Paris Salons March 31st & April 1st–Faulkner Woolf and TS Eliot

1.     March Salons 31^st & 1^st of April 2012

• Saturday March 31^st  10:00-13:00  Short Story Salon William Faulkner’s “The Bear”
• Saturday March 31^st   17:00 – 22:00 pm T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”  Salon Intensive  (recommended edition: (Faber Poetry) [Paperback])

This Salon is full so is no longer open for registration

• Sunday April 1st   15:00-20:00 pm   Between the Acts Salon Intensive(Oxford World Classics)

Registration is happening NOW–the Eliot Salon is almost full so sign up today to ensure your participation.
To Register, follow the link to the Salon event that you would like to join and use the paypal button to register; upon receipt of payment, I will send you the opening notes and details… Contact me if you have any questions.

2.     May 12 & 13^th Salons

For your calendars– The next Paris Salon is scheduled for May 12-13…this will most likely include:

• The Aeniad (Robert Fagles translation recommended –he has gotten us through Odyssey and Iliad–why stop now?)The Aeneid (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Virgil and Robert Fagles (1 Apr 2010)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God  by Zora Neale Hurston  (recommend Virago ed. with intro by Zadie Smith)
• The Odyssey  Robert Fagles translation recommended
• Short Story Salon for busy people—Chekov and Cheever

Please do let me know your preference for the May Salons now…

3.     Musings on the private self

Last Sunday I had the wonderful opportunity  to hear Henry Goodman and Howard Jacobson speak about and read from Ulysses as part of the King’s Place Jewish Book Week. Many rich thoughts and questions were spurred- and I heard one of my favorite readings of Molly Bloom’s monologue ever—but one that I thought would be applicable to many great reads (as I do realize not everyone in the world is swimming in Ulysses world right now) had to do with Joyce’s celebration of the private self.

We might call this the soul or the interior voice but it is that deeply buried self that may escape censorship and conformity; the social forces that shape the parts of the self that are closer to the surface. To find that self and give it permission to want what it wants, to be what it may be, to explore all possibilities, desires and dark corners is a rare and private thing. Jacobson’s passionate proposal was that Joyce celebrates and advocates for this voice in the person and narration of Leopold Bloom…and that this may allow the reader to find and attend to that voice in themselves. This is an act of courage sometimes as that self may be what speaks against prevailing attitudes of discrimination or small-mindedness or all the forms of narrowness we inhabit as the quotidian wears us into thoughtlessness; Jacobson’s example was Bloom’s confrontation with the Citizen in what are some of my favorite lines of the book.

–But its no use, says he, Force hatred, history, all that. That’s not a life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everyone knows that it’s the very opposite of that that is really life.
–What? Says Alf.
–Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

What is astonishing to me about this passage is this is not a quiet conversation between friends; Bloom says this in the face of the Citizen who is vilifying Bloom in front of a group of drunken men who are bearing down on Bloom, accusing him of being an outsider, one who does not belong…and yet he can say something so lucid and authentic. I hope you are reading something that opens up your quiet self.