Latest news with #Mrs.Dalloway
IOL News
02-07-2025
- General
- IOL News
Is the semi-colon semi-dead?
Too demure to be a colon but more assertive than a comma, the semicolon is a useful little tool. Mark Lasswell Like the fissionable atom, punctuation marks are wee items capable of causing a tremendous release of energy. Passionate disagreement over the use of exclamation points is so familiar that a 'Seinfeld' plotline saw Elaine's new romance with a writer blow up because he didn't share her enthusiasm. F. Scott Fitzgerald, in the anti-exclaim brigade, famously said using them is 'like laughing at your own joke.' Tell that to Tom Wo!fe. Or just about anyone who texts in this angry age, when the exclamation point signals 'I'm not fuming!' and a period can go off like a gunshot. Apostrophes? George Bernard Shaw loathed 'em, often leaving the 'uncouth bacilli' out of contractions, including didnt, wont and aint. Today, capricious apostrophe usage is so widespread (Its banana's out there!), and meets with such predictable fury, that one suspects a vast prank-the-English-teachers campaign. No piece of punctuation, though, stirs people up more than the humble semicolon. Too demure to be a colon but more assertive than a comma, the semicolon was introduced in 1494 by Venetian printer and publisher Aldus Manutius. What a useful little tool it has been in its primary role of inserting a graceful pause between two related independent clauses, as in: 'RFK Jr. came to my house; he tore out the medicine cabinet with a crowbar.' But now the semicolon is dead. Or semi-dead. Its use has collapsed, as underlined last month by a study from Babbel, an online language-learning platform. 'Semicolon usage in British English books has fallen by nearly 50% in the past two decades,' the survey said - and this sudden drop followed a steady decline across the past two centuries. A study of semicolon use in U.S. publishing from 1920 to 2019 saw a similarly dramatic slide. Newspapers, magazines, and fiction and nonfiction books all soured on the semicolon, though nonfiction after 2000 did see an uptick from the depths. The Babbel analysis touched off a gratifying round of articles in the British press contemplating the semicolon. The Independent: 'Our best punctuation mark is dying out; people need to learn how to use it'; the Financial Times: 'Semicolons bring the drama; that's why I love them'; the Spectator: 'The semicolon had its moment; that moment is over.' (A secondary function for semicolons is to divide up unwieldy lists; a tertiary function is to help headline writers amuse themselves.) On Team Semicolon, it turns out, we have Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and possibly Abraham Lincoln. ('I have a great respect for the semicolon; it's a very useful little chap' is a line attributed to Abe by a reminiscing journalist in 1878, which is to say: It sounds too good not to quote.) Virginia Woolf's novel 'Mrs. Dalloway,' the Guardian noted, employed 'more than 1,000 [semicolons] to echo its hero's flow of conscious thought.' On the Not a Fan side, the flow of conscious thought hating on the semicolon is considerable. 'Do not use semicolons,' Kurt Vonnegut advised in 2005. 'All they do is show you've been to college.' George Orwell: 'An unnecessary stop.' (Unnecessary but irresistible, apparently: He used plenty.) Cormac McCarthy: 'Idiocy.' Edgar Allan Poe wrote in an 1848 magazine article about being 'mortified and vexed' by printers who substituted semicolons for the dashes in manuscripts. But a couple of paragraphs above that complaint, Mr. Nevermore himself used one, writing, 'That punctuation is important all agree; but how few comprehend the extent of its importance!' Then again, maybe the printer just couldn't resist. Here's New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia delivering the keynote address at the 1935 U.S. Conference of Mayors: 'We have developed a new kind of officeholder: 'the semicolon boys.' The semicolon boys are simply a boil on the neck of this administration - the fellows, you know, who have an office and some law school has graduated them. … They sit down and look for semicolons. … If they would only stop the typewriters, we could get the steam shovels working.' When you have the Little Flower and Kurt Vonnegut, 70 years apart, agreeing that semicolon users are irritating, diploma-flaunting show-offs, what chance does the self-effacing little dot-over-comma have in these populist times? It's a miracle the Trump administration's threats to universities haven't included making federal support for infectious-disease research contingent on the immediate cessation of all semicolon use. But the semicolon will never completely go away, not as long as there are grown-ups around who still think punctuation emoticons are fun, using a ; and a ) to make a winking face and sending it to their teenage children, who are probably as mortified as Edgar Allan Poe. Maybe even vexed.
