Blogging Woolf

Two controversies take up significant space in our Woolf sightings this week.

Dust-up number one: V.S. Naipaul’s arrogant claim brought to light in a Guardian report that no woman writer can match him — not even Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf. For this topic, see sightings numbered 23 through 27.

Dust-up number two: Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, is justly criticized by participants on the VWoolf Listserv for reducing Woolf to an insecure mad woman in another Guardian interview. Other complaints include the factual inaccuracies in his musings about Woolf and her work, the false modesty inherent in his complaint that he is considered a peripheral expert on Woolf and his lack of knowledge about her. See numbers seven through nine.

1. Can You Learn About Happiness From Virginia Woolf? I Think So, Forbes (blog)
   Assay: Recently, I posted a quotation from Virginia Woolf for my weekly quotation. I often quote from Woolf, because she’s one of my very favorite writers. And, as has happened before, I got a few comments from readers saying, …
2. More Re-read Recommendations from Ms. Cheap & friends, The Tennessean (blog)
   Here is the list plus some other great ones that people have recommended to add to the list: A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf. Patrick O’Brian series of Jack Aubrey-Stephen Maturin sea stories. Let me know what books you would add (just …
3. When bad people write great books, Salon
   TS Eliot was an anti-Semite, Virginia Woolf a snob and Ezra Pound a flaming fascist, but I’m not ready to shrug off “The Waste Land,” “To the Lighthouse” or “The Cantos.” Charles Dickens’ shortcomings, on the other hand, were more personal than …
4. Old-fashioned fun, Buffalo News
   “I spent a lot of years trying to be Virginia Woolf, trying to be Chekhov,” Simonson said. “With the Major, I have found my authentic voice. And it is funny.” To celebrate “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” being selected as The Buffalo News Book Club’s …
5. The philosopher, his dream for an Oxbridge in London and a rumpus on campus, Evening Standard
   “Yes, but then you think of Virginia Woolf looking mournful. No, we think New College of the Humanities works pretty well, has the right kind of resonance.” At around this point, the doorbell rings and I nip to the loo. I count no fewer than nine …
6. Alchemist’s “Fool for Love”; too cool?, ThirdCoast Digest
   The play’s Virginia Woolf-like premise and powerful tension are grueling, but even so, this cast seems under-wrought. Ligocki Peters’ May maintains a singular, disconnected mode. As the focal point of two lovers, she seems aloof. …
7. Across the literary pages, Spectator.co.uk (blog)
   Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, disabuses readers of the Guardian of their misconceptions about Virginia Woolf. ‘Virginia Woolf was great fun at parties. I want to tell you that up front, because Woolf, who died 70 years ago this year, …
8. Woolf, my mother and me, The Guardian
   Virginia Woolf was great fun at parties. I want to tell you that up front, because Woolf, who died 70 years ago this year, is so often portrayed as the Dark Lady of English letters, all glowery and sad, looking balefully on from a crepuscular corner of …
9. Michael Cunningham discusses The Hours, The Guardian
   Drawing inspiration from the life and work of Virginia Woolf, the novel is told through the narratives of three generations of women. In 1920s Richmond Virginia Woolf struggles to make a start on her new book. In 1940s Los Angeles Laura, …
10. Captivating Portraits and Raw Collages: Why Carl Köhler’s Art is Worth the Looking, NY Arts Magazine
    Henry Miller, Virginia Woolf, Antonin Artaud – Carl Köhler knew them all. At least, so it seems when facing his portraits. From the edgy, black lines of Franz Kafka, crudely cut in wood, to the airy blue shades used to capture the sensitivity of Joyce …
11. Our Dinner with the Dead at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, SF Weekly (blog)
    The conceit was that 12 dead celebrities, through an elaborate metaphysical contrivance/wormhole, had ended up at a dinner salon hosted by Virginia Woolf. Over the course of two hours, McSweeney’s editor and poet Jesse Nathan held forth with imagined …
12. 6/5: McSweeney’s Jesse Nathan and composer Chris Janzen’s Dinner at the …, San Francisco Chronicle (blog)
    What would happen if Gertrude Stein, Thelonious Monk, Bobby Fischer, Salvador Dali, Billie Holiday, and Michael Jackson showed up for a dinner party at Virginia Woolf’s house? This fantastical scenario comes to life in “Dinner,” a …
13. Diary: Patti Smith, Vanity Fair
    
