Blogging Woolf

A mashup of Woolf sightings this week, including a bunch that refer to A Room of One’s Own, two that refer to a production of  The Odyssey with a Woolf touch (#46-47) and a warning against literary snobbery (#48).

1. Are girls less than equal to boys?, The Hindu
   A century ago, Virginia Woolf reflected on why the Elizabethan age in England, the glorious age of English literature that inspired every other man to pen a song or sonnet, did not record a single female author? In order to show that any woman born …
2. Steve Jobs, Adrienne Rich, Mark Roth: Anger as fuel for creativity, OregonLive.com
   Virginia Woolf, author: “A Room of One’s Own,” influential 1929 essay about art and sexism concludes that women writers need an income and privacy to achieve success. Anger is everywhere. Liberals denounce conservatives. Tea Partyers rail against …
3. Hulda Klager’s lilac gardens and spirit inspire Jane Kirkpatrick’s new book …, OregonLive.com
   As Virginia Woolf once wrote, “Women’s history must be invented … both uncovered and made up.” I also wanted to explore what we have in common with people from the past and allow them to step from one generation to ours to teach us and touch us with …
4. Of perfumes and high heels, Postnoon
   While I was never a bra-burning feminist from the Feminist Movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, writers such as Virginia Woolf, who are associated with the ideas of the first wave of feminism, aptly describe how men socially and psychically …
5. Women, Math, and the Addition of Stereotypes, Miller-McCune.com
   As Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own (and Steele and Spencer quoted in their study),“There was an enormous body of masculine opinion to the effect that nothing could be expected of women intellectually.” Do biological differences between …
6. Get reading at the St Ives Literature Festival, LateRooms.com (press release)
   St Ives has a proud literary heritage, with Virginia Woolf spending her childhood holidays in the town during the late 1800s. It is believed that Godrevy Lighthouse, located across the bay from St Ives, was the inspiration for her famous novel To the …
7. Freud, Virginia Woolf & Other Great Writers In Their Own Voice, Daily Beast
   When Virginia Woolf’s done describing a face, the words stand alone, more beautiful and canny than any actual face: “Nothing disturbed the arrowy nose in its short, tense flight; the hair was dark, the ears small, and fitted closely to the head.
8. Collected Poems by Hope Mirrlees, The Guardian
   What this “mystical experience” might feel like, and what the “aural kaleidoscope” might look and sound like, can be seen in her long poem “Paris”, written in 1919 and published by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1920. Woolf called it “indecent, …
9. William Boyd: Our man in 007 land, The Independent
   … a half-British, half-Uruguayan writer who publishes a best-selling novel in his twenties and spends 80-odd years with writer’s block meeting key figures from the literary century: TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn.
10. The man with the big ideas, Financial Times
    He wrote about William James and reductionism, and Virginia Woolf’s relationship to psychology. “I never really could leave science behind,” he says. “I thought if I can’t be a scientist, maybe I can be a science writer. I can hang out with scientists.
11. Hugh Cecil Lowther, 5th Earl of Lonsdale, Express.co.uk
    He owned 2000 costumes and liked to materialise silently from one of the house’s dark corners in the hope of spooking friends such as John Betjeman, Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene. When entertaining or dining alone a pair of bread ovens provided the …
12. Madness Ain’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be, Wired News
    The long walks during which Virginia Woolf half-consciously wrought her characters and stories — walks in which insights were often found more than created — fed her art as essentially as did the long mornings in which she sat in her armchair penning …
13. Four Indie DVDs, North Coast Journal
    From Bertrand Russell to Virginia Woolf, on through to JRR Tolkein and Salman Rushdie, the works of great thinkers serve to illuminate the broader culture climates that produced them. This excellent six-part series serves as a crash course on the …
14. Gut-wrenching ‘Kevin’ bound to evoke dialogue about nature versus nurture, Columbia Daily Tribune
    I’ve been a fan since her breakthrough role in Sally Potter’s curious, multilayered adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” in 1992. I consider this one of her all-time best performances and was floored when she was not even nominated for Best Actress …
15. An Unexpected Guest, Entertainment Weekly
    Virginia Woolf believed that ordinary decisions matter so much that it’s ”very dangerous to live even one day.” This promising debut novel, a political thriller inspired by Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, takes that warning literally.
16. We Can’t All Be Shakespeare–And That’s OK, Fox Business
    Not every writer is William Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf. Not every photographer is Annie Liebowitz or Ansel Adams. Not every painter is Renoir or Van Gogh. The reason this is important is because in my coaching experience, I find this is something …
17. Women’s Library campaign gathers steam, The Guardian
    Today based in London’s Aldgate, its collection ranges from scholarly works on women’s history and feminism to press cuttings, pamphlets and literature, including first editions of works by Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf and the Brontës.
