Just coming down from the amazing energy and insights shared in the past weekend Paris studies. I wish I could capture that energy in a balloon: I could get myself to a Caribbean Island where I could read and swim for days with the glow of the words we read and shared. But back in this life, planning is required. So what next? If you participate in the Paris studies (or if you would like to, if so please contact me ), please vote for the next set.
And in a fit of planning, I think I can even offer the NEXT weekend possibility: weekend of May 12-13th, choices to include at least Virgil’s Aeniad, possibly also Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, Updike’s “A & P” and…
Feedback from the Iliad study:
“This is just to say thank you for that wonderful discussion around our reading of the Iliad – and again for sending those v. very useful background docs…
You managed to steer the discussion in such away that in spite of the 600 pages (breadth) and the highly complex content (depth) that we seemed to cover the most important aspects of this totally outstanding work. Do you know, even if I LIKE the Odyssey better, I think the Iliad is the greater work. Maybe because it is a sustained narrative as you said, and less of a patch-work than the Odyssey. So one feels one’s on a wave, ON A ROLL, from the beginning to end.
WHAT a read…!” (Paris participant, Iliad 02.12)
I am counting my blessings: such rich books, such wonderful minds: thank you Salonistas.
We are having joyful moments in the Ulysses studies as we are challenged and asked to think anew about the nature of language, thought and the daily assault of life upon the body. I was speaking with a Salon participant recently about how one of the amazing aspects of Joyce’s work is to bend language to make you think about how your mind works: how perception, interior thought, the subconscious and the relational impressions are all part of the material of our understanding of who we are. Joyce somehow manages to play these threads in his narrative and reflect back to the reader how his presentation of a thinking, talking moving character illuminates our own.
But Ulysses is not the only happening in this New Year (still has that sheen of newness). The other Salon offerings are listed below…those without dates will be assigned dates in the coming weeks; if you are interested in any of these studies—PLEASE let me know of your interest and of preferred meeting time including a short intensive vs. longer weekly study format. Descriptions and registration for some can be found on the website; others will be posted. I always welcome requests…
· JAN 31ST Breaking out of the Music Box: lecture on the impact of Music and Protest Song by Salon member Geoff Brown and Barry Cohen free; 1 PM at City Lit room G08
· FEB. 6th Steady My Gaze Poetry book launch by Marie Elizabeth Mali
· FEB 24th The Sound and the Fury Salon Intensive 5-10:00 PM
· FEB 29, March 7 & 14: The Passion of New Eve Salon study co-facilitated by Dr. E. Welby
(two schedule choices: Wednesday evenings 8-10 PM, Thursday afternoons 1-3 PM)
· The Iliad with reflections from Christopher Logue’s War Music
I had offered this earlier in January but did not have enough takers; Liane Aukin and I would be interested in exploring the world of the Homeric hero and the paradoxes of immortal glory as illuminated in the gorgeous words of both Homer and Logue. If you are interested, please email me with your availability and I will organize this study to start in March.
· Bleak House by Charles Dickens
In the 200th birth year celebration of one of the original writers of social commentary, why not immerse yourself in the work that gave us Esther, Jarndyce, Skimpole, Lady Dedlock, miss Flite, Mr. Guppy and one of the few instances in literature of spontaneous human combustion.
· Richard III
Using the successful formula for the recent Measure for Measure study, we will meet for three consecutive weeks to study this play and plan a trip to see the RSC performance in Stratford: immersion in the world of the Bard for the weekend!
Contact me for questions or requests for any of the above…I look forward to seeing you in the pages!
The New Year arrives with its blasts, post-holiday gear change and opportunity for a fresh start. I love the idea of New Year’s resolutions, though have noticed my resolutions for the past several years are very much the same: more writing, more stretching, less time being distracted, more authentic presence with the amazing people in my life…So instead of revisiting the list, I am trying something new: approaching the opportunity of the NEW YEAR with an active sense of newness. So into the garbage all the old, dried flowers! Away with last years’ teapot residue! Gone with the worries that gathered, buddy-like, around my thoughts and sucked away my energy. Out with fuzzy condiments sulking in the back of the fridge, off to Oxfam with the clothes that hold memories but not fashion sense, the books that offered a sweet retreat but don’t startle with ideas or writing…and welcome in to the excavated space the freshness of possibility.
I hope your shift into this New Year is refreshing and revitalizing…I would welcome stories of your passage.
