Today was largely a recovery day for Brandon and me. I Skyped with Erika and read Mrs. Dalloway until 2am last night (left it unfinished) and then woke up at about 10:30 this morning to finish the 90 pages I had left before and then after lunch. We met as a group to discuss the book, which I really loved, from 2 to 3:30pm.
Virginia Woolf's writing was really fantastic in the book. Her eloquent stream of consciousness writing offered us amazing glimpses into each character's unique viewpoint and made her underlying theme - of solipsism and the miracle of any real human connections - hit home much harder because we knew each character's outer and inner, semi-rational selves. Yet, as Jon pointed out, Woolf's stream-of-consciousness style led to many imitators but those imitations were often awful and unreadable. This is because Woolf very carefully picked and placed every detail of the stream of consciousness that came from each character because each detail or clue in their thoughts was put in for a reason. Nothing in Mrs. Dalloway is superfluous or accidental. It takes a true master to craft a work like this - one that spends nearly 200 pages talking about one day in the life of a hostess and a war veteran and didn't leave me, as a reader, bored at any point.
After our discussion, we scattered and Tyler and I watched the Netherlands beat Slovakia in the Round of 16. Tyler spent a few years of his childhood in the Netherlands and still has family friends who he's visiting this summer there so naturally his team tie is quite tight. Unfortunately, my nation has bowed out (we discussed this at length earlier) and so I'm adopting Spain as my team of choice. This is purely opportunistic and bandwagon-esque of me since Paul, Matt and I will be in Spain during the semis and final matches so we hope Spain will stay around for us to cheer them on.
After dinner, we went to see Salome put on at the Hampstead Theater and it was really awful. I know Oscar Wilde took a departure from his usual comedy style to write this dark show about Salome dancing for Herod and then demanding the head of St. John the Baptist in return. However, the director, David Lloyd, set the show in a post-modern apocalypse with unnecessary sexuality, nudity, disturbing graphic actions and really, really, above all, unbelievably annoying characters. The actors, no doubt, played these parts to perfection but I really ended up hating everyone onstage just because it took them 10 lines to say the same phrase over and over again... and it seemed to be a stupid, indecipherable phrase in the first place. I hated the performance and I'm being kind in my criticism here.
Tomorrow morning, we're going to the Houses of Parliament and meeting with a representative from the Scottish National Party.
My parents and brothers are arriving tomorrow as well so I'm excited to see them all for the first time in a month and a half.
Check back soon!
-Simon
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