18. Edith Wharton: A Writer’s Reflections, The Millions
    Virginia Woolf once said, “We think back through our mothers, if we are women.” This is also true for those of us who are not only women, but writers. Edith Wharton is one of my mothers, and for that I am grateful. Talk given at the opening of the …
19. The Love Songs of F. Scott Fitzgerald, OUPblog (blog)
    … kind[s] of voice in which [those types are] spoken” in descriptions of various romantic gestures (first glances, kissing, coitus itself) appearing in authors as diverse as John Ruskin, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, DH Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf.
20. Carla Carlisle on the brilliant Dorothy L.Sayers, Country Life (blog)
    Contemplating the wines, I feel like a time traveller who’s entered the opening pages of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, when she describes a lavis
21. A Room of Everyone’s Own: The Writer as Public Fixture, The Millions
    Virginia Woolf, who also knew from solitude, even went as far as to write that a marginalized individual could only contribute quality literature to the world by first having A Room of One’s Own. These days, many of our most prominent writers seem to …
22. Per Diem: Old-School Food in the FiDi, SF Weekly (blog)
    Homey details abound: shelves of old books, a table which is really a backgammon board, and an antique (and fully operational) typewriter, from which a sheet of paper emerges emblazoned with a Virginia Woolf quote: “One cannot think well, love well, …
23. Architects who put their stamp on the Post Office, The Guardian
    More or less bisexual people: Shakespeare, Lord Olivier, Dame Daphne du Maurier, Alexander the Great, Virginia Woolf, Mary Wollstonecraft, David Bowie. Then there is that treacherous category, “never married”: Admiral Robert Blake, Marea Hartman, …
24. Lunch with BS: Amit Chaudhuri, Business Standard
    “And we will elide the fact that people like Tagore or Qurratulain Hyder may have been responding to Shelley or Elizabeth Bowen or Virginia Woolf — a network of reading and cross-fertilisation that has formed us over the last 200 years.
25. Nilanjana S Roy A charpai of her own, Business Standard
    But what struck me was the space that Ismat occupied — small but absolute, a charpai of her own, in answer to Virginia Woolf’s dictum that a woman writer must have a room of her own. The 14 chapters collected in Ismat’s memoirs, Kaghazi hai Pairahan, …
26. Beware Literary Snobbery: Why We Should Read Bestsellers, Wall Street Journal (blog)
    … I had evolved from an avid but indiscriminate reader devoted to science fiction and mysteries to a professor of literature who regularly taught “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Giles Goatboy,” and the novels of Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.
27. Assisting hands, Easter blessings, The Times and Democrat
    English author Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) writes about humankind in the survival mode: “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” Be especially aware of hunger and its negative impact. Some people are hungry and need assistance. 1.
28. Music, Poetry Pulitzer Winners Have Minnesota Ties, HispanicBusiness.com
    It’s not the first time that a Twin Cities arts organization has commissioned a Pulitzer winner: The Schubert Club commissioned Dominick Argento’s song cycle, “From the Diary of Virginia Woolf,” which won the 1975 music prize after being premiered at …
29. “God Bless David Bowie,” and Let’s Still Save Publishing: A First-Timer’s …, Library Journal
    In closing, the image of a lovely door on a Georgian terrace in Bloomsbury, just a stone’s throw from Virginia Woolf’s Tavistock Square. Call it the phantom tollbooth to the future of publishing, just don’t call me late to a dinner of toad in the hole.
30. The Realism of Idealism, Cornell University The Cornell Daily Sun
    On the ride home after an especially disastrous semester densely populated with existential crises, I watched Virginia Woolf (exquisitely played by Nicole Kidman in The Hours) walk into a river, her pockets heavy with pebbles.
31. Humor & Satire | Mr. Bouchard’s guide to succeeding at room draw, The Miscellany News
    According to my freshman writing seminar’s discussion of Virginia Woolf, it could be any place that we feel comfortable enough to produce work or confront our private-most thoughts. And if that’s the case, or at least the case you’re willing to argue, …
32. Jane Schaberg, Feminist Theologian, Has Died, Patheos (blog)
    And she considered Virginia Woolf to be her greatest mentor. Jane Schaberg was actually a thorough researcher, a compelling writer, and a popular teacher, even though she often strayed far from Catholic teaching on matters that interested her.
