“I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving, human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride.”
(William James, 1842 – 1910)
The Salon started in Paris and will continue to return to Paris– and celebrate all the beauty, hope and diversity in the City of Light. Our thoughts go out to all who live and love Paris. This is a global struggle–but it is our friends in Paris whose world has been shattered.
Sometimes you need to return to the source to retrace the outlines– where you have been, what you are and why….though these are the questions that drive us forward into our lives. It is too easy to become distracted with the daily rhythms and not pull yourself up- look around, and remember what you have missed. The Paris Salon group was the source of the original Salon and worked through the early bumps and learning curve as we figured out together how to engage deeply with literature and how to open each other up and into the beauty of language, the challenge and wonder of our humanity. So it is a great gift to return to Paris and offer a new study in the astonishing power of Toni Morrison’s art.
November 27th Salon Intensive on Toni Morrison’s A Mercy 5:30- 10 PM Register here.
The next set of Paris Salons will be in February the weekend of 13th-15th. Please vote now (contact me) as to preferred books for study: William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Beowulf, Shakespeare: what’s your pleasure?
IN the midst of Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury, Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah and a study of The Odyssey– all these rich works result in a bit of mental cacophony…but then a Salonist offers a clarifying statement as this in reflection to this week in Faulkner: “I don’t recall what we concluded about time and death, but life is too short to worry about it…” In another Sound & Fury conversation, we connected the act of Cronus’ castration of his father to the fantasy Quentin has as an option out of his suicide– and mused on the struggle to castrate Time itself.
We do manage to go down deep in all of these works, thinking and discussing how to understand the self and human relationships in the loud world, how to find integrity in a world of monsters and angry gods, what does love look like in a society that has created an art of subversion and manipulation?
Coming Salon studies are in response to reader requests– but we are always open to other possibilities. I am researching a series on literature of transgression including Celine, Nabokov, Wilde, Genet….and am hoping to continue our Faulkner work with Absalom, Absalom! I am still hoping to schedule a Salon Intensive on Hamlet; and have had a few requests for a Midnight’s Children study–stay posted as I continue my own battle with time. Please let me know which studies are of interest to you and what works well for you in terms of schedule (afternoon vs evening).
In the last few weeks, the new Salon season has kicked off with Intensive studies of Beloved and Housekeeping–delving deeply into the haunted spaces of the human psyche. There is clarity to be found in these conversations; hearing the responses of others to the raw moments of the human journey reminds me of the extraordinary resilience and hope gained by widening one’s own perspective. The personalities I find most difficult are those who are unable to hear nor value the experience of the other– whether the other is an intimate or a refugee. The study of literature constantly expands the narrow lens of the individual–that is just one advantage.
“They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Next week we start our study of The Sound and the Fury— there is a Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday evening schedule option. There are still spaces available for both– please sign up soon so you can get the opening notes and start reading!
In William Faulkner’s first truly modernist work, he pushes to break through the confines of time and sequence to get at the essence of human nature- as Malcolm Bradbury explains, “Faulkner’s preoccupation with time has to do with the endless interlocking of personal and public histories and with the relation of the past to the lost, chaotic present.” The Sound and the Fury uses the interior world of its narrators to expose a crumbling world, through inference and allusion rather than through direct social critique. In the Modernist method, Faulkner employs stream of consciousness, symbolism as a connecting fibre and several interior realities (that show how one can see the world as absolutely in one’s way, and directly in contrast to others) that must compete for authority.
This Salon will draw upon individual’s questions and ideas to shed light on this complex text. The book is richer upon re-reading, enabling the first time reader access to Faulkner’s complex vision through the insights of others. Upon a first reading, the narratives appear jumbled and opaque but as the pieces start to fit together, one can see the complex and careful planning that Faulkner has used- and to what end? This is what we must grapple with for the Salon.
Studying Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, ‘Hamlet’ and selections from Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist’, we consider the questioning and dissenting mind across ages. This course will be excellent preparation for a study of Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. There will be no class on 20 October.
