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 toilet paper (though I understand that strange temptation). I celebrate how local groups are reaching out to connect with the most vulnerable, I am finding the balance between social distancing and offering kindness in interactions. Meanwhile, I think it is important that we find ways to continue the rich and connecting work of the Salons.

For the current on-going studies (three Prousts and one Finnegans Wake): we will take it on-line this week. This is something I have always meant to do– and now is the perfect moment. This also opens up the possibilities for other on-line studies: once I have played with he technology this week, I will post some other studies that will be on-line at a reduced cost for those who would like a focused reading experience while at home in the coming weeks.

For the coming travelling studies: We are making decisions about these as we go forward. The coming Proust trip scheduled for mid-April, for example, will be re-scheduled for the fall. I will do everything possible to go forward with he trips as planned, but recognise that for everyone’s safety and peace of mind, several will need to be re-scheduled and that is going to present challenges for everyone. I really appreciate the patience and flexibility participants have shown thus far.

The middle-of-the-night thoughts are not about scheduling nor refunds, logistics –but about loss. Loss of loved ones, loss of friends, loss of certainty. In our last in-person meeting, one of the many wise souls I have come to know in the Salon community framed the time as a wrenching– and an opening. Perhaps we will get through this time with a different, healthier sense of ourselves and our connections to each other and the earth.

I hope for ease for all.

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 Two meetings; June 2020
The Iliad  One-week travel study on the island of Agistri in Greece September 2020

We are trying to squeeze in a few more studies in the coming months—I am inspired by a recent study of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and am offering a short study of this powerful work in June. Having just finished a rich study of Jazz with Geoff Brown we realised how much is packed into these fluid pages—I need another look– aiming for a study in the autumn.
Coming in April, I am offering a Beloved four-week study—this is such a complex and powerful read, each tour through the loaded and lyric pages yields insights on racism, parenting, the claim of the ancestors, the hunger for beauty in an abject world…

After two sold-out trips to Greece to read Homer’s Odyssey, we’re very excited to announce a week-long study this September in Greece to explore the Iliad. This time, facilitator Mark Cwik will be your guide into Homer. Mark is just wrapping up our study here in London of the myths and legends of Troy, and will be bringing that rich background to this immersion into the world of the Iliad.

I am preparing my first study of Virginia Woolf’s final book, The Years. We are combining this with the essays she composed (gathered in the Leaska-edited volume The Pargiters)  to comment on the politics she was addressing through the fiction. This study, five days in beautiful St Ives, is a unique opportunity to delve into the on-going question of the ability of narrative art to act politically. Woolf also looks directly at the sexual suppression of her time and how this translates into broken relationships in intimate as well as social spaces.
The group currently moving through the layers of honeysuckle and nihilism in Sound and the Fury have found much to consider—and as with many studies, our work will extend beyond the final meeting with an after-math gathering. We will endure.

The current long-term studies in the Salon exemplify the connections and depth available when we spend time intensely  working through the web of ideas held in significant literature. These long-term studies also provide a safe space to consider afresh the hard parts of our lives. Great art reflects the contradictions of ourselves—and in our work together, we move beyond the limits of our own perspective and experience.
Our Finnegans Wake group has been meeting for two and half years—and we aren’t done yet. Each meeting covers about five pages of text—in that time we may travel from Paradise Lost references to Emily Dickinson, sexual exploits to toxic masculinity, cyclical history…and constantly opening ourselves to the work.
There are currently three Proust groups moving through In Search of Lost Time. The Thursday group travelled to Iliers/ Combray last spring; this year we will spend a weekend together in Paris that includes a visit to the Hôtel Littéraire Le Swann curated as a passionate tribute to the writer and his vision-—as well as a stay in ancient convent and visits to museums that expand our knowledge of Proust’s world and French history and art. The two Wednesday groups are deep into the Guermantes Ways—turning over ideas about constructed femininity and masculinity, the unshakeable nature of social power systems, the vulnerability of our constructed identity, love as performance art…. I hope to start a new Search in the autumn.

We are living in truly challenging times. I continue to find some salve in the beauty of the literature, the passionate response to the realm of ideas offered in the Salons—and the generosity Salonistas show in our work together.

—Toby

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 Proust’s anti-Semitism, Woolf’s snobbery, Faulkner’s race-divided world, Joyce’s xenophobic Dublin. These discussions present the opportunity to distinguish between a writer presenting a point of view for critique and illumination versus a reflection of the writer’s own prejudice. The writers I have cited above purposefully present the worst views of their world to probe, overturn and dismantle—but their writing often takes us into the heart of these views—often views that they themselves have inhabited—to extricate the roots that are embedded in their culture.
Though we may look at these works as chronicling a past history, last week’s election suggests that we desperately need to consider openly our prejudices, our violently differing political perspectives and how we will foster greater understanding of each other moving forward.

The studies on offer in the coming months provide an opportunity to consider and discuss the roots of tribalism, the impact of a racist world on individual identity, the female reduced to male projection, the way the weight of traumatic history distorts an individual—and the way art holds up the bright and hard edges of human experience. I believe our engagement in the literature has the capacity to engender hope—hope that can translate into activism.
Coming in January and beyond:

• A short course on two stories from Joyce’s Dubliners (one space remaining)
• Troy: Myth, Legend and Inspiration—just a couple seats left in this special study keyed to the British Museums new exhibition
• The Sound and The Fury—five-week study of Faulkner’s brilliant early work
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison—an American epic examining the struggle to claim identity in a racialized society
• Jazz by Toni Morrison—examination of love, improvisation and choice that kills
• The Years by Virginia Woolf – five-day travel study in St Ives (just announced—five spaces remaining)
• Lolita by Nabokov—Marcy Kahan leads this provocative study (one space remaining)
• Portrait of a Lady—weekend study in Rye or week-long study in Umbria (with yoga!)

