Attention English Graduate Students
Teaching at Brooklyn College
Information Session
Wednesday, April 21st (CORRECTED DATE)
Boylan 3407
6:30 – 7:30 p.m.
Facilitators
Martha Nadell, Deputy Chair for Summer Sessions
James Davis, Deputy Chair for Graduate Studies
Elaine Brooks, Administrative Deputy Chair
This is an information session for any interested English graduate students in the MA and MFA programs. The goal is to clarify the department’s procedures. The presentation by the faculty members will be followed by Q & A.
Topics of discussion will include
What should graduate students do if they wish to teach at BC?
What factors determine the number and kind of courses that are available for graduate students to teach?
What factors determine who is selected to teach?
What other options are available for students who do not receive courses to teach?
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Friday, March 19, 2010
New Bloomsbury Archive: King's College, Cambridge
In The Guardian, 19 March 2010
At the bottom of the page, you can access 5
photos from Frances Partridge collection
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/19/bloomsbury-archive-virginia-wool
f-death
New Bloomsbury archive casts revealing light on Virginia Woolf's death
A revealing letter about the disappearance and
suicide of Virginia Woolf in 1941 is part of a
new archive of letters by the Bloomsbury group
that is being opened to public viewing for the
first time.
The two collections belonged to the novelist
Rosamond Lehmann and the diarist and writer
Frances Partridge, once described by fellow group
member Clive Bell as having "the best legs in
Bloomsbury". Lehmann and Partridge became friends
at Cambridge University, later getting to know
the group of intellectuals that also included
Woolf, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey and JM Keynes.
One of the documents in the archive, which has
been acquired by King's College Cambridge, sees
Clive Bell writing to Partridge on 3 April 1941,
shortly after Woolf's final disappearance. "I'm
not sure whether the Times will by now have
announced that Virginia is missing. I'm afraid
there is not the slightest doubt that she drowned
herself about noon last Friday," writes Bell.
"She had left letters for Leonard and Vanessa
[Woolf and Bell]. Her stick and footprints were
found by the edge of the river. For some days, of
course, we hoped against hope that she had
wandered crazily away and might be discovered in
a barn or a village shop. But by now all hope is
abandoned; only, as the body has not been found,
she cannot be considered dead legally."
Bell wrote that it had become evident some weeks
earlier that Woolf "was in for another of those
long and agonising breakdowns of which she had
had several already". "The prospect of two years'
insanity, then to wake up to the sort of world
which another two years of war will have made,
was such that I can't feel sure that she was
unwise," he added.
The archive's thousands of pages of letters,
including some from Woolf herself, and 30 albums
of photographs featuring key members of the group
such as Forster and Strachey, are being opened to
the public by King's. The collection also details
the Bloomsbury group's reaction to the suicide of
the artist Dora Carrington, the first wife of
Frances Partridge's husband Ralph Partridge. She
shot herself two months after Strachey - with
whom she was besotted - died of stomach cancer.
She was still alive when Ralph and Frances
arrived at the Wiltshire house, hours later.
"For me the final touch of horror seems to be
given by the fact that she was still alive and
conscious when you arrived," wrote Clive Bell to
Frances Partridge in 1932. "What can it have been
like - I'm glad I can't clearly imagine it. This
world of tragedy in which all my dearest friends
are engulfed is only half-real to me because I
left England a day or two after Lytton died.
Hadn't you and Ralph better get out of it for a
bit?"
Lehmann - whose controversial first novel Dusty
Answer, partly about her time as a student in
Cambridge, catapulted her to fame - provides a
lighter note in an August 1932 letter to
Partridge about an argument between her husband
Wogan Philipps and his father. "It started with
an argument about capital punishment (W against,
Papa for, of course) and developed at lightning
speed into communism, filthy painting, being in a
filthy set, rotten intellectuals, intention of
making Wogan squirm and beg for every penny, etc
etc," she wrote. "Before we knew where we were,
Wogan was presented with a document to sign,
agreeing to go into Morris's motorworks as an
ordinary mechanic and then go to Russia for six
months and find any work he could. Meanwhile
another letter was composed to Morris asking him
if he would take in Wogan and cure him of
communist nonsense."
She also gives an insight into her lifestyle,
writing about how she had been looking after her
son Hugo while his nurse had a holiday. "I've
really enjoyed it, tho' it makes one feel rather
blank in the head. He really is rather an amusing
child," she wrote.
King's archivist Patricia McGuire said the two
collections also provide glimpses into what
Partridge and Lehmann "were reading or listening
to, into what art galleries and exhibitions they
were attending and into how they responded to
major political events of the day, such as the
Spanish civil war".
"In a way, these two women belonged to a
generation that could only have existed between
the wars," she said. "They had education,
training and rights but they also had lots of
free time and didn't necessarily have to keep a
house. They had well-developed points of view,
were articulate about their emotions and at the
same time struggled with their bohemian
lifestyles and the more conservative, older
generation."
--
At the bottom of the page, you can access 5
photos from Frances Partridge collection
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/19/bloomsbury-archive-virginia-wool
f-death
New Bloomsbury archive casts revealing light on Virginia Woolf's death
A revealing letter about the disappearance and
suicide of Virginia Woolf in 1941 is part of a
new archive of letters by the Bloomsbury group
that is being opened to public viewing for the
first time.
The two collections belonged to the novelist
Rosamond Lehmann and the diarist and writer
Frances Partridge, once described by fellow group
member Clive Bell as having "the best legs in
Bloomsbury". Lehmann and Partridge became friends
at Cambridge University, later getting to know
the group of intellectuals that also included
Woolf, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey and JM Keynes.
One of the documents in the archive, which has
been acquired by King's College Cambridge, sees
Clive Bell writing to Partridge on 3 April 1941,
shortly after Woolf's final disappearance. "I'm
not sure whether the Times will by now have
announced that Virginia is missing. I'm afraid
there is not the slightest doubt that she drowned
herself about noon last Friday," writes Bell.
"She had left letters for Leonard and Vanessa
[Woolf and Bell]. Her stick and footprints were
found by the edge of the river. For some days, of
course, we hoped against hope that she had
wandered crazily away and might be discovered in
a barn or a village shop. But by now all hope is
abandoned; only, as the body has not been found,
she cannot be considered dead legally."
Bell wrote that it had become evident some weeks
earlier that Woolf "was in for another of those
long and agonising breakdowns of which she had
had several already". "The prospect of two years'
insanity, then to wake up to the sort of world
which another two years of war will have made,
was such that I can't feel sure that she was
unwise," he added.
The archive's thousands of pages of letters,
including some from Woolf herself, and 30 albums
of photographs featuring key members of the group
such as Forster and Strachey, are being opened to
the public by King's. The collection also details
the Bloomsbury group's reaction to the suicide of
the artist Dora Carrington, the first wife of
Frances Partridge's husband Ralph Partridge. She
shot herself two months after Strachey - with
whom she was besotted - died of stomach cancer.
She was still alive when Ralph and Frances
arrived at the Wiltshire house, hours later.
"For me the final touch of horror seems to be
given by the fact that she was still alive and
conscious when you arrived," wrote Clive Bell to
Frances Partridge in 1932. "What can it have been
like - I'm glad I can't clearly imagine it. This
world of tragedy in which all my dearest friends
are engulfed is only half-real to me because I
left England a day or two after Lytton died.
Hadn't you and Ralph better get out of it for a
bit?"
Lehmann - whose controversial first novel Dusty
Answer, partly about her time as a student in
Cambridge, catapulted her to fame - provides a
lighter note in an August 1932 letter to
Partridge about an argument between her husband
Wogan Philipps and his father. "It started with
an argument about capital punishment (W against,
Papa for, of course) and developed at lightning
speed into communism, filthy painting, being in a
filthy set, rotten intellectuals, intention of
making Wogan squirm and beg for every penny, etc
etc," she wrote. "Before we knew where we were,
Wogan was presented with a document to sign,
agreeing to go into Morris's motorworks as an
ordinary mechanic and then go to Russia for six
months and find any work he could. Meanwhile
another letter was composed to Morris asking him
if he would take in Wogan and cure him of
communist nonsense."
She also gives an insight into her lifestyle,
writing about how she had been looking after her
son Hugo while his nurse had a holiday. "I've
really enjoyed it, tho' it makes one feel rather
blank in the head. He really is rather an amusing
child," she wrote.
King's archivist Patricia McGuire said the two
collections also provide glimpses into what
Partridge and Lehmann "were reading or listening
to, into what art galleries and exhibitions they
were attending and into how they responded to
major political events of the day, such as the
Spanish civil war".
"In a way, these two women belonged to a
generation that could only have existed between
the wars," she said. "They had education,
training and rights but they also had lots of
free time and didn't necessarily have to keep a
house. They had well-developed points of view,
were articulate about their emotions and at the
same time struggled with their bohemian
lifestyles and the more conservative, older
generation."
--
BC Library Reserve List
WOMAN READER
ON DECONSTRUCTION
ALLEGORIES OF READING
PLEASURE OF THE TEXT
FAHRENHEIT 451
THEORIES OF READING
ULYSSES AND US THE ART OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN JOYCES' MASTERPIECE
ULYSSES-EN-GENDERED PERSPECTIVES
VIRGINIA WOOLF, THE IMPACT OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE ON HER LIFE AND
WORK
VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE LANGUAGES OF PATRIARCHY
VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE BLOOMSBURY AVANT-GARDE
ULYSSES
PAPERSPACE
ON DECONSTRUCTION
ALLEGORIES OF READING
PLEASURE OF THE TEXT
FAHRENHEIT 451
THEORIES OF READING
ULYSSES AND US THE ART OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN JOYCES' MASTERPIECE
ULYSSES-EN-GENDERED PERSPECTIVES
VIRGINIA WOOLF, THE IMPACT OF CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE ON HER LIFE AND
WORK
VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE LANGUAGES OF PATRIARCHY
VIRGINIA WOOLF AND THE BLOOMSBURY AVANT-GARDE
ULYSSES
PAPERSPACE
Bibliography: Modernism
Selected Texts:
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space (1964).
Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination (1981).
Barthes, Roland. S/Z
Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (1968).
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1941. (1986)
Broe, ed. Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes (1991).
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity (1987).
Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary
Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992).
Dettmar, Kevin & Stephen Watt (eds.) Marketing Modernism: Self-Promotion, Canonization and Reading (1996).
Eagleton, Terry. After Theory (2003).
Hamner, Robert. Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (1986).
Kenner, Hugh. Joyce’s Voices (1978).
King, Bruce Alvin. Derek Walcott: A Carribean Life (biography) (2001).
Lawrence, Karen. The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses (1981) and De-Colonizing Tradition.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf (biography) (1996).
Levenson, Michael. A Geneology of Modernism (1984).
Lukacs, Geog. Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle (chapter on “The
Ideology of Modernism”) (1971).
Marek, Jane E. Women Editing Modernism: Literary Magazines and Literary History
(1995).
Mao, Douglas & Rebecca Walkowitz. Bad Modernisms (2006).
Nelson, Cary & Laurence Grossberg. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (see
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”) ( 1988).
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995).
Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (1998).
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative (Essay on Mrs. Dalloway, vol. II) (1984.
Riquelme, J.P. Gothic Modernisms: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (2008).
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism (1993).
Saussy, Haun. Comp Lit in an Age of Globalization (Yale 2008)
Scott, Bonnie Kime. The Gender of Modernism (1990) and Refiguring Modernism:
Postmodern Feminst Readings of Woolf, West and Barnes (1995).
Walkowitz, Rebecca.Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2007).
Williams, Patrick, ed. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (1994).
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space (1964).
Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination (1981).
Barthes, Roland. S/Z
Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (1968).
Benstock, Shari. Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1941. (1986)
Broe, ed. Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes (1991).
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990).
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity (1987).
Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary
Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992).
Dettmar, Kevin & Stephen Watt (eds.) Marketing Modernism: Self-Promotion, Canonization and Reading (1996).
Eagleton, Terry. After Theory (2003).
Hamner, Robert. Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott.
Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (1986).
Kenner, Hugh. Joyce’s Voices (1978).
King, Bruce Alvin. Derek Walcott: A Carribean Life (biography) (2001).
Lawrence, Karen. The Odyssey of Style in Ulysses (1981) and De-Colonizing Tradition.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf (biography) (1996).
Levenson, Michael. A Geneology of Modernism (1984).
Lukacs, Geog. Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle (chapter on “The
Ideology of Modernism”) (1971).
Marek, Jane E. Women Editing Modernism: Literary Magazines and Literary History
(1995).
Mao, Douglas & Rebecca Walkowitz. Bad Modernisms (2006).
Nelson, Cary & Laurence Grossberg. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (see
Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”) ( 1988).
Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995).
Rainey, Lawrence. Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (1998).
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative (Essay on Mrs. Dalloway, vol. II) (1984.
Riquelme, J.P. Gothic Modernisms: Essaying Dark Literary Modernity (2008).
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism (1993).
Saussy, Haun. Comp Lit in an Age of Globalization (Yale 2008)
Scott, Bonnie Kime. The Gender of Modernism (1990) and Refiguring Modernism:
Postmodern Feminst Readings of Woolf, West and Barnes (1995).
Walkowitz, Rebecca.Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (2007).
Williams, Patrick, ed. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (1994).
Bibliography: Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf: Selected Bibliography
Works:
Woolf, Virginia.The Complete Shorter Fiction, Susan Dick.
---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 5 v.
---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicholson & Joanne Trautmann. 5 v.
---. The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 4v.
Biography:
Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005)
Caws, Mary Ann. Women of Bloomsbury: Virginia, Vanessa and Carrington (1990, Routledge).
Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (1984, Norton)
Leaska, Mitchell. Granite & Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf (1998, Farrar).
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf (1997).
Reid, Panthea. Art & Affection: The Life of Virginia Woolf (1996).
Rose, Phyllis. Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (1978, Oxford)
Reference:
Kirkpatrick, B.J.& Stuart Clarke. A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, 4th ed. (1997)
Haule, Jame & Philip Smith. A Concordance (Oxford Microforms, 1981-84).
Hussey, Mark. Ed. Virginia Woolf A-Z (1995, Facts on File).
Silver, Brenda. Virginia Woolf Reading Notebooks (1983, Princeton).
Criticism:
Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. (1989, U of Chicago Pr).
Caramagno,Thomas. Flight of the Mind:Virginia Woolf and Manic-Depressive Illness (1992,U
Ca Pr).
Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism (1991, U of Illinois Pr).
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere (2007)
DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf: the Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse (1989, Beacon).
Fernald, Ann. Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (Palgrave 2006
Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization,
Modernity (Gender and Culture Series (2007).
Gillespie, Diane. The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf (1993, U of Missouri Pr).
Hussey, Mark. Ed. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth (1992).
