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Woolf sightings: At Penshurst, in the canon, in the loo

Posted in play, Vita Sackville-West, Woolf online, Woolf sightings, tagged , , , on Monday 22 August 2011| 1 Comment »

Penshurst Place

One of today’s Woolf sightings — #10 — claims that Penshurst Place and Gardens inspired Virginia Woolf. I wondered how.

So I explored the location’s literary links Web page and learned that Woolf visited the property with Vita Sackville-West, who was then living 22 miles away at Sissinghurst Castle and Gardens. Woolf later shared her personal impressions of the nearly deserted house and garden in a 1940 diary entry, specifically mentioning “the ‘shell of lady Pembroke’s lute – like half a fig’.”

In other news, Woolf is sighted in the literary canon. Edinburgh publisher Canongate’s canon, that is. Canongate is repackaging some of its titles in a new series called The Canon. Included among the 2012 titles is Woolf’s Orlando, with an introduction by Tilda Swinton. See #9.

And finally, Woolf has been sighted on stage in the ladies’ loo, along with Shakespeare’s Ophelia, in a production called Sailing On. Get the details in #12 and on the Events page.

  1. Eau Claire writer discovers iimportance of rediscovering self, Leader-Telegram
    However, the next time I make travel plans, I’ll remember the famous essay by the English author,Virginia Woolf, and request “A Room of One’s Own.” Tzetzo Gosch is a freelance writer in Eau Claire.
  2. All Made Up by Janice Galloway – review, The Guardian
    For Virginia Woolf, “life writing” seems to have meant biography, but the phrase has expanded since her time to include a wide range of what Galloway refers to in All Made Up as “putative non-fiction”, including memoirs and diaries. …
  3. Edith Sitwell: Avant Garde Poet, English Genius, Richard Greene, Virago, Pp …, Organiser
    Born in a privileged family in England, she counted as friends the likes of WB Yeats, TS Eliot,Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. Graham Greene was one of her ‘followers.’ A new biography on her, thirty years after the last one was published and 45 …
  4. Callahan’s ‘Consummation of Dirk’ wins Starcherone Prize, Buffalo News (blog)
    The gifted child contemplating murder, the husband drowning in melancholy, the pro basketball athlete finding his road to Damascus all emerge from adept torrents of words that bear comparison with Virginia Woolf and David Foster Wallace,” wrote Mason …
  5. A Room of Miss Mozart’s Own, Cinespect
    In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf uses the extended metaphor of “Shakespeare’s sister” to describe the hardships faced by artistically brilliant women whose opportunities are stifled and curtailed when compared to men with similar talents. …
  6. Too much grief, The Guardian
    When, in Jacob’s Room, the grieving widow Betty Flanders sits on the beach and writes a letter, Virginia Woolf gives us her tears thus: “The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast of Mr Connor’s yacht was …
  7. Joan Bakewell prepares to solve the world’s problems, Telegraph.co.uk
    They range from The Ego Trick by philosophy’s most waspish thinker, Julian Baggini, to a lingeringly lyrical account of walking the length of the Ouse River – haunted by the shade of Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in its waters. …
  8. Grim Reader, Aug. 19, 2011: Jani Lane, Sophie Gurney and Howard Paster, Obit-Mag.com
    The artist Sophie Gurney’s mom was Charles Darwin’s granddaughter and an artist herself; their circle included the likes of Virginia Woolf. A Telegraph obit says these things “shaped Sophie Gurney’s unusual childhood.” Well, yeah. …
  9. Canongate to launch The Canons, The Bookseller
    Among the 2012 titles are Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (introduced by Tilda Swinton), Richard Brautigan’s Sombrero Fallout (introduced by Jarvis Cocker) and The Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova (selected and introduced by Jo Shapcott).
  10. Island says goodbye to its gardener, Guernsey Press and Star (subscription)
    It has inspired such literary luminaries as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Virginia Woolf. James will be assisting the head gardener in the design and care of more than 51 acres of gardens. ‘I was at Writtle College from 2003 to …
  11. One Minute With: Alison Pick, novelist and poet, The Independent
    This changes on a dime, but today I’ll say Virginia Woolf for her range, her nuance, her nostalgia, her sensuality. It’s a tiny little bedroom in my home in Toronto. When we bought it, we were told it was a bedroom but we couldn’t fit a bed into it. …
  12. Sailing On, The Skinny
    Eventually the women introduce themselves, and we realise we are actually lucky to be in the presence of two female icons,

    Meeting in the ladies loo in "Sailing On"

    Virginia Woolf and Ophelia – both missing, presumed drowned. Together they explain their mission to help a frequent visitor, …

