16 April 2012
Salons starting this week: The Iliad and Richard III—still a few spaces and time to read* Use the links for each to go to the event page where you will find all the details:
• The Iliad Salon will be starting on Thursday the 19th of April (meeting afternoons, 1-3 PM) and the power of this work and Christopher Logue’s poetry will give us great fodder for discovery. Please register for this as soon as possible so I can mail to you the opening details.
• * POSTPONED* Bleak House by Charles Dickens Salon will commence the week of the 17TH of MAY for five weeks—please email me with schedule preferences ( I am currently reserving Wednesday evenings 8-10 PM but would also consider Wednesday afternoons 12:30-2:30 PM).
• Richard the III –in preparation for the coming RSC visit will meet for two Intensive meetings on 7-10 PM Sundays, April 22nd & 29th…and then we need to schedule our theater date.
Amazing what some time away from the daily gallop can do for your perspective. I returned to London and realized I must have had temporary insanity when I set the schedule for April: there is not enough room in my head for the clamoring voices of Ulysses, the calculations and cravings of Richard III, the brilliance of Achilles’ anger AND the spontaneous combustions of Dickens’ Bleak House. So Our Dear Friend Dickens will wait until May. In the meantime…
The Iliad starts this Thursday..room for two more participants
Working with Christopher Logue’s accompanying poetry is extraordinary. In literature there is often an undercurrent of competition: who tells the best story? Who creates the most memorable scene, the most believable character? Reading War Music alongside Homer’s Iliad helps me shift that perspective. These two works speak to each other across the ages as Logue seeks to infuse the magnificent heroism of the epic with the human passions, gestures and subtle moments. Aphrodite adjusts the spaghetti strap of her golden girdle, the arrival of the gods is heralded by ‘…A change of temperature. Or else, as now, the scent of oceanic lavender…’, the men of the Achaean army are first seen:
Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet
Logue’s poem and The Iliad engage each other; in the Salon study we will use these two brazen and awesome epics to discover our own understanding of the absolute definition of the heroic, the nature of honor and wrath and the glory of friendships commingled with sacrifice. With Liane’s guidance, we will also make use of our time to bring the words into being with our own dramatization—underscoring the Salon proposal that poetry shared aloud manifests itself most thoroughly as art.
Richard III meets this Sunday (April 22nd) evening 7-10 PM and next; please register now on the website and I will send opening notes and details….
This is a short intensive Salon that coincides with the many Richard III productions occurring in the coming months. We will read the play in two sessions and view parts of a production; as with the 2011 Measure for Measure study, anyone interested will attend a local production in September in Stratford. Our trip in January was inspiring in all things Shakespearean.
Richard III is Shakespeare’s probing of unrepentant evil. In this play, the beauty of Shakespeare’s language combines with his psychological probing to develop one of the most complex and riveting portraits of human agony turned into action. As literary critic Marjorie Garber points out: “Shakespeare’s Richard III is arguably the first fully realized and psychologically conceived character in his plays.” As an audience, we are fascinated by how raw power is socially channeled into manipulation and revenge—perhaps we learn more from the study of misbehavior than we do studying those who behave in morally acceptable ways. Richard III is the ancestor to many of our popular villains: his masterful wielding of language offers a thinking villain who will ask us to reflect on our own structures of truth and moral behavior.
Some words…
I, that am rudely stamp’d and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them
See you in the pages….
