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I would recommend courses led by Toby to anyone who wants to look at a text in detail in a study group
I was certainly surprised at how much I was thrown off balance by these two astounding writers…I look forward to returning for more
We all came to the group with different backgrounds and interests but Mark has skillfully guided us through a stimulating programme of Greek literature.
I always leave the meetings with a much broader understanding of what we are reading than when I arrived
Everyone feels they get heard and therefore that each of us has a contribution to make
In all of the courses I have attended I have felt a bond within the group, and this contributes significantly to the quality of the discussions
Lovely, intimate groups with in-depth discussions, lots of learning, and friendships are made for life there
I’ve read things I’d never dared read before. I’ve made new friends and met really interesting people.
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‘The Waste Land’ is the early Modernist poem classic. T. S. Eliot was striving to understand a shattered world post WWI and
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‘The Waste Land’ is the early Modernist poem classic. T. S. Eliot was striving to understand a shattered world post WWI and how the inherited cultural knowledge could offer direction or solace in a broken, mechanistic world. His use of literary and cultural allusions may feel overwhelming at first, but an open mind and supportive discussion will illuminate this gorgeous poem.
At this moment of Modernism, the urge was to separate from the oppressing past (‘Make it new!’ charged Ezra Pound, Eliot’s mentor) but this becomes a double gesture. The attempt to repress or break free from the past ends up haunting the writers and thinkers of the modern period—until they negotiate a link with the myths and images of the past that threatened. ‘Waste Land’ demonstrates this in the specific allusions to past works and in its melding of characters of the past and the present (Cleopatra becoming a modern working woman in ‘A Game of Chess’ for example) as well as the use of myth to reconnect our lost modern psyche to a past of ritual and meaning.
The experience of ‘The Waste Land’ combines a dig through allusions to a sense of what we hear: the journey is impressionistic. Eliot struggles to rediscover primitive, authentic emotion against the falseness of modern life. He employs the poetic technique of multiplying references (thinking of form of sedimentary rock—the layers evoking ages but holding discordant impressions together).
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
—from The Burial of the Dead
SALON DETAILS ***THIS STUDY IS NOW FULL*** I will offer another Waste Land in the future…
- Facilitated by Toby Brothers
- Wednesday early eves 5:30-7:30 PM BST
- Three meetings over three weeks from May 20th
- Meetings conducted virtually via ZOOM
- Edition recommended: The Waste Land (Faber 2019) ISBN 978-0571351138
- £75 includes background notes and materials
To register, please use the paypal button below to pay £75 for this three meeting study. Upon receipt of payment, I will send you the opening notes, resources and preparation suggestions.
The shorter Salon format is a wonderful way to experience the Salon briefly. As we prepare for the fall course offerings, this study will give participants the opportunity to energise the brain with provocative images and philosophical considerations on the tragedy of humanity in the aftermath of WWI.
If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.
Event Details
"You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.” —William Faulkner If there was ever
Event Details
“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”
—William Faulkner
If there was ever an ideal time to read Ulysses, this moment: future uncertain, present controlled by world leaders blinded by greed, xenophobia rising, identities re-imagined– this moment offers the space. Our work with this book will widen your perspective and deepen your experience of the power of language.
When Joyce was asked (as Tom Stoppard relates) what he did during WWI, he replied: “I wrote Ulysses. What did you do?” Here is your chance to mark this strange halt to life as normal with a huge reading project that will make you a better reader. For this unique time, I am offering this intensive study (two meetings a week for eight weeks) to get us more than halfway through the book (up to Oxen of the Sun). I will be prepared to continue with the second half, but as the future for all of us is ever-changing dependent on the progress of the COVID-19, I want to re-assess towards the end of this study. We start slowly: about 20-25 pages per meeting– and I will support you with LOADS of resources. So you can respond when asked “What did you do during the pandemic?”
“I read Ulysses“.
There is a strong argument for studying this huge and intimidating text—book list chart-topper of 100 greatest books of all time, critics’ darling, most lauded/least read, the book that many literary academics dedicate their lives to studying—but you will only know for yourself by diving in. I believe the only way to study it is with a group of hungry, curious readers who all contribute to evoking meaning, through their questions as well as their insights.
The good news: reading Ulysses is fun. And I don’t mean in a frustrating, overly-analytical see-how-much-you-know-way. The language is amazing—even when I don’t understand it. Perhaps, especially when I don’t understand it, because meaning sneaks in through more than my critical faculty. Meaning slides in through sound, through the lushness of the language, through the filmy and substantial images, and suddenly I find myself transported from a walk on a beach to a contemplation of the origins of man—thanks, James Joyce.
Any time spent studying Joyce leaves one a better reader—a broader thinker—even if all the references, repetitions, epiphanies and allusions are not immediately understood.
