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Archive for July 9th, 2012

“As to Woolf, who isn’t fascinated by her?”

Posted in Alice Lowe, art, Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, tagged , , , on Monday 9 July 2012| 2 Comments »

That’s what Carol Anshaw said when I asked her about the reference to Woolf in her newest novel, Carry the One. The story weaves in and out of the lives of several people for 25 years following a momentous event that had a great and lasting impact on each of them.

I found the book to be an engrossing and rewarding read, deserving its praise in reviews, including those of the New York Times and NPR.

So, the scene in question: Alice is talking to her sister Carmen about her volatile on-and-off relationship with Maude, who also happens to be Carmen’s sister-in-law. Alice says: “‘She can try all the men she wants. She’ll come back to women. She’s a bloodhound who’s been given the scent of the glove.’”

“Carmen was always a little startled (and titillated) when Alice said things like this. She wasn’t sure if this was her sister’s way of being shocking, or if lesbians all talked this way among themselves. It always tripped her up. She used to imagine love between women as a languid extension of friendship. Something Virginia Woolf-ish involving tea and conversation and sofas and afternoon eliding into evening, a small lamp needing to be turned on, but left unlit.”

Carol Anshaw added to the above response about Woolf: “when I read her letters maybe 30 years ago, I loved seeing her get swept off her feet by Vita. Then I read Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Vita and fell in love with her big, arrogant, blundering passage through life.” So we see how fitting this particular name-dropping is.

Screen shot of Carol Anshaw’s Vita Sackville-West Project page on her website

But Carol’s fascination with Vita has taken on a life of its own in a series of paintings (she’s multi-talented), the Vita Sackville-West project. Several are posted on her website.

 

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Woolf sightings: Making a connection between Virginia and Nora Ephron

Posted in Virginia Woolf, Woolf online, Woolf sightings, tagged , on Monday 9 July 2012| Leave a Comment »

When it comes to Virginia Woolf and just about anyone worth mentioning, there are no degrees of separation. For example, #24 in this week’s Woolf sightings links Woolf to writer Nora Ephron, who died June 27.

Other sightings worth a shoutout: #2 mentions the latest occupant of Woolf’s Richmond home, and #3 cites essay writer Siri Hustvedt’s reference to Woolf in a chapter on her father in her latest book of essays, Living, Thinking, Looking. No surprise that Hustvedt makes that connection, as Woolf had many complicated thoughts and feelings about her father Leslie Stephen.

