Video lecture on Virginia Woolf and painting

If you are interested in Virginia Woolf and art, a 46-minute introductory talk on “Women Writers and the Avant-Garde: Virginia Woolf and Painting“ is a real find.

Dr. Manuela Palacios González

Dr. Manuela Palacios González, professor of English Literature at the University of Santiago at Compostela, is the lecturer.

Thanks to Manuela Palacios Gonzalez for the link.

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Essays from Woolfians greet the new year

Blogging Woolf is back from a holiday hiatus made longer by a bout with On Being Ill — the virus, not the Virginia Woolf essay published in 1930  by the Hogarth Press. But now that we are back, we recommend a couple of essays for your edification in this new year.

The first, “1913–What year…“ by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly on the SuchFriends blog, takes an in-depth look at the New York Armory Show in February 1913, connecting it to Bloomsbury Group painters Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, etc. who closed London’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibit early so many of the paintings could be sent on to New York.

Donnelly promises to post updates all year on what was happening to writers in 1913. You can also check out the Such Friends page on Facebook.

The second is Blogging Woolf contributor Alice Lowe‘s latest published work, “On the Road Again,” which appears in the current issue of The Feathered Flounder.

Lowe notes that “being the mother of a daughter and the daughter of a mother is a rich source of reflection.” In this latest poignant essay, she draws on those dual experiences, as well as “from those other gems, memory and aging” to wonder whether she has encountered the beginning of her dotage.

Related articles

• Woolf-inspired journal launched – in print (bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com)

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Cartoon Woolf in cyberspace

“Good Ol’ Women’s Rights” cartoon

We have all seen caricatures of Virginia Woolf. One appears on a coffee mug I use when I need a swig of inspiration. But there are also a number of Virginia Woolf cartoons out in cyberspace, and here are a few I found.

• “A Wolf Reading Virginia Woolf,” on cartoonstock.com
• “Virginia Woolf Double Vision by Lytton Strachey” by Guillermo Martin Bermejo. Click on the middle thumbnail to view the Woolf cartoon.
• Virginia Woolf Cartoon Postcard by David Levine
• A 1946 three page cartoon story of the Dreadnought Hoax, now for sale on eBay
• “Virginia Woolf And Feminism: A Cartoon And a Few Quotes to Consider”
  

  “Virginia Woolf And Feminism” cartoon

• A cartoon titled “Good Ol’ Women’s Rights” that is posted on The Life of Virginia Woolf page created by a student in a high school advanced placement English class. She says it “illustrates Virginia Woolf’s feelings on the typical Woman in society and her non-conformity. It is a play on her famous essay ‘The Angel in the House’.”
• “Virginia Woolf Meets ‘Car Talk,’” a New Yorker cartoon by William Hamilton

And for a real treat, get ahold of a copy of the new graphic novel Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama by Alison Bechdel. It features pages of drawings and text that feature Woolf’s intellectual struggle with the concepts of private writing versus public writing, the influence of her mother and her novel To the Lighthouse.

Here’s a quote about Bechdel’s book from Gloria Steinem:

Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this; sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won’t believe it until you read it—and you must!

Related articles

• A Woolf conversation in cartoon form (bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com)
• Finding Woolf in today’s art (bloggingwoolf.wordpress.com)

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Finding Woolf in today’s art

So many Woolf sightings and so little time. I found both of these on the Virginia Woolf author Facebook page, which is not to be confused with my own Virginia Woolf Facebook page noted in the right sidebar.

The first find is a 13 x 9-inch print of an artist’s illustration of the Virginia Woolf quote, “There is no denying the wild horse in us.” Titled “Horse,” it’s for sale in the artist’s Etsy shop, Obvious State, for $24.

As the New York artist Evan Robertson explains, “I took little snippets of text and ideas from some of my favorite authors (with some notable exceptions that I’m saving), and let the words be a springboard for an illustration. The illustrations incorporate and interact with the text and hopefully add up to something that engages the mind as much as the eye.”

He has completed 23 of a planned 50 illustrations following that scheme.

The second is a drawing by Ellie Curtis that is based on Woolf’s novel The Waves. She, too, has an Etsy shop, and the fabrics you will find there seem reminiscent of the Bloomsbury Group. But why not? The designer lives in London.

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“As to Woolf, who isn’t fascinated by her?”

That’s what Carol Anshaw said when I asked her about the reference to Woolf in her newest novel, Carry the One. The story weaves in and out of the lives of several people for 25 years following a momentous event that had a great and lasting impact on each of them.

