Fernham

One last draft footnote

2012-01-30T21:47:00.002-05:00

31:9 Princess Mary Princess Mary (1897-1965) was the thirdchild and only daughter of George V and Queen Mary. She married Viscount Henry Lascelles(1882-1947) on February 28, 1922. Lascelles had been an early suitor of VitaSackville-West and would be the model for the Archduke Harry in O. MichaelNorth notes that, for many people in England, this royal wedding was a signthat the war was finally over (5). Woolf took a passing interest in the wedding‘Please tell me why Pr. Mary marriedLd. Lascelles’ (L2 511). Later Clarissa'smaid Lucy imagines herself as attending Princess Mary (59).

Happy Birthday, Miss Jan

2012-01-25T15:42:00.002-05:00

Adeline Virginia Stephen, later Virginia Woolf, was born onthis day in 1882. One of her family nicknames was Miss Jan, on account of herJanuary birthday. In the Monday 21^st December [1891] issue of the HydePark Gate News, young Virginia, nearly 10, this fictional love letters,part of a regular series in the HPGN:

My own Tom I love you with that fervent passion with whichmy father regards Roast beef but I do not look upon you with the same eyes asmy father for he likes Roast Beef for its tast [sic] but I like you for yourpersonal merits.

Happy Birthday, Miss Jan!

Draft footnote of the day: the green dress

2012-01-22T15:09:00.002-05:00

58:14-15 By artificial light the greenshone The green dressthat becomes magical by artificial light reverses a distressing memory of a greendress gone wrong: ‘Down I came one winter’s evening about 1900 in my greendress […] All the lights were turned up in the drawing room; and by the blazingfire George sat, in dinner jacket and tie, cuddling the dachshund [….] He saidat last: “Go and tear it up”’ (MB151).

Draft footnote of the day: red flowers in Flanders Fields

2012-01-14T16:13:00.003-05:00

104:19-20 Red flowers grew through hisflesh John McCrae’s 1915poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ commemorates the fact of red poppies bloomingabundantly in battlefields that saw some of the heaviest casualties duringWorld War One: ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, rowon row’ (1-2). Line six begins ‘We are the dead.’ Since 1920, the red poppy hasbeen a symbol of remembrance of the war dead.

Hampstead

2012-01-11T15:06:00.003-05:00

Not her most charitable mood, but sometimes I find myself thinking something similar about those #occupy kids. Yeah, they're my heroes, but they're kind of weird...

266:20 Hampstead Village in North London dating from theeighteenth century, where artists and freethinkers have resided. The poet JohnKeats, who, like Jim Hutton, Woolf imagines in red socks, lived in Hampsteadfrom 1818-1820 (see EN 265.28). He wrote ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ there. Adjacentis the preserved open space of Hampstead Heath. Cf. ‘It’s unfortunate thecivilization always lights up the dwarfs, cripples, & sexless people first.And Hampstead provides them’ (D 1:110; 21 January 1918).

Draft footnote of the day: Voltaire

2012-01-10T11:00:00.000-05:00

An oldie but a goodie:

77.27-28 getting books sent out to them In 1904, when Leonard Woolf went to Ceylon as a young colonialadministrator, he brought with him the complete works of Voltaire in seventyvolumes (Glendenning 66).

Draft footnote of the day: Albanians

2012-01-09T11:00:00.000-05:00

181:8 Albanians Albania, too,was in the news at this time, although for far different reasons than Armenia and with muchless public sympathy from Britain. By 1921, Albania was bankrupt, having beenat war continuously since 1910. The discovery of oil led the British-basedAnglo-Persian Oil Company to send significant financial support to Ahmed Zogu.Zogu was elected prime minister in 1922, then, president in 1925. In 1928,Albania became a monarchy and Zogu, its king, Zog I. See Vickers.

This morning's mystery

2012-01-08T08:34:00.002-05:00

I'm off to read 'The Rape of Lucrece' for Mrs. Dalloway and it strikes me as a pretty grim task. I was summarizing Cymbeline yesterday, trying to describe how Imogen's husband makes a bet that she is faithful, sets up a friend to test her, and he sneaks into her bedroom and spies on her while she's asleep. Later he pretends to have raped her.

Then, I spent all that time re-reading Clarissa last spring which is all about rape.

And the other Clarissa in literature is the rapist's accessory in 'The Rape of the Lock.'

And Jane de Gay's book pointed me to the links between Clarissa's thought that there will be no more marrying and Hamlet's 'Get thee to a nunnery' speech.

So why, I want to know, is Clarissa Dalloway's happy memory of love also Othello's feeling? Why, when she remembers feeling in love, does she remember the feeling of a lover who will become a murderer, a man who will go mad from suspicion of his wife's infidelity?

Looked at from this angle, the violence and the threat of rape seems to be in too many places with no one untainted.

Draft footnotes of the day: The Tempest & Cymbeline

2012-01-07T13:02:00.001-05:00

Jane de Gay's excellent book led me to look again at Ariel's song in The Tempest. Earlier, I had heard 'those are pearls that were his eyes' more strongly through Eliot's quotation of it than through Shakespeare himself. Jane's work taught me to think differently and led me to a great dog footnote too. Enjoy.

61:18 Fearno more From Cymbeline. See EN 16:23. See also 46:26, 211:1. JanedeGay notes that Woolf’s earlier allusion to Ariel’s song from The Tempest(47:21) informs this allusion to Cymbeline: ‘Fear no more says the heart, committing its burden to the sea’(61:18-19). Both songs are dirges sung for characters presumed dead who turnout to be alive (de Gay 89). See also EN:61:24.

61:24 the dog barking See The Tempest: ‘Hark, hark! | burthendispersedly, [within]. Bow-wow. | The watch-dogs bark! (1:2:381-383). This,from the first half of Ariel’s song, closely follows the combined allusion to Cymbelineand The Tempest above(61:18).

Shakespeare, the sun to our little moons

2012-01-02T12:00:00.002-05:00

One of the puzzles in writing footnotes to Mrs. Dalloway is that the direct allusions don't necessarily correlate to the writers who most influenced Woolf. This makes a lot of sense--we often talk a lot about influences that bother us and talk seldom at all about those who are so important to us that they run in our veins. Still, one of my challenges as an editor has been to think about ways to depict this accurately. Woolf herself offers an explanation for this phenomenon in this discussion of Shakespeare from the 1924 essay‘Indiscretions’:

‘Of Shakespeare weneed not speak. The nimble little birds of field and hedge, lizards, shrews anddormice, do not pause in their dallyings and sporting to thank the sun forwarming them; nor need we, the light of whose literature comes fromShakespeare, seek to praise him’ (E 3:463)

It's a beautiful metaphor. I've certainly found a lot more Shakespeare than I expected in Mrs. Dalloway and, thank to other critics, will be able to cite many more.

Mocking James

2012-01-02T11:00:00.000-05:00

Nothing is better than when Virginia Woolf gets going on Henry James. (We have played this game before.) This is from a review of a very bad-sounding book of reminiscences of 19th c. novelists by Molly MacCarthy:

'through the drawing-room door we may hear the reverberation of Mr. Henry James, who, seeing the end of his sentence in the distance, with uplifted hand and rumbling fence of sound wards off intruders.' (E 3 444).

Hello, TR; Hello 2012

2012-01-01T11:00:00.000-05:00

Why not start the year with more dark comedy? This from a review by Woolf of a book on Teddy Roosevelt. 'Body and Brain' is the title of the review & Woolf's point is that TR, unlike many politicians, clearly possessed both:

When he was President of the United States a cowboy came upto him and said, ‘Mr. President, I have been in jail a year for killing agentleman.’ ‘How did you do it?’ asked the President, meaning to inquire as to thecircumstances. ‘Thirty-eight on a forty-five frame,’ replied the man, thinkingthat the only interest the President had was that of a comrade who wanted toknow with what kind of tool the trick was done.’ No other President, it issaid, from Washington to Wilson, would have drawn that answer. (E 3:225)

Good-bye Lord Harcourt, Good-bye 2011

2011-12-31T21:56:00.000-05:00

2011, I leave you with this bit of black humor from Woolf's 1919 review of Edward Jerningham and his Friends:

‘Lord Harcourt, indeed, vanished in an extremely abrupt and,to him, unpleasant manner, being found“in a narrow well, nothing appearing above water but the feet and legs,occasioned, as it is imagined, by his over-reaching himself to save the life ofa favourite dog, who was found in the well with him, standing on his lordship’sfeet"’ (E 3:60-61)

Happy New Year to all.

The edition is due on January 31. I am in the thick of it.

Even Woolf nods

2011-12-16T17:40:00.000-05:00

In the finished novel, Clarissa's maybe-I-should-have-married-him friend, Peter Walsh, has a young (24) girlfriend called, obviously enough, Daisy. But in the draft, she was, for a moment & far too obviously, Daisy Summers. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to learn how ham-fisted Woolf could be in her drafts and how sure she was in her revisions to excise such silliness.

Daisy Buchanan came into being in the spring of 1925 as well, by the way.

As a name, Daisy first became popular in the Victorian period, along with other flower names.

The threshold

2011-12-05T08:00:00.000-05:00

This fragment from Mansfield's diaries, close to the end of her life, hits a little too close to home.

Above all else, I do still lack application. It's not right. There is so much to do, and I do so little. Look at the stories that wait and wait, just at the threshold. Why don't I let them in? (The Dove's Nest xvi; from her Diary, July 1921)

Indeed. Why didn't she? Why don't we? And then:

My deepest desire is to be a writer, to have 'a body of work' done--and there the work is, there the stories wait for me, grow tired, wilt, fade, because I will not come. When first they knock, how eager and fresh they are! And I hear and I acknowledge them, and till I go on sitting at the window, playing with the ball of wool. What is to be done?

Such a mystery of creativity and work.
Back to Mrs. Dalloway I go.

Draft Textual Note of the Day: Elizabeth's dogs

2011-12-01T11:30:00.000-05:00

10:10 absurd woolly dogs Notebook 2 includes this cancelled phrase,giving the dogs to Elizabeth. There is no closing parenthesis in the draft: “~~(asher Elizabeth would be giving their absurd woolly dogs a run;~~” (Notebook 2117; H 255)

Draft footnote of the day: Elizabeth's profession

2011-11-29T11:30:00.000-05:00

205:28-206:1 every profession is open to the women of your generationCf. the added remark in Notebook 2: “her father said of course if she wanted togo to college she might; & her mother ~~m finally~~ agreed” (Notebook 289; H 228).

Draft footnote of the day: She was at her worst

2011-11-25T10:37:00.001-05:00

252.6 “How delightful to see you!” Inher 1919 essay, “The Royal Academy,” Woolf describes an unidentified portraitof a woman in full evening dress: “She stands at the top of a staircase… aboutto greet someone of distinction who advances towards her up the stairs. Not ahair is out of place. Her lips are just parted. She is about to say, ‘How niceof you to come!’” (E 3.89).

Sport and fashion

2011-11-21T11:30:00.000-05:00

Heretofore, the best and mostthorough set of footnotes to an edition of Mrs. Dalloway is, without adoubt, the Oxford paperback. I am grateful to it, have profited often from theeditor’s insights, and hope that my work is a worthy successor to his. I’mparticularly grateful for all the notes about the game of cricket. However, hispriorities strike me forcibly in light of Woolf’s comment about culturalpriorities surrounding sports and fashion in A Room of One’s Own:

Speaking crudely, football andsport and ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial.’And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is animportant book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is aninsignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in adrawing-room. (128)

So, my edition of Mrs.Dalloway will include footnotes on cricket, sure. It will also be the firstedition to elaborate on the meaning of “court dress,” Lady Bradshaw’s attire inthe portrait that hangs in Dr. Bradshaw’s office.

Deuil

2011-11-20T21:50:00.001-05:00

Re-reading Hope Mirrlees’ 1920 Paris.There’s a section that simply documents advertisements in the Paris of 1919.One heartbreaking one: DEUIL EN 24 HEURES. Literally, “mourning in 24 hours,”which wouldn’t be a pun in English but simply a service. In a time and placewhere almost every woman was in mourning, there’s a service to dye your clothesblack.

About a mile from my house, on the Newarkborder, is a t-shirt and skate shop. One of their specialties? R.I.P.s.

Draft footnote of the day: Mallarme

2011-11-17T12:46:00.001-05:00

20.22 throw of the dice Clarissa’s musings echo the title of (butresist the sentiment expressed in) Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem, “Un coup de désjamais n’abolira le hasard” (A Dice Throw At Any Time Never Will AbolishChance.”) Mallarmé (1842-1896) died almost unknown and a definitive edition ofhis poem was not published until 1913. For a discussion of Mallarmé’s influenceon Hope Mirlees as well as Mirrlees’ importance to Woolf, see Briggs (in Scott)267 ff. Roger Fry would translate Mallarmé in 1936. The Woolfs had both the1913 French edition of Mallarmé’s works and the later Fry translation in theirlibrary. The typographically experimental poem opens with an image thatjuxtaposes the chance of a dice throw with a shipwreck: “A THROW OF THE DICE /AT ANY TIME / EVEN WHEN CAST IN /EVERYLASTING CIRCUMSTANCES / FROM THE DEPTH OF A SHIPWRECK” (1-5).

I couldn't have predicted this one.

Draft Textual Note of the day

2011-11-07T12:28:00.000-05:00

Another piece of this project, other thanfootnotes, are the textual notes—not allusions but notes on significant changesamong versions of Mrs. Dalloway. I’m hacking away at a few of thosetoday, comparing The Hours notebooks (available, delightfully, in afantastic transcription from Helen Wussow), against the final draft. Since thenotebooks are available as a book, since I’m not trying to present a completegenetic edition, my task here is simply to highlight some key alterationsduring the composition and revision process.

