn, annotated books ranging from St. Augustine to Virginia Woolf. When he sat in an evening literature class at the University of Houston, he kept three ...
35. Wesley Yang Confuses Asian Masculinity With White Male Supremacy, ColorLines magazine
    We need a Virginia Woolf for all the Asian ladies. And I don’t mean some “let’s all get together and hug Joy Luck Club” kinda of way. Asian women get the double whammy-Asian Female. Bamboo ceiling, my a**. Asian females get the lead ceiling. …
36. Agincourt Will Be Directed By Michael Mann, FilmShaft.com
    The film is being developed independently by Luc Roeg, the producer behind the frankly beautiful Virginia Woolf adaptation ‘Othello’, and the script is being penned by Benjamin Ross. If Roeg is smart he’ll bring Cornwell onboard as a consultant for the …
37. Mental illness, privilege and the myth of ‘success’, The Scavenger
    Meanwhile, the mystifying thoughts, habits and behaviours of many creative types who are now deceased (everyone from Winston Churchill to Virginia Woolf) is often ascribed to the work of bipolar disorder in post-mortem diagnoses. …
38. Library speed-dating event unfolds slowly, TheDay.com
    Caitlin brought “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf, a book she admitted she disliked when she read it in high school. She had borrowed it from the library to see if an older, more mature version of herself might like it better. If you ask me, …

Read Full Post »