I found the book to be an engrossing and rewarding read, deserving its praise in reviews, including those of the New York Times and NPR.

So, the scene in question: Alice is talking to her sister Carmen about her volatile on-and-off relationship with Maude, who also happens to be Carmen’s sister-in-law. Alice says: “‘She can try all the men she wants. She’ll come back to women. She’s a bloodhound who’s been given the scent of the glove.’”

“Carmen was always a little startled (and titillated) when Alice said things like this. She wasn’t sure if this was her sister’s way of being shocking, or if lesbians all talked this way among themselves. It always tripped her up. She used to imagine love between women as a languid extension of friendship. Something Virginia Woolf-ish involving tea and conversation and sofas and afternoon eliding into evening, a small lamp needing to be turned on, but left unlit.”

Carol Anshaw added to the above response about Woolf: “when I read her letters maybe 30 years ago, I loved seeing her get swept off her feet by Vita. Then I read Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Vita and fell in love with her big, arrogant, blundering passage through life.” So we see how fitting this particular name-dropping is.

Screen shot of Carol Anshaw’s Vita Sackville-West Project page on her website

But Carol’s fascination with Vita has taken on a life of its own in a series of paintings (she’s multi-talented), the Vita Sackville-West project. Several are posted on her website.

 

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Woolf and collage

Night and Day: Monk’s House, Rodmell (2011), an original cut paper collage by Amanda White that is part of her Writers' Houses series. See more at http://www.amandawhite-contemporarynaiveart.com.

Woolf and collage, anyone?

That was the question that came up on the VWoolf Listserv a few weeks ago. Other list members promptly and generously shared information on the topic of Woolf and modern collage.

Here are the highlights of that discussion, along with some details I have added:

• Brenda Helt cited Woolf’s writing about the 1910 and 1912 Post-Impressionist Exhibitions and the Omega Workshop.  Specifically, she mentioned the
  sometimes snide and snarky commentary” in Volumes 1 and 2 of Woolf’s letters, indexed as “Post-impressionist Exhibition” and “Omega Workshop,” and “her later more complex and appreciative understanding” included in the chapters on Post-impressionism and the Omega in Woolf’s biography of Roger Fry.
• Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and other post-impressionists worked with collage. Both used collage in objects sold at the Omega Workshops and in decorating furniture at Charleston Farmhouse and elsewhere.
• Woolf knew of early Cubist collage, but would have been most familiar with applied arts such as collage through Bell’s and Grant’s work, as well as the work of other Bloomsbury artists.
• Three examples of Bell’s and Grant’s collages from 1912, 1914 and 1915 are included in the exhibition catalog for A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections. You can read a post about the last stop on that exhibit’s 2010 cross-country tour here. Collage examples in the exhibition catalogue include:
  • Bell’s Composition (1914), oil and gouache on cut-and-pasted paper, Page 124
  • Grant’s In Memoriam: Rupert Brooke (1915), oil and collage on panel, Page 176
  • Grant’s Design for a Fire Screen (1912), watercolor, gouache and collage, Page 220
• Christopher Reed, associate professor of English and visual culture at Penn State, discusses and shows examples of others in Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture, Domesticity. They include:
  • Grant’s On the Mantelpiece, 46 Gordon Square (1914), oil and collage on board, Page 149.
  • Roger Fry’s Essay in Abstract Design (1915), oil and collaged bus tickets, Page 155.
  • Grant’s Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with Sound (1914), gouache, watercolor and collage on paper, Page 156
  • Grant’s Abstract (1914-5), paint, fabric and collaged paper on board, Page 158
  • Grant’s Interior at 46 Gordon Square (1914-5), collaged paper on board, Page 159
• In Bloomsbury Rooms, Reed discusses Grant’s use of a piece of foil from a cigarette pack liner in In Memoriam as its only collaged element and says it is echoed in Woolf’s review of Edward Marsh’s 1918 memoir on Brooke (161). He also mentions that reviewers unanimously dismissed Grant’s abstract collages in the 1915 Vorticist exhibition, calling them a foreign joke (162).
• Other important research sources on this topic include:
  • Frances Spalding’s biographies of Bell and of Grant
  • Simon Watney’s The Art of Duncan Grant
  • Douglas Turnbaugh’s Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group
  • Richard Shone’s The Art of Bloomsbury
  • Bell and Nicholson’s Charleston

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Woolf sightings: What if Virginia were …

What if Virginia Woolf were a food writer? What if she were a dog? This week’s Woolf sightings have a few “what-ifs” and a lot of other stuff too.