  13. CORNELL PLANTATIONS FALL LECTURE SERIES LINEUP, GardenNews.biz (press release)
    Vita Sackville-West, a prolific poet, novelist, and memoirist, considered herself foremost a writer, but her enduring reputation rests on the imprint of her provocative personality on the life and writing of Virginia Woolf, and on her stirring …
  14. Darwin the Writer, By George Levine, The Independent
    What’s more, Levine highlights his effect upon later work, with close analysis of Hardy’s The Woodlanders and an adroit glance at Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall”. There is also a persuasive take on Wildean paradoxes, and, brilliantly, …
  15. Dinner in vineyards for a good cause, Santa Rosa Press Democrat
    The outdoor pizza oven will be working hard and, for dessert, JJ Wilson, retired SSU professor of English and renowned Virginia Woolf scholar, will prepare honeydew melon drenched in absinthe and topped with a chiffonade of mint. As of press time, …
  16. 1965 Impala Hell Project, Part 9: Fastening Shoulder Belts, Bailing From Academia, Truth About Cars
    Accelerating this realization was the fact that I had been taken under the wing of the angry, sociopathic professor of feminist literature who had poisoned her relationships with academics on several continents (I was heavy into Virginia Woolf at the …
  17. Hollywood beauties go Plain Jane for roles, msnbc.com
    To play real-life literary figure Virginia Woolf, Kidman wore a prosthetic nose and dark brown hair. Not much change by some measures, but the effect was one of transformation, allowing Kidman to get lost in Woolf’s sudden presence, and win the best …
  18. Back to School The Backup Plan, Salt Lake City Weekly
    I like art history, I like film, I like Virginia Woolf (OK, I love her. Don’t hate), but do I love them enough to spend $50000 on them? Thus, therefore, ergo, in conclusion, there isn’ta backup plan; there never was a backup plan. …
  19. Would Alan Moore’s ‘1969’ work without Wikipedia?, Creative Loafing Atlanta (blog)
    Now partnered with Virginia Woolf’s immortal Orlando, a similarly ageless Mina and Allan return to Swinging London to solve a mystery involving Oliver Haddo, a satanist they thwarted back in 1910, but has managed to remain alive. …
  20. Canberra Conversations: Thomas Keneally, ABC Online
    “He’d have music evenings and he took the honours English boys down the back of the room, opened a cupboard and there was all the good stuff: Graeme Greene, Evelyn Waugh, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and that’s when I felt the world expand greatly, …
  21. Sophie Gurney, Telegraph.co.uk
    Her mother, Gwen Raverat, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, was the leading woodcut artist of her time, and her close friends included Virginia Woolf, Rupert Brooke, André Gide and Stanley Spencer. This milieu, combined with the influence of the …
  22. Literary Criticism and Generics of the Text published, Iran Book News Agency
    The book consists of chapters “Virginia Woolf’s Room”, “TS Eliot’s Literary Dictatorship”, “Types of Literary Criticism”, “Classic Novel and New Novel”, “Meaning and Visual Artistic Significance”, “Literature and Philosophy”, “Understanding Myths”, …

    "Literary Criticism and Generics of the Text" by Iranian author Abdol-Ali Dastgheib

  23. @EmeliSande chats to MSN’s @TinieTinah (part 2), MSN Music UK (blog)
    On my left arm I have ‘A Room of One’s Own’ which is a Virginia Woolf book that I love. And on the back of my neck I have ‘Did our last castle look like this?’ which came from thinking past lives, people you’ve created with before and stuff like that. …
  24. Woman battles bipolar to publish ghost story, Birmingham Mail
    The winner will be announced at a ceremony at Charleston House, East Sussex, the former home of author Virginia Woolf. Jan is now planning to run a series of writing workshops aiming to encourage other women into print. And she is being supported in …
  25. When fiction becomes a work of art, Sydney Morning Herald
    Bell designed a number for books by her sister, Virginia Woolf, and her whimsically abstract style became emblematic of Woolf’s publishing house, Hogarth Press. In some of the great covers of that period, you can see cubism and expressionism at work. …
  26. Friday, August 26, eTaiwan News
    … Julio Cortazar, Argentinian writer (1914-1984); Branford Marsalis, US jazz musician (1960–); Macaulay Culkin, US actor (1980–). Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded _ Virginia Woolf, English author and critic (1882-1941).
  27. A space of your own, Malaysia Star
    The experience of restricted physical space led me to re-read Virginia Woolf’s seminal lecture, A Room Of One’s Own. In 1928, when Woolf was asked to speak about women and fiction to an audience at Girton College, Cambridge, she decided to seek the …
  28. Edith Wharton: Sex, Satire and the Older Woman, By Avril Horner and Janet Beer, The Independent
    And in respect of female consciousness, the authors argue, she has much in common with Virginia Woolf. Like Woolf, Wharton can be placed at the end of a long European lineage that includes George Eliot. “The supposedly reactionary values implicit in …
  29. `The Help’ is middlebrow? So be it. Count me in., Los Angeles Times
    Virginia Woolf defined the middlebrow reader as “betwixt and between,” devoted not to art for its own sake but to “money, fame, power, or prestige.” In other words, the middlebrow is not quite as smart as the true highbrow and not as spirited as the …
  30. For Love of the Game, New Yorker (blog)
    In her essay “How Should One Read a Book,” Virginia Woolf furnishes some magnificent advice: Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and …
  31. Carnegie Mellon’s Miller Gallery Opens New Section of Pittsburgh Biennial, PR Newswire (press release)
    Inspired by modernist writer Virginia Woolf’s antidote to the war-mentality brewed in boardrooms and command centers, subRosa re-envisions lab workbenches as a series of small tables for more intimate and conversational “tea-table thinking. …
  32. Never mind the looters, what about the ‘fascists’?, Spiked
    Using words that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Virginia Woolf’s diaries on one of her off-days, one radical journalist claimed that ‘in Enfield a mob of white men swarmed through the streets chanting “England”’. Chanting ‘England’? …

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Woolf sightings: She’s an inspiration, not a dried out burger, buddy

Posted in Woolf online, Woolf sightings, tagged on Tuesday 19 July 2011| Leave a Comment »

The Light Within (for Virginia Woolf)

I am not suprised when Virginia Woolf inspires dance, drama, art and music. And I approve when her work appears on lists of must-read books.

But when Slovenian writer Slavoj Žižek speculates that a burger created in her honor would be “dried out, topped with parsley, totally overrated,” the description does not match my view of the author, and my dander is up.