    

    Patti Smith as pictured on the Vanity Fair website

    I was an artist, but the world insisted on treating me as though I were just another little girl with a tattoo on her shoulder, a reefer in her mouth, and a Virginia Woolf doll drowning each day in her basin. Walking into the lobby of the Chelsea hotel …
    

14. Theater review: ‘Ordinary Days’ at Serenbe Playhouse, Access Atlanta
    In “Ordinary Days,” aspiring artist Warren (Serenbe founder Brian Clowdus) finds a notebook that belongs to graduate student Deb (Laura Floyd) and contains all her thesis research on the English novelist Virginia Woolf. The pair meet in front of a …
15. A Wider View of Authorship: Eroticizing the Past, Bookslut
    Her narrative draws upon many texts, most readily Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic and Rainer Marina Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. The first part of the book, entitled “Journeys,” …
16. Four Economic Questions to Ponder, Minyanville.com
    … 2008 and (to a much lesser degree) in 2011 resemble the frail psyches of Cleopatra and Marc Antony, Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe, Ernest and Margaux Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Vincent van Gogh, Billie Holiday, Diane Arbus and Virginia Woolf. …
17. Battle of the sexes, The Hindu
    “I love authors like Virginia Woolf, Mahashweta Devi and Ismat Chughtai not because of their feminism but because of the frank portrayal of human nature which can put to shame any man worth his salt,” admits Payal Tewari. She adds that the diversity …
18. TODAY THE CELEBRATED AUTHOR CELEBRATES HIS BIRTHDAY, BASIT MALIK PROFILES …, GreaterKashmir.com (press release)
    Orhan Pamuk born this day (7th June, 1952) often calls himself an admirer of modern writers like Faulkner, Proust and Virginia Woolf. In his teens he sought painting but soon gave up the idea after winning a Novel Contest for his novel kakanlik ve Isik …
19. Hans P. Kraus Jr. to Exhibit Early British Masters of Photography at …, Art Daily
    Julia Margaret Cameron’s dramatic portrait, Stella – study of Mrs. Herbert Duckworth, an 1867 albumen print, depicts the timeless Victorian beauty who was Cameron’s niece and the mother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. The skies over prewar London …
20. Lost generation, Boston Globe
    Virginia Woolf, feeling faint on a wintry Berlin trip, needs to eat; she points to some pastry at a nearby table; Heinrich Mann, who is eating it, nods politely. Joseph Roth walks by. (Woolf, representing a different kind of contemporary shattering, …
21. The Other Mann, Wall Street Journal
    Amid so many germane references to writers sent abroad by the Nazis, the book includes dozens of passages about a writer who was not: Virginia Woolf. This tick is, at best, irrelevant; at worst, ludicrous. (She had nothing to do with Heinrich Mann or …
22. House of Exile by Evelyn Juers, The Independent
    Apart from the Mann brothers, the likes of BertoltBrecht, Sigmund Freud, Joseph Roth and Ernst Toller jostle for space with Virginia Woolf, whose struggle for life and art is threaded through the narrative. But it is Heinrich Mann who stands at the …
23. Naipaul reconciles with Theroux, then denigrates all women writers, Buffalo News (blog)
    Is Virginia Woolf the “equal” of James Joyce? Is Toni Morrison a better writer than Saul Bellow? Each us us can advance our respective arguments, but these are arguments about status and value, not about reading and writing as creative experiences in … Read Woolf vs. Joyce in the context of women’s history.
    
