Closer to Fine

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Photo by Mark Lewis on Unsplash

August is the moment when I breathe in and gaze across the previous months of studies and work. This August feels particularly welcome: the Salon has grown with the incredible energy of the new facilitators (new as in going from myself and Mark a few years ago to a current staff of 13) and Nicky Mayhew keeping the Salon ship moving with communications, strategic advice and administrative support. We are also indebted to Sophie and crew at TPR media who have helped raise the Salon profile with interviews and news on Start the Week, BBC London and more.

At the heart of our work is always the experience of the studies themselves: the magical and enriching journey through the words into the blossoming spaces of imagination and contemplation. I am sharply aware that all around me the world is challenged with wars and violence, with climate change and suffering. I am also aware that the monsters of intolerance and prejudice are swelling, greedy in their appetite for discord. Sometimes I realise the Salon discussions offer an escape—an immersion in the artistic rendering of the human mind that emphasizes the lyric and generous visions of writers able to illuminate all aspects of our living.

But it is more than an escape. Within Salon discussions we learn to form and speak our insights to provocative ideas. We learn to hear each other and even—perhaps especially—to disagree respectfully, opening our minds to differing views and the reflections of others. Stepping out of our individual perspective and entering into the mind of an author, a character, another being—this is the practice of empathy. I experience this both in deep reading and discussion of the literature, and also in focused engagement with the participants in a Salon discussion. 

Mohsin Hamid recently explored the dangerous progression he has witnessed towards binary thinking and how reading and writing literature pushes against it, read his article here.

“I wrote this novel to explore what it has been to be myself, and also to explore what it is to be other selves. I intend it as a means for readers to do the same. We risk being trapped in a dangerous and decadent tyranny of binaries. Perhaps fiction can help us investigate the space between the ones and zeroes, the space that presently seems empty, impossible, but then, when entered, when occupied, continues to expand and expand, bending and stretching and eventually, possibly, revealing its unexpected capacity for encompassing us all.”

Mohsin Hamid

August is also the time (well, of course, it should be July or earlier but, hey, we are all doing the best we can) when we plan and announce the bulk of the studies for the coming year. This has been a big year for Joyce and Ulysses (one hundred years since publication) and I am still basking in the afterglow of the three study groups—one for returning readers, with whom I was privileged to explore again, more deeply, this incredible work that celebrates curiosity, fantasy, and desire while skewering one-eyed prejudicial perspectives. The Bloomsday festivities—in London and in Dublin—were particularly sweet this year. The building Ulyssian energy has prompted a new ‘Slow Read’ of the great book, commencing in October, rolling forward in ten-week waves so participants can join along the way. This format echoes the Finnegans Wake approach that is now on its second cycle after four years of study, and it is so satisfying to dwell in such a complex text with the time and space for careful consideration. 

There are so many wonderful and unique studies coming in the next few months. I am still harnessing the right words to express the particular magic of the travel studies—this past year in St Ives, Umbria and Greece—these adventures create on-going groups connected through their combined love of literature and adventure. We are working on the travel offerings for the coming year, and this year’s September/October St. Ives studies are in place with one remaining space for Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as I write.

Thinking across the variety of genres, historical and social contexts that we offer in the Salon, an old verse from the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls plays on the edges of my mind. My hungry brain seeks an answer, THE answer (how to fight inequities in power and resources, what is the best way to live, what confers meaning on our existence?), but the study of great writing bends my mind towards possibilities and means of expanding my understanding. Art can offer a gasp of insight to the big questions—not to stop the asking but to find a moment of solidity on the climb. 

And I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
(The less I seek my source)
Closer I am to fine, yeah

Indigo Girls, Closer to Fine

Bloomsday 2022!

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So, in the centenary year of Ulysses, this year’s Bloomsday on 16th June was – perhaps slightly confusingly – the 100th (from publication) or the 116th (from the setting of the book in 1904).

