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Travel Studies: journeys to the centre of so many things

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Leah Jewett (far left) and other members of The Years study group, St Ives, September 2021

Three times I’ve taken the train down to St Ives – a region apart – for London Literary Salon Travel Studies of Virginia Woolf books: The Waves, To the Lighthouse and the last book published in her lifetime, The Years.

Woolf means a lot to me. Growing up I read her journals, just as I devoured the diaries of Sylvia Plath and Anaïs Nin to enter into the detail of these female writers’ thoughts and lives. Some of the last lines of Mrs Dalloway saw me over the threshold of turning 50: “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?”

Travel Studies are worth going the distance for. Set against the backdrop of a place related to the book you are reading, a Travel Study makes the words come alive over time and feel shot through with new meaning.

I’d already been to Dublin with the London Literary Salon after doing a six-month study of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Because Joyce, as he proclaimed, “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries”, the least daunting and most rewarding way to read this vast book is in the company of a group of people spearheaded by the astute, inquisitive, light-hearted, deep-diving teacher/facilitator Toby Brothers. Founder and Director of the Salon, she masterminds seminar-like discussions that are informal and in depth. Because she’s an avid swimmer, a Travel Study often incorporates swimming – in the bracing Atlantic (for The Years), in warmer Grecian waters (for The Odyssey) and off the Forty Foot promontory into the roiling Irish Sea (for Ulysses).

In Dublin on Bloomsday – which commemorates the events of 16 June 1904 described in Ulysses – we retraced characters’ steps and watched scenes played out in costume on doorsteps, in a crypt and at Sweny’s, the Dispensing Chemists (“Mr Bloom raised a cake [of soap] to his nostrils. Sweet lemony wax”).

He bought lemon soap; we bought lemon soap – and its tart scent time-travelled me back to turn-of-the-century Dublin.

That’s the thing about a Travel Study: it superimposes echoes of the book, and the life and times of the author, onto your experiences in real time. It transports you into the book and the book into the moment.

No 4 St Ives, the B&B where we’ve stayed for the Virginia Woolf Travel Studies, is a 30-second walk from Talland House, where Woolf spent 13 happy childhood summers. We stand transfixed in front of the white villa and think of how she movingly wrote in the essay “A Sketch of the Past”:

If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills – then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach . . . and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.

A bit bedazzled, I keep thinking: This is the view (partially impeded, since, by houses) of the sea that she would have seen; that tide mirrors the waves she wrote about in The Waves; there’s the lighthouse from To the Lighthouse. Did the wind sound similar in these same trees? Undoubtedly she walked here, turned that doorhandle, looked through that pane of glass.

Time on a Travel Study is telescopic: it takes a while to put the workaday London world behind me, but by day two I’ve decompressed and am caught up in the escapism.

Each Travel Study is a study in work/life balance. It reminds me of the buzz I felt working at the Cannes Film Festival. Alternating schedule and spontaneity, you work, wander around, run into people, socialise, carve out some solitude.

Every day we parcel out the time: dash five minutes down to the sea for a 7am swim; join the others for breakfast; walk through the cobbled streets of whitewashed houses over to the rough-hewn, Grade II-listed Porthmeor Studios, which give on to a beach, to read aloud and discuss The Years; go our separate ways – to maybe take an open-top double-decker along the coast, tour the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden or opt for downtime to catch up on reading – then reconvene to discuss the book for another hour; continue talking over dinner; sleep.

A Travel Study, which elides past and present, is a journey to the centre of many things – of how aspects of a book’s personal and political landscapes resonate when you take them in experientially, how your ideas can evolve as you hear other people’s perceptions and analysis, and the connectedness – on location – with a writer and their words.

Leah Jewett is director of Outspoken Sex Ed and an inveterate Salonista

Returning to Paris, October 2021

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Every visit to Paris is an encounter with the inexhaustible ideal of style. Even though I once lived here, I find myself tipsy with the sights and smells and sheer beauty of it all, even before I sip the crisp Pouilly-Fumé that somehow tastes better in Paris. 

