Month: April 2013

Monsters- An Evening of Readings at Working Men’s College Camden

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Monsters

an evening of readings

Working Men’s College Library

44 Crowndale Road London NW1 1TR

Nearest tubes: Camden, Mornington Crescent

Wednesday 1 May @ 7.00pm

FREE

To reserve a seat please email: lucyjpop@gmail.com

Amanda Craig is the author of six novels, Foreign Bodies (1990), A Private Place (1991) A Vicious Circle (1996), In a Dark Wood (2000) and Love In Idleness (2003). Her novels and short stories carry characters on from one book to the next, and her last novel, Hearts and Minds (2009) is a sequel to both A Vicious Circle and Love in Idleness. She lives in London, is a reviewer and broadcaster, and is also the children’s book critic for the Times. She will be reading from her two novels: A Private Place, about school bullying, recently reissued by Abacus, and Hearts and Minds about London’s migrant workers.

Suzi Feay is a critic, writer and broadcaster. She was literary editor of the Independent on Sunday for 11 years and currently lectures in journalism at Brunel. She has judged many literary prizes, including the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the National Poetry competition. She will be reading from The Holy Innocents, a cycle of 12 poems about the life of Gilles de Rais, vastly wealthy marshall of France, companion in arms of Joan of Arc, warrior, devout Catholic, necromancer and serial killer, eventually executed for his crimes in Nantes.

Emran Mian is a civil servant working in the Cabinet Office. He is a frequent contributor to Prospect magazine and the author of an acclaimed non-fiction book about the lives of autistic adults, Send In The Idiots: Stories from the Other Side of Autism. He will be reading from his debut novel, The Banker’s Daughter, a tense thriller, set in Lahore, Beirut and London, that charts the rise and fall of a banker and explores the moral ambiguities of our money-dominated world.

Lloyd Shepherd is a former journalist and digital producer who has worked for the Guardian, Channel 4, the BBC and Yahoo. He will be reading from his first novel, The English Monster, based on the real-life story of the gruesome Ratcliffe Highway murders that takes in piracy, early colonialism and the slave trade, spanning different continents and centuries.

Meike Ziervogel is a writer and publisher living in north London. She grew up in northern Germany and came to London in 1986 to study Arabic language and literature. She has worked for Reuters, Agence France Presse, Financial Times and Routledge. In 2008 she founded Peirene Press, an award-winning independent publishing house. She will be reading from Magda, her debut novel based on the life of Magda Goebbels, published by Salt in March 2013.

Come and meet the authors, hear them read, buy their books

There will be a cash bar available on the night…

“Wonder. Go on and wonder”- Faulkner– Salons coming and news

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Coming Salons:
*April 29th The Fields Beneath Poetry Salon 3-4 PM Birches by Robert Frost
*30th April Ulysses Nausicaa chapter (Salon full)
*May 2nd–6-10 PM The Sound and the Fury Salon Intensive (four spaces remaining)
* May 11th 10:30-16:30 Joyce Taster: the Genius of James Joyce at CITY LIT

taylor-maggie_southern-gothic_el-lanouefineartcom

The Salon conversations often feel like effervescent glimmers against the chugging engine of schedules and time. The study of words and ideas plunges through the rigid patterns of work to glimpse the wholeness of what we are, of what we could be…at the same time the conversations are so much a reflection of where the individual participants are at any given moment in their lives, and where they meet the language and each other. This unpredictably feels risky–and potent. My head is still full (and this writing is influenced by) the strong work we did on Woolf’s Between The Acts this past Friday evening. Even at the end of the week, readers can come together and find their own framework reflected and sharpened through the vision of the artist of language.

From a Salon participant:
Re the salon, what I’ve found especially appealing – and stimulating – is the way it brings together such a vivid variety of viewpoints and stances and gives each one a space. And allows them to spark off one another and create the most wonderful, unlikely correspondences – a real meeting of minds, as it were. I’m also impressed by the way that, if anyone is struggling with the text (all of us at some point, I imagine), the support and encouragement provided by the group – and, of course, yourself – generate energy flashes that give you the stamina and confidence to continue. Bravo, bravo.

The crunch of family needs, work, depleted energy and resources requires a postponement of the Paris Salons until September. The conversations that happen in those weekends are magical…I do not want to approach them with less than a full load of energy and focus. I am looking towards the second week of September and am taking requests now for readings…on the top of the charts at the moment: Between The Acts and a second consideration of Moby Dick.

