George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” begins with a setting, “a cold but stuffy-bed sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea.” A man in “a moth-eaten dressing-gown” sits at a makeshift desk surrounded by papers. We are told he is a:

a man of thirty-five but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover.

A page later our man’s vocation is revealed: “Needless to say this person is a writer.” Almost reluctantly does Orwell decide to be more specific and call him a book reviewer; it is of no real consequence to him what kind of writer he is because “all literary people are alike.”

So much for the average writer. Virginia Woolf sketches the average reader in an essay from 1916 entitled “Hours in a Library”. This person, again male, is “a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open-minded and communicative.” On the negative side he is:

a pale, attenuated figure in a dressing-gown, lost in speculation, unable to lift a kettle from the hob, or address a lady without blushing, ignorant of the daily news, though versed in the catalogues of the second-hand booksellers, in whose dark premises he spends the hours of sunlight.

Orwell’s writer is unkempt and disorganized. Woolf’s reader is hungry to learn but socially gauche. Both wear dressing-gowns, perfect attire for people who prefer to be indoors.

The Orwell essay is famous, the Woolf less so. Hesperus Press has raided Woolf’s volumes of critical writing and rescued four lesser-known literary essays, grouping them under the title On Fiction. Each essay brims with insight and interpretation that is conveyed stylishly and authoritatively. Here is a writer expounding on the secrets of her craft. In one essay, “Women and Fiction”, she classifies criticism as one of the few “sophisticated arts”, something seldom practised by women, at least in 1929. She foresees more women tackling and mastering it, albeit in a “golden” future when they will no longer have to protest to be heard, being enfranchised, financially and socially independent and with “a room to themselves” – a reference to her most celebrated critical work, “A Room of One’s Own”, published one year earlier. The essays are bound by ideas that are perceptive and prophetic. She scrutinizes the worth of literature past and present but goes the extra mile to consider if it, and its practitioners, can improve and increase in value in the future.

That first essay, “Hours in a Library”, focuses more on the reader. After her generalized image of him she adds, somewhat surprisingly, that “the true reader is essentially young.” Woolf was prone to bold pronouncements but she was always able to convincingly corroborate them. “The great season for reading,” we learn, “is between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.” This is a sobering fact certain to make some of us feel we have passed our prime; but it also conjures up an image of the young self-taught Virginia Stephen, losing herself in her father’s vast library. Later in the essay she asserts the power the classics have on contemporary literature – that a schooling in the past is vital for appreciation of the present – but by the same token the more modern books we read, the greater our realization that some classics are not as imperishable as we previously imagined.

Classic writers throughout the ages are revisited and scrutinized in the longest essay here, “Phases of Fiction”, originally serialised in three parts in The Bookman in 1929. Woolf praises and takes down canonical authors in equal measure. It is refreshing to read of the shortcomings of the exalted: Proust mires the reader by surrounding his characters with clutter, an “accumulation of objects”; Walter Scott’s plots are too often “scamped, botched, hastily flung together”; Dickens, while hugely inventive, created “substantial, lumbering worlds”. This last point is typical of Woolf’s appraisals in that a writer’s strengths are examined alongside his faults in the same sentence. “Substantial” is apt for summing up those Victorian doorstop novels, but “lumbering” can equally fit the bill. George Eliot’s mind, she tells us, is both “clumsy and powerful”. Only Jane Austen escapes complete censure. We pause when we finish Pride and Prejudice and turn our mind back to what we have just read, “rather than forward to something fresh.”

In “The Narrow Bridge of Art” (1927) Woolf writes on fiction’s limitations. Compared to poetry, and the “glories” of the Elizabethan dramatists, prose is relatively hamstrung when dealing with “the common and the complex”. For all that fiction writers can experiment (Woolf herself a good example) they cannot fashion their prose to “chant the elegy, or hymn the love, or shriek in terror.” In short, prose, for all its elasticity, cannot “say the simple things which are so tremendous.” This is Woolf at her most opinionated and certainly her most contentious, and we could argue that fiction has more than adequately managed to say simple and tremendous things in the last eighty years. But she is unquestionably spot-on when, in a better bid at prescience, she talks of the fertility of the novel, how it is a “cannibal” form that will devour other forms to create new ones so that “in ten of fifteen years time prose will be used for purposes for which prose has never been used before.’

