Reflections on Their Eyes Were Watching God by Alison Cable The Dream Keeper, by Langston Hughes Bring me all of your dreams, You dreamers, Bring me all of your Heart melodies That I may wrap them In a blue cloud-cloth Away from the too-rough fingers Of the...
“There is one peculiarity which real works of art possess in common. At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season....
Reading to Widen Perspective The London Literary Salon has always been committed to using literature to combat prejudice. I have been leading discussions on literature by Black Americans for 30 years- and continue to find the study of the passionate writing by Toni...
MEDIA RELEASE – 8 APRIL 2020 (for immediate release) KEEP CALM, READ ULYSSES AND CARRY ON . . . The impact of COVID-19, which initially threatened disaster, has resulted in one London business going global almost overnight. The Kentish Town-based London...
Than there is the writing: to grapple with the words and linguistic pyrotechnics of James Joyce—to enter into his exploration of the body, mind and street-life, to sit in awe of his allusions, musicality, interweaving structures and thematic developments is to expand...
March 16, 2020 From Toby– We are entering into a crisis that is unknowable. There are so many difficulties in this moment– it feels easy to get lost in the anxiety and uncertainty. My go-to coping mechanism is to DO SOMETHING– and not just hoard...
Courses coming with spaces remaining: Beloved four weeks starting mid-April The Years—Five-day intensive study in St Ives April (two spaces available) Yoga and Literary Retreat in Umbria early June of Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady –one space available A Mercy...
“But Virginia Woolf wanted us to take a closer look than this at masculine power and control; to analyse with greater precision some tacit manifestations of sexual polarization and to examine their effects on young women in England in 1880. So we are moved into the...
December 16th, 2019 After last week’s election… In recent Salon discussions and in several social conversations, we have re-visited the question as to why we read writers who present perspectives that we now find deeply problematic. This could be in reference to...
Spend the Winter tackling Ulysses with Toby Brothers and The London Literary Salon By Nicole Hubbard (published on Bookstoker) After a chance conversation with a friend about life after 50, she casually mentioned that each year she had taken on a new project outside...
I would recommend courses led by Toby to anyone who wants to look at a text in detail in a study group
I was certainly surprised at how much I was thrown off balance by these two astounding writers…I look forward to returning for more
We all came to the group with different backgrounds and interests but Mark has skillfully guided us through a stimulating programme of Greek literature.
I always leave the meetings with a much broader understanding of what we are reading than when I arrived
Everyone feels they get heard and therefore that each of us has a contribution to make
In all of the courses I have attended I have felt a bond within the group, and this contributes significantly to the quality of the discussions
Lovely, intimate groups with in-depth discussions, lots of learning, and friendships are made for life there
I’ve read things I’d never dared read before. I’ve made new friends and met really interesting people.
“Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts
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Vintage International 1990 Marc J. Cohen
“Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both:—touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am’s private own: not spirit, soul; the liquorish and ungirdled mind is anyone’s to take in any any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too. ”
― William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
Absalom, Absalom! is said to be Faulkner’s most difficult but most brilliant work. Absalom presents the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him.”
Described as ‘hard-core Faulkner’, one review says: “The words and writing are critically acclaimed since your parents were in school. The examples of how a war can raze an entire culture’s edifice of identity are compelling, each person’s doom and curse being common among her kin and her countrymen: ghosts and sex and violence and cruelty, gut wrenching drama to challenge any soap opera or miniseries or movie. There are themes and studies aplenty within the nightmare realm of Faulkner’s masterpiece.”
Absalom, Absalom! includes characters and shadows from The Sound and the Fury but delves more deeply into the surrounding world and Southern inheritance that S&F traces. The multiple voices and perspectives each clamor to have their story told, to get to the heart of how they understood the fecund and exhausted world and their role in it. Faulkner orchestrates shifting sympathies and the reader is struck with how deeply immersed we become with the characters and the unfolding mystery at the heart of the work. Racism and its imbedded structure in Southern history at first seem to be the background against which the drama of the story is played out; but ultimately slavery and its de-humanization of all involved becomes the project of the book to explore—although from an unusual and intimate angle.
This book will offer the Salon much to discuss in its gorgeous language and complex subjects: racial identification, pride, identity, impact of history on family, the drive of revenge, the struggle to claim selfhood in a broken world. . .