See #11 below for the latter reference, which is ostensibly about the former Virginia Woolf Burger bar at the Hotel Russell in Bloomsbury. It apparently no longer exists. But do note that a cow was created in Woolf’s honor for the 2009 Boston Cow Parade.

  1. A pretender to Capote’s throne?, Sydney Morning Herald
    She’s well read, not some ingenue looking for the next party: not for her and pal Eve the novels of Virginia Woolf; their tastes are more muscular. Katey reads Hemingway novels from
    anywhere but the beginning, so ”bit characters [stand] on equal …
  2. Fear And Loathing The Dog Days Of Sports Summer, SportsFanLive
    As much as I appreciate Henry Miller, Raymond Chandler, Rex Stout, Virginia Woolf, Ring Lardner, John Fante, Charles Bukowski and many others, I have to credit the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson for the best ever opening line of a book in the 20th Century …
  3. New restaurants opening in Amherst, others moving to bigger spaces, MassLive.com
    “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,” the British writer Virginia Woolf once said. Amherst restaurant operators are hoping to help people think. The restaurant scene here is evolving this summer, …
  4. Barfly: Who s afraid of a hip, hot happy hour?, Marin Independent-Journal
    “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,” wrote Virginia Woolf. It was in this spirit that I ventured out, looking to think, sleep and if I was lucky, to love better — or at least a little more often. …
  5. QFEST 2011: Reviews From Philadelphia’s Annual LGBT Film Fest, Cherry Grrl
    Even with the temporal breakages, the narrative flows smoothly, with pieces of the protagonists’ lives all intersecting finely, as in a Virginia Woolf novel. Perhaps it is Kay who says it best at the film’s denouement; it is up to the individual to …
  6. Novel Marriage — Art and Books at El Cerrito Library, Patch.com
    Britton was actually thinking about a book she had read, Stephanie Barron’s, The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf, when she created her contribution to the show, a watercolor called “Narcissus.” Several examples of the art can be seen in the …
  7. Shakespeare at the spa, Minneapolis Star Tribune
    And I have spent an afternoon in St. Ives, staring as the sun set behind Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse, still looking as transcendental as ever, as the beacon seemed to burst into golden flames in the middle of the sea. …
  8. The Blagger’s Guide To…Greatest holiday reads ever, The Independent
    Try, for example, Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang in Tuscany, or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway on a Greek Island. Or read Høeg’s delicious, icy-cool, 1992 Scandinavian detective story while sunbathing on a Caribbean beach. …
  9. Opening credits, Telegraph-Journal (registration)
    The Nicest Place In England, about Virginia Woolf, was staged as a one-act for NotaBle Acts. This year, he was commissioned to write a short, site-specific work. Staged at School Days Museum in Fredericton, where Lynch works, the play is about the …
  10. In praise of … an isle of one’s own., Herald Scotland
    A WOMAN must have money and an isle of one’s own if she is to remain sane, as Virginia Woolf almost wrote. There’s something undeniably romantic about owning your own island and now the dream is within reach, as long as you don’t have your sights set …
  11. A life in writing: Slavoj Žižek, The Guardian
    He is disappointed, he tells me parenthetically, that we didn’t do the interview in the hotel’s adjacent Virginia Woolf burger bar. “What would the Virginia Woolf burger be like?” he asks. “Dried out, topped with parsley, totally overrated. …
  12. Dance Events Announced For TNC’s Dream Up Festival, Broadway World
    He devised and performed his First Season (2009/2010) : “Solo For Three Visions” (Visions of Peter Hanke, Samuel Beckett & Virginia Woolf) to high critical acclaim, bringing him a nomination for the most prestigious state award in choreography …
  13. Pioneering Author, World Traveler Returned to Albuquerque, Middle East North Africa Financial Network
    In 1969, she began to spend more time back in Albuquerque, where she began teaching about writing, Virginia Woolf, of whom she wrote a critically acclaimed work, and a class of her own design called “The Creative Imagination.” Jeanne Shannon, a friend …
  14. The best summer reads – and where to read them, The Guardian
    And if you are traveling through several locations yourself, then The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford, The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf.
  15. Using this disparaging term dismisses author’s vision, The Virginian-Pilot
    It ran on for pages, with works by authors like Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, Doris Lessing, George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, DH Lawrence, Jane Austen. Deep in that list was a novel, published in 1852, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. “’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin’? …
  16. Sometimes good men do bad things… to good women, ABC Online
    What, as Virginia Woolf once wrote, of Shakespeare’s sister? What if Virginia Woolf had not killed herself? What if Billie Holiday had not died at the age of 44 with a pitiful 70 cents in her bank account, having been swindled out of her earnings? …
  17. Druthers dilemma dogs Fraser and Nicholls, ABC Online
    Policies are like the novels of Virginia Woolf or Henry James – they’re worthy tomes, but how many people these days actually read them? They need to be written, and someone has to read them, but really and truly they don’t often get read from cover to …
  18. Delve into the creation of Stuart Little at the Little Theater, Examiner.com
    Our director for Little Book had his adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts given a staged reading by Book-It, so he’s our strong connection. Our work is not as full of third person narration as Book-It, nor do we focus exclusively on adapting …
  19. The Origin of the (Book as a) Work of Art, New York Observer
    The inspiration for the series was described as “the early works of Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, The Yellow Book magazine, and the early days of The New Yorker.” A suitably nostalgized party therefore had to be thrown to celebrate the book, …
  20. Patti Smith Previews Photographs at Robert Miller Gallery, New York Observer
    On the walls were images of Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers, the river Ouse where Virginia Woolf took her life, the grave of Susan Sontag, a life mask of William Blake. Ms. Smith paced quickly around the room, sometimes making eye contact, …
  21. Prague Summer Program, Prague Post
    … citing Ema Katrovas’ recital of songs inspired by the literature of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, among others, and Miloš Čuřík’s lecture on Czech alternative music during the normalization period as highlights of this year’s program. …
  22. Unique look at artists’ homes, yourhome.ca
    But Vanessa Bell’s house — of the Bloomsbury Group and sister to Virginia Woolf —
    is so chaotic as to be endearing. You can picture her running after a child one moment and picking up a paintbrush the next. Each home entry provides a biography of the …
  23. Katie Mitchell: I try to write about real people in real time in real places, Metro
    Sometimes it can reap rewards – as with her brilliant Iphigenia At Aulis, which luminously betrayed a microscopic attention to psychological detail – or her free, revelatory, mixed-media adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. …
  24. In the age of Simpsons PhDs, enough with the cultural snobbery, Globe and Mail
    … taste – categories of culture, with poetry at one end and pornography at the other – and stops with an embarrassed pleasure on the uneasy middle, the undefinable category that has
    been denounced by the educated since at least Virginia Woolf. …
  25. Jonathan Raban: captain of seagoing literature, The Guardian (blog)
    … The Godforsaken Sea, being my favourite), the sea also stands as one of literature’s most enduring and flexible metaphors, ably exploited by like of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch and endlessly reached for in poetry, from Homer onwards. …
  26. Frank Stanford deserves to be read: A Q&A with Matthew Henriksen, Fayetteville Flyer
    I have been working through Knut Hamsun’s novels, just finished Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and just started Heinrich Boll’s The Clown. I’m reading Lydia Davis’ Collected Stories (purchased at Nightbird Books) from cover to cover with slow and …
  27. Oregon hotel connects with Salinas author, The Salinas Californian
    “The new ones are JK Rowling [author of the Harry Potter series], Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf and [JRR] Tolkien [author of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy].” Oh, yes, and Cable’s and Robles’ favorite writer.
  28. Michael Cunningham meets the Guardian book club – podcast, The Guardian
    Michael Cunningham told the Guardian book club that he initially chose to rework Mrs Dalloway in The Hours (Virginia Woolf’s working title for her own novel), because it had been the first book he ever really looked hard at. He was trying to impress a …
  29. Why I’m Sometimes Tempted to Fight My New Passion–And Why I’m Embracing It …, Forbes (blog)
    As Virginia Woolf noted in her Diary: “I must remember to write about my clothes next time I have an impulse to write. My love of clothes interests me profoundly: only it is not love, & what it is I must discover.” Because of the happiness project, …
  30. Where Are The Biopics About Powerful American Women?, Think Progress
    … Julia Child are obviously both very famous, but Erin Brockovich, Leigh Anne Tuohy, Aileen Wuronos, and Christine Collins are much more minor or transitory ones, who aren’t nearly as
    powerful or as long-lasting as English queens or Virginia Woolf. …

