Blogging Woolf

About 11 days of Woolf sightings here. Scroll down to number 13 for an item that mentions the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf.

1. Frank Duff challenged attitudes to unmarried mothers, Irish Times
   VIRGINIA WOOLF observed that a painter could penetrate to the character of a person without the necessity of writing 300-400 pages. If I could paint, I asked myself, how would I paint Frank Duff? Of all the images which I retain of him, that which made …
2. Fighting the Good Fight for Art, New York Times
   “A woman,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1928, “must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. …
3. A Woman’s Tale Of Survival In The Surf Of Death And Taxes, Huffington Post
   If I chose a few contemporary autobiographies of women to send back to the beloved 19th and 20th century suspects — Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and George Eliot — Joynt’s book might make the cut. A literary masterpiece? …
4. Ayn Rand Style Parenting, dagblog (blog)
   Virginia Woolf was mentally ill and the Brontes died prematurely. My mother had me – a ‘delightful distraction’, but a calamity nevertheless. I found that a huge shock and very upsetting. According to the strident feminist ideology of the Seventies, …
5. Fiction Addiction, New Zealand Herald
   Also Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Don DeLillo’s The Body Artist, Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, and any of the Paris Review interviews with writers. When I’m working on a novel I don’t read much fiction. I tend to read letters or journals of …
6. The BBC missed out on some fishy tales in the Royal Ascot nosebag, The Guardian (blog)
   Also, DC – as I am sure he will not mind me calling him – is the grandson of Sir George Duckworth, a half-brother of the painter Vanessa Bell and writer Virginia Woolf, who charged George with molesting her. There is one to throw in during a lull in . . . 
7. Things My Father Taught Me, Patch.com
   That Christmas, he gave me a notebook inscribed with verses from Robert Burns, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf – each accompanied with his hand-painted illustrations. But I have always carried with me each lesson I learned on the water.
8. Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree?, Salon
   These were people who’d published dissertations on Freud, written definitive volumes on Virginia Woolf. The language of real-world career preparation was a language they simply didn’t speak. And if they did say anything at all, it was usually a …
9. The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, Tate Britain, London, The Independent
   So awestruck had Virginia Woolf been by this that she wrote, “On or about December 1910 human character changed.” What she meant was British character. By 1910, Post-Impressionism would have been old hat in Paris, where Analytic Cubism was just kicking …
10. NXNE Preview: Freedom or Death, blogTO (blog)
    Atmospherics seem important in many of the songs on this record, like the instrumental or sound bites in “Virginia Woolf” or the near-seven-minute silence in the acoustic version of “This Crowded Room”. What other art forms influence EGO? … Read Indie Woolf song debuts.
    
11. To the River by Olivia Laing – review, The Guardian
    The Sussex Ouse draws Laing because it is the river by which Virginia Woolf lived and in which she drowned herself in 1941. The book’s project is to use the river to enter the stream of Woolf’s consciousness and to follow in her literary wake. …
    