Here, life is lived on the streets in the most swirling and satisfying ways. In this city I am always hungry: the smells of coffee and patisseries surround me as I run along the Canal Saint Martin; on rue Montorgueil we are torn between multiple bistros for dinner, our mouths watering with the possibilities of fresh fish and autumn’s mushroom bounty.

We visit the newly reopened le Musée Carnavalet — the city’s oldest museum, dedicated to celebrating the history of this illuminated city. The current retrospective exposition of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson reminds us how his work is so embedded in the history and vision of Paris that my friend, who thought she was not familiar with his work, kept murmuring, ‘I know this picture . . .’ With his images in my mind, I am thinking about how an artist can shape our idea of a place — Paris becomes the time-misted, complicated, fleeting glimpses that Cartier-Bresson captured: the days of liberation, the children on Paris streets whose poverty does not diminish their intense play, the women walking as though they aren’t being watched, knowing very well they are watched . . . All his images catch moments of motion and hold them frozen in time: I am aware of a tilting skirt, a leaping man, a glance across a room. None of these movements may be remarkable in themselves, but by being captured in the instant they become eternal. In this and many other ways, our visit to the Carnavalet has me thinking about Proust’s explorations. Finding on the rue de Sevigne the entrance to the building that was home to Mme Sevigne, the 17th century journalist beloved by Marcel’s grandmother, is only the start of the threads of connection to Proust. 


Reflecting on the Belle Époque in the Musee Carnavalet

Travelling is different in these pandemic days. Each café requires proof of our vaccinated status; I find this is reassuring. I wonder if I am also newly alive to the allure of foreign spaces and unknown faces. The months of enclosure have made me hungry – and Paris feeds the senses voluptuously. 

Literature for stressful times . . .

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As September slides in under summer’s fading shadow, I find returning to the depths of literature offers a delicious slowing down after the shifting and frantic days of  this summer with its overwhelming world news. I look for a way to balance the fears and dread of global and local upheavals with a space for hope, inspiration and celebration of the human creative spirit.

One Salonista put it succinctly: “. . . I look forward to seeing you and reading the book which helps me to think deeply rather than be frightened by the daily news.”

Immersion in literature is not to escape, but to find a perspective that is wide enough to hold the chaos of living, to help give context – historical, global – to the individual subjective self that must absorb and flow through the experience of being awake in this world, at this moment.

This autumn’s Salon Studies offer a sumptuous feast to support, expand and sometimes soothe the troubled mind. We have expanded our offerings to give choices in length of courses and cost, approach, focus, genre and historical perspective.  In our recent facilitators’ meeting, we discussed developing studies that connect and build on one another – studies which can stand alone but are also linked thematically,  developing ideas and understanding of particular strands of literature.

The coming study of Ulysses (starting January 2022, as we approach the centenary of its first publication) offers an opportunity for this kind of interconnected study: this huge book that is both the peak of modernist literature and one of the great unread books, is interwoven with other great works. Joyce used Homer’s Odyssey – often humorously – as a reference point and scaffold upon which to weave his tale of a scruffy and sensitive modern hero who echoes Odysseus in unexpected ways. Ulysses also repeatedly echoes Shakespeare’s Hamlet both thematically and in exploring the perennial question of the relationship between the artist and their vision. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may be seen as the prequel to Ulysses – giving the reader background to Stephen Dedalus and his struggles, as well as introducing us to Joyce’s experiments in language and style.

We will be offering studies of The Odyssey, Hamlet (soliloquies) and Portrait this autumn. If you are joining the Centenary Study of Ulysses, any or all of these courses would be valuable but, of course, you don’t need to be preparing for Ulysses to enjoy these extraordinary works!

See you in the pages…

Toby Brothers,
Salon Director

Obituary – Agi Katz, 1937-2021

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It is with great sadness that I share the news of the death of a Salonista, beloved Agi Katz. When I went back through the records to see what studies Agi had done, I was amazed by the breadth of her participation: she was one of the second tour of Proust, she completed studies on Magic Mountain, Paradise Lost, The Iliad, Absalom, Absalom, The Sound and The Fury, Ulysses, Hamlet, Invisible Man . . . Those who were on these courses with her will remember her lively mind, her extensive knowledge of visual art, her strong opinions and her humour.

