The Mumpsimus

Today is the anniversary of Virginia Woolf's death in 1941. Tomorrow, I defend a doctoral dissertation with a chapter on Woolf's 1937 novel The Years , and I have spent much of last few years studying Woolf's writings and life in the 1930s especially. Here, a few thoughts on that. Woolf's last decade is under-appreciated both by general readers and by scholars, although there seems to be growing scholarly interest in her final, not-quite-finished novel Between the Acts . ("Under-appreciated" is, of course, relative — Woolf is one of the most-studied writers of the 20th century, and many of her contemporaries don't have even a small percentage of the attention for their entire ouevres  that Woolf has for her least-read writings.) The relative lack of interest in Woolf's life and work after The Waves  has various sources, many of them having to do with why readers are attracted to Woolf in the first place. Her achievement with Mrs. Dalloway , To the...

BPM: Beats Per Minute (120 battements par minute)  tells the story of AIDS activists with ACT UP Paris in the 1990s, and its scenes of ACT UP meetings are among the most compelling representations of everyday political planning and argument I know of other than the extraordinary land reform debate scene in Ken Loach's Land and Freedom .  (There's also a powerful debate scene in Loach's later  The Wind that Shakes the Barley ,  but Land and Freedom  is even more remarkable in my eyes because it so patiently dramatizes a kind of conversation rarely even imagined by most of its likely viewers. Almost any other director would pare such scenes down to soundbites, but Campillo lets us watch discussions play out and doesn't simplify the arguments into pro/con battles. We see the characters react, think, respond. Even in a movie like Land and Freedom , the narrative starts with a focal character and brings us into the story via that focal character. One of the m...