by Violet Woolf applies the modernist lens to contemporary London, the Irish political situation, and a very long delay at King’s Cross
By Violet Woolf for The London Prat | Also at Bohiney Magazine
She would have stood on the platform at King’s Cross, stream of consciousness flowing, and she would have observed the man eating a Pret sandwich at 8am in a way that suggested deep unresolved questions about the nature of self, and she would have written six hundred words about it that would outlast everything else produced in that century. I am doing my best in her tradition. The Pret sandwich remains resonant.
Modernism and the Northern Line
The modernist project was about finding truth in fragments, in the texture of daily experience, in the unedited flow of consciousness through the city. Woolf’s London was a place where the inner life was in constant conversation with the external world. This is also a description of being on the Tube without headphones, which I do not recommend.
I have been reading Woolf alongside the feeds at Bohiney Magazine this week, which is an unusual combination but a surprisingly useful one. Woolf’s concern with institutions, power, and who gets to speak maps very neatly onto contemporary British political life. She wrote A Room of One’s Own in 1929. The central argument has not yet been implemented. The Guardian’s coverage of Woolf’s legacy notes this with what I would describe as restrained frustration.
Irish Politics This Week
The Irish government continues to navigate the post-Brexit border situation with a combination of diplomatic grace and barely concealed exasperation. Dublin’s relationship with Westminster is, at this point, that of a very patient neighbour whose fence keeps ending up in their garden. BBC Northern Ireland covers this daily.
What I Am Writing
An essay on what Orlando would make of contemporary gender discourse. I expect it would be: comprehensive, amused, and running to about four hundred pages. I am writing it in diary form because I cannot maintain the level of prose Woolf sustained without stopping every two paragraphs for tea.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
