Woolf’s Waves inspired solo piano ballads

Here’s a bit of Virginia Woolf trivia. Did you know that pianist Ludovico Einaudi’s first album “Le Onde” was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves?

The cycle of solo piano ballads came out in 1996.

Einaudi’s music is often compared to that of Philip Glass, who composed the music for Stephen Daldry’s film “The Hours” — thus, another Woolf connection for the Milan-trained Einaudi.

Listen to the title track, and feel the waves wash gently over you. The sound is quite beautiful and soothing with just a hint of dramatic tension.

Researching Taoism and Virginia Woolf

A student-faculty team at Mars Hills College has won grant funding to explore the connection between Taoism and the writing of Virginia Woolf.

Ali Andrejewski, an English and psychology student, was awarded $500, and faculty mentor Joanna Pierce won $250 to support research for the grant proposal titled, “’But how describe a world seen without a self?’: Taoist Principles in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves.”

The college recently awarded grants to 12 students and faculty members for research projects ranging from mountain history to pop music.

Web site launched for 2010 Woolf conference

A Web site for the 20th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf and the Natural World has launched, and organizers have announced the conference call for papers, which are due Jan. 15, 2010.

The conference, which will be held in the Thomas & King Leadership and Conference Center at Georgetown College in Georgetown, Kentucky, is set for June 3 to 6.

Georgetown is located 10 miles north of Lexington on I-75. Get a map of the area.

Keynote speakers will be:

• Bonnie Kime Scott, University of California, San Diego
• Diana Swanson, Northern Illinois University
• Carrie Rohman, Lafayette College
• Christina Alt, University of Ottawa

The conference will also include an Art and Rare Book Exhibit at the Anne Wright Wilson Art Gallery on the Georgetown campus and a Silent Auction, with proceeds going to Old Friends, a Kentucky facility for retired thoroughbreds. 

“Sharp stripes of shadow lay on the grass, and the dew dancing on the tips of the flowers and leaves made the garden like a mosaic of single sparks not yet formed into one whole. The birds, whose breasts were specked canary and rose, now sang a strain or two together, wildly, like skaters rollicking arm-in-arm, and were suddenly silent, breaking asunder.”  Virginia Woolf – The Waves

For more information, contact conference organizer Kristin Czarnecki, assistant professor of English, by mail at Georgetown College, 400 E. College St., Georgetown, KY 40324. Or send her an e-mail.

Virginia Woolf, Essayist

I just treated myself to the new 2009 edition of The Best American Essays. I’m often left speechless at the incredible diversity of work as well as the brilliance, cleverness, wit and pathos of individual selections.

The first essay in the collection, “Taking a Reading” by Sue Allison, starts with, “A yard, a pace, a foot, a fathom. How beautiful the language of measurement is…,” and ends a mere page later, reiterating her point: “A ream is a lot of paper, sold and purchased blank. Written on, it’s a book.”

John Updike and Cynthia Ozick offer insightful pieces about writers. And Brian Doyle, in “The Greatest Nature Essay Ever,” speaks of the perfect essay as having an ending that provides “a shot of espresso hope.” Wow!

In her editorial introduction, Mary Oliver champions the form. In the essay, she says, “what we receive is not didactic, not even, sometimes, totally believable, but the soul-felt truth from the individual perspective of someone deft in the craft of expression. The essay is not the world of Middlemarch, of Mrs. Dalloway going out to buy the flowers—it is neither less nor more, but different.”

Her reference to Mrs. Dalloway struck me as an irony in that she’s using Woolf the novelist to talk about what the essay is not, and yet Woolf was such a prolific and masterful essayist herself. One only has to revisit “Street Haunting” or “On Re-Reading Novels,” to name just two that come to mind, to recognize that she takes her place among the greats from Montaigne and Samuel Johnson to E. B. White and Joan Didion.

Smith College course features Woolf and friends

A Smith College professor will teach a course on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group that offers students the opportunity to work closely with primary materials from the Smith collections.

Professor Robert Hosmer, of Smith’s English language and literature department, will teach the course, which is called “Reading and Writing with Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.” Hosmer specializes in the works of 20th century women writers.

In the course, students will work closely with primary materials from the Mortimer Rare Book Room and the Smith College Museum of Art. The Mortimer Rare Book Room has an extensive collection of Woolf’s works.

In addition, students will be able to view the traveling exhibit, “A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in America Collection,” which will be at the Smith College Museum of Art April 3 to June 15.

Read more about the course.

For links to other courses that feature Woolf and her Bloomsbury contemporaries, check the right sidebar under the heading “Woolf Courses.”

Virginia Woolf: There’s an App for that

Being able to download Virginia Woolf novels to Apple’s sleek little iPod means we can now carry her words with us anywhere we go.  Because so far, I haven’t found a pocket that the gizmo — stocked with Woolf novels — doesn’t fit in.