Either way, devotees of James Joyce and his most famous work continue to use the day as as a reason to celebrate all things Joycean and in particular the fabulous characters that populate Ulysses, most notably Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Below are some of this year’s highlights for the LitSalon.

‘Bloomsday’ by Nick Midgley on RTE Radio 1

Nick Midgley’s radio play Bloomsday, dramatising the relationship between James Joyce and his brother Stanislaus and their time together (with Nora Barnacle) in Trieste, was broadcast on RTE Radio 1 on Sunday 12 June and can still be heard online.

The Bootleg Balloonatics’ Bloomsday Walk in Tufnell Park,
12 June 2022

The Bootleg Balloonatics – organiser Chris Bilton, Paul Dornan and John Goudie – invited Toby Brothers to join them (playing Molly, Milly and Mrs Breen) for a two-hour recreation of Leopold Bloom’s Dublin perambulations in London’s Tufnell Park, performed for an appreciative travelling audience of around 50, ending with gorgonzola sandwiches in the Dartmouth Arms . . . Read more in the Camden New Journal here.

Bloomsday in Dublin, 16 June 2022

A group of intrepid Salonistas – including Sheila Fitzgerald, Leah Jewett, Paul Caviston, Zita Moran (to name just a few) – visited Dublin to enjoy Bloomsday celebrations in situ. The day included the Dublin Balloonatics’ Bloomsday Walk led by founder Paul O’Hanrahan, an early morning swim from the Forty Foot (that’s Toby diving in), a variety of period costumes, a visit to The James Joyce Centre, and an Eccles Cake (or perhaps it’s a toasted teacake) in Eccles Street . . . a good time was had by all!

At a specially convened celebratory lunch on the following day, Toby – who has guided so many in the Salon through this extraordinary literary journey – recited her poem about launching a new Ulysses study:

Launching Ulysses study

A new study begins…
First time faces gather in Hollywood Squares
Alarmed face asks me
Why did he come?
Courtesy or an inward light?

Will they find their way?
Will they stumble and fall into ineluctable modality of the impossible?
This reader wants into the fray, but
“I’m not a believer myself, that is to say…
A believer in the narrow sense of the word.”
And I want to say:
Shut your eyes and See.

Another reader takes tentative steps forward
Her reading wobbles but Buck draws her near
“Are we supposed to like him – or not?”
In Joyce, there are no easy answers. 
In the stilted dance of Telemachus
I hope she will catch a grip
And Joyce whispers close:
“That’s the bucko that’ll organise her, take my tip.”

A frustrated reader who hasn’t yet learned to swim in Jim
Scratches at the text
But it is himself he fears
Plenty to see and hear and feel yet.
“The only thing is to walk,
Then you’ll feel a different man. 
It’s not far – lean on me.“

I hope they will hear in a profound 
Ancient male unfamiliar melody
The accumulation of the past.  

I hope that they will hear
The chant of a quick young male form
The predestination of the future.

Look out—gender fireworks ahead
Who will stumble? O, so many rocks!
“Possess her once take the starch out of her”
“O wept! Aren’t men frightful idiots!”
“She does whack it, by George!“
So many cocks. 

But if—o, but if they can find
The ample bed-warmed flesh

Yes                Yes        
FORWARD woozy Wobblers!
Old Ulyssians – Make more room in the Bed!

Reading Ulysses is not only a wonderful literary adventure, it’s also great fun! Our next Ulysses studies (a six-month study beginning in January 2023 and an extended ‘slow read’ option starting in October 2022) are now open for booking.

Also in Dublin . . .

Meanwhile, Salonista Geoff Strange has kindly allowed us to publish below an account of his own independent visit to Dublin for Bloomsday 2022.


