Blogging Woolf

This week in Woolf sightings: another helping of Virginia Woolf’s Tears (#19), Woolf on stage from Louisiana to Portsmouth, and A Room of One’s Own as an edible tableau (#39).

Oh, and you can listen to a BBC broadcast on Writing Madness (#24) that includes a discussion of Mrs. Dalloway, complete with sound effects. After all, it is radio.

1. Walk from Knole to Emmetts Garden and back, BBC News
   Once at the centre of court life, Knole was the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and contains extraordinary furniture from royal palaces, alongside supurb portraits, textiles and silver.Show less… Knole, one of our most important and complete …
2. The March of Women … In Music, The NextWomen Business Magazine
   That remains the single most famous observation about this “lady composer” who dressed in tweeds, smoked cigars and fell in love with Virginia Woolf..such eccentricities show why she hasn’t become a usable female-composer to help promote role models …
3. “The Force of Sensation”: Keats and Constable on Hampstead Heath, Town Topics
   … arrived conveniently in accord with this Anglophile’s ongoing Charles Dickens bicentenary tribute to England featuring, so far, PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, Cary Grant’s Bristol, Virginia Woolf’s Dorothy Wordsworth, and George Gissing’s Dickens.
4. Mr. Kent’s Tulip, March 21: Gardens are going crazy, Toronto Star
   We will leave Virginia Woolf for another day. The blooms in the White Garden: white peonies; white pansies; white tulips; white cosmos; white hollyhocks. The greens and the grays play an essential supporting role — southernwood and artemesia and …
5. Authors rock Chicago’s Metro with Story Week, RedEye Chicago (blog)
   PM: There’s a whole lot of beauty in our Story Week colleague Christine Sneed’s “Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry.” And you can’t really go wrong by going back in time and reading “Mrs. Dalloway,” by Virginia Woolf. Just sayin’.
6. Author Interview: Catherine Chung of Forgotten Country, Color Magazine
   So they publish people like Virginia Woolf and Zdena Berger; they published Ruth Stone before she got the National Book Critics Circle Award. There are so many voices – whether they are the voices of women or coming from marginalized communities – that …
7. ‘Wolf Won’t Bite!’ and ‘Virginia Wolf’, New York Times
   Operating on a much deeper and darker level, “Virginia Wolf,” an ambitious story about girlish blues, sisterly differences and the healing power of art, will do wonders for Woolf-besotted former English majors. But the story, about Virginia and her …
8. Gabrielle’s Bells: Oh, Gastronomy! Humana Festival play 4, WHAS 11.com (subscription)
   And as the great Virginia Woolf once said, “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” You can catch this show along with the other Humana Festivals at Actor’s Theatre now through the end of March.
9. An afternoon of delights, This is Leicestershire
   Well Amen to that, Virginia Woolf, because last Thursday I was focused at work, romantic with my boyfriend, and managed a full, undisturbed eight hours kip later that night. To codify, I’d had lunch at Hambleton Hall. The boyfriend came along too – and …
10. Spotlight: Stage listings, Seacoastonline.com
    MARCH 28 | A Room of One’s Own, 7 pm, Local actress, Alexandra Borrie honors Women’s History Month with a performance of excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s, A Room of One’s Own, Levenson Room, Portsmouth Public Library, 175 Parrott Ave., Portsmouth.
11. Psychosis Diagnosis Could Mean Jason Russell Is a Genius (VIDEO), The Stir
    Isaac Newton, for example, is believed to have suffered from manic depression, as did Ludwig van Beethoven, Vincent Van Gogh, Michelangelo and Virginia Woolf. Of Winston Churchill’s bipolar disorder, author Anthony Storr wrote: “Had he been a stable …
12. Virginia Woolf, Mail Tribune
    Jeannine Grizzard is Virginia Woolf in Ashland Contemporary Theatre’s production of “A Room of One’s Own.” A landmark feminist lecture and essay by Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own,” will be presented this …
13. Readers’ Favorite Mini-Narratives, New York Times (blog)
    A few sentences readers mentioned — from Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” and Gabriel García Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” — were on my short list for this essay or another in the series.
14. Beacon of promise, Sydney Morning Herald
    FROM Virginia Woolf to Colm Toibin, the lighthouse has been a source of myth-making in literature. The structure has stood for sanctuary, the edge of knowledge and reason. Its beam of white brilliance slashes inky black nights, thick sea mists and …]
15. “The Dressmaker,” by Kate Alcott, Washington Post
    Which brings up an interesting aspect of “making history,” particularly the kind that Virginia Woolf used to talk about: the flocks of girls with bits of sewing in their laps, chattering about men, defining them, often by bursts of rude laughter.
16. The originality of the species, The Guardian
    And he and modernists like Virginia Woolf found new means of representing the flow of consciousness that now are common, even in children’s books. But Richardson, Austen, Joyce and Woolf were inheritors in their turn. They sat on the shoulders of …
17. Sleep deprivation bad for health, success, Edmond Sun
    Virginia Woolf referred to sleep as “… that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.” High profile shakers and movers like Bill Clinton, Condoleezza Rice and Margaret Thatcher were said to operate at high levels of efficiency on remarkably little …
18. The slacker is back – and this time she’s female, The Guardian
    In A Room Of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes (and if Woolf sanctions it, it must be OK): “It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether it’s in a room of one’s own, …
19. Eating your way to happiness in the Philippines, BBC News
    Virginia Woolf’s Tears, aimed at staving off depression, is a turkey soup with cabbage and green apples. The customers certainly seemed to be embracing the happiness vibe. Mitch and his girlfriend Jeti had just finished a stressful work week, …