So, as I labor to meet my deadline (January 31,my friends), I am anxiously trying to add words every day to what I think of as“my Dalloway files.” And one thing I’m adding is evidence of how right Woolfwas to strip away what she did. So this is a post about the rightness of taking words away.

Take, for instance, the moment when Peterremembers the night that Clarissa fell in love with Richard Dalloway:

They sat on the groundand talked--he and Clarissa. They went in and out of each other's minds withoutany effort. And then in a second it was over. He said to himself as they weregetting into the boat, "She will marry that man,"

In August of 1923, Woolf wrote a version of thisscene:

“she liked laughing at him. ~~Oh he talked about~~ Ibsen.~~His recollection was that they had sat down on this~~ They had sat on theground & talked—he & ~~Sally He & Clarissa &~~ & Clarissa argued.” (Notebook 1 38; H 37).

It’s the Ibsen thatstuck out to me here: of course Peter, trying so hard to be advanced, andClarissa, attracted by advanced views but still sheltered, would have arguedabout Ibsen. It’s the 1890s. But we already know that she and Sallywere reading Shelley and sneaking William Morris. Ibsen is one too many and hedistracts from the emotions of the scene. So right to excise him. Right, too,to let Peter talk to Clarissa passionately here (rather than Sally—something shecannot quite decide in the notebook): it makes his loss of her love all themore profound. And it only strengthens our sense of what he loves and hatesabout her: her dignity and grace (as well as her maidenhood) in being able tobe kind to him, to be a friend to him, even as she’s shifting her allegiance toa new man.

Draft footnote of the day: Shallott's shallop

2011-11-02T21:55:00.001-04:00

When Richard Dalloway finds himself, unwillingly following Hugh Whitbread on a necklace-shopping trip, he thinks "Goodness knows he didn't want to go buying necklaces with Hugh. But there are tides in the body. Morning meets afternoon. Borne like a frail shallop on deep, deep floods...."

I got interested in that shallop and here's what I've come up with. It may be a reach, but I rather like it:

171.26 frailshallop By the 19^th century, an unusual* word, denoting a smallboat for shallow waters. Tennyson’s Lady of Shallott floats to Camelot“unhailed / The shallop flitteth silken-sail’d / Skimming down to Camelot”(21-23).

*I would love to use "rare" but that is a term of art for lexicographers, so I'll stay safe with unusual, which I believe to be accurate. The OED's 19th c attestations are to Tennyson and William Holman Hunt: both deliberately archaizing writers.

Draft footnote of the day: the daily paper

2011-10-31T11:30:00.000-04:00

117.21 Morning Post: ownedby Lady Bathurst, this was a publication of the extreme right, which hadpublished violent anti-Semitic propaganda in 1920. Peter Walsh exaggeratesRichard Dalloway's conservatism; he reads The Times. Cf. Woolf’s accountof her paper-reading habits: “I have changed the Daily News for the MorningPost. The proportions of the world at once become utterly different. The M.P.has the largest letters & the double column devoted to the murder of MrsLindsay; anglo Indians, Anglo Scots, & retired old men & patrioticladies writer letter after letter to deplore the state of the country; applaudthe M.P., the only faithful standard bearer left” (D 2.127; 10 August 1921). LadyOttoline Morrell announced her daughter’s (unsuccessful) social debut in the Morning Post. Cf. L 3.180: “Not a singleparty has Julian [Morrell] been asked to, though they put a notice in theMorning Post.” See also Mansfield’s story “The Dove’s Nest,” in which a femalecharacter consults The Morning Postin hopes of finding suitable conversation topics for a male luncheon guest(249). Woolf glanced at the Mansfield volume in June 1923 (D 2. 247-8).

NYPL Exhibit A Century of Art: 1926 “What London Wears,” Attributed to Mabel Thérèse Bonney

2011-10-27T11:30:00.000-04:00

Thérèse Bonney during WWII, via Library of Congress

On Saturday, I participated in a the first of two panel discussions in support of the wonderful new exhibit at theNYPL, A Century of Art. Part of the larger centenary of the Schwarzman buildingon 42^nd and 5^th, this exhibit displays one print orphotograph from the collection for each year, from 1911 to 2011. As a scholaraffiliated with the Wertheim Study, I was invited to speak on one image and Ichose an amazing fashion photograph from 1926. I don’t have permission to showyou the picture, but I thought you might be interested in my description of itand of what it signifies. The second panel, in which five additional scholarsspeak for ten minutes each on five other prints or photographs will be on Friday,December 9, 2011, 2 - 3:30 p.m. It’s a lovely, friendly format, so do you’reyour calendars and go!

When JayBarksdale sent around the list of images to be included in this exhibit, I knewimmediately that, if I were to speak, it would be on this image, although Ididn’t see it until last week. After all, it’s an image made by a woman, aboutfashion, from 1926, and my current project is a textual edition of VirginiaWoolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, a novel about an upper class Londonwoman who goes shopping and throws a party. But when I saw the image, I gaspedwith shocked delight. Not having known her work before, how could I haveguessed that Thérèse Bonney had created an image that captures at once a veryspecific moment in women’s fashion and, at the same time, would be at home in awindow at Sak’s today?

My expertise isnot photography or fashion, but literature and history, and, in the brief time Ihave today, I want to talk about the caption, the photo, and a little bit aboutthe photographer itself. I should sayhere that, as the prints department is not even 100% sure of the artist, I donot know the source or author of the caption, nor where, if anywhere, thisimage originally appeared. The full caption is an amazing bit of 1920sfashion writing:

What London wears—The continental way of beingeconomical—Rubbers for legs—fold into a dainty little package and easily leftin escort’s coat pocket. Ingenious way of keeping silk stockings clean.

For copywriters in the 1920s, as today, London prides itself on being glamorous,signaled here by the word “continental,” and practical. What London wears is,in fact, not from London at all, but an import from Europe. However, cautiousLondoners need not fear—these rubber stocking covers are economical as well. Ashigh fashion as the photograph is, the caption itself brings us squarely intothe world of advertising. The rest of the caption flirts with sexuality.“Rubber” as slang for a condom goes back to 1913 but it has been chiefly NorthAmerican slang. Still, the idea of sex, of the ways in which we clothe ourbodies to conceal and reveal possibilities of intimacy, hovers throughout thissilly little bit of prose. The caption contains within it the narrative of adate: these removable little stocking covers slip off and into a pocket, butnot your pocket, your date’s. The image of a young woman, balancing onone leg, her hand, perhaps, on her escort’s shoulder for balance, as sheunclasps the three hooks on each rubber, folds them into their “dainty littlepackage,” and hands them to him for safekeeping would have been impossiblebefore the war. And then, the next line, “ingenious way of keeping silkstockings clean,” implies that the same daring woman who would wear theserubbers is also one who worries about her laundry. This is a modern woman,sexy, confident, and living on her own. She is like T. S. Eliot’s typist, homeat teatime, her drying combinations strewn about her flat. She is not like theprotagonist of Dorothy Richardson’s 1915 novel Pilgrimage, a youngboarding school teacher who worries, in a panic, about how to do her hair, forit’s still wet from having been forced to shampoo it just before dinner.

The idea of galoshes as dangerously contintental, as a French letterfor the feet, shows up in a wonderful scene from James Joyce’s 1914 story, “TheDead”:

"O, but you'll never guess what hemakes me wear now! … Galoshes!" said Mrs. Conroy. "That's the latest.Whenever it's wet underfoot I must put on my galoshes. Tonight even, he wantedme to put them on, but I wouldn't. The next thing he'll buy me will be a divingsuit."Gabriel laughed nervously and patted histie reassuringly, while Aunt Kate nearly doubled herself, so heartily did sheenjoy the joke. The smile soon faded from Aunt Julia's face and her mirthlesseyes were directed towards her nephew's face. After a pause she asked:"And what are goloshes,Gabriel?""Goloshes, Julia!" exclaimedher sister "Goodness me, don't you know what goloshes are? You wear themover your... over your boots, Gretta, isn't it?""Yes," said Mrs. Conroy."Guttapercha things. We both have a pair now. Gabriel says everyone wearsthem on the Continent."

Gretta Conroy’slast remark—that everyone wears them on the Continent—is the beginning of anend for her husband Gabriel who, over the course of the evening, will beexposed for preferring Europe to Ireland, for being in danger of being leftbehind, both by his wife’s memories of a boy from the West and by his femalecolleague’s commitment to the Irish language and the Irish Free state. Therubbers of 1914 are not the same as the ones shown here.

Galoshes do notfigure in Mrs. Dalloway, but another kind of tube for the extremitiesdoes: gloves. The original first line of Mrs. Dalloway was not “Mrs. Dallowaysaid she would buy the flowers herself” but “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buythe gloves herself.” And the 1923 short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street”which began Woolf’s serious return to Clarissa Dalloway as a possibleprotagonist (She had been a minor character in an earlier work) contains anextended meditation on the decline of gloves since the war. In that story,Clarissa’s preoccupation with gloves is part of the sharper satire on her—she’sa much less sympathetic figure in the story than in the novel—so, she thinks“It would be intolerable if dowdy women came to her party!” and then wonders“Would one have liked Keats if he had worn red socks?” Woolf uses Keats, agreat poet revered across England, as a crucial barometer: the notion thatone’s opinion of a poet might alter if his socks were not quite so is asshallow to Woolf’s ears as to ours. So when, in the next paragraph, Clarissaforges a connection with the shop girl over the old gloves, “With pearlbuttons… perfectly simple—how French!,” we are reminded of how a certain kindof woman still judges others’ value by the correctness of her accessories.

For Joyce,galoshes are a way that a middle-aged husband protects his wife from a chill.For Woolf, gloves are a sign of a middle-aged wife’s continuing care forpropriety. The rubbers that London wears in this 1926 photograph are somethingelse entirely. And to turn from the ways in which Joyce and Woolf ironize thebourgeois preoccupations of the prior generation to Bonney’s photograph is tosuddenly feel a breath of fresh air, to feel the breathing room that modernityopened up for women.

Ifthe caption flirts cloyingly, the photograph itself is less shy. It is alsoart. We see a pair of long, slim legs, crossed just above the ankle, inmedium-heeled Mary Janes, with a button strap. The strap and the opening of theshiny black shoes are piped with a thin strip of leather in a paler shade. Thespat-like galoshes hook under the heel and fasten three times in the front,leaving large gaps up the shin between buttons. The rubbers hardly look like apractical solution to walking in rainy streets. Surely the splash of a mudpuddle is as likely to hit the front of a leg as the back. In Woolf’s shortstory, Mrs. Dalloway remembers how “old Uncle William used to say” that “A ladyis known by her gloves and her stockings” (26). That old saw, still currenttoday, about the telling signs of a woman’s accessories, applies here in waysthat might shock Clarissa, for the story that these rubbers tell is not aboutclass or breeding but about modern glamour.

One of the mostimportant facts about these rubbers is how they remind us that this Londonwoman is no longer wearing dresses down to her ankles. Her skirts would havecome down just below her knees and her legs are now on display. But the displayitself participates in a distinctively twenties aesthetic. The overall effectis glamorous rather than practical. Both sexy and abstract, the rubbers createthree additional pale ovals up the white leg, echoing the oval created by thestrap itself. If you go to the gallery upstairs, you’ll see that next to thisphotograph, the Delaunay print, representing 1924, and the Man Ray photographrepresenting 1925 both feature studies of circles and curved forms. Thedesigner of these rubbers, the model, and Thérèse Bonney have collaborated tocreate in three dimensions, on a woman’s leg, a design that echoes the cleanlines and pure shapes of avant garde art of the period.

In her recentbook Glamour in Six Dimensions Judith Brown argues that the world of glamour and of high modernism are not so farapart. We should not, she insists, see a divide between consumerism and art,but notice instead a shared aesthetic delight in abstract forms and cleanlines. The Bonney photograph absolutely participates in the phenomenon thatBrown describes and it’s an exciting reminder of how fast the world waschanging in 1926: just the year before, Woolf published a novel in whichClarissa laments that her daughter doesn’t care about gloves, but now, thatlament is tinged with a kind of pride. At the party, one of Clarissa’s elderlyguests notes to herself how the young girls’ gowns are short, tight, andstraight, a look she finds unflattering. And the very next year time, in Paris,designers are making rubbers to market to the modern Londoner so she canprotect her stockings and show off her legs.

The photographer is presumed to be Mabel Thérèse Bonney (limited access link, sorry) and, as I have learned in the past few days, she is very muchworth more of our attention. Bonney was born in Syracuse in 1894. Educated at theUniversity of California, and Harvard, she earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne.During the 1920s, she and her sister published a series of books about Frenchcooking and fashion for American and English readers and this photograph looksto be part of that phase of her career as a photographer: gorgeous editorialfashion work.

She returned to New York in 1935 to become director of the new MaisonFrançaise, a gallery in RockefellerCenter dedicated to fostering better cultural understanding between France andthe United States. That worksent her back to Europe and, while in Finland in November 1939 to photographpreparations for the 1940 OlympicGames, she instead became the only photojournalist at the scene of theRussian invasion of Finland. Her war photography was exhibited at the Library of Congress and published in books as War Comes tothe People (1940) and Europe’s Children (1943). Her concept for a film about children displaced by war became the AcademyAward- winning movie, The Search (1948). She died in France in 1978.

Baron Marbot's Memoirs, a footnote examined

2011-10-26T12:36:00.000-04:00

This footnote, so far, gathers information that's been available in many other editions of Mrs. Dalloway, so I'm not presenting it to you as a sign of my research. Instead, it's an occasion to think about the choices every editor must confront. Here is the draft note as I have it:

48.23-24 Baron Marbot's Memoirs:Jean Baptiste Antoine Marcelin, Baron de Marbot (1782-1854), French generalwho accompanied Napoleon on his disastrous retreat from Moscow in 1812. A. J.Butler translated his memoirs into English in 1892 (3 vols.), with an abridged,one-volume, version appearing in 1893, and a new version in 1897.

