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Old 02-26-2008, 07:19 AM
RH1 RH1 started this thread
 
Location: Lincoln, UK
1,160 posts, read 4,227,113 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by chielgirl View Post
One of my favorite lit classes as an undergrad was Virginia Woolf. My prof was one of the most marvelous instructors ever. He'd read her aloud and we'd take it from there.

I haven't read her in years but I still can't part with her books.
Having someone read it aloud would be really interesting - I wouldn't have to worry about how to emphasise each bit of sentence in my head!

I think that's half my problem, I tend to read to hear it in my head, so if I can't figure out a sentence properly I'm unhappy.

I wish we'd done Virginia Woolf at school, we did Thomas Hardy and went through the whole of the Mayor of Casterbridge paragraph by paragraph. It bored me senseless at the time and I still loathe Hardy to this day! It's sad when a school experience can actually put you off an author - your experience is what teachers should be achieving isn't it?
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Old 02-26-2008, 10:36 AM
 
Location: Journey's End
10,203 posts, read 27,059,223 times
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RH1,

You stroke two chords:

One, I too read aloud (in my head) but comfortable with poetry and reading aloud to an audience, I've learned the cadence and that has eliminated some of the difficulty with prose writing.

And, pity you have come to dislike Hardy. I consider him one of the masters of English literature. Perhaps you can give him a new look.
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Old 02-26-2008, 11:05 AM
 
Location: Piedmont NC
4,596 posts, read 11,419,983 times
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Exactly what I dislike about so many of my colleagues, RH1 -- they'll kill a writer, or a period, or a genre, for a student(s). I had it done to me and vowed I'd never do it to my own students.

I hope you, and anybody else with that experience, will go back and try an author/title/genre again sometime. One of my college professors killed Emily Dickinson for me, and for years I poo-pooed reading her poetry, until I got to see her stuff through whole new eyes when my daughter fell in love with her poetry.

That said, perhaps I should delve into Conrad's Heart of Darkness again. On second thought, just beat me.
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Old 02-27-2008, 03:32 AM
RH1 RH1 started this thread
 
Location: Lincoln, UK
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Thanks Ontheroad and RDSLOTS.

I probably should go back and try Hardy again some time but time always seems against you with books doesn't it? I've already got a list in my diary I'm waiting to buy and a stack at home I haven't read yet! Plus I might be adding a couple more Woolfs to my list now I'm enjoying this one.
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Old 03-01-2008, 07:41 PM
 
335 posts, read 1,530,424 times
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I never liked Ms. Wolf. Never got into any of her books. I tried to read a few books and felt like I was being drawn into a bunch of jibberish so I put them down. Not my style.
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Old 04-13-2008, 12:35 AM
 
Location: George Town Tasmania, Australia
126 posts, read 209,948 times
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Default I Find Her Very Stimulating

Here are two passages in which I draw on Woolf's useful ideas:
___________________________________
Virginia Woolf says that “if we cannot analyse these invisible presences, we know very little of the subject of our memoirs.†In the first epoch I have very little to go on to make for useful and genuine analysis. Any writing has largely futile features, filled with hints and glances. The realm is enchanted; it belongs to me alone to do with what I desire. It is a bowl I can fill again and again, but the contents are hypothetical, shifting, unknown, possess little vertical thrust, just some linear perspective that informs us of little and contributes a small amount to our understanding. My inability to analyse my parents here may be a serious flaw in my overall work. I take some comfort in the words of William Carlos Williams in the introduction to his autobiography:

“Nine-tenths of our lives is well forgotten in the living. Of the part that is remembered, the most had better not be told: it would interest no one, or at least would not contribute to the story of what we ourselves have been.â€
____________________
It seems to me that, in some respects, I am completely unable to write anything about much that is quintessential in life, nor will I ever be able. For, as Baha’u’llah writes, “myriads of mystic tongues find utterances in one speech and how many are the mysteries concealed in a single melody but, alas, there is no ear to hear nor heart to understand.†The garment of words can only contain so much. There is much knowledge that can not be put into words like the content of many of the arts and sciences. Mysticism itself finds its origins in this notion. No sensible man will venture to express some of his deepest thoughts in words, especially in a form which is unchangeable. So much that is said and thought here is as potentially changeable as the wind which blows and the clouds which change their patterns in the sky from minute to minute and hour to hour. A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living, as Virginia Woolf once said. -Ron Price, Tasmania
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Old 04-13-2008, 09:13 AM
 
Location: Piedmont NC
4,596 posts, read 11,419,983 times
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I'm with you, RonPrice and RH1, in that I enjoy Virginia Woolf quite a bit, myself. I like her style, and how she feels about herself, and things, and life, 'speaks' to me. Maybe I was Woolf in a former life? Now, wouldn't that be something? Only, her life ends so tragically, on so many levels.

Carrot Juice, I think we should, as readers, maybe make a pact? Go back and pick one author/title/genre that we have heretofore detested -- like Conrad's Heart of Darkness, for me -- and try it again, with an open mind.

You know I say that, and am proud of myself for having said it, but there's this little voice, screaming at the top of its volume-controller-thingy, going, "Are you KIDDING me?!"

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Old 04-14-2008, 11:28 AM
RH1 RH1 started this thread
 
Location: Lincoln, UK
1,160 posts, read 4,227,113 times
Reputation: 577
Quote:
Originally Posted by RDSLOTS View Post
I'm with you, RonPrice and RH1, in that I enjoy Virginia Woolf quite a bit, myself. I like her style, and how she feels about herself, and things, and life, 'speaks' to me. Maybe I was Woolf in a former life? Now, wouldn't that be something? Only, her life ends so tragically, on so many levels.

Carrot Juice, I think we should, as readers, maybe make a pact? Go back and pick one author/title/genre that we have heretofore detested -- like Conrad's Heart of Darkness, for me -- and try it again, with an open mind.

You know I say that, and am proud of myself for having said it, but there's this little voice, screaming at the top of its volume-controller-thingy, going, "Are you KIDDING me?!"

Just don't make me read any more Dan Brown. Please, have a heart.

Oh no hang on, you said "author."
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Old 04-27-2008, 03:23 AM
 
Location: George Town Tasmania, Australia
126 posts, read 209,948 times
Reputation: 105
Default Thanks Folks

Each of you have, in your own way, raised interesting questions. My problem is that, at present, I need some sleep--so Iwill have to come back to this thread lateRon. In my late adulthood, heading for old age, I can't promise to get back here soon. But if you folks write more, I promise to write more. Over and out.-Ron:
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Old 06-09-2008, 01:49 AM
 
Location: George Town Tasmania, Australia
126 posts, read 209,948 times
Reputation: 105
Default Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal......

Defeats are not final and, as Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal eight months into WW1, "The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think." Dark, she seems to say, she seems to define, as something inscrutable, not as something terrible. We often lose the meaning of darkness as Woolf defines it. People imagine the end of the world is nigh because the future is unimaginable. Who twenty years ago would have pictured a world without the USSR and with the Internet?

We talk about "what we hope for" in terms of what we hope will come to pass, but we could think of it another way, as why we hope. We hope on principle, we hope tactically and strategically, we hope because the future is dark, we hope because it's a more powerful and a more joyful way to live. Despair presumes it knows what will happen next. But who, two decades ago, would have imagined that the Canadian government would give a huge swathe of the north back to its indigenous people, or that the imprisoned Nelson Mandela would become president of a free South Africa? But hope must be linked to something more, something akin to certitude, something akin to whole-hearted enthusiasm, something that invites a totality of response unchecked by any maybe, one of the characteristics of great art. -Ron Price, From Tasmania, Australia
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