Musings on the Short Stories for Paris Salon Intensive April 2014
Sometimes two random pieces connect in the mind by sheer accident—but the way they speak to each other becomes something more than coincidence. As I re-read ‘Boys and Girls’ today, I also read a piece on Laura Bates and her blog, Everyday Sexism (http://everydaysexism.com) and there was the clang. Alice Munro has a gift for exposing the strange customs of our realm—the realm I live in & have formed my identity and relationships in- without direct commentary but in a way that as reader, I stand back somewhat aghast at this odd, normalized world.
“Girls don’t slam doors like that.” “Girls keep their knees together when they sit down.” And worse still, when I asked some questions, “That’s none of girls’ business.” I continued to slam the doors and sit as awkwardly as possible, thinking that by such measures I kept myself free. –“Boys and Girls”
This short story concerns itself with how a girl learns to be a girl-and how awkward that learning is. The story was written fifty years ago and is set in a time before then—but still; there is something recognizable about the way we are socialized to a reduced form of ourselves (boys AND girls) to ‘right’ ways of behavior and an acceptance of inequities that stated openly, I would not accept. The blog Laura Bates started to simply hear (is that the right verb for electronic admissions?) examples of everyday sexism has hit an unexpected nerve and revealed a level of daily sexism that is astounding. And here is the meet for me: as a deep believer in the power of relationships to bridge divides (gender, nationality, age, race, beliefs…) I can not believe how far we have not come. Or how short a distance we have gone in our ability to reduce gender oppression knowing as much as we do.
I appreciate stories and narratives for this: whatever maybe bubbling and sawing away in my mind suddenly gains shape when carefully crafted as an objective portrayal. My own struggles and turmoil clarifies against the experience of another—and I gather words and examples to sift the chaos of feelings. This is only the start of the process of actively working for positive change—but then we come together in a group, we talk about the issues raised in the literature and our own lives—and we turn away with strength and company in the strangeness of life.
Still open for registration SHORT STORIES SalonIntensive May 16th and Aeschylus’ Oresteia May 17th
Why I Live at the P.O. (1941) Boys and Girls (1968) Both of these works are available on line using the links to the titles.
Cost 30€
The Short Story Salon offers a great (and relatively easy) introduction to the Salon work. These two sharp and witty pieces provide an accessible breadth of writing for our discussion—loads to consider on the nature of language, perspective and narration. We need a few more participants to join those already registered—if you have been interested in trying a Salon, this would be a perfect place to dive in.
From Beowulf through The Odyssey, our study of the classics informs our understanding of the role of art and literature in forming our sense of ourselves and human history. This will be the first Salon study of the Oresteia so will have the energy of new & unexplored territory. Aeschylus explores the shift from a world ruled by force and feud to a time when human rationale and the early ideas of civilisation start to inform law and behaviour.
Salon community news..
Lizzie Harwood is touting her editorial services to authors or companies in need of a freelance copy-editor, book doctor, ghostwriter, or writing mentor (personal training for writers! bring on the Book Bookcamp!). See www.editordeluxe.com for further details.
With renewed commitment to get out and enjoy cultural London rather than (simply?) living in the realm of words, parenting, teaching and running through the Heath with a muddy dog – I enjoyed two theatrical productions this past weekend (thanks to inspired friends).
Olwen Fouéré in her solo stage interpretation of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake becomes the language she speaks. Without plot, character, consistent setting nor event, we are left with pure language which is often just sound played and expanded. Fouéré uses her body to convey meaning while the language tends to elude interpretation—and we travel the river’s meanderings with her, flashing through our own memories that her chants and rhymes evoke, occasionally meeting the Irish world of rich traditions and song that she swims through. Salvation morphs into Salve Ocean –I know that song.