“Cannibal” is a wonderful description, one of many in these essays. It succeeds on two levels. Firstly it opens up Woolf’s line of argument in an original and eye-catching way; secondly it reads beautifully. The main problem with these essays is not that we wrestle with any opaqueness of thought (each is remarkably lucid) but that there is a temptation to underline every second sentence, such is her dexterity with words. This, of course, is the great advantage of reading a critic who is primarily a writer. She writes of “the foam and flood of language”. Poetry “has remained aloof in the possession of her priests.” Henry James helps us explore “endless filaments of feeling” whereas Dostoevsky leads us down “miles and miles into the deep and yeasty surges of the soul.”

This fine collection reminds us of Woolf’s binary genius as fiction writer and fiction critic. In these essays her judgement illuminates and her descriptions sparkle. James Wood has noted that her essays are “written in the language of art, which is the language of metaphor.” It took her a while to be entirely satisfied with this language in her novels – it was only her last novel, Between the Acts, that she considered “more quintessential than the others” – but in the essays the language, like the thinking, consistently impresses.

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“In To the Lighthouse Woolf has returned again and again to the destructive power of the male upon the creativity of the female… But Woolf seems to argue, at the end of the novel, that there is something beyond this agonizing fact of destruction, which is the saving androgyny of creation itself.”

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There are times, though, when I am not so feral. Reading is mostly a bust. Books fail. They fail to pinch my nerve.

Reading requires conviction. I try to find a spark that sets my brain ablaze. I fail, mostly.

A few weeks ago my energy had waned. I needed a shot in the arm, a book that would affirm my effort and push me forth. Good books lead to a good life. That is what I needed to hear, again. I yearned to feel the swell, again.

I turned to David Ulin, no stranger to the slog. The title of his new book, The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, provoked me. By reading it I hoped to regain my mojo. Ulin, a book critic by trade, is like me a lover of literature, but the advent of digital culture, he says, has affected all of us in a particular way: Close reading has become difficult.

Ulin’s teenaged son Noah thinks books are dead. He is reading The Great Gatsby and isn’t jazzed about it. Ulin, understandably, is concerned for both himself and his kin. He laments the loss of silence in our lives. I understand. There are days when I dream of a chair in an otherwise empty room. Some of the best moments of my life have been spent alone.

Like me, Ulin was a devoted reader as a teenager. Books filled him with wonder, made him feel like “the world had opened up in the palm of [his] hands. It is this that draws us to books in the first place, their nearly magical power to transport us to other landscapes, other lives.” Though Ulin is old enough to be my dad, I can sympathize with his nostalgia. What a time, my teenaged years! I, too, consumed books at a fast clip. But that pace shows why some perspective is necessary. When I was a teen, fried food, Tom Clancy, and sweatpants were amazing. My penis, keep in mind, was in a constant state of erection.

Why is youth held in such high regard? Youth represents in our memories a time when joy was free of work. We were—and this is Ulin quoting Frank Conroy—“free to drift into fantasy, living a thousand lives, each one more powerful, more accessible, and more real than [our] own.” The wrong word here is free. “Free” can just as easily mean free of taste. Free of values. Free of effort. Free of those damn clunky things that ruin our damn reading experiences.

Ulin’s urge to return to the time when he “read quickly and without interruption” concerns me. He seems to lament not silence but swiftness. I, too, want to feel a buzz, but I have no illusions. It takes big effort. Reading good books requires discipline. And by “good books” I don’t mean “good plots” or “good times.” Good books challenge us, and like all things important they require work. Serendipity is a crock of shit.

