Model Trains Notes

It quickly became apparent that the problem was caused by the foam underbed for the track which had the effect of raising the track by about 1/4". My solution was to insert a base under both the mine structure and the track while removing the foam underbed for that section of the track. Here are 4 images of the result.

The base still needs to be painted black.

SUMMARY of the session: I continue to slowly improve the layout as little glitches are noticed and overcome.

Literature Notes

link to back cover

• "Woolf's fiction is centrally concerned with the inner life, and finding ways of re-creating that life in narrative." [p. ix]
  
  
• "Her first short story written for the Hogarth Press takes place inside the head of a woman sitting by a fire and looking at 'The Mark on the Wall' (as the story is called), while she meditates on the elusive and fragmented nature of experience. Her train of thought is interrupted by a man with a newspaper who identifies the mark, thus extinquishing the rich imaginative potential of uncertainty." [p. ix]
  
  
• "In his magisterial survey of representation in European fiction, Mimesis, the German critic Erich Auerbach argued that Woolf's method of depicting the interior life of a range of characters gestured towards 'a common life of mankind on earth', and he considered this a new and significant development in narrative method." [p. x]
  
  
• "In 1918, she noted in her diary, 'The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one's imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his means to him - the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent'. " [p.x]
  
  
• "She remained a fascinated observer of her own thoughts and also of her own creative process, recording both in her diaries and letters..." [p. x]

This latter point parallels my own interest in Learning, and in how I go about it in a variety of contexts such as model trains, mathematics and this web site.

• The Voyage Out (1915):
  • "But before the novel was finished, the nature and meaning of marriage would be thoroughly explored, and its promise of 'calm sea and fair voyage' dismantled." [p. 3]
    
    
  • "Our narrative expectations are frustrated and disappointed with an abruptness that seems closer to the randomness of life than the tidier outcomes of fiction." [p. 11]
    
• Night and Day (1919):
  • "Instead Night and Day focuses on day dreams, the willed or controlled fantasies in which both the hero and heroine indulge in order to hold the dissatisfactions of their daily lives at bay." [p. 34]
    
    
  • "Woolf's headaches of 1910, 1912 and 1913 may be attributed to genetics or personal trauma, to biohemistry or family interaction, but her inner tensions parallel those of a darkening world beyond." [p. 47]
    
    
  • " 'It's life that matters ... the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at all.' " [p. 50]

  Once again, this quote of Woolf's mirrors my interest in Learning ... and again ...

  • "... but she recognized that she had failed to solve the riddle of how a modern novel should be written: 'as the current answers don't do, one has to grope for a new one; & the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.' " [p. 51]
    
    
• Monday or Tuesday (1921):
  • Virginia recognized the power of the mind 'plaiting incessantly the many-coloured and innumerable threads of life'..." [p. 75]
    
    
• Jacob's Room (1922)
  • "Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room, is her protest against the First World War, and the shocking impersonality of its killing machine." [p. 84]
    
    
  • "Woolf had instinctively hated violence from childhood. She remembered the exact moment when she had turned against fighting: she and Thoby had been 'pommeling each other with our fists' on the lawn at St Ives when suddenly she thought, 'why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and sstood there, and let him beat me,' A sense of 'hopeless sadness ' followed." [p.87-88]
    
    
  • "Jacob Flanders is the unknown warrior, individual and representative, yet minus the distortions of sentiment or retrospective glory. There is nothing military about him, for this was a war fought largely by civilians in uniform." [p. 93]
    
    
  • "The novel seeks to hold together the multiplicity, inconsistency and variety that characterize our experience of living ..."[p. 94]
    
    
  • "Rooms, like our bodies or our lives, express us yet are only partly ours, carrying the marks of our predecessors as well as our own histories." [p. 96]

SUMMARY of the session: Making these notes has been as much fun as reading both Woolf's novel Jacob's Room as well as Briggs' commentary.