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Topic: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
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'lance
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 1064
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posted 15 August 2002 02:56 PM
Yikes! I admit I haven't read much Woolf, but guys like Mr. Theodore Dalrymple, Esq., I feel I know in my very blood... quote: Along with the other members of the Bloomsbury group—that influential and endlessly chronicled little band of British aesthetes of which she was a moving spirit—she was dedicated to the proposition that beings as sensitive as they to the music of life ought not to be bound by gross social conventions, and that it was their duty (as well as their pleasure) to act solely upon the promptings of the sympathetic vibrations of their souls. In a demotic age, however, their justification for personal license could not long be confined to socially superior types such as themselves. Before very long, what was permissible for the elite became mandatory for hoi polloi; and when the predictable social disaster occurred, in the form of a growing underclass devoid of moral bearings, the elite that had absorbed (indeed, reveled in) Bloomsbury’s influence took the growth of the underclass as evidence that their original grudge against society and its conventions had been justified all along. The philosophy brought about the disaster, and the disaster justified the philosophy.
At least he makes himself plain straight away. "Underclass devoid of moral bearings," hey? I'd like to ask him just where this "underclass" is, and what it looks like. But I suspect his answer would simply make me grit my teeth, and my dentist has warned me about this. You're right, Tres. This would be at home in the New Criterion. Does he write for ol' Hiltie's rag, do you suppose? Edited to add: Every paragraph brings vistas new and startling. On a new women's college, Woolf took the view that quote: “It must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions.” This is surely an odd architectural position for an aesthete to take: a position whose baleful practical consequences are, alas, visible throughout the whole island of Great Britain, where hardly a townscape has escaped being ruined by it.
So Virginia Woolf is even partly responsible for shoddy modern architecture? Seems a heavy burden to place on the shoulders of one depressive and eventually suicidal writer. Surely she suffered enough while alive. [ August 15, 2002: Message edited by: 'lance ]
From: that enchanted place on the top of the Forest | Registered: Jul 2001
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Trespasser
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 1204
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posted 16 August 2002 02:21 PM
What really gets me is when the conservatives bash some radical lefties for not being grassroots-left enough or in the right way... Honestly...Or get this sentence: quote: Might the revelation by the war of the utter frivolity of her previous attitudinizing have contributed to her decision to commit suicide?
Darlymple (doesn't that name sound Rabelais-esque?) I believe writes for the NCriterion - oh, about the decline of the Western culture and true virtue undoubtedly.
From: maritimes | Registered: Aug 2001
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Arch Stanton
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 2356
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posted 16 August 2002 02:36 PM
quote: My copy of the book is a slightly battered first edition that was once in the library of Michel Leiris, the French writer and anthropologist who knew all the best-worst (or worst-best) people, such as Sartre and de Beauvoir. Leiris’s annotations consist only of a list of three pages of special impact to him, written in the elegant hand of a bygone era, and small crosses on the top outside corners of the pages themselves—pages 62, 63, and 64.
Geez, if he wants to name-drop, can't he just get it over with? quote: ...a woman of such languorous, highly strung, thoroughbred equine beauty as she...
Hmm. A lesser wit would have made do with "horse-faced." His comments on the distress of the priveledged do hit the mark, though: quote: The Cambridge Guide to English Literature describes Three Guineas as an established classic—but a classic of what genre exactly? Of political philosophy? Contemporary history? Sociological analysis? No: it is a locus classicus of self-pity and victimhood as a genre in itself...The book might be better titled: How to Be Privileged and Yet Feel Extremely Aggrieved.
From: Borrioboola-Gha | Registered: Mar 2002
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