Looking at it yesterday, I deleted a comment that I had previously accepted from another editor, to the effect that Clarissa is likely reading from the abridgment. Why? How on earth might we guess that she is reading the abridged Marbot? The whole point of her reading is that she sleeps alone, doesn't have an intimate relationship with her husband anymore and, all in all, prefers about reading about a humiliating, (and frigid) Napoleonic defeat. If you're choosing Marbot over intimacy, why not go for the three volume version?

Rolling turf. Draft footnote of the day

2011-10-24T12:23:00.000-04:00

44.6 rolling his strip of turf Mr. Bentleyis tending to his lawn with a roller, a metal drum with an axle through thecenter leading up to a handle. Rollers smooth the lawn's surface and arefrequently used on cricket pitches, golf courses, and formal gardens to insureperfectly even grass. Woolf’s narrator is shooed off such a lawn in Oxbridge inA Room of Own’s Own (1929).

Not sure about the description of the roller itself. Any suggestions, gentle readers?

The Serpentine. Draft footnote of the day.

2011-10-23T20:56:00.002-04:00

I am still here. I still exist. I have more substance than a tweet--barely--I'm just striving to make a 1/31/12 deadline for Dalloway and that makes me a little batty.

16.1 Serpentine The Serpentine is the lake in Hyde Park, formed in 1730by the damming of the River Westbourne. Hyde Park, another of the major RoyalParks, appropriated by Henry VIII (1536), and site for carriage drives by the wealthy.Hyde Park lies tothe west of Clarissa's route. For Clarissa’s memory of throwing a shilling intothe Serpentine, see 277.17. In1903, Woolf wrote a short sketch about a woman who committed suicide by jumpinginto the Serpentine. See also her letter to Violet Dickinson, 22 May 1922: “you’lltell me I’m a failure as a writer, as well as a failure as a woman. Then Ishall take a dive into the Serpentine” (L 1.499).

Cura: A new journal of art and action

2011-10-12T21:33:00.000-04:00

Late last spring, a group of Fordham students gottogether with Sarah Gambito, our Director of Creative Writing. They werefrustrated that all the work they were doing on the student literary journalresulted in a pretty little booklet that sat in stacks on the radiators of ourbuilding, ignored. How could they convey their passion for art and their desireto change the world in ways that would touch other people?

Lots of brainstorming, conversations, coding, and afew visits to Zuccotti Park later, and Curais the result. I’ve been tweeting about this for a while, but I haven’t writtenabout it here.

Cura is going to be an onlinemagazine, available on Kindle and with a number (how many? we’re not sure yet)of print editions. Four times a year, we’ll publish a prompt, each one relatedto the theme, and select the best art—fiction, poetry, photography, or any newmedia that can be displayed on a website—we get in response. The students writethe prompt and they’re also writing the Muse, the blog that riffs on thatprompt.

Our theme is Home.

Our first prompt is “What does your white picketfence keep out? And what has slipped in?”

Our first deadline is October 17^th.

But that’s not all. We are committed to art andaction and with the theme of home we’ll be hosting some fundraising events tobenefit Covenant House, a nonprofit that benefits homeless youth. Any money wemake from sales of the print journal will go to Covenant House, too.

We are so excited about this! I am super proud toplay a small role as a faculty advisor. I hope that you’ll pass the call forsubmissions to all your friends, that you’ll submit your work, and that you’llcome back at the end of the month and read what we’ve put together.

Draft footnote of the day: Lady Bexborough

2011-10-10T13:08:00.003-04:00

Lady Desborough

Lady Bexborough who opened a bazaar, they said, with the telegram in her hand, John, her favourite, killed.

9.23 Lady BexboroughThe name recalls the Countess of Bessborough (1761-1821; born Lady FrancesHenrietta Spencer), a celebrated Regency hostess, confidant of Lord Byron, andmother to Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828). It also rhymes with that of LadyDesborough (1867-1952), a prominent Edwardian hostess and intimate friend ofmany Prime Ministers of the period. Her resemblance, both physically and inmanner to an eighteenth-century hostess was widely remarked. Two of LadyDesborough’s sons were killed in WWI (See EN 9.24) See (D 3.37; 20 July 1925): “Sometimesa buttery crumb of praise is thrown me—‘Lady Desborough admires your booksenormously—wants to meet you.’”

One Diary Entry, Five Footnotes

2011-09-26T21:18:00.004-04:00

"& then therewas Mrs Asquith. I was impressed. She is stone white: with the brown veiledeyes of an aged falcon; & in them more depth & scrutiny than Iexpected; a character, with her friendliness, & ease, & decision. Oh ifwe could have had Shelley’s poems, & not Shelley the man! she said. Shelleywas quite intolerable, she pronounced; she is a rigid frigid puritan” (D 2.244;4 June 1923)

My notes to self:

add to fn. re her memoirs which are inthe bookshop window in Mrs. Dalloway
falcon: add to fn. about bird re:Clarissa & about martial Lady Bruton
Shelley: Clarissa and Sally read and loveShelley
Shelley: Clarissa’s favorite poet fromback in 1915
disapproval of Shelley: cf. Richard’s disapproval ofShakespeare

Virginia Woolf in Uruguay, final dispatch: food edition

2011-09-23T11:25:00.002-04:00

The beginning of the term has me spinning like a top. Somuch so, that I forgot to mention that my account of the Woolf Conference inUruguay was published at the wonderful Words Without Borders site, a terrific resourcefor literature in languages other than English, with many supporting materialsfor teachers and students and a beautifully designed virtual space. You can godirectly to my dispatch by clicking here.

The one thing that was just too non-literary to mention washow great and interesting the food was, but, especially since I got teased formy enthusiasm about it, before, during, and after, I’ll share that with youhere, now.

Forty percent of Uruguayans are of Italian descent and pizzawas everywhere. When I asked how it differed from Italian or American pizza, Iwas told it didn’t, but a group of us went out for pizza on my first nightthere and I learned different. The slices came to our table on individual,dessert-size melamine plate, each slice cut into strips for sharing. Thedelicious brick-oven pizza had no tomato sauce at all. It was served withfainá, a flatbread made with chick pea flour. Both were delicious, but neitherthe food nor the generous way it was shared, down the middle of a long tablecluttered with tumblers of water and red wine, was much like eating a slice inNew York.

The chivito, the national sandwich of Uruguay, surpassed itsreputation. This sandwich, with a thin layer of steak, ham, bacon, mayonnaise,hard-boiled egg, and pickles on a sweet soft roll is messy, delicious, and toomuch. It’s everything a Big Mac dreams of being: too many meats and condiments,too much juicy flavor, all coming together into a perfect sandwich.

I don't know how she does it

2011-09-22T22:12:00.001-04:00

I thought, "Well, since I don't have to teach tomorrow, maybe I'll read a little Proust." (I really do need to read Proust.) Now, two hours later, I am still trying to fill out those beginning of the year forms. "Which package for school pictures? And if I get package B with the $5 sibling discount, how much is the check for?"

I am reading I Don't Know How She Does It on my Kindle. it's very very funny and so close to home that it's almost unbearable.

I hope that my madeleine for these years is a madeleine and not the sight of a reminder stapled to the front of the homework folder: "Pumpkin patch form and $ DUE MONDAY! : )"

A footnote to a footnote

2011-08-26T11:53:00.000-04:00

This is obscure, even for me, but very cool.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa wonders if Hurlingham might be the cause of the traffic. Hurlingham is a polo ground outside London. The Woolf's went to see the polo there in May of 1923, when she was returning, in earnest, to drafting the novel. In a letter, Woolf writes:

"We’ve just been to see the Polo at Hurlingham, and my wits are gone. How I wish I were the Duke of Peneranda and could play polo! And what d’you think they’re like to talk to?—the D. of Peneranda, the Marquis of Cholmondeley? Imagine their conversation” (L 3.41; 21 May 1923; to Molly MacCarthy)

But who is this Duke of Peneranda? None other than a silver medalist for polo...

Wikipedia tells me, after some labor, that "The Duke of Peñaranda de Duero was a Gentilhombre de Camara (Gentleman of the Household) to King Alfonso XIII of Spain. At the1920 Summer Olympics he and his brother were on the Spanish polo team, winning the silver medal.^[1]"

Intensity, Mrs. Dalloway edition

2011-08-25T11:38:00.000-04:00

I'm wrestling a file full of quotations into a book introduction. It's not pretty, but that's the project. My brain is like a jello salad that didn't quite set. I don't trust myself to blog. But I can share some great quotations with you. Like this one:

“I have had only 4 days writing at my novel [Mrs. Dalloway] since I got back. Tomorrow, I say to myself, I shall plunge into the thick of it. But how does one make people talk about everything in the whole of life, so that one’s hair stands on end, in a drawing room? How can one weight and sharpen dialogue till each sentence tears its way like a harpoon and grapples with the shingles at the bottom of the reader’s soul? (L 3.36; 13 May 1923; to Gerald Brenan)

Septimus & Leonard

2011-08-24T14:56:00.000-04:00

Septimus (?) must be seen by some one. HIs wife? She to be founded on L? Simple, instinctive, childless.

L? L! (Virginia Woolf, The Hours (the manuscript draft of Mrs. Dalloway, ed. Helen Wussow, 416)

Gerald Brenan & Woolf, Septimus & Clarissa

2011-08-23T12:42:00.000-04:00

An incredibly humane letter from Woolf to Gerald Brenan, a WWI veteran:

“You said you were very wretched, didn’t you?....and compared this state of yours with mine, which you imagine to be secure, rooted, benevolent, industrious—you did not say dull—but somehow unattainable, and I daresay, unreal. But you must reflect that I am 40: further every 10 years, at 10, again at 30, such agony of different sorts possessed me that not content with rambling and reading I did most emphatically attempt to end it all; and should have been often thankful, if by stepping on one flagstone rather than another I could have been annihilated where I stood.” (L 2.598; 25 December 1922; to Gerald Brenan)

Here, we see so much of Woolf's sympathy for the suffering veteran that we cannot help but see how Woolf drew on her own experiences to make Clarissa into more of a person, less of a satire.

Bad Bankers, c. 1879

2011-08-19T12:02:00.000-04:00

From Olivia Laing's new book, To the River, about a walk up the Ouse. This passage describes Kenneth Grahame's early working life, in the Bank of England, c. 1879:

“the Bank was, by all accounts an exceedingly eccentric place…it wasn’t unusual to come across a clerk in the lavatory butchering the carcass of a sheep bought wholesale in the local market. The lavatories were also used for dogfights, which were so much a part of Bank culture that some of the rougher clerks kept fighting dogs chained in readiness at their desks” (65).

One might write a nostalgic book about rodents in canoes after such an adventure. I'm glad Wind in the Willows emerged from this nonsense. Don't get me started on the bankers of 2011...

Draft footnote of the day: Peter the porpoise

2011-08-10T14:10:00.002-04:00

7.21 Peter Walsh Cf. Hours notebook 3 for an anecdote about a porpoise called Peter at the Brighton aquarium (Add. MSS 51046, 130R)

Draft footnote of the day: flying flowers

2011-08-09T20:19:00.002-04:00

227.4 flying flowers over some tomb Persephone is gathering flowers when Hades abducts her and takes her to the underworld. Cf. the anonymous Homeric “Hymn to Demeter, c. ll. 5-19.

Rumpelmayer's

2011-08-04T11:00:00.001-04:00

From Putnam's Monthly (1907), celebrating the arrival of Rumpelmayer's in London. Gertrude Stein loved their honey cake. Hope Mirrlees invited Woolf to the Paris Rumpelmayer's in the early 1920s.

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer's men were coming."

The orchids of Burma

2011-08-03T18:25:00.000-04:00

Ah! She could not resist recalling what Charles Darwin had said about her little book on the orchids of Burma.--Mrs. Dalloway (269-70).

For a real life botanist and amateur orchid enthusiast, read Katherine Harrington's Kew Gardens blog post about Charles Samuel Pollock Parish (1822 - 1897). He and his friend, Major Tickell, made an annual collecting trip there.

Summer Mix, 2011—Heat wave edition

2011-07-28T14:11:00.000-04:00

Here is the track list for our 2011 summer cd, the 6^th we’ve made as a family:

Lovely Day--Bill Withers

Eet--Regina Spektor

Boogie Nights--Heat Wave

Chic C'est La Vie--Countess Luann

Montezuma--Fleet Foxes

Police On My Back--The Clash

Like A Rolling Stone--Bob Dylan

You've Got a Friend in Me (para el Buzz Español)--Gipsy Kings

Firework--Katy Perry

Dancing Queen--Abba

What a Wonderful World--Louis Armstrong

Thunder Road--Bruce Springsteen

Right as Rain--Adele

Candombe Del Olvido--Alfredo Zitarrosa

The Cave--Mumford & Sons

Sugar Mountain--Neil Young

Town Called Malice--The Jam

Viva La Vida--Coldplay

Maybe I'm Amazed--Paul McCartney

Doña Soledad--Repique

Mountain Greenery--Ella Fitzgerald

Perhaps not surprisingly, Uruguayan music is represented as never before. Of the three kiddie pop songs that emerged after a weekend with our Vermont cousins, Justin Beiber and Taio Cruz didn’t make the cut, but Katy Perry turns out to be a crowd-pleaser. And, in honor of a genius tribute video by one of my husband’s colleagues, we have our first ever track from one of the Real Housewives, Countess Luann. As Izzy (5) says, “It’s silly, but it’s fun to dance to.” Coldplay makes its third appearance, one of only three artists to do so in six years. The other two are Stevie Wonder and Pink Martini. That trio captures, I think, what it is we’re up to here: picking great songs that are fun to share across generations.

