Literature Notes

link to back cover

• The Common Reader (1925)
  • "Readers of modern texts must be prepared to let their old habits go, and learn to read in a new way." [p. 123]

• Mrs. Dalloway (1925):
  • "For Woolf, fiction's traditional focus on highly charged moments threatened to devalue daily experience. In Mrs. Dalloway, she set out to restore 'the life of Monday or Tuesday' to its proper, central place in fiction. At the same time, avoiding familiar narraive sequences made greater demands on her readers,requiring them to take a more active role in the process of interpretation." [p. 130 -132]]
    
    
  • "Clarissa is humanly inconsistent: at once cold and self-absorbed ... ; yet also warm , quick and full of sympathy." [p. 137]
    
    
• To The Lighthouse (1927):
  • " 'Why am I so incredibly & incurably romantic about Cornwall? One's past, I suppose: I see children running in the garden. A spring day. Life so new. People so enchanting. The sound of the sea at night ... & almost 40 years of life, all built on that: how much so I could never explain.' This was the vision that inspired To the Lighthouse." [p. 162 - 163]
    

  This brings to my mind my similar views about Jasper. One difference would be an increased fondness for nature and the mountains, and going for long hikes alone with only a pack on my back, or fishing from a large log as the light disappeared on Patricia Lake. Why does this leave such an "incredibly & incurably romantic" impression? I will always be grateful that my parents decided to live in Jasper.

  • "Meanwhile, Virginia was deliberately holding herself back: 'I must write a few little stories first, & let the Lighthouse simmer, adding to it between tea and dinner till it is complete for writing out.' " [p. 163]

This is very similar to my approach for working on my model train layout. Let the layout simmer and play with it in small pieces as the ideas themselve emerge. A plan is something one deviates from as better ideas present themselves.

• "She wanted to re-create the constant changes of feeling that pass through human beings as rapidly as clouds or notes of music, changes ironed out in most conventional fiction." [p. 164]
  
  
• " 'I wish you could live in my brain for a week,' Virginia wrote to Vita. 'It is washed with the most violent waves of emotion. What about? I don't know.' " [p. 169]
  
  
• " 'I am back again in the the thick of my novel,' she told Vita, early in February, 'and things are crowding into my head: millions of things ... which I make up walking the streets, gazing into the gas fire. Then I struggle with them, from 10 to 1: then lie on the sofa, and watch the sun behind the chimneys: and think of more things: then set up a page of poetry in the basement, and so up to tea..." [p. 171]
  
  
  

SUMMARY of the session: Once again, selecting some personally meaningful passages, which just seem to jump out of the page, is a very satisfying way to spend an hour.

 

Model Trains Notes

I have been working on this web site for about 6 hours - 2 of which was spent troubleshooting a bug with Dreamweaver. I finally decided to split my October files into two parts and that at least worked.

I still have a little bit of front end work in front of me as I create an Introduction page, but the basic task of copying the files and making minor formatting modifications so the links would work properly is complete.

The URL is: http://people.uleth.ca/~d.burnett/Trainsweb/Index.htm

SUMMARY of the session: I have now created a stand-alone web site dedicated to my model train activities.