Laurence, Patricia.The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (91
Stanford); Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury Modernism and China (2003).
Levenback, Karen. Virginia Woolf and the Great War (1999).
Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf & the Problem of the Subject (1987, Rutgers).
Marcus, Jane. Virginia Woolf & the Languages of Patriarchy (1987, Indiana UP).
Naremore, James. The World Without a Self (1972, Yale UP).
Phillips, Kathy J. Virginia Woolf Against Empire (1994, U of Tennessee Pr).
Richter, Harvena. Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (1970, Princeton).
Rosenbaum S.P. The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary.
Rosenberg, Beth & Jeanne Dubino. Eds.Virginia Woolf and the Essay (1997, St. Martin’s).
Ruototolo, Lucio. The Interrupted Moment (1986, Stanford).
Tremper, Ellen. Who Lived at Alfoxden? Virginia Woolf & English Romanticism (1998).
Willis, J.H.Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers:The Hogarth Press,1917-41(1992,U P Va).
Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Virginia Woolf: Life and London, A Biography of Place(1987, Norton).
Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf & the Real World (1986, U of Ca Press).
Works:
Woolf, Virginia.The Complete Shorter Fiction, Susan Dick.
---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell, 5 v.
---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicholson & Joanne Trautmann. 5 v.
---. The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. 4v.
Biography:
Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)
Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005)
Caws, Mary Ann. Women of Bloomsbury: Virginia, Vanessa and Carrington (1990, Routledge).
Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (1984, Norton)
Leaska, Mitchell. Granite & Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf (1998, Farrar).
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf (1997).
Reid, Panthea. Art & Affection: The Life of Virginia Woolf (1996).
Rose, Phyllis. Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (1978, Oxford)
Reference:
Kirkpatrick, B.J.& Stuart Clarke. A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, 4th ed. (1997)
Haule, Jame & Philip Smith. A Concordance (Oxford Microforms, 1981-84).
Hussey, Mark. Ed. Virginia Woolf A-Z (1995, Facts on File).
Silver, Brenda. Virginia Woolf Reading Notebooks (1983, Princeton).
Criticism:
Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. (1989, U of Chicago Pr).
Caramagno,Thomas. Flight of the Mind:Virginia Woolf and Manic-Depressive Illness (1992,U
Ca Pr).
Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism (1991, U of Illinois Pr).
Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual and the Public Sphere (2007)
DeSalvo, Louise. Virginia Woolf: the Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse (1989, Beacon).
Fernald, Ann. Virginia Woolf: Feminism and the Reader (Palgrave 2006
Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization,
Modernity (Gender and Culture Series (2007).
Gillespie, Diane. The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf (1993, U of Missouri Pr).
Hussey, Mark. Ed. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth (1992).
Laurence, Patricia.The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition (91
Stanford); Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury Modernism and China (2003).
Levenback, Karen. Virginia Woolf and the Great War (1999).
Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf & the Problem of the Subject (1987, Rutgers).
Marcus, Jane. Virginia Woolf & the Languages of Patriarchy (1987, Indiana UP).
Naremore, James. The World Without a Self (1972, Yale UP).
Phillips, Kathy J. Virginia Woolf Against Empire (1994, U of Tennessee Pr).
Richter, Harvena. Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (1970, Princeton).
Rosenbaum S.P. The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary.
Rosenberg, Beth & Jeanne Dubino. Eds.Virginia Woolf and the Essay (1997, St. Martin’s).
Ruototolo, Lucio. The Interrupted Moment (1986, Stanford).
Tremper, Ellen. Who Lived at Alfoxden? Virginia Woolf & English Romanticism (1998).
Willis, J.H.Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers:The Hogarth Press,1917-41(1992,U P Va).
Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Virginia Woolf: Life and London, A Biography of Place(1987, Norton).
Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf & the Real World (1986, U of Ca Press).
A Trip to the Lighthouse: Daphne Merkin
By DAPHNE MERKIN: Woolf’s Lighthouse
[In the novel, the lighthouse is set in the Hebrides, but inspired by Godrevy Lighthouse, Cornwall (SW England), where the Stephens spent their summers)
Published: September 12, 2004
I went to Cornwall to see the lighthouse -- Virginia Woolf's, that is, the one that stands tantalizingly out of reach until the very end of what is arguably her best novel, ''To the Lighthouse.'' The novel is Woolf's most autobiographical. (Transfixed by the portrait of their mother, her sister Vanessa wrote, ''It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead.'') Set in the Hebrides, it is based on Woolf's recollections of idyllic childhood summers spent at St. Ives on the Cornish coast.
Unlike the green light that winks at the end of the dock in F. Scott Fitzgerald's ''Great Gatsby,'' the lighthouse that lends itself to the title of Woolf's novel is not merely a writerly conceit. It actually exists in the form of the Godrevy lighthouse, which you can see off in the distance from the end of the quay that runs along the pier at St. Ives. It was in search of a glimpse of this literary landmark that my 14-year-old daughter, Zoe, and I traveled early in July to the southwestern tip of England, where the country narrows down into a shape approximating a human foot.
The stark white Godrevy stands on an island of its own at the head of St. Ives Bay, looking oddly less substantial in real life than as a symbol on the page -- a delicate spire rather than an imposing tower. I had impressed upon my daughter the great significance of this occasion, explaining that it would create a link between me and the writer I most admired, but she looked decidedly underwhelmed. You could hardly see the lighthouse, she pointed out, and wasn't I sick of Virginia Woolf already?
The sun flashed off the water, which glimmered a deep blue green more reminiscent of the Mediterranean than foggy, rainy England, as the bobbing sailboats clinked gently in the harbor. A narrow stretch of brownish sand in front of the quay was scattered with sunbathers, some of them sitting inside old-fashioned striped tents of the kind you can see in photos taken decades ago. All around us the sea gulls flapped, making their strange cawing sound -- half-angry, half-nostalgic, as if something has been taken away from them. (And, indeed, they have a reputation as scavengers; signs abound warning the unwary not to feed them.)
St. Ives was the center of the fishing industry throughout the 19th century until its pilchard stocks began to dry up. (Pilchards, which taste like muted sardines, are sold in tins that are decorated with evocative fishing scenes by the painter Walter Langley, who lived in Newlyn, a fishing village across the peninsula from St. Ives.) Since the 1880's, however, when the painter Walter Sickert sought out the area for the vaunted quality of its light -- both limpid and crystalline -- St. Ives has been best known as a mecca for artists and imbibers of artistic atmosphere. Its status as such was confirmed in 1993, when a small, gemlike branch of the Tate Gallery in London opened here.
The sparkling view of porthmeor Beach from the museum's top floor vies for visitors' attention with the exhibits. These include work by contemporary artists and a sampling of the artists who followed in Sickert's footsteps and came to be known as the St. Ives School. This group included painters like Ben Nicholson, Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham and Terry Frost, and the sculptors Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth. (One of them, the painter Patrick Heron, designed the stained-glass window that greets you on arrival.) Inspired by the ancient landscape of rocks, cliffs and Celtic standing stones -- being in touch with primeval life forces created by the promixity of sun, sky and water -- they tended toward an abstract and formalist aesthetic. Other members of the community were the self-taught naive artist Alfred Wallis, a retired Cornish fisherman; Bernard Leach, the pioneering British potter; and painters like Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton, who eventually veered away from strict abstraction. All of them were struck by the same lilting energy -- the ''general sense of the poetry of existence'' as Virginia Woolf once described it -- that continued to haunt the author of ''To the Lighthouse'' many years after her family stopped going to St. Ives.
Within five minutes' walking distance from the Tate, along St. Ives's higgledy-piggledy cobblestone streets, is the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. The gifted and fiercely independent-minded sculptor moved here from London together with her husband, Ben Nicholson, in 1939. Hepworth, who had four young children on her hands, observed that she felt immediately ''nourished'' by the beauty and sense of camaraderie that the village offered. She lived and worked in St. Ives until 1975, when she died in a fire in her studio. The museum displays work from different periods of Hepworth's prolific and celebrated career, including her last major piece, a poignant multipart sculpture in white marble called ''Fallen Images.'' Zoe and I walked through her sparsely furnished house in hushed contemplation, then into the carefully designed yet informal garden, where every few steps we came upon another of Hepworth's organic, elemental forms, carved variously out of wood or stone. Here you can almost feel the artist's consuming dedication as a kind of silent, hovering presence; this impression is heightened when we turn a corner and come upon her workshops, which remain as they were at the time of her death, with unfinished sculptures resting on stands, as if Hepworth herself will shortly return.
It is impossible for any visitor to Cornwall not to be captivated by its richly atmospheric aspects: the miles of untouched green countryside, dotted with cows and lambs, looking as if at any moment Tess of the D'Urbervilles might come running out in an apron and bonnet; the cliff walks straight out of ''The French Lieutenant's Woman,'' with their suggestion of romantic doom; the little grocery stores and intimate pubs; the winding roads bracketed on either side by hedgerows and wildflowers; the fishing trawlers with their array of weather-beaten ropes; the quiet churches with their impeccably maintained cemeteries, like the one in St. Just, where you can still make out the inscription on a gravestone from 1750; and the cluster of 19th-century thatched ''round houses'' in the tiny gleaming village of Veryan -- built without corners, as local lore has it, so there would be no place for the devil to hide. Even the photo-ready, cheerfully self-marketing spirit that informs the tiny town of Mevagissey, near St. Ives -- a fishing village that is also a destination for day-trippers, chockablock with stands selling cotton candy and ''real'' Cornish ice cream and shops carrying plastic pails and shovels and disposable fishing rods -- has its tinselly charm.
And yet it is also impossible for anyone who stays for any time in Cornwall not to realize fairly quickly that it is a region at odds with itself, torn between the temptations of progress and the grip of an idealized past. Everywhere you go you can sense the clash between the thrifty, cautious habits of a rural indigenous population -- a spirit characterized by the plain-spoken fishermen, matey pubs and a dismissive attitude toward all that is showy or too openly aspiring -- and the rapacious consumerism of the Londoners (the ''I want people,'' as they are called) with their buy-'em-and-gut-'em mind-set. Locals or transplanted residents who consider themselves locals -- it doesn't seem to matter how briefly one has actually lived here before claiming this part of the world as one's own -- are in the habit of referring mistily to the ''old'' Cornwall as opposed to the ''new'' Cornwall. The past stands for an irreverent and stubbornly isolationist spirit, the sense the Cornish have of being a people unto themselves ever since the days when Cornwall still went by its Cornish name of Kernow.
The past also stands, although this goes mostly unremarked, for the specter of poverty that marks grim, depleted towns like Camborne and Redruth. Once the center of the defunct tin- and copper-mining industries that were the backbone of Cornwall's economy from the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries, they now can lay claim to one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the country. Like St. Austell, the bleak town in mid-Cornwall where our five-hour train ride from London deposited us, these are not places in which one would care to linger. Yet in the last few years, St. Austell, on the verge of dereliction since the decline of its once-flourishing china-clay industry, has begun to rebound, with the beginning of the astonishingly successful Eden Project. This environmental development, built on the site of an abandoned clay pit on the outskirts of town, consists of two enormous biospheres that recreate two of the earth's climates, replete with jungle, waterfalls, whimsical sculptures and all manner of plants.
The ''new'' Cornwall -- its present and future -- is embodied by the tourists the locals refer to (even as they assure me that no one uses the derogatory term) as ''emmets'' -- the local word for ''ants.'' Starting with the arrival of Easter and continuing though November, throngs of visitors pour in from other parts of England, bringing with them a much-needed infusion of income to a part of the country that remains, in spite of its breathtaking landscape and inarguable seductions, one of the most economically depressed. They come, like the two jolly retirees from Kent my daughter and I meet down on the dock in Megavissey, to breathe in the fresh sea air, reel in a fish or two and get their fill of ''cream teas'' (showcasing the artery-clogging clotted cream the region prides itself on). The doughy specialty with crimped edges known as as the Cornish pasty is also to be had here; originally devised as a one-stop meal for the men working down in the mines, with a bit of sweet and savory nestled together under the same crust, pasties put me in mind of overgrown apple turnovers.
And now, I suppose, is as good a moment as any to admit the truth: I came to Cornwall to see Virginia Woolf's lighthouse -- which belongs to the old Cornwall, when lightkeepers still roamed the earth (these days the lights go on automatically) -- but I succumbed to the enchantment of two tiny villages, whose pristine, ungussied-up essence is largely underwritten by emmets, I mean tourists, like me. Both of these villages are within an hour or so from St. Ives and have first-class hotels that helped put them on the map.
The allure of St. Mawes, where we stayed at the Tresanton, and Portloe, where we put in at the Lugger, is precisely the time-true quality that, like all authentic experiences of place, requires an element of affluent elitism to preserve that very picturesqueness. Both towns are set in the lush section of Cornwall known as the Roseland Peninsula, much of which is under the domain of the National Trust.
St. Mawes is a singularly captivating mix of the pastoral and coastal. It has drawn wealthy summer visitors and holiday vacationers since Edwardian times hawking nothing other than its own natural assets, which include the climate (reputedly the warmest in England), a glorious setting on Falmouth Bay, with palm trees no less, and a sense of easeful respite. The Tresanton, originally created in the 1940's as a yachtsmen's club, is made up of a cluster of whitewashed old houses on different levels that give little clue from the outside to the casual elegance within. The hotel was bought in 1997 by Olga Polizzi, who first came to St. Mawes at the urging of her husband, the writer William Shawcross, who summered here as a child. The 29 rooms, most with views of the sea, are invitingly done up in tawny colors, Frette sheets and eclectic pieces. The hotel has brought a not entirely unappreciated glamour to quiet St. Mawes (Prince Charles was a guest here just a few weeks before my visit) that is not matched by the more basic accommodations that line Lower Castle Road alongside attached seafront houses.
The remarkable part of St. Mawes is that it manages to have the best of all worlds: think a bit of Capri tossed together with a scattering of Maine and a dollop of East Hampton, and then deduct the crowds. Within a few doors of one another there are a sophisticated gallery, a sleekly designed food emporium, Chalmers & Short, and the dusty, serenely outdated-looking Fashion Center, which seems straight out of a William Trevor story. James Wood, whose family runs the Waterside Gallery, which carries woodcarvings, ceramics and jewelry by Cornwall residents, undertakes to explain the town's magic to me. ''In nice weather,'' he says, ''I've never known a nicer place. I think people who come here find what they're looking for. They don't get homesick.''
