Reading Virginia Woolf's "Orlando". Fun book. Her big fat lesbian love letter to Vita Sackville-West.

I think the reason I'm reading it... well, it's Nicole Kidman's fault. My favorite scenes in "The Hours" were when she was writing in her sitting room. She would take a big drag on her hand-rolled cigarette, space out a bit, then crank a few lines with her fountain pen. I've heard some people say that Nicole Kidman doesn't particularly look like Virginia Woolf. Like they used to shoot pool with her or something. Who cares?

Tried reading "Mrs. Dalloway" right after seeing the movie. Seemed like too much of a chick book. Now I'm reading her big fat lesbian love letter instead. Doh!

So, yeah, it's pretty good. As usual I have been bookmarking lines and passages that I like:

"He seemed in the act of rolling some thought up and down, to and fro in his mind till it gathered shape or momentum to his liking."

"For in all she said, however open she seemed and voluptous, there was something hidden; in all she did, however daring, there was something concealed."

"For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing."

"Of the nature of poetry itself, Orlando only gathered that it was harder to sell than prose, and though the lines were shorter took longer in the writing."

"The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second."

"Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life (of the animals' we presume not to speak) is beyond our capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground."

"'Oh! if only I could write!' she cried (for she had the odd conceit of those who write that words written are shared)."

"No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high."

Just checked that hotmail account that I signed up for two days ago. I haven't given anybody the address but there are thirty two spam messages sitting in there right now. What a joke. To sign up for the account I had to wade through a bunch of stuff about and sign up for Microsoft Passport. Some kind of internet identity "service". Who are they kidding?

Microsoft... get your shit together.