I first met Agi at the Kenwood Ladies Pond, where she became for me one of those ‘mother swimmers’ – those seasoned Ladies whose stewardship and advocacy have kept the Pond the unique haven we love. Agi also brought her incredible work in researching and advocating for lesser known European artists (she was the founder and director of The Boundary Gallery) to the Salon: for the Proust studies, she brought original sketches made during the trial of Dreyfus – bringing this pivotal moment in history to life for us.

You may also be interested to read the obituary from the Ben Uri Research Unit, where Agi was a curator for six years before opening her own art gallery, The Boundary Gallery, in 1986.

Toby Brothers

Indigenous Peoples in Canada: A Reflection on Art and Self-Reflection

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LLS facilitator Julie Sutherland lives and teaches in Canada. Please note, some of the details in this reflective piece are distressing.

Photograph: First Nations Women, Act On Climate March

How can art teach us? How can it help us unfurl into a more exposed, humane and empathetic version of ourselves? This short piece provides a brief summary of Indigenous Peoples (known in the United States as Native Americans) and considers how art may offer us insight into the lives of the first human inhabitants of the lands to which my ancestors came.

When I say ‘Indigenous Peoples’, I am referring to the first human inhabitants of the lands now called Canada, many of whom have lived on, and in relationship with, these lands since time immemorial. Pre-European contact, ‘North America’ was home to as many as 112 million Indigenous People. However, within a century of Christopher Columbus having arrived on these lands, that number was reduced by as much as 90% – a sobering result of violent displacement, disease and what Canada has now formally recognized as genocide. Officially, Canada recognizes three distinct groups of Indigenous Peoples: First Nations (originally, and now offensively, called ‘Indians’ by white settlers); Inuit (originally, and now offensively, called ‘Eskimos’ by white settlers); and Métis (individuals of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry). Indigenous Peoples are resilient. Today, they are the youngest and fastest-growing population in Canada.

The Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver, which is located on the traditional and unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples, is popularly referred to as ‘the poorest postal code in Canada’. While this isn’t quite accurate, a stroll down East Hastings Street reveals more heartbreak than the average middle class resident of any ‘Western’ country would usually encounter in a lifetime of strolling through their own neighbourhoods. Indigenous Peoples comprise less than 5% of the population in Canada; Vancouver’s DTES has the highest Indigenous population in the city, at 31%.

An extremely high number (over 50%) of the street-based survival sex workers (those who trade in sex out of dire need) in the DTES identify as Indigenous. Between 1978 and 2001, at least 65 women, many of them sex workers, disappeared from this neighbourhood. In a jailcell confession, Robert ‘Willie’ Pickton, a pig farmer and serial killer from a nearby suburb, claimed he had killed nearly 50 women in the neighbourhood, though he was only officially charged with the murder of 26. In 2007, a jury found him guilty on six counts of second-degree murder and he is now serving a life sentence in prison. An official inquiry in the matter identified ineptitude by police and prejudice against racialized peoples as two of several explanations for the delay in apprehending Robert Pickton. The case was a turning point in the nation’s recognition of the tragic issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls not just in Vancouver but also across Canada.

Sarah de Vries was one of the 33 women whose remains or DNA were found on Robert Pickton’s pig farm. Sarah was a poet and artist of mixed-race descent, including First Nations, who lived in Vancouver. She was last seen April 12, 1998. In one of her poems, she asked, ‘Will they remember me when I’m gone / or would their lives just carry on?’

We remember. Sarah was a daughter, a sister, a mother. Her disappearance broke their hearts, and mine. I lived in Vancouver’s DTES and worked for many years for different organizations that aimed to support the lives of survival sex workers in the area. I spent hundreds of hours on the streets with these women, and in safe houses, hearing their stories. I also heard the remarks of others who, not understanding or knowing these women, said hurtful, hateful things about how these women brought this on themselves, how they deserved no better than disease, rape, death. How ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’. I watched cars go by, hurtling raw eggs and bags of human excrement at the women’s bodies, heads, hearts. I saw them held at knifepoint. I looked at photos of their children and visited them in hospital when they gave birth. I saw them ‘tweaking’, overdosing, dying. I also saw them singing, laughing, living.

