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Archive for the ‘Woolf sightings’ Category

Woolf words that inspire dancing, dining

Posted in food, Woolf sightings, tagged , , , on Thursday 19 July 2012| 1 Comment »

Photo by Roberta Rubenstein

Virginia Woolf scholar Roberta Rubenstein offers this Woolf sighting and a photo to illustrate it: The London restaurant, Zizzi, 33 Charlotte Street, London, features a 12-foot wall mural of a couple dancing. Below them is this famous Woolf quote:

One cannot think well, sleep well, live well if one has not dined well.

Woolf’s assertion is one of several comments printed on paper napkins at the restaurant, which features excellent Italian food, according to Rubenstein.

The mural is likely a product of the restaurant’s “Fresh Talent” initiative, which commissions artists to produce their art inside the chain’s restaurants.

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Random sightings of Woolf in contemporary fiction

Posted in Alice Lowe, Virginia Woolf, Woolf in Contemporary Fiction, Woolf sightings, tagged , , , , , , , , on Wednesday 18 July 2012| Leave a Comment »

In addition to our regular Woolf sightings, we offer a number of references to “Woolf in Pop Culture” shared via the VWoolf Listserv.

Contributors include Keri Barber, Vara Neverow, Helen E. Southworth, Cheryl Hindrichs and Blogging Woolf’s very own Alice Lowe, who has been collecting references to Woolf in contemporary fiction for years — and has lived to write a monograph about it. Alice’s Beyond the Icon: Virginia Woolf in Contemporary Fiction is part of Cecil Woolf Publishers’ Bloomsbury Heritage Series.

  • Jane Gardam slips Woolf into her work. In her 2008 novel Faith Fox, a major character is Thomasina Fox. A confused woman refers to her as Thomasina Woolf, remarking that “She wrote The Waves, you know.” Woolf also appears as a glimpsed character in Crusoe’s Daughter and in Gardam’s stories “The Last Reunion” and “The People on Privilege Hill.”
  • Woolf shows up in Alison Bechdel‘s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? Reviews of the memoir often include this fact, as mentioned in numerous Woolf sightings.
  • Woolf makes a quick appearance in Gillian Flynn‘s new novel, Gone Girl. Here is the quote: “I will drink a giant ice-wet shaker of gin, and I will swallow sleeping pills, and when no one is looking, I’ll drop silently over the side [of the Mississippi], my pockets full of Virginia Woolf rocks. It requires discipline.”

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Woolf sightings: Now she’s shooting photos in New Zealand

Posted in Woolf online, Woolf sightings, tagged , , , , on Tuesday 17 July 2012| Leave a Comment »

Virginia Woolf is alive and well — and shooting photos in Fairfax, New Zealand. One Woolf sighting this week shows Woolf with a credit line for a photo illustrating the story “Locking lips for same-sex rights” on the Nelson Mail website. Read on for 13 additional sightings.
  1. Skye Book Festival, Stornoway Gazette
    The little-known fact that Virginia Woolf based her famous novel ‘To the Lighthouse’ on a lighthouse between Skye and Kyle of Lochalsh will be explored. The piping traditions of Skye will be discussed with author Bridget Mackenzie. And the festival ..
  2. Skye Book Festival to discuss author Virginia Woolf, BBC News
    Author Virginia Woolf’s associations with the Isle of Skye will be explored during the island’s book festival.
  3. Biographer Lisa Cohen makes ‘All We Know’ a thrilling look at three brilliant …, Plain Dealer (blog)
    Garland made it herself in 1930, expanding on Virginia Woolf’s observations the year before in “A Room of Her Own.” Both these women were fascinated by “how we wear what we wear,” Cohen notes, and Garland read Woolf shrewdly as “a venerated writer…
  4. Questioning US ‘Soft Power’, Khaleej Times
    In the early twentieth century the writer, Virginia Woolf of the Bloomsbury Group, one of the guiding spirits of London’s intellectuals, treated America with a mixture of disdain and disinterest. In 1931 a former viceroy of India complained to …
  5. Orlando Comes To Blu-Ray, Subtitledonline.com (press release)
    Orlando is based on Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name, remaining true to Woolf’s literary wit while streamlining the story into a cinematic tale and adding choice excerpts of poetry – as well as Othello’s dying soliloquy – underscoring Orlando’s ..
  6. Well schooled in Newlyn, This is Cornwall
    Her great grandmother Florence Pilcher, and her second husband artist Thomas Millie Dow, lived for a long time at Talland House, St Ives, which they took over from the Stephen family and where the author Virginia Woolf and the painter Vanessa Bell …