Express Tribune
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
A 100 years on, Mrs Dalloway continues to walk
On May 14, 1925, a London flower shop became the unlikely threshold to literary history. It was the day Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway was published, introducing readers to Clarissa Dalloway, a poised yet introspective woman preparing for an evening party. Over the course of a single day, Virginia captured a vast emotional landscape. A century on, the novel endures as a profound meditation on time, love, and the quiet performances of everyday life. This year marks not only a century of Clarissa's walk across London but a return to the web of feeling that pulses beneath the novel's stream-of-consciousness style. At its heart is a triptych of love stories, Clarissa and her husband Richard, Clarissa and her childhood friend Sally Seton, Clarissa and herself, and, hovering just beyond the page, another marriage: Virginia and Leonard Woolf. A marriage of two minds Virginia and Leonard married in 1912. She was luminous, volatile, brilliant. He was steady, cerebral, and deeply devoted. Their marriage, like Clarissa's, was not defined by passion alone but by an intricate choreography of companionship, caretaking, and creative cohabitation. Together they founded the Hogarth Press from their dining table in Richmond, hand-printing and publishing some of the twentieth century's most radical writing, including Mrs. Dalloway. Leonard typed the manuscript; Virginia, with trembling hands and a mind always on the edge, reworked the sentences until they flowed like breath. It was a novel she had to write, and he ensured she could. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia gave us a marriage that echoes her own: a partnership defined as much by what is unsaid as what is spoken aloud. Richard Dalloway, who cannot say "I love you" to his wife, buys her flowers instead. Clarissa, who once kissed Sally Seton in the garden at Bourton and called it the "most exquisite moment of her whole life," now hosts parties, listens for Big Ben, and thinks of lost chances. It is a novel filled with ghost loves: those that could have been, those that almost were, those that continue in silence. But Virginia's genius lies in the way she resists simplifying love into a single narrative. Clarissa's feelings for Sally, blooming in youth and buried under layers of societal constraint, never vanish. Nor do they erupt into melodrama. They shimmer, instead, in small glances, brief memories, the way Sally "squeezed the water out of a sponge" at the sink. Richard, too, is not a villain or fool. He loves Clarissa, in his quiet, English way. And she, for all her longing, acknowledges the safety and structure he provides. What emerges is not a love triangle, but a love constellation: fragile, flickering, true. Clarissa's party becomes the stage upon which all these tensions play out: Sally arrives late, older and changed; Richard, as ever, present but opaque; Clarissa, radiant and alone in a room full of people. It is one of literature's most piercing explorations of married life; not its beginnings, but its weathered middle. To love many Outside the novel, Virginia was writing from inside her own complicated geometry of love. She had close, intimate relationships with women, most famously Vita Sackville-West, but never left Leonard. "You have been in every way all that one could be," she wrote to him in her last letter before she committed suicide in 1941. "I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been." It is a line that glows with love's strange alchemy: she loved others, but she chose him. The centenary of Mrs. Dalloway comes at a time when we are, once again, asking what it means to love in difficult times. In an age of climate anxiety, political collapse, and collective fatigue, Clarissa's insistence on beauty, on throwing a party, even as the world breaks, is radical. So too was Virginia's choice to write a book not about war itself, but about the quiet traumas it leaves behind. Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked veteran whose story runs parallel to Clarissa's, is not healed by love. He is undone by a society that cannot comprehend his pain. His suicide, so carefully rendered, casts a long shadow over the Dalloways' drawing room. But love is not absent; it simply cannot save everything. Still, the marriage of the Woolfs, and the parallel one in the novel, reveals something deeper: that love, even when imperfect, can be a scaffolding for art. Leonard did not always understand Virginia's mental spirals, but he protected the space in which she could write. She, in turn, left behind some of the most luminous prose in the English language. The prose of Mrs. Dalloway is like no other. Virginia once wrote that she wanted to "follow the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall." And so she did. The novel flows without chapters, shifting seamlessly from one consciousness to another, rendering the texture of thought in motion. Virginia broke the rigid structures of Victorian fiction and created a modernism of empathy, one that allowed readers to live briefly inside many minds. At the time of its publication, Mrs. Dalloway was met with awe and some bewilderment. Critics admired its beauty but questioned its form. Today, it is canonical. It has inspired films, reimaginings, tributes, from Michael Cunningham's The Hours to experimental theatre adaptations. Penguin has released a centenary edition; institutions from Bloomsbury to Bombay have planned events, readings, and exhibits. Around the world, Clarissa walks again. Love at third sight In Karachi, where I first read Mrs. Dalloway as a teenager, the novel became a quiet compass. I did not know, then, that literature could be structured like time, like breath. That a woman thinking could be the plot. That love could be a thought remembered thirty years later and still burn. What Virginia gave us in Mrs. Dalloway is no grand romance but a mosaic of human bonds; she gave us the space between words, the pause before a confession, the petal that falls before the kiss. And she showed us that marriage, even without drama or climax, could be a place of deep, and difficult, love. As Clarissa throws her party, as the clocks strike, as the past and present fold into each other like silk, we remember: she is not just a character. She is a mirror. So too was Virginia, writing her way through pain, through passion, through partnership. One hundred years on, both women still walk through open doors, still gather the flowers, still greet the day. And in that moment, they are loved. Have something to add to the story? Share it in the comments below.