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Woolf sightings: A story of passion, a song about suicide

Posted in Woolf online, Woolf sightings, tagged , on Tuesday 12 July 2011| 2 Comments »

A week’s worth of Woolf sightings, just 13, here. Michael Holroyd’s A Book of Secrets, which explores the passion between Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis may deliver a steamy summer read. See #7. Then scroll down to #11 and listen to a song that mentions Woolf’s suicide. Again.

  1. ‘Last Summer’ evokes fond memories with lyrical craftwork, UT The Daily Texan
    It’s Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style that gets to the core aesthetic of
    Virginia, Violet, Vita and passion

    Friedberger. She doesn’t evoke much through heavy narratives or bombastic music. Instead, she writes about her surroundings to bring up moods and uses music as …

  2. Canonizer’s Feast, Brooklyn Rail
    Beckett “became a strong fourth with Joyce, Proust, and Kafka as the masters of prose fiction in the 20th century, transcending Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner.” “The poets of my generation of the highest …
  3. Remarkable Person: Arlene K. Hoffman, Chicago TribuneA: I guess it would be Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, because I related to them the most. It was, like, about me. A: The Grateful Dead, but I like country music as well. The most
    comforting thing for me from growing up to this very moment has …
  4. Harry Potter and the book snobs, Herald Scotland
    Ms Virginia Woolf could never be trash – though I’ll give you an argument – while spy fiction, or SF, or any airport pulp, was “clearly” garbage. Even while wading through my James Joyce – and I mean the lot, “pomes” and all – I had a problem with that …
  5. Talkingbooks: Sehba Sarwar, DAWN.com
    There are many inspiring authors: Julia Alvarez, Ismat Chughtai, Sandra Cisneros, Edwidge Danticat, Mahmoud Darwish, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Patti Smith, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf… The list is endless. …
  6. Your child, the modernist, Boston Globe
    The writers we now call modernists-TS Eliot, for example, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound-often aimed for shock or surprise. They created their most famous poetry and fiction, during the first decades of the 20th century, …
  7. The book is not dead, it’s just shape-shifting, The Guardian
    A distinguished example is Michael Holroyd’s A Book of Secrets, an enthralling study of the passionate interactions among Virginia Woolf, Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West. In an arresting manoeuvre, Holroyd …
  8. With a Kindle, no one can see the Mills & Boon cover, Telegraph.co.uk
    She would read a Virginia Woolf one day and a Jackie Collins the next. Intrigued, I picked up her Collins from the sun lounger, but after a few pages I had to stop, because it was making me feel ill. One grinding cliché after another. …
  9. Granta on “The F Word”: VS Naipaul not included, Montreal Gazette (blog)
    A clearheaded, socially rooted comment on women’s practical ability to clear the space required to write, with echoes of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own—the contrast with Naipaul’s crabby superiority couldn’t be more stark, or more refreshing. …
  10. Before the beginning was silence, Calcutta Telegraph
    Damaris refers to Evie as a “man-woman”, resonating with Virginia Woolf’s “androgyny”.
    They communicate for the first time through an act of mime — again, a performance in silence — where Evie enacts a “statue of herself”. The feminist search for an …
  11. Juana Ghani, Salt Lake City Weekly
    She mentions “The Incredible Sadness of Sonia,” a haunting melody based somewhat on Virginia Woolf’s suicide, with references to Alice in Wonderland. “But there’s more to the story than just that—that is where the hyperbole comes in. …
  12. Review of Sandra Park’s ‘If You Live in a Small House’, Hyphen Magazine (blog)
    Much like the characters in a Virginia Woolf novel, haunted by memories of WWI, Park’s characters exist as ghosts, drifting past each other without comprehending. “As in most crowded homes, people learned how to draw the shade, looking and seeing …
  13. Going places — literally, Hindustan Times
    Over three years s/he will have to take nine papers that cover canonical authors of mainly British literature – Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf etc. But s/he will also be exposed to literatures from other times and other parts …