Lady Henry Somerset & the Chinese Shoe

2011-07-14T11:23:00.002-04:00

My grandmother grew up in China, where she lived until she went to college. She once described witnessing little girls with newly bound feet being chased about the courtyard with switches, the older women forcing them to become accustomed to walking so bound. My grandmother loved China, spoke Chinese, believed—in spite of some of her strict Lutheran teaching—that God must surely admit some of the kind, non-Lutheran Chinese to heaven, too. She did not at all love her girlhood on the mission, but she loved Chinese culture. She was a brilliant, kind, strong woman, and, for all that, she abhorred footbinding.

All that is a long preface to explain why I was so forcibly struck by this quotation from Woolf on footbinding, from a short review called, to emphasize her metaphor, “The Chinese Shoe.” Woolf reviewed a biography of Lady Henry Somerset in the fall of 1923. She emphasizes the immense social pressures that conspired to quash Lady Somerset’s joie de vivre:

“The Victorian age was to blame; her mother was to blame; Lord Henry was to blame; even the saintly Mr. Watts was forced by fate to take part in the general conspiracy against her. Between them each natural desire of a lively and courageous nature was stunted, until we feel that the old Chinese custom of fitting the foot to the shoe was charitable compared with the mid-Victorian practice of fitting the woman to the system.”

Bonar Law, The Forgotten Prime Minister

2011-07-12T14:12:00.002-04:00

One couldn't laugh at him. He looked so ordinary. You might have stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits--poor chap, all rigged up in gold lace. And to be fair, as he went his rounds, first with Clarissa, then with Richard escorting him, he did it very well. He tried to look somebody. It was amusing to watch. Nobody looked at him. They just went on talking, yet it was perfectly plain that they all knew, felt to the marrow of their bones, this majesty passing; this symbol of what they all stood for, English society. Old Lady Bruton, and she looked very fine too, very stalwart in her lace, swam up, and they withdrew into a little room which at once became spied upon, guarded, and a sort of stir and rustle rippled through every one openly: the Prime Minister!--Mrs. Dalloway.

Alfredo Zitarrosa

2011-07-07T11:49:00.000-04:00

Last week, after the conference was over, two of the English professors from the University of the Republic of Uruguay were kind enough to take me and another visiting American on a drive to the charming vacation town of Colonía.

While there, I spotted a music store and asked my new Uruguayan friends to help me pick some Cds to remember Uruguay by. I had read about Luciano Supervielle as the hot new Uruguayan artist on the plane, so I picked up his album. I also got a two-cd compilation of Candombe, the distinctive, highly percussive Afro-Uruguayan music (and, I’m told, the only music that this solely Uruguayan—tango, being, of course, shared with Argentina). Both are terrific.

If you want old music, traditional music, they said, maybe try Alfredo Zitarrosa. But, the man warned, his music is very sad, very depressing. He has one song, my new friend continued, in which he likens his failed love, his failed life, his failed nation, to the slaughter of a calf which is vividly described in the 16-minute song. By the end of the 16 minutes, you’ll want to kill yourself, too, he said. This music may not be for you.

But my fellow American and I took one look at this face—that sad, manly bassett hound topped with a lot of hair and a bit too much gel really does it for me—and picked up copies of a collection of Zitarrosa. I can’t stop listening to it and it seems to me that his is the music I have been needing all my life. Gorgeous, lush, and melancholy, with beautiful clear masculine vocals and a sweet Spanish guitar, the music moves me to my core.

To hear this man singing mi pais, mi dolor, mi gente, mariposa is to feel, all facts to the contrary, almost able to understand Spanish.

I love Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but there is something about melancholy songs in another language that just slays me. My love for Jacques Brel will never abate, but I needed someone new. Zitarrosa forever!

The first Mrs. Dalloway

2011-07-06T11:42:00.000-04:00

I really can barely stand the Clarissa of The Voyage Out, but this is too funny:

Mrs. Dalloway, with her head a little on one side, did her best to recollect Ambrose—was it a surname?—but failed. She was made slightly uneasy by what she had heard. She knew that scholars married any one—girls they met in farms on reading parties; or little suburban women who said disagreeably, "Of course I know it's my husband you want; not me."

A thin thread

2011-07-05T11:30:00.005-04:00

“Because,” he said, “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you,—you’d forget me.”--Jane Eyre, chapter 23

Spotted whilst watching the wonderful new film of the book on American flight 596 from Buenos Aires to JFK, confirmed via e-text. Compare to:

And they went further and further from her, being attached to her by a thin thread (since they had lunched with her) which would stretch and stretch, get thinner and thinner as they walked across London; as if one's friends were attached to one's body, after lunching with them, by a thin thread, which (as she dozed there) became hazy with the sound of bells, striking the hour or ringing to service, as a single spider's thread is blotted with rain-drops, and, burdened, sags down. So she slept.--Mrs. Dalloway.

You never know when you'll find a footnote.

Coloquio Internacional Montevideana VII: Programa Montevideana VII

2011-07-04T07:07:00.000-04:00

Coloquio Internacional Montevideana VII: Programa Montevideana VII: "MIÉRCOLES 22 DE JUNIO 13.30 – 14.30. Inscripciones. 14.30 – 15.10. Palabras inaugurales a cargo de: Enrique Aguerre, Director del Museo ..."

Uruguay

2011-06-27T13:32:00.002-04:00

Back from Uruguay this morning. The chivitos were delicious. I was treated like a princess. The Woolfians of the Southern Cone were amazing and I learned so much it will take me days to process, but let us say that Montevideana VII was a wonderful, unforgettable experience. Wow!

The 21 Woolf Conferences

2011-06-15T11:24:00.000-04:00

How many have you been to? My 14 are in bold:

1. Pace U--NYC (Mark Hussey) 1991

2. Southern Conn State U--New Haven (Vara Neverow) 1992

3. Lincoln U--Jefferson City (Jane Lilienfeld) 1993

4. Bard College--Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (Paul Connolly) 1994

5. Otterbein College--Westerville, OH (Beth Daugherty) 1995

6. Clemson U--Clemson, SC (Wayne Chapman and Elisa Sparks) 1996

7. Plymouth College--Plymouth, NH (Jeanne Dubino) 1997

8. St. Louis U—St. Louis, MO (Georgia Johnston) 1998

9. U of Delaware—Newark, DE (Bonnie Kime Scott and Ann Ardis) 1999

10. U of Maryland-Baltimore—Baltimore MD (Jessica Berman) 2000

11. Bangor U—Bangor, Wales (Michael Whitworth) 2001

12. Sonoma State U--Rohnert Park, CA (J.J. Wilson) 2002

13. Smith College—Northampton, MA (Karen Kukil et alia) 2003

14. U. of London—London, UK (Gina Potts and Lisa Shahriari) 2004

15. Lewis and Clark College—Portland, OR (Rishona Zimring) 2005

16. U of Birmingham—Birmingham, UK (Kathryn Simpson, Steve Ellis et alia) 2006

17. Miami U, Ohio—Miami, OH (Madelyn Detloff and Diana Royer) 2007

18. U of Denver—Denver, CO (Eleanor McNees) 2008

19. Fordham U, Manhattan—NYC (Anne Fernald) 2009

20. Georgetown College—Georgetown, KY (Kristin Czarnecki) 2010

21. And U of Glasgow—Glasgow, Scotland (Jane Goldman) 2011

Thanks to Vara Neverow for posting the list on the Woolf listserv.

I've missed some of the best ones, I'm told, but what I've seen has been pretty awesome, pretty sustaining. I'm sad to have missed Glasgow this year, but I'm looking forward to Saskatoon in 2012!

Two of my pieces elsewhere

2011-06-14T11:26:00.000-04:00

In case you missed it, my letter to the NYTBR in response to a review of Harold Bloom's new book was published in this Sunday's edition.

And I have a longish blog post on rape, Clarissa, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn over at Guernica.

Please do read them, and if you're moved to comment on the Guernica piece, please do so. I'd love the editors to see that you'd been by, read, and responded...

Jay-Z and Cockney Rhyming Slang

2011-06-13T10:20:00.000-04:00

Every once in a while, I’ll be teaching and Cockney rhyming slang will come up. Can “apples and pears” really be “stairs”? Do people really say “trouble and strife” to mean “wife”? And frankly, I can’t answer. It has always seemed baffling to me, too.

Then, on my run this morning, I’m listening to Jay-Z’s “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”

If a man named Shawn Corey Carter can re-style himself as Jay-Z and then reshape that into the grandiose (and pretty terrific) god-term pun Jay-hova, and then turn it into a kind of new pig Latin and get sweet-voiced women to sing “H to the Izzo, V to the Izzay” so we all understand that this is a tribute to the greatness of that same young Shawn Carter’s rap stylings, why shouldn’t Brahms, shortened from Brahms and Lizst, mean “pissed” (as in drunk)?

The link, if you click it, has some really good examples, and, in more patient terms, shows how many such rhyming substitutions are in common use (such as 86'd for nixed).

This makes me feel much better.

New Blog Post

2011-06-10T16:23:00.002-04:00

Over at Guernica!

It's my first post there, and it's about rape in 1747 and today, about Clarissa and about Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Please do read it and leave a comment!

Rio de la Plata, Uruguay

2011-06-09T11:12:00.000-04:00

A fantasia on Uruguay from Woolf's great 1925 essay, "The Elizabethan Lumber Room":

“what if the passage to the fabled land of uncounted riches lay only a little farther up the coast? What if the known world was only the prelude to some more splendid panorama? When, after the long voyage, the ships dropped anchor in the great river of the Plate and the men went exploring through the undulating lands, startling grazing herds of deer, seeing the limbs of savages between the trees, they filled their pockets with pebbles that might be emeralds or sand that might be gold; or sometimes, rounding a headland, they saw, far off, a string of savages slowly descending to the beach bearing on their heads and linking their shoulders together with heavy burdens for the Spanish King”

Google Coincidence

2011-06-01T12:02:00.000-04:00

The other night, I was re-reading Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid.” A provocative and funny title for a really thoughtful piece on how our thinking may be changing—really, profoundly changing—with our increasing reliance on computers. I really love that essay for the care with which it weighs the good and the bad of Google. Carr writes: “The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes.” I feel that profoundly, too. Much as I love the hours and hours that I’ve logged in the stacks and in the reading rooms of great libraries, it’s exciting and a lot easier to find the stuff so fast.

I turned from Carr to Woolf, to reread her essay “The Russian Point of View.” I’m rereading The Common Reader in its entirety for my talk in Uruguay and for the Dalloway edition. As I read, I come upon one of Andrew McNeillie’s footnotes from 1984: “This reference has resisted all efforts at discovery.”

It’s a wonderful footnote and one I’ve long admired. McNeillie is a fabulous editor and, in days before Google, he tracked down dozens and dozens of allusions, translated Greek, and generally showed the seams of Woolf’s work so that scholars like me could trace her sources and hear her allusions. And, this note, to a bland quote from one of Chekhov’s over 100 stories, seems fair: it’s the only time in the whole book when McNeillie just gives up.

So, of course, I typed the phrase “such conversation as this between us would have been unthinkable for our parents” into Google. First hit? “Anton Chekhov, A Doctor’s Visit, trans. Constance Garnett”—of course, the very translation Woolf used. Second hit? Virginia Woolf,

Cool.

Quiet Americans

2011-05-27T12:29:00.000-04:00

I took a break from Clarissa last weekend to read my friend Erika Dreifus’s debut collection of short stories, Quiet Americans. It’s a lovely collection of loosely interconnected stories about American Jews and their European roots.

Erika is a historian by training, and you can feel that in the assurance of her voice, her attention to details, the way that every character, every story feels rooted in a precise time and place. The opening story, about a Jewish pediatrician who counted among his patients a child of a top-ranking Nazi is wonderfully tense. The scene in which the doctor is summoned to the Nazi’s office and advised, strongly, to leave Germany is cinematic and haunting. The fact that the doctor heeds the advice, a welcome happy ending.

But all the characters in the book are haunted. Most of these stories are about American Jews with German roots who just barely got out in time (or are the children and grandchildren of those men and women). The survivor’s guilt, the sense of the duty to remember, to protect, to insure that a Holocaust doesn’t happen again, is palpable throughout. These are stories that convey one of the key strains in our culture. For me, they worked best when there is tension within that burden, as in the witty and effervescent last story about a man who becomes obsessed with tracing his own family tree. Less successful, for me, were stories about the 1972 Munich Olympics or the sorry episode of Amiri Baraka’s lost tenure as poet laureate of New Jersey for his nutty, anti-Semitic musings about the root causes of 9/11. Those stories keep alive a grief and a grievance that’s fully justified: I shudder in horror at the thought of those slaughtered athletes and in shame at the way a great poet can fall prey to crackpot ideas. Still, in political fiction, I want more subtlety, an acknowledgment of the real pain that leads people to become violent or even just to believe in conspiracies.

Unqualifiedly wonderful is a story where Erika works a different vein, channeling Isaac Babel or Isaac Bashevis Singer in “Matrilineal Descent,” a moving fable about two sisters in a village in Germany, one plain and hardworking, the other pretty and delicate, and the baker whom they both love.

Best of all, as others have said, is the title story, “Quiet Americans, or How to Be a Good Guest.” There, the duty to witness battles with a character’s natural reserve richly and powerfully. I approached this story, its title so evocative of Louis Begley or Graham Greene, with some trepidation, fearing it would be a paean to “The Greatest Generation.” Instead, the quiet American is “you,” a young grad student born in the 60s or 70s, visiting Germany for the first time. As she listens to a young tour guide noting, again and again, buildings that were destroyed in the war, never mentioning the lives lost, never acknowledging the Holocaust, the young quiet American grows increasingly frustrated with rage. But what to say? How to interrupt the tour? It’s a wonderful dilemma and the solution is just terrific.

It reminded me of a tour I took, years ago, of a stately home outside Charleston. The tour guide said that the family had taken a “hiatus” to England during the years 1862-1866. Why, asked my friend, also a historian, did the family choose to leave the South during just those years exactly? Hmmm?

In any case, I can highly recommend Erika’s collection. Each story is a gem on its own and, together, they paint a portrait of the enduring European roots of many American Jews, both of the Holocaust and of the culture that the Holocaust tried, but failed, to fully destroy. They are also beautifully written, crafted with care, with a sure voice that has many registers. A great debut.

Leslie Stephen, Catskills Comic

2011-05-26T11:00:00.000-04:00

Last week, I read (Woolf’s father) Leslie Stephen’s essay on Clarissa as part of my ongoing quest to figure out the relationship between Richardson’s novel and Woolf’s. I found some wonderful stuff, including Stephen’s surprising (to me) wit. In fact, if you were to look over my reading notes, you might mistake them for some weird brand of literary stand-up. I give you some of my favorites:

On Richardson’s moralizing

“indefinite twaddle of a superior kind” (83)

More on Richardson’s moralizing

“he has succeeded in thoroughly forcing upon our minds, by incessant hammering, the impression which he desire to produce” (116)

On a priggish male character

“He is one of those solemn beings who can’t shave themselves without implicitly asserting a great moral principle” (103)

On Richardson’s gift with women characters

“Richardson’s sympathy with women gives a remarkable power to his work. Nothing is more rare than to find a great novelist who can satisfactorily describe the opposite sex” (82)

[pause. Wait for it.]

“Unluckily, his conspicuous faults result from the same cause. His moral prosings savour of the endless gossip over a dish of chocolate in which his heroines delight” (83)

On Pamela
“distinctly the words of his works—of which it is enough to say at present that it succeeds in being neither moral nor in amusing” (86)

On the thoroughness of his novels

“We get the same sort of elaborate familiarity with every aspect of affairs that we should receive from reading a blue-book full of some prolix diplomatic correspondence” (91)

And, the best one: On reading Clarissa

“readers…may find the prolixity less intolerable than might be expected” (94)

Sweetheart, I feel the same about you…

2011-05-25T11:00:00.000-04:00

“I do not know that I am happiest when alone; but this I am sure of, what I am never long in the society of her I love without a yearning for the company of my lamp and my utterly confused and tumbled-over library.”—Lord Byron, from More’s Life, quoted in Leslie Stephen’s Hours in a Library

If, like me, you love quotations about books and libraries, you’ll find a treasure trove in Stephen’s ten-page album of quotations, which opens his collection of literary essays.

The Incomparable Max (Beerbohm) on the BL

2011-05-24T11:00:00.000-04:00

Searching for a quote on tweeds, I re-read the wonderful “Enoch Soames” (1919) last week. It’s still a great story. Here’s a taste of the dialogue:

--The reading room?

--Of the British Museum. I go there every day.

--You do? I’ve only been there once. I’m afraid I found it rather a depressing place. It—it seemed to sap one’s vitality.

--It does. That’s why I go there.

Five

2011-04-27T20:44:00.001-04:00

My youngest turned five today. It makes me sentimental and sad. For her part, she opened everything, very businesslike, with a shrug and a "that's nice" or a thank you or, sweetest of all, turning to her sister, we can share this!

Then, when they were all opened, she let loose a LOUD scream--an Arrrmphh-- jumped Really High five times, coming down Hard and said, loudly "Best Birthday Ever!"

Waiting for the Bus

2011-04-14T12:22:00.002-04:00

This quotation from feminist geographer Doreen Massey haunts me:

Much of life for most people, even at the heart of the first world, still consists of waiting in a bus-shelter with your shopping for a bus that never comes.

The Myth of Progress

2011-04-06T20:59:00.000-04:00

A month ago, Guernica linked to a blog post from Amy Davidson at The New Yorker. Meditating on the death of nine little boys in Afghanistan, out gathering firewood, she asked us to pause, once again, over this war. “Do we know the costs, or even understand our own losses?” she asks. Reflecting on the testimony of the surviving witness, she offers an aside: “Hemad is eleven years old. (So, as it happens, is my own child.)”

That aside touched me deeply. When terrible things happen to someone who is just my age or just my child’s age, we feel them more keenly. We can imagine more vividly how great the loss because we are intimately involved in what it is to be eleven or the mother of someone who is.

I thought about how little I’ve done to work for peace in the past year. At other times, I’ve really tried to do my part, but it’s been a long time since I have even blogged about peace, let alone tried to contact congress. I’m deleting emails from progressive groups unread and I’ve barely signed a petition in 2011. So, for the past month, I’ve been wondering what I can do to work for peace.

And I’ve been feeling pretty discouraged about the prospects.

Then, today, I listened to my 8 year old give me the plot summary of the Kit: An American Girl (1934) book from the library, explaining the Great Depression to me and I thought about how much easier it was to imagine having parents who took in boarders in 2011 than it might have been in 2008. I thought about the wars and listened to an interview with a Tunisian activist. I read about the stagnating violence in Libya and the vortex of violence in the Ivory Coast. I saw headlines about tax season and retirement and worried about my daughters’ future. After all this, I heard myself whine to myself, “I thought everything was going to get better, but it’s not better. It’s worse.”

Shame on me. All those moments in class when I mock the modernists for how shattered they were when their world didn’t get better, when war turned out to be ugly and ignoble, when bringing women into the workplace proved complicated. Suddenly, I feel so like them. Middle-aged, worried about the future of my children and my students, nostalgic for past times that were really not that good, but are now colored by the knowledge that the gas crisis would abate, the Iran hostages would be released, the Berlin Wall would come down…

The Myth of Progress dies hard. I have yet to kill it.

I need to find new ways to work for peace--and, the Bob Marley fan in me rushes to add--and justice.

Barges

2011-04-05T16:11:00.001-04:00

I’ve got a pretty sweet Pandora station to listen to when I need to work but don’t want to. It’s based on Iron & Wine and it plays all kinds of gentle folk rock by soulful kids living in Brooklyn—a little Coldplay, lots of Sufjan Stevens, some Neko Case, moments of Phillip Glass, Penguin Cafe Orchestra. But I had an intense reaction of fascinated loathing when The Vision of a Dying World’s “Barges” came on.

Find more artists like The Vision of a Dying World at Myspace Music

We used to sing “Barges” at Camp Sealth, a Camp Fire Girls camp on Vashon Island (and less often at the Y-owned Camp Orkila) and I always found it creepy. First of all, of all the sea-going vessels that passed through Puget Sound, or any waterway, barges hold the least romance for me—and have the ugliest name. Singing “Barges, I would like to go with you / I would like to sail the ocean blue” always seemed sorry to me. I dreamed of ships, of islands, of adventures, but they never involved a barge.

Then, too, at sleepaway camp, I worked hard to guard myself against group sentiment. I was homesick at night and I knew that the counselors preyed on that generic feeling to build esprit de corps. Dreamy and bookish, I resisted anything that smacked of manufactured sentiment.

My feelings about the song are really strong. If you asked me when I was ten, I would have told you that it was really stupid, but something in it moved me deeply and I resented being moved. I still do.

Turns out that this is an old camp song and feeling about it run high from those who were campers in the 50s and 60s. (I would have been at Sealth in the mid-late 70s), as this discussion board attests. Many of those campers were burdened with the dubious origin story that it was written by a crippled, dying child who longed for escape from her hospital room. If that is not enough to secure a permanent contempt for the song and the custom of terrifying little girls away from home for a week, I don’t know what is. I was delighted to learn, decades too late, that it spawned some delicious parodies. Here is one:

Out of my tent flap, glowing in the night
You can see the leaders' cigarette light 
Silently flows the whiskey from its flask 
As the leaders do go for a blast

Leaders, I would like to go with you
I would like to share your whiskey too 
Leaders, are there boy scouts in your bed?
Are you prepared for the night ahead?

That's one I'll remember to teach my kids should the occasion arise.

Afro-American, Afro-British Lit, 1900-1960

2011-04-04T11:30:00.007-04:00

I’m teaching a new grad class in the fall, Afro-American, Afro-British Lit, 1900-1960. The prospect has me excited and scared. Here is the description:

Anglophone literature of the African diaspora including canonical and less-well known of the Harlem Renaissance, the pre-civil rights era, and Britain’s Windrush generation. Authors include: Toomer, Hurston, Ellison, Selvon, Marson, Baldwin.

A new federal law means we have to order our books early, so I made a too-long list and sent it in. Some of these books I’ve never read, others I have read and taught many times. Having the list made me want to share it. Maybe you can see what is missing or what can be cut. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.

I can see that, in spite of the title, the years 1900-1920 are not represented! I certainly will want to do some DuBois, maybe some Washington, too, and maybe even some Marcus Garvey but, frankly, I’d prefer to include all of that within a lecture on the first night of class and get to the Harlem Renaissance quick: that’s what I love and what I am eager to share. But maybe you can persuade me of why I need a day or so on James Weldon Johnson or fellow Wellesley alumna, Angelina Grimké…

This list of 16 books includes Andrea Levy’s historical novel from 2004 as a kind of coda. I just found The Emigrants from George Lamming today and, though I’ve never read it, I’m hopeful: I wanted Lamming, but his In the Castle of My Skin has a Caribbean setting and I’m trying to focus on England for the Afro-British section.

Una Marson, a Jamaican poet and broadcaster, worked at the BBC in London throughout the 1930s, before the first big wave of Afro-Caribbean immigration to England, so she’s a great figure to have on the syllabus. I chose to stop at 1960 so that I could stay within my modernist ambit, include some writers from the Windrush Generation [1948 and after] and sneak Another Country onto the syllabus without covering the Civil Rights Movement proper, which is a whole other context. This choice, however, means that most of the African writers to write about London arrived in the 60s, so they’re outside my time frame.

Here they are, in chronological order, with my 3 poets stuck in more or less where they seem to fit. I am not sure if I’ll teach the class chronologically: I loved a recent class I took which paired texts and took a look at an issue in the field and I’d like to do a better job developing that approach. In any case, I think the balance is decent: 8 women, 8 men; 10 writing in America, 6 in Britain.

Have a look.

Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)
Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928)
Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)
Langston Hughes, Collected Poems
Jessie Redmon Fauset, Comedy: American Style (1933)
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Una Marson, Selected Poems
Richard Wright, Native Son (1941)
Ann Petry, The Street (1946)
Louise Bennett, Jamaica Labrish
George Lamming, The Emigrants (1954)
Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956)
Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)
E. R. Braithwaite, To Sir, With Love (1959)
James Baldwin, Another Country (1962)
Andrea Levy, Small Island (2004)

Room

2011-03-24T11:15:00.000-04:00

I would give the current revival of the Anne Bogart-Ellen Lauren collaboration a mixed but generally positive review. I would give the talk-back after Tuesday night’s show five stars.

Room is a one-woman show about Virginia Woolf, from a script drawn from Woolf’s writings, selected by Bogart and adapted by Joceyln Clark. Lauren starts the show in an aisle seat in the audience, severely dressed with a severe expression on her face. The only thing distinguishing her from a really mean English teacher (or Miss Hathaway in the Beverly Hillbillies) is the spotlight. There is no curtain on the nearly bare stage; just three huge scrims of the palest blue and an armchair. The play begins when, from row F one hears a commanding “GOOD EVENING.”

The show is largely drawn from A Room of One’s Own and Moments of Being and, I think every word uttered is a quotation from Woolf (although the interludes about a pear tree were said to be from Between the Acts and were not familiar to me, to my shame). The first few minutes are strangely discomfiting: Lauren is stern and a bit goggle-eyed and the play feels like parody, although it’s hard to discern what’s being parodied. However, as the play unfolded, the uncertainty about what we were to think and feel took an encouraging shape: the play deals honestly (albeit indirectly—I wanted more) with war, alludes to mental illness, and is direct about sexual abuse without imposing a reading and always, always with tremendous interest in and respect for Woolf as a mind.

Lauren’s movements are jerky and constrained and, as quickly becomes apparent, she is restricting herself to a very limited range of gestures: a Cassandra-like pose, hands upraised; a pedagogical gesture, finger pointing down at an imaginary text; an inward twist of pain, hands folded together and low to protect her most private parts and thoughts.

Some of the editorial decisions struck me as brilliant. All the names of women writers are stripped from the famous opening of A Room of One’s Own, so we just have the catalog of what one could do (anecdote, mention, etc.) without the list of forgotten women that would distract a 21^st century theater audience (even one as literary as those likely to attend a one-woman show on Woolf). She recites the long quotation from Jane Eyre and Woolf’s ensuing commentary brilliantly and the gothic lighting in that segment is fabulous. There is a gorgeous sound cue of an air raid, during which Lauren lies on stage, breathing hard. I only wish that afterwards she’d recited from “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”—I longed for that 1, 2, 3, 4… that Woolf uses in that essay to mark how impossible it is to think during a bombing. Toward the end of the play, Lauren works herself into a frenzy of movement, a kind of final crescendo of word and gesture, emphasizing, over and over again, how hard it is to know a person.

At other moments, because there is no clear through-line to follow, I found myself a little bored. Sometimes, because Woolf is the chief intellectual companion of my life, I could float off on Woolf’s words, even when I disagreed with Lauren’s interpretations; sometimes Lauren brought new meaning to familiar phrases; sometimes I just worried about what my students in English 3502: Modern British Writing thought.

But the talk back was absolutely brilliant.