Sightings include inspiring new cover designs by Angus Hyland for a hardback series of Woolf’s major works. The covers are modeled after the textile designs of the Omega Workshop. The series includes Mrs. Dalloway,

A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Orlando and is available on Penguin Books U.K. site for 14 pounds (about $21) each.

1. Wanted: A Virginia Woolf Series Designed By Pentagram’s Angus Hyland, Co.Design
   What a shame that the thought and imagination inside of Woolf’s books aren’t reflected on the outside. So it’s with great relief that we bring you news of Angus Hyland’s designs for a fresh hardback series of Woolf’s major works. ..
2. The Best of British in the kitchen: CHRISTMAS COOKERY BOOKS, Daily Mail
   In her tie-in cookbook, she quotes Virginia Woolf: ‘One cannot think well, love well and sleep well if one has not dined well.’ Lorraine’s take on easy fine dining includes salami-stick sausage rolls and a cake made of readymade chocolate ice-cream and …
3. Nightcaps: If famous writers had been food writers, San Francisco Chronicle (blog)
   [Tablehopper] What if Virginia Woolf was a food writer? “Looking back at the cherries, that would not be pitted, red polka dots on white, so bright and jolly, their little core of hardness invisible, in pity she thought of Mrs Sorley, that poor woman …
4. What We’re Reading, New York Times (blog)
   So beginneth an onion tart recipe as set down by Geoffrey Chaucer — and imagined by Mark Crick, who speculates how Chaucer, Virginia Woolf and Raymond Chandlerwould have written cookbooks. (Chandler on lamb with dill sauce: “Feeling the blade in my …
5. What Virginia Woolf might look like. As a dog., Houston Chronicle (blog)
   It’s like finding your other half. Needless to say, the temptation to upload every photo of every friend and family member is frighteningly strong. I’m proud to say I stopped at two: That’s Virginia Woolf, with her doggelganger. ..
6. In Praise of PG Wodehouse, TIME
   He was a comic writer in an age of serious aesthetes: he was of the generation of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, and the toweringly serious works of his famous coevals have gone a long way towards obscuring Wodehouse’s enormous gifts as a stylist.
7. Board of Education Approves Search Contract, Discusses Book Purchases, Patch.com
   Most of those novels are being used in classrooms, though administrators told the board that they are working with a publisher to exchange hundreds of extra copies of Mrs. Dalloway, the Virginia Woolf classic. However, the updated version of the
8. Afternoon of Cakes & Conversation at Dimbola, Island Pulse
   Enjoy the atmosphere of Dimbola Lodge where Lord Tennyson and Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Virginia Woolf and many other writers found inspiration. – Well known playwright John writes novels for children, BBC Radio plays and local dramas. …
9. How a Hangover Will Help you Achieve Huge Commercial Success, ChicagoNow
   The lyrics are equally strong; particularly striking are those in “What the Water Gave Me”, which evinces Virginia Woolf’s suicide with pockets full of stones. Each song on the album is different and memorable in its own right. …
10. Mac the Knife: On Dwight Macdonald, The Nation
    He also had a predilection, perhaps not surprising for a man of his time, for a certain type of virile authorial presence, which a “lady novelist” like Virginia Woolf failed to satisfy. (He said he preferred George Eliot, “whom I really don’t consider …
11. Beattitudes: On Ann Beattie, The Nation
    Wider questions are discussed, as well: what Katherine Anne Porter meant when she said that Virginia Woolf “ranged freely under her own sky,” what Louise Glück had in mind when she spoke of “the impossibility of connecting the self one is in the …
12. Woolf who turned his back on the pack – I, The Island.lk (subscription)
    Leonard was later to marry Virginia, the younger of the two sisters, whose fame as a writer eclipsed his, though he was himself a star in his own right in a combination of diverse other roles; Leonard Woolf was a prominent member of the Fabian Society, …
13. Biopic Pictures The Oscars, FemaleFirst.co.uk
    Other winners since 2000 include Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich, Nicole Kidman as troubled Virginia Woolf, Charlize Theron as Aileen Wuornos and Reese Witherspoon for her portrayal of June Carter in Walk the Line. Similarly six of the last eleven …
