19th annual Virginia Woolf conference

For various reasons--including a connection to parts of Woolf's biography and personality, an attraction to her honesty in her diaries and her frighteningly perceptive view of the world, and her philosophies--I'm really into Woolf. Reading her was like not having to be lonely because I had thought these things but no one really told me it was okay to think those things--that not everything has to be how it is structured to be. I found this mostly in The Waves and To the Lighthouse and Moments of Being. I had this phase where I thought maybe I was somehow Virginia reincarnated, but like, a way less brilliant and less ill version, or that maybe I was her sister reincarnated. But I'm not a painter so that wasn't it either. Maybe I'm just one of her fans reincarnated as another one of her fans.

I had the opportunity to attend the conference this year and I wrote a little review of it for The Rumpus--it's up today HERE.

Preview: "Loving Woolf as a common reader today requires a certain defensiveness. In addition to intimidation, I experienced nostalgia passing through the rooms of my college literature professors and near embodiments of Woolf herself, jarred occasionally by a student or a man."

Listening to scholars discuss the intricacies of Woolf was just so damn fun and interesting, and difficult at times. They devote their lives to this, going over and over what's been gone over and digging up new bits to string in a new order of lights, for a slightly different effect. I mean, I'm sure within academia this stuff is valuable, but for a common reader of Woolf, sometimes I felt they were dissecting her too much, trying to explain her. No one needs to be explained. No real person, anyway. I mean, for one speaker I looked back over my notes and saw only babble, like:

"subordinated principles of orientation and various tropes of performance with an interval of prolepsis to eroticize mastery of foreign tongues and androgynous aspects of eastern cultures attracted modernists and parody of stylization of the body, fraught with coded domesticity..."

and somehow this was all related to Lily Briscoe putting her head on Mrs. Ramsey's knee in To the Lighthouse, or something.

I think I was meaning to say what a great experience it was for me...because it was. But I think the parts I enjoyed most weren't scholars necessarily rearranging and "illuminating" Woolf, but those speakers you could tell were really inspired by her. Like Rebecca Solnit.