The next evening was in the layers of the Lion and Unicorn—part pub, restaurant and tiny theatre—for a version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This work has been the source of many interpretations over the years: one might argue that the interpretations have eclipsed Shelley’s stark and complex tale. Those who know the story primarily through its film versions are surprised to discover how the story itself focuses on intimate relationships, the struggle between work and family and the responsibility of the creator for the one created. Any theatrical or film production of the work must make choices about what parts of the story to illuminate and in so doing changes the focus of Shelley’s complex vision. The performance at the Lion and Unicorn reduced Frankenstein’s relationships with his family and loved ones and the careful education—in both books and human relations—that the Monster undergoes. This version highlighted the way Victor’s creation of the monster destroys him psychically and physically: but I found his character less compelling with the lack of context.
Both of these experiences have me humming on the nature of language and story: what makes a story worth telling- worth re-telling? I think about how we each hold our particular version of a beloved story—that has as much to do with our own ideas & history as it does the text itself and its placement in time and perspective. How I would love to make my own production of Ulysses—to help the language leap towards an audience, to make the beloved and appalling characters dance out their story. As our study of The Magic Mountain nears its end, I see that the unfolding of a work with a group of minds deeply engaged gives us each an entrance to the vision of the writer. We make our own production.
Lizzie is a writer and Paris Salonista– she perfectly sums up the expereince of being in the belly of the Whale in last weekend’s lively study…check out her blog on writing, living and life’s interruptions: http://lizzieharwood.com/2013/03/29/readthewhale/
10 reasons to read Herman Melville’s The Whale (or M.D.)
March 29, 2013
Last Saturday, I jumped onboard of another of Toby Brother’s awe-inspiring Literary Salons – (here in Paris) this time on Moby Dick or The Whale, by Herman Melville (published in 1851). It was 427 pages long. But in teeny-tiny font with itty-bitty footnotes. It was a book that required halogen reading light – so I dunno how the 19th Century folks read it. I only received the book on Tuesday – four days before the Salon, so I can’t say I read all of it because that would have been insane, but I read 3/4th of it, which was still fairly insane. Boy, the book blows your mind.
Here are my 10 Reasons Why We Should All Read Melville’s The Whale.
1) The cannibal is a really lovely guy. Who knew?
2) Captain Ahab is the possibly the loneliest character in literature. He’s also a jerk. It’s pretty compelling.
3) The Whales ROCK. They are described in detail, including their willies, which takes up Chapter 95, where we see a mincer wearing the skin of the Whale’s six-foot-long, one-foot diameter member. Way out there.
4) The language is totally sagacious!
5) Melville plays around with so many narrative forms, and gets so darned allegorical, that you don’t know what’s what anymore but you are on the boat with those guys and you totally understand why they regularly spend three years at a time at sea eating salted meat and ship’s biscuit. And blubber steaks.
6) Starbuck’s, the coffee empire, was named after the First Mate character, Starbuck. So now I can’t see Starbuck’s without thinking of this novel.
7) It’ll make you want to make and eat Clam Chowder. And possibly watered down Rum.
8) If you don’t take the side of Moby against Ahab then you know you are a jerk. The detail of how they strip a dead whale for its oil will make you cry.
9) It’s basically an adventure story. And a bit of a love story between Ishmael and Queequeg.
10) It explains why we are currently in a mess with the ecology, capitalism, the treatment of other cultures in a post-colonial world, and why man is basically a self-centered destroyer of our planet. Yet it was written over 150 years ago. Way before Greenpeace.
Thank you Toby and fellow Salonistas for taking on such a leviathan of a book.
Hello all–apologies for the repeat info– but when I sent out the newsletter last week, the website was TIRED and when people tried to access the information, they found it unavailable. So writing to say I believe it is fixed…and now would be a good time to sign up for the following if you are interested….
Cost: 30.00 euro (includes opening notes and critical work)
April 4th: 6:30- 10 PM
I have loved the craft and world evoked by Alice Munro for years–I first taught her work Lives of Girls and Women in a very energetic and popular Salon in Paris some years ago. I suggest that Munro explores juxtaposed worlds in her fiction…that she uses her characters to probe the relationships between psychological spaces and the outside world.