Look no further than professional sports. Occasionally, an athlete will break protocol and complain about the slog. Really? we ask. You make the long dollar, millions at that, and you have the gall to bitch about a game as I sit here in my cube working on a data presentation? But an athlete’s high, realize, is much higher than the high you feel when trotting around the bases in your company’s softball league. Herein lies the problem: In order to feel that joy, athletes must train. It takes conviction. Joy never precedes work—it is the result of work. After they feel that big joy, the work can seem like a grind, a slog. Joy appears, it fleets, its return date is unknown. Routine is the enemy of spontaneity. But as any great improviser knows, there is no jazz without practice. Joy is a job.

David Ulin

Distraction, as many have noted, is easier. Hyperlinks are fussing with our brain syntax. In the near future books will smell not of sap but alloy. Some philistines already prefer gadgets to God. A distracted clan we are, moving from screen to screen, filling our domes with facts and data, as good books lie dead or dying.

Distraction, some say, is adaptive, a product of evolution. Brains developed the ability to improvise. If you were, say, a hunter, it was best to keep one eye out for grizzly bears. Response to stimuli saves lives, especially when we are minding a toddler or carrying a firearm. Every so often it’s best to be alert.

But books aren’t bears. They rarely attack.

Ulin nails the need for contemplation, but he misses the mark about technology. A jones for gossip is, at its core, no different than a zeal for good books. In this context our mass consumption of information seems a rational act. Media of all sorts provide quantity. We consume facts and tidbits because we are curious. Information satisfies an innate urge. Technology, then, is not a crime but an alibi. Easy access allows for easy plunder. Control is ours. But it’s curiosity at a bargain price.

Ulin, thankfully, knows that quality lies not in the medium but the message. A grainy video of a performance by Björk could make my skull feel soft, whereas a book about bears, though fascinating, would not make my heart twitch.

It isn’t about technology—it’s about conviction.

Goods books aren’t rad. That, simply, is why people do not read them. They are difficult. A little bit of learning, said Alexander Pope, is a dangerous thing. The danger here is that once you feel the ecstatic, you want to feel it more and more. You want to feel undead, again. But if language has ever made your knees buckle, you know it takes big effort. Say you are reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. At first the syntax perplexes you. The words are heavy with modernist portent. All those dependent clauses impede the flow. Commas, you think, are overrated. Take a look. In this passage, a young boy, James, awaits his family’s trip to a lighthouse:

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition was bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night’s darkness and a day’s sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsey, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy.

Virginia Woolf

The words are, at first, a trod. The first sentence wants to push forth but the commas stall the progress. The end, it seems, is “within touch” but the sentence keeps us waiting. But James, with his gnarled feelings, is waiting too. The next sentence finds its eloquence and sprawls. The point of view shifts indirectly to the mother. These are her feelings. And then there’s that last sentence, the claptrap that snaps the tongue: “It was fringed with joy.” Those five words, as Emily Dickinson would say, Deal-One-Imperial-Thunderbolt. It was fringed with joy. Those five words make my brain go goo.

Virginia Woolf is my wife and my foe. I love her for these types of sentences—but I hate her, for in her light all else pales. She stalks me. At times I wish we’d never met. The pictures have been burned. I’ve hidden Mrs. Dalloway in the stacks, only to find The Waves staring back at me. She taunts me. Her sentences—they tap at my brain. That fine English lady refuses to hear my pleas. She won’t quit me.

I don’t know how to explain the sensation. Here’s Ulin on the time he visited the place where Malcolm Lowry set Under the Volcano:

This is how good Lowry was, I remember thinking, and this is what language, at its most acute, can do. It can collapse the distances, bring us into not just the thoughts but also the perceptions of a writer, allow us, however fleetingly, to inhabit, literally, his or her eyes.