Lauren and Bogart described rehearsing in Bogart’s upstate home where the rule was that Lauren was to work on memorizing the script then, at some point in the day, to come upon Bogart in a room and intone “GOOD EVENING.” From there, Lauren would recite all that she’d thus far memorized, stop, and withdraw. Bogart then followed Lauren to a new room where they’d discuss what they’d done before.

The strangely limited choreography came from a series of 29 photographs of Woolf, the poses of which Lauren memorized. These were limited back down to 9 gestures which then became the language of movement for the play.

They said that they wanted Woolf to seem old-fashioned, limited as the play began and that then, as we were more and more confined in our seats and we saw, more and more, how much she had in her mind, how bravely she faced her life—its beauty and its despair—we would see that she was far more free than we.

I left thinking the show was interesting, feeling that the thought behind the show was brilliant—beyond what I’d been able to detect as an audience member. Was that failure mine or that of the production? I don’t know.

Room is playing through Sunday, 3/27, at the Julia Miles Theater on 55^th and 9^th and, if you’re interested, there are tons of discount codes on the theater’s website.

Here's an interview with Ellen Lauren:

In New York magazine, Scott Brown says:

Lauren's delivery sounds a wee bit Mrs. Doubtfire at first, and for a good half-hour we wonder if we're watching nothing more than highfalutin semaphore. But halfway through, the flint hits the steel, and the show's soul catches the flame. Room isn't a perfect translation of Woolf's gestalt, but watching Lauren climb the walls of Neil Patel's terrifyingly empty set leaves one images, both haunting and heroic, of a great mind abandoned to itself — free and unmoored, equally.

Uncanny Room

2011-03-23T21:48:00.002-04:00

About six weeks ago, a colleague whom I admire tremendously was diagnosed with acute leukemia. She died on Tuesday morning, a fact I learned just before going to teach the first class after spring break, the first class on Mrs. Dalloway.

My colleague, Margaret (Mimi) Lamb was an older woman, a Vassar grad who left North Dakota and never looked back. More than once she told me that her Vassar professors used to say “our marriages are our failures.” She was a pistol: kind to people but utterly straight-shooting and uncompromising about literature and plays. She was a great, great New Yorker: the kind of person who, without pretense, would always know one deeper, cooler, richer thing about any place, any theater, any stone, any street corner, you happened to mention. She loved being alive—in spite of years tending to a chronically ill husband (who predeceased her) and poor health herself)—she was full of a zest for life, curiosity, engagement, sharpness. I so admire her. We both loved our Norwegian sweaters and had the same J. Jill corduroy jacket.

When her diagnosis came, it fell to me to staff her freshman class. Still, she had been teaching at Fordham for 33 years and, for all that I admired her, she was not a close friend. Nonetheless, through a friend who knew her better, whose loss is so much greater, I sent her a card and a copy of Dolen Perkins-Valdez’ Wench to keep her company in hospital.

On Sunday, we learned she’d been moved to hospice and would be glad for visitors. Four of us planned to visit Tuesday afternoon. I put on a vivid flowered skirt and tried not to worry about the hospice. Tuesday morning, right before class, the word came that she’d died.

Such a strange feeling. At once, the sadness of knowing that never again would I see her shambling by my office, papers under her arm, maybe stopping to tell me what was on her mind, maybe wearing one of the sweaters that she and I both love. At the same time, the guilty relief of not having to learn, yet again, how bad I am at hospitals and, worse, the recognition that I had my afternoon back to catch up on email.

But there was that class to teach. Sure, it was on Mrs. Dalloway, but I didn’t have a plan.

I talked—about moments of being, about Septimus’ madness in the park, about Woolf’s esteem for Jane Harrison.

After class, a dear friend who has a real West Coast 70s yoga vibe stopped by my office. He offered his condolences, admired my skirt, and said he could tell that my “energy” was with Mimi, that I was helping her make her transition.

I didn’t think much of it--I love that sincere spirituality, but do I believe it?--until I went to the play. Somehow, the intensity of my loss, of my love for Woolf, of my raw unpreparedness for class meant that I quoted for my students almost every passage that was central to Anne Bogart’s production. It was uncanny and beautiful. Maybe we can count it as a tribute to Mimi. May she rest in peace. We miss her here.

City of Immigrants

2011-03-22T11:33:00.001-04:00

Ford’s The Soul of London (1905) has great praise for immigrants and the city’s ability to assimilate and absorb them. I hadn’t expected to find this sentiment about London of over a century ago; in spite of a different, more old-fashioned way of speaking about races, nationalities, and assmilation, (provincially) I tend to associate this sentiment—the wonderful metropolis that lets all become of it—with New York more than London:

London is the world town, not because of its vastness; it is vast because of its assimilative powers, because it destroys all race characteristics, insensible and, as it were, anaesthetically. A Polish Jew changes into an English Hebrew and then into a Londoner without any legislative enactments, without knowing anything about it. You may watch, say, a Berlin Junker, arrogant, provincial, unlicked, unbearable to any other German, execrable to anyone not a German, turning after a year or two into a presentable and only just not typical Londoner, subdued, quiet in the matter of collars, ties, coat, voice and backbone, and naturally extracting a ‘sir’ from a policeman. London will do all this imperceptibly. And, in externals, that is the high-water mark of achievement of the Modern Spirit.

Edited to add that my friend Beth Rosenberg of UNLV notes that 1905 was the year of the Aliens Act, restricting immigration. How blind, how willful is this vision?

In Praise of London

2011-03-21T11:43:00.001-04:00

I’m trying to finish up an article on London and Woolf and came across Ford Madox Ford’s 1905 book (from Duckworth, Woolf’s half-brother’s publishing house), The Soul of London. This beautiful sentiment on London, as rich as Samuel Johnson’s familiar saw, deserves to be better known.

One may sail easily round England, or circumnavigate the globe. But not the most enthusiastic geographer…ever memorized a map of London. Certainly no on ever walks round it. For England is a small island, the world is infinitesimal among planets. But London is illimitable.

Lovely, yes?

The wig

2011-03-18T11:43:00.000-04:00

I love this idea of la perruque, from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life:

La perruque is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. La perruque may be as simple a matter as a secretary’s writing a love letter on ‘company time’ or as complex as a cabinetmaker’s ‘borrowing’ a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room. (25)

The book is wonderful, too, and I’m glad to have read it. I learned a lot. But I copied this passage out over a week ago to share with you and something's been making this post really hard to write. At first, I thought it was so exciting an idea: the notion of this kind of mild pilfering we all do at work. Then, too, since the advent of the internet, how much more must go on. Everyone I know pops onto a blog or facebook for fun at work. And I thought, too, of Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper, whose entire conceit is une perruque: the speaker, Pompey, is writing a novel on yellow paper so as not to confuse it with the white and blue paper she uses, in the same typewriter, for her secretarial work.

But, I must say, that quotation is bugging me. Something as small as a love letter or as big as a manly piece of furniture. Really? De Certeau is actually better on gender issues than most of these high flown theorists, but I get bored of pointing out all the unconscious hierarchies being perpetuated all the time everywhere.

Being a feminist is a full-time contact sport, people.

The need to call out all these theorists, all the time, saying “good idea, but you really haven’t thought through the implications for women…” makes me long to write a book that is, from its conception through its execution, feminist to the core.

BareBurger Japan benefit, 3/22

2011-03-18T11:01:00.000-04:00

One of my wonderful former students manages the Village location & he convinced the owners to donate 20% of sales (not profits, but SALES) to Japan relief on Tuesday. Of course, direct gifts are better, but sometimes, it's also good to get a burger. If you need a burger anyway, show Joe and BareBurger that it does matter when our businesses support relief efforts.

The Cambridge Edition of Virginia Woolf: here it comes!!!

2011-03-17T11:30:00.000-04:00

Woolf scholars of the world, rejoice! Maybe you caught the brief celebratory mentions inthe Independent recently? In any case, the first two volumes of the Cambridge edition of the novels of Virginia Woolf are out. You can buy The Waves or Between the Acts for a mere $130 a volume and have the benefit of full textual and contextual annotations.
Or, if you’re me, you can burrow even more deeply in the library so that the Cambridge edition of Mrs. Dalloway doesn’t trail too too far behind.

Friends of the (New York Public) Library

2011-03-16T21:26:00.001-04:00

I have written many times before of my debt to the New York Public Library. I have my seat at the Wertheim Study until the end of May and, believe me, I am making every use of it.

Librarian Jay Barksdale wrote earlier this week to say that budget woes have sharply curtailed the library’s book-buying budget. If you’re moved to help the library, this is the week to do it: every dollar you give will be matched by $2 from an NYPL Trustee (up to $100,000). This challenge has the potential to purchase 7,500 new books for the library. Click here to give.

These books are help scholars like me consult expensive monographs but they also help new immigrants learning to read, mothers reading to their children, students studying for the SAT, and readers across all five boroughs. If you are moved by the power of reading, please do consider giving a few dollars.

And if not to this challenge, you can always click here and, for $40/year, become a Friend. I just did. For all it’s done for me, it was the least I could do in return.

Pearls & Power, 2

2011-03-09T13:09:00.003-05:00

My post from last week on the signification of pearls in literature and a dustup on the Woolf listserv has been nominated for a prize for arts & lit blogging over at 3 Quarks Daily.

Voting ends tomorrow. Vote for me!!!

Edited to add that I made the seminfinalist round! Hooray! Thanks so much for voting. Now, 3 Quarks Daily will send the top 8 or so on for judging.

Crumbs

2011-03-07T13:03:00.000-05:00

I had never read Julia Stephen’s Notes from Sick Rooms (1883) until last week. It’s a short little book and a strange one. Written when Woolf was one, it’s Woolf’s mother’s long, impressionistic essay on nursing, or rather, on tending to the sick when a nurse or doctor is away or otherwise occupied.

The voice is amazing: brisk, efficient, and full of care. It made Woolf’s mother—and her resemblance to the fictional Mrs. Ramsay—clearer to me than anything else I’ve read. She trips along, associatively, from one subject to the next, beginning in praise of nursing as a practice and ending in the humble pride a nurse can take in her role in nursing someone to a good death. Along the way, she explains how to make a bed when the patient is too ill to get up, describing that amazing process I have occasionally witness of rolling a patient gently onto his side, removing the dirty and adding the clean sheet, and then completing the operation by rolling him back.

She loves nursing because “ordinary relations between the sick and the well are far easier and pleasanter than between the well and the well.” That impatience is wonderful, isn’t it? You can hear, in the book’s opening lines, this strong, practical preference for defined human relationships: none of this petty bickering, this nattering on and on about this and that. Give me a role and I will happily play it, nurse or patient, both are fine. Hardly sounds a bit like what Bloomsbury would become.

I leave you with two gems on crumbs, and hair:

“Among the number of small evils which haunt illness, the greatest, in the misery which it can cause, though the smallest in size, is crumbs… the origin of crumbs in bed has never excited sufficient attention” (5)

“Hairs are not so bad as crumbs, but they are very tormenting bed-fellows, and there is little excuse for any nurse who, after brushing the patient’s hair, allows any stray hairs to remain on the night dress or bed-clothes” (20)

Overheard, Midtown Pret

2011-03-02T13:36:00.003-05:00

Around the corner on the banquette, and to my right, sat two strikingly beautiful businesswomen, late 30s. The suited blonde ate her salad while the ballerina brunette in navy pashmina and dress and orange Prada bag talked, without cessation, about her amazingly perspicacious people skills. These skills seem to have lead her to work, unhappily, in consulting, for many years, and to have been a contributing factor in her divorce from a man who made a lot more money than she. Ballerina drank a diet coke, left her boxed salad unopened and untouched, and, when blonde went back for a lemonade, got herself a still water. I think ballerina was being recruited by blondie.

To my left, two scruffy cute Euro-hipster men, sweatshirts and jean jackets, early 30s. They purchased one cup of coffee between them. The one seated immediately next to me pulled two sandwiches out of his backpack and they proceeded to have a conversation that moved between English and a second language (Italian? Russian? Portuguese? I’m ashamed to be able to come no closer than that). So I would hear, “Well, it’s not really human nature, I mean it’s more xxxxx, xxx xxx Spinoza.” “Ah, Spinoza! Well, xxx xxxx xxxxx Heidegger xxx.”

To my immediate left in the corner seat sat, first, a middle-aged women, eavesdropping, and then a businessman reading the Knicks box scores from last night’s loss.

I was reading Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. The Morroccan chicken soup was good.

In Memory of Peter Gomes

2011-03-01T19:51:00.000-05:00

The Reverend Peter Gomes, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at the School of Divinity and the Pusey Minister of Memorial Church, has died at age 68. I am so sad to hear it.

I was a lecturer at Harvard from 1994-98 and, during those years, spent many Sundays at the Memorial Church. It’s an intimidating New England building, white, beautiful and austere, anchoring a side of Harvard Yard. To me, a young lecturer on the fringes of Harvard and on the fringes of Christianity, it took a lot of courage to even cross the threshold.

When Rev. Gomes was preaching, it was worth it to find the courage. He was the first and best minister at delivering sermons that made you think about the ethical world of the Bible, compare it to our ethical world, and then want to go back into that world, determined to make it better. I never judge ministers against his standard—none could meet it—but I always brighten a bit when I’m in a church and the minister gives a sermon that enacts the process of intelligence working on a great text.

What first got me to the church was not Gomes himself but my friend Janet Legro, his junior minister (after years of ministry, she’s now teaching in a Quaker school in Virginia). Part of her job was to line up a daily homily for morning prayers. She asked me if I would do one.

I balked. I told her that I wasn’t sure if I believed in God. I told her that I had never been confirmed. I told her I hadn’t read the Bible.

That doesn’t matter, Anne, look, there are 12 weeks in the semester and I need to find sixty people each semester, no repeats, to give a five minute meditation on a passage from the Bible. If you say yes, I only need to find 59 more.

