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
