Monday, April 25, 2005



My writing is outsider's writing - and all of a sudden it becomes a kind of trend or mainstream My characters are always the one who gets kicked in the chair [Until you're 70 you're a young writer ;-) ]

Art of Living & Literature Across Frontiers: Stream of consciousness in full spate
Consciousness is very isolating for Virginia Woolf, but her fiction always works towards making connections - between people, and across time. This may be the reason why her novels so often focus upon hostesses, such as Mrs Ramsay or Clarissa Dalloway, for the hostess is a person who specialises in bringing people together. Perhaps they reminded Woolf of the kind of role she herself wanted to play - that of the discreet enabler, who helps establish connections between strangers ...
In May 1929, at the peak of her literary career, and having already published eight novels to critical acclaim, Virginia Woolf made the following note in her diary about a new idea for a novel:

Now about this book, The Moths [later to become The Waves]. How am I to begin it? And what is it to be? I feel no great impulse; no fever; only a great pressure of difficulty. Why write it then? Why write at all?


Virginia Woolf didn’t believe in biography. A bastard, an impure art she called it, in which the truth of the inner life - the only life we have - was always being strangled by the fungoid growth of external facts. The biographer cannot extract the atom, he gives us the husk. And so Woolf remained deeply suspicious of conventional biography, always more interested in what slipped through its net - the unrepresented, the unfixed, the fine-grained, the feminine.
• It is true that biography tends to see everything back-to-front Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life [With online shopping comes a new chapter in the secondhand business, and shops morph to survive Creative destruction: Used-book sellers span digital ; Marina Krakovsky: Making Books Love, lust and literary life ]
• · Who can forget the day Oprah came to Literaryville? She blazed into town like a carpetbagger preaching glory, unpacking her Book Club to the awe and unease of the locals, who whispered about her behind her back. She was sanctified and vilified and, finally, she was hounded right out of town - well, metaphorically speaking Thorn: Author covers prose, cons of Oprah's club ; A novelist is an imaginative historian who is able to get closer to contemporary facts than social scientists possibly can Novelist par excellence: Praise from the best
• · · Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned... I did a bad thing today. No, really. I know it's hard for you to believe. Arrggghhhh...I guess I'll have to fill you in. Super-volcano, robotic rebellion or JI (Jozef Imrich)? Kate Ravilious asks 10 scientists to name the biggest danger to Earth and assesses the chances of it happening What a way to go ; The Fire Sermon: The more criticism attempts to tame this wildness the more it must ultimately have recourse to adjectives like ineffable, unspeakable, unutterable Shelf Life: Literary Essays and Reviews of Waste Land
• · · · It's not always interesting, but it's my life ... My husband and I were sitting in the kitchen, the edited manuscript of my first book in my hands, the galleys in his. I always read aloud, he always proofreads -- that's our system. That was the first time, though, and we didn't really have a system yet. It was just the two of us, trying to figure out how to review galleys The I in Sociology ; Research and Markets: Teenagers Hold Power Over Advertising and Marketing World ; If you walk into the library with an axe and start surfing Internet porn sites, you're bound to cause a stir Library rethinks ‘porn' policy
• · · · · Maurice Yacowar is right that The Sopranos bears the critical analysis routinely accorded good literature, drama, and films When America opened the floodgates and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it for? ; Believing in Yourself" as Classroom Culture (Special Edition - Issue) : It has become part of the conventional wisdom that a decidedly left-wing slant influences what students are taught at elite colleges and universities in America, chiefly at Ivy League institutions. Critics of the academy have lambasted faculty doves. History shows that academia has roosted a flock of hawks The Academic Elite Goes to Washington, and to War
• · · · · · Rural schools often lack a library. This means that there is no place for children to get their hands on a great book to encourage more learning or to gain a new skill like computers Reading Room ; During Auschwitz: Adorno, Hegel, and the "Unhappy Consciousness" of Critique