SALON DETAILS
Facilitated by Salon Director Toby Brothers
Seven- meeting study starting 5th October (No meeting 19 October nor 9 November)
VIRTUAL meetings– on ZOOM
Recommended edition: Absalom, Absalom!, by William Faulkner, Vintage Classics edition (1995); ISBN-: 978-0099475118
Antigone, Medea, Clytemnestra, Phaedra, Electra, Hecuba—it's remarkable that some of the most memorable female characters
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Clytemnestra, by John Collier, 1882
Antigone, Medea, Clytemnestra, Phaedra, Electra, Hecuba—it’s remarkable that some of the most memorable female characters in drama might first have appeared on stage before an audience of only men (with the roles played by men, as well). We are not sure whether women were even allowed to attend theatre performances in 5th century Athens. We do know, at least, that these fascinating characters were created in a place and time where women had little place in public life.
It’s all the more fascinating, then, that the playwrights who brought them to life gave a voice to such noble, clever, passionate—and above all, strong—women who were keenly aware of the contraints placed on them by the society in which they lived. Whether in doing so the writers were portraying what they desired, or what they feared, is much less clear.
In the six weeks of this study we’ll read six of the finest Classical-age Greek dramas, from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides–the latter, especially, showed a keen interest in the lives of women: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Antigone and Electra, and three plays by Euripides, the Medea, Hippolytus and Bacchae.
Six-meeting study, 05 October to 16 November 2020 (no meeting 26 October)
Online discussions using Zoom meeting interface. Zoom is free for participants, instructions will be sent upon registration.
Recommended edition:
The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm; ISBN-13: 978-0812983098
£150 for six-week study, includes notes and questions for preparation.
TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £150.
ABOUT THE FACILITATOR: Mark Cwik has been organizing and leading discussions of great literature for over twenty years in London, Chicago and Toronto. He specializes in works from the ancient, mythic and religious world. He was trained as a discussion facilitator while at the Great Books Foundation in Chicago and has been a passionate advocate for great books education since attending St. John’s College, Santa Fe and the University of Chicago Basic Program in Liberal Education.
“I’ve been coming to Mark’s discussion groups for about 15 years . . . Mark is amazing in his ability to keep the group functioning smoothly. He asks questions that get to the heart of the piece and he keeps the group focused on those questions. You don’t feel that he’s trying to steer us to any conclusion; he’s in it with us to figure out what the author is saying. He makes everyone feel welcome and their opinions are respectfully heard. He’s always prepared and totally dedicated to advancing our understanding of the great books.” — group participant.
If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly
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“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch
In Middlemarch, Eliot probes the complexity of human nature and studies the idea of vocation: the call to find meaning through work in a provincial world.
I love the dilemma–how is an intelligent woman going to be intellectually stimulated in a time when there are so few options for women? This reflects Eliot’s own story: why does she write under a male pseudonym? Dorothea settles on marriage to an older man, a scholar and (she hopes) a mentor–ironically making an intellectual choice about the desire of the heart. What ensues is her struggle to be the person she aspires to being a world which values none of the ideals that interest her.
I love how psychological Eliot is, how interested she is in the inner workings of people’s minds. Why do Dorothea and Lydgate make the choices they do? Why do they choose people so unsuited to them? As in Daniel Deronda, Eliot is very interested in intellectual/spiritual passion–how religious scholarship can inform or transform a life–but while she is attracted to the dispassionate discipline of religious wisdom, she also knows that earthly love is what sustains us. This tension, between moral ideal and human behaviour, is the drive of the novel and probably makes the most sense in its historical context: a time of great intellectual inquiry, the Victorian obsession with self-improvement. Yet it isn’t that different from the self-improvement obsessions of our own time…
Seven-meeting study, 22 October to 3rd December 2020
Online discussions using Zoom meeting interface. Zoom is free for participants, instructions will be sent upon registration.
Recommended edition: Middlemarch by George Eliot (Norton Critical Editions) Paperback – 26 Jan. 2000 ISBN-10 : 9780393974522
£170 for six-week study, includes notes and questions for preparation.
TO REGISTER for the study, please use the secure Paypal payment button below to pay £170 (Please contact us if you prefer to pay by direct bank transfer).
I admit that even when I knew I had to dive into the text it took me 3 or four starts. Eliot does not make the work easy to enter: some find Dorothea annoying in her earnestness, others find the narrative repetitive. We are entering a different world and I found once I had the rhythm of the writing, the story was so compelling that the earlier frustrations melted away. The Prelude sets up epic possibilities for female roles by using Saint Theresa and her life as an example of a’ life beyond self’. While this first page left me awed with its spiritual grandeur, I had a hard time finding my place in this elevated conversation. But on rereading, I found that Eliot had understood my concern. What the prelude considers is a very recognisable struggle, for me, for women, for anyone who has dreamed large dreams and found that the quotidian world does not always make room for grand design.
From the Prelude:
“That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.”