That doesn’t cut it for me. The first part is agreeable but the rest seems too easy. Language is mentioned but never explored. Reading appears, in turn, as a passive experience, absent of art and genius. There’s no mention of craft, the shaper of our consciousness. It’s all experience.

Reading rarely delivers. As Samuel Beckett wrote: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” Ulin gets the buzz and the joy, sure, but he leaves out the rigor: “The best we can hope for are a few transcendent moments, in which we bridge the gap of our loneliness and come together with another human being.” I agree with the transcendent bit but disagree with the connection part. Books are not people. They are no friends of mine. When I first read Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace, whom Ulin and I both count as favorites, I felt unbalanced. I felt influenced, yes, but in a punch drunk sort of way. I don’t want to be swayed too easily.

Reading is not an “excavation of the inner world.” It’s a lonely plunge into the unsaid. There’s no doubt that we want to enrich our lives with something. Books, though, will not “blur the boundaries that divide us, that keep us separate or apart.” Sure, we all want to feel connected in every sense of the word. We all want to feel the buzz. But we can’t have both the sensation and the shoptalk. In between, compromise lurks.

As William James wrote:

Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest experience is utter chaos.

Conviction is selective interest. The more I attend to good books the less I have to say. That is why good books transcend most experiences. They are private, in the truest sense of the word.

Reading is, to me, a faithful pursuit of an abstract essence. Joy, then, is a rare emotion.

I plod through the nothing new hoping to see a flash that shocks me still.

I want to live in the space between a weep and a scream.

I want to love something with all my bones.

I want to feel my brain go goo.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

If only I could tell you the rest.

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Condensing his life into 10,000-word mini-biographies made Wallace’s struggle with depression and eventual suicide seem like a smooth transition. But depression is anything but smooth. It is flat. It’s as close to catatonic as you can get without being in a coma. So if the writing here is flat, that’s probably a good thing, or at least somewhat honest. To write about depression in electric, page-turner prose is disingenuous, untrue to the experience, and is a persisting problem with writing and depression. Put simply, it’s really fucking hard to get this illness onto the page. And, as both Max and Lipsky noted, it’s something Wallace never did. He wrote a lot about depression, but never directly detailed his own suffering. So what makes me think I have any right to? Why should I expect someone to be interested? What do you care if I ate a whole jar of pickles in one go?

In November 2008, two months after Wallace’s death, but before I’d read the Max and Lipsky pieces, I was due to give my first academic paper. It was on novels and short fiction that dealt with the events of September 11, 2001, for the aptly themed Creativity and Uncertainty conference at the University of Technology, Sydney. I was depressed, not with the theme – although it certainly could not have helped – but with the pressure I was putting on myself to be a writer.

In the 48 hours before my presentation, I wandered the cramped streets of Sydney, trying to figure out how I could edit the essay to the level that I imagined was expected of me. I stayed up until 4 am without changing a single word, scared as I was by the whole situation. After all, there’s no progress like no progress. On the morning of the conference, I panic-attacked and, consequently, experienced my first near-blackout from hyperventilation. I was using my girlfriend as a sounding board – between sobs – going from I’ll do it to I’ve probably got to pull out to I’m never writing another word ever again and I’m never coming back here again and I’m going to go out of my way to never see any of these people again. I was desperate, but I was also determined to pull myself together for the session before mine, in which novelist James Bradley was to give a paper on the links between creativity and depression. I was keen to crawl into the room, thinking it might say something to me in my current condition, but I was frozen in the corner of a communal space on campus, wrestling with my mind to stop the spread of anxiety. In other words, I was suffering from the very symptoms Bradley was likely to outline. At the time, I was aware of the irony but, as is often the case, couldn’t pull myself out of it.

The anxiety on that particular day stemmed partly from the public speaking side of the conference and partly from being programmed alongside PhD students and professors, myself having only just finished my undergrad degree. In any case, it wasn’t the first time I’d experienced feelings of that intensity. I had suffered the same steeply depreciating sense of self when writing for publication. The writing of prose – essay, fiction and memoir, in particular – can be an incubator for depressive moods more than other forms, in that it invites long periods of seeming inactivity, obsessiveness and over-analysis (analysis paralysis, as my mother so succinctly puts it).