12. Escaping Hitler, Cracking Up in LA, New York Times
    Juers went to England for a Ph.D. from the University of Essex — if I had to guess, I would say on Virginia Woolf. This would explain countless passages based on the lives, or quoted from the writings, of Woolf and her husband, Leonard. …
13. Morris People in Business, Dailyrecord.com
    MARY THOMPSON attended and presented a paper at the 21st annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at the University of Glasgow’s School of Critical Studies. Musician and film director ROB ZOMBIE has directed at TV ad launching new …
14. Lit Lawyers: The Fake-Memoir Business, New Yorker (blog)
    I’m reluctant to bring her into this swamp, but Virginia Woolf writes well about the slipperiness of personal history in the unpublished meta-memoir “A Sketch of the Past”: These then are some of my first memories. But of course as an account of my …
15. Rocker’s art, BBC News
    A number of pictures feature Monk’s House, the Sussex retreat of novelist Virginia Woolf. Captured with her vintage Polaroid camera, Smith’s photographs also commemorate the friends and family she draws inspiration from. …
16. Margaret Atwood to be honoured by NUI Galway, Irish Times
    … is the topic to be discussed by Susan Osborn, who edited Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives, published by Cork University Press in 2009, and is working on a book about Bowen’s relationship with the Bloomsbury set of Virginia Woolf et al. …
17. Is it a novel, a TV series, or a “polyphonic narrative”? Buffalo News (blog)
    As Egan has made a point of saying, readers who credit her with “reinventing the novel” should take a serious second look at the truly radical narrative innovations of Cervantes, Sterne, Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf. …
18. BASED IN BERLIN, Artnet
    Swedish artist Kasja Dahlberg checked out all the copies she could find in Berlin libraries of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and collected all the notes that readers had written in the margins into a single copy, which is here reproduced …
19. Chapter and verse, Ha’aretz
    In the 1920s, Virginia Woolf wrote articles in which she claimed that the world was going through profound changes and concluded that some literature is innovative and relevant, and provoking existential questions, while other literature is simply no …
20. Album Review: Marissa Nadler – Marissa Nadler, Consequence of Sound
    Nadler’s work has mainly surveyed struggle, sometimes her own, as on “Diamond Heart”, or others, like Virginia Woolf’s on “Virginia”, and her very unique voice is well-placed to search out the nooks of the shattered human spirit. …
21. Kindle vs. books: The dead trees society, Los Angeles Times
    I’ve seen them in an over-the-shoulder sort of way — the sleek tablet design, the portraits of Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf that materialize on the screen like the work of a divinely inspired Etch A Sketch. Part of the reason I’m wary of picking one …
22. One Minute With: Sarah Gristwood, historian & novelist, The Independent
    Virginia Woolf, for her combination of lushness and discipline, and bravery. It’s like watching a very skillful rider handling the reins of a difficult horse. Our 17th-century house has gone through many incarnations… from estate cottage to village …
23. Bebe Neuwirth, Dianne Wiest, et al. Set for Classic Stage Company’s 2011-12 Season, Broadway World
    The 2010-2011 Season also marked CSC’s first collaboration with nationally-acclaimed playwright Sarah Ruhl, with the New York premiere of her adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. 2011 also ushered in the first professional production of the recently …
24. Restoration work needed to save Knole’s priceless treasures, Kent News
    In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which is set at Knole, the home of the writer’s lover and friend Vita Sackville-West on whom the novel is partially based, the winds blow through the corridors. A total of £15 million needs to be raised for the work, …
25. On the Desire to Be Well-Read: A Review of The Pleasures of Reading in an Age …, The Millions
    But The Pleasures of Reading also features numerous casual allusions to serious, difficult authors ranging from Virginia Woolf toLeo Tolstoy to David Foster Wallace, and thus demonstrates a kind of cultural mastery that allows Jacobs to get away with …
26. A Monthly Cycle Ladies Will Actually Welcome: Critical Lass, Chicagoist
    Lady bikers of Chicago are finally getting–to heavily paraphrase Virginia Woolf–“a ride of one’s own” in the new women and trans-only monthly bike ride, Chicago Critical Lass. Taking a page from the worldwide gathering of bikes-cum-political …
27. The Hackneyed Bollywood Trail, Businessworld
    In A Room Of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf memorably mentioned two prerequisites to being a writer-a room of one’s own (privacy and creative liberty) and money (financial freedom). One is not sure if Kanika Dhillon had either or both or …
28. Tate Britain presents Vorticism, AMA (press release)
    The movement was created in reaction to Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops, a design enterprise that created visual representations of the ideas of theBloomsbury group, which included the author Virginia Woolf. Vorticism was rooted in Cubism, …
29. The enlightened library, Ha’aretz
    “Secondhand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather,” Virginia Woolf once said. The library was opened in 2009, and has since revolutionized the park, formerly colonized by drug addicts, …
30. Haentjens turns sure hand to anglophone Elle, CBC.ca
    Since 1997, she has also been director of her own company Sibyllines, which presented a series of portraits of women writers such as Sylvia Plath (La Cloche de verre), Ingeborg Bachmann (Malina) and Virginia Woolf (Vivre).
31. Touching Based, Artforum
    … 8 films and sharp color prints of recent sculptural works are gorgeous and moving, as are Keren Cytter’s Avalanche films; Kajsa Dahlberg’s Reclam-printed collation of hand-notated copies of Virginia Woolf’s 1929 A Room of One’s Own is excellent. …
32. The decline of the pseudonym, Salon
    Virginia Woolf, who never adopted a nom de plume herself, once expressed the fundamental and maddening condition of authorship: “Never to be yourself and yet always—that is the problem.” She was describing the predicament of the personal essayist, …
33. The Closet Thinker: Hat tricks, Telegraph.co.uk
    Finally, one cautionary tale: beware overly fashionable hats, or you may fall prey to the misery endured by Virginia Woolf. In her diary entry for 30 June 1926 she reported ‘black despair’ because her friends had laughed at her new hat, bought on the … Special thanks to Jane Stewart, who sent us this Woolf sighting after she returned home from the 21st Annual Internation Conference on Virginia Woolf.
    
