in light of recent Woolfposting i wanted a palate cleanse. so enjoy this masterclass of description from To The Lighthouse, wherein the story of the protagonists is told in brief asides as our focus remains fixed on their decaying summerhouse by the sea.

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100101h.html#ch201

'What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature? ... The place was gone to rack and ruin. Only the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw. Nothing now withstood them; nothing said no to them. Let the wind blow; let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build in the drawing-room, and the thistle thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun itself on the faded chintz of the arm-chairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries.'

#VirginiaWoolf #bookstodon #reading #AmReading

i should not have to tell people on the #VirginiaWoolf hashtag* that circulating pictures of her suicide note is fucking ghoulish, should i

*other social media, not here

Life, Loss, and the Wisdom of Rivers

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/03/22/olivia-laing-to-the-river/

I Am Not a Gun

Reconstructing Manliness with The Iron Giant and Mr. Darcy

“What is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.”

— Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2.

When I was in college I decided to start a faith-based discussion group for men, about well, being a man. For some strange reason, I felt that it had to be very early in the morning, because getting up early was manly. In my campus-wide emails I also resorted to tasteless jokes about going out to chop down trees and break rocks with heads. Whatever this says about my social development is less relevant than the question that I was attempting to answer, however foolishly, with that group and those jokes: What does it mean to be a man?

This is a question that has tortured me since my adolescence, and tortures me still. Whether this essay will provide any relief remains to be seen. My small group, unsurprisingly, was not very popular, even with my Christian friends. Not many undergraduate guys were willing to get up for a discussion group that started at 6:30am on Friday mornings; or if they were willing, the flesh was weak. This does not mean that the group was a failure, because I had one regular attendee who I was able to talk quite deeply with, and I still think about him today. I was also told by a few people that they would have attended if it was at a less inconvenient time. This showed me that I was not the only one tortured by the question.

So, what does it mean to be a man? We will find out together, dear reader, whether I am any better equipped to answer this question than I was over a decade ago. But first I must define exactly what is meant by it. We could try to answer it by taking a survey of the men in our lives, and saying, “These examples show what it is to be a man.” But despite confounding us with wildly different conclusions, this method also reveals to us our bias. I think that most of us, consciously or unconsciously, have already taken a survey of the men in our lives, and the results have made us uneasy. That the question occurs to us reveals an insecurity about manhood that cannot be assuaged by the simple truth that no men are perfect. We would not be asking if there wasn't something resembling a real crisis. What I believe we really mean to ask is, “What does it mean to be a good man?”

[...]

https://blog.hdansin.com/i-am-not-a-gun

"I used to believe, as I was taught, that literacy was primarily about decoding text. But watching how people actually learn and think has convinced me that literacy is about something deeper: the capacity to construct and navigate environments where understanding becomes possible."

I'm thinking about #VirginiaWoolf and "A room of one's own"...

https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem

#FeedsVersusFocus
#IntentionalDesign

https://mstdn.social/@ppatel/116266505306659978

👉 #WoolfWorks - Das 🩰 Ballett nach Texten von #VirginiaWoolf mit der 🎼 Musik von #MaxRichter diesen So, 22. März 2026 | 11.00 Uhr | kult.kino atelier | als Aufzeichung des #RoyalBalletAndOpera #London 💂 vom 09. Februar 2026

🎟 Letzte Tickets an allen kult.kino Kassen und online unter: https://www.advance-ticket.ch/omniticket/kultkino/64351

#WordWeavers 11. Give an example of brilliant writing. What's special about it?

a short one:

'Life was rough, cheerless, and disappointing. A whole year of days would pass fruitlessly in dreary business, like dashes of rain on the window-pane.'

this is from an essay by #VirginiaWoolf called 'The Pastons and Chaucer.' in two strokes she gives us the essence of her subject's bleak fifteenth century existence. (he finds escape by reading Chaucer.)

the whole thing is here, and it reads more like a story than an essay: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300031h.html#C01