Look for the annual Ulysses study in 2021, leading to next year’s centenary of Joyce’s immense work…

In this week’s Guardian, Philip Hoare celebrates Moby Dick on the occasion of Herman Melville’s 200th year birthday– and offers six reasons why this is the novel for our times.

Mark & I have completed two studies of this incredible and uncanny book this past year–and will offer one more study starting in September.

Here is Hoare on why everyone should read this book:

“The book features gay marriage, hits out at slavery and imperialism and predicts the climate crisis – 200 years after the birth of its author, Herman Melville, it has never been more important.

Thursday marks the 200th birthday of Herman Melville – the author of the greatest unread novel in the English language. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen eyes glaze over when I ask people if they have conquered Moby-Dick. It is the Mount Everest of literature: huge and apparently insurmountable, its snowy peak as elusive as the tail of the great white whale himself.

Having grown up loving whales as a boy – in the era of the Save the Whale campaigns of the 1970s – I was underwhelmed when I watched John Huston’s grandiose 1956 film, Moby Dick. Perhaps it was because I saw it on a tiny black-and-white TV, but the whole story seemed impenetrable to me. And there weren’t enough whales. I would have been even less keen had I known that the whale footage Huston did include had been specially shot off Madeira, where they were still being hunted. For the Hemingwayesque director, there was none of that final-credit nonsense: “No animals were harmed in the making of this film.” Because they very much were.

Forty years later, I saw my first whales in the wild, off Provincetown, a former whaling port on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It was there, in New England, that I finally finished the book. What had seemed to be a heroic tale of the high seas proved to be something much darker and more sublime. I realised its secret. Not only is it very funny and very subversive, but it maps out the modern world as if Melville had lived his life in the future and was only waiting for us to catch up. I fell in love with Melville as much as I had fallen in love with the whales. My own five-year-long voyage searching for these magnificent creatures produced my own book, Leviathan or, The Whale and a subsequent film, The Hunt for Moby-Dick. But even now, having read it a dozen times, I’m still not sure I can tell you what Moby-Dick is all about. Yes, it’s the tale of Captain Ahab, who sails his ship, the Pequod, in search of a white whale that had bitten off his leg. But it’s also a wildly digressive attempt to comprehend the animals themselves. And despite the author’s rather unhelpful conclusion, after 650 pages, about the whale, “I know him not, and never will”, here are some very good reasons why you need to read his crazily wonderful book.

Enjoy the rest of the article:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jul/30/subversive-queer-and-terrifyingly-relevant-six-reasons-why-moby-dick-is-the-novel-for-our-times

Late Summer-Autumn 2019 thru Spring 2020

Having just returned from another magical St Ives weekend immersed in Virginia Woolf, I am inspired anew by the rare luxury of being in a beautiful place with a group of wonderful minds encountering a work of literature intensely together.

I leave these weekends gasping: they are full on (even as we build in down-time)—the intense engagement with the book fills and expands the mind. There is the added stimulus of the place and the experience of the group: joining together, coming to know each other, pushing against each other, clarifying one’s own thoughts and perspectives as they rub up against others…each retreat feels larger than the actual time—and we are so fully awake.

Here are some participant reflections from this past weekend:

“Thank you Toby for this caring, well organised, managed tour de force VW weekend…”

“Toby you are incredible!   it was a wonderful two days which felt like a week….  such a great bunch of women and  so interesting.   friendships made, insights gained…. lighthouse reached…. perfect……   hope you get some proper down time.   thank you thank you!”

Below you will find some of the coming courses– both travelling and in London…always happy to hear feedback on the offerings and what is of interest. Most of the following should be posted and available for registration in the next week.

Fall London Regular

• Monday 5-7 Moby Dick 9 weeks Sept.16- Nov.25
• Tuesday evenings short courses TS Eliot: “The Wasteland” followed by “Four Quartets”
• Wednesdays 1:15-3:15 Finnegan Wake
• Wednesdays 5-7, 7:30-9:30 Proust– Volume II Budding Groove (On-going study)
• Thursdays 12-2 PM Proust  Volume IV pt. 2 (On-going study, Salon Full)

Fall travel studies

• Sept 20-22 Camber Sands Beloved  (Private group study)
• Nov 22-24  Rye Henry James — Portrait of A Lady
• October 18-21 St Ives Retreat: Between the Acts
• November 15-18 Javier Marías – Infatuations

Spring London Regular

• Continued Proust studies Wednes. Eves & Thursday mid-day
• Continued Finnegans Wake Weds. 13:15-15:15
• Ulysses 2020 January -June Tuesday mid-day & evenings

Spring 2020 Travel Salons

• April St Ives Woolf Immersion (dates to be determined)
• May 3-11   Homer’s Odyssey Greece (posted)
• May 17-24  Umbria yoga & Henry James/Silent Duchess trip
• September 2020 Iliad in Greece  (dates to be determined)