Poet Les Murray made this incubator idea clear in his regularly reprinted (again just last year by Black Inc.) Killing The Black Dog—the title of which referred to Winston Churchill’s pet name for his major depressive episodes. Murray wrote, ‘I cut down on writing prose pieces because they were more liable than poetry to be infiltrated with the colours of confusion and obsession.’

When I wrote prose, the same thing always tripped me up: trying to succeed in writing beyond realistic expectations. The desire to be above the level that I was could stop me from progressing on a draft entirely. I would be halted mid-sentence, with little else to do but stew on why I’d stopped. In the slowed-down process of revising work with editors, depressive moods prevailed. I couldn’t bring myself to email them on some days and would get up each morning frightened that the deadline – with the hard finality of the word pressing down on me – was one day closer, or worse, one day behind me, unmet. I would finish multiple drafts, but the piece could never be good enough, never up to the exacting standards that I, like many young writers, had invented for myself. I would stare blankly at the computer, the Word doc refusing to edit itself. Individual sentences would make sense, but the whole would be irreversibly tangled.

Bradley’s essay was eventually published in the Griffith Review, under the title Never Real and Always True, a quote from Anton Artaud used in Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon. I read its black details on a particularly sunny, clear-headed afternoon. I read it again out loud to my parents, and we hummed with the collective recognition at certain details. And we weren’t the only ones. Bradley’s piece had been cathartic for many, some leaving comments on his website to thank him for his honesty and insight.

Most writing on depression, however, doesn’t achieve this. It fails to move beyond Churchill’s ubiquitous black dog personification and a listing of the usual casualties: Woolf, Hemingway, Plath et al. Yet, in the lexicon of manic depressive writers, the ones who survived it are the least likely to make the list. Graham Greene, for example, suffered manic depression and lived to be 86. He is rarely mentioned among writers with the disorder, save for playing Russian roulette on his lonesome in his early twenties.

Bradley’s essay is important, not just because it skips these clichés of writing about depression, but because it engages with the realities of the illness while relating a personal take on it. And it was Bradley who inspired me to describe my own depressive episodes. I know I’m not alone – in the experience and the writing of it – and that makes it both easier and harder. The statistics, like most statistics, are scary.

Alice W. Flaherty states in The Midnight Disease (2005) that writers are ten times more likely to be manic-depressive than the rest of the population, and poets are a staggering forty times more likely. The overriding concern then becomes a variation on the classic chicken-or-the-egg: does the act of writing invite mental illness, or does writing come from some need to cope with it? It’s not as clear-cut as one or the other, but if it were solely the former, who would go into it willingly? And if so, what can we do to make writers more aware of the realities of these statistics? Do you put up a white warning sticker, like on the packets of cigarettes, so that every time you bought a Moleskine notebook or a Uni-ball pen, they would be emblazoned with: Writing May Cause Harm?

This was what I struggled with as I published my first pieces. But the all-important question I should have considered was: if this is going to get me down – like so gloomed out I can’t operate on a normal level – is it really worth doing? It’s something others asked along the way for me, but which I never asked myself.

The reality of writing at a professional level is that the process isn’t exactly cheery. It can, in fact, mimic manic-depressive cycles: The inspiration that comes with an idea takes hold for weeks, bringing with it sleeplessness and excited energy, before slowly succumbing to the turgidity of rewriting and overworking. These were symptoms I first became familiar with vicariously, before experiencing them directly. In 2007 I’d watched Stephen Fry’s popular BBC documentary The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive over and over on YouTube. I read the online transcript of an episode of Four Corners that profiled cartoonist Bill Leaks’ struggle with the disorder. Reading about the life of iconic bipolar Spike Milligan gave me hope in that he suffered ten nervous breakdowns but lived to be 83. This was during my first major depressive illness, when I was especially interested in the “manic” variety of depression, which, with its ups, seemed preferable to the sink-hole that I was set in. There is a danger that depression gets glamourised in reading like this, that to be a great writer you need to experience low moods and that depression can authenticate your efforts. (I know that in writing this piece, there is part of me that is very, very hungry for people’s pity and concession: if you think I suffer depression then you might also think I have the potential to be pretty fucking profound.)