One of the guilty nuggets that balloons during the holiday season is around holiday cards. I always want to—and imagine each year it will be different—but have only managed to get out holiday cards twice in the past 15 years. I love receiving these cards with the warm thoughts enclosed; but though I can come up with all sorts of (rather lame)excuses for why I can’t get these done (between travel, family needs, extended family needs, extended extended family needs, work), my nagging disappointment in myself remains. So here is a stab at dismantling: I want to thank and emphatically appreciate all those who have entered and participated in the Salon in 2011; joining with the fullness of their energy and taking risks in the name of learning and communication.
There. Feel better already.
Five Week Study starting the week of January 18th DATE CHANGE
Two schedule choices:
Wednesday Evenings 8-10 PM
Thursday Afternoons 1-3 PM
Cost is £75 for the five week study
Registration open now
20 Week Study starting the week of January 17th
“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.” William Faulkner
Two Schedule Choices:
AFTERNOONS: Monday 1-3 PM
EVENINGS : Tuesdays 8-10 PM (three spaces remaining)
*The payment is for a five week series, but for the integrity of the study, you should be prepared to commit for four groups of five week studies (from January 16-June 11). We will take a few weekly breaks as determined by participant schedule needs.
Registration open now on the salon website: Salon events page for Ulysses…
Two Schedule Choices:
AFTERNOONS: Monday 1-3 PM
EVENINGS : Tuesdays 8-10 PM
*Both afternoon and evening studies start the week of January 16th/17th.
* We will meet for 20 meetings, possibly joining both studies for a special session or two as schedules allow.
*The payment is for a five week series, but for the integrity of the study, you should be prepared to commit for four groups of five week studies (from January 16-June 11). We will take a few weekly breaks as determined by participant schedule needs.
There is a strong argument for studying this huge and intimidating text- book list chart-topper of 100 greatest books of all time, critics’ darling, most lauded/least read, the book that many literary academics dedicate their lives to studying…but you will only know for yourself by diving in. I believe the only way to study it is with a group of hungry, curious readers who all contribute to evoking meaning—through their questions as well as their insights. The Ulysses Salon will commence with a close study of the first section. Any time spent studying Joyce leaves one a better reader- a broader thinker- even if all the references, repetitions, epiphanies and allusions are not immediately understood. Now, more thoughts as to Why do it?
Clifton Fadiman offers a concise list:
1. It is probably the most completely organized, thought out work of
literature since The Divine Comedy.
2. It is the most influential novel (call it that for the lack of a
better term) published in our century. The influence is indirect-
through other writers.
3. It is one of the most original works of the imagination in the
language. It broke not one trail, but hundreds.
4. There is some disagreement here, but the prevailing view is that
it is not “decadent’ or “immoral” or “pessimistic”. Like the work
of many of the supreme artists…it proposes a vision of life as
seen by a powerful mind that rises above the partial, the
sentimental, and the self-defensive.
5. Unlike its original, The Odyssey, it is not an open book. It
yields its secrets only to those willing to work, just as
Beethoven’s last quartets reveal new riches the longer they are
studied.
And another perspective:
Ulysses can be read with passion without intellectually understanding the text. In this case, we identify ourselves completely with the character, our imagination lays hold of his sensation, his pleasure, his reminiscences, and we live with him, we dream with him. The prolonging of the interior monologue in our imagination will provoke pure reverie…Because the interior monologue in its fragmentary incoherence includes, as we have seen before, all the logical structure and grammatical armature of thought.
–Emeric Fischer
“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.” William Faulkner
For More Details and to register, please go to the Events page for this Salon….
The Passion of New Eve Salon co-facilitated by Dr. E. Welby meets for two intensive sessions at the end of February and the first week of March.
For the New Year, gift yourself or a friend the opportunity to focus and learn. Our lives are full of noise and distractions; reading a book like Ulysses and participating in the Salon conversations allows a time of reflection. You are accompanied by fellow journeyers who are balancing the demands of the exterior world with the hunger of the inner world to be present, to be aware. Here is one route in.
1. Updates
2. New Salons Starting NEXT WEEK(date change): Hamlet and Odyssey
3. Doodle Poll for upcoming Salons….
1. Updates
We are having lively discussions around fragmentation and identity, parenting, inheritance and the subjective nature of history in the current study of Midnight’s Children. I am recognizing again that no study of a complex work of literature is ever the same; though we visit some previous ideas, the particular combination of participants and the worlds they each bring to the study invigorates the understanding of the novel in new ways.
I have pushed out the start of Hamlet and The Odyssey a week as we are just under the minimum needed to run a strong Salon…so if you are interested, please let me know in the next few days…I am reminded of the importance of The Odyssey to all who live in the idea of a democratic world: how we find in the ancient tales the roots of our ideas around fairness and justice, fate and human responsibility.