** We will be discussing Circe to the end of the work– this study is best for those who have already read the first 2/3rds of the book previously. If you would like to start form the beginning, a new journey starts January 2021
“Joining the Ulysses salon was one of the best things I have ever done. This was a book I had wanted to read for years but never got past the first section. I had no idea what the salon would be like and was very apprehensive about joining up. But Toby so skilfully guided us through it, her knowledge of the text seemingly inexhaustible, that with her warmth and generosity and sensitivity she got everyone involved and the satisfaction of participating in the salon and in getting an understanding of this marvellous work was immense.”
—Ulysses Salon participant
See more participant feedback here…
SALON DETAILS
- Study runs June 1st- June 15th
- We will meet for 5 Sessions: Monday and Thursday 5-7PM BST
- We will be meeting on ZOOM– this is free for participants and simply requires registration
- Please purchase these editions in preparation for our study:
- Ulysses, by James Joyce, Annotated Students’ Edition; (Penguin Modern Classics), ISBN-10: 0141184434. (There are many editions of Ulysses — I find this edition is most coherent and the notes and introduction by Declan Kieberd very helpful; as we will constantly be referencing particular passages, having the same edition will be extremely useful.)
- The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses, by Harry Blamires, ISBN-10: 0415138582
- The total cost for the -meeting study, with all notes and resources materials, is £120
TO REGISTER, Please use the Paypal button below to pay for the study; upon receipt of payment, you will receive opening notes and loads of resources to start the study.
If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.
Event Details
“Risky, I’d say, trying to figure out anybody’s state of mind.” Although not as well known as some of Toni Morrison’s other novels, Jazz
Event Details
“Risky, I’d say, trying to figure out anybody’s state of mind.”
Although not as well known as some of Toni Morrison’s other novels, Jazz addresses with the power we have come to expect from her issues drawn from the legacy of slavery. The novel is about the flight from the South to the North, from the farm to the city, and from family life to independent living. The backdrop is 1920s New York. The built urban environment replaces the open spaces of Ohio in what is and is not a sequel to Beloved.
The connections and disconnections which Morrison weaves between her characters form a loosely structured saga of generational kinship and friendships, in which preoccupations like love, possession, imprisonment, freedom, hate, and forgiveness, bind and separate people, according to their natures and their experiences.
SALON DETAILS
- Facilitated by Toby Brothers
- Tuesday early eve 5-7 PM BST
- Three meetings over three weeks from June 2nd
- Meetings conducted virtually via ZOOM
- Jazz by Toni Morrison edition recommended: Picador of 1992 (many copies available on Abe) or Vintage 2005 (229 pages)
- £75 includes background notes and materials
TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £75. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration. The study is limited to 10 participants. Please contact us if you have any questions.
Despite its title, this is not a novel simply about music. Yet musical rhythms run through its heart. Nor is it simply about race and deprivation, although those issues are central ones. For some commentators, Jazz is Morrison’s most difficult book. Its fluid structure certainly requires careful reading. The study will offer opportunities for considering how the complex arrangement of events and the shifting narration of those events can be understood as a pattern of observation and commentary which reflects hard realities alongside psychological truths.
Description by Geoff Brown- co-facilitator of LLS Jazz study 2020
Event Details
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader
Event Details
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. -Marcel Proust
After completing incredibly satisfying studies of Ulysses and Magic Mountain, we have turned to the next big mountain of Modernism, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. This is my fifth tour through the Search— each visit reveals new nuggets and gasping moments This third volume considers closely the draw of the social dance and the realm of social power: you might not think the anxious aristocracy of the Belle Epoque will teach you something about the world you live in– you will be surprised. The two groups who have made it through the first two volumes in the last six months are lively and welcoming– we have room for two or three in either the afternoon or the evening. If you have not read the first two volumes previously, please contact us to discuss.
Here is how one Salonista describes the pleasure and work of reading Proust: ” This is a velvet jewel of a book that demands the attention of a lover full of enchantment and obsession ,we need not get impatient as all good lovers perfect their art in taking their time.”
Reading Proust teaches the reader to observe how the world is experienced, to be aware that although humans are tempted to give greater weight to the perceptual universe, it is the entwining of memory, idealized experience (dreams) and relationships with what our senses perceive that molds our consciousness.
**5-7 PM Full; Two spaces 7:30-9:30** Please contact us if you have questions about starting The Search in the fourth volume
Salon Details
- Facilitated by Toby Brothers
- Wednesday afternoons 5-7 PM OR 7:30-9:30 PM
- Thirteen Meeting study from June 10th- July 8th; Sept 16- Nov 11 (No meeting October 14th)
- Recommended edition: Vintage Classics Moncrief/Kilmartin/Enright
- £290 for thirteen meetings includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes & discussion notes
- This is a VIRTUAL study– depending on the changing circumstances, we may return to live meetings in Kentish Town in October– if you are only able to do this study virtually, please contact me.
Use the correct Paypal button below to register . The cost is £290 for the thirteen-week study–this will cover the entire volume. I will send along opening notes and critical resources once I have received your registration. Studies start June 10th .