I became infatuated with Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, a fictionalised take on the life of poet and manic depressive Delmore Schwartz, shortly before I was officially diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Reading the book for the first time at 21, I took Martin Amis’ quip that Humboldt ‘is a very dangerous book to read in your twenties’ literally, so much so that the book itself became an evil omen and whenever I saw it lying around the house – hard to miss, an original Viking hardcover in gaudy bright yellow – it taunted me to open its pages and indulge in its vices. When the titular Humboldt tells Charlie Citrine (Saul Bellow’s barely disguised alter-ego) that he needs a drink before bed to quiet his thoughts, I feared for my sanity, imagining my own ideas spinning like a tornado inside my head.

My psychologists were always beguiled by the language I’d adopted from Humboldt and other depression novels. I’d say I’d been in a funk for three months, for example, to which the psychologist would giggle: ‘I’ve never heard that word used for depression before.’ What have you been reading, I thought, just the textbooks? Through my own reading I felt I’d come to know as much about depression and psychosis and all the rest as they did. I knew the details so well that I sometimes wondered if my manic depression were not, in fact, a fiction.

The details have the weird texture of fiction, at any rate. In my first hypomanic swing I completed an 80,000-word novel in three weeks, experiencing something close to hypergraphia. There’s a comic book super strength in your head when you’re in an upswing of that scale. It was great to finish the work, but the best of it was not exactly publishable and the worst of it failed to make sense on several very basic levels. Plots twisted and turned and didn’t connect, mirroring the mode my mind was working in. There were plenty of bipolar effects that had nothing to do with writing, of course (driving down the F3 at 140km at 3am, for instance), but writing was always the overriding obsession.

Something about David Foster Wallace’s suicide shocked me out of all that. Part of it was because I was beginning to see the effects of my depression on those around me and I was also beginning to seek real treatment. The accounts of Wallace’s depression make all of what I’ve felt feel real in a way that most other writing has not. It is real in a scary way but it’s also real in a very human way. There was a surprisingly common description of altered gustatory sensations in what I read. James Bradley described food as changing taste when he was depressed – he became disgusted by shellfish, mushrooms and Chinese food. Les Murray was pleased that depression had made the taste of cigars repellent to him – it was a very easy way to quit smoking. And Wallace, when being eased onto the anti-depressant Nadril, was warned off eating a menu of everyday foods – cured meats, certain cheeses and pickles. It was this small detail – pickles – hidden within Lipsky’s account, that stunned my parents and me. During my most intense hypomanic swings, I would stand at the fridge and eat simultaneously from a jar of anchovies and a jar of gherkins. It didn’t and doesn’t mean anything to me scientifically – I don’t have a degree in neuropsychology – but it resonates at a deep level when I read details like this. It means that these weird and out-there experiences are more common than you’d think. That’s what I needed to know when I wondered what Bradley would be talking about at the Creativity and Uncertainty conference. If the strange stuff is common, then surely the mundane – the suffering – must be too.

Unlike some writing, it wouldn’t have been very fun if this essay had turned meta-textual on me – if drafting ‘Don’t Get Me Down’ did, in fact, get me down. But it didn’t. I haven’t fallen into a depressive funk because I’ve learnt how to avoid those pitfalls. And here is basically what I’ve learnt: don’t spend too much time on a single draft; communicate with an editor if there’s a problem; don’t compare your writing to that of others; and stick to your medication like glue. I believe I’ve been able to gain these insights by separating the writing and depression. I don’t deny that they’re likely linked in very complex ways, but they need to be approached on their own. The depression is the serious thing that I will always prioritise over the writing. So yes, it’s nice having you read this, but if I’d had to lie in bed for three months for it to happen, it wouldn’t have been worth it. Because as the late Roberto Bolaño put it in an essay, while dying of liver disease, “Illness + Literature = Illness.”