Reading another of Sarah’s poems presents an opportunity for us to understand ways in which art – and in this case, poetry – can, however disturbing, help readers to learn, reflect, grow and change. It demonstrates how poetry can expose us to new perspectives and encourage us to think about ourselves in relation to the world around us.

Woman’s body found beaten beyond recognition
You sip your coffee
Taking a drag of your smoke
Turning the page
Taking a bite of your toast
Just another day
Just another death
Just one more thing you so easily forget
You and your soft, sheltered life
Just go on and on
For nobody special from your world is gone
Just another day
Just another death
Just another Hastings Street whore
Sentenced to death

Sarah de Vries, (used with the kind permission of Maggie de Vries)

A poem like Sarah’s may conjure up many negative emotions. We may react in myriad ways. An easy, and understandable, reaction might be defensiveness. How dare she tell us we don’t care? Who is she to attack us anyway? If this is our experience, we might try to reflect on it. Why have we reacted defensively? Is it because there might be some truth to what she says? Have we ever written someone off because of our preconceived notions of their identities?

Such an awareness may lead us to consider our own positions vis-à-vis Sarah’s and try to see ourselves from her point of view. Can she help us to reflect on our own apathy? If we conclude we are not personally apathetic, can she lead us to contemplate apathy (or worse, active racism, sexism, etc.) at systemic and structural levels – perhaps at the levels of media, healthcare, justice, child welfare and education? How can we find more out about lives such as Sarah’s? What else can we read? Who can we listen to? Who can help us shed our prejudices and inspire us to work toward a more equitable, just, caring society?

The self-reflection that creative writing can inspire may be a compelling reason for engaging with ‘off-putting’ art. Critics of this kind of reading may say compositions like Sarah’s fall into the genre of ‘misery lit’ or ‘misery porn’, that is, writing in which central characters endure great hardship. They may say we as readers are merely revelling in the horrors of others. But, in fact, there is a well established body of research that has found that reading all kinds of literature has transformative power. If the studies don’t convince you, look into your heart. Has it changed because of the art you’ve encountered? Has it made you reflect? Has it made you grow? Keep reading.

Copies of Julie Sutherland’s forthcoming book: Bright Poems for Dark Days: An Anthology for Hope (to be published in November, available in Canada, the UK, the US and Australia) can now be pre-ordered. See here for more information.

Dante’s Divine Comedy

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Dante’s Divine Comedy

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Già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle,
sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa,
l’amor che move ’l sole e l’altre stelle.

Now my will and my desire were turned,
like a wheel in perfect motion,
by the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

These breathtaking lines conclude Dante’s Divine Comedy, a 14,000-line epic written in 1321 on the state of the soul after death. T. S. Eliot called such poetry the most beautiful ever written—and yet so few of us have ever read it. Since the poem appeared, and especially in modern times, those readers intrepid enough to take on Dante have tended to focus on the first leg of his journey, through the burning fires of Inferno.

As I prepare opening notes for Dante’s Inferno, I am reading again about the medieval world view and how our idea of the human being has evolved. Dante offers a wonderful road into these deep and dense queries as his Divine Comedy is his attempt to construct an intellectual universe based on the visions of his faith. Several interested participants have wondered how the study of the Inferno might be approached if one is not formally religious. I am finding, as I did in the previous Paris-based study of this work, that the pilgrim’s exploration of his moral and spiritual universe—and the fantastic images that result—provide the reader a map for their own inquiry.