20. Alain de Botton: ‘My father was physically quite violent… he would destroy …, The Independent
    Virginia Woolf. We never discussed those writers. But it was a way of connecting with him.” “And your own books?” “Were attempts at connecting with him.” “So anyhow, what parts of the house did he trash?” “Mostly doors. He was very anxious all the time …
21. A WRITER SPEAKS OUT, The Register-Guard
    She also said that she went six or seven years before any of her submissions were accepted, that she often returns to classic authors Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf, that she has a certain distaste for literary awards and that both e-books and …
22. In My Shoes: In my grandmother’s shoes, Richmond Times Dispatch
    The picture of my birth grandmother portrays an image strongly reminiscent of portraits of the writer Virginia Woolf: a broad-brimmed straw hat perched on her head with masses of light-brown hair spilling out from under it, a faint Mona Lisa smile on …
23. Portsmouth area community calendar, Seacoastonline.com
    The cost is $10. www.eyeofthehawk.org. Local actress Alexandra Borrie: honors Women’s History Month with a performance of excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s, “A Room of One’s Own,” at 7 pm, Wednesday, March 28, at Portsmouth Public Library, …
24. Writing Madness, Radio Times
    She analyses the heroines of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway and F Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, and considers both authors’ views on the connection between `madness’ and creativity. She also considers how the books reflect the growing …
25. Authors in LA: Parenting lessons from Anne Lamott and more, Los Angeles Times (blog)
    3/29: 7:30 pm Hermione Lee, president of Wolfson College, Oxford, and prize-winning biographer of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, presents a lecture on the art of biography “From Memory: Literary Encounters and Life Stories” at the Huntington Library …
26. Reviews of new pop, country/ roots, jazz and classical releases, Bellingham Herald
    Lyrics include quotes from Frank O’Hara and Virginia Woolf, and stylistically, Holter occasionally echoes Laurie Anderson and, more obscurely, Stina Nordenstam. But ultimately, “Ekstasis” is fascinating, complex and unique. Via either his much-touted …
27. Virginia Woolf Visits the Daily Mail, New Yorker (blog)
    Given that long-established editorial stance, the Mail would seem to be an unlikely venue for members of the Bloomsbury Group, the cluster of writers and intellectuals that included John Maynard Keynes, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey, and Virginia Woolf …
28. Nights Out by Judith R Walkowitz: review, Telegraph.co.uk
    By Judith Flanders In her fiction, Virginia Woolf transformed Soho into a menacing urban space filled with “fierce” light and “raw” voices, even as she privately commended herself for driving a good bargain on some silk stockings “(flawed slightly)” at …
29. On This Day in History, The Province
    Died on this day: Author Virginia Woolf (1941), 34th US president Dwight D Eisenhower (1969) and Olympic gold medalist Jesse Owens (1980). To order reprints of these or other archival photos, go to http://www.sunprovince.com/reprints.
30. Breaking the Silence…, About.com Guide
    Virginia Woolf killed herself on March 28, 1941. She is one of the most important women writers in English literature, famous for works like A Room of One’s Own, Mrs. Dalloway, and many other novels, …
31. Milton Earth Day Festival, NorthFulton.com
    1941: English novelist Virginia Woolf throws herself into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex. Her body is never found. 1942: A British ship, the HMS Capbeltown, a Lend-Lease American destroyer, which was specifically rammed into a German occupied …
32. Perfect Double Bill: “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” and “A Thousand Clowns”, Salon
    Daldry was also the auteur behind the best ever performance by a fake nose, in a film that made me VERY afraid of Virginia Woolf, “The Hours.” And to finish off this recipe of indigestible worthiness, meet the cast. To quote the immortal (I wish.
33. Around Acadiana for March 27, 2012, The Advocate
    Written by Cody Daigle and directed by Alicia Chaisson, the play was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” and imagines Shakespeare’s sister as equally talented and ambitious as her brother. The dress rehearsal from 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm …
34. Hollywood’s Lady All-Stars, Grantland
    It took me 20 years before I got the Virginia Woolf reference in the title. Released ahead of the 50th anniversary of pro baseball played by women, A League of Their Own doubles back from a star catcher who reluctantly attends the induction of the …
35. Bechdel looks at her mom, Abrams packages the Garbage Pail Kids, and Corman’s …, The Phoenix
    But the book is also preoccupied with other matters: a life history of the pioneering child psychiatrist Donald Winnicott; a close reading of Virginia Woolf’s letters and her novel To the Lighthouse; Bechdel’s own long foray into psychoanalysis, …
36. Eat this book, City Pulse
    At MSU’s contest last year, Dorothy Brooks of East Lansing created an edible tableau out of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.” She built a small library by arranging Allsorts licorice squares (they look like little books) on graham-cracker shelves …
37. The Triumph of ‘Craigslist Mom’ Rebecca Land Soodak, New York Observer
    For Ms. Land Soodak, outsourcing the minutiae of modern childrearing is a privilege with feminist implications, a way to stake out not just a room of one’s own (like the Virginia Woolf essay young Kara studies in the novel), but also the mental space …
38. Wordsmiths waiting in the wings, Cambridge News
    “There will also be a celebration of the life of Angela Carter, author of The Bloody Chamber, 20 years after her untimely death, a look back at the story of the Titanic 100 years to the day after she sank, and a chance to get up-close to Virginia Woolf …

Read Full Post »