    St. Ives Bay

  7. Changing the Dialogue, Huffington Post
    As Virginia Woolf once famously said, “throughout history, anonymous was a woman.” So what is the difference between those women who have achieved significance and success and those who haven’t? There are several traits that these women possess …
  8. A Legend Reborn: Café Royal to Reopen This Fall, Elite Traveler Website
    Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor,Winston Churchill and Muhammad Ali were all patrons. Over the past four years, David Chipperfield Architects has restored and transformed the grandeur of the old Café Royal …
  9. ‘Elite’ has become a vicious five-letter word, Economic Times
    Alison Light’s 2007 book Mrs Woolf and the Servants: The Hidden Heart of Domestic Service posited an interesting theory – without servants to take care of quotidian concerns, Virginia Woolf may never have become a writer. To a large extent, this theory …
  10. The Mayors of Boston’s Bloomsbury group are Jewish!, Examiner.com
    The Bloomsbury Set, as it was also called, was an influence bunch of English writers, intellectuals, and artists. They included Virginia Woolf, V. Sackville-West, Mary McCarthy and others who influenced prevailing attitudes of the early and middle 20th…
  11. Nicole Kidman and Dustin Hoffman Latest Additions to Audible’s A-List Collection, Publishers Weekly (blog)
    Audible just added two new audiobooks – Nicole Kidman’s performance of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Dustin Hoffman’s performance of Being There by Jerzy Kosinsk — in its A-List Collection. As narrators for the A-List Collection, Kidman and …
  12. Artist Spotlight: Sally Whitwell, Autostraddle
    Among all this, Sally somehow found time to create her sophomore album, The Good, The Bad and The Awkward — a three-second record that pays tribute to her most loved cinematic characters such as Anne Frank, Virginia Woolf and Amélie, those she …
  13. Florence Welch says she has ‘massive girl crush’ on MIA, Electric Banana
    Discussing her inspirations to the magazine, she said: “I like the idea of being likeVirginia Woolf; in the old photos she looks very beautiful to me. I’ve always …

    Florence And the Machine

     

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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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Woolf sightings: Missing Clarissa Day

Posted in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf online, Woolf sightings, tagged on Saturday 23 June 2012| Leave a Comment »

Even though Woolfians declared June 21 Clarissa Day, this week’s crop of Woolf sightings include no media mentions of that first-time event.
Instead, my daily Google alerts were swamped with links to stories mentioning the Edward Albee play, all of which — as always — I have omitted from my listing. What’s left are just 30 sightings, despite the fact that it has been more than two weeks since I posted the last Woolf sighting, Riches include Woolf and the Jubilee of her time.
  1. The Many Sides of Jack Dorsey, Wired News (blog)
    Press briefings transform into critiques of Virginia Woolf novels. A comment about Dorsey’s game-changing startup, Square—which lets anyone accept credit …
  2. An Introductory Feminist Reading List, ThinkProgress
    A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf: Woolf is arguing for educational access and economic independence as necessary preconditions for women who want to …
  3. ‘Marsales’ has fallen off the anglo map, Montreal Gazette
    Long-limbed and sharp-nosed, she looked like an older version of Virginia Woolf. Joan loved art, history and nature – her walls were filled with Victorian ..
  4. The changing face of cosmetic surgery, Sydney Morning Herald
    ”Virginia Woolf wrote all her books standing up. … eyes are wide and bright and your forehead is raised in astonishment: ”but why didn’t Virginia’s feet get sore?
  5. Joydeep Roy-Bhattachara’s ‘The Watch’ recasts ‘Antigone’ in …, Buffalo News (blog)
    … internationally-heralded new novel “The Watch” published by Hogarth Press–the venerable literary press founded in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf–that …
  6. Sophie wins prestigious writing prize, Bromsgrove Advertiser
    The prize is run by Newnham College in Cambridge in honour of the writer Virginia Woolf, one of the college’s most famous alumni. It is designed to give …
  7. Grosvenor Square, Tavistock Square: Odes to Political Correctness, American Thinker
    If hard copies of the papers and theses churned out annually on Virginia Woolf could float and were laid end to end, you could walk from Greenwich Village to …
  8. Theatre: Plough Plays, Varsity Online
    Strolling into the favourite village of Richard Brooke and Virginia Woolf, we are greeted with the magical sight of what seems to be a congregation of …
  9. Rainy tales, Daily News & Analysis
    My favourite monsoon read is To The Light House by Virginia Woolf.The stream of consciousness technique incorporated makes it very dreamy and surreal.
  10. Shakespeare’s Sister Presents Summer Play Reading Series, 6/18-8 …, Broadway World
    Beth’s play has premiered in Europe and we’re excited to share the story of Virginia Woolf and her sister with American audiences. Finally, we’ll end the evening …
  11. Doing up your study your way, Times of India
    No, not the kind that Virginia Woolf had referred to but a small, quiet room where you can spend some time with your favourite books away from the madness of …
  12. Alison Bechdel III (The Bat Segundo Show), Reluctant Habits
    Subjects Discussed: Attempting to ratiocinate on four hours of sleep, Virginia Woolf’s diary entries, Virginia Woolf’s photography, To the Lighthouse as surrogate …
  13. 24-hour intellectual capital, Times Higher Education
    … said the title of the festival had been inspired by his own research on novels such as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway – both of which …
  14. Famous Writers’ Retreats: The Rooms Where Classics Were Created, Huffington Post UK

