Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for October, 2012

It’s less than a week until the U.S. presidential election, and our first Woolf sighting turns to Virginia’s diary — and a new book — to discover her political leanings. See 1. Even more of the moment, today is Halloween, and a New Yorker reader thinks a sexy Virginia Woolf is the worst Halloween costume ever. See 14.

  1. This feast of diaries may leave you with indigestion: EVENTS, DEAR BOY …, Daily Mail
    In 1929 both Virginia Woolf and her servant Nelly intend to vote Labour, but Comrade Virginia’s radicalism has its limits. ‘I don’t want to be ruled by Nelly,’ she snorts. By 1952 the descendants of Nelly are living high on the hog. Labour MP Richard …
  2. The London best: sleep aidsEvening Standard
    Virginia Woolf called sleep “that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life”. Yet most of London now fantasises about eight hours uninterrupted by the strepitous sex sessions of foxes or the early sounding of the alarm. With the clocks going back on 
  3. Finding souls in a search for solacePhiladelphia Inquirer
    The result was Pilgrimage, (Random House, 2011), a book of photographs from Leibovitz’s global search for solace. She visited the homes of Sigmund Freud andVirginia Woolf, of Elvis Presley and Eleanor Roosevelt, Georgia O’Keefe and Martha Graham.
  4. On the Couch: Study links creativity with mental illnessEaling Gazette
    Whilst troubled writers such as Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemmingway would appear to bear this out, we know that in fact mental illness affects 25% of the population, not all of whom are creative geniuses! That said, a study by the same institute in 
  5. Saints and doubtersThe Christian Century
    Their daughter, Virginia Woolf, raised without a faith to lose, sought new forms of the sacred in her writing, new expressions of religious experience focused around what she called “moments of being”—moments when the pattern through which we are all 
  6. Reviewed: Sitelines’ Sailing OnReading Chronicle
    Following their own watery deaths, the writer Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare’s Ophelia have taken up residence in the toilets, where they observe the habits of its patrons. One young woman in particular, Romola, has caught their attention and by 
  7. The old man and the seaSydney Morning Herald
    The war trilogy was first published in London, by Hogarth, the press established by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. ”I would prefer it to be published there,” Parkin observed, ”for it does seem that no prophet is acceptable in his own country.” The 
  8. Murder on the dancefloor: art’s fascination with deathThe Guardian
    Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/PARAMOUNT. Virginia Woolf, an admiring reader of Proust, was interested in the dramatic potential of the party as a way of bringing to the fore that which the joviality of the occasion attempts to deny. In Mrs Dalloway’s 
  9. Art Review ‘Picasso Black and White,’ at GuggenheimBoston Globe
    With the likes of Mozart, Virginia Woolf, and Picasso, the unspoken implication is so often: They can’t help themselves; the art just spouts out. If, in addition, the genius’s personality is awkward, or his personal life chaotic to the point of self 
  10. Carolyn Hitt: There are no longer barriers blocking female authorsWalesOnline
    Mary Ann Evans had to call herself George Eliot to get noticed while Virginia Woolf attempted to rent us a room of our own in the palace of patriarchy. When I read English at university 25 years ago we prided ourselves on the rows of ivy green spines 
  11. Author’s mum hated his Pulitzer Prize winning bookStraits Times
    The story traces the lives of three women affected by the 1925 Virginia Woolf novel, Mrs Dalloway. Cunningham’s mother was the inspiration behind the character of a bored housewife, and she did not like having her life on display. “She didn’t like the 
  12. Questioningly Results: Worst Halloween CostumeNew Yorker (blog)
    And, of course, many readers imagined inappropriate variations on seductive Halloween wear: sexy baby (from @MargoLezowitz), sexy George Bush (from @capitalsquirrel), sexy Virginia Woolf (from @andrewnford), sexy JarJar Binks (from @nemesisn4sa), 
  13. Prescription for laughterThe National
    It’s a busy Thursday night in Bloomsbury, the central London district where Virginia Woolf’s infamous set held court. At a plush, packed theatre, Ben Smith’s increasingly popular set is causing uproar. Smith also has literary links, being the younger 
  14. The Penguin-Random House book merger is a big deal: MallickToronto Star
    A writer has a vision, like a fin in the water as Virginia Woolf put it, a book is written and read, notions are floated and ingested like billions of plankton and suddenly the world has changed. Ideas are worth money. The book world is imprinted with 

Read Full Post »

The deadline for A Room of Her Own Foundation‘s sixth $50,000 Gift of Freedom Award has been extended until Nov. 15, due to Hurricane Sandy.

Read Full Post »

Killing the Angel is a new literary journal, “a literary experiment inspired by Virginia Woolf.” The journal is the love child of its founder, publisher and editor, Jessica Rosevear, who describes herself as “a high school English teacher in New Jersey obsessed with writing and studying Virginia Woolf, promoting creativity, and selling Shakespeare to today’s youth.”

Jessica has proudly given birth to the inaugural issue of Killing the Angel, a satisfying composite of poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction. I’m happy to add that my own personal essay is among the contents. “My Space” is not about social networking; rather, in homage to A Room of One’s Own, it’s a search for my own literal and metaphorical room and an overview of fictional treatments of the theme by Alice Munro, Doris Lessing and others. I was delighted to find such a perfect home for this piece in Killing the Angel.