Munro’s award of the Nobel Prize for literature is the perfect excuse to offer a study based on her short stories. We will look closely at both short stories in this single meeting and consider each writer’s unique voice in probing the intimacy and peculiarities of the human heart. Eudora Welty offers a different world, a different rhythm, perhaps a sharper comic edge in “Why I live at the P.O.”. It is easy to be seduced by the humour there– but there is also a disruptive family event explored and analysed. There is always an outsider in any group–this is at its most awkward in family structures–but often the outsider has the widest view…
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann–first and second third
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain has been grouped with the two other giant Modernist classics Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past as the formative novels of the Modernist era. A first dip in to the text reveals an accessible, lilting narrative that once in, you find yourself considering time, society, passion, memory from the strange angle of remove that characterises the perspective of the invalid. Mann’s work is also deeply political; placed before WWI but written between WWI and WWII, MM engages questions of Nationalism and nostalgia with the shadow of future events shifting the weight of the ironic stance that Mann employs.
For the first third study, please read through “Encyclopedia” (pg. 299 in the Woods ed.)
For the second third- please read through the chapter entitled “Snow” (pg. 590 in the Woods ed.)
We will need some time to encounter the richness and length of this work: the study will extend over three meetings: following dates will be in May and June. The cost for each five hour meeting (critical resources, session notes and historical/cultural background readings included) is 45 euro.
RECOMMENDED EDITION EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY trans. by John e. Woods
To register, please use the paypal button below to sign up for this study. Email me at lit salon@gmail.com if you have any questions. Upon receipt of registration, we will send you the opening notes and details. Welcome to this immersion in the language and philosophy of one the 20th century’s greatest thinkers.
These galloping lives– the commitments & details, the lists and demands on our time can eat away at our lives until our daily rhythm is defined by bits and pieces–not passions and purpose. I speak from my own experience– and am recognising my daily struggle to stay present and aware. In the moments of the Salon, my attention is drawn deep into language and meaning– and then into the words of others who are also responding to the ideas and art before us. It is a wonderfully rich and sharp time together; when I am able to take the gift of this awareness, the ability to pay attention and shut out the noise of the thousand clamouring things that need to be done–my relationships and movement through life is simply better. Each member of the Salon community offers insights and a way of seeing that broadens my own–I emerge from our work together with a cleansed and renewed perspective. Two studies are in the process of finishing our 15 week study of Mann’s Magic Mountain just now: while at moments the climb has been hard, the gift of our work together is a clarity on the work of living in the knowledge of our mortality, a deeper understanding of the struggle between the realm of ideas and the urges of passion, some stirring meditations on the embrace of suffocating snow and studies on the sublimity of music…
Again I am living the lesson that to read a few books deeply is more satisfying than trying to read it all. Wishing you all renewed attention and reading time…
Pitfield London is thrilled to introduce “LIT IN PIT – Literature in Conversation” our Thursday 7pm-11pm get-together dinner hosted by Wendy Meakin (Channel 4 Four Rooms) and Toby Brothers (London Literary Salon).
Toby and Wendy at Pitfield London
Come join an evening of literary exploration and discover T. S. Eliot’s Modernist classic poem “The Wasteland”.
Combining deep knowledge with passion for language and expertise in meaningful group studies; this event also includes a tasty meal and wine.
So what are you waiting for? Book now! Don’t let “April be the cruellest month”…
shop@pitfieldlondon.com www.pitfieldlondon.com
“Yet when we came back, from the hyacinth garden,
Yours arms full, and your hair wet,
I could not Speak, and my eyes failed,
I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing.
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
What they say…
“Stimulating. Supportive. Sociable. Multiply those three terms by at least a million and what do you get? The Literary Salon, that’s what. A galvanising gateway to some of the most challenging – but rewarding – works in the modernist canon (and before and beyond); a much-needed meeting point for quick, quirky minds of all ages, shapes and backgrounds. In short, T. Brothers is gifted with a strange and lovely alchemy that transforms the torpor of a weekday evening into something intriguingly torrid and tantalising…”
Salon Participant, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, To the Lighthouse