Studies coming:
Proust: Swann’s Way- Vol. I of In Search of Lost Time — the evening study will commence towards the end of September– in the afternoon study we are on the fourth volume and going strong–participants have found this immersive reading has deepened their reading habits significantly.
Hamlet: We will do this study as a Salon Intensive– one meeting in early October. I will post the date in the coming days– email me (litsalon@gmail.com) if you are interested….
Ulysses— This is a Salon signature study– our 20 week voyage will start in January 2016.
Email me with questions or suggestions–comments always welcome! Lots of events in the local community–check out the Salon community happenings on the website for details.
Next Tuesday a group of old and new Salonistas will be gathering to read Beloved— one of those books that marks you singularly with its power and beauty. The following week, we will study Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping— a lyric and haunting exploration of the end of domesticity. Longer studies start in September including Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury on Wednesday nights and a new Proust study launching later in September on Tuesday evenings. The daytime Proust study– now in its fourth volume and tenth month, starts again in a few weeks. I am in the process of re-scheduling the Hamlet study to work with the end of summer madness….stay tuned. While you are getting news about the coming Salons, here is a selection from a gem floating around social media…if you have not seen it, here it is– if you have, read it again: crystalline writing is worth re-reading…this comes from Brevity Magazine and is titled:
An Address to My Fellow Faculty Who Have Asked Me to Speak About My Work
by A. PAPATYA BUCAK • January 20, 2014
My work is to see who you are and who I think you could become. To notice the slate grey night lit by a full moon half behind a cloud. To know what it is to want more from someone than they are willing to give. To see the shadows cast by your secrets. To notice an ant that has drowned in a single drop of water in my sink.
My work is to explain my heart even though I cannot explain my heart. My work is to find the right word even though there is no right word.
My work is to remember that I always wanted to be a writer and that one day my father turned to a friend of his and said, “This is my daughter, she is trying to be a writer,” and then he corrected himself and said, “She is a writer.”
My work is to stop everything when a student—right in front of me—writes the line, “I think I would be a better dancer if only I had wings.”
My work is to believe in grace even though I don’t believe in God. To realize that all of my greatest fears are things that are definitely going to come true. My father will die, my mother will die, my brother will, my niece, my nephew, me.
My work is to pay attention when my mother says, “I cried all of my tears that first year I lived in Turkey.” To pay attention when my mother says of her freshman roommate, “It was like Tigger rooming with Owl.” To pay attention when my father says, “You should sit by my side and write down everything I say like the Prophet.” To pay attention when my father says, “Chickens are braver than us.” To pay attention when my nephew says to his sister, “All of your teeth are sweet teeth.” To pay attention when my nephew says to me, “I’d like to see how long you’d last in Azkaban without a book.”
My work is to tell you that without art we would be in a world without art.
My work is the blood on the heels of my socks in high school because I ran hard sometimes, but not always, so that my calluses came and went.
My work is to honor the glory of trash day, all of those cans lined up before dawn, an obedient nation in this one instance only.
My work is to believe in everybody’s capacity for kindness.
My work is to believe in everybody’s capacity for cruelty.
My work is the bird of dawn, the tale of my grief, the thief of love, the city of beauties, the nest of snakes, the helping animal, the animated doll, the transformative power of love, the juice of a single grape.
My work is to imagine a world without art so that there is never a world without art.
My work is to tell you this:
Years ago I was on the subway in Manhattan, and we stopped between stations, and the staticky voice came on the speaker and said there would be a delay of twenty minutes, and cursing ripped through the car, as if a tribe of the homeless mad had just swept into our presence. But then a young woman across from me took out a small pile of paper, and she started folding red origami swans, and each time she finished one, she handed it to one of us.
A journalist friend told me never to read the comments section (better known as CiF) of articles about issues you care about—especially issues that touch on provocative subjects like race and gender—but I can not help myself. Particularly when it comes to books—why we read what we read, why it has value…so when I saw a list of ‘Ten books that shaped the World’, I leapt in.
