“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

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 . 

“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.”

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.

“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

Morrison has commented that she wrote A Mercy  to explore a time before slavery was identified with race. This may help readers to consider race more as ‘an interplay with other social determiners, such as gender and class. Moreover, we must resist the trigger reaction that interprets “race” to reference black-white relations, given that in colonial America another different people lived here who were subjected to biological mayhem as well as painstakingly plotted genocide” (Tally & Stave, intro to Critical Approaches: Toni Morrison’s 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