Green Woolf Notecard Block

Photo of a block of notecards, 5x8, from 1966. I typed these notes on multicolored index cards my junior year of college at the University of Maryland, College Park. I was doing an undergraduate thesis paper on Virginia Woolf's aesthetic values as revealed in her essays and Diary. At that time only one volume of selections from her diary was available. I went in to the Library of Congress many days to find her essays and I would sit in the stacks and type up the notes on my little Smith Corona portable typewriter.

Twenty five or so years later I transformed this stack of notes into an artwork. But before that my mother had wrapped the whole stack of cards in paper from Dad's meat market---dark tan butcher paper and cotton string. She sent me the whole block, clearing out her basement shelves. I kept the block for many years. Then when I was installing a wall of images for an art project, I inked over the paper and cut out a window at one end and set the block down in front of the wall of color photocopied images. I also had a few other objects on the floor with this block but I forget now what they were.

Later I gave many of the notecards away to students in classes. The block is no more. No copy was kept of the paper on Woolf. No photos of the art wall. Only a few of the photocopies, like this one, which I am uploading onto sites on the web
to preserve them for infinite posterity.

Molloy

Over the next two weeks I am trying to get two classes to take a serious look at Beckett's Molloy.

They are, so far, resisting. Today I will have us read one sentence at a time out loud. Nothing will

work, no doubt, but this is worth a try. I will also show slides of paintings by Pollock and other

abstract expressionists to see if a visual analogy will help. Probably not. What college students

are really reading these days are the novels by Stephanie Meyers about vampires. Maybe I can

show them the rich analogies between vampires and Beckett's two main characters in Molloy.