Finally, there is dreamy, reclusive Portloe, which is a mere 20 minutes away from St. Mawes if you know your way around the hairpin roads. A slip of a fishing village with nothing in it but a post office, a pub and the Lugger, it makes St. Mawes look positively bustling by contrast. There is nothing to do in Portloe but take walks along the cliff, hole up in your pricey but infinitely chic room in the Lugger or hang out in the Ship Inn, which has been described to me as the best pub in Cornwall. The owner and barkeeper is Andrew Tregunna, much the friendliest person I met in the area. Andrew, who has a wife and two young children, recently renovated two upstairs rooms, which he showed me with shy pride. He plans to charge a fraction of the price of the Lugger and the Tresanton, which would make his rooms the only bargain left on Roseland.
As I watched him greet a regular who seated himself at the bar with a hearty ''How the devil are you, sir,'' I could understand why his cozy place does such a brisk business. My last night in Cornwall, I decided to forego the Lugger's tony cuisine for an excellent piece of sole cooked with capers and butter sauce at the Ship Inn.
Zoe and I sat at our table, and, while we waited for dinner, I finished off a pint of west country scrumpy (cider). The waitresses and 16-year-old pastry chef from the Lugger dropped in for drinks and a chat with friends. They hand-packed the tobacco in the cigarettes they deftly rolled; no worry about secondhand smoke in these parts.
It was nearly midnight by the time we reluctantly bade Andrew good night and made our way down the road in pitch-blackness. It occurred to me belatedly that I should have thought to take a flashlight; there were no streetlights and the only illumination was provided by the stars blinking up in the night sky. The next morning, we were booked to take the train to London, and after that we returned home.
Meanwhile, back in New York, I found myself daydreaming about waking up to the briny smell of the sea and the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks. Cornwall had cast its spell on me, as James Wood had predicted. There's something about the place -- maybe it comes back to the light, which really does have a sheen to it, almost like a curtain of glass beads -- that works its way into your bones.
Daphne Merkin, a novelist and critic, is working on a memoir of depression, ''Melancholy Baby.''
[In the novel, the lighthouse is set in the Hebrides, but inspired by Godrevy Lighthouse, Cornwall (SW England), where the Stephens spent their summers)
Published: September 12, 2004
I went to Cornwall to see the lighthouse -- Virginia Woolf's, that is, the one that stands tantalizingly out of reach until the very end of what is arguably her best novel, ''To the Lighthouse.'' The novel is Woolf's most autobiographical. (Transfixed by the portrait of their mother, her sister Vanessa wrote, ''It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead.'') Set in the Hebrides, it is based on Woolf's recollections of idyllic childhood summers spent at St. Ives on the Cornish coast.
Unlike the green light that winks at the end of the dock in F. Scott Fitzgerald's ''Great Gatsby,'' the lighthouse that lends itself to the title of Woolf's novel is not merely a writerly conceit. It actually exists in the form of the Godrevy lighthouse, which you can see off in the distance from the end of the quay that runs along the pier at St. Ives. It was in search of a glimpse of this literary landmark that my 14-year-old daughter, Zoe, and I traveled early in July to the southwestern tip of England, where the country narrows down into a shape approximating a human foot.
The stark white Godrevy stands on an island of its own at the head of St. Ives Bay, looking oddly less substantial in real life than as a symbol on the page -- a delicate spire rather than an imposing tower. I had impressed upon my daughter the great significance of this occasion, explaining that it would create a link between me and the writer I most admired, but she looked decidedly underwhelmed. You could hardly see the lighthouse, she pointed out, and wasn't I sick of Virginia Woolf already?
The sun flashed off the water, which glimmered a deep blue green more reminiscent of the Mediterranean than foggy, rainy England, as the bobbing sailboats clinked gently in the harbor. A narrow stretch of brownish sand in front of the quay was scattered with sunbathers, some of them sitting inside old-fashioned striped tents of the kind you can see in photos taken decades ago. All around us the sea gulls flapped, making their strange cawing sound -- half-angry, half-nostalgic, as if something has been taken away from them. (And, indeed, they have a reputation as scavengers; signs abound warning the unwary not to feed them.)
St. Ives was the center of the fishing industry throughout the 19th century until its pilchard stocks began to dry up. (Pilchards, which taste like muted sardines, are sold in tins that are decorated with evocative fishing scenes by the painter Walter Langley, who lived in Newlyn, a fishing village across the peninsula from St. Ives.) Since the 1880's, however, when the painter Walter Sickert sought out the area for the vaunted quality of its light -- both limpid and crystalline -- St. Ives has been best known as a mecca for artists and imbibers of artistic atmosphere. Its status as such was confirmed in 1993, when a small, gemlike branch of the Tate Gallery in London opened here.
The sparkling view of porthmeor Beach from the museum's top floor vies for visitors' attention with the exhibits. These include work by contemporary artists and a sampling of the artists who followed in Sickert's footsteps and came to be known as the St. Ives School. This group included painters like Ben Nicholson, Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham and Terry Frost, and the sculptors Naum Gabo and Barbara Hepworth. (One of them, the painter Patrick Heron, designed the stained-glass window that greets you on arrival.) Inspired by the ancient landscape of rocks, cliffs and Celtic standing stones -- being in touch with primeval life forces created by the promixity of sun, sky and water -- they tended toward an abstract and formalist aesthetic. Other members of the community were the self-taught naive artist Alfred Wallis, a retired Cornish fisherman; Bernard Leach, the pioneering British potter; and painters like Peter Lanyon and Roger Hilton, who eventually veered away from strict abstraction. All of them were struck by the same lilting energy -- the ''general sense of the poetry of existence'' as Virginia Woolf once described it -- that continued to haunt the author of ''To the Lighthouse'' many years after her family stopped going to St. Ives.
Within five minutes' walking distance from the Tate, along St. Ives's higgledy-piggledy cobblestone streets, is the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. The gifted and fiercely independent-minded sculptor moved here from London together with her husband, Ben Nicholson, in 1939. Hepworth, who had four young children on her hands, observed that she felt immediately ''nourished'' by the beauty and sense of camaraderie that the village offered. She lived and worked in St. Ives until 1975, when she died in a fire in her studio. The museum displays work from different periods of Hepworth's prolific and celebrated career, including her last major piece, a poignant multipart sculpture in white marble called ''Fallen Images.'' Zoe and I walked through her sparsely furnished house in hushed contemplation, then into the carefully designed yet informal garden, where every few steps we came upon another of Hepworth's organic, elemental forms, carved variously out of wood or stone. Here you can almost feel the artist's consuming dedication as a kind of silent, hovering presence; this impression is heightened when we turn a corner and come upon her workshops, which remain as they were at the time of her death, with unfinished sculptures resting on stands, as if Hepworth herself will shortly return.
It is impossible for any visitor to Cornwall not to be captivated by its richly atmospheric aspects: the miles of untouched green countryside, dotted with cows and lambs, looking as if at any moment Tess of the D'Urbervilles might come running out in an apron and bonnet; the cliff walks straight out of ''The French Lieutenant's Woman,'' with their suggestion of romantic doom; the little grocery stores and intimate pubs; the winding roads bracketed on either side by hedgerows and wildflowers; the fishing trawlers with their array of weather-beaten ropes; the quiet churches with their impeccably maintained cemeteries, like the one in St. Just, where you can still make out the inscription on a gravestone from 1750; and the cluster of 19th-century thatched ''round houses'' in the tiny gleaming village of Veryan -- built without corners, as local lore has it, so there would be no place for the devil to hide. Even the photo-ready, cheerfully self-marketing spirit that informs the tiny town of Mevagissey, near St. Ives -- a fishing village that is also a destination for day-trippers, chockablock with stands selling cotton candy and ''real'' Cornish ice cream and shops carrying plastic pails and shovels and disposable fishing rods -- has its tinselly charm.
And yet it is also impossible for anyone who stays for any time in Cornwall not to realize fairly quickly that it is a region at odds with itself, torn between the temptations of progress and the grip of an idealized past. Everywhere you go you can sense the clash between the thrifty, cautious habits of a rural indigenous population -- a spirit characterized by the plain-spoken fishermen, matey pubs and a dismissive attitude toward all that is showy or too openly aspiring -- and the rapacious consumerism of the Londoners (the ''I want people,'' as they are called) with their buy-'em-and-gut-'em mind-set. Locals or transplanted residents who consider themselves locals -- it doesn't seem to matter how briefly one has actually lived here before claiming this part of the world as one's own -- are in the habit of referring mistily to the ''old'' Cornwall as opposed to the ''new'' Cornwall. The past stands for an irreverent and stubbornly isolationist spirit, the sense the Cornish have of being a people unto themselves ever since the days when Cornwall still went by its Cornish name of Kernow.
The past also stands, although this goes mostly unremarked, for the specter of poverty that marks grim, depleted towns like Camborne and Redruth. Once the center of the defunct tin- and copper-mining industries that were the backbone of Cornwall's economy from the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries, they now can lay claim to one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the country. Like St. Austell, the bleak town in mid-Cornwall where our five-hour train ride from London deposited us, these are not places in which one would care to linger. Yet in the last few years, St. Austell, on the verge of dereliction since the decline of its once-flourishing china-clay industry, has begun to rebound, with the beginning of the astonishingly successful Eden Project. This environmental development, built on the site of an abandoned clay pit on the outskirts of town, consists of two enormous biospheres that recreate two of the earth's climates, replete with jungle, waterfalls, whimsical sculptures and all manner of plants.
The ''new'' Cornwall -- its present and future -- is embodied by the tourists the locals refer to (even as they assure me that no one uses the derogatory term) as ''emmets'' -- the local word for ''ants.'' Starting with the arrival of Easter and continuing though November, throngs of visitors pour in from other parts of England, bringing with them a much-needed infusion of income to a part of the country that remains, in spite of its breathtaking landscape and inarguable seductions, one of the most economically depressed. They come, like the two jolly retirees from Kent my daughter and I meet down on the dock in Megavissey, to breathe in the fresh sea air, reel in a fish or two and get their fill of ''cream teas'' (showcasing the artery-clogging clotted cream the region prides itself on). The doughy specialty with crimped edges known as as the Cornish pasty is also to be had here; originally devised as a one-stop meal for the men working down in the mines, with a bit of sweet and savory nestled together under the same crust, pasties put me in mind of overgrown apple turnovers.
And now, I suppose, is as good a moment as any to admit the truth: I came to Cornwall to see Virginia Woolf's lighthouse -- which belongs to the old Cornwall, when lightkeepers still roamed the earth (these days the lights go on automatically) -- but I succumbed to the enchantment of two tiny villages, whose pristine, ungussied-up essence is largely underwritten by emmets, I mean tourists, like me. Both of these villages are within an hour or so from St. Ives and have first-class hotels that helped put them on the map.
The allure of St. Mawes, where we stayed at the Tresanton, and Portloe, where we put in at the Lugger, is precisely the time-true quality that, like all authentic experiences of place, requires an element of affluent elitism to preserve that very picturesqueness. Both towns are set in the lush section of Cornwall known as the Roseland Peninsula, much of which is under the domain of the National Trust.
St. Mawes is a singularly captivating mix of the pastoral and coastal. It has drawn wealthy summer visitors and holiday vacationers since Edwardian times hawking nothing other than its own natural assets, which include the climate (reputedly the warmest in England), a glorious setting on Falmouth Bay, with palm trees no less, and a sense of easeful respite. The Tresanton, originally created in the 1940's as a yachtsmen's club, is made up of a cluster of whitewashed old houses on different levels that give little clue from the outside to the casual elegance within. The hotel was bought in 1997 by Olga Polizzi, who first came to St. Mawes at the urging of her husband, the writer William Shawcross, who summered here as a child. The 29 rooms, most with views of the sea, are invitingly done up in tawny colors, Frette sheets and eclectic pieces. The hotel has brought a not entirely unappreciated glamour to quiet St. Mawes (Prince Charles was a guest here just a few weeks before my visit) that is not matched by the more basic accommodations that line Lower Castle Road alongside attached seafront houses.
The remarkable part of St. Mawes is that it manages to have the best of all worlds: think a bit of Capri tossed together with a scattering of Maine and a dollop of East Hampton, and then deduct the crowds. Within a few doors of one another there are a sophisticated gallery, a sleekly designed food emporium, Chalmers & Short, and the dusty, serenely outdated-looking Fashion Center, which seems straight out of a William Trevor story. James Wood, whose family runs the Waterside Gallery, which carries woodcarvings, ceramics and jewelry by Cornwall residents, undertakes to explain the town's magic to me. ''In nice weather,'' he says, ''I've never known a nicer place. I think people who come here find what they're looking for. They don't get homesick.''
Finally, there is dreamy, reclusive Portloe, which is a mere 20 minutes away from St. Mawes if you know your way around the hairpin roads. A slip of a fishing village with nothing in it but a post office, a pub and the Lugger, it makes St. Mawes look positively bustling by contrast. There is nothing to do in Portloe but take walks along the cliff, hole up in your pricey but infinitely chic room in the Lugger or hang out in the Ship Inn, which has been described to me as the best pub in Cornwall. The owner and barkeeper is Andrew Tregunna, much the friendliest person I met in the area. Andrew, who has a wife and two young children, recently renovated two upstairs rooms, which he showed me with shy pride. He plans to charge a fraction of the price of the Lugger and the Tresanton, which would make his rooms the only bargain left on Roseland.
As I watched him greet a regular who seated himself at the bar with a hearty ''How the devil are you, sir,'' I could understand why his cozy place does such a brisk business. My last night in Cornwall, I decided to forego the Lugger's tony cuisine for an excellent piece of sole cooked with capers and butter sauce at the Ship Inn.
Zoe and I sat at our table, and, while we waited for dinner, I finished off a pint of west country scrumpy (cider). The waitresses and 16-year-old pastry chef from the Lugger dropped in for drinks and a chat with friends. They hand-packed the tobacco in the cigarettes they deftly rolled; no worry about secondhand smoke in these parts.
It was nearly midnight by the time we reluctantly bade Andrew good night and made our way down the road in pitch-blackness. It occurred to me belatedly that I should have thought to take a flashlight; there were no streetlights and the only illumination was provided by the stars blinking up in the night sky. The next morning, we were booked to take the train to London, and after that we returned home.
Meanwhile, back in New York, I found myself daydreaming about waking up to the briny smell of the sea and the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks. Cornwall had cast its spell on me, as James Wood had predicted. There's something about the place -- maybe it comes back to the light, which really does have a sheen to it, almost like a curtain of glass beads -- that works its way into your bones.
Daphne Merkin, a novelist and critic, is working on a memoir of depression, ''Melancholy Baby.''
Joyce Reading Question: Week of 3/18-25
Briefly describe your adventures in reading the first three chapters of Joyce's
Ulysses. We'll discuss some of these responses
in class next week.
Ulysses. We'll discuss some of these responses
in class next week.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Contemporary Treatments of Reading: potential paper topics
Contemporary Bits on Reading (more suggestions?)
Rachel Jennings sends this link on "The Twilight Zone," an episode in which a man who loves to read cannot find the time until...
http://www.cbs.com/classics/the_twilight_zone/video/
Also new books: The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, a spoof on the Queen's new engagement with reading.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Shaffer and Borrows, the charming story of a reading society (told in epistolary style) that formed on the island of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands between France and England, during German occupation of the island in WWII.
Stevie Smith has a new book of essays, out this month, Changing My Mind. There are a few interesting essays on her reading of Forster, Barthes, Nabokov in a section called "Reading."
Rachel Jennings sends this link on "The Twilight Zone," an episode in which a man who loves to read cannot find the time until...
http://www.cbs.com/classics/the_twilight_zone/video/
Also new books: The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, a spoof on the Queen's new engagement with reading.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Shaffer and Borrows, the charming story of a reading society (told in epistolary style) that formed on the island of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands between France and England, during German occupation of the island in WWII.
Stevie Smith has a new book of essays, out this month, Changing My Mind. There are a few interesting essays on her reading of Forster, Barthes, Nabokov in a section called "Reading."
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Talk on Abolition: March 17th, 3:40-5:00, BC
Book Talk: David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City.
Woody Tanger Auditorium, Library, March 17, 3:40-5:00 p.m.
Noted historian Graham Hodges (Colgate University) will discuss his latest book--the first biography of David Ruggles, a leading African American activist, writer, publisher, and hydrotherapist who led more than 600 bond people to freedom, the most famous of whom was Frederick Douglass. Ruggles mentored leading black abolitionists including Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Book signing to follow talk.
Woody Tanger Auditorium, Library, March 17, 3:40-5:00 p.m.
Noted historian Graham Hodges (Colgate University) will discuss his latest book--the first biography of David Ruggles, a leading African American activist, writer, publisher, and hydrotherapist who led more than 600 bond people to freedom, the most famous of whom was Frederick Douglass. Ruggles mentored leading black abolitionists including Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Book signing to follow talk.
Friday, March 5, 2010
NYT Review of Burton's "Alice in Wonderland"
Movie Review
Alice in Wonderland (Walt Disney Pictures) (2010)
Alice in Wonderland (Walt Disney Pictures)
Walt Disney Pictures
Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland.”
March 5, 2010
What’s a Nice Girl Doing in This Hole?
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: March 5, 2010
Into the dark you tumble in “Alice in Wonderland,” Tim Burton’s busy, garish and periodically amusing repo of the Lewis Carroll hallucination “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” It’s a long fall turned long haul, despite the Burtonian flourishes — the pinch of cruelty, the mordant wit — that animate the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and the porker that slides under her feet with a squeal. “I love a warm pig belly for my aching feet,” the queen tells Alice. Played by Mia Wasikowska, Alice looks a touch dazed: she seems to have left her pulse above ground when she fell down the rabbit hole of Mr. Burton’s imagination.
-----------------
Multimedia
Faces of WonderlandSlide Show
Faces of Wonderland
Related
Film: Drinking Blood: New Wonders of Alice’s World (February 28, 2010)
DVDs: Another Trippy Rabbit Hole (February 28, 2010)
ArtsBeat: Curiouser and Curiouser Cinema Adventures in 'Wonderland'
Blogs
The Carpetbagger
The
Carpetbagger
Your guide to the news and the nonsense of awards season. Join the discussion.
Go to Awards Season
------------------
Mr. Burton has done his best work with contemporary stories, so it’s curious if not curiouser that he’s turned his sights on another 19th-century tale. Perhaps after slitting all those throats in his adaptation of “Sweeney Todd,” he thought he would chop off a few heads. Whatever his inspiration, he has tackled this new story with his customary mix of torpor and frenzy. After a short glance back at Alice’s childhood and an equally brief look at her present, he sends the 19-year-old on her way, first down the hole and then into a dreamscape — unfortunately tricked out with 3-D that distracts more than it delights — where she meets a grinning cat and a lugubrious caterpillar, among other fantastical creatures.
Dark and sometimes grim, this isn’t your great-grandmother’s Alice or that of Uncle Walt, who was disappointed with the 1951 Disney version of “Alice in Wonderland.” “Alice has no character,” said a writer who worked on that project. “She merely plays straight man to a cast of screwball comics.” Of course the character of Carroll’s original Alice is evident in each outrageous creation she dreams up in “Wonderland” and in the sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass,” which means that she’s a straight man to her own imagination. (She is Wonderland.) Here she mostly serves as a foil for the top biller Johnny Depp, who (yes, yes) plays the Mad Hatter, and Mr. Burton’s bright and leaden whimsies.
First thought up by Carroll in a rowboat in which one of the passengers was the 10-year-old Alice Liddell, the object of his much-debated love, “Wonderland” (1865) is, among many other things, a testament to glorious nonsense as well as an inspiration for dark thoughts (about Carroll’s feelings for Liddell) and for lysergic works from the likes of David Lynch. It’s a total (head) trip, one that starts and stops and doesn’t fit easily into the mainstream narrative mold, which could explain why the screenwriter Linda Woolverton, borrowing both from “Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass,” has given Alice a back story, a dash of psychology and a battle royal if, alas, not a pool of her own tears in which to swim.
Since narrative momentum isn’t Mr. Burton’s strength, “Alice in Wonderland” probably seemed a good fit for him, and there are moments when his transparent delight in the material lifts the movie and even carries it forward. His Wonderland (here, Underland) isn’t inviting or attractive. The colors are often bilious, though the palette also turns gunmetal gray, bringing to mind “Sweeney Todd.” There’s a suggestively nightmarish aspect to Alice’s journey, as when she steps on some severed heads in the Red Queen’s moat as if they were stones. The queen herself is a horror: Bette Davis as Elizabeth I and reconfigured as a bobble-head doll. Ms. Bonham Carter makes you hear the petulant child in her barbarism and the wounded woman too. She rocks the house and the movie.
And she does, even though the character is a harridan cliché who, smitten with her knave (Crispin Glover) and clutching her power, rules with a boom. (“Off with his head!”) She eventually dukes it out with her rival and sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway, gliding like an ice dancer), who enlists Alice’s help. There’s more, including computer-generated flowers, assorted 3-D projectiles and the usual British actors earning their pay, like the “Harry Potter” alumni Timothy Spall, Alan Rickman and Imelda Staunton. Mr. Burton lavishes his attention on the little things in “Wonderland” — the perfectly drawn red heart painted on the center of the Red Queen’s mouth, for instance — perhaps because nothing else claims his attention. He’s very bad with the awkward action scenes, maybe because he’s embarrassed that they even exist.
Mr. Depp’s strenuously flamboyant turn embodies the best and worst of Mr. Burton’s filmmaking tendencies even as the actor brings his own brand of cinematic crazy to the tea party. With his Kabuki-white face, the character seems to have been calculated to invoke Heath Ledger’s Joker, though at his amusing best the Hatter brings to mind a strung-out Carrot Top. But Mr. Depp doesn’t have much to do, which he proves as he wildly flirts with the camera. The only time the character hooks you is in the shivery moment when his gaze turns predatory as he looks at Alice, who, every inch a Tim Burton Goth Girl, from her corpselike pallor to her enervated presence, presents a more convincing vision of death than of sex.
That queasy, potentially rich and frightening moment expectedly fades as fast as the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), which doesn’t leave you with much else to hold onto, Alice included. Mr. Burton’s heroine is a wan figure to hang an entire world on, and Ms. Wasikowska, who’s a livelier, truer presence in the forthcoming “The Kids Are All Right,” barely registers among Mr. Burton’s clanging and the computer-generated galumphing. This isn’t an impossible story to translate to the screen, as the Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer showed with “Alice” (1988), where the divide between reality and fantasy blurs as it does in dreams. It’s just hard to know why Mr. Burton, who doesn’t seem much interested in Alice, bothered.
“Alice in Wonderland” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It is a surprise (or not) that this movie, with its severed heads and Jabberwocky battle, is not rated PG-13, which serves as a warning for parents.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Tim Burton; written by Linda Woolverton, based on “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass” by Lewis Carroll; director of photography, Dariusz Wolski; edited by Chris Lebenzon; music by Danny Elfman; costumes by Colleen Atwood; senior visual effects supervisor, Ken Ralston; makeup design by Valli O’Reilly; produced by Richard D. Zanuck, Joe Roth, Suzanne Todd and Jennifer Todd; released by Walt Disney Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.
WITH: Johnny Depp (Mad Hatter), Mia Wasikowska (Alice Kingsleigh), Anne Hathaway (White Queen), Helena Bonham Carter (Red Queen), Crispin Glover (Stayne-Knave of Hearts), Matt Lucas (Tweedledee and Tweedledum), Alan Rickman (Absolem the Caterpillar), Timothy Spall (Bayard the Bloodhound) and Imelda Staunton (Tall Flower Faces).
WITH THE VOICES OF: Michael Sheen (White Rabbit), Stephen Fry (Cheshire Cat), Barbara Windsor (Dormouse), Christopher Lee (Jabberwocky), Michael Gough (Dodo) and Paul Whitehouse (March Hare).
Average Reader Rating
2.5 rating, 31 votes
Rate It
Log In to Rate This
5 Readers' Reviews
* All Comments
* Highlights
* Readers' Recommendations
* Oldest
* Newest
March 4th, 2010
10:03 pm
Rating:
5.
Lighten Up
Stop dissecting; just sit back and enjoy the fun. It's just entertainment, why so serious?
– Byron Furseth, Chicago
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers
March 4th, 2010
9:23 pm
Rating:
4.
Wonderful Movie
The critic disqualifies herself when she says that Alice is a foil for Mr. Depp. There can be no doubt that Ms. Wasowski is the heroine of this film, whether you like her or not. Mr. Depp is good as usual, but as expected he does not have the major part the trailers would have us believe.
It is a wonderful and magic movie for anyone who has kept their imagination and a love for fairy tales. The visuals are absolutely stunning and artful, the aesthetically loveliest movie I have seen. The 3D beautifully adds to the immersion.
– MadHatter, Berlin, Germany
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers
March 4th, 2010
8:40 pm
Rating:
3.
Waste of rabbit time. 1 star.
1 star
Once again, Tim Burton demonstrates a complete lack of imagination. Instead of telling a wonderful story of how a young girl descends into a wonderland of the mind, we get the usual cliched Burton handbag of gothic grunts, overtoothed animals, and lispy lead character in Depp who seem not to have even a passing acquaintance with one of childhoods fabled imaginative fables. Where oh where is the spine of the story, the characters, the conflict, the story and the story?
Tony Gillotte
Vacaville, CA
– Tony Gillotte, Vacaville, CA
Recommend Recommended by 4 Readers
March 4th, 2010
8:35 pm
Rating:
2.
misuse of talent
I admit that I always cringe when I see Dargis' byline, but if I read her right, as I muddle my way again through her signature convoluted 'review,' I am in agreement that this is not much of a movie, and that Burton's and Depp's talents were not put to good use.
– davidkirby008z, perth
Recommend Recommended by 9 Readers
March 3rd, 2010
8:39 pm
Rating:
1.
Alice in a by-the-numbers Wonderland
When it was announced that goth-pop filmmaker Tim Burton was going to remake Alice in Wonderland, on paper it appeared a match made in cinematic heaven.
With a back-catalogue featuring some of cinema's most unique treats (Edward Scissorhands, Batman and Beetlejuice to name just a handful), Burton seemed the ideal candidate to give Lewis Carroll's Alice a 21st century makeover.
Burton gathered a stellar cast of his favourites (Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter), bona fide stars (Anne Hathaway) and fresh talent (Australia's Mia Wasikowska), recruited high-profile scriptwriter Linda Woolverton and told the world he was going to make his Wonderland a 3D visual spectacular.
It appeared he was going to try to make his 3D Wonderland the 2010 equivalent of Dorothy walking into a Technicolor Oz back in 1939.
However, what sounds good on paper doesn't always translate into reality, and sadly that is what has happened here.
The story itself could have saved this film, however, it seems the scriptwriter herself was relying on the amazing visuals to give the story more impact and pacing than what this paper-thin narrative could offer.
It opens with a 19-year-old Alice (Wasikowska) at a crossroads in her life.
While she has grown up and blossomed into a beautiful young woman, she is still haunted by the same dream, her journey to Wonderland as a wide-eyed youngster.
When she is proposed to by a man she has no romantic interest in, she escapes back to Wonderland, where she finds the huge-headed Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter playing, well, herself) is destroying everything.
A group of familiar characters - including the mad hatter (a ludicrously miscast Depp), the Cheshire Cat and Tweedledee and - dum (Little Britain's Matt Lucas) - are not convinced this is the same Alice that has been prophesised as the one to come and save them from the evil queen's rule.
After the visual phenomenon that is Avatar, global audiences are eagerly awaiting the next movie to submerse them into a 3D cinematic experience and alas, Alice isn't going to be the movie to do that.
Whereas Cameron filmed his visual opus in 3D, Burton opted against this, deciding to convert it after filming, because it is easier and cheaper.
As such, the 3D and overall visuals of Wonderland are as good as your basic by-the-numbers CG blockbuster, not the groundbreaking visual experience we were being told to expect.
– Ross, Perth, Australia
Recommend Recommended by 8 Readers
Average Reader Rating
2.5 rating, 31 votes
Rate It
Log In to Rate This
Read All Readers' Reviews »
Related Articles
* SPECIAL REPORT; Designing for 'Alice in the Real World' (March 4, 2010)
* FILM; Drinking Blood: New Wonders of Alice’s World (February 28, 2010)
* 'Avatar' Faces Traffic Jam At 3-D Screens (January 30, 2010)
* ARTS, BRIEFLY; Brains Behind 'Beetlejuice' To Head Cannes Jury (January 26, 2010)
* FILM; Unleashing Life's Wild Things (November 8, 2009)
Ads by Google what's this?
Alice in Wonderland Bucks
Give Alice in Wonderland Fandango Bucks. Good Towards Any Movie/Time!
Fandango.com/AliceInWonderland
Alice in Wonderland
Download Alice in Wonderland digital book now
www.weebly.com/weebly/main.php
Alice Wonderland Jewelry
Chesire Cat, Mad Hatter, Red Queen, White Rabbit, Alice and More
www.KirksFollyStore.com
Tickets & Showtimes
Enter your ZIP code or city to view tickets and showtimes in your area.
Odd Facebook ads
Alice in Wonderland (Walt Disney Pictures) (2010)
Alice in Wonderland (Walt Disney Pictures)
Walt Disney Pictures
Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland.”
March 5, 2010
What’s a Nice Girl Doing in This Hole?
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: March 5, 2010
Into the dark you tumble in “Alice in Wonderland,” Tim Burton’s busy, garish and periodically amusing repo of the Lewis Carroll hallucination “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” It’s a long fall turned long haul, despite the Burtonian flourishes — the pinch of cruelty, the mordant wit — that animate the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and the porker that slides under her feet with a squeal. “I love a warm pig belly for my aching feet,” the queen tells Alice. Played by Mia Wasikowska, Alice looks a touch dazed: she seems to have left her pulse above ground when she fell down the rabbit hole of Mr. Burton’s imagination.
-----------------
Multimedia
Faces of WonderlandSlide Show
Faces of Wonderland
Related
Film: Drinking Blood: New Wonders of Alice’s World (February 28, 2010)
DVDs: Another Trippy Rabbit Hole (February 28, 2010)
ArtsBeat: Curiouser and Curiouser Cinema Adventures in 'Wonderland'
Blogs
The Carpetbagger
The
Carpetbagger
Your guide to the news and the nonsense of awards season. Join the discussion.
Go to Awards Season
------------------
Mr. Burton has done his best work with contemporary stories, so it’s curious if not curiouser that he’s turned his sights on another 19th-century tale. Perhaps after slitting all those throats in his adaptation of “Sweeney Todd,” he thought he would chop off a few heads. Whatever his inspiration, he has tackled this new story with his customary mix of torpor and frenzy. After a short glance back at Alice’s childhood and an equally brief look at her present, he sends the 19-year-old on her way, first down the hole and then into a dreamscape — unfortunately tricked out with 3-D that distracts more than it delights — where she meets a grinning cat and a lugubrious caterpillar, among other fantastical creatures.
Dark and sometimes grim, this isn’t your great-grandmother’s Alice or that of Uncle Walt, who was disappointed with the 1951 Disney version of “Alice in Wonderland.” “Alice has no character,” said a writer who worked on that project. “She merely plays straight man to a cast of screwball comics.” Of course the character of Carroll’s original Alice is evident in each outrageous creation she dreams up in “Wonderland” and in the sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass,” which means that she’s a straight man to her own imagination. (She is Wonderland.) Here she mostly serves as a foil for the top biller Johnny Depp, who (yes, yes) plays the Mad Hatter, and Mr. Burton’s bright and leaden whimsies.
First thought up by Carroll in a rowboat in which one of the passengers was the 10-year-old Alice Liddell, the object of his much-debated love, “Wonderland” (1865) is, among many other things, a testament to glorious nonsense as well as an inspiration for dark thoughts (about Carroll’s feelings for Liddell) and for lysergic works from the likes of David Lynch. It’s a total (head) trip, one that starts and stops and doesn’t fit easily into the mainstream narrative mold, which could explain why the screenwriter Linda Woolverton, borrowing both from “Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass,” has given Alice a back story, a dash of psychology and a battle royal if, alas, not a pool of her own tears in which to swim.
Since narrative momentum isn’t Mr. Burton’s strength, “Alice in Wonderland” probably seemed a good fit for him, and there are moments when his transparent delight in the material lifts the movie and even carries it forward. His Wonderland (here, Underland) isn’t inviting or attractive. The colors are often bilious, though the palette also turns gunmetal gray, bringing to mind “Sweeney Todd.” There’s a suggestively nightmarish aspect to Alice’s journey, as when she steps on some severed heads in the Red Queen’s moat as if they were stones. The queen herself is a horror: Bette Davis as Elizabeth I and reconfigured as a bobble-head doll. Ms. Bonham Carter makes you hear the petulant child in her barbarism and the wounded woman too. She rocks the house and the movie.
And she does, even though the character is a harridan cliché who, smitten with her knave (Crispin Glover) and clutching her power, rules with a boom. (“Off with his head!”) She eventually dukes it out with her rival and sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway, gliding like an ice dancer), who enlists Alice’s help. There’s more, including computer-generated flowers, assorted 3-D projectiles and the usual British actors earning their pay, like the “Harry Potter” alumni Timothy Spall, Alan Rickman and Imelda Staunton. Mr. Burton lavishes his attention on the little things in “Wonderland” — the perfectly drawn red heart painted on the center of the Red Queen’s mouth, for instance — perhaps because nothing else claims his attention. He’s very bad with the awkward action scenes, maybe because he’s embarrassed that they even exist.
Mr. Depp’s strenuously flamboyant turn embodies the best and worst of Mr. Burton’s filmmaking tendencies even as the actor brings his own brand of cinematic crazy to the tea party. With his Kabuki-white face, the character seems to have been calculated to invoke Heath Ledger’s Joker, though at his amusing best the Hatter brings to mind a strung-out Carrot Top. But Mr. Depp doesn’t have much to do, which he proves as he wildly flirts with the camera. The only time the character hooks you is in the shivery moment when his gaze turns predatory as he looks at Alice, who, every inch a Tim Burton Goth Girl, from her corpselike pallor to her enervated presence, presents a more convincing vision of death than of sex.
That queasy, potentially rich and frightening moment expectedly fades as fast as the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), which doesn’t leave you with much else to hold onto, Alice included. Mr. Burton’s heroine is a wan figure to hang an entire world on, and Ms. Wasikowska, who’s a livelier, truer presence in the forthcoming “The Kids Are All Right,” barely registers among Mr. Burton’s clanging and the computer-generated galumphing. This isn’t an impossible story to translate to the screen, as the Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer showed with “Alice” (1988), where the divide between reality and fantasy blurs as it does in dreams. It’s just hard to know why Mr. Burton, who doesn’t seem much interested in Alice, bothered.
“Alice in Wonderland” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It is a surprise (or not) that this movie, with its severed heads and Jabberwocky battle, is not rated PG-13, which serves as a warning for parents.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Directed by Tim Burton; written by Linda Woolverton, based on “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass” by Lewis Carroll; director of photography, Dariusz Wolski; edited by Chris Lebenzon; music by Danny Elfman; costumes by Colleen Atwood; senior visual effects supervisor, Ken Ralston; makeup design by Valli O’Reilly; produced by Richard D. Zanuck, Joe Roth, Suzanne Todd and Jennifer Todd; released by Walt Disney Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes.
WITH: Johnny Depp (Mad Hatter), Mia Wasikowska (Alice Kingsleigh), Anne Hathaway (White Queen), Helena Bonham Carter (Red Queen), Crispin Glover (Stayne-Knave of Hearts), Matt Lucas (Tweedledee and Tweedledum), Alan Rickman (Absolem the Caterpillar), Timothy Spall (Bayard the Bloodhound) and Imelda Staunton (Tall Flower Faces).
WITH THE VOICES OF: Michael Sheen (White Rabbit), Stephen Fry (Cheshire Cat), Barbara Windsor (Dormouse), Christopher Lee (Jabberwocky), Michael Gough (Dodo) and Paul Whitehouse (March Hare).
Average Reader Rating
2.5 rating, 31 votes
Rate It
Log In to Rate This
5 Readers' Reviews
* All Comments
* Highlights
* Readers' Recommendations
* Oldest
* Newest
March 4th, 2010
10:03 pm
Rating:
5.
Lighten Up
Stop dissecting; just sit back and enjoy the fun. It's just entertainment, why so serious?
– Byron Furseth, Chicago
Recommend Recommended by 0 Readers
March 4th, 2010
9:23 pm
Rating:
4.
Wonderful Movie
The critic disqualifies herself when she says that Alice is a foil for Mr. Depp. There can be no doubt that Ms. Wasowski is the heroine of this film, whether you like her or not. Mr. Depp is good as usual, but as expected he does not have the major part the trailers would have us believe.
It is a wonderful and magic movie for anyone who has kept their imagination and a love for fairy tales. The visuals are absolutely stunning and artful, the aesthetically loveliest movie I have seen. The 3D beautifully adds to the immersion.
– MadHatter, Berlin, Germany
Recommend Recommended by 2 Readers
March 4th, 2010
8:40 pm
Rating:
3.
Waste of rabbit time. 1 star.
1 star
Once again, Tim Burton demonstrates a complete lack of imagination. Instead of telling a wonderful story of how a young girl descends into a wonderland of the mind, we get the usual cliched Burton handbag of gothic grunts, overtoothed animals, and lispy lead character in Depp who seem not to have even a passing acquaintance with one of childhoods fabled imaginative fables. Where oh where is the spine of the story, the characters, the conflict, the story and the story?
Tony Gillotte
Vacaville, CA
– Tony Gillotte, Vacaville, CA
Recommend Recommended by 4 Readers
March 4th, 2010
8:35 pm
Rating:
2.
misuse of talent
I admit that I always cringe when I see Dargis' byline, but if I read her right, as I muddle my way again through her signature convoluted 'review,' I am in agreement that this is not much of a movie, and that Burton's and Depp's talents were not put to good use.
– davidkirby008z, perth
Recommend Recommended by 9 Readers
March 3rd, 2010
8:39 pm
Rating:
1.
Alice in a by-the-numbers Wonderland
When it was announced that goth-pop filmmaker Tim Burton was going to remake Alice in Wonderland, on paper it appeared a match made in cinematic heaven.
With a back-catalogue featuring some of cinema's most unique treats (Edward Scissorhands, Batman and Beetlejuice to name just a handful), Burton seemed the ideal candidate to give Lewis Carroll's Alice a 21st century makeover.
Burton gathered a stellar cast of his favourites (Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter), bona fide stars (Anne Hathaway) and fresh talent (Australia's Mia Wasikowska), recruited high-profile scriptwriter Linda Woolverton and told the world he was going to make his Wonderland a 3D visual spectacular.
It appeared he was going to try to make his 3D Wonderland the 2010 equivalent of Dorothy walking into a Technicolor Oz back in 1939.
However, what sounds good on paper doesn't always translate into reality, and sadly that is what has happened here.
The story itself could have saved this film, however, it seems the scriptwriter herself was relying on the amazing visuals to give the story more impact and pacing than what this paper-thin narrative could offer.
It opens with a 19-year-old Alice (Wasikowska) at a crossroads in her life.
While she has grown up and blossomed into a beautiful young woman, she is still haunted by the same dream, her journey to Wonderland as a wide-eyed youngster.
When she is proposed to by a man she has no romantic interest in, she escapes back to Wonderland, where she finds the huge-headed Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter playing, well, herself) is destroying everything.
A group of familiar characters - including the mad hatter (a ludicrously miscast Depp), the Cheshire Cat and Tweedledee and - dum (Little Britain's Matt Lucas) - are not convinced this is the same Alice that has been prophesised as the one to come and save them from the evil queen's rule.
After the visual phenomenon that is Avatar, global audiences are eagerly awaiting the next movie to submerse them into a 3D cinematic experience and alas, Alice isn't going to be the movie to do that.
Whereas Cameron filmed his visual opus in 3D, Burton opted against this, deciding to convert it after filming, because it is easier and cheaper.
As such, the 3D and overall visuals of Wonderland are as good as your basic by-the-numbers CG blockbuster, not the groundbreaking visual experience we were being told to expect.
– Ross, Perth, Australia
Recommend Recommended by 8 Readers
Average Reader Rating
2.5 rating, 31 votes
Rate It
Log In to Rate This
Read All Readers' Reviews »
Related Articles
* SPECIAL REPORT; Designing for 'Alice in the Real World' (March 4, 2010)
* FILM; Drinking Blood: New Wonders of Alice’s World (February 28, 2010)
* 'Avatar' Faces Traffic Jam At 3-D Screens (January 30, 2010)
* ARTS, BRIEFLY; Brains Behind 'Beetlejuice' To Head Cannes Jury (January 26, 2010)
* FILM; Unleashing Life's Wild Things (November 8, 2009)
Ads by Google what's this?
Alice in Wonderland Bucks
Give Alice in Wonderland Fandango Bucks. Good Towards Any Movie/Time!
Fandango.com/AliceInWonderland
Alice in Wonderland
Download Alice in Wonderland digital book now
www.weebly.com/weebly/main.php
Alice Wonderland Jewelry
Chesire Cat, Mad Hatter, Red Queen, White Rabbit, Alice and More
www.KirksFollyStore.com
Tickets & Showtimes
Enter your ZIP code or city to view tickets and showtimes in your area.
Odd Facebook ads
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Virginia Woolf: Diary Excerpts & "Time Passes" from TL
Virginia Woolf's Diary written during the period she was writing "Time Passes" in To the Lighthouse
Sources for Genetic Criticism (a criticism that explores the early drafts, versions and sources of a text.
Woolf On-Line
Question: What kinds of literary questions might you generate after reading some of the diary entries and the historical information below as well as the text of To the Lighthouse? What are the connections between the private life and public historical events in the life and writings of an author?
Ways of developing a paper from the sources below will be discussed in class and in
Individual conferences
Julia Briggs, an eminent critic and biographer of Virginia Woolf, who died last year, created a wonderful Virginia Woolf resource on-line for the underlying aspects of To the Lighthouse (diaries, drafts of the “Time Passes” section, historical information on The General Strike of miners in 1926 during which time Woolf was writing “Time Passes,” images of St. Ives, the seaside village that entered into Woolf’s images in the book; and the Stephen family history.
Additional information and other sources besides those listed below:
www.woolfonline.com/?q=image/tid
Images of the General Stike, St. Ives, the Stephen Family.
Below you will find Virginia Woolf’s Diary entries during the writing of the “Time Passes” (middle section) of To the Lighthouse. To appreciate the context of the times—the public and historical context of this private diary about her writing and life, it is important to know that The General Strike of Miners was going on May 3-12, 1926. It is also important to know—given popular conceptions of Woolf—that she was involved in the cause of the coal miners, listening to daily reports on the strike, speaking with her husband, Leonard Woolf (who was a radical socialist) and friends about the events.
What was this strike about?
The British General Strike began on 3rd May 1926, and ended on 12th May 1926. Ten days of strike action that were to change the very nature of work relations in the country for years to come.
The strike was called by the Trades Union Congress (T.U.C.) on 1st May 1926, with action to begin on 3rd May 1926. It was precipitated in support of striking coal miners in the North of England, Scotland and Wales. The strike action was perceived as necessary to ensure current and future pay and work conditions would remain acceptable to the industry. In reality, it was the latest in a long series of industrial disputes that had crippled the coal industry since the end of the First World War, creating real hardship for mining families, and continuing political unrest and uncertainty for numerous governments. 'Not a minute on the day, not a penny off the pay', was the miners' slogan as they marched headlong in to Britain's one and only General Strike.
Despite commencing in the mining towns and Unions of the country, one of the flash points for the strike itself occurred in London, when the Daily Mail's Fleet Street printers refused to print a leading article criticising trade unions. Subsequently, other print workers joined the protest and the General Strike started to gain momentum. The TUC activated its strike plans, calling out all union members in essential industries. The strike had begun.
Woolf’s Diary
April 30, 1926
Yesterday I finished the first part of To the Lighthouse, & today
began the second. I cannot make it out—here is the most difficult abstract
piece of writing—I have to give an empty house, no people's characters,
the passage of time, all eyeless & featureless with nothing to cling to:
well, I rush at it, & at once scatter out two pages. Is it nonsense, is it
brilliance? Why am I so flown with words, & apparently free to do
exactly what I like? When I read a bit it seems spirited too; needs com-
pressing, but not much else. Compare this dashing fluency with the
excruciating hard wrung battles I had with Mrs Dalloway (save the end).
This is not made up: it is the literal fact.
May 5, 1926
An exact diary of the Strike would be interesting. For instance, it is
now a 1/4 to 2: there is a brown fog; nobody is building; it is drizzling.
The first thing in the morning we stand at the window & watch the
traffic in Southampton Row. This is incessant. Everyone is bicycling;
motor cars are huddled up with extra people. There are no buses. No
placards. no newspapers. The men are at work in the road; water, gas &
electricity are allowed; but at 11 the light was turned off. I sat in the
press in the brown fog, while L. wrote an article for the Herald. A very
revolutionary looking young man on a cycle arrived with the British
Gazette. L. is to answer an article in this. All was military stern a little
secret. Then Clive dropped in, the door being left open. He is offering
himself to the Government. Maynard excited, wants the H[ogarth].
P[ress]. to bring out a skeleton number of the Nation. It is all tedious &
depressing, rather like waiting in a train outside a station. Rumours are
passed round—that the gas wd. be cut off at 1—false of course. One
does not know what to do. And nature has laid it on thick today—fog,
rain, cold. A voice, rather commonplace & official, yet the only common
voice left, wishes us good morning at 10. This is the voice of Britain,
to wh. we can make no reply. The voice is very trivial, & only tells us
hat the Prince of Wales is coming back (from Biarritz), that the London
streets present an unprecedented spectacle.
May 6, 1926
(one of the curious effects of the Strike is that it is difficult to remember
the day of the week). Everything is the same, but unreasonably, or
because of the weather, or habit, we are more cheerful, take less notice,
& occasionally think of other things. The taxis are out today. There are
various skeleton papers being sold. One believes nothing. Clive dines in
Mayfair, & everyone is pro-men; I go to Harrison [dentist], & he shouts
me down with "Its red rag versus Union Jack, Mrs Woolf" & how
Thomas has 100,000. Frankie dines out, & finds everyone pro-
Government. Bob [Trevelyan] drops in & says Churchill is for peace,
but Baldwin wont budge. Clive says Churchill is for tear gas bombs,
fight to the death, & is at the bottom of it all. So we go on, turning in
our cage. I notice how frequently we break of[f] with "Well I don't
know." According to L. this open state of mind is due to the lack of
papers. It feels like a deadlock, on both sides; as if we could keep fixed
like this for weeks. What one prays for is God: the King or God; some
impartial person to say kiss & be friends—as apparently we all desire.
Just back from a walk to the Strand. Of course one notices lorries
full of elderly men & girls standing like passengers in the old 3rd class
carriages. Children swarm. They pick up bits of old wood paving.
Everything seems to be going fast, away, in business[?]. The shops are
open but empty. Over it all is some odd pale unnatural atmosphere—
great activity but no normal life. I think we shall become more in-
dependent & stoical as the days go on. And I am involved in dress
buying with Todd [editor of Vogue]; I tremble & shiver all over at the
appalling magnitude of the task have undertaken—to go to a dress-
maker recommended by Todd, even, she suggested, but here my blood
ran cold, with Todd. Perhaps this excites me more feverishly than the
Strike. It is a little like the early hours of the morning (this state of
things) when one has been up all night. Business improved today. We
sold a few books. Bob cycled from Leith Hill, getting up at 5 a.m. to
avoid the crowd. He punctured an hour later, met his tailor who mended
him, set forth again, was almost crushed in the crowd near London, &
has since been tramping London, from Chelsea to Bloomsbury to gather
gossip, & talk, incoherently about Desmond's essays & his own poetry.
He has secreted two more of these works which 'ought to be published'.
He is ravenous greedy, & apelike, but has a kind of russet surly charm;
like a dog one teases. He complained how Logan teased him. Clive calls
in to discuss bulletins—indeed, more than anything it is like a house
where someone is dangerously ill; & friends drop in to enquire, & one
has to wait for doctor's news—Quennel, the poet, came; a lean boy,
nervous, plaintive, rather pretty; on the look out for work, & come to
tap the Wolves—who are said, I suppose to be an authority on that
subject. We suggested Desmond's job. After an hour of this, he left,
— here Clive came in & interrupted. He has been shopping in the
West End with Mary. Nothing to report there. He & L. listened in at
7 & heard nothing. The look of the streets—how people "trek to work"
that is the stock phrase: that it will be cold & windy tomorrow (it is
shivering cold today) that there was a warm debate in the Commons—
Among the crowd of trampers in Kingsway were old Pritchard,
toothless, old wispy, benevolent; who tapped L. on the shoulder & said
he was "training to shoot him"; & old Miss Pritchard, equally frail,
dusty, rosy, shabby. "How long will it last Mrs Woolf?" "Four weeks"
"Ah dear!" Off they tramp, over the bridge to Kennington I think;
next in Kingsway comes the old battered clerk, who has 5 miles to walk.
Miss Talbot has an hours walk; Mrs Brown 2 hours walk. But they all
arrive, & clatter about as usual—Pritchard doing poor peoples work for
nothing, as I imagine his way is, & calling himself a Tory.
Then we are fighting the Square on the question of leading dogs.
Dogs must be led; but tennis can be played they say. L. is advancing to
the fight, & has enlisted the Pekinese in the Square. We get no news from
abroad; neither can send it. No parcels. Pence have been added to milk,
vegetables &c. And Karin has bought 4 joints.
It is now a chilly lightish evening; very quiet; the only sound a distant
barrel organ playing. The bricks stand piled on the building & there
remain. And Viola was about to make our fortune. She dined here,
Monday night, the night of the strike.
May 7, 1926
No change. "London calling the British Isles. Good morning every-
one". That is how it begins at 10. The only news that the archbishops
are conferring, & ask our prayers that they may be guided right. Whether
this means action, we know not. We know nothing. Mrs Cartwright
walked from Hampstead. She & L. got heated arguing, she being anti-
labour; because she does not see why they should be supported, &
observes men in the street loafing instead of working. Very little work
done by either of us today. A cold, wet day, with sunny moments. All
arrangements unchanged. Girl came to make chair covers, having walked
from Shoreditch, but enjoyed it. Times sent for 25 Violas. Question
whether to bring out a skeleton Roneo Nation. Leonard went to the
office, I to the Brit[ish] Mus[eum]; where all was chill serenity, dignity
& severity. Written up are the names of great men; & we all cower like
mice nibbling crumbs in our most official discreet impersonal mood
beneath. I like this dusty bookish atmosphere. Most of the readers
seemed to have rubbed their noses off & written their eyes out. Yet
they have a life they like—believe in the necessity of making books, I
suppose: verify, collate, make up other books, for ever. It must be
15 years since I read here. I came home & found L. & Hubert [Henderson]
arriving from the office—Hubert did what is now called "taking a cup
of tea", which means an hour & a halfs talk about the Strike. Here is his
prediction: if it is not settled, or in process, on Monday, it will last 5 weeks.
Today no wages are paid. Leonard said he minded this more than the war &
Hubert told us how he had travelled in Germany, & what brutes they were
in 1912. He thinks gas & electricity will go next; had been at a journal-
ists meeting where all were against labour (against the general strike that
is) & assumed Government victory. L. says if the state wins & smashes
T[rades]. U[nion]s he will devote his life to labour: if the archbishop
succeeds, he will be baptised. Now to dine at the Commercio to meet Clive.
May 9, 1926
There is no news of the strike. The broadcaster has just said that we
are praying today. And L. & I quarrelled last night. I dislike the tub
thumper in him; he the irrational Xtian in me. I will write it all out later—
my feelings about the Strike; but I am now writing to test my theory that
there is consolation in expression. Unthinkingly, I refused just now to
lunch with the Phil Bakers, who fetched L. in their car. Suddenly,
10 minutes ago, I began to regret this profoundly. How I should love the
talk, & seeing the house, & battling my wits against theirs. Now the
sensible thing to do is to provide some pleasure to balance this, which
I cd. not have had, if I had gone. I can only think of writing this, &
going round the Square. Obscurely, I have my clothes complex to deal
with. When I am asked out my first thought is, but I have no clothes to
go in. Todd has never sent me the address of the shop; & I may have
annoyed her by refusing to lunch with her. But the Virginia who refuses
is a very instinctive & therefore powerful person. The reflective &
sociable only comes to the surface later. Then the conflict.
Baldwin broadcast last night: he rolls his rs; tries to put more than
mortal strength into his words. "Have faith in me. You elected me
18 months ago. What have I done to forfeit your confidence? Can you
not trust me to see justice done between man & man?" Impressive as it
is to hear the very voice of the Prime Minister, descendant of Pitt &
Chatham, still I can't heat up my reverence to the right pitch. I picture
the stalwart oppressed man, bearing the world on his shoulders. And
suddenly his self assertiveness becomes a little ridiculous. He becomes
megalomaniac. No I dont trust him: I don't trust any human being,
however loud they bellow & roll their rs.
May 10, 1926
Quarrel with L. settled in studio. Oh, but how incessant the arguments
& interruptions are! As I write, L. is telephoning to Hubert. We are
getting up a petition. There was a distinct thaw (we thought) last night.
The Arch B. & Grey both conciliatory. So we went to bed happy.
Today ostensibly the same dead lock; beneath the surface all sorts of
currents, of which we get the most contradictory reports. Dear old
Frankie has a story (over the fire in the bookshop) of an interview
between Asquith & Reading which turned Reading hostile to the men.
Later, through Clive, through Desmond, Asquith is proved to be at the
Wharfe, 60 miles from Lord Reading. Lady Wimbore gave a party—
brought Thomas & Baldwin together. Meeting mysteriously called off
today. Otherwise strike wd. have been settled. I to H of Commons this
morning with L.'s article to serve as stuffing for Hugh Dalton in the
Commons this afternoon. All this humbug of police & marble statues
vaguely displeasing. But the Gvt. provided me with buses both ways, &
no stones thrown. Silver & crimson guard at Whitehall; the cenotaph,
& men bare heading themselves. Home to find Tom Marshall caballing
with L.; after lunch to [Birrell & Garnett's] bookshop, where the gossip
(too secret for the telephone) was imparted; to London Library where
Gooch—a tall, pale mule, affable & long winded, was seen, & Molly
dustily diligently reading the Dublin Review for 1840, walk home;
Clive, to refute gossip; James to get St Loe to sign; then Maynard
ringing up to command us to print the Nation as the N. Statesman is
printed; to wh. I agreed, & L. disagreed; then dinner; a motor car
collision—more telephones ringing at the moment 9.5.
May 11 , 1926
I may as well continue to write—this book is used to scandalous
mistreatment—while I wait—here interruptions began
which lasted till the present moment/ when I write from 12.30 to 3
with Gerald Brenan in the study composing with infinite difficulty a letter
to Mr Galsworthy. Arguing about the Ar[chbisho]p of Canterbury
with Jack Squire at 12 seems now normal, but not—how often do I
repeat—nearly as exciting as writing To the Lighthouse or about de
Q[uincey]. I believe it is false psychology to think that in after years
these details will be interesting. The war is now barren sand after all.
But one never knows: & waiting about, writing serves to liberate the
mind from the fret & itch of these innumerable details. Squire doesn't
want to "knuckle under". To kneel is the duty of the Church. The
Church has no connection with the nation. Events are that the Roneo
workers refuse to set up L.'s article in the Nation, in which he says
that the Strike is not illegal or unconstitutional. Presumably this is a
little clutch of the Government throttle. Mr Baldwin has been visiting
the Zoo. In the middle of lunch admirable Miss Bulley arrives, having
visited Conway unsuccessfully. St Loe has joined. So Rose Macaulay
& Lytton. Tonight the names are to be handed in; & then perhaps
silence will descend upon us. Ralph & Gerald are our emissaries. But
then everyone rings up—the most unlikely people—[Donald] Brace for
instance, Kahan; the woman comes with the new sofa cover. Yester-
day Ralph & Frances Marshall were in a railway accident. She had her
teeth jangled. One man was killed; another had his leg broken—the
result of driving a train without signals, by the efforts of ardent optimistic
undergraduates. Billing has been in to say he will print anything, all
his men being back & needing work. So, as poor MacDermott has been
dead since January, perhaps the Nation will be done by them. Come to
think of it, almost all our type is standing, so our printing was in any
case hardly feasible. Must I now ring up James? Day's Library boy was
set upon by roughs, had his cycle overturned, but kept his books & was
unhurt after calling here for 6 Tree. Tree dribbles along. There is an
occasional order. Mrs C[artwright]. arrives on Faith's bicycle which is
red with rust.
May 12, 1926
Strike settled. (ring at bell)
The Strike was settled about 1.15—or it was then broadcast. I was in
Tottenham Court Rd. at 1 & heard Bartholomew & Fletcher's megaphone
declaim that the T.U.C. leaders were at Downing Street; came home to
find that neither L. or Nelly had heard this: 5 minutes later, the wireless.
They told us to stand by & await important news. Then a piano played
a tune. Then the solemn broadcaster assuming incredible pomp & gloom
& speaking one word to the minute read out: Message from 10 Downing
Street. The T.U.C. leaders have agreed that Strike shall be withdrawn.
Instantly L. dashed off to telephone to the office, Nelly to tell Pritchard's
clerk, & I to Mrs C. (But N[elly]. was beforehand) then we finished
lunch; then I rang up Clive—who proposes that we should have a drink
tonight. I saw this morning 5 or 6 armoured cars slowly going along
Oxford Street; on each two soldiers sat in tin helmets, & one stood with
his hand at the gun which was pointed straight ahead ready to fire. But I
also noticed on one a policeman smoking a cigarette. Such sights I dare
say I shall never see again; & dont in the least wish to. Already (it is now
10 past 2) men have appeared at the hotel with drainpipes. Also Grizzle
has won her case against the Square.
May 13, 1926
I suppose all pages devoted to the Strike will be skipped, when I read
over this book. Oh that dull old chapter, I shall say. Excitements about
what are called real things are always unutterably transitory. Yet it is
gloomy—& L. is gloomy, & so am I unintelligibly—today because the
Strike continues—no railwaymen back: vindictiveness has now seized
our masters. Government shillyshallies. Apparently, the T.U.C. agreed
to terms wh. the miners now reject. Anyhow it will take a week to get
the machinery of England to run again. Trains are dotted about all over
England. Labour, it seems clear, will be effectively diddled again, &
perhaps rid of its power to make strikes in future. Printers still out at
the Nation. In short, the strain removed, we all fall out & bicker &
backbite. Such is human nature—& really I dont like human nature
unless all candied over with art. We dined with a strike party last night
& went back to Clive's. A good deal was said about art there. Good dull
Janet Vaughan, reminding me of Emma, joined us. I went to my
dressmaker, Miss Brooke, & found it the most quiet & friendly & even
enjoyable of proceedings. I have a great lust for lovely stuffs, & shapes;
wh. I have not gratified since Sally Young died. A bold move this, but
now I'm free of the fret of clothes, which is worth paying for, & need
not parade Oxford Street.
May 20, 1926
Waiting for L. to come back from chess with Roger: 11.25. I think
nothing need be said of the Strike. As tends to happen, one's mind slips
after the crisis, & what the settlement is, or will be, I know not.
We must now fan the books up again. Viola & Phil Baker were both
struck on the wing. Viola comes, very tactfully, as a friend, she says, to
consult after dinner. She is a flamboyant creature—much of an actress—
much abused by the Waleys & Marjories; but rather taking to me. She
has the great egotism, the magnification of self, which any bodily display,
I think, produces. She values women by their hips & ankles, like horses.
Easily reverts to the topic of her own charms: how she shd. have married
the D. of Rutland. "Lord — (his uncle) told me I was the woman
John really loved. The duchess said to me 'Do make love to John &
get him away from —. At any rate you're tall & beautiful—' And I
sometimes think if I'd married him—but he never asked me—Daddy
wouldn't have died. I'd have prevented that operation: Then how he'd
have loved a duke for a son in law! All his life was dressing up—that
sort of thing you know." So she runs on, in the best of clothes, easy &
familiar, but reserved too; with the wiles & warinesses of a woman of
the world, half sordid half splendid, not quite at her ease with us, yet
glad of a room where she can tell her stories, of listeners to whom she
is new & strange. She will run on by the hour—yet is very watchful not
to bore; a good business woman, & floating over considerable acuteness
on her charm. All this however, is not making her book move, as they say.
Eddy came in to tea. I like him—his flattery? his nobility? I dont
know—I find him easy & eager. And Vita comes to lunch tomorrow
which will be a great amusement & pleasure. I am amused at my relations
with her: left so ardent in January—& now what? Also I like her presence
& her beauty. Am I in love with her? But what is love? Her being 'in
love' (it must be comma'd thus) with me, excites & flatters; & interests.
What is this 'love'? Oh & then she gratifies my eternal curiosity: who's
she seen, whats she done—for I have no enormous opinion of her poetry.
How could I—I who have such delight in mitigating the works even of
my greatest friends. I should have been reading her poem tonight:
instead finished Sharon Turner—a prosy, simple, old man; the very spit
& image of Saxon. a boundless bore, I daresay, with the most intense zeal
for "improving myself", & the holiest affections, & 13 children, & no
character or impetus—a love of long walks, of music; modest, yet
conceited in an ant like way. I mean he has the industry & persistency in
recounting compliments of an ant, but so little character that one hardly
calls him vain!
May 25, 1926
The heat has come, bringing with it the inexplicably disagreeable
memories of parties, & George Duckworth; a fear haunts me even now,
as I drive past Park Lane on top of a bus, & think of Lady Arthur Russell
& so on. I become out of love with everything; but fall into love as the
bus reaches Holborn. A curious transition that, from tyranny to freedom.
Mixed with it is the usual "I thought that when you died last May,
Charles, there had died along with you"—death being hidden among
the leaves: & Nessa's birthday among the little hard pink rosettes of the
may, which we used to stop & smell on the pavement at the top of
Hyde Pk. Gate & I asked why, if it was may, it did not come out on
the 1st; it comes out now, & Nessa's birthday, which must be her 47th,
is in a few days. She is in Italy: Duncan is said to have "committed a
nuisance" for which he has been fined 10 lira.
Diary of Margaret Woods: day to day reactions to the General Strike
http://www.woolfonline.com/?q=diaries/mw/overview
Sources for Genetic Criticism (a criticism that explores the early drafts, versions and sources of a text.
Woolf On-Line
Question: What kinds of literary questions might you generate after reading some of the diary entries and the historical information below as well as the text of To the Lighthouse? What are the connections between the private life and public historical events in the life and writings of an author?
Ways of developing a paper from the sources below will be discussed in class and in
Individual conferences
Julia Briggs, an eminent critic and biographer of Virginia Woolf, who died last year, created a wonderful Virginia Woolf resource on-line for the underlying aspects of To the Lighthouse (diaries, drafts of the “Time Passes” section, historical information on The General Strike of miners in 1926 during which time Woolf was writing “Time Passes,” images of St. Ives, the seaside village that entered into Woolf’s images in the book; and the Stephen family history.
Additional information and other sources besides those listed below:
www.woolfonline.com/?q=image/tid
Images of the General Stike, St. Ives, the Stephen Family.
Below you will find Virginia Woolf’s Diary entries during the writing of the “Time Passes” (middle section) of To the Lighthouse. To appreciate the context of the times—the public and historical context of this private diary about her writing and life, it is important to know that The General Strike of Miners was going on May 3-12, 1926. It is also important to know—given popular conceptions of Woolf—that she was involved in the cause of the coal miners, listening to daily reports on the strike, speaking with her husband, Leonard Woolf (who was a radical socialist) and friends about the events.
What was this strike about?
The British General Strike began on 3rd May 1926, and ended on 12th May 1926. Ten days of strike action that were to change the very nature of work relations in the country for years to come.
The strike was called by the Trades Union Congress (T.U.C.) on 1st May 1926, with action to begin on 3rd May 1926. It was precipitated in support of striking coal miners in the North of England, Scotland and Wales. The strike action was perceived as necessary to ensure current and future pay and work conditions would remain acceptable to the industry. In reality, it was the latest in a long series of industrial disputes that had crippled the coal industry since the end of the First World War, creating real hardship for mining families, and continuing political unrest and uncertainty for numerous governments. 'Not a minute on the day, not a penny off the pay', was the miners' slogan as they marched headlong in to Britain's one and only General Strike.
Despite commencing in the mining towns and Unions of the country, one of the flash points for the strike itself occurred in London, when the Daily Mail's Fleet Street printers refused to print a leading article criticising trade unions. Subsequently, other print workers joined the protest and the General Strike started to gain momentum. The TUC activated its strike plans, calling out all union members in essential industries. The strike had begun.
Woolf’s Diary
April 30, 1926
Yesterday I finished the first part of To the Lighthouse, & today
began the second. I cannot make it out—here is the most difficult abstract
piece of writing—I have to give an empty house, no people's characters,
the passage of time, all eyeless & featureless with nothing to cling to:
well, I rush at it, & at once scatter out two pages. Is it nonsense, is it
brilliance? Why am I so flown with words, & apparently free to do
exactly what I like? When I read a bit it seems spirited too; needs com-
pressing, but not much else. Compare this dashing fluency with the
excruciating hard wrung battles I had with Mrs Dalloway (save the end).
This is not made up: it is the literal fact.
May 5, 1926
An exact diary of the Strike would be interesting. For instance, it is
now a 1/4 to 2: there is a brown fog; nobody is building; it is drizzling.
The first thing in the morning we stand at the window & watch the
traffic in Southampton Row. This is incessant. Everyone is bicycling;
motor cars are huddled up with extra people. There are no buses. No
placards. no newspapers. The men are at work in the road; water, gas &
electricity are allowed; but at 11 the light was turned off. I sat in the
press in the brown fog, while L. wrote an article for the Herald. A very
revolutionary looking young man on a cycle arrived with the British
Gazette. L. is to answer an article in this. All was military stern a little
secret. Then Clive dropped in, the door being left open. He is offering
himself to the Government. Maynard excited, wants the H[ogarth].
P[ress]. to bring out a skeleton number of the Nation. It is all tedious &
depressing, rather like waiting in a train outside a station. Rumours are
passed round—that the gas wd. be cut off at 1—false of course. One
does not know what to do. And nature has laid it on thick today—fog,
rain, cold. A voice, rather commonplace & official, yet the only common
voice left, wishes us good morning at 10. This is the voice of Britain,
to wh. we can make no reply. The voice is very trivial, & only tells us
hat the Prince of Wales is coming back (from Biarritz), that the London
streets present an unprecedented spectacle.
May 6, 1926
(one of the curious effects of the Strike is that it is difficult to remember
the day of the week). Everything is the same, but unreasonably, or
because of the weather, or habit, we are more cheerful, take less notice,
& occasionally think of other things. The taxis are out today. There are
various skeleton papers being sold. One believes nothing. Clive dines in
Mayfair, & everyone is pro-men; I go to Harrison [dentist], & he shouts
me down with "Its red rag versus Union Jack, Mrs Woolf" & how
Thomas has 100,000. Frankie dines out, & finds everyone pro-
Government. Bob [Trevelyan] drops in & says Churchill is for peace,
but Baldwin wont budge. Clive says Churchill is for tear gas bombs,
fight to the death, & is at the bottom of it all. So we go on, turning in
our cage. I notice how frequently we break of[f] with "Well I don't
know." According to L. this open state of mind is due to the lack of
papers. It feels like a deadlock, on both sides; as if we could keep fixed
like this for weeks. What one prays for is God: the King or God; some
impartial person to say kiss & be friends—as apparently we all desire.
Just back from a walk to the Strand. Of course one notices lorries
full of elderly men & girls standing like passengers in the old 3rd class
carriages. Children swarm. They pick up bits of old wood paving.
Everything seems to be going fast, away, in business[?]. The shops are
open but empty. Over it all is some odd pale unnatural atmosphere—
great activity but no normal life. I think we shall become more in-
dependent & stoical as the days go on. And I am involved in dress
buying with Todd [editor of Vogue]; I tremble & shiver all over at the
appalling magnitude of the task have undertaken—to go to a dress-
maker recommended by Todd, even, she suggested, but here my blood
ran cold, with Todd. Perhaps this excites me more feverishly than the
Strike. It is a little like the early hours of the morning (this state of
things) when one has been up all night. Business improved today. We
sold a few books. Bob cycled from Leith Hill, getting up at 5 a.m. to
avoid the crowd. He punctured an hour later, met his tailor who mended
him, set forth again, was almost crushed in the crowd near London, &
has since been tramping London, from Chelsea to Bloomsbury to gather
gossip, & talk, incoherently about Desmond's essays & his own poetry.
He has secreted two more of these works which 'ought to be published'.
He is ravenous greedy, & apelike, but has a kind of russet surly charm;
like a dog one teases. He complained how Logan teased him. Clive calls
in to discuss bulletins—indeed, more than anything it is like a house
where someone is dangerously ill; & friends drop in to enquire, & one
has to wait for doctor's news—Quennel, the poet, came; a lean boy,
nervous, plaintive, rather pretty; on the look out for work, & come to
tap the Wolves—who are said, I suppose to be an authority on that
subject. We suggested Desmond's job. After an hour of this, he left,
— here Clive came in & interrupted. He has been shopping in the
West End with Mary. Nothing to report there. He & L. listened in at
7 & heard nothing. The look of the streets—how people "trek to work"
that is the stock phrase: that it will be cold & windy tomorrow (it is
shivering cold today) that there was a warm debate in the Commons—
Among the crowd of trampers in Kingsway were old Pritchard,
toothless, old wispy, benevolent; who tapped L. on the shoulder & said
he was "training to shoot him"; & old Miss Pritchard, equally frail,
dusty, rosy, shabby. "How long will it last Mrs Woolf?" "Four weeks"
"Ah dear!" Off they tramp, over the bridge to Kennington I think;
next in Kingsway comes the old battered clerk, who has 5 miles to walk.
Miss Talbot has an hours walk; Mrs Brown 2 hours walk. But they all
arrive, & clatter about as usual—Pritchard doing poor peoples work for
nothing, as I imagine his way is, & calling himself a Tory.
Then we are fighting the Square on the question of leading dogs.
Dogs must be led; but tennis can be played they say. L. is advancing to
the fight, & has enlisted the Pekinese in the Square. We get no news from
abroad; neither can send it. No parcels. Pence have been added to milk,
vegetables &c. And Karin has bought 4 joints.
It is now a chilly lightish evening; very quiet; the only sound a distant
barrel organ playing. The bricks stand piled on the building & there
remain. And Viola was about to make our fortune. She dined here,
Monday night, the night of the strike.
May 7, 1926
No change. "London calling the British Isles. Good morning every-
one". That is how it begins at 10. The only news that the archbishops
are conferring, & ask our prayers that they may be guided right. Whether
this means action, we know not. We know nothing. Mrs Cartwright
walked from Hampstead. She & L. got heated arguing, she being anti-
labour; because she does not see why they should be supported, &
observes men in the street loafing instead of working. Very little work
done by either of us today. A cold, wet day, with sunny moments. All
arrangements unchanged. Girl came to make chair covers, having walked
from Shoreditch, but enjoyed it. Times sent for 25 Violas. Question
whether to bring out a skeleton Roneo Nation. Leonard went to the
office, I to the Brit[ish] Mus[eum]; where all was chill serenity, dignity
& severity. Written up are the names of great men; & we all cower like
mice nibbling crumbs in our most official discreet impersonal mood
beneath. I like this dusty bookish atmosphere. Most of the readers
seemed to have rubbed their noses off & written their eyes out. Yet
they have a life they like—believe in the necessity of making books, I
suppose: verify, collate, make up other books, for ever. It must be
15 years since I read here. I came home & found L. & Hubert [Henderson]
arriving from the office—Hubert did what is now called "taking a cup
of tea", which means an hour & a halfs talk about the Strike. Here is his
prediction: if it is not settled, or in process, on Monday, it will last 5 weeks.
Today no wages are paid. Leonard said he minded this more than the war &
Hubert told us how he had travelled in Germany, & what brutes they were
in 1912. He thinks gas & electricity will go next; had been at a journal-
ists meeting where all were against labour (against the general strike that
is) & assumed Government victory. L. says if the state wins & smashes
T[rades]. U[nion]s he will devote his life to labour: if the archbishop
succeeds, he will be baptised. Now to dine at the Commercio to meet Clive.
May 9, 1926
There is no news of the strike. The broadcaster has just said that we
are praying today. And L. & I quarrelled last night. I dislike the tub
thumper in him; he the irrational Xtian in me. I will write it all out later—
my feelings about the Strike; but I am now writing to test my theory that
there is consolation in expression. Unthinkingly, I refused just now to
lunch with the Phil Bakers, who fetched L. in their car. Suddenly,
10 minutes ago, I began to regret this profoundly. How I should love the
talk, & seeing the house, & battling my wits against theirs. Now the
sensible thing to do is to provide some pleasure to balance this, which
I cd. not have had, if I had gone. I can only think of writing this, &
going round the Square. Obscurely, I have my clothes complex to deal
with. When I am asked out my first thought is, but I have no clothes to
go in. Todd has never sent me the address of the shop; & I may have
annoyed her by refusing to lunch with her. But the Virginia who refuses
is a very instinctive & therefore powerful person. The reflective &
sociable only comes to the surface later. Then the conflict.
Baldwin broadcast last night: he rolls his rs; tries to put more than
mortal strength into his words. "Have faith in me. You elected me
18 months ago. What have I done to forfeit your confidence? Can you
not trust me to see justice done between man & man?" Impressive as it
is to hear the very voice of the Prime Minister, descendant of Pitt &
Chatham, still I can't heat up my reverence to the right pitch. I picture
the stalwart oppressed man, bearing the world on his shoulders. And
suddenly his self assertiveness becomes a little ridiculous. He becomes
megalomaniac. No I dont trust him: I don't trust any human being,
however loud they bellow & roll their rs.
May 10, 1926
Quarrel with L. settled in studio. Oh, but how incessant the arguments
& interruptions are! As I write, L. is telephoning to Hubert. We are
getting up a petition. There was a distinct thaw (we thought) last night.
The Arch B. & Grey both conciliatory. So we went to bed happy.
Today ostensibly the same dead lock; beneath the surface all sorts of
currents, of which we get the most contradictory reports. Dear old
Frankie has a story (over the fire in the bookshop) of an interview
between Asquith & Reading which turned Reading hostile to the men.
Later, through Clive, through Desmond, Asquith is proved to be at the
Wharfe, 60 miles from Lord Reading. Lady Wimbore gave a party—
brought Thomas & Baldwin together. Meeting mysteriously called off
today. Otherwise strike wd. have been settled. I to H of Commons this
morning with L.'s article to serve as stuffing for Hugh Dalton in the
Commons this afternoon. All this humbug of police & marble statues
vaguely displeasing. But the Gvt. provided me with buses both ways, &
no stones thrown. Silver & crimson guard at Whitehall; the cenotaph,
& men bare heading themselves. Home to find Tom Marshall caballing
with L.; after lunch to [Birrell & Garnett's] bookshop, where the gossip
(too secret for the telephone) was imparted; to London Library where
Gooch—a tall, pale mule, affable & long winded, was seen, & Molly
dustily diligently reading the Dublin Review for 1840, walk home;
Clive, to refute gossip; James to get St Loe to sign; then Maynard
ringing up to command us to print the Nation as the N. Statesman is
printed; to wh. I agreed, & L. disagreed; then dinner; a motor car
collision—more telephones ringing at the moment 9.5.
May 11 , 1926
I may as well continue to write—this book is used to scandalous
mistreatment—while I wait—here interruptions began
which lasted till the present moment/ when I write from 12.30 to 3
with Gerald Brenan in the study composing with infinite difficulty a letter
to Mr Galsworthy. Arguing about the Ar[chbisho]p of Canterbury
with Jack Squire at 12 seems now normal, but not—how often do I
repeat—nearly as exciting as writing To the Lighthouse or about de
Q[uincey]. I believe it is false psychology to think that in after years
these details will be interesting. The war is now barren sand after all.
But one never knows: & waiting about, writing serves to liberate the
mind from the fret & itch of these innumerable details. Squire doesn't
want to "knuckle under". To kneel is the duty of the Church. The
Church has no connection with the nation. Events are that the Roneo
workers refuse to set up L.'s article in the Nation, in which he says
that the Strike is not illegal or unconstitutional. Presumably this is a
little clutch of the Government throttle. Mr Baldwin has been visiting
the Zoo. In the middle of lunch admirable Miss Bulley arrives, having
visited Conway unsuccessfully. St Loe has joined. So Rose Macaulay
& Lytton. Tonight the names are to be handed in; & then perhaps
silence will descend upon us. Ralph & Gerald are our emissaries. But
then everyone rings up—the most unlikely people—[Donald] Brace for
instance, Kahan; the woman comes with the new sofa cover. Yester-
day Ralph & Frances Marshall were in a railway accident. She had her
teeth jangled. One man was killed; another had his leg broken—the
result of driving a train without signals, by the efforts of ardent optimistic
undergraduates. Billing has been in to say he will print anything, all
his men being back & needing work. So, as poor MacDermott has been
dead since January, perhaps the Nation will be done by them. Come to
think of it, almost all our type is standing, so our printing was in any
case hardly feasible. Must I now ring up James? Day's Library boy was
set upon by roughs, had his cycle overturned, but kept his books & was
unhurt after calling here for 6 Tree. Tree dribbles along. There is an
occasional order. Mrs C[artwright]. arrives on Faith's bicycle which is
red with rust.
May 12, 1926
Strike settled. (ring at bell)
The Strike was settled about 1.15—or it was then broadcast. I was in
Tottenham Court Rd. at 1 & heard Bartholomew & Fletcher's megaphone
declaim that the T.U.C. leaders were at Downing Street; came home to
find that neither L. or Nelly had heard this: 5 minutes later, the wireless.
They told us to stand by & await important news. Then a piano played
a tune. Then the solemn broadcaster assuming incredible pomp & gloom
& speaking one word to the minute read out: Message from 10 Downing
Street. The T.U.C. leaders have agreed that Strike shall be withdrawn.
Instantly L. dashed off to telephone to the office, Nelly to tell Pritchard's
clerk, & I to Mrs C. (But N[elly]. was beforehand) then we finished
lunch; then I rang up Clive—who proposes that we should have a drink
tonight. I saw this morning 5 or 6 armoured cars slowly going along
Oxford Street; on each two soldiers sat in tin helmets, & one stood with
his hand at the gun which was pointed straight ahead ready to fire. But I
also noticed on one a policeman smoking a cigarette. Such sights I dare
say I shall never see again; & dont in the least wish to. Already (it is now
10 past 2) men have appeared at the hotel with drainpipes. Also Grizzle
has won her case against the Square.
May 13, 1926
I suppose all pages devoted to the Strike will be skipped, when I read
over this book. Oh that dull old chapter, I shall say. Excitements about
what are called real things are always unutterably transitory. Yet it is
gloomy—& L. is gloomy, & so am I unintelligibly—today because the
Strike continues—no railwaymen back: vindictiveness has now seized
our masters. Government shillyshallies. Apparently, the T.U.C. agreed
to terms wh. the miners now reject. Anyhow it will take a week to get
the machinery of England to run again. Trains are dotted about all over
England. Labour, it seems clear, will be effectively diddled again, &
perhaps rid of its power to make strikes in future. Printers still out at
the Nation. In short, the strain removed, we all fall out & bicker &
backbite. Such is human nature—& really I dont like human nature
unless all candied over with art. We dined with a strike party last night
& went back to Clive's. A good deal was said about art there. Good dull
Janet Vaughan, reminding me of Emma, joined us. I went to my
dressmaker, Miss Brooke, & found it the most quiet & friendly & even
enjoyable of proceedings. I have a great lust for lovely stuffs, & shapes;
wh. I have not gratified since Sally Young died. A bold move this, but
now I'm free of the fret of clothes, which is worth paying for, & need
not parade Oxford Street.
May 20, 1926
Waiting for L. to come back from chess with Roger: 11.25. I think
nothing need be said of the Strike. As tends to happen, one's mind slips
after the crisis, & what the settlement is, or will be, I know not.
We must now fan the books up again. Viola & Phil Baker were both
struck on the wing. Viola comes, very tactfully, as a friend, she says, to
consult after dinner. She is a flamboyant creature—much of an actress—
much abused by the Waleys & Marjories; but rather taking to me. She
has the great egotism, the magnification of self, which any bodily display,
I think, produces. She values women by their hips & ankles, like horses.
Easily reverts to the topic of her own charms: how she shd. have married
the D. of Rutland. "Lord — (his uncle) told me I was the woman
John really loved. The duchess said to me 'Do make love to John &
get him away from —. At any rate you're tall & beautiful—' And I
sometimes think if I'd married him—but he never asked me—Daddy
wouldn't have died. I'd have prevented that operation: Then how he'd
have loved a duke for a son in law! All his life was dressing up—that
sort of thing you know." So she runs on, in the best of clothes, easy &
familiar, but reserved too; with the wiles & warinesses of a woman of
the world, half sordid half splendid, not quite at her ease with us, yet
glad of a room where she can tell her stories, of listeners to whom she
is new & strange. She will run on by the hour—yet is very watchful not
to bore; a good business woman, & floating over considerable acuteness
on her charm. All this however, is not making her book move, as they say.
Eddy came in to tea. I like him—his flattery? his nobility? I dont
know—I find him easy & eager. And Vita comes to lunch tomorrow
which will be a great amusement & pleasure. I am amused at my relations
with her: left so ardent in January—& now what? Also I like her presence
& her beauty. Am I in love with her? But what is love? Her being 'in
love' (it must be comma'd thus) with me, excites & flatters; & interests.
What is this 'love'? Oh & then she gratifies my eternal curiosity: who's
she seen, whats she done—for I have no enormous opinion of her poetry.
How could I—I who have such delight in mitigating the works even of
my greatest friends. I should have been reading her poem tonight:
instead finished Sharon Turner—a prosy, simple, old man; the very spit
& image of Saxon. a boundless bore, I daresay, with the most intense zeal
for "improving myself", & the holiest affections, & 13 children, & no
character or impetus—a love of long walks, of music; modest, yet
conceited in an ant like way. I mean he has the industry & persistency in
recounting compliments of an ant, but so little character that one hardly
calls him vain!
May 25, 1926
The heat has come, bringing with it the inexplicably disagreeable
memories of parties, & George Duckworth; a fear haunts me even now,
as I drive past Park Lane on top of a bus, & think of Lady Arthur Russell
& so on. I become out of love with everything; but fall into love as the
bus reaches Holborn. A curious transition that, from tyranny to freedom.
Mixed with it is the usual "I thought that when you died last May,
Charles, there had died along with you"—death being hidden among
the leaves: & Nessa's birthday among the little hard pink rosettes of the
may, which we used to stop & smell on the pavement at the top of
Hyde Pk. Gate & I asked why, if it was may, it did not come out on
the 1st; it comes out now, & Nessa's birthday, which must be her 47th,
is in a few days. She is in Italy: Duncan is said to have "committed a
nuisance" for which he has been fined 10 lira.
Diary of Margaret Woods: day to day reactions to the General Strike
http://www.woolfonline.com/?q=diaries/mw/overview
Alice in Wonderland Ms.
See this website for an on-line version of Carroll's ms. of Alice in Wonderland
accounts@users.wowio.com
Before there was a Wonderland, Lewis Carroll presented Alice's Adventures Under Ground to his young friend, Alice Liddell, in November 1864. Carroll hand wrote the story and illustrated it in his own whimsical style. This WOWIO version is a high-resolution reproduction of that original manuscript. Later, the story was expanded by Carrol, re-illustrated by Sir John Tenniel and published in 1865 as the now-familiar Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. More
When Lewis Carroll dreamed up Wonderland for his little friend, Alice, who knew he would stir the imagination of so many for all these years? From the little girl of Carroll's original manuscript to the heroine of comics and film, Alice has had many incarnations, from mother and wife to remix warrior. See how far she's come...
Support our featured Gifting for a Cause partner, Reading to Kids, and help inspire children's imaginations with the power of reading!
Before there was a Wonderland, Lewis Carroll presented Alice's Adventures Under Ground to his young friend, Alice Liddell, in November 1864. Carroll hand wrote the story and illustrated it in his own whimsical style. This WOWIO version is a high-resolution reproduction of that original manuscript. Later, the story was expanded by Carrol, re-illustrated by Sir John Tenniel and published in 1865 as the now-familiar Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. More
New Alice in Wonderland 01
Rod Espinosa
Rod Espinosa's incredible adaptation of this timeless classic. The Eisner-nominated creator of such critically acclaimed, sweeping epics as Neotopia... More
Preview Online Free
Alice: New Adventures in...
Dave Berg
The continuing stories of Alice of Wonderland fame are here in their golden age glory. Stories include: Flying Saucers, Super-Dooper Special, Curious... More
Preview Online Free
Return to Wonderland 00
Raven Gregory
Alice Liddell is no longer the little girl you once knew. Years have passed since her trip down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. A grown woman now... More
Preview Online Free
Abigail & Rox: In the Land of...
Joshua Gamon and Adrian Sibar
Wonderland's in chaos, Sleepy Hollow's besieged by giants, and Emerald City is at the mercy of a mad genius. Trapped in a cursed book of fairy tales... More
Read Online Free
accounts@users.wowio.com
Before there was a Wonderland, Lewis Carroll presented Alice's Adventures Under Ground to his young friend, Alice Liddell, in November 1864. Carroll hand wrote the story and illustrated it in his own whimsical style. This WOWIO version is a high-resolution reproduction of that original manuscript. Later, the story was expanded by Carrol, re-illustrated by Sir John Tenniel and published in 1865 as the now-familiar Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. More
When Lewis Carroll dreamed up Wonderland for his little friend, Alice, who knew he would stir the imagination of so many for all these years? From the little girl of Carroll's original manuscript to the heroine of comics and film, Alice has had many incarnations, from mother and wife to remix warrior. See how far she's come...
Support our featured Gifting for a Cause partner, Reading to Kids, and help inspire children's imaginations with the power of reading!
Before there was a Wonderland, Lewis Carroll presented Alice's Adventures Under Ground to his young friend, Alice Liddell, in November 1864. Carroll hand wrote the story and illustrated it in his own whimsical style. This WOWIO version is a high-resolution reproduction of that original manuscript. Later, the story was expanded by Carrol, re-illustrated by Sir John Tenniel and published in 1865 as the now-familiar Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. More
New Alice in Wonderland 01
Rod Espinosa
Rod Espinosa's incredible adaptation of this timeless classic. The Eisner-nominated creator of such critically acclaimed, sweeping epics as Neotopia... More
Preview Online Free
Alice: New Adventures in...
Dave Berg
The continuing stories of Alice of Wonderland fame are here in their golden age glory. Stories include: Flying Saucers, Super-Dooper Special, Curious... More
Preview Online Free
Return to Wonderland 00
Raven Gregory
Alice Liddell is no longer the little girl you once knew. Years have passed since her trip down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. A grown woman now... More
Preview Online Free
Abigail & Rox: In the Land of...
Joshua Gamon and Adrian Sibar
Wonderland's in chaos, Sleepy Hollow's besieged by giants, and Emerald City is at the mercy of a mad genius. Trapped in a cursed book of fairy tales... More
Read Online Free
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)