33. IN THEIR OWN WORDS (DVD), Film Threat
    Along the way, we hear from a wide range of writers, including a rare audio recording of Virginia Woolf and a bit of JRR Tolkien reading a piece in Elvish. Graham Greene allowed BBC cameras to accompany him on a train trip but refused to show his face.
34. Cleese propels Spud to big time, NEWS.com.au
    “There were certain writers – it’s all a question of taste – like Virginia Woolf and Henry James who never much appealed to me, and in the very first scenes he makes a couple of insulting references to them and I immediately thought, ‘I like this guy’.
35. VIDEO: ‘Sex, Race and Class’ — Extended Interview with Selma James on Her Six …, Democracy Now (blog)
    He met Virginia Woolf. He met a number of people who were prominent in the UK more than in the US And he went to England. He returned to England. He had been there before. He had always earned his living as a cricket journalist, among other things.
36. San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco Bay Guardian
    … Robert Macfarlane, and Tacita Dean, though Gee succumbs to the spectacle of Google Earth mapping of the novel and some decidedly sub-Sebaldian spiritualism. Still, hearing the author speak his own mind on Virginia Woolf’s moth and the phenomenology …
37. Isle of Skye, fresh air, and beautiful highlands, Daily Californian
    By Alex Matthews | Staff Freshman year, back when I thought I was an English major, I took English 45C and had to read “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf. One of the themes I remember our professor teaching us was the concept of the sublime: …
38. Meet the Staff at Highbrow Magazine: Q&A With Writer Rachael Jennings, Highbrow Magazine
    My unchangeable all-time favorite writers are Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, James Joyce, Henrich Ibsen, Gustave Flaubert and Anton Chekhov. Joan Didion makes a double appearance as my favorite journalist.
39. Anne Enright’s ‘Making Babies’: At times pleasing, at times troubling, Washington Post
    And — invoking Virginia Woolf — “no rocks.” What’s the implication here? That babies are lifesavers? What is the purpose? To establish her motivation if, in a few years, the worst occurs? To establish a niche in a certain literary pantheon?
40. An interview with National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, Los Angeles Times (blog)
    We were reading Faulkner, reading Virginia Woolf, reading James Joyce, reading Hemingway, reading Ford, reading Malcolm Lowry, and attempting to mimic their styles. Write our own work, these exercises, then mimic their prose styles.
41. Stop Hating, Start Teaching, Huffington Post
    I also have courses on the Canterbury Tales, Postcolonial Literature, Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and Literary Theory. My degree prepared me to teach English as a literature class, not a literacy class. I have no formal background in literacy, …
42. Female artists emerge in ‘Shakespeare’s Sisters,’ ‘Royalists and Romantics’, Washington Times
    That was after the author Virginia Woolf raised the issue of female writers in Shakespearean England in her book “A Room of One’s Own” in 1929. In the book, she imagined that Shakespeare had a sister (hence the Folger exhibit’s title), Judith, …
43. Commencement speaker dampens alumna’s spirit, The Collegian — University of Richmond
    Westhampton College offers UR women something that Virginia Woolf might deem “a room of their own,” a place for support tailored to women and increased leadership opportunities, among other things. McDonnell, on the other hand, has actively worked to …
44. Talk to fine arts society, Doncaster Today
    An enormously energetic group of English writers, intellectuals and artists, their best known members included Vanessa Bell, her sister Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes, EM Forster and Lytton Strachey. Their work and modern attitudes …
45. University of Maryland Celebrates Dominick Argento With Week-Long Series, Baltimore City Paper (blog)
    Argento won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975 for his song cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf. He also won a Grammy in 2004 for Von Stade’s recording of his song cycle Casa Guidi. Mabbs said she and professor Leon Major decided that Argento’s …
46. The Core No More, Bwog
    D: The general idea is The Odyssey plus Virginia Woolf in a blender. So there’s a loose 1920s setting with Odysseus as a shell-shocked WW1 soldier and his adventures as hallucinations. For the first part, the audience can choose what to follow.
47. Forewarned is Fore(20)armed, Bwog
    The Odyssey: In a performance that promises to be a trip and a half, the journey of the Odyssey crossed with Virginia Woolf will start at 8 pm in the Hamilton lobby. It will be on at the same time on Saturday. Bacchanal’s Space Jam Screening: Following …
48. Beware Literary Snobbery: Why We Should Read Bestsellers, Wall Street Journal (blog)
    … I had evolved from an avid but indiscriminate reader devoted to science fiction and mysteries to a professor of literature who regularly taught “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “Giles Goatboy,” and the novels of Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.

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