Of course, I said yes. And, in saying yes, I found that I really should go to the church once or twice, and in going to the church once or twice, I found Rev. Gomes and I went many, many more times.

Many have been saying this all day in remembrance, I’m sure, but I will repeat that he was a great, charismatic man. Wholly his own person and one of those wonderful Ivy League originals who exudes intelligence, kindness, and confidence all at once. He was a short man but a great man with a huge, charismatic presence and a beautiful, booming voice. The obituary mentions James Earl Jones and that seems right. He was formal and even a little vain of his clerical robes and a profoundly New England, even Harvardian type. Though I have never met anyone like Rev. Gomes, he seemed to fit in to Harvard completely and the fact that this openly gay, African-American minister from Plymouth, MA seemed to fit in perfectly made me feel a lot happier about God and Harvard.

And my homily? It became an essay here.

For the Record

2011-02-28T21:57:00.001-05:00

Years ago, I heard a charismatic Marxist professor give a lecture on modernism, the General Strike of 1926. One of the main points he made was an anti-Woolfian one: how could people claim such great political credentials for a woman who barely wrote a thing about the General Strike?

In fact, Woolf did take notice of the strike. More than that, she supported the miners and the workers striking alongside them. More than that, she bicycled around London (no buses or tube, of course, for it was a strike) collecting signatures from other artists and writers in support of the strikers.

But that, for this Marxist critic, was not enough. Clearly he was wrong, but I was shocked to think of all the world events that some (narcissistically imagined) future biographer would be able to claim I had shockingly failed to take an interest in. It’s a distressing standard.

In my head, I can compose the self-condemning judgments: “In spite of Fernald’s commitment to feminism/Africa/workers, she had surprising little to contribute to the discussion of how the revolutionary changes in North Africa/Wisconsin might affect women’s rights/political freedom/economic stability for the working and middle class…”

Let me just say, for the record, that my feelings about these exciting changes are about as complex as the complexities of the situations require. I have no insights. I have many fears. I have great hopes that the downtrodden and disempowered will retain and regain the dignity that we all deserve.

I know my house is glass; I cast no stones.

Pearls and Power

2011-02-21T21:13:00.002-05:00

There was a dust-up on the Woolf listserv over the weekend.

Someone posted, innocently enough, “Did Virginia Woolf own pearls?” To be honest, when I first read the post, I thought that we had reached a new level of triviality in Woolf studies, wondering about every last little detail of her life. What, I thought, can come of this?

The answer is: a lot.

The first few answers came in as references—Vita Sackville-West had pearls, Orlando wears pearls, have you read the articles by Reginald Abbott and Kathryn Simpson?—and, once again, a tiny detail revealed itself as utterly interesting. Immediately, a strong theme of female sexuality emerged, linking pearls to the clitoris. I had forgotten that. The conversation ranged around, with eight or nine people chiming in with thoughts, suggestions and references. That’s high volume for the Woolf listserv. Even with nearly 500 subscribers, it can go days with only a message or two. The original questioner mentioned that her interest arose from Leonard Woolf’s involvement with the Sri Lankan pearl industry.

Then, someone wrote in to assert the link between pearls and power, linking Vita’s pearls with those of Queen Elizabeth I. For neither woman, this poster suggested, did pearls signify anything as tedious as the clitoris.

That got us off to the races.

A passionate advocate for lesbian and queer studies posted simply “Ah, the tedious clitoris.” That made me laugh. Then, a man posted, with equal brevity, his surprise that anyone would ever find that part of the anatomy remotely tedious. That made me laugh even harder.

But suddenly, it seemed, lines were drawn, and those who took an interest in power and trade stood on one side while those who wanted to see the pearl as sexual on the other: I began thinking of them as the “No sex, please, we’re British” camp versus the acolytes of the clitoris. I checked my email from time to time as temperatures rose, and when the attacks got personal, I intervened as “owner” of the listserv (the so-called “mistress” of the list—that would be me--had already been “tsk’ed” by one irritated member).

But why did temperatures rise so heatedly on the signification of pearls on the listserv? I’m not sure. Listservs are funny things. I think of them as strange eddies in the currents of new media. Among the first ways we made community in the digital age, they persist but are strangely private compared to blogs, facebook, twitter, and tumblr. Because a post to a listserv only goes to subscribers, one can feel perhaps a little too comfortable that everyone in the conversation is like-minded. This particular manifestation still strikes me as a little quaint, a battle of first wave feminism with the Vassar alums tossing their pearls in the faces of the dungareed co-eds from the public university down the interstate.

Still, resistance and offense-taking are interesting. One posts that she never confuses her pearls with any part of her anatomy and that the metaphor strikes her as specious. (For the record, I have never thought cigars or carrots were perfect representations either.) But that's beside the point. Such refusal seems to fly in the face of aphrodisiacs 101: Oysters anyone? More to the point, the refusal struck me--and others--as an attempt to deny that the metaphor could work sexually when it plainly does, often, in Woolf and elsewhere. I kept my counsel, but I could feel my own irritation growing and I expected some other poster would turn that grain of insult into a pearl of a post. Soon enough, another poster struck back, accusing the first of denying the work of great lesbian and queer scholars.

Once attacks become personal—and only then—do I step in to moderate. And I did. The personal attacks have subsided for the moment, but the discussion has broadened out to jokes about Earl ‘the Pearl’ Monroe and reference to Ariel’s song in The Tempest. Fascinating to remember how much literature still matters, how it can move us to passion, to rage, to work, to insult, to rethink what we thought we knew.

(Want in on the listserv conversation? Email me--fernham AT gmail DOT com & I can sign you up or subscribe directly by sending the message SUBSCRIBE VWOOLF [email] [name] to listproc AT lists.acs.ohio-state.edu)

AROHO Retreat for a Disabled Woman Writer

2011-02-19T10:50:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the very generous donations of many, the A Room of Her Own Foundation--a very Woolfian nonprofit--has a fellowship, honoring my friend the writer and disability activist Kenny Fries, to fund a disabled woman writer's attendance at a retreat.

If you are or know a disabled woman writer, please encourage her to apply!

Deadline for Kenny Fries Fellowship for a disabled woman writer to attend the A Room of Her Own Foundation (AROHO) Retreat this summer is March 1. For more info click here.

NYPL Research Fellowships

2011-02-18T13:19:00.001-05:00

I’ve written here about how transforming my space in the Wertheim Study of the New York Public Library has been. I have use of that spot till the end of May and, believe me, as soon as I finish a few pedestrian errands, I’m heading right over there for a quick Friday research fix.

Jay Barksdale, the wonderful librarian who manages the Wertheim and Allen Rooms sent along this link about short term fellowships for scholars. If you live far from New York and have research that depends on the collections at the NYPL, why not apply?

A few preliminary details, more at the website:

The New York Public Library is pleased to announce the availability of 20 fellowships to support visiting scholars conducting studies in the Library’s unique research and special collections between June 1, 2011, and June 30, 2012. The Fellowship stipend is $2,500. Scholars from outside the New York metropolitan area engaged in graduate-level, post-doctoral, or independent research are invited to apply. Applicants must be United States citizens or permanent residents with the legal right to work in the U.S. Applications must be received by April 1, 2011, in order to be considered.

Room at Women's Project in March

2011-02-17T16:17:00.000-05:00

Three years ago, I took students to a wonderful production of Woolf's only play, Freshwater, at the Julia Miles Theater. Now, the Women's Project is back with an adaptation of A Room of One's Own. It should be wonderful! I'm taking my students--though they don't know it yet!

ROOM

based on the writings of Virginia Woolf

directed by Anne Bogart

adapted by Jocelyn Clark

starring Ellen Lauren

Harvested from a lifetime of Virginia Woolf's writing, Room traces the movement of a creative spirit in exquisite crisis, an artist in a pressure cooker of articulation who seeks room to move, room to breathe, and room to imagine. The New York Times calls it “a theatrical representation of the writer's mind, an abstraction painted with theater's animated tools.” And the L.A. Times raves “Ellen Lauren's masterly economy of movement, combined with Anne Bogart's unerring compositional sense, is breathtaking.”

Only 16 Performances!

MARCH 12-27, 2011

Tuesdays & Wednesdays at 7:00

Thursdays-Saturdays at 8:00

Sundays at 3:00 & 7:30

Exceptions: Matinee only--no 7:30 show--on Sunday March 13.

Join Anne Bogart & Ellen Lauren for a post-performance discussion on Tuesday, March 22nd & Wednesday, March 23rd.

Julia Miles Theater

424 West 55th Street, just west of 9th Avenue, New York City

Tickets on Sale

Click Telecharge.com

Call 212.239.6200

Regular Tickets = $60

Premium Tickets = $75

Groups = $25/ticket for 9+ at 212.765.1706 or "tickets at womensproject.org".

Re-reading, Richardson & Lawrence

2011-02-07T21:52:00.000-05:00

At the moment, I’m not reading anything new. Instead, I’m re-reading Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa for the Dalloway edition and re-reading Women in Love for teaching. Both are such intense experiences.

I read Clarissa in the first weeks of graduate school, in Patricia Spacks’ 18^th century novel class. We used to hole up on the big orange blocky chairs at the back of Cross-Campus Library with the huge Penguin edition and read for hours, checking in with each other: “What letter are you on? Are you at volume 4 yet?” I remember the book as a hazing ritual. I didn’t like it or understand it that well. It was a torture to me, though I remember loving—and writing my seminar paper in part on—Anna Howe, Clarissa’s best friend.

Now, reading it a second time (on my Kindle, not on this massive Penguin that gives me flashbacks), I am amazed, again and again, by how sadistic it is. Knowing how brutally it will end, it’s hard to understand the depths of Richardson’s depravity, setting up this appealing, annoying chatty girl for humiliation after humiliation.

But then, it is so amazingly well-written. It’s just incredible how Richardson manages to convey the voices of writer after writer. When Lovelace’s uncle pops in with his tired sermonettes and aphorisms, it’s fantastic comic relief. So the writing—and my own project on Woolf—keeps me going even as I feel more outrage and wonder than ever at how cruel Richardson is. It is an amazing document and I don’t expect to ever read it again in this lifetime.

Women in Love, by contrast, I might read many times more, but reading it, too, brings back such memories. I was working on Lawrence—on the essays he wrote alongside Women in Love—when I fell in love with my husband and so much of that urgent sincerity in Gudrun and Ursula feels like myself to me (for better and for worse, as I’ve often recognized).

I’m off to Macy’s tomorrow for some purple and orange tights. It’s just not right to teach Lawrence with legs entirely clad in black.

(Janeite Deb is reading Clarissa for the first time at her mostly Janeite blog: worth a click!)

New Essay Up Elsewhere!

2011-02-01T14:22:00.000-05:00

I wrote an essay about my Yankee grandmother and her love of Virginia Woolf. It's been published by Open Letters Monthly & you can read it there, if you like.

Anne is as good as any man

2011-01-31T21:50:00.000-05:00

The semester started just after Martin Luther King Day. Right around then, I got an email from a colleague whom I really like. Her son is in 6^th grade. The 6^th graders in his class were doing reports and, as part of their assignment, had to interview someone. Would it be o.k. for a 6^th grade girl to interview me about women’s suffrage.

Sure. After all, I had just been reviewing the suffrage movement in preparation for my beginning of semester lecture (something I ended up not giving, as it happened).

But then I got her email. She was researching Seneca Falls. 1848. America.

That’s not my specialty.

I panicked, then calmed down. After all, this was for a 6^th grader. Her very smart, focused email was as much about women’s lives before and after the vote as anything. I could do this.

Oh, and when would I be available to come to her school to be videotaped.

Oh, no! Part of me did not want this at all. Part of me wanted it a little too much. On the first day of teaching, I took a taxi across town to meet this young student. Was I really so narcissistic that I would travel across town to be videotaped by a middle schooler? Was I such a procrastinator that I would take time out of my day for this rather than create that calendar for program administration that I always mean to create? Half mad at myself for wasting my own time and hers, half excited, I signed in at the school.

As soon as I met her, I knew I had been right to come. We went to the library where I met the AV teacher. We talked about how she got interested in the topic (through a longstanding interest in equal rights for women). She set her flip camera up on a tripod and set the tripod on top of a stack of thin books, a series about marine invertebrates. She asked me to kind of repeat the question in my answer as she planned to edit her own voice out. She had a couple other coaching questions for me. And when I answered one question honestly, she laughed nervously and, departing from script, said, “Oh, that turns out to be a stupid question, doesn’t it? Let me ask a different one.” Once or twice, my answer pleased her and she squeezed her arms in tight to her sides, lifting up her shoulders and scrunching her eyes in delight.

I don’t know why it took me until then to see that this was the very best thing about teaching, this was really one of the coolest, most exciting things I had done in a long time. I am so glad that I let that young student interview me!

After all, when I was in 6^th grade, I ran for president (and lost) on a platform of unilateral disarmament and the Equal Rights Amendment. My slogan? "Anne is as good as any man." One of my favorite talking points was why I chose "as good as" in lieu of "better than." (I felt that my superiority was for me to prove.) My campaign poster—with a picture of me in my favorite batik unicorn t-shirt--is in my office to this day.

A new course blog over here

2011-01-31T21:18:00.001-05:00

My students are going to be blogging on modern british writing over here all term. Follow along & enjoy! We've already been reading and listening to a lot--we finish A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tomorrow!

Happy Birthday Virginia Woolf!

2011-01-25T23:14:00.000-05:00

129 years ago today.

I celebrated over pizza with two storied litbloggers, pizza, and the gift of a couple Princeton (the band) EP's for them.