The list, found here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/07/10-books-that-shaped-the-world, includes expected works—The Bible, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Freud…and then the unexpected: Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold and Beloved by Toni Morrison. I was so glad to see Beloved there—but then I began reading the comments:
“Yes, I think that saying Beloved changed the world is REALLY overstating things. And it’s not a book I ever care to read, either”
“To put relatively obscure books like A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold and Beloved by Toni Morrison, which few people have read, among a list of classics only serves to reduce the usefulness of the list.”
“ It only ‘speaks’ to you if you’re a black female”
Okay. So I shouldn’t have read the comments. FFS, Morrison won the Nobel Prize. Does Shakespeare only speak to 16th century white men? Morrison’s project is to make accessible the experience of slavery and its impact on identity and individual psychology—but in a way that is neither exclusive nor limiting. Her incredibly lyric writing and beautifully wrought images reveal levels of intimacy and complex relationships between people that is incredibly illuminating—not just for women, not just for black people, not just for former slaves. And yes, this book is changing the world because of the universality of the relationships portrayed AND because the story makes the horrific—and recent—experience of slavery accessible to a modern audience. Why is this important? At such a primitive level, so many of our struggles start with inequality between people—the deep gaps between individuals wrought by a sense of difference—and race is the most tangible and direct creator of that gap.
This book is so powerfully written that it does not distance me (like, for ex., Uncle Tom’s Cabin)but brings me into the black slave experience. As a person who is white, I can not know what it means to struggle with daily racial oppression—but it is crucial that I enter imaginatively into this experience—as much as possible. And why? If I remain in my own narrow perspective, if I do not reach out into any other’s realm, I am reduced—and my humanity is single-sided. I am struggling to put words to the importance of understanding the experience of another: but every time I read of racially inspired violence or inequality—on a personal or societal level, I know that our individual work to reach across difference towards understanding is crucial.
A great work of literature can open the mind in amazing and challenging ways—and this is what Morrison does in Beloved. Reading this book in a group creates an openness to discuss the dehumanization of oppression and the work to claim self-hood in the face of that struggle. The writing is luminous, the subject is hard and the realm of the book extends into the fantastical—and reading this book opens up your humanity.
Beloved by Toni Morrison –One evening Salon Intensive 01.09
“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”– Beloved
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson One evening Salon Intensive 07.09
“To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Hamlet by William Shakespeare –Two evenings: Wednesday August 26th & Sept. 2nd
“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner Four meetings over four weeks– Tuesday afternoon or Wednesday evening schedule available starting 15.09.15
“They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.”
― William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
These brief studies offer a slide back into the rhythms of the Salons. If you are new to the Salons, this will give you a chance to sample the energy and exploration of the Salon meetings; previous participants may enjoy the contained intensity of one or two meetings. Registration information is available on the page for the listed Salons or under the courses list on the front page of the website. Please contact me if you have any questions.
Next week: Autumn Salons on Proust to be announced…also Ulysses 2016 will be open for registration..
Summer travels that includes old friends and loved places can be disorientating. Each place, each relationship, once I am there, seems the only place I have ever been, the only world I have ever known—all others feel a fiction…I forget who I am, who I have become as I return to the Adirondack lakes and mountains that contain my adolescence & first loves. This is so delicious for the moments of reconnection; but means that the parting requires a sacrifice of sorts, a shard of the heart.
I am reading about the nature of epic in Adam Nicolson’s The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters. He argues that epic’s value is not as a matter of memory nor history but ‘to make the distant past as immediate to us as our own lives, to make the great stories of long ago beautiful and painful now”. So many of the significant works of literature we engage in the Salon explore how we live the past—how we live with our own other stories, how we hold these in our present, how we live within the context of our cultural or ancestral histories—whether these are known or mysteries.
All of these stories imprint on the psyche. Our own immediate narratives as well as the greater narratives that define cultural values, norms and biases shade and colour our relationships with the world and each other. In our studies of literature, the overlays and shadings can be more clearly seen—sediments compacted that witness the endless complexity of the human story.