    The Lodge, as shown on Huff Post U

    It’s surrounded by the world-famous, romantic garden and was where Vita Sackville-West (close friend of Virginia Woolf) did most of her writing. IMAGE: National Trust John Hammond Hidden at the bottom of Irish playwright Shaw’s garden was a rotating …

  15. Paris’ Village Voice Is Closing Huffington Post (blog)
    It is full of character: its eclectic collection includes not only the latest English novels, but also such relatively esoteric perennials as John Mepham’s Virginia Woolf, Michael Gray’s Song and Dance Man, and the wonderful mysteries of Fred Vargas.
  16. The Sound of a Sentence, New York Times (blog)
    What do you notice about the relationship between music and meaning in this passage, from Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”? …the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts ..
  17. Fear no more the heat of the sun, Calcutta Telegraph
    Consider Mrs Dalloway walking the streets of London on a Wednesday in June, 1923, in that eponymous novel by Virginia Woolf. The sights and sounds of London swirled around her as she went out to buy flowers for her party. Yet her mind tunnelled to the…
  18. Is literature elitist? Of course it is, Daily News & Analysis
    Virginia Woolf recognised this ages before any of us when she said, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Q: What’s the worst thing anyone has ever said about you? A: A review of Ancient Promises, which gleefully …
  19. Hay Festival 2012: Street style, Telegraph.co.uk
    Virginia Woolf introduced us to Orlando, one of the world’s more elegant cross-dressers. Hemingway gave us Brett, “damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s.
  20. Antigonick by Anne Carson – review, The Guardian
    Carson, a poet influenced by authors as diverse as Sappho, Euripides, Emily Brontë, Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, is known both for innovative translations of ancient texts and for her restrained but searing confessional poetry (try “The Glass …
  21. ‘The Chaperone,’ by Laura Moriarty, New York Times
    Familiar as this seems — staid Midwestern matron confronts permissive urban world, ineffable longings stir — Moriarty’s plot appears at first to provide an opportunity for exploring what happens when, as Virginia Woolf put it, “Chloe likes Olivia …
  22. Today’s Page: June 8th, Iran Book News Agency
    She translated Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves” over a 10-month period in 1937. In 1951 she published, in France, the novel “Memoires d’Hadrien”, which she had been writing with pauses for a decade. The novel was an immediate success and met with great …
  23. Herstory Spotlight: Vita Sackville-West Wrote Words, Wooed Women, WantedWoolf, Autostraddle
    The Way We Were Spotlight: Vita Sackville-West, by Sawyer Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Virginia Woolf. That ought to be about 99% of you feministas. Now keep your hand raised if you’ve heard of Orlando, the novel she wrote about her lesbian lover …
  24. Hat Fair fun, Daily Echo
    Meanwhile ShadyJane’s Edinburgh Fringe hit show of 2011, Sailing On, comes to a local ladies toilet near you for an evening in the company of Ophelia and Virginia Woolf (tickets from Theatre Royal Winchester). Dutch company Close Act will bring a new …
  25. Tahmima Anam on complicated literary heroines, Telegraph.co.uk
    Fragile, sexually ambiguous, and with her heart in the past, Mrs Dalloway (1925) is an ephemeral presence in Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. Yet she sparkles with life, prompting her old lover to note her presence, simply and repeatedly: “there she was”.
  26. One Last Day at BEA: Jimmy Fallon, Kirstie Alley, and More Jokes About Fifty …, Vulture
    If her last novel, On Beauty, was an homage to EM Forster, this one owes a debt to Virginia Woolf. And it redeems a history of writing books that she feels didn’t turn out quite right. “I’ve never really been able to get the book on the page that I had …
  27. Like the chevalier, we are all cross-dressers now, Evening Standard
    Like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, he spent the first half of his life a man, the second as a woman. Once a stooge of Louis XV in his personal secret police, he was later part of the French mission to the court of the Empress Elizabeth of Russia.
  28. Summer of love stories, Chico News & Review
    Bechdel is a literary wonder, effortlessly weaving together strands like the history of psychoanalysis, the novels of Virginia Woolf, mother-daughter rivalry and her personal love trials, with a mixture of self-effacement and wit that never rings false …
  29. Elizabeth Bowen in European modernism and the awakening of Irish consciousness, OUPblog (blog)
    Although undeservedly neglected, her writings have a central place in the emergence of European modernism, alongside those of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and TS Eliot. The Heat of the Day (1949) remains one of the most powerful fictional renderings of …
  30. Meet the Staff at Highbrow Magazine: Q&A With Writer Mike Mariani, Highbrow Magazine
    Authors: Vladimir Nabokov, JD Salinger, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Marilynne Robinson, Annie Dillard, Hunter S. Thompson, Lewis Carroll, it goes on. Artists (filmmakers): Terrence Malick, Henry Selick, Quentin Tarantino, ..

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