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Woolf sightings: Art from St. Louis to Liverpool

Posted in art, Virginia Woolf, Woolf online, Woolf sightings, tagged , on Friday 3 June 2011| 1 Comment »

In this week’s Woolf sightings, Virginia Woolf inspires art in St. Louis, Missouri, titled A Silk Worm of One’s Own and a dance staged in Liverpool, England, titled The Big Smoke, as well as a Brown commencement speech.

  1. Fire Lookout on Solitude (and Lots of Time to Read), New York Times
    This year, I’m bringing some Virginia Woolf — “To the Lighthouse,” which I’ve never read — half a dozen issues of the London Review of Books and New York Review of Books, a collection of Balzac novellas, “Mating” by Norman Rush, Terry Castle’s new …
  2. Appealing Events: Jazz, Poetry, And Dead Celebs At The Contemporary Jewish Museum, The San Francisco Appeal
    … salon-like dinner party” with guests like Stein, Virginia Woolf, Bobby Fischer, Michael Jackson, Billie Holiday, Glenn Gould, and other dead greats. The series of poems, jazz, rock-and-roll, and collages promises a more than exciting evening. …
  3. Dine with Famous Dead Folks at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, SF Weekly (blog)
    We’ll be disappointed if Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein don’t break latkes over the direction of modern feminism and more importantly, what’s the most flattering length for a caftan. Enquiring minds. Laura Beck is a founding editor of Vegansaurus! …
  4. The Baroque Folk of Foxtails Brigade, East Bay Express
    Some are based on fairy tales, with language filched from her favorite canonical authors — Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Hans Christian Andersen. Others, like the title track, were inspired by her experiences as a substitute teacher. …
  5. Memorial Day Lessons From Darwin, Virginia Woolf, and Altruistic Squirrels, Huffington Post
    Of course, he meant that he’d learned a different way of reading, courtesy of Virginia Woolf, who he had nicknamed “Ginny” to make her more approachable and real to him. What she taught him was that “the reader is not a bystander, but rather an active …
  6. Books by dudes for dudes, books by chicks for dudes, Los Angeles Times
    Included in the list: Zadie Smith, Kelly Link, Marilynne Robinson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lydia Millet, Doris Lessing, Djuna Barnes, Toni Morrison, Harper Lee, Clarice Lispector, Iris Murdoch, Shirley Jackson, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop …
  7. The class war: Why everyone feels insecure, The Guardian
    It would explain a lot even though the middle class – snooty Virginia Woolf despised them too – whose postwar expansion lies behind such feelings of insecurity is also entitled to feel threatened, not least by globalisation. “Squeezed middle”? …
  8. A new book club on Twitter (better be concise!), Marketplace
    Primarily a biographer whose works include studies of Maria Callas, Virginia Woolf, and Camille Claudel, she is the author of 18 published books. Her latest, Margaret Mahler, A Biography of the Psychoanalyst, was published recently by McFarland …
  9. Stands the church clock at ten to three, Varsity Online
    The appeal soon caught on and Brooke became the centre of a set which included Keynes, Virginia Woolf, Wittgenstein and Forster. They were the Neo-Pagans. For them, time, appointments, deadlines, seemed as distant as these figures now seem to us. …
  10. Help yourself and help others, Brown grads told at commencement, Providence Journal
    Combs speech was inspired by a class he took last fall about author Virginia Woolf. He said the course and school, which doesn’t have a core curriculum, forced him to read actively and become engaged with everything in life. …
  11. Commencement 2011: Senior orators, The Brown Daily Herald
    Combs will speak about the effect Virginia Woolf’s work has had on him. He first discovered her work in a class last semester, and he said Woolf taught him to read and write in a new way and appreciate “what it can do for us as people. …
  12. The literary divide pt. 2 – Europe and the isolationism of American literary …, Czech Position (blog)
    In a parenthetical aside in “The Novel Is Not Dead: Despite Critics’ Best Attempts” in the Boston Review, Jess Row quotes Virginia Woolf, who he paints as the modernist protector of upper-class privilege, on why she didn’t include Joseph Conrad in her …
  13. Supreme Court Takes Up Scholars’ Rights, Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription)
    Other works once available but now restricted include books by HG Wells, Virginia Woolf, and CS Lewis; films by Alfred Hitchcock, Federico Fellini, and Jean Renoir; and artwork by MC Escher and Pablo Picasso. The US Copyright Office estimated that the …
  14. The Blagger’s Guide To…Self-Publishing, The Independent
    Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, launched in 1917, published many of Woolf’s works, along with the first UK edition of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land in 1924, and In A Province (1934), the first book by Laurens van der Post. …
  15. Literary guide, San Francisco Chronicle
    A series of poem songs that narrate a story – via words, jazz, rock, electronica – of a dinner party populated by Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Bobby Fischer and other dead eccentrics. 7 pm The Yud gallery, Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St. …
  16. Portrait of the artist as a headscarf-wearing woman, Ha’aretz