Dante fought the Church—his banishment from his beloved Florence was in part a result of his criticism of Pope Boniface and the political party he supported. His creation of the realms of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise were his attempt to bring his intellect and faith in alignment; a struggle that humans have been inspired by since Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Although I will provide background on the historical moment of Dante’s Florentine world and the political and ecclesiastical struggles that tore at his home, these are background to the very human pursuit: to understand the human soul. Although Dante’s terms are Christian, I do not think this desire is limited to the Christian realm. As always, the Salon conversation is enriched with a variety of perspectives, those who hold a formal faith as well as those who hold a formal questioning, along with those, (and I would place myself in this category) whose inquiry is loose and fluid and lifelong. We have so few spaces to share diverse views in religious ideas or spiritual traditions; I propose the study of a great work that engages a vigorous questioning of a formal belief offers that space.

From Inferno, we move towards the mountain of Purgatory. . .

As Dante explains in the opening lines of the canticle, Purgatory is the place in which “the human spirit purges himself, and climbing to Heaven makes himself worthy.” Dante’s Purgatory consists of an island mountain, the only piece of land in the southern hemisphere. Divided into three sections, Antepurgatory, Purgatory proper, and the Earthly Paradise, the lower slopes are reserved for souls whose penance was delayed. The upper part of the mountain consists of seven terraces, each of which corresponds to one of the seven capital sins. Atop the mountain Dante locates, Eden, the Earthly Paradise, the place where the pilgrim is reunited with Beatrice, the woman who inspired the poem. (from The World of Dante: http://www.worldofdante.org/purgatory1.html)

Then on to Paradise. . .

In each translation and writing about the Divine Commedia that I have consulted, the unanimous conclusion is that Paradise is the most difficult—the least likely to be read—the most likely to be started and not finished. We are warned by Dante himself, in the longest address to the reader, that if we have followed thus far in our little boat we should turn back now while we can still see the shores, lest in “losing me, you would be lost yourselves. . .” (l.5, Canto 2). How can we turn back now? I recognize the going will be tough and this might not be the most enjoyable Salon read- but I have not known any of us to shrink from challenge.

Dante has these challenges of ineffability as he attempts both to describe Paradise and his journey—the experience is beyond memory, the visions beyond human words. Here he uses the examples of the human need to put feet and hands on God, to give the Angels wings—we cannot conceive of what he has seen because we are still in our human state. Thus Dante himself must change—transhumanize—(Canto I, l. 70) to manage the journey, and we must shuffle along as best we can in our mortal skins to understand what Dante is offering.

“O you, who in some pretty boat,

Eager to listen, have been following

Behind my ship, that singing sails along

Turn back to look again upon your own shores;

Tempt not the deep, lest unawares,

In losing me, you yourselves might be lost.

The sea I sail has never yet been passed;

Minerva breathes, and pilots me Apollo,

And Muses nine point out to me the Bears.

You other few who have neck uplifted

Betimes to the bread of angels upon

Which one lives and does not grow sated,

Well may you launch your vessel

Upon the deep sea.”

― Dante Alighieri, Paradiso

SALON DETAILS:

  • Three six-meeting studies, one on each book of the Divine Comedy
  • Recommended editions:
    • Inferno by Dante Aligheri, translated by Mark Musa; Penguin Classics; ISBN-13: 978-0142437223
    • Purgatorio by Dante Aligheri, translated by Robin Kirkpatrick; Penguin Classics; ISBN-13: 978-0140448962
    • Paradiso by Dante Aligheri, translated by Mark Musa; Penguin Classics edition; ISBN-13: 978-0140444438

From Joseph Luzzi\’s illuminating article in American Scholar 03.16

How to Read Dante in the 21st Century

How to Read Dante in the 21st Century 

“Dante requires what Nietzsche called “slow reading”—attentive, profound, patient reading—because Francesca’s sparse, seemingly innocent-sounding words speak volumes about the kind of sinner she is. In the first place, she’s not “speaking” to Dante in a natural voice; she’s alluding to poetry. And it’s a very famous poem, Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore, “Love always returns to the gentle heart,” a gorgeous medieval lyric by Guido Guinizelli, one of Dante’s poetic mentors in the Sweet New Style, a movement in the late 1200s that nurtured Dante’s emerging artistic sensibilities. Francesca, by citing the poem and the Sweet New Style, is saying: it wasn’t my fault, blame it on love. Despite her prettiness, her sweetness, and her eloquence, she is like every other sinner in hell: it’s never their fault, always someone else’s. They never confess their guilt, the one thing necessary for redemption from sin. With one deft allusion, one lyrical dance amid the ferocious winds in the Circle of the Lustful, Dante delivers a magnificent psychological portrait of Francesca’s path to damnation.”

