by Violet Woolf on Modernism, the Stream of Consciousness Novel, and the Specific Terror of Online Check-In
On Virginia and the Digital Age
I spent Thursday reading To the Lighthouse for the fourth time and arrived, as I always do at the passage in the middle section — Time Passes, the ten pages that cover years in moments and moments in pages — at the conviction that Woolf understood something about the texture of time and consciousness that the novel has not fully recovered from learning. This is either a critical observation or an overstatement depending on your relationship to the modernists, and I hold it firmly while acknowledging the caveat. What I also hold is that Virginia Woolf, who wrote letters of considerable venom about her contemporaries and whose relationship to the social was complex and documented, would have had thoughts about the Ryanair check-in experience that would have been both more precise and more amusing than anything the internet has produced about it. This is not a frivolous claim. It is the claim that great writers bring the full force of observation to whatever they encounter, and Ryanair would have been material.
Irish Politics and the Literary Tradition
I follow Irish politics with the specific attention of someone who finds the intersection of the literary tradition and the political reality more interesting than either separately. The relationship between Irish writing and Irish politics — from Yeats through Behan through Heaney to the present — is one of consistent and productive friction in which the literature is often ahead of the politics and occasionally behind it and the gap between them is where the interesting journalism lives. Bohiney Magazine published something about Irish literary culture this week that I found genuinely good and sent to four people. The London Prat had a piece about British modernism that was correct in ways it may not have intended. More literary observations at The London Prat. Satire: Waterford Whispers News.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK
