Oct. 31st, 2019

jazzy_dave: (Default)
Penultimate selection -

Ray Parker Jr. - Ghostbusters



Michael Jackson -Thriller



The Charlie Daniels Band - The Devil Went Down to Georgia



Rockwell - Somebody's Watching Me



Miles Davis - Miles Runs The Voodoo Down




Enjoy.
jazzy_dave: (Default)
The final selection from me -


Siouxsie And The Banshees - Spellbound



Robert Johnson - Me And The Devil Blues



Savoy Brown - Hellbound Train



Electric Wizard - Devil's Bride



John Carpenter - Halloween Theme




Enjoy.
jazzy_dave: (bookish)
Nigel Nicolson "Virginia Woolf" (Phoenix)




Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is considered by some to be one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century. She was the author of nine novels, numerous short stories, a semi-biography (of art critic Robert Fry), and numerous essays, including the famous A Room of One's Own. She also has been the subject of numerous biographies (including at least two psycho-sexual analyses).


The British writer and publisher Nigel Nicolson (1917-2004) was uniquely positioned to write a biography of Woolf for the Penguin Lives series. He knew Virginia from boyhood on, and his mother Vita Sackville-West (who enjoyed an open marriage) had an intimate affair with her throughout the 1920s. (In fact, this relationship was the basis for Woolf's Orlando, described by Nicolson as "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature.") Further, Nicolson edited a 6 volume collection of Woolf's letters (1975)-1980).

In this concise biography (186 pages), Nicolson gives a broad overview of Woolf's life and career. He traces her childhood and adolescence (when she bore the surname Stephen), her participation in the famous "Bloomsbury group" of intellectuals, her (largely chaste) marriage to Leonard Woolf (whom she described to friends as "a penniless Jew"), her career as an author and publisher, her growing fame, and her personal relationships; he also touches on her episodes of mental illness, depression, and her suicide.

Nicolson's portrayal is informative and affectionate, but by no means uncritical. He recounts a lecture that he gave in the US in 1982 in which he warned his audience that England's Virginia and their Woolf were not the same person (meaning that academics in the US had moulded her and her milieu into their preconceived notions). Thus, to Nicholson, the "Bloomsbury Group" (which included Woolf, EM Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey) were not the brave forerunners of modern progressive views; their socialism was "tepid" and even Virginia's championship of women's rights was restricted to those of her own social class.

Indeed, the feminist views Woolf published in her later works are deemed by Nicolson as "vastly overstated". In A Room of One's Own, "she was speaking only of women of her own class and cultural background, a tiny minority who had little cause for complaint." Her political views were simplistic and out of step with the times; she blamed the existence of war entirely on men, and by the Second World War, her pacificist inclinations had become irrelevant. Germany's bombardment of England destroyed the Woolf's own home, and they fled the coast, knowing that upon invasion, they would be in grave danger given Leonard's Jewish ancestry. Nicolson also casts a sceptical eye on another author's claims about rampant sexual abuse in Virginia's early life.

Nigel Nicolson's book is a biography, not a hagiography, and he seeks neither to construct nor destroy a literary icon. Those who want to view Ms Woolf as an unblemished heroine will not find this book easy to dismiss, unless on the entirely unfair grounds of the author's own gender. However, those interested in seeing Virginia Woolf as a full-scale human being, and a product of her times and social class, will gain a deeper understanding from this sympathetic but honest appraisal of her life and career.
jazzy_dave: (Default)
A selection of loungecore folks -

Martin Denny - Firecracker



Ray Coniff - Lisbon Antigua



Russ Garcia And His Orchestra - Nova



Les Baxter - Jewels Of The Sea



Bas Sheva - Lust



Enjoy.
jazzy_dave: (Default)
A few more for Halloween -

Les Baxter - Voodoo Dreams / Voodoo



Tubby Hayes - Voodoo Session



Just had to -

Buffy - Once More, With Feeling - Dawn's Ballet / What You Feel



Enjoy

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