Watching someone lose their mind—even very slowly—is a means, perhaps, to watch the defenses sheer off—from intellectual & emotional discourse to historical recounting to adamancies and absurdities to questions—and finally, to fear. Fear seems to be the root actor—and our conscience mind develops so many layers to cloak how much fear drives us. I watch this family member try to protect themselves—with routines, material objects, anger and, when possible, with weapons. It is horrific. And enlightening—how much of what we do is to shore up against our fears: of aging, of loneliness, of others, of pain?
I realize how much art—both in creation and contemplation—confers a conquering of fears. To achieve the space necessary to think about art: meaning, form, layers, complexity, connectivity—means you have the privilege and psychic comfort to have overcome all the primal urges that drive us towards simply seeking a safe and affirming space.
from Network Rail
This afternoon I met a wonderful woman I am mentoring as she pursues her doctorate in film & literature concerned with identity, African diaspora, representation, imposed narratives…we were having a lovely chat in the late afternoon sunshine at a fancy café in King’s Cross, when 20 feet away there were screams and a young man was violently tackled by police. He may- or may not- have picked someone’s pocket.
We watched and then turned and stared at each other: this is the world, these are our circumstances, this is the jagged edge between possibility and desperation.
After the intensive, multi-month studies of Ulysses and Proust, participants were asked to comment on their experience of the Salon…
How would you describe the Salon experience?
Politely wild.
Surpassed my expectations….It’s been terrific, stimulating and well-structured. You lead us in the most gentle and firm way.
Starting by facing a wall with a closed door and no key–ending in a wonderful gander on the other side.
always enjoy it. ..ultimately though love being able to read this book as part of a group and infact think it the only way to read it.
if i were to carry on doing this i would like to look at the various stylistic devices and motifs etc that are employed.
not so much what joyce is doing but how he is doing it. which is going to be difficult because I’m not really sure what he’s doing- but i jeep thinking the conversation can easily go the way of what he is doing – when there is a lot of richness in the historical detail, myths and techniques etc.
Very positive.
Beforehand I have not met anyone who had read Ulysses to the end and without the Salon I am sure I would have counted myself amongst that number.
Ulysses is not easy to read and understand and the sessions helped enormously, to the extent that I can now see why it is such a great book, which is not how I felt at the beginning.
It has exceeded my expectations. I had high expectations of the ‘standard’ of the Salon as far as the knowledge of the text and supporting materials go and this was certainly met. In addition however, it has been a very positive experience in that the atmosphere of the Salon is so permissive and generous, and that the Director and participants are such lovely people.
Being in a group was also good though I prefer the sessions when there not more than 6 present. More than that and the sessions lose their focus.
I remember Toby saying on one occasion how she’s seen people open up during the course of the study and my own experience of the Salon relates to this. Prior to the study, and still at times on individual sessions, I have been wary to speak out for several reasons, but the fact that the group is so open-minded allows for even the most poorly prepared explorations of the text. It is interesting also to see how we as a group have developed the reading and understanding together, and how much, variably, clearer/richer/more layered it appears than when reading it in solitude.
If anything I think we covered too much in each session. The chapters are long, too long to read comfortably in a week and contain too much to be discussed properly in a session. We needed more time. If I had a choice I would have preferred the course to last twice as long so we could have delved more deeply into the symbolism and had explained those parts which were incomprehensible. That we did not have enough time was a great pity. In the end I feel we only scratched the surface of the book.
What was good was how the group jelled into a cohesive group. It is perhaps obvious that it would do so but nevertheless it was pleasing to be part of this.
Overall most enjoyable and always of interest with lots of stimulating content. It more than met my expectations and kept me on my toes.
The venue in a private house lends the proceedings a more informal air and presents as less intimidating that a formal classroom setting. On the other hand, there is less space to hide and therefore puts greater pressure on one as a participant to do a bit of homework. It’s not so easy to ‘wing it’ really.
“I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving, human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride.”