Express Tribune
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Mrs. Dalloway at 100
On May 14, 1925, a London flower shop became the unlikely threshold to literary history. It was the day Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway was published, introducing readers to Clarissa Dalloway, a poised yet introspective woman preparing for an evening party. Over the course of a single day, Virginia captured a vast emotional landscape. A century on, the novel endures as a profound meditation on time, love, and the quiet performances of everyday life. This year marks not only a century of Clarissa's walk across London but a return to the web of feeling that pulses beneath the novel's stream-of-consciousness style. At its heart is a triptych of love stories, Clarissa and her husband Richard, Clarissa and her childhood friend Sally Seton, Clarissa and herself, and, hovering just beyond the page, another marriage: Virginia and Leonard Woolf. A marriage of two minds Virginia and Leonard married in 1912. She was luminous, volatile, brilliant. He was steady, cerebral, and deeply devoted. Their marriage, like Clarissa's, was not defined by passion alone but by an intricate choreography of companionship, caretaking, and creative cohabitation. Together they founded the Hogarth Press from their dining table in Richmond, hand-printing and publishing some of the twentieth century's most radical writing, including Mrs. Dalloway. Leonard typed the manuscript; Virginia, with trembling hands and a mind always on the edge, reworked the sentences until they flowed like breath. It was a novel she had to write, and he ensured she could. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia gave us a marriage that echoes her own: a partnership defined as much by what is unsaid as what is spoken aloud. Richard Dalloway, who cannot say "I love you" to his wife, buys her flowers instead. Clarissa, who once kissed Sally Seton in the garden at Bourton and called it the "most exquisite moment of her whole life," now hosts parties, listens for Big Ben, and thinks of lost chances. It is a novel filled with ghost loves: those that could have been, those that almost were, those that continue in silence. But Virginia's genius lies in the way she resists simplifying love into a single narrative. Clarissa's feelings for Sally, blooming in youth and buried under layers of societal constraint, never vanish. Nor do they erupt into melodrama. They shimmer, instead, in small glances, brief memories, the way Sally "squeezed the water out of a sponge" at the sink. Richard, too, is not a villain or fool. He loves Clarissa, in his quiet, English way. And she, for all her longing, acknowledges the safety and structure he provides. What emerges is not a love triangle, but a love constellation: fragile, flickering, true. Clarissa's party becomes the stage upon which all these tensions play out: Sally arrives late, older and changed; Richard, as ever, present but opaque; Clarissa, radiant and alone in a room full of people. It is one of literature's most piercing explorations of married life; not its beginnings, but its weathered middle. To love many Outside the novel, Virginia was writing from inside her own complicated geometry of love. She had close, intimate relationships with women, most famously Vita Sackville-West, but never left Leonard. "You have been in every way all that one could be," she wrote to him in her last letter before she committed suicide in 1941. "I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been." It is a line that glows with love's strange alchemy: she loved others, but she chose him. The centenary of Mrs. Dalloway comes at a time when we are, once again, asking what it means to love in difficult times. In an age of climate anxiety, political collapse, and collective fatigue, Clarissa's insistence on beauty, on throwing a party, even as the world breaks, is radical. So too was Virginia's choice to write a book not about war itself, but about the quiet traumas it leaves behind. Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shocked veteran whose story runs parallel to Clarissa's, is not healed by love. He is undone by a society that cannot comprehend his pain. His suicide, so carefully rendered, casts a long shadow over the Dalloways' drawing room. But love is not absent; it simply cannot save everything. Still, the marriage of the Woolfs, and the parallel one in the novel, reveals something deeper: that love, even when imperfect, can be a scaffolding for art. Leonard did not always understand Virginia's mental spirals, but he protected the space in which she could write. She, in turn, left behind some of the most luminous prose in the English language. The prose of Mrs. Dalloway is like no other. Virginia once wrote that she wanted to "follow the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall." And so she did. The novel flows without chapters, shifting seamlessly from one consciousness to another, rendering the texture of thought in motion. Virginia broke the rigid structures of Victorian fiction and created a modernism of empathy, one that allowed readers to live briefly inside many minds. At the time of its publication, Mrs. Dalloway was met with awe and some bewilderment. Critics admired its beauty but questioned its form. Today, it is canonical. It has inspired films, reimaginings, tributes, from Michael Cunningham's The Hours to experimental theatre adaptations. Penguin has released a centenary edition; institutions from Bloomsbury to Bombay have planned events, readings, and exhibits. Around the world, Clarissa walks again. Love at third sight In Karachi, where I first read Mrs. Dalloway as a teenager, the novel became a quiet compass. I did not know, then, that literature could be structured like time, like breath. That a woman thinking could be the plot. That love could be a thought remembered thirty years later and still burn. What Virginia gave us in Mrs. Dalloway is no grand romance but a mosaic of human bonds; she gave us the space between words, the pause before a confession, the petal that falls before the kiss. And she showed us that marriage, even without drama or climax, could be a place of deep, and difficult, love. As Clarissa throws her party, as the clocks strike, as the past and present fold into each other like silk, we remember: she is not just a character. She is a mirror. So too was Virginia, writing her way through pain, through passion, through partnership. One hundred years on, both women still walk through open doors, still gather the flowers, still greet the day. And in that moment, they are loved.
Boston Globe
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In defense of the em dash
There are But as some have Advertisement ChatGPT's writing is the product of the 90 Pulitzer Prize nominees from 1924 to 2020, 95 bestsellers from The New York Times and Publisher's Weekly in the same timeframe, and other works it was If you're feeling unsure about how to use the punctuation mark, the em dash (—) can be used to set off extra information — like a Shakespearean aside — in the middle of a longer passage. It functions like — and can be used instead of — commas or parentheses. With an em dash, you can rise above an ordinary train of thought as if on an observation deck — wow! Advertisement Citing one piece of punctuation to judge whether something has been written by artificial intelligence is dangerous. It could lead to teachers grading their students improperly or prospective hires being rejected. After all, great writers have used the em dash throughout history. In 'Mrs. Dalloway,' Virginia Woolf combined em dashes with semicolons and sprinkled them like seeds on the breeze: 'How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, 'Musing among the vegetables?' — was that it? — 'I prefer men to cauliflowers' — was that it?' The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once went comedically overboard in his journal to prove a point: 'I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away — yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit ——————————— and wanted to shoot myself,' wrote Kierkegaard. Advertisement Being em-dash-happy isn't a style that ChatGPT invented, and we shouldn't give it credit for that. Real em dash fans have been singing its praises online for years. 'The em dash can also usurp the semicolon's glory — for it shows more than equality! The em dash has its own veritable inflection — its own tempo! One can use it profusely to show excitement and dynamism of thought,' — long before ChatGPT made its Kool-Aid-man-esque entrance into our lives. Now the em dash might need our help. A new generation of writers must feel free to use the fanciful — if sort of funky looking — punctuation in peace. It's there to let them set their creative impulses free. As one poster I use the em dash because it allows me to construct sentences — castles of thought, really — that contain unexpected, experimentally jazzy multitudes. Long story short — they're fun. I will not let ChatGPT — the 'helpful' roommate who dyes all your white socks beige in the wash of literature — make writing less fun.
