The Eighteenth Annual Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture, “Woolf and the Essay” by Susan Sellers, Professor of English and Related Literature, St Andrews University, and General Editor of the Cambridge University Press Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf, will be held at 2 p.m., Saturday 28 January 2017 at the Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU. See map and directions.
Aaron Gell will edit the male-centered blog, Beta Male.
A recent article by Jia Tolentino on the feminist blog Jezebel.com titled, “Sheesh, There’s a Reason Women Are ‘Totally Crushing It’ at the Confessional Essay” channels Woolf several times as Tolentino analyzes the future existence of a “new pop-up blog at New York Magazine, a six-week project called Beta Male.”
This new “pop-up blog” will highlight men’s writing, (and presumably, celebrate “beta males”) with a particular interest in the male confessional essay.
The editor of the new blog, Aaron Gell, who is the executive director of Maxim.com, sent out a call for submissions which Leah Finnegan published at Genius.com. Gell calls for men to “demonstrate” that they too can be “introspective” like women writers:
Among the many areas in which women are just totally crushing it lately (sheesh, women!) is the confessional essay. We would like to demonstrate that men can be introspective and self-aware, too. So by all means, whatever you pitch me, try to include a personal essay idea or two. These can be about sex and relationships, family, work, friendships, race, art, beauty, obsession, the body, war, childhood celebrity crushes, parenthood, butt play and/or shoes.
Tolentino alludes to (and links to) Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own several times as she questions the “outlets available for men to confess things about their personal lives online” and the confessional nature of women’s writing. Tolentino writes:
And as we are now in a cultural moment where people are—thankfully—interested in learning about social structures and what life is like for people who have suffered greater hardships, we have, to mixed effect, progressed on the personal essay front from “A Room of One’s Own” into sort of “A Room of One’s Own, Wallpapered With Identity and the Particular Difficult Things It Brings.”
Do men need a new room of their own in which to write and publish?
Composer Brian Mark has set Virginia Woolf’s essay, “Craftsmanship,” to music. The piece was broadcast on 29 April 1937 as part of BBC Radio’s “Words Fail Me” series.
With “A Eulogy to Words,” he has fulfilled an eight-year ambition to create a piece for chamber orchestra and electronics. It is written for London’s Royal Academy of Music and conducted by Michael Alexander Young.
Maria Popova of Brainpickings.org called it “the best thing since the Solar System set to Bach and Carl Sagan adapted as a three-movement choral suite.”
Have a listen and tell us what you think of the piece, which runs nearly 10 minutes, in the comments section below.
Virginia Woolf’s normal wake-up time was 9 a.m., according to this graphic included in a post on Brain Pickings that discusses the literary productivity of 37 famous authors.
In another Brain Pickings post, author Maria Popova takes on the age-old battle of the brows — highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow and broadbrow. In it, Popova discusses the criticism Woolf received from English novelist and critic J. B. Priestley for being a highbrow and the words she lobbed back in response.
Woolf’s response started out as an unsent letter to New Statesman and ended up as an essay titled “Middlebrow.” It was published in 1942 in the posthumous collection The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, a volume that contains 26 essays written over a period of 20 years. “Craftsmanship,” the essay Woolf broadcast on BBC Radio on 29 April 1937, is also included in the volume.