I should add that this is a print journal, and everyone knows what a bold undertaking that is in today’s economic and reading climate, when most new publications are Web-only and even established literary journals are promoting Web content, some of them shifting entirely from print to online. I know I’m not the only one who likes to hold printed materials in my hands, to fondle their covers and feel their silky pages between my fingers, so I’m hoping that this new addition is supported within the Woolfian community. Jessica informs me that Killing the Angel is on sale at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, but for the rest of us, it’s available for purchase online at http://killingtheangelmagazine.wordpress.com/.

Please join me in kudos to Jessica. And New Yorkers please note: there will be a launch party on Dec. 18, 2012, from 7-9 p.m. at the KGB Bar, 85 East Fourth St.

Read Full Post »

Annie Leibovitz says Virginia Woolf was sloppy. Her evidence? Woolf’s desk in her writing lodge at Monk’s House.

This screenshot from The Guardian website shows Woolf’s desk in her writing lodge at Monk’s House.

Leibovitz photographed the desk, along with other objects, rooms and landscapes that had special meaning for her to include in her book Pilgrimage, which was published last fall.

The photo of Woolf’s desk shows scratches and stains that mar nearly the entire desk surface. After snapping it, Leibovitz wondered what the scratches and stains were all about, and she discovered “that Woolf was a very sloppy person who often spilled drinks all over her work space,” according to an interview published in the Evening Sun.

Now an eponymous photography exhibit of Leibovitz’s work is on display at the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum through Jan. 20. It features more than 70 photographs chronicling the photographer’s journey to landmarks — some literary — throughout the United States and England.

Read Full Post »

This week’s collection of Woolf sightings includes a glaring oversight. In a book claiming to collect the 40 greatest parties in literature, Mrs. Dalloway’s famous party is missing. Scroll down to 4 for the details. Another notable item on this week’s list is America’s Top Model contestant’s Kim Stolz’s plan to open a restaurant named The Dalloway with a “lesbian-implied theme.” See 8. Oh, and guess what — someone is calling Virginia a snob. Again. See 9 and 10.

  1. Constellation of Genius, 1922: Modernism Year One by Kevin Jackson – reviewThe Guardian
    According to Virginia Woolf – one of the sources on whom Kevin Jackson leans heavily for his account of what he believes to be modernism’s momentous year – “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.” If we look five years either side of
  2. Books You Have Always Meant to Read: Mrs. DallowayHeraldNet (blog)
    This time around we are in for a treat when Kevin Craft from Everett Community College discusses Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf on Tuesday, October 23rd from 7-8:30 pm at the Main Library. Mrs. Dalloway is, to put it mildly, an extraordinary novel 
  3. Creativity and Mental Illness are LinkedOnlymyhealth
    English author Virginia Woolf had walked into the river Ouse with stones in her pockets, thus killing herself; and throughout history we have known how creative people have always been depressed and on the brink of self destruction. Now according to 
  4. Imaginary Party PeopleWall Street Journal
    Women writers are largely ignored—no Virginia Woolf, so no Clarissa Dalloway. Novels of the past century account for the largest share of the fun. Yet Ms. Field says she has aimed for eclecticism in terms of “genre, country, period and style.” No 
  5. U of Minn. concert to showcase Argento’s musicHouston Chronicle
    He won the Pultizer for music in 1975 for his song cycle “From the Diary of Virginia Woolf.” He won a Grammy in 2004 for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, for his song cycle “Casa Guidi.” The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. at Ted Mann Concert Hall 
  6. Zadie Smith’s “NW” charts a bold new path for the novel and offers its readers Salon
    Like Big Ben overseeing every page of Virginia Woolf’s modernist classic Mrs. Dalloway, time — even the actual word — haunts NW with a needling and anxious insistence. These textual echolocations with Mrs. Dalloway patinas the novel as a literary 
  7. Walls buzzing with creativity at ARTworks basketry classHilton Head Island Packet
    In her famous essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf wrote, “Women have sat indoors all these millions of years so that by this time, the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and 
  8. Model Stolz ’05 Lands New Job, Restaurant, Book DealWesleyan Connection (blog)
    The Dalloway, named after Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, is set to open later this month and will have a “lesbian-implied” theme. While at Wesleyan, Stolz was awarded honors for her thesis, “The Impact of Exit Strategies of United States 
  9. Nick Hornby blasts Booker, Woolf and snobbery at the 92nd Street YNew York Daily News (blog)
    Hornby — after bringing the house down with a lecture on Virginia Woolf and signing a mountain of books — is enjoying a well-earned cigarette. He is the acclaimed author of hit novels such as “Fever Pitch” “High Fidelity” and, most recently, “Juliet 
  10. The Under 30 Crowd Reads More Books; Bill O’Reilly Humbly Takes the The Atlantic Wire
    Today in books and publishing: People under 30 most likely to read; who keeps buying O’Reilly’s books?; Nick Hornby finds Virginia Woolf snobby; Jackie Collins recaps Revenge. Kids these days, am I right? Everyone concerned about whether or not 
  11. 10 Writers’ Mental And Physical MaladiesHuffington Post (blog)
    Most great writers experienced emotional or financial turbulence in childhood. Swift, Defoe, Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Hawthorne, Melville, Thackeray, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath all lost a parent in childhood. Poe, Tolstoy, and Conrad 

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »

%d bloggers like this: