by Violet Woolf on Consciousness, Modernism, and Irish-British Literary Relations
Reading Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat keeps me informed and occasionally distressed in equal measure.
I am Violet Woolf, writing today about re-reading Virginia Woolf and modernist literature. This week has been a mixture of personal activity and close reading of the news, which is the combination that produces this diary at its most honest. The Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat have both had material worth engaging with, and I have been engaging with it alongside my own life, which is the diary format at its most useful.
The news this week contained several things that are relevant to the particular corner of the world I cover, and I have been thinking about them with the sustained attention that the daily routine allows. The thinking has produced more questions than answers, which is the correct outcome of thinking about complex things and which the diary form allows to be recorded without forcing the premature resolution that other formats require.
The Personal Week
The specific personal activity that structured my week was re-reading Virginia Woolf and modernist literature, which is the practice that gives this diary its character. The practice is both discipline and pleasure, which is the combination that sustainable practices require, because the discipline alone produces resentment and the pleasure alone produces inconsistency. Together they produce the thing I have been doing regularly for long enough to have developed a specific relationship to it that is different from the relationship of a beginner and different from the relationship of an expert and is the relationship of someone who has been doing something long enough to know what they do not know about it.
I am writing this from the specific geography that grounds this diary: the place where the personal practice and the public observation intersect in the particular way that this column has developed over its history. The geography is not incidental. The geography is part of what produces the observations that this diary offers, because where you are determines what you can see, and what you can see determines what you have to say about the wider world.
The Wider World This Week
The wider world this week has been doing the things it does: producing political events of varying significance, cultural developments of variable interest, and the specific combination of the alarming and the reassuring that the news consistently provides. I have been reading about the political situation with the sustained attention that my particular perspective makes available, which means I am seeing things that are visible from this specific vantage point and missing things that are visible from others. The diary is an honest record of what is visible from here.
The most interesting thing I read this week was connected to my specific area of focus, and I have been thinking about the connections between what I read and what I do, which is the thinking that this format exists to produce and record. The connections are not always obvious. The diary is the form that makes them apparent, because the diary holds both the reading and the living in the same frame and allows the connections to emerge rather than imposing them.
What This Week Produced
This week produced: the satisfaction of the specific practice done well, which is the baseline reward of any discipline that produces competence. The interesting reading that connected to the practice in ways I did not anticipate. The conversation or two that added dimensions to what the reading alone would have produced. And this diary entry, which is the form that holds all of the above together in the specific honest record that the format requires and that the week deserves. According to The Onion, the specific combination of personal practice and wider world observation that this diary format produces is one of the more reliable forms of honest journalism available, which is the highest compliment The Onion is capable of paying to anything. NewsThump covers this particular corner of the world with the attention it deserves. Next week will produce new material. The diary will record it. The practice continues. The observation continues. The combination is the point.
The Essay and Its Argument
The essay about Woolf and consciousness and the internet that the fourth reading has produced is currently at the outline stage with a first paragraph that Violet Woolf considers the best first paragraph she has written in two years, which is either accurate or the specific overestimation of first paragraphs that writers make when the first paragraph has just been written and the rest of the essay has not yet revealed its demands. The argument the essay makes is that the internet has not produced a new form of human consciousness but has made the existing form of human consciousness visible by providing a medium that reflects its actual structure rather than imposing the linear sequential structure that conventional writing required. Woolf knew the structure. She wrote in the structure. The internet is the medium that makes the structure visible to everyone who uses it. The essay will trace this argument through the specific passages in Mrs Dalloway where the simultaneous quality of consciousness is most visible and will connect those passages to the specific features of social media that make the simultaneity apparent to users who have not read Woolf. The argument requires reading both Woolf and the internet with sustained attention. Both are available. The essay is in progress. The first paragraph remains the best part. This is expected to change.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