    The studio’s name was Mizrahi’s idea, and as suggested by the play on Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” it points to a feminist agenda. As head of the art track in Ulpanat Tzvia in Ma’aleh Adumim, a religious girls’ high school, Mizrahi – from …
  17. Inspiration is never quite where you expect it to be, The Cornishman
    Unfortunately, I am not that au fait with the wit and wisdom of Virginia Woolf, well apart from “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”To be honest that would have seemed rather a pretentious introduction especially …
  18. The nearness of heartbreak, The Australian
    In 1929 Virginia Woolf thought it could be procured for pound stg. 500 a year, but she did not specify by what means this money was to be found. Paid work, Simone de Beauvoir said, weighing in on the debate 20 years later, was the answer. …
  19. Physical theatre experts from across the globe descend on Liverpool for …, Liverpool Daily Post
    Laura Davis reports WHEN life became too much for Virginia Woolf, she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the river near her home. When repeated bouts of depression got the better of her, American writer Sylvia Plath placed her head inside …
  20. Vorticism: the biz of the buzz – review, The Guardian
    In Orlando, Virginia Woolf definitively mocked the idea that literature, that prose style, was the toy of social conditions: “Also that the streets were better drained and the houses better lit had its effect upon the style, it cannot be doubted. …
  21. Essays, Volume 6: 1933-1941, By Virginia Woolf, The Independent
    Virginia Woolf, high priestess of modernism, had to earn her living like anybody else. These days, her kind of fiction, richly figurative, with her characters’ narratives floating dreamily between inner and outer life, is not fashionable. …
  22. ‘Goat’ takes a fanciful what-if look at Virginia Woolf’s life, Ventura County Star
    Virginia Woolf (Melonie Mazman Hayden) tries to work through her demons with the aid of a psychologist (Bill Waxman) in Arthur Kraft’s new play “Goat.” Arthur Kraft’s “Goat,” a fanciful what-if play that considers a crucial turn in the …
  23. To the River: A Journey Beneath The Surface, By Olivia Laing, The Independent
    But it is inevitable that the Ouse should be associated with the Woolfs: here Virginia committed suicide, as Leonard realised the moment he saw her stick lying on its bank. But none of Virginia Woolf’s biographers has identified, as Laing does here, …
  24. Glorious St Ives: An artistic holiday that lets you take Cornwall’s …, Daily Mail
    To the right are rustling long grasses, boulders, thunderous waves and, in the distance, Godrevy Lighthouse – that once inspired Virginia Woolf’s writing but today looks like a blurry white smudge, half rubbed out on the horizon. … Read St. Ives: A place for lovers
  25. Virginia Nicholson: Heroines on the home front, Telegraph.co.uk
    Most surprisingly, perhaps, Nicholson quotes Virginia Woolf, her grandmother’s younger sister, after whom she is named and to whom she bears more than a passing resemblance. “It would have been hard for me to leave her out,” she says, even though Woolf …
  26. June’s Little Black Dress, Wall Street Journal
    London dealer Peter Harrington will offer an intimate letter written in 1932 by Virginia Woolf to her fellow writer Vita Sackville-West in which she says, “I would pitch you a very melancholy story about my jealousy of all your new loves” (price: …
  27. Lila Azam Zanganeh: ‘I’ve always wanted to push myself to do things I don’t …, The Guardian
    Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is of course one in a long line; there were many Orlandos before her, and the original was a knight in medieval times, who appears as Roland in the French epic Chansons de geste.” I tell her that it sounds incredibly ambitious …
  28. The Irish Times – Friday, May 27, 2011, Irish Times
    Produced Around the World in 80 Days. Carrie Fisher’s dad. Used to be Richard Jenkins. A selection of what? 10 Greer Garson braves the war at home. Queen Victoria dallies with a servant. Vanessa Redgrave plays a Virginia Woolf heroine. …
  29. Sisterhood does not exist, DAWN.com
    In the words of Virginia Woolf: “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man in twice its natural size.” According to Women’s Action Forum member, Neelum Shah, …
  30. St. Louis Art Capsules, Riverfront Times
    Invoking Virginia Woolf’s seminal feminist essay, A Silk Worm of One’s Own, cordons off space with tangled white threads that dangle from the ceiling in mud-smeared clumps or writhe freely in space. A video piece, entitled I Breathe, I Walk, …
  31. The Typewriter — Part Of What We Are, Irish Independent
    Other upstanding authors of note included Virginia Woolf, Tom Wolfe and Vladimir Nabokov. Jack Kerouac typed his most famous novel, On The Road, on a long roll of paper so he wouldn’t have to break his train of thought. After a fortnight he’d produced …
  32. Cary Grant Wasn’t Gay, Says His Daughter, Village Voice (blog)
    “Perhaps Dad had what Virginia Woolf described as ‘an androgynous mind’,” she concludes. But did dad ever experiment sexually? wonders Jennifer, aloud. “I don’t know. Have I ever experimented sexually? Have you? If experimentation makes one gay, …

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Woolf sightings: As inspiration, on summer reading lists

Posted in Charleston Farmhouse, Woolf online, Woolf sightings, tagged , on Tuesday 24 May 2011| Leave a Comment »

My goal is to post a compilation of Woolf sightings every week. But the weeks keep getting longer. This time there are 10 days between the last compilation and this one. Can this be attributed to summer time? I think so.