  1. Photo-Op: Hall of Fame, Wall Street Journal
    Virginia Woolf was a little sharper when she declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed,’ as Modernism coalesced. Despite what textbooks say, art travels both fast and slow, and people don’t swap styles the way they change hats.
  2. ALCHEMY VIRAL OPENS HEAD OFFICE IN RICHMOND-UPON-THAMES …, CisionWire (press release)
    Alchemy Viral is proud to announce the official opening of their head office in July ’12 in Virginia Woolf’s esteemed former home, Brooks House, in the centre of Richmond-upon-Thames. The company also launches its website, http://www.alchemyviral.com. For the ..
  3. Sober judgments, The Age
    As a woman of letters, she looks for inspiration to Virginia Woolf, who demanded that ”the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea”. But while Hustvedt can match Woolf for high seriousness, she doesn’t have the same snap or ..
  4. Message regarding the passage of John H. Willis, Jr., William and Mary News
    His first book, William Empson, based on his dissertation, was issued by Columbia University Press, and in 1992 his second book, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41, was published by the University Press of Virginia.
  5. Shakespeare’s Sister Company Presents THE BIGSLEY PROJECT, Now thru 8/13, Broadway World
    Shakespeare’s Sister has discovered some great pieces launching its reading series with the American premiere of “Vanessa and Virginia”, Beth Wright’s play based on Susan Sellers novel about the life of our patron saint Virginia Woolf and her sister …
  6. A story of notes, Financial Times
    Given that Gunn teaches creative writing at the University of Dundee, and that she thanks real people for their help in making sense of these “papers” – including the director of the Scottish Arts Council and two Virginia Woolf scholars – it’s a …
  7. But what are you really reading?, National Post
    Last night I told some friends I was reading The Waves, by Virginia Woolf, begun about six months ago when I was reading anything mildly related to swimming or the seaside — but was really reading One Dark Night: 13 Masterpieces of the Macabre, ..
  8. The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack – review, The Guardian
    Twenty years on in London, Virginia Woolf had a different kind of home education, reading her way through her father Leslie Stephen’s library. “I am to re-read all the books Father has lent me.” These (she was 15) were Carlyle, Scott, Macaulay, Hakluyt …
  9. ‘Annie Leibovitz: Pilgrimage’ at Concord Museum, Boston Globe
    Almost all of the photographs in the show relate in some way to a famous individual: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s study, Virginia Woolf’s desktop, Lewis and Clark’s compass, the hat Abraham Lincoln wore the night he was killed. It’s telling that the most …
  10. ‘Pilgrimage’ sets the model for travel, Boston.com (blog)
    By and large, they were spots associated with major artists, thinkers, and public figures ñ Elvis Presley’s Graceland, Virginia Woolf’s desk in the ”room of one’s own with a lock on the door,” and Ghost Ranch studio in New Mexico, where Georgia O …
  11. An artist’s ‘Pilgrimage’: Annie Leibovitz opens new exhibit, MetroWest Daily News
    Filling three second-story galleries, “Pilgrimage” comprises color photos taken between April 2009 and May 2011 in homes, studios and museums devoted to artists and luminaries including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott, Virginia Woolf and ..
  12. Jack Dorsey created Twitter, now he’s taking on the banks with Square, Wired.co.uk
    Job interviews pivot into 30-minute disquisitions on the New York Yankees. Press briefings transform into critiques of Virginia Woolf novels. A comment about Dorsey’s game-changing startup, Square — which lets anyone accept credit cards — triggers a …
  13. Travelling in Time, plus Swords and Sorcery, Daily Mail (blog)
    Neither of them pretends to be Tolstoy, and (thank heaven) neither of them is in competition withVirginia Woolf either. But both have obviously read widely, know a great deal of history, and have an enviable skill with words. Yet I still have a deep …
  14. Free your mind on this Independence Day, Muskogee Daily Phoenix
    Like an early day Virginia Woolf, she wonders why her brother can learn Latin and Greek, but she cannot. And like Woolf, Bethia must teach herself to exist within the strict confines of proper society, plagued by the guilt inherent in a modest, but …
  15. Good, bad — and just plain ugly, National Post
    In attempting to ridicule my claim that Virginia Woolf’s reviews can provide models for those of us who are looking for alternatives to getting out the chainsaw, Mr. Lista fails to distinguish between what someone does and what they say. Nor does Woolf …
  16. Aiman, Adele and Agnes Obel, DAWN.com
    IN THE first quarter of the last century, Virginia Woolf, famous for taking on subjects as complex as the streams of consciousness and a vociferous feminist, wrote that in a hundred years woman will have ceased to be a protected sex, and logically she …
  17. Book lover: Paula Green, New Zealand Herald
    Emily Perkin’s The Forrests, with whiffs of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. The book I want to read next is … Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance as he left me spellbound at Wellington Writers and Readers Week. My favourite bookshop is … The …
  18. Statue of Liberty, Viewed From Afar With Affection, New York Times
    The space between Liberty and me brings to mind Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.” In that novel the remoteness of the lighthouse matters more than the arrival there. It reminds me of a visit to St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1994, when I became riveted …
  19. A new era at the American National Biography, OUPblog (blog)
    Then my husband started referring to me as the next Sir Leslie Stephen, and as a lifelong feminist who has been reading Virginia Woolf since I was a teenager, this was almost too much historical lineage to shoulder. But once I began to settle in to my…
  20. Rewrites a blight on Blyton’s legacy … by golly, Casey Weekly Berwick
    In London, Virginia Woolf’s most influential stream-of-consciousness novel, Jacob’s Room, and Katherine Mansfield’s first collection of stories, The Garden Party, came out within months of each other; towards the end of the year, T. S. Eliot’s The …
  21. Dear Life by Dennis O’Driscoll – review, The Guardian
    Illustration: Clifford Harper/agraphia.co.uk. “Virginia Woolf thought that the income tax, if it continued, would benefit poets by enlarging their vocabularies and I dare say that she was right.” So wrote Wallace Stevens in 1942, confronting the …
  22. Olympics Field Guide: Hiroshi Hoketsu, The 71-Year-Old Olympian, Deadspin
    Click for more field guides. On the day Hoketsu was born, Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with rocks and drowned herself in the River Ouse, and Judy Garland performed live at the Shrine Auditorium to benefit the Greek Resistance against its Nazi …
  23. 4 Tips for Writing on the Road in Chicago, Business 2 Community
    In fact, solitude is so important that writer Virginia Woolf wrote an entire essay about it, “A Room of One’s Own“. Writing on the Road in Chicago. You can choose from a number of downtown Chicago hotels — there are plenty of luxuriously appointed …
  24. Nora Ephron’s Hollywood Ending, New York Times
    A lot of female writers are famous for not having happy endings — besides Virginia Woolf. Nora admired and wrote a play about Mary McCarthy and Lillian …
  25. The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack: review, Telegraph.co.uk
    At the beginning of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf made a case for a “Room of One’s Own” for all women, without which they could not become writers. Near the …
  26. Travellers along two blind alleys?, The Island.lk (subscription)
    He married the famous novelist and literary figure Virginia Woolf, was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, a gathering of unorthodox liberals like-Lytton …
  27. Fiona Apple’s ‘Wheel’ Of Extravagant Emotions, WBUR
    I mean it as a compliment to say that Apple is working in the literary tradition of “the difficult woman,” closing in on Virginia Woolf and already superior to Sylvia …

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