14. OxStu Big Book Survey: The Results, Oxford Student
    In the ‘Favourite Author’ category Virginia Woolf edged to victory, ahead of a four-way tie for second place. Clearly opinion was divided between classic literature and more modern favourites, with JK Rowling and Terry Pratchett sharing the spoils with …
15. Don’t Miss: Nov. 26-Dec. 2, Wall Street Journal
    The William B. Beekman collection of memorabilia tied to novelist-essayist Virginia Woolf is up for sale and partly on view in “Virginia Woolf: The Flight of Time”—including a 1911 letter rebuffing her suitor Sydney Waterlow. …
16. Writing Middlesex, The Guardian
    Traditionally, literary characters who change sex have been mythical figures such as Tiresias, or fanciful creations such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. I wanted to write about a realistic person and be as accurate as I could with respect to the …
17. Going ‘Solo,’ plus one, The Boston Globe
    Others she seeks out, as a kind of pilgrim: gravesites (Shelley’s, Brancusi’s, Walt Whitman’s) or personal artifacts, again mundane, belonging to the famous (Robert Graves’s hat, Virginia Woolf’s cane, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter). …
18. Things Fall Apart, Wall Street Journal
    In its literary brilliance and evocative power, the diary is the equal of those of Virginia Woolf, Harold Nicolson and André Gide. Mr. Easton ranks it one of the greatest diaries ever. Many will agree. But if the journal is so significant as a literary ...
19. Cary Grant: Hollywood enigma was a devoted dad but a despicable husband, Daily Mail
    Perhaps he had what Virginia Woolf described as “an androgynous mind”. I’m sure he was sometimes a bit flirty with men. People can be so black and white. I’d like to think Dad greyed the line a bit. Not long ago, someone asked if I’d heard George …
20. How fiction can engage history students in the past, The Guardian (blog)
    8 – 13 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925, pp. 58 – 63 • Debbie Bogard teaches History and Politics at City and Islington Sixth Form College in London. A …
21. Books of the year 2011, The Guardian
    As Virginia Woolf said: “The whole world is a work of art.” Non-fiction: I loved two very different books of criticism, Nicola Shulman’s beautifully lucid study of Thomas Wyatt, Graven with Diamonds (Short Books), and Owen Hatherley’s furiously …
22. Library Connection, Conway Daily Sun
    PWR (People Who Read) a discussion group for adults and teens gathers to discuss “Make Lemonade” by Virginia Woolf. Warning: this group tackles controversial issues and is not for the faint of heart. Teens must be in at least ninth grade. …
23. Woolf signature seals £10250 sale, Falmouth Packet
    The visitors’ book from Godrevy Lighthouse in St Ives, containing the childhood signature ofVirginia Woolf, was sold last week for £10250 at the Bonhams Books, Maps, Manuscripts and Historical Photographs Sale in London. …
24. Insider’s view, Chandigarh Tribune
    What is interesting is the frequent meetings of a small group consisting of James Strachey, Maynard Keynes, EM Forster, Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf who met in rooms in Neville’s Court with the conviction that they had found the answer to moral …
25. Jack Kerouac’s ‘first’ novel published, DigitalJournal.com
    The prose style utilizes a free-from style of writing and is in the tradition of the ‘stream of consciousness’ (that is a flow of thoughts and images) prose style (earlier employed by Virginia Woolf in “To The Lighthouse”). …
26. Pilgrimage by Annie Leibovitz: review, Telegraph.co.uk
    So she photographs the detail in Dickinson’s sole surviving dress; the books on Sigmund Freud’s shelf; a pigeon skeleton labelled by Darwin; Georgia O’Keeffe’s box of pastels; Virginia Woolf’s desk, covered in stains and scratches – the residue left by...
27. The Fashion Set Flocks to Chelsea for Leibovitz’s ‘Pilgramage’, Women’s Wear Daily
    Guests, who included Carolina Herrera, Jann Wenner, Tory Burch, Karen Elson and Ali Hewson, took in shots of relics that ranged from Virginia Woolf’s writing desk to the gloves Abraham Lincoln wore the night he was assassinated. …
28. Leibovitz’s ‘Pilgrimage’ records photographer’s journey, Lincoln Journal Star