24. Offensive but VS Naipaul’s views also reflect the malady of a “mimic man”, Economic Times
    Virginia Woolf isn’t around to point out he’s, with due ill-will, inverting precisely what she said in A Room of One’s Own. Jane Austen too can’t make a character out of him, in her quiet, sharp way. But if she could, with her hinted-at knowledge of …
25. Naipaul is right in part about women novelists, Evening Standard
    And no, I’m afraid Virginia Woolf doesn’t do it. I adore (early) Muriel Spark and I’m prepared to hear it for Elizabeth Bowen, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Pym, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Edith Wharton and the back catalogue of Virago, but, pound for pound, …
26. uncommon reader, Calcutta Telegraph
    Trying to justify the merit of the novels of Virginia Woolf or the stories of Katherine Mansfield is as absurd as defending the works of James Joyce or DH Lawrence. Apparently, it does not take Mr Naipaul long to decide whether a book he is reading is …
27. Against Art in Politics, and Politics in Art, The Atlantic
    Much less from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, JD Salinger, Virginia Woolf, or the utterly appalling Percy Bysshe Shelley. So it doesn’t surprise me that Naipaul is kind of a jerk about women. Nor does it really bother me. …
28. First Lady of Fleet Street by Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren – review, The Guardian
    Beer was examined by the doctor who subsequently treated Virginia Woolf, and she seems to have fallen victim to a practice she had once described as the popular tendency for head doctors “to imprison those from whom they differ in opinion”. …
29. House of Tammam Debuts U.K.’s Only Ethical Ready-to-Wear Wedding Gowns, Ecouterre (blog)
    Founded by Lucy Tammam, who also serves as the label’s creative director, House of Tammam is based in London’s Bloomsbury district, where novelists such as Virginia Woolf and Mary Shelley lived just around the corner. Whereas Woolf and Shelley were …
30. Classics scholar turns his attention to 20th century author’s letters, Shetland Times Online
    He has published work on Virginia Woolf and Dorothy L Sayers, and now his edition of a collection of letters written by Rose Macaulay to her first cousin Jean Smith has been published under the title Dearest Jean. Macaulay was one of the most versatile …
31. Works by Ivy Ma on display tomorrow, 7thSpace Interactive (press release)
    Through this exhibition, visitors will be able to better appreciate scenes depicted in the classic films of Fei Mu, Yasujiro Ozu and Yoshimitsu Morita and the writing of Virginia Woolf from another perspective. The exhibition’s movie-related imagery …
32. More Than a Room of One’s Own, New York Times (blog)
    He goes on to explain that, in part, women fall short because they aren’t the boss at home. “She is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too.” Maybe Virginia Woolf should have asked for more real estate.
33. Charleston: the Bloomsbury Group’s favourite house, Telegraph.co.uk
    

    Charleston Farmhouse

    Virginia Woolf wandered its corridors, discussing philosophy with her sister Vanessa Bell. John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace in an upstairs bedroom. Duncan Grant – who lived here until his death in 1978 …

34. A Book For All and None, Oxford Times
    As is the way in Oxford, he knows Beatrice — a Virginia Woolf expert — by sight and by reputation. The progress of their affair is interwoven with details of Nietzsche’s involvement with Russian émigré Louise von Salome more than a century before. …
35. Professors prepare for new fall courses, K College Index
    Smith’s new class, Early Modern Women’s Literature, will look at the work of “Shakespeare’s sisters,” a phrase coined by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. In the work, Woolf laments “why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature,” the …
36. Modern Is Modern Is … New York Times
    … was in her late 20s and early 30s, she wrote her masterpiece, “The Making of Americans,” the first major modern experimental novel in English, predating by a decade the mature work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and offering an analog to Cubism. …
37. Femme- fiction unbound, Pasadena Weekly
    Mansfield left her native New Zealand for England to start her writing career, associating with notable literati like Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence before succumbing to tuberculosis in 1923 at age 34. Gilman wrote thousands of works and journalistic …
38. SFist Tonight, 6/2: ‘Resistance to the Indignities of Modern Life’ Art Show …, SFist
    … poem songs that narrate — with words, jazz, rock and roll, and electronica — a fantastical, salon-like dinner party populated by Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Bobby Fischer, Michael Jackson, Billie Holiday, Glenn Gould, and other dead …
39. Honing in on the Humanities, The Stanford Daily
    However, the guidance of his fellow, Heather Love, led him to a thesis on the transience of identity in Virginia Woolf’s Waves, which relates to her topic, the power of group stigmatization. “She recognized what I was interested in and pushed me in …
40. Movie Title: Dish: Women, Waitressing & The Art of Service (Until June 9 …, Uptown
    Waitressing, we see, may perfectly illustrate Virginia Woolf’s famous observation that men need women so they may feel superior to them. Of course, it goes deeper than that: it shows us that everyone seems to need to feel superior to someone.

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