Scroll down to sighting #16 to read a brief about this year’s 20th Charleston Festival, which runs through May 29.

  1. Facets of Virginia Woolf, The Hindu
    Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), a widely acclaimed novelist, short-story writer, essayist, feminist, critic and publisher, needs little introduction to students of world literature. Her attitude towards life and literary vision were …
  2. To The River, Financial Times
    Although Virginia Woolf – the book’s guiding spirit – drowned here, Laing acknowledges that “such waterways are 10 a penny in these islands”. That doesn’t stop this local river providing an exemplar for all confluences that traverse the British Isles. …
  3. The top 10 books of all time, MinnPost.com
    Virginia Woolf called this Victorian masterpiece and detailed portrait of provincial English life “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” Martin Amisand Julian Barnes have both cited it as perhaps the greatest novel in the English …
  4. Open thread: What are the great unread books?, The Guardian (blog)
    (“I don’t like it” is not a substantial criticism, but it is a good reason not to read it–a better reason than Virginia Woolf’s too-oft-quoted snobby criticism.) The same is true of Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest and The Recognitions, …
  5. ‘Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man’ by James Joyce, TheCelebrityCafe.com
    Like his contemporaries, Virginia Woolf and Henry James, Joyce was committed to portraying the human mind as it is, and in real life, our thought process is often splintered and disjointed, not clean and straightforward the way it’s presented in …
  6. Summer reading: The big list, Los Angeles Times
    Also in Sunday’s pages, book critic David L. Ulin remembers his summer reading: Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut. And Jessica Gelt weighs in with a summer reading memory of her own: Virginia Woolf    .
  7. Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in London cleaned, Zee News
    Tavistock Square’s other features include a bust of writer Virginia Woolf and a cherry tree commemorating the victims of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. …
  8. NY Public Library turns 100, not just with books, Wall Street Journal
    Five hundred people spent the night at the library using a smartphone app to search for artifacts such as the cane found after Virginia Woolf drowned herself and the taxidermied paw of Charles Dickens’ cat. For the centennial gala Monday, LeClerc said     …
  9. House of Exile by Evelyn Juers – review, The Guardian
    One group of contemporaries in particular – James Joyce, Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf – suffered a unique apprehension of their generation’s fate. This sombre tableau is the subject of Evelyn Juers’s enthralling book. by Evelyn Juers Juers, ..
  10. Book review: To the River: A Journey beneath the Surface, Scotsman
    But the Ouse will forever be bound up with Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in its murky waters one cold March day 70 years ago. Laing’s passages about the beauty and precision of Woolf’s prose are echoed in her own use of language for the landscape     …
  11. Wish You Were Here: England on Sea by Travis Elborough – review, The Guardian …
    sceptical to have time to dwell on the misty light, the fading ornamental balustrades, the trim white fences orthe sopping esplanades which have been lyrically evoked by artists such as Virginia Woolf, WH Auden, John Piper and Benjamin Britten. ..
  12. Tavistock Square reopened after £280000 restoration, BBC News
    … which funded the cleaning of Gandhi’s stature, also attended. Tavistock Square’s other features include a memorial to conscientious objectors, a bust of Virginia Woolf and a cherry tree commemorating the victims of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. Read War and Peace at Tavistock Square.
  13. Nostalgia’s vortex: Why you should just go to your high school reunion, National Post (blog)
    How it was that the potential for friendship had eluded us by virtue of … what? If we really were unchanged, then it was only the empty rivalries of youth that had been the obstacle. Virginia Woolf said that we trade youth for a sense of fellowship.
  14. The girl who cried Woolf, Irish Times
    Rather than stay at home and despair, she set off to a river best known for its connection with Virginia Woolf’s suicide in 1941. The outcome is a quasi-confessional meditation-cum-travelogue of immense charm, personal observation and historical fact. …
  15. Exiles from a devastated world, Irish Times
    At one point Nelly finds a parcel containing a new slip that Virginia Woolf had bought in Wertheim department store and lost on the street in the snow while on a visit to Berlin. In a cafe Virginia asks the waiter to bring her a Schwarzwälder tart like ..
  16. Top writers at literary festival, West Sussex Today
    Charleston was the meeting place of a remarkable group of progressive individuals, including Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey and TS Eliot. Spokeswoman Philippa Rowson said: “The Festival was founded in 1989 …
  17. What if it were ‘Mr. Dalloway’? Book covers revisited, Los Angeles Times
    How would Virginia Woolf’s feminist classic “Mrs. Dalloway” change if it were “Mr. Dalloway”? Would it be all about going to work on the day of a party? Jean Cocteau’s “La Belle et La Bête” (“Beauty and the Beast”) is transformed to “Le Beau et La Bête …
  18. V V: Michel Montaigne: In defence of the human, Business Standard
    His attractions have led writers as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf and Andre Gide — Frampton’s Cat is a popular introduction to Montaigne’s Essays that should get the serious common reader to look into them. …
  19. 10 of the best books set in London, The Guardian
    Mrs Dalloway lives in Westminster and Virginia Woolf brilliantly describes a day in her London life, stepping out on a glorious summer morning, Big Ben striking in the background. “For having lived in Westminster — how many years now? over twenty, …
  20. A deep sense of kinship with Virginia Woolf, Los Angeles Times
    The book was “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf. The extended essay is based on a series of lectures on women and fiction that Woolf gave in 1928 at two women’s colleges at Cambridge University. In examining the lives of female writers, …
  21. Benjamin Rivers’ Sense of Snow, Torontoist
    In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf describes a woman’s entire life through the course of events that occur in a single day. In a similar way, Benjamin Rivers’ comic Snow captures a sense of Toronto focusing only on a single street: Queen Street West. …

