Virginia Woolf

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Hugh
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Virginia Woolf

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Some years back I stumbled across an audio recording of Virginia Woolf giving a talk on the English language for the BBC in 1937. It's the only known surviving recording of her voice: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/201 ... inia-woolf

On this very day in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: "Now I have to broadcast on the 29th. It will go like this: cant be a craft of words. am going to disregard the title and talk about words. why they won't let themselves be made a craft of. They will tell the truth: they aren't useful. That there shd. be two languages: fiction and fact. Words are inhuman... won't make money, need privacy - Why. For their embraces, for to continue the race. A dead word. The purists & the impurists. There are only impressions, not fixations. I respect words too. Associations of words. Felicity brings in absent thee. We [have to] can easily make new words. Squish Squash: crick crack: But we can't use them in writing."

And then the editor added a footnote to this entry that says in part: The word associations with 'felicity' stem from the last scene of Hamlet

Listen to the aristocratic refinement of her voice in that recording, but also notice the gentle authority with which she speaks. You would never guess that suicide was something that was always with her in the back of her mind. At that time, 1937, Europe was dreading the inevitable war with Germany, and it was the war that finally pushed Woolf over the edge after her home was bombed.

Hugh
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Re: Virginia Woolf

Post by Hugh »

Okay, enough of Virginia Woolf for tonight. I'm working on a first-person short story about a day in the life of a crackhead. While drinking Natural Ice. There's probably an ordinance somewhere that prevents jerk-offs like me from reading Virginia Woolf.

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oettinger
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Re: Virginia Woolf

Post by oettinger »

She sounds like an aunty you could talk things with you`d never share with your parents
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Hugh
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Re: Virginia Woolf

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On this very day in 1918, 104 years ago, Virginia Woolf wrote this in her diary: "To the Printers today & find him calmly asserting that he really can't send the press on the 14th. Can't find anyone to move it. This is cool as he took our £10 on the understanding that we should have the press without fail. However, these chilly half animate overworked little creatures can't be taken seriously. They don't attach the same meaning to promises, that we do. People badgering him with small jobs, he said, & hasn't even the time to claim his money."

There are several entries in her diaries where she derides the working class, and I cringe every time I read one. She especially hated her Irish housekeeper Nelly. But I have to admit, she is mostly right about how stupid, incompetent, and lazy they can be. I say this as a low level working class person myself. When I read her diary entries I often fantasize about what it might have been like if I could have chanced to meet her and maybe impressed her with my literacy. And as much as she disliked the working class, I recall at least one entry where she said that her husband Leonard was especially impatient with the working class people around him.

And then also, I'd like to tell her to fuck off and shove a sledgehammer right up her aristocratic cunt.

But that's just the chilly half animate overworked little creature in me talking.

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Re: Virginia Woolf

Post by oettinger »

Hugh wrote:
Sat Jan 08, 2022 8:03 pm


And then also, I'd like to tell her to fuck off and shove a sledgehammer right up her aristocratic cunt.
Me too
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