I have shortened both these studies to just four weeks in recognition of the reduced time available just before the winter holidays…I am also announcing a Faulkner Salon intensive on December 11th…As I Lay Dying is one of his shorter, more accessible works and would be a good starting place for more Faulkner work in the New Year. Also coming up due to participant request…Between the Acts, The Passion of New Eve, Light in August…
Come join the conversation and help open minds…some great studies starting next week …and I welcome suggestions for the 2012 Salon season(use the Doodle Poll below). I am planning on a Ulysses study starting in the second week of January…six months and a read of a lifetime…let me know if you are interested. To sign up for any of the following, use the hyper link or visit the websitehttp://clone.checkyourtestsite.co.uk/ or email me… PLEASE sign up soon so I can confirm which Salons will be running and get the opening notes out to you to support your reading.
See you in the pages….
2. Upcoming Salons: Starting next week—still time to register and read…
• The Odyssey by Homer (recommended translation:Robert Fagles/Penguin Classics)
Starts: Tuesday, November 23th 2011 at 8:00 pm
Ends: Tuesday, December 13th 2011 at 10:00 pm
Four week study 65£
This study will help prepare for Ulysses in 2012…or is a richly satisfying work simply for its own huge cultural footprint in the development of epic literature.
The Salon has certainly been a place to re-discover- or discover for the first time- the works that form the cornerstones of Western literary tradition. The Odyssey is a root for our understanding of ourselves as well as the words and ways of the ancients. How does it continue to shape our idea of the heroic? What do the dilemmas that Odysseus faces offer to us today? Can we still appreciate the lyric and narrative quality alongside a violent story filled with the suffering and death of nameless servants, slave girls and soldiers?
• Hamlet Poem Unlimited by William Shakespeare (recommended edition: Arden)
Starts: Wednesday, November 16th 2011 at 1:00 pm
Ends: Wednesday, December 7th 2011 at 3:00 pm
Four Week study daytime study 65£ Wednesdays 1-3 PM
Or Two night Evening study 45£
Friday December 2nd and Thursday December 8th 7-10 PM
How does one introduce a play that is already drunk on its own superlatives? For this Salon, I propose 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. I 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.
As with any other Salon dealing with a dramatic work, we will perform large parts of the text and view various filmed adaptations….and hopefully organize ourselves to go see a performance.
Register here
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear.” –As I Lay Dying
3. Doodle Poll to choose the next Salon intensive and weekly studies:
“Things–even people–have a way of leaking into each other” I explain, “like flavours when you cook.”–Midnight’s Children pg. 37 Saleem our narrator is trying to explain to his demanding audience why so many fragments of stories of others must be told before he is even born into his own…and hitting upon a vein of relational truth.
Due to illness, vacations and life’s accidents, the Midnight’s Children Salon (both afternoon and evening sections) will be starting on November 3rd. There are three or four spaces remaining in both groups- please use the events page to register or contact me for enquires…
To the Lighthouse
• One night intensive November 4th 5-10 PM with potluck dinner £40 (two spaces remaining)
Hamlet *DATE CHANGE*
• Starting week of November 14th ; 4 meetings afternoon and evening sessions available
The Odyssey
• Starting week of November 14th; 4 meetings afternoon and evening sessions available
*Please vote now for particular sessions (day of the week, afternoon or evening) for The Odyssey Salon and the Hamlet Salon…send me your preference and I will confirm the study sessions on October 25th (so vote before then!).
Just emerging from a six month study of Dante’s Divine Comedy and a wonderful weekend in Paris studying short stories one night and Milton’s Paradise Lost the next. The energy is building toward Ulysses starting January…if you are interested in taking on this galloping, huge and wild work, Hamlet and The Odyssey are important scaffolds to deepen your Joycean pleasure.
Previous Salon studies of this work have probed the nature of memory both personal and societal. In the book, Rushdie, through his narrator, considers how memory is both shaped and inflected by the individual which in turn changes how history reports its story. Here is Rushdie considering how immigrants, in particular Indian writers, have a unique view of their home history:
” As Richard Wright found long ago in America, black and white descriptions of society are no longer compatible. Fantasy, or the mingling of fantasy and naturalism, is one way of dealing with these problems. It offers a way of echoing in the form of our work the issues faced by all of us: how to build a new, ‘modern’ world out of an old, legend haunted civilization, an old culture which we have brought into the heart of a newer one. But whatever technical solutions we may find, Indian writers in these Islands, like others who have migrated into the north from the south, are capable of writing from a kind of double perspective: because they, we, are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders in this society. This stereoscopic vision is perhaps what we can offer in place of ‘whole sight’.
