One of the big hits at Woolf and the City was the performance by the West Coast band Princeton, who rocked out on stage Friday evening with all four tunes from their “Bloomsbury” album.
Another big hit was the Virginia Woolf t-shirt the band sold. It featured Virginia looking trés cool behind a pair of metallic-gold-trimmed Ray-Bans.
You, too, can be trés cool. Order a shirt from the band’s MySpace page. Scroll way down. Choose your size — men’s or women’s from small to large — and click on the “Pay Now” link to pay through PayPal.
Tip: The shirts are 100 percent cotton, and the women’s sizes run small. Bump your order up a size.
While you are on their site, you can check out their music.
Emma Watson, star of the Harry Potter films, is the new “face” of Burberry, and Burberry’s new fall/winter collection is said to be inspired by Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury set.
But I don’t think Woolf would have opted to spend £1,095 on the roomy suede tote with embroidered overlay that Burberry has dubbed its “Woolf bag.”
Nor can I imagine Woolf, who wandered so many miles around London, schlepping along carrying such a huge bag. I picture her using roomy pockets, not a handbag, to carry what she needed. Cast your vote on the issue by taking the poll below.
However, I do wish I had managed to attend the fashion panel, “Bloomsbury and Fashion,” at Woolf and the City.
Here are the intriguing presentations it included:
“Clothes Make the Flaneuse” – Catherine Mintler, University of Oklahoma
“The Language of Shop Windows in Virginia Woolf’s Novels” – Katarzyna Rybinska, Wroclaw University
“Cities of Fashion: Sartorial Topographies in ‘Street Haunting,’ Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves” – Randi Koppen, University of Bergen
“Self-Fashioning Identity: Clothing and Subjectivity in Orlando: A Biography” – Ula Lukszo, Stony Brook University.
Wow! That is my overwhelming response to the Virginia Woolf conference that ended yesterday afternoon in New York City.
The comments I heard throughout the four-day event tell me that Woolf and the City left everyone buzzed. Anne Fernald and her team of volunteers from Fordham University — Megan Branch, Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, Kelly Spall and Sarah Cornish — put together a dynamite event that sparked many ideas in the minds of Woolfians from around the world.
Here are some highlights:
Fifty fabulous panels featuring the work of Woolf scholars and common readers from around the globe, including Bloomsbury biographer Frances Spalding of Newcastle University, Pace University’s Mark Hussey of Virginia Woolf from A to Z fame, Alice Lowe of San Diego, artist Suzanne Bellamy of the University of Sydney, Sarah Prieto of SUNY New Paltz, Katarzyna Rybinska of Wroclaw University in Poland and Iolanda Plescia of Roma Tre University in Rome.
Alice Lowe
Dr. Ruth Gruber. Yes, Dr. Ruth Gruber. The 97-year-old journalist, photographer and author of Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman, was part of a conversational panel led by writer and broadcaster Katherine Lanpher. She shared fascinating stories of her 1930s experiences as a journalist who visited the Soviet Arctic and a writer who met Virginia and Leonard Woolf in their Tavistock Square flat.
Susan Sellers, author of Vanessa and Virginia, the novel based on the relationship between sisters Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, which is receiving rave reviews in the U.S. after its recent release, was also part of the Lanpher conversation. When she read a passage from her novel, I wasn’t sure what impressed me more — the words she read or the liltingly beautiful English accent with which she read them. Maybe it was the combination.
Kris Lundberg, founder of Shakespeare’s Sister, a New York theater company for women that also focuses on community literacy. She did a dramatic reading of Woolf’s words that made a hush fall over the audience.
Keynote speaker Rebecca Solnit, a prolific author whose soothing voice left her audience in a state of suspended animation while her intriguing ideas left their minds in a state of excitement.
Tamar Katz of Brown University who spoke about the importance of “pausing and waiting” in life and in Woolf.
Anna Snaith of King’s College, London, who shared her views regarding the meaning of street music in The Years — and treated us to audio clips of the actual tunes as well.
Plus a reading from Vita and Virginia and a performance that combined rock-out music from Princeton with dance from the Stephen Pelton Dance Theatre.
A table full of lovely books for sale from New York’s independent, activist book seller, Bluestockings.
Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson
And, of course, what Woolf conference would be complete without the inimitable combination of Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson and their collection of Bloomsbury Heritage Series monographs, including their two latest.
These monographs, published by their London publishing house, Cecil Woolf Publishers, are always popular at Woolf conferences, as they cover topics often missing in other Woolf scholarship.
Get the full list of books available in his Bloomsbury Heritage and War Poets series.
I will soon be posting an order form as a PDF to make the purchasing process easier. And I promise to keep you updated on other steps Cecil and Jean plan to take to make their monographs more available to their reading public.
My headline is a blatant come-on. I know that. But I simply can’t resist shouting out loud in cyberspace about Cecil Woolf’s appearance at the Woolf conference.
And that’s not just because he is my publisher. It’s actually because he is such a dear — and the nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf to boot.
I met Cecil Woolf at the 17th Annual International Conference on Woolf, which was held in 2007 at Miami University of Ohio, within driving distance of my Northeast Ohio home.
It was my first Woolf conference, and I felt slightly intimidated — despite my advanced age — as I stood by myself at the opening reception. There I was, surrounded by the brilliant Woolf scholars whose books were my friends, even though the writers themselves were complete strangers to me.
Drew Patrick Shannon, a young Woolf scholar from the Cincinnati area, sort of took me under his wing that evening. He and his friends were funny and bright, and they seemed to know everyone. One person they knew — and pointed out to me — was Cecil Woolf.
The next day, while browsing the book tables, I lingered at the one covered with artfully decorated softcover volumes published by Cecil Woolf Publishers. It was staffed by Cecil himself, and our conversation lasted right through the next conference session.
One conversation led to another, and by the time I drove home from Oxford, I had agreed to write a monograph for Cecil on Woolf and weather, a topic I had been researching and musing about for six years.
Drew, who congratulated me that day but wondered aloud what idea he could pitch to Cecil, is now writing How Should One Read a Marriage? Private Writings, Public Readings, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. It will be published in Cecil’s Bloomsbury Heritage Series later this year.
So if you are on the fence about attending the conference, get off the fence and into the city. Even if you have to beg, borrow or steal the $45 for a one-day pass.
Besides all of the fabulous sessions on the conference schedule, believe this: You won’t want to pass up the opportunity to meet Cecil Woolf. You never know what may come of it.
Stop by the opening reception for the conference, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. June 4, where I will be signing copies of my monograph, Reading the Skies in Virginia Woolf: Woolf on Weather in Her Essays, Her Diaries and Three of Her Novels. Cecil will be there too.
The signing will be held in Fordham University’s Lowenstein Plaza Lobby, 113 W. 60th St. in New York’s Lincoln Center.