    Leibovitz has the former, regardless of subject matter, and her photos here, be they of the dark interior of Virginia Woolf’s home, Old Faithful or Annie Oakley’s boots, show her mastery in the capture of light. This is a true aside. …
29. Picture books hook the eye, San Antonio Express
    There are intimate shots of ghostly interiors —Eleanor Roosevelt’s bedroom — and meaningful objects — the hat Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theater — that tell us something about their owners — including John Muir, Virginia Woolf, Annie Oakley.
30. Hills & Gardens Photographer Leibovitz at BookCourt, Brooklyn Daily Eagle
    We see Virginia Woolf’s writing desk and the carpeted couch in Sigmund Freud’s London study. There is a section devoted to the New Mexican desert world of Georgia O’Keeffe — both the outdoor vistas that inspired her art and the collected rocks and …
31. Self-Knowledge: Identify Your Patron Saints., Huffington Post (blog)
    Virginia Woolf: intensely attuned to the power of the passing moment. Well, Julia Child and Winston Churchill are probably rarely paired together in the same discussion, but they both represent very powerful ideas to me. It’s interesting — the posts …
32. Tilda’s talking, New York Post
    Anyone hear she keeps her “Virginia Woolf” prosthetic nose? When it wrapped, producers gave her a permanent silver one. PRAYER heard out on the North Fork: “Dear Father: Please. For this year a thin body and a fat bank account. …
33. From the archives: Remembering Ken Russell, Film Journal
    “I think of Virginia Woolf and The Waves—on one page, she manages to convey the childhood of six people and you also get how they’re going to grow up, as well as an afternoon in an English country garden. There are so many layers that words can make. …
34. Sullivan Street Press Announces New Book Launch, Scags at 18, About Boomers …, PR Web (press release)
    To discover the power of feminism, specifically by reading Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.” It’s during her trip to DC to participate for the first time in an anti-war march that Scags experiences more than she could have imagined. …
35. University Club, A.V. Club New York
    Instead of focusing on the food, let the spirits of luminaries who have supped at this 104-year-old establishment—many exchanging bon mots concerning Thomas Kuhn, Xenophanes, and Virginia Woolf—come alive as a collective ghostly presence. …
36. The Literary Cubs, New York Times
    Rachel Rosenfelt, right, reads a selection from Virginia Woolf at a literary salon held by the editors of The New Inquiry, an online journal she helped start. Also at the salon, from left to right, are Rebecca Chapman, Helena Fitzgerald and Tim Barker. …
37. Improve your health… get a garden shed: How solitude may help lower blood …, Daily Mail
    Among those who swore by them include Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling and Dylan Thomas, not forgetting Benjamin Britten, whose potting shed at Horham, Suffolk, is now a Grade II listed building, one of 50 such places of special interest nominated by…
38. Upheaval at the New York Public Library, The Nation
    Over the decades, the NYPL would acquire a spectacular range of materials: Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, Walt Whitman’s personal copy of Leaves of Grass,Virginia Woolf’s cane, Man Ray’s portrait of Arnold Schoenberg, …
39. Paris paradox: The changelessness of change, Gadling
    You’ve seen these faces before: Malraux, Cocteau, Gide, Colette, Valéry, Zweig, Joyce, Virginia Woolf… But you’ve never seen them displayed and lit so skillfully. Another German Jew who fled the Nazis and transited through Paris was Walter Benjamin, …
40. A Spirit from the Past Moves the Present, Palisadian-Post
    I often think of Beryl as I while away the hours here at the coffee shop, plucking out poems and lesson plans for my students at Marquez Elementary and Palisades Elementary, ‘musing among the cauliflowers,’ as Virginia Woolf once put it. …
41. Art shows run gambit of elements, students, books, size, Tulsa World
    Meltzer writes that the images he builds feature “the most meaningful and representative passages” from writers as diverse as Henry David Thoreau and Friedrich Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf and Lewis Carroll. “I hope to encourage the viewer to experience …