    The cover of Benjamin Rivers' Snow

  22. Thrifty Flair: Books create character and charm, yourhome.ca
    It’s easier to find what you want because Sylvia Plath actually comes before Virginia Woolf on the shelves, but if I really want something and can’t find it locally, I’ll purchase it online from an independent store. Even when you factor in the cost of …
  23. Jason Reed/Reuters, The Atlantic
    Then, as an antidote to law school, I read through Virginia Woolf and George Eliot, with a sense of revelation. But Roth’s voice remains more resonant for me, a reminder that neither ideology nor the bounds of sex and gender need limit empathy, …
  24. Sarah Winman – in her own words, New Zealand Herald
    Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway. Ian McEwan: Atonement. Elizabeth Bowan: Death of the Heart. Graham Greene: Brighton Rock. Andrea Levy: Small Island… I could go on! When’s your second international bestseller due? (No pressure…) Luckily, I don’t have…
  25. MSO Concludes Season with Afternoon of Favorites, Atlantic Highlands Herald
    His song cycle from the Diary of Virginia Woolf earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975. Valentino Dances is an orchestral suite from his 1994 opera The Dream of Valentino, about movie star Rudolph Valentino. The suite features accordion and …
  26. VIEWS: A new future for LGBT books, Windy City Times
    I wrote Winter Eyes because back in college, I was profoundly inspired by a scene in Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out. Someone asks a would-be writer kind of books she wants to write and she says, “I want to write a novel about Silence …
  27. Oslo, August 31st, Variety
    After an unsuccessful morning of the Virginia Woolf variety, Anders travels to Oslo for a job interview at a magazine. Arriving early, he has time to visit some acquaintances, starting with his best friend, Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner), with whom he used …
  28. Reblogged from Samuel Pepys by The Morgan: What happened to the diary?, Capital New York
    Then there are those who publish their own diaries, like the authors William Burroughs and Anaïs Nin, and those whose diaries were published posthumously, like Virginia Woolf and Tennessee Williams, illuminating their writing processes as well as their ..
  29. Tough Love: Things No One Is Brave Enough to Tell Self-Published Authors, Huffington Post (blog)
    Even though Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf self-published, the stigma didn’t really lift until very recently. Suddenly self-publishing is no longer just a fall-back position. It can be a first choice. Just be sure you choose to do it for the right …
  30. Oh, the Stuff Those Lions Guard, New York Times
    Also on view are the walking stick of Virginia Woolf’s that her husband found floating in a river four days after she drowned herself and Beethoven’s sketches as he worked on the Scherzo of the “Archduke” Trio. But what ties the library’s research …
  31. Natalee Caple: Resisting borders, National Post (blog)
    Virginia Woolf famously wrote about how writing and freedom were linked for women because of the dematerial nature of the text. In contrast to painting, sculpting, or (in the present day) filmmaking all the materials necessary to write are cheap and …
  32. Canton resident a voice for young writers, Foothills Media Group
    Crowe enjoys reading poetry by Barbara Ras, Jane Hirshfield, Carolyn Forche and WS Merwin, and prose by Edwidge Danticat, Charlotte Bacon, Virginia Woolf and Lydia Davis. Crowe began the mastery of her writing at the Greater Hartford Academy for the…
  33. Student thrives in Merced College environment with 4.0 grade point average, Merced Sun-Star
    She once liked reading books by John Steinbeck, and then her affection turned to novelists Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway. “Fictional characters are more real than real people,” she said, laughing, outside the Merced College Library one recent ..
  34. The astronaut who learned how to see, Christian Science Monitor (blog)
    When I visited him at his home in Houston in 1996, he showed me shelves filled with well-worn, annotated books ranging from St. Augustine to Virginia Woolf. When he sat in an evening literature class at the University of Houston, he kept three ...
  35. Wesley Yang Confuses Asian Masculinity With White Male Supremacy, ColorLines magazine
    We need a Virginia Woolf for all the Asian ladies. And I don’t mean some “let’s all get together and hug Joy Luck Club” kinda of way. Asian women get the double whammy-Asian Female. Bamboo ceiling, my a**. Asian females get the lead ceiling. …
  36. Agincourt Will Be Directed By Michael Mann, FilmShaft.com
    The film is being developed independently by Luc Roeg, the producer behind the frankly beautiful Virginia Woolf adaptation ‘Othello’, and the script is being penned by Benjamin Ross. If Roeg is smart he’ll bring Cornwell onboard as a consultant for the …
  37. Mental illness, privilege and the myth of ‘success’, The Scavenger
    Meanwhile, the mystifying thoughts, habits and behaviours of many creative types who are now deceased (everyone from Winston Churchill to Virginia Woolf) is often ascribed to the work of bipolar disorder in post-mortem diagnoses. …
  38. Library speed-dating event unfolds slowly, TheDay.com
    Caitlin brought “To the Lighthouse” by Virginia Woolf, a book she admitted she disliked when she read it in high school. She had borrowed it from the library to see if an older, more mature version of herself might like it better. If you ask me, …

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