As Ulysses takes over my mind and hints of summer starts to scatter us to the world around, there will be fewer Salons on offer in the coming months. I am starting to look towards September offerings and hope to post these in the coming weeks to fortify your summer reading. Some suggestions so far include: Dylan Thomas, Oscar Wilde, Moby Dick, The Odyssey….There may be a few casual evening studies in the second half of June– ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, anyone? for a bit of Salon gathering fun…let me know where you are, what you are reading and what words move you.

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

Poetry Salon on Robert Frost’s Birches

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This is taken from the Poetry Foundation’s website where you will find an audio reading by Frost of the poem along with a thoughtful, if dense, essay on Frost’s style and work.
When we discuss poetry, we start with a close consideration of the words and how they are used. This may lead us to the larger question of what the poem does: does a poem, as some have suggested, work to capture human experience at so sharp and close an exposure that in reading a good poem we learn a bit more about the process of being human? Does this poem act in this way? How does this differ from other media forms we encounter? Why should we do the work poetry requires?

Birches
by Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Source: The Poetry of Robert Frost (1969)

Some further thoughts:
*Narrative prose form offers the Other for study; poetry throws us back into ourselves (without plot, the story comes from me).
Robert Frost defines a poem: “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” He contends that the wisdom might provide temporary stability: “a momentary stay against confusion”. Wildness is necessary to balance form- tension between the need for form and the corresponding need of freedom from form. Frost uses a container (the Sonnet, for ex.) to create tension. (Echoes E. Bishop’s Sestina)
–From Rereading Robert Frost, p.220

Art is organization—a searching after order. The primal artistic act is God’s creating of the universe out of chaos—shaping formlessness into form. Therefore evaluate a poem by its unity, coherence and proper placement of emphasis: structure, form, pattern, symmetry (reflect) the human instinct for design.
–notes from Perrine’s Sound & Sense pg. 219


This image was borrowed from Poem Shape where you will find a thoughtful essay on the meter and rhyme of “Birches”.

Joyce taster at CityLit May 11th

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For those who can’t get enough of Joyce– or for those who would like to know what the fuss is about, I will be facilitating a study at CityLit, London’s centre for adult learning on May 11th. We will be looking at his formidable short story, “The Dead” which was reveals the moment of transition for Joyce into the experimental genius of his novels. We will also look at the first two sections of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s semi-autobiographical journey into the depths of language and experience. At the start of the book Stephen is an innocent coming into being- “Who am I?” as we all ask and answer in our own terms, using our experience. How do we locate the Self in the world?
Use the link below to register at CityLit and contact me so I can send you additional notes and resources.

The genius of James Joyce
10:30-16:30 Saturday May 11th, £38 with reduced senior/concession fees.

Dip into James Joyce’s inner world exploration in a dynamic one day course using the short story, “The Dead” and the first two sections of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Please read the sections in preparation for our discussion.

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London Week of April 21st–Prufrock in the Fields, The Citizen in Ulysses, Potluck Between the Acts

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Labrynth Tielman

What a week for intellectual wandering!

Monday 3-4 PM The Fields Beneath Poetry Salons— T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
This poem- considered a Modernist classic–comes alive when read aloud and considered with a group of lively minds. Drop ins welcome as space allows…

Friday: Between the Acts Salon Intensive 5:30-10 PM
There are a few spaces remaining in this study so sign up now and start reading!. We will take the whole novel in one gulp: the novel itself is among Woolf’s more accessible (not very long and distinctive characters and plot. “Yet in her “easier” last book, ingeniously the story is played out on three levels–a pageant within a pageant and all within the vaster pageant of creation and infinity. The animal plane, the human and the spiritual, each has function and counterpointal significance….On a single day of June, 1939–with the war imminent but virtually unperceived–the action takes place at Pointz Hill, an English country house. It revolves about a pageant played upon the lawns by the local villagers.” (Hudson Strode in the NYT Book Review). This book offers a road into the deep psychological probing that Woolf leads us on…darkly funny and provocative about the ideal of English life in the shadow of war, this work will gives us much to consider about the tensions between unity and dispersal, the play between the world as a spectacle and the role of the viewer.

Ulysses by James Joyce Tuesdays 8-10 (Salon full) The discussions here have the energy of a wonderful intellectual struggle and camaraderie… feedback: your contagious enthusiasm is what brings me back eagerly each week to continue with the text. Although I initially found the idea of studying amongst ten strangers daunting, the positive energy amongst yourself and the other members of the group is both encouraging and exciting. Each individual brings a fresh aspect of learning into the group which is perhaps what is most enjoyable, as it allows us to interpret the text from every angle. I have thoroughly enjoyed the course so far…

NEXT WEEK–REGISTER NOW! THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner Salon Intensive Thursday May 2nd

Here is an excerpt from a Paris Review interview on the impelling image of The Sound and the Fury:
INTERVIEWER

How did The Sound and the Fury begin?