New York Times
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
One Exhilarating, Excruciating Night in Nell Zink's Berlin
There's a moment in J.D. Salinger's short story 'Teddy,' in which a boy watches his younger sister drink a glass of milk. He describes this vision as God 'pouring God into God.' Nell Zink's new novel, 'Sister Europe,' ends with a moment so lambent — but it takes one excruciating, tangled, exhilarating, humiliating night to get us there. Many novels take place over the course of a single day: Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs. Dalloway,' James Joyce's 'Ulysses,' Nicholson Baker's 'The Mezzanine.' Fewer chart the course of a single evening, as does 'Sister Europe' — although Haruki Murakami's 'After Dark' is another that comes to mind. To stay out late in Zink's world, loitering, is a pleasure. If you don't know what her writing sounds like, the only word for it is Zinkish. Her voice is cool and fastidious, but she has a screwball quality — a comic sensibility rooted in pain. She grinds her own sophisticated colors as a writer; her ironies are finely tuned; she is uniquely alert to the absurdities of human conduct. If this doesn't happen to be among her finest novels, well, it has strong consolations. The events in 'Sister Europe' occur on a Tuesday night in 2023. The place: a mediocre luxury hotel in Berlin. The occasion: a second-rate literary award ceremony. A $54,000 prize for Arabic writing is being given to a Bedouin writer who sounds a good deal like Salman Rushdie. The Rushdie character comes in for some ribbing. One wit comments that he probably uses A.I. to churn out his wordy and florid fables. Few of the guests want to be there. The evening is drudgery. The speeches are too long, the food is execrable (one attendee calls the entree 'Michelin mystery meat') and no alcohol can be had because of the event's Muslim hosts and guests. The prevailing mood is: Get me out of here. Among this book's primary characters is Demian, a German art critic, who is married to an American structural engineer named Harriet. They have a 15-year-old daughter, Nicole, who is transitioning from male to female. To her father's surprise, Nicole turns up at the hotel with Demian's friend Toto, an American publisher. Toto had recognized Nicole, in a party dress and with bee-stung lips, posing as a streetwalker in a red-light district, and invited her to the event to get her off the corner. Harriet is calm about Nicole's transition and her desire to take puberty blockers. Demian is less sanguine. He has a liberal intellect but a conservative gut, and he has an instinct to protect her from decisions made in haste. He battles his transphobia, Zink writes, but 'clearly hoped Nicole would emerge from her gaudy chrysalis as just another twink in golf duds.' Nicole is carefully and vividly drawn. She's a bird shivering on a wire. She's in an awkward phase, but then who isn't at 15? Zink writes: Demian seems relatively unperturbed that his daughter was (apparently) streetwalking, and similarly unperturbed when she vanishes into the hotel with a sybaritic prince, Radi, who has sexual designs on her. No real sex takes place in this novel, though it's gently pervy, like Mr. Whipple squeezing the Charmin. A main topic in 'Sister Europe' is indeterminacy. All of us are between stages, this novel suggests, at every moment. Another main topic is Berlin and its discontents. Zink, who has lived in and around the city for many years, catalogs the ghosts that continue to haunt it. A drawback of this short novel is that it introduces too many characters; none quite sink in. 'Sister Europe' lacks the air of inevitability that a good novel has. It also lacks a sense of drama, not that the gifted Zink does not try to inject some. All evening, an undercover cop named Klaus is following Nicole, thinking she may be the victim of sex trafficking. He represents the Chekhovian gun that keeps threatening to go off. He's an oddly comic fellow. In a film version, he'd be portrayed by the wonderful Yuriy Borisov, who plays the fragile and sentimental hired muscle in 'Anora.' After the ceremony, the characters spill out onto Berlin's wet, chilly, windswept streets. The merry revelers — among them Demian, Nicole, Radi, Toto and a young woman nicknamed the Flake (whom Toto met on a dating app) — form a sexy caravan. People stop and stare. Zink has a way of rendering even a late-night walk indelible, as if each moment has been tapped with a sprinkle from Tinkerbell's wand: I won't spoil the ending. Suffice it to say that these characters, along with an intimidating poodle, end up together in a space that functions as a kind of black-box theater, one with Nazi associations. Bring your black turtleneck; you may briefly feel you are in an absurdist Wallace Shawn play. Some of the characters pair off. For others, it's a school night. The cop is outside looking in. Is he really a gentle screw-up? Or will that Chekhovian gun finally go off?