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Woolf sightings: Artistic vaginas, “scrolloping” and a new song

Three things pop out at me from this week’s list of Woolf sightings. The first is the mention of Virginia in a story about young female artists who represent “unmentionable” female body parts in their work. See #22.

The second is the mention of Woolf’s use of the word “scrolloping,” an item that drew the recent attention of the VWoolf Listserv. See #7.

The third is a new song about Virginia Woolf. It is one of 13 cuts on a new album due out Nov. 7 by Florence + The Machine. The song’s title, “What the Water Gave Me,” comes from a 1938 oil painting by Frida Kahlo. See #17-21 and listen to the song below.

1. Thought-Provoking Highbrow Magazine Launches, MarketWatch (press release)
   Virginia Woolf once described a highbrow as “…the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.” “It is that pursuit of an idea that inspires us at the magazine to critique and analyze …
2. Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow, Movie City News
   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 …
3. Much ado about nothing, Boston Globe
   That would not necessarily be a difficulty: Think of Samuel Johnson’s “Life of Mr. Richard Savage,” or the many marginal yet unforgettable subjects in Virginia Woolf’s “Common Reader.” Yet unlike the treatment of his parents in “Basil Street,” …
4. A fascination with real lives, Boston Globe
   I admire Virginia Woolf, but I’m not sold on her novels. I’d rather read her diaries, journals, and letters. Henry James – finally a man – I love him. Last year I read “What Maisie Knew.” I was relieved that I understood it. James is hard. …
5. MEMOIR: A fun and gossipy look at British bluebloods, Minneapolis Star Tribune
   He shows the ties between Beckett’s illegitimate daughter by Keppel, novelist Violet Trefusis, and Violet’s lesbian lover, poet Vita Sackville-West, then links them both to Virginia Woolf. He manages, too, to find a long association between Vita’s …
6. Book review: House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly …, Taipei Times
   The author clearly wants to offer a life of Heinrich, but also to bring in other authors, such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, who he never met. Diverse topics are also given capsule treatment — how writing-quills were once made, and the theory …
7. OMG, the charabanc has been plutoed, Telegraph.co.uk
   But I am likely to need help with Samuel Beckett’s use of “athambia”, or Virginia Woolf’s of “scrolloping”. In any case, predictions about what will last are risky. In 2007 Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary chose “pod-slurping” as its word of the year. …
8. The New Atheism, The Guardian
   Melville, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, Beckett, Camus – and in our own time José Saramago, Marilynne Robinson and JM Coetzee – have all shown sustained interest in questions of belief and unbelief; …
9. The dentist & Dr. Seuss, Boston Globe
   “But it’s like minor works by Virginia Woolf or Shakespeare or Jane Austen. They may be minor, but they’re the minor works of a genius,” Nel said. In order to bring these stories to a fresh audience, Cohen first needed to prove his own credibility. …
10. Bridge Views: Grounded in 1980, Patch.com
    “If you want to learn point-of-view, read Henry James; if you want to learn irony, read Jane Austen; if you want to learn what Hell smells like, read John Milton; if you want to understand the importance of using punctuation, read Virginia Woolf—she …
11. iriam Grant, Vice Provost of Research and Dean of the College of Graduate Studies, Castanet.net
    He has distinguished himself as a scholar of the work of Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf and Wyndam Lewis. Of particular note is his forthcoming book, Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur: The Annotated Edition is the first annotated edition of Pound’s highly …
12. Interview: Lynne McTaggart, Author of The Bond, Blogcritics.org (blog)
    Twentieth century writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, but also so-called ‘new journalists’ – Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Hunter Thompson, Truman Capote – who wrote non-fiction using fictional techniques. My heroes in journalism were …
13. Why women are enjoying being home alone, The Age
    VIRGINIA WOOLF thought every woman writer needed a room of her own. But many women are now opting for an entire home of one’s own. Women are twice as likely as men to live alone for more than a decade, and report greater levels of …
14. A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers” by Michael Holroyd, Washington Post
    The child, Violet, achieved notoriety first, during and after World War I, as the same-sex lover of the writer Vita Sackville-West — their scandalous affaire was mirrored in Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando” (1928) — and then, starting in the 1930s, …
15. Michael Holroyd finally reveals himself in ‘Book of Secrets’, Plain Dealer (blog)
    Virtuoso insights connect the dots among his characters, as he intertwines the lives of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis, the illegitimate daughter of Grimthorpe. Holroyd himself finally arrives center stage. …
16. ‘Miracle’ in Battersea: Francesca Kay has turned from the enigmas of art to …, The Independent
    In the switches of mood and tone of an urban panorama, with a politician’s wife close to its heart, the book brought to my mind Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Kay says that she did not take Woolf’s metropolitan collage as a model, although “I do …
17. Florence + The Machine, new album due Nov 7, Street North East (blog)
    It’s about water in all forms and all bodies. It’s about a lot of things; Virginia Woolf creeps into it, and of course Frieda Kahlo, whose painfully beautiful painting gave me the title.” ‘What The Water Gave Me’ it’s available now on iTunes.
18. This week in new music, FasterLouder
    For a tune named after a Frida Kahlo painting and featuring reference to Virginia Woolf it still has festival anthem written all over it. Let’s hope we get to see her again this summer. James Blake and Justin ‘Bon Iver’ Vernon met at this year’s South …