Event Details
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it
Event Details
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
I consider this to be one of the greatest works of American Literature. The unnamed protagonist’s search for identity in a world that will not see him gives us as readers an opportunity to try to understand the psychological devastation of racism in its subtle as well as its violent forms and to consider how each of us participates in the fate of all humanity. Ellison weaves in themes and images from Virgil, Dante, Emerson, and TS Eliot while also using the structure and transcendence of Jazz to create a work that haunts and stirs to the core of our experience.
SALON DETAILS
- Facilitated by Toby Brothers
- Monday afternoons 4-6 pm BST (with one meeting on Wednesday 15 July )
- Seven meetings over seven weeks June 22nd – July 27th
- VIRTUAL —
- Recommended edition: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Penguin Modern Classics (Aug. 2001); ISBN-13: 978-0141184425
- £165 for the seven-week study
TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £165. Opening notes will be sent shortly after registration. The study is limited to 10 participants. Please contact us if you have any questions.
From Saul Bellow’s essay:
“Man Underground”
Review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
published in Commentary (June 1952)
“It is commonly felt that there is no strength to match the strength of those powers which attack and cripple modern mankind. And this feeling is, for the reader of modern fiction, all too often confirmed when he approaches a new book. He is prepared, skeptically, to find what he has found before, namely, that family and class, university, fashion, the giants of publicity and manufacture, have had a larger share in the creation of someone called a writer than truth or imagination that Bendix and Studebaker and the nylon division of Du Pont, and the University of Chicago, or Columbia or Harvard or Kenyon College, have once more proved mightier than the single soul of an individual; to find that one more lightly manned position has been taken. But what a great thing it is when a brilliant individual victory occurs, like Mr. Ellison’s, proving that a truly heroic quality can exist among our contemporaries. People too thoroughly determined and our institutions by their size and force too thoroughly determine can’t approach this quality. That can only be done by those who resist the heavy influences and make their own synthesis out of the vast mass of phenomena, the seething, swarming body of appearances, facts, and details. From this harassment and threatened dissolution by details, a writer tries to rescue what is important. Even when he is most bitter, he makes by his tone a declaration of values and he says, in effect: There is something nevertheless that a man may hope to be. This tone, in the best pages of Invisible Man, those pages, for instance, in which an incestuous Negro farmer tells his tale to a white New England philanthropist, comes through very powerfully; it is tragi-comic, poetic, the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence. In a time of specialized intelligences, modern imaginative writers make the effort to maintain themselves as unspecialists, and their quest is for a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone. What language is it that we can all speak, and what is it that we can all recognize, burn at, weep over, what is the stature we can without exaggeration claim for ourselves; what is the main address of consciousness?
“I was keenly aware, as I read this book, of a very significant kind of independence in the writing. For there is a way for Negro novelists to go at their problems, just as there are Jewish or Italian ways. Mr. Ellison has not adopted a minority tone. If he had done so, he would have failed to establish a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone.”
Event Details
How does one introduce a play that is already dizzy on its own superlatives? For this Salon, we come to study Hamlet
Event Details
How does one introduce a play that is already dizzy on its own superlatives? For this Salon, we come to study Hamlet afresh, not worrying about whether we see it as Shakespeare’s greatest play ever or whether we stand breathless at the language – but finding within the play that that has so riveted audiences and readers for centuries. We welcome to this Salon those who have never read or seen the play along with those who have memorized entire soliloquies – we will need both perspectives to carefully negotiate our way through the “constantly shifting register not only of action but of language” (Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, 2000).
What is Hamlet about? Themes include the most precise questions of loyalty, revenge and allegiance, what it means to be human, the role of fate and self-will, the truth of madness- the essences of human experience. The language must stand up to the weight of these themes – we will closely examine the words and structures to decide if it does and if so, how. Hamlet as a character is utterly compelling: the sinuous dance of his mind, his outrage at human frailty, his exquisite language infused by his agony at a world too small and mean for his spirit inspires the reader.
As with any other Salon dealing with a dramatic work, we will read aloud — sections of the text and I will suggest viewing various filmed adaptations. For those interested in reading Ulysses in 2021, this is an important preparatory work.
SALON DETAILS
- Facilitated by Toby Brothers
- Tuesday early eves 4-6 PM BST
- Four meetings over four weeks from June 23rd
- Meetings conducted virtually via ZOOM
- Any standard edition of Hamlet with line numbers will work– I recommend the Arden Shakespeare for anyone keen to read around the text and to understand the differences in editions
- £95 includes background notes and materials
To register, please use the Paypal button below to pay £95 for this four meeting study. Upon receipt of payment, I will send you the opening notes, resources and preparation suggestions.
Event Details
"I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth,
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“I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be.”
― Toni Morrison, A Mercy
Please notice as you read the differing perspectives and narrative styles that tell the story. Notice also how the land—the specific geographical settings—impact character and tellings. Notice how you read different paradigms: for example, what is ownership to one character is different to another….
SALON DETAILS