Streams of Consciousness by Susie Gharib

I teach Virginia Woolf to fourth-year students in the English Department at the University of Ethics in the middle part of the globe. I have a lot of fun explaining her technique to a hundred eager students by always beginning with my own stream of consciousness which is triggered by the word Glasgow. A string of images flows beginning with the swans at Knightswood Park … Continue reading Streams of Consciousness by Susie Gharib

Virginia Woolf by Susie Gharib

Your agony is flowingin my veins,the accumulating residueof thousands of decades,of women entrappedwithin allotted spheres. In the name of protection,you were banished awayfrom the stimulus of Londonwhich had allayedthat innermost lonelinessof the emancipated. A new type of atticengulfed your fragile frame,so every woman is made to believethat madness is the outcomeof intellectual freedom.  Continue reading Virginia Woolf by Susie Gharib

The Library and Literature of Gunpowder Milkshake

There are few movies that make libraries “sexy” (or even use libraries at all for that matter). Certainly not The Pagemaster. Maybe Funny Face. But with Navot Papushado’s latest film, Gunpowder Milkshake, the cachet of the library might just get a brief defibrillation (because Ghostbusters and The Day After Tomorrow certainly did not make the library look inviting, nor did Sex and the City: The Movie with Carrie and her dramatic “left at the … Continue reading The Library and Literature of Gunpowder Milkshake

Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again

As is the case with many a writer’s life, it is their death–or, more precisely–their suicide that will define them. Virginia Woolf is just one such scribe from an era in writing when a person felt things so deeply that no matter how much of it poured out of them and onto the page it was still there. Always lingering, never fully gone. Over the … Continue reading Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again