FAULKNER

It began with a mental picture. I didn’t realize at the time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a short story and that it would have to be a book. And then I realized the symbolism of the soiled pants, and that image was replaced by the one of the fatherless and motherless girl climbing down the drainpipe to escape from the only home she had, where she had never been offered love or affection or understanding.

I had already begun to tell the story through the eyes of the idiot child, since I felt that it would be more effective as told by someone capable only of knowing what happened but not why. I saw that I had not told the story that time. I tried to tell it again, the same story through the eyes of another brother. That was still not it. I told it for the third time through the eyes of the third brother. That was still not it. I tried to gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman. … It’s the book I feel tenderest toward. I couldn’t leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again.”

This is one of those books that teaches us to read more deeply as we consider how each narrator tells the story from within their own realm and language. This is a beautiful, disturbing book that will open your mind to the tyrannies of Time, the smell of honeysuckle, the haunting of dusk…

Coming end of May: the London Literature Festival– check it out: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/festivals-series/london-literature-festival

Date Change for London Sound & The Fury; Emily in the Fields tomorrow

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The conversations that have erupted recently in the Ulysses study leave me (and others) spinning. We grapple and argue about the nature of truth, of art, of gender and words–and to put these conversations down into electronic strokes seems cheap. But a great work of literature with an energetic gathering of minds does just this: brings to the surface the power and possibility of language to illuminate our humanity.

Forgive me: I am feeling full of Spring.
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15 April 3-4 PM Poetry Salon: Emily Dickinson at The Fields Beneath Cafe–all welcome.
26 April 5:30-10 PM Between the Acts Salon Intensive–register now to receive opening notes & start reading…
2 May 6-10:30 PM The Sound and the Fury Salon Intensive–register now to receive opening notes & start reading…

To accommodate participant requests, I have moved the Sound and Fury study ahead to give time to read–but do sign up now so you can recieve the opening notes. This is one of those books that teaches you to be a better reader–and a more aware human being.

Tomorrow, April 15th, The Fields Beneath Cafe is hosting the second Poetry Salon— a casual drop-in study from 3-4PM.
We will be considering two poems of Emily Dickinson whose work trips off the tongue but engages the soul. No preparation necessary; this is for poetry lovers and those who are unsure how to approach the stuff….next week, T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock: Let us go then.

Tell All The Truth

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth’s superb surprise;

As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind,
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.
–Emily Dickinson

So much to read; so little time….Salons coming April & May London 2013

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Since I feel this can’t-read-enough anxiety daily, I am trying a new approach: it is not the amount I read but the depth of consideration in what I do read. Cliche? Perhaps…but any given moment or struggle offers a newly carved truth if I am attending to it. I can say over and over to myself ‘we are all doing the best we can’ but is only when I feel it in my bones, hold the words like some delicacy that I must think about to savour, that the truth leaks out beneath the saying.

The recent weeks have included two galvanizing studies of Moby Dick in Paris, the on-going challenge and glory of the six month Ulysses study and the start of a new program: Poetry Salons at the Fields Beneath Cafe adjacent to Kentish Town West. Coming up (and time to sign up):

The Sound and The Fury Salon Intensive 6-10:30 PM cost is 45 pounds; evening includes a pot-luck meal. Participant in recent Paris S&F study had this feedback: “Our study of this book has re-made me as a reader and student of human nature…”. Reading Faulkner will infuse your mind–but sign up today to get the notes and start reading. recommended edition: Norton Critical
Friday April 19th;
four remaining spaces
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Between the Acts Salon Intensive
5:30-10 PM cost is 45 pounds; evening includes a pot-luck meal.
Virginia Woolf on how to read: “[F]ew people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite.” from The Second Common Reader
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Weekly brief Poetry Studies at The Fields Beneath Cafe Mondays 3-4 PM register by contacting me; cost is the purchase of a coffee or tasty treat and sliding scale donation to the London Literary Salon (4-8 pounds suggested).

Moby Dick The recent Salon Intensive in Paris on Moby Dick was amazing and exhaustive– and we only had six hours. I am considering proposing a Moby Dick study in London–interested? We would go for 5ive weekly meetings– it is a matter of blood and sweat to complete the work in less time. Please email me with schedule prefernces (Thursday afternoons? Wednesday or Thursday evenings?) and if there is enough interest, I will announce the study in the next newsletter…The Arcola Theatre is offering this performance until May 4th:
http://www.camdenreview.com/reviews/theatre/2013/apr/ahab-spring-%E2%80%93-moby-dick-arcola-theatre

 

See you in the pages…

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