Here’s my story. I bought an IPod touch a few weeks ago. Since then, I have spent way too much time searching for and downloading fun, interesting and useful iPod Apps.

I won’t bore you Woolfians with my love for the AP Stylebook App that set me back $29 but is worth every penny. Nor will I discuss the free Italian lessons I’m taking on my iPod or the Rachel Maddow shows I’m watching or the multiple Twitter accounts I’m following via TweetDeck.

But I will gladly tell you about the Apps I found that are related to Virginia:

• The Virginia Woolf Collection – Nine of Woolf’s novels. Cost: $2.99
• “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Study Guide and Quiz. Cost: 99 cents
• Three versions of Night and Day at a cost of 99 cents each
• Mrs. Dalloway. Cost: $17.99
• Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers. Cost: $9.99
• Orlando Study Guide and Quiz. Cost: 99 cents
• To the Lighthouse Study Guide and Quiz. Cost: 99 cents

The best news is that if you want to get Woolf novels for free, and you have an iPod touch or an iPhone, you can. Here’s how:

1. Download the free Kindle App for the iPod touch and the iPhone from the App Store.
2. Visit Amazon.com’s Kindle store. Search for Virginia Wolf. Sort your search by price so you can easily spot the free downloads.
3. Download The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room and Night and Day for free.
4. Relax in the knowledge that no matter where you travel, you can always have Virginia in your pocket.

More of Woolf’s published work is available as Kindle e-books for under $2, including Monday and Tuesday and The Early Works of Virginia Woolf.

What book changed your life?

In a recent interview, writer Jeanette Winterson was asked, “What book changed your life?”

Here is her answer: “The Bible shaped me; Virginia Woolf’s Orlando shaped my imagination; and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities gave me the courage to write whatever I wanted.”

I posed the same question to myself just moments ago and felt hard-pressed to come up with an answer. I guess I’ll have to swish it around in my mind for awhile.

Meanwhile, I pose the question to you: “What book changed your life?”

Please post your answers in the comments section below.

Woolf’s Lighthouse on list of 40 personal classics

Susan Hill had a mountain of books inside her Gloucestershire farmhouse that she had never made time to read. So she spent a year reading nothing but the unread books that filled her shelves.

The result is Howards End Is On the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home, published in August by Profile Books. Included in the book is a list of 40 titles that “I think I could manage with alone, for the rest of my life,” Hill said.

Among them is one by Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse.

Hill said she chose Lighthouse rather than The Waves, because the latter “always reminds me of the sort of highbrow radio play they used to broadcast on Radio 3.”

A review of Hill’s book in The Guardian calls the book “a mind-map of a novelist in her late 60s who has spent her life reading and writing books.”

Read the introduction to Hill’s book.

Mrs. Dalloway is having a party in San Francisco

If you live in the Bay Area, you can go to Mrs. Dalloway’s party. It’s an evening of short stories written by Virginia Woolf and performed by an ensemble of actors at St. Mary’s College of California.

According to the school’s Web site, “Wry observations and elegant prose come to life onstage through some of Woolf’s most amusing characters-ordinary women and men whose anxious thoughts and social predicaments make this party a night to remember.”

The production is directed by guest artist Delia MacDougall, a founding member of Word for Word Performing Arts Company in San Francisco.

Performances are scheduled on:

• Thursday, Nov. 12, 8 p.m.
• Friday, Nov. 13, 8 p.m.
• Saturday, Nov. 14, 8 p.m.
• Friday, Nov. 20, 8 p.m.
• Saturday, Nov. 21, 8 p.m.
• Sunday, Nov.15 & 22, at 2 p.m.

When reading Woolf: Read. Think. Repeat.

James Joyce detailed Leopold Bloom’s day in Dublin. Virginia Woolf followed Clarissa Dalloway through London on a fine day in June. Ian McEwan told Henry Perowne’s tale on a post-Sept. 11 Saturday in February. And Christopher Isherwood described one day in the life of an ageing professor named George in his 1964 novel A Single Man.

That novel has now been made into a film produced and directed by Tom Ford, who also co-authored the screenplay. And when I read his comments about the impact A Single Man had on him, I saw another similarity to Mrs. Dalloway.

Ford said he first read Isherwood’s novel when he was in his twenties, and the book stuck with him. But it wasn’t until he read it again years later, when he was in his late forties, that he says he found “the book resonated with me in an entirely different way.” Ford called it ”a deeply spiritual story.”

That’s how I felt about Mrs. Dalloway. I was 20 when I first read it and was duly impressed by Woolf’s thinking and her magical way with words. But I didn’t really get Clarissa Dalloway.

When I reread the novel 20 years later, I did. After marriage and children and the winding ways of life, I could understand much more about Clarissa.

But not everything. Each time I reread the novel, I get to know her better. 

That’s why I think these instructions should be on each of Woolf’s novels: Read. Think. Repeat.