Traffic Lights and Full Stops

2011-01-18T22:01:00.000-05:00

This poor little blog has come to a full stop. I miss it and I miss you. I gave a lecture on Woolf on October 21 at the New York Public Library. On October 22, we closed on a house. On October 27^th we moved. We hung pictures during the snow days that followed the Boxing Day blizzard. We are all still tired, still disoriented, loving our new house and our new community, but reeling from the loss of friends and neighbors in Jersey City.

It’s true, Jersey City is just thirty minutes away, but I lost three great women friends whom I would see a couple times a week, just in passing. About twice a week, I would walk my dog in the mornings and would often see Kadee taking her kids to school. Usually, I didn’t even bother to flag her down—I had just bid my kids good-bye, she was in her last few moments of the morning with them, she would have two in tow, I had my elderly dog and often, a poop bag. It’s hard to imagine that luxury now. Then, I could count on seeing Laura in the mornings when I dropped the kids off at school or, more often, in the late afternoons, as we passed her apartment on the way home. And checking to see if Lizzie was home—and to see if she looked like she wanted us to bug her—was a nightly ritual for the girls and me. These are big losses.

Having enough room, having a proper study of my own with a door are big gains and we love the community.

In any case, to re-ignite this blog, I bring you the link to my October lecture, available here and on the NYPL website.

Wishbones

2010-12-05T20:22:00.000-05:00

We had our turkey with my mother-in-law in Utica and then came back down to Jersey with the carcass. I boiled it down to make stock and used that for a turkey soup. The wishbone has been drying on our sill since last Saturday.

Tonight, I let the children break it, explaining the principle of the wishbone to them. They wanted to know if they had to make a wish before or after breaking. Before, I said.

“I can make a quick wish!” boasts Izzy (4½). “I make the princess wish, the pony, and the unicorn. And that’s it. That’s three wishes. I can do ‘em quick.”

And off she scampers to brush her teeth.

Still holding the wishbone, I am joined by Livie (nearly 8). “Can I tell you my wish? That everything goes all right with moving in to our house and that I have a nice birthday. ‘Cause I don’t really need anything, right?”

And in comes the little one, teeth brushed. They grab the bone and pull.

To everyone’s surprise, the big girl won.

Oh, Charles

2010-11-27T09:30:00.002-05:00

The errands continue to proliferate. Between the move and an unusually busy semester, I find myself swimming upstream in turbid waters at all times.

My husband and I have been working as hard as we can to make our new house into a home. Still, each box unpacked is mitigated by a new surprise. A bit of water damage at my little one’s new daycare led a mommy to call the city with a worry about mold. Suddenly, the daycare was shut down for a week and, desperate, we had to ship the little one off to my in-law’s. Then, the former owners left us with a filthy oven and, in cleaning it, I put the racks into the sink to soak. Alas, the weight of the racks and the water caused the under-mounted sink to break free of the counter, so now it sits, ¾ of an inch below the marble, on its plywood frame. You can imagine three or four more of these and you’ll have a sense of the domestic side of our lives lately. Add to that a similar set of comic mishaps, all leading to more work for each of us, at our respective jobs, never forgetting, of course, that there are two young children to feed and bathe on occasion, and you’ll have a snapshot of our life in November.

At the moment, my stamina is on low, and, though my mouth runs on as ever, I find myself wanting to channel Ma on “Little House on the Prairie.” As my beloved continues to find the energy to unpack, as I just really want to curl up in a corner and read, I need to talk less and express more. What I remember most of Karen Grassle’s Ma was the many, many inflections of “Oh, Charles.”

“Oh, Charles” could mean “thank you so much for replacing the waxed paper in the windows with real glass.” It could mean “I’m both pleased and embarrassed that you’re flirting with me in front of the children.” It could mean “I’m so grateful that you brought home four new chickens, but where are we going to put them?” Or it could mean “I’m so proud and happy that you’re willing to make this run into town in the blizzard, as we have neither food nor fuel, and yet, it’s terrifying to me that you propose to leave me alone here in the prairie with three young children and no food or fuel.”

Oh, Charles.

Julia Briggs Essay Prize for 2011

2010-11-18T10:57:00.000-05:00

The Woolf Society of Great Britain is holding another essay competition in honor of the late, great, dearly missed Woolf scholar and feminist Julia Briggs. Here are the details:

The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain (VWSGB) is holding an essay competition in memory of acclaimed Virginia Woolf scholar and VWSGB Executive Council member Julia Briggs, who died in August 2007.

The competition is open to members and non-members (except for the Executive Council and Editorial Committee of the VWSGB, the judges, and families of the above). Entries should be sent to Ruth Webb, 15 Southcote Road, London SE25 4RG, to arrive by 10 January 2011.

Entrants should read these carefully and return the signed form with the entry. If you have any queries or would like an entry form, please email Sarah M. Hall on smhall123@yahoo.co.uk.

Please note that student membership of the VWSGB costs only £10 for those at UK addresses and £15 for those at overseas addresses, per calendar year.

Competition Rules

The essay, on the topic ‘Why is reading Virginia Woolf still so crucial today?’, but with a title of the entrant’s choosing, should be between 2,000 and 2,500 words in length. It should be the original work of the named entrant, and previously unpublished in print or any other medium. Student coursework is acceptable.

Entrants should supply THREE typed copies of the essay on A4 paper, printed on one side only, double-spaced (or 1.5) and in a font size no smaller than 10-point. The VWSGB regrets that no emailed entries will be accepted, because of printing costs.

The competition will be judged by acclaimed Woolf scholars Lyndall Gordon and Maggie Humm, and VWSGB Vice-Chair and Woolf biographer Ruth Webb. The decision of the judges is final. The VWSGB reserves the right not to award the prize if, in the judges’ opinion, none of the entries attains the required standard. Otherwise the winner will be contacted in mid-March.

The winner will receive a cheque for £250, presented at the VWSGB’s AGM in central London on 2 April 2011, and the winning essay will be published in the Virginia Woolf Bulletin. If the winner is unable to attend the AGM, the prize will be sent by secure mail.

In Praise of Libraries

2010-11-16T21:21:00.000-05:00

It's been a long time. There have been highs and lows. But that's for another day. For now, some Wyndham Lewis. This quotation, about a curmudgeon's private library, comes courtesy of John Whittier-Ferguson's paper at MSA12 (the Modernist Studies Association Conference) in Victoria, B.C.:

This was 1939, the last year, or as good as, in which such a life as this one was to be lived. Parkinson was the last of a species. Here he was in a large room, which was a private, a functional library. Such a literary workshop belonged to the ages of individualism. Its three or four thousand volumes were all book-plated Parkinson. It was really a fragment of paradise where one of our species lived embedded in books, decently fed, moderately taxed, snug and unmolested.--Self Condemned (79)

Wonderful. I love the Lewisian misanthropic soupcon of paranoia added on to the praise of the library: the library in 1939 as a tiny little paradise, under siege from all sides. Wonderful.

T-16 days and counting

2010-10-11T20:53:00.000-04:00

Gentle readers, I know that posting has been light. I am writing--more than ever--but the work I'm pouring into my lecture (just eleven days away!) on Mrs. Dalloway is sufficiently consuming that I'm finding it hard to digest it into little blog-friendly tidbits.

On top of that, we have bought a house--or are buying one--and will close on the sale the very day after my lecture!

I pack a box. I write a paragraph. I lie awake at night worrying about where the couch will fit, what the new daycare will be like, and whether I really should include that anecdote about Lytton Strachey in my lecture.

All of this makes for a rather manic interior life, but not one that I want to blog about.

Never fear. In November, I'll be unpacking at my leisure in our new home (with my very own study) in the melodiously named and lovely town of South Orange, New Jersey (where, yes, the middle school does have a giant orange on a pole out front!) and blogging should resume at its usual sporadic pace.

Until then, I hope to see you--in reality or in spirit--on 10/21 at 4:00!

The Art of Captivity

2010-10-04T16:52:00.000-04:00

My friend and colleague Lenny Cassuto has curated a wonderful small exhibit on the idea of captivity. In American literature, captivity narratives have a very particular connotation: a subgenre of stories of whites who were kidnapped by (or ran off with) Native Americans and then wrote of their experiences. And, of course, in American history, the word captivity always recollects the sorry fact of slavery. This exhibit keeps its focus on the political while opening that category up, for us to think about mythology (Demeter and Persephone). As I walk past the show up to work each morning, I find myself particularly drawn to the play on celebrity wives, looking on in poses of “Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” by Karen Yama.

But that is not the only amazing image. Kara Walker never disappoints, and four of her gorgeous and disturbing silhouettes are on display. As is an amazing, Jasper Johns or Glenn Ligon-like print of the lyrics of Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire.” And then, anchoring the gallery with a stunning pop of color is Anne Sherwood Pundyk’s painting.

If you’re around Lincoln Center, pop your head into Lowenstein and ask the security guard to let you see the art. Or better, pop by tomorrow.

The show will have a formal opening receptions and artists’ panel discussion tomorrow, Tuesday, October 5^th. Reception is 5:00-6:30; panel discussion is 6:30-8:00. The gallery is located on the street level of Fordham University’s Lincoln Center Campus, 113 W 60^th St., just west of Columbus Circle.

Part two of the exhibition will be held at Susan Eley Fine Art (46 W 90^th), beginning on October 26, 2010.

More on Sissinghurst, elsewhere

2010-10-01T13:00:00.002-04:00

My review of Adam Nicolson's Sissinghurst is now live at Open Letters Monthly.

Opening Doors: Girls Write Now Party!

2010-09-29T10:35:00.000-04:00

You have heard me rave and rave and rave about Girls Write Now. If you are in New York and want to see for yourself why it's such an amazing organization, why it continually inspires me, and why I'm taking a quick break from writing to celebrate with them, why not stop by their new space next Tuesday, October 5th? I'll be there!

Community Soccer, Jersey Style

2010-09-23T11:53:00.003-04:00

My seven-year-old is playing community soccer for the first time this year. Her team is sponsored by the Friendly Son’s of St. Patrick. I both love and cringe at the apostrophe error on the back of her uniform. With her blue eyes and freckles, she certainly has the map of Ireland on her face much more than I do and that makes her very cute indeed in that dark green jersey.

So, last night, I sat on the aluminum bleachers and watched her first practice. Two men, looking like extras from central casting for “Jersey dad/Sopranos extra” called out “Hey, kick the ball at the goal!” to their son, and I began to fear a season of coaching from the sidelines. (It’s actually decent advice, of course, and not very aggressive, but I am a timid mommy when it comes to sports.) Still stereotyping all these strangers, I glanced at the Patagonia-clad, athletic-professional dad for support, but he didn’t look at me. A few minutes later, his beautiful daughter came to him in tears. She had been hit in the face with a ball. He gave her a sip of water and a hug and then, confirming she was o.k., sent her back on the field, “all right now, go out there and kick someone else in the face.”

Jersey is as Jersey does.

A Room of Her Own Foundation: Kenny Fries Scholarship

2010-09-22T09:10:00.002-04:00

If you would like to support a woman writer with disabilities or if you ARE (or know) such a woman whose writing would benefit from a retreat, here is a great opportunity:

In honor of my friend, the writer and disabilities advocate Kenny Fries' 50th birthday, A Room of Her Own Foundation (AROHO) is sponsoring a scholarship for a disabled writer who without financial support could not attend the AROHO 2011 Retreat for Women Writers. Kenny will choose the recipient in an open application process.

AROHO is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that champions women writers. The suggested donation is $45. But any amount, even $5 or $10, will help us come closer to a fully funded scholarship. Donations to AROHO are tax-deductible. You can give online by choosing "Kenny Fries Scholarship" from the drop-down menu here, which will take you to PayPal. If you prefer you can mail a check to AROHO, PO Box 778, Placitas, NM 87043, mentioning that the check is for the Kenny Fries Scholarship for a Writer with a Disability.

The Flu at Sissinghurst

2010-09-16T11:00:00.000-04:00

Vita Sackville-West to Leonard Woolf, January, 1940:

“Dear Leonard, I ought to have answered your letter long ago, but both the boys came home fro 24 hours leave and immediately took to their beds with ‘flu. You may imagine that Sissinghurst is at no time an ideal place for invalids, but when it means carrying trays, hot water bottles and other requirements through snowdrifts some sixteen times a day it is really hell….Pipes froze; lavatories ceased to function; snow came through the roof and dripped on to my bed. So perhaps you will forgive the delay.”

From Adam Nicolson's Sissinghurst.

And one in URUGUAY!

2010-09-15T11:00:00.000-04:00

I was interested to see that the University of Montevideo in Uruguay was dedicating its 7^th annual literature conference to Virginia Woolf this coming June, 2011. The call for papers (due February 28^th, 2011) makes lovely use of the South American setting of The Voyage Out to explain the thinking behind the focus.

But I cannot remember a more exciting email ever than the one I got a few weeks later inviting me to give one of the talks there. I am still gobsmacked and very excited.

All my fantasies of Tobermory are on hold as I imagine the reality of a few days in Montevideo next June. Wow. In honor of the trip, my student sent me the song "Skipping Down the Street" by My Little Pony which includes the lyric If I'd fallen in love in Montevideo....

I’ll be speaking about The Common Reader and eating a chivito, the national sandwich.

From the CFP:

These South American places imagined by Woolf are an invitation to the possibility of reflecting on her work from a transatlantic perspective, as Victoria Ocampo did in 1929 when she first read A Room of One´s Own. The essay confirmed many of Ocampo´s ideas on the woman-writer, and inspired her to promote critical readings and translations of Virginia Woolf´s work in the River Plate, especially through Sur, the literary journal she founded in Buenos Aires in 1931.

Seventy years after Virginia Woolf´s death, Montevideana VII calls for papers presenting innovative readings, translations, and exchanges in connection with the multiple dialogues which her work continues to establish, either directly or indirectly, with this part of the world.

Abstracts should be submitted by February 28th 2011.

For further information click or email.