34. Thanks to the internet, we’re all literary omnivores now, The Guardian
    Long gone are the days when the Common Reader of Virginia Woolf’s snooty label behaved like the koala and stuck to a diet of literary eucalyptus supplied by the literary-critical establishment. Today, not only do the goatish omnivores favour a varied …
    
35. Shows – June 16 onwards, ChesterChronicle.co.uk
    SALFORD: June 23 – Ad Infinitum presents The Big Smoke – Inspired by the lives and works of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, this poignant story is sung a cappella by one woman. It tells the story of a talented young Canadian artist who, …
36. Theatre Ad Infinitum brings The Big Smoke, Manchester Confidential
    The show has been inspired by both the lives and works of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and American poet Anne Sexton. Sung a cappella throughout, the tragic story centres on a very talented young artist, Nathalie, and the collection of characters she …
37. What’s Hot | “What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora …, Louisville Courier-Journal
    … which take us up to the 1990s into his old age, the pair discuss not only their work together and apart, but the orchids they loved, their day-to-day lives, and the writers they admired, from Virginia Woolf and Dylan Thomas to JD Salinger. …
38. The Lingering Scent of a Woman’s Ink, New Yorker (blog)
    Since I’ve never been able to read Virginia Woolf, and am sometimes willing to believe that it can conceivably be my fault, this verdict maybe taken fairly as the twisted tongue of a soured taste, at least by those readers who do not share with me the …
39. Book Review: Wry and poignant story of loss, Cape Times (subscription)
    The members of the once-close family seem to all bob gently against each other but never to really connect – rather like the family group Virginia Woolf gathers at the Ramsays’ holiday home in the opening part of To the Lighthouse. …
40. First Lady of Fleet Street by Eilat Negev & Yehuda Koren – review, The Guardian
    It was a heroic effort, but it knocked the stuffing out of her, and when he finally died she put up no resistance when the Sassoons and various “experts” (including a highly suspect doctor who was the model for Virginia Woolf’s evil Dr Savage) declared …
41. Wendy houses for grown-ups! Men love their sheds – now it’s the ladies’ turn …, Daily Mail
    A treehouse similar to this costs from £28500, squirreldesign.co.uk THE READING ROOM – Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s own garden retreat, this charming room from the National Trust Garden Rooms Collection is the perfect place to escape with a novel. …
42. VS Naipaul: Proud and prejudicial, The Express Tribune (blog)
    Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, , Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson are women whose writings are among the best written in their times, and without who’s contributions a great chasm would be created in world …
43. Who says women can’t write great works of art just like men?, Sydney Morning Herald
    I’ve known a few distinguished women writers who think that the chap in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, who declares that women can’t paint, touches some dark place in a few male artistic breasts – but there aren’t many who are willing to trumpet …S Mainstream Media Covers Weinergate, Ignores BilderbergGate, OpEdNews
    
44. “Nothing has really happened,” said Virginia Woolf, “until it has been recorded.” People who are indifferent and silent in the face of injustice and state criminality can’t change the course of history and bring tyrants down. We have to record the fact …
45. The Millions Interview: Rebecca Makkai, The Millions
    As a novelist, unless you’re Virginia Woolf, you have to find the midpoint between those two extremes if you’re going to maintain the reader’s interest over the long haul. In The Borrower, I have three different (unmarked) sections with different …
46. RAINBOW AND GRANITE, Calcutta Telegraph
    In her essay, “The New Biography” (1927), Virginia Woolf, quoting Sir Sidney Lee’s remark that “the aim of biography is the truthful transmission of personality”, writes: “No such single sentence could more neatly split up into two parts the whole …
47. The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress, New Statesman
    By Beryl Bainbridge One of the last letters Virginia Woolf wrote was toJohn Lehmann at the Hogarth Press in March 1941, withdrawing her just-finished novel from publication. It was, she explained, too silly and trivial and would require extensive …
48. As Good as God, as Clever as the Devil by Rodney Bolt, The Guardian
    It’s like the lists of objects that Virginia Woolf conjures in Orlando to summarise a whole Victorian way of life, though even Orlando (as far as we know) does not have the pleasure of owning a giant pincushion made for the queen. …
49. ‘Ahead of Time’ proves apt description of journalist-advocate Ruth Gruber, St. Louis Jewish Light
    Significantly, her dissertation was on Virginia Woolf, with “A Room of One’s Own” proving a key text. As a Jew studying in Germany as the Nazis rose to power, Gruber was acutely aware of the threat posed by Hitler – she even attended a Nazi rally to …
50. ‘Oh darling, I just love being a housewife like Princess Kate’, Belfast Telegraph
    … role but as her 2000 bestseller and TV programmes showed, it was really the same job description. Good Housekeeping magazine arrived in Britain from America in 1922. Famous writers who have graced its pages include Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh…

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