***

This essay was originally printed in the Australian journal The Reader.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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(And while we’re talking about slideshows, I’d actually recommend the Jacket Copy write-up instead of the Guardian’s, because slideshows drive me freakin’ bonkers. Slideshows are for photography only, people. PHOTOGRAPHY!)

Among some other great ones:

“What’s that? Do I look strange?” — Robert Louis Stevenson

“I must go in. The fog is rising.” — Emily Dickinson

“I feel certain that I’m going mad again.” — Virginia Woolf

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An archive, made public for the first time, casts a revealing light on Virginia Woolf’s death, and includes a letter that “shows Clive Bell coming to terms with sister-in-law’s suicide.”

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Someone made a font out of Franz Kafka’s handwriting! The post is in German, but even if you don’t speak the language, it’s kinda cool to look at. (via Quarterly Conversation)

Got writer’s block? This list of “unusual firearms” should do the trick.

A look at romance novels from the perspective of evolutionary biology. (via Bookninja)

James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel talk with Rain Taxi about how we define science fiction. (via Mumpsimus)

And finally, a Cambodian reflection on Virginia Woolf.

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Corpses doing it. Go on. Click. What could go wrong?

Its been said that the defining characteristic of us post-gen Xers is intense whimsy. That’s why I’m linking to these paper sculptures.

SFO to let you purchase carbon offsets for your flight right at the gate.

Nothing about this makes any sense to me: dental surgery key to restoring sight.

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Elizabeth Onusko at Guernica discusses the Kindle and E-textbooks and wonders “why our culture seems to value that which is new and novel without asking a few questions first.”

Virginia Woolf reads out loud.

On Galleycat, crappy trailers can hurt your book.

On Harriet the Blog, how will we study writers when they die if we don’t have their facebook passwords?

A social network for writers (via Silliman).

TV attacks books.

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Predisposed for love, I was in the throes of incipient romance by the end of the first page which comprises sex, class, and empire, as embodied in a widow, a wedding, a country house, the Diplomatic Service, and a middle-aged parlourmaid. Add Strachey’s razor-sharp prose, not to mention repeatedly laughing out loud (rare for me, no matter how funny the book), and there was no doubt: this was love.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding takes place on the day Dolly Thatcham, having drunk half a bottle of rum, with an ink stain the size of a teapot on her dress, is supposed to marry the Hon. Owen Bigham, although Joseph Patten, a young man from the previous summer, may have something to say about that. Then again he may not. Think Nancy Mitford, P.G. Wodehouse, Stella Gibbons, and an oblique touch of Virginia Woolf.

Brief, pointed, and utterly complete, it captures a dozen characters, a handful of relationships, and an entire social world in 119 pages. It gestures toward sentiment and revels in slapstick, capturing the complexities of real emotions in a satirical frame. And the weather! It’s a glaring-bright gale: cheerful to the nth degree, deemed delightful by Dolly’s mother, but quite horrendous for everyone else, which is to say the perfect weather for wedding and book.

When I finished Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, I started thinking about other wedding books, and then I read Dorothy West’s The Wedding—which I thought might be perfect too, but, alas, isn’t quite—and that made me think of how the nature of weddings—their nuclear fission-like essence rending families asunder to create new formations of intimacy and alienation; their embodiment of past, present, and future; their social capaciousness—makes them perfect narrative crucibles, and then I wondered why women (Strachey, West) write wedding books, while men (Robert Altman, Noah Baumbach, Jonathan Demme) make wedding movies, and then I thought once again how very much I loved this book.

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