The Waste Land

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T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

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‘The Waste Land’ is the early Modernist poem classic. T. S. Eliot was striving to understand a shattered world post WWI and how the inherited cultural knowledge could offer direction or solace in a broken, mechanistic world. His use of literary and cultural allusions may feel overwhelming at first, but an open mind and supportive discussion will illuminate this gorgeous poem.
At this moment of Modernism, the urge was to separate from the oppressing past (‘Make it new!’ charged Ezra Pound, Eliot’s mentor) but this becomes a double gesture. The attempt to repress or break free from the past ends up haunting the writers and thinkers of the modern period—until they negotiate a link with the myths and images of the past that threatened. ‘Waste Land’ demonstrates this in the specific allusions to past works and in its melding of characters of the past and the present (Cleopatra becoming a modern working woman in ‘A Game of Chess’ for example) as well as the use of myth to reconnect our lost modern psyche to a past of ritual and meaning.

The experience of ‘The Waste Land’ combines a dig through allusions to a sense of what we hear: the journey is impressionistic. Eliot struggles to rediscover primitive, authentic emotion against the falseness of modern life. He employs the poetic technique of multiplying references (thinking of form of sedimentary rock—the layers evoking ages but holding discordant impressions together).

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
—from The Burial of the DeadSALON DETAILS

  • Two-meeting Salon intensive

Four Quartets

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T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

–From ‘Burnt Norton’

T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ is often described as the best long poem of the 20th century. Eliot’s vast final work attempted to order and understand the movement of time, the dissatisfaction of worldly experience, the nature of purgation and the struggle towards artistic wholeness and spiritual health(modified from C.K. Stead). In the poem, Eliot weaves belief systems and diverse influences including Dante, The Bhagavad Gita, The Eightfold Path of Buddhism, the New Testament, medieval mystics, Greek myths and the Grail Legend: so our study will also involve comparing wisdom traditions.

I will provide each participant with pages of annotations and reference reading (gratefully donated by Mike McGarry, fellow educator and philosopher)—but as always with the Salon work, the focus is on the text itself. In previous Salons, we have found our way to thoughtful considerations of various belief systems in a respectful atmosphere; this study will open up space for such considerations using the poem as a spring board. What we believe—as individuals, as cultures—addresses how we live and how we try to invest our lives with meaning. Eliot is taking on these elemental questions through his Anglo-Catholic faith but drawing into this perspective wisdom across time and beliefs.

Christopher Guerin, writing in the on-line magazine ‘When Falls the Coliseum’, describes his pleasure in the poem:

“Though I first studied the poem in college — emphasis on “studied”, which doesn’t always mean “experience” or “appreciate” — my firstencounter with Four Quartets took place while being chased by fierce thunderstorms across Interstate 70 in Kansas in the early evening. (I learned the next day that I had been surrounded by tornados!) I had put in a cassette recording I’d made off an LP of Four Quartets being read by Sir Alec Guinness.
No, the incredible impression the poem made on me at the time had nothing to do with Obi Wan Kenobi. Guinness’ delivery, though, seems the perfect voice for this poem, much more earnest and spiritually aware than Eliot’s own weary, almost defeated delivery. (The recording is hard to find, but well worth the search. Highly recommended.)
From the beginning, I was captivated by the cadence, the imagery, and the playful, seeking nature of the words. It’s impossible to quote anything less than the whole of the first section…”
Which he does—and you can read the rest of his commentary and selections of the poem here.

SALON INTENSIVE DETAILS
The Salon Intensive offers a wonderfully dynamic five-hour study (with a necessary pot-luck meal break half way through). Although this format may feel intimidating, those who have participated find the conversation gallops along and we take the book in one big and satisfying gulp. The study is a rich weave of participant questions and responses, readings of significant passages and consideration of the themes and genres that the book illuminates.