19. Florence And The Machine Reveal New Track, RTT News
    While speaking about the track with NME.com, Florence Welch revealed that the track was inspired by the story of writer Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide by drowning. It also shares a title with a painting by legendary Mexican artist and feminist …
20. Florence and the Machine debut new track ‘What The Water Gave Me’ – video, Digital Spy
    When I was writing this song I was thinking a lot about all those people who’ve lost their lives in vain attempts to save their loved ones from drowning. “It’s about water in all forms and all bodies. It’s about a lot of things; Virginia Woolf creeps …
21. Hear Florence and the Machine’s new song ‘What The Water Gave Me’ – audio, NME.com
    The track is named after a painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and has also been part inspired by the death of author Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in a river by filling her coat pockets with stones. You can see Florence working on the album …
22. The naming of parts: a new frankness about vaginas, Evening Standard
    Chicago created 39 place settings for famous female “guests” – including Sappho, Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf – with labias rising up out of the plates themselves. The new craft-led work is as much about playfulness as a po-faced “comment” on …
23. Orlando, St George’s West, Edinburgh, The Independent
    Adapting Virginia Woolf’s fantastical novel, which follows the title character through four centuries and a sex change, is no mean feat. It has the potential to be epic, but Darryl Pinckney’s script for theatre company Cryptic goes in …
24. A ‘World of Taste’ hits Rishon Letzion, Ha’aretz
    By Elka Looks Tags: Israel culture Virginia Woolf once said, “one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” After attending Rishon Letzion’s ‘World of Taste’ fair, I could not agree more. Over twenty of Israel’s leading …
25. Tale of loss and friendship cuts to the quick, Independent Online
    Today, she is Senior Fellow at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and the distinguished biographer of TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Brontë, Henry James, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and, most recently, the acclaimed poet Emily Dickinson. …
26. How One Book Changed My Life, Huffington Post
    I have most all of Virginia Woolf’s books on one shelf. There are books by Toni Morrison, Willa Cather, Julia Alvarez, James Baldwin, John Irving and dozens of other favorite authors. There is my friend Peg’s wonderful novel, “Spinning Will. …
27. Fill up your shelves at the Locust Grove book sale! [Books], Louisville.com
    My own personal finds from past sales have included titles from Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov. And, of course, no shortage of Shakespeare. Tax deductible book donations will also be accepted at any time …
28. Stigma should be removed from mental illness, Cincinnati.com
    Provided Abraham Lincoln, Virginia Woolf, Eugene O’Neill, Leo Tolstoy, Tennessee Williams, Winston Churchill, Charles Dickens, Carrie Fisher, Mike Wallace, Patty Duke, Demi Lovato, Catherine Zeta-Jones – all talented and gifted individuals, …
29. Book festival: Andrew O’Hagan, Edinburgh Festivals
    Last night’s topic was landscape, which Bakewell addressed with Olivia Laing, author of To The River, a meditation in travel, nature and history along the course of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself in 1941. ..
30. Offerings from Edinburgh’s International Book Festival, STV Local
    At 7 pm she’ll be reading from her book To the River, the story of the Ouse, the Sussex river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. One midsummer week over 60 years after Woolf’s death, Olivia Laing walked the river from source to sea. …
31. ED2011 Theatre Review: Sailing On (ShadyJane), ThreeWeeks News
    It revolves around a girl’s poignantly suppressed memory coming to light with the help of a pretend Ophelia and Virginia Woolf. Though beautifully enacted and adeptly enhanced by the use of multimedia, it was not the performance itself that most stood …
32. Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights: Bronte vs Bronte, Telegraph.co.uk
    Virginia Woolf once said that, in Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë had gigantic ambition that was summed up by the sentence “You the eternal powers…” but she didn’t know how to finish it. I think there’s something in that. For me, Wuthering Heights is …
33. Julia Margaret Cameron exhibition opens at Hans P. Kraus Jr. Fine Photographs, ArtfixDaily (press release)
    She later became the mother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Mary Hillier, a local shoemaker’s daughter who served as a parlor maid in Cameron’s household, became, as the artist wrote, “one of the most beautiful and constant of my models. …
34. Robert Fulford: Postmodern love?, National Post (blog)
    Books appeared under otherwise identical titles about Nietzsche, WB Yeats, Virginia Woolf, St. Augustine, Jesus and many more. Postmodernism, while it no longer so freely speaks its name, remains the operative principle beneath much of contemporary …
35. ED2011 Theatre Review: Orlando (Cryptic), ThreeWeeks News
    Adapted from Virginia Woolf’s novel, this production is especially adept in its synthesis of Woolf’s linguistic virtuosity with contemporary sound and projection techniques. Although the show’s pace lags occasionally, Judith Williams impresses with a …
36. A New Life of EM Forster, Xtra.ca
    While his contemporaries were DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, the Bloomsbury circle and Christopher Isherwood, a new generation of Americans also longed to meet him. People such as artist Paul Cadmus, actor William Roerick and painter Jared French …
37. Play’s a slap in face for parents, Macedon Ranges Weekly
    She says the play is like “Virginia Woolf on steroids” and audiences will experience a “rollercoaster of emotions. It’s a fun play and it disintegrates into madness!” Ms Boyd said it had already received much praise from the Melbourne theatre network. …