The facilitated discussion will use the text of the poem as a springboard for our conversation; participant questions, responses and ideas are welcomed to help navigate the challenges of the work. There is no expectation of previous study or work with the poem nor in the academic tradition: this study will challenge and invigorate the first time reader as well as the life-long lover of T.S. Eliot’s extraordinary vision.

The poem can be found in T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909-62 (Faber & Faber; ISBN-13: 978-0571105489).

Aeschylus’ The Oresteia

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Aeschylus’ The Oresteia

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 and 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.

From http://www.neebo.com/Textbook/the-oresteiab9780140443332/ISBN-9780140443332:

The only trilogy in Greek drama that survives from antiquity, Aeschylus’ The Oresteia is translated by Robert Fagles with an introduction, notes and glossary written in collaboration with W.B. Stanford in Penguin Classics. In the Oresteia Aeschylus addressed the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos. As they move from darkness to light, from rage to self-governance, from primitive ritual to civilized institution, their spirit of struggle and regeneration becomes an everlasting song of celebration. In Agamemnon, a king’s decision to sacrifice his daughter and turn the tide of war inflicts lasting damage on his family, culminating in a terrible act of retribution; The Libation Bearers deals with the aftermath of Clytemnestra’s regicide, as her son Orestes sets out to avenge his father’s death; and in The Eumenides, Orestes is tormented by supernatural powers that can never be appeased. Forming an elegant and subtle discourse on the emergence of Athenian democracy out of a period of chaos and destruction, The Oresteia is a compelling tragedy of the tensions between our obligations to our families and the laws that bind us together as a society. Aeschylus (525-456 BC) was born near Athens. He wrote more than seventy plays, of which seven have survived, all translated for Penguin Classics: The Supplicants, The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides. If you enjoyed The Oresteia, you might like Euripides’ Medea and Other Plays, also available in Penguin Classics.

‘Conveys more vividly and powerfully than any of the ten competitors I have consulted the eternal power of this masterpiece … a triumph’ –Bernard Levin

‘How satisfying to read at last a modern translation which is rooted in Greek feeling and Greek thought … both the stature and the profound instinctive genius of Aeschylus are recognised’ –Mary Renault, author of The King Must Die

The Waves

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Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

9780141182711

“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night; who turn over in their sleep, who utter their confused cries, who put out their phantom fingers and clutch at me as I try to escape—shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”

—Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Reading Virginia Woolf requires a releasing of the faculty we have so carefully trained to be grounded in time and fact. Her fluid and probing prose allows such a deep and troubling glimpse in to the human heart that one comes away wiser and broader than before. This is not my first floating into The Waves—what I have already tasted makes me want to swim far out into her embracing world of character and reflection.

This review from a GoodReads reader sounds perfect for the Salon!!

My umpteenth reading of The Waves and it still floors me. There’s not a wasted word here: Woolf’s attention to rhythm—she was listening to Beethoven’s String Quartet in B-flat Minor, Opus 130 while writing this novel, and Beethoven’s nuances are found in her prose at all turns—and the ways in which she questions subjectivity, interpersonal relations, the ways in which we are connected and yet disparate from those around us are on display here more so than in any of her other fictional works.

The last section is sadly not as famous as the last section in Joyce’s Ulysses, but it may well be even more gut-wrenchingly brutal in its philosophical underpinnings and the ways in which Woolf engages with poetics to sustain the flow of her inquiries into what it means to be human. On each reading there is something more to be found here, something more to be learned, something to relish and treasure, some keen diamond-edged truth that slices just as much as it illuminates.

Salon Details

  • Four-meeting study
  • Recommended edition:
    • The Waves by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Kate Flint; Penguin edition (2000); ISBN-13: 978-0141182711
      OR
    • The Waves by Virginia Woolf, with introduction by Jeanette Winterson; Vintage Classics Ed. (Oct. 2016) ; ISBN-13: 978-1784870843
+ More

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