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Woolf and the Chaucer Horse: The painting and the commentary

Editor’s Note: This commentary and photo were contributed by Suzanne Bellamy who exhibited her painting, “Woolf and the Chaucer Horse,” at the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf.

"Woolf and the Chaucer Horse" by Suzanne Bellamy

The research

Researching illuminated manuscripts and Psalters opened the vision of the written page to the visual world that has always been there for me in Woolf as a reader. The page drips with image and interaction with other form, and as a writer of that tradition she embodies that now invisible world. Woolf says in ANON that the printing press ultimately took that rich layered other dimension away, but she is still soaked in it in her visual invocations, in her synaesthesic imagination.

The painting

I started working on the painting as I was reading the scholarship around Between The Acts, the late 1930s and Woolf’s last writings. Seeing her riding on Chaucer’s horse, as the Chaucer of her times, came visually first, then all else flowed from that. The Chaucerian trope of the stories wrapped within the journey infuses all Woolf’s work, as also in the essayistic form itself, street haunting being an expression of the pilgrim’s way.

The painting is as much an illuminated manuscript as a map… as a collage of layered memory, where everything happens and all at the same time, as in the novel. In harmony with the 1930s’ rural revivalism and sensitivity to possible loss of cultural heritage, the spirit of continuity is challenged by the threat from the planes and the coming war. But the land itself holds the dream of a common culture which is soaked in Nature and wild forms, animals birds, structures and sounds.

Some images swirled around in my head for weeks but never made it onto the canvas much as I tried to force the issue. The old wall and the ladder, the horse with the green tail, Sohrab the dog, the greenhouse, Mrs. Swithin’s hammer, and also Mrs. Swithin’s criss-cross letter (a term from ancient manuscripts), imps, elves, demons and mirrors, all the flowers, cars, the barn, the pub, the megaphone, Giles feeling chained to a rock, the white lady — those never made it but are in there somehow.

But the stegasaurus and the mammoth made it, and the fossils, the Roman roads, the planes, the pond, the house (taken from Vita Sackville-West’s book on English Country Houses), the cows, the Ouse and the map of the Sussex coast, and then the Celtic maze which held it all together. The maze, the Chaucerian horse, and the lines of the Prologue were the moments that gave it all a structure. The idea that words came from hearing birdsong drawn from the core of the maze holds the centre.

There are several examples of doubling and tripling images, as for example with the Uffington White Horse, the Guernica Horse and the Chaucer Horse. Also with the Circle of Birds and the formation of Lancaster Bombers over the English Channel, as contrary formations. The South Downs, the coastline, the map of Sussex, Lewes and Rodmell, the River Ouse and tributaries, prehistory, mastodons, cars and Roman roads, images improvised from medieval illuminated manuscripts. I used the Oxford Ellesmere text for the five lines of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Copying those five lines straight onto the canvas from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, from the online Oxford site of the Ellesmere text, was a deep thrill.

The exhibit

The painting, which measures two by four metres, was planned to act as a set canvas behind the pageant performance, but that proved to be technically impossible. In the end it hung in the Bute Hall below the stained glass windows, close to the window of Chaucer. The light streamed through the image of Woolf on her horse, the Chaucer of her times, and all was well.

More coverage of the 21st Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf on Blogging Woolf:

• Order new books by Cecil Woolf Publishers
• Annual Woolf Conferences: Comment if you were there
• Conference organizers post photos online
• Take a peek at more photos from Contradictory Woolf
• Take a look at the 21st Conference: Contradictory Woolf
• In unequivocal praise of the Contradictory Woolf conference

  

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Woolf sightings: Art from St. Louis to Liverpool

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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