The day was long, starting with a brisk walk to the Martello Tower in Dalkey, then walking the strand in Sandymount, then Sweny’s, then The National Museum and for then what we hoped to be a relieving park bench in St Stephen’s Green before our next “appointment.” But could we find a spare park bench anywhere? No! Literally all benches were occupied and occupied, I might add, by a cacophony of bonnet/boater wearing Edwardians, some of whom were even playing American football! At last, we spied a shady bench and after a dash that would impress Usain Bolt, the bench was duly nabbed! We sat and napped only to discover on awakening that we were sat opposite non other than our very own Jim! There he was, plinthed and peering back at us with those dodgy eyes of his. It’s as if he had bequeathed his very own bench to a couple of foot weary flaneurs in our hour of need!   

Suitably reinvigorated we left our bench, said bench soon to be taken up as temporary dug-out for those Edwardian garbed American footballers, and made our way to MoLI for a lecture by Paul Muldoon, Irish poet and general polymath about town. He was giving the inaugural Dedalus Lecture entitled, “Spinoza’s Shillelagh: Some Thorny Issues in Ulysses.” We were treated to an hour of poetic investigation of, wait for it, the first three words of the novel. Can you remember them? Of course: stately, plump, and buck. To Muldoon, the whole book is bound within those three words. It was a fanciful and entertaining romp through Irish and Classical literature! 

The whole sixty minutes was, in a way, quite Joycean, not through design but in the way he was initially interrupted by the reggae band in the garden, then a stream of late attendees with himself, no less, showing them to their seats and then to cap it all, the gentle murmur of somebody’s mobile phone. All of us reached for our pockets but all but one was safe in the knowledge that it was not ours. For the poor eejit that discovered that it was his phone was bad enough but his woeful inability to firstly find the correct pocket and then work out how to switch the damned thing off, all the time the volume of its inane ringtone getting louder and louder, made me think of how Joyce would actually have loved this! 

After that there was only one final destination on the agenda: pints and a toasted sandwich at Peter’s Pub. No, not mentioned by Joyce but this favourite Dublin haunt of mine is so redolent of a bygone era of manners, stools at the bar and none of that musak, maybe similar to Davy Byrne’s in its heyday. As you walk in, they say “how are yer, what’ll you have,” to which the response is two pints please (no need for clarification in this boozer). “No matter, you sit down, and I’ll bring them over. Toastie?” No need to tell you the answer to that! 

Several hours later we are back on the DART speeding past Sandymount Strand with not a firework in sight! We look left across the sea denuded strand, peering into eternity. 

What a day!

Hope your day was special!

And just to say, Toby, how grateful I am to you for your amazing guidance on this epic journey. You certainly opened an old door very carefully to another way of reading and I can’t thank you enough. 

Go raibh mile maith agaibh


The Waves – novel or poem?

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The Waves, first edition
Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry

Is it a novel? Is it a poem? What exactly was Virginia Woolf trying to achieve when she wrote The Waves?

In his review in the New York Times in October 1931, critic Louis Kronenberger wrote:

“This prose, this imagery, is not in other words a medium, but an end in itself. The texture of the prose is a warp of sensory impressions woven into woof of poetical abstraction. As prose it has very often a high distinction–it is clear, bright, burnished, at once marvelously accurate and subtly connotative. The pure, delicate sensibility found in this language and the moods that it expresses are a true kind of poetry. And since literature comes before the novel, and “The Waves” reaches the level of literature, whether it is a good or bad novel, or any novel at all, is not really important. Bernard’s summing up at the end, for instance, of what their lives have meant–a cohesive, exquisite and sometimes moving stretch of writing–must be allowed, if no precedent exists for it, to set its own.”

Over the years The Waves has remained one of Woolf’s lesser-known works, perhaps because it defies categorisation and lacks the narrative unity of novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. Yes, it can seem difficult, but it is also extraordinarily beautiful, the writing complex and daring. There will be much to discuss during our time in St Ives and two places remain on the Salon study this October!

Midsummer writing . . .

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Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

June rolls on, and suddenly it’s the middle of summertime in the northern hemisphere – longest day of the year, midpoint of the year. The peak of solar energy, the green stuff bursts forth. Celebrating the Solstice means observing fire and our great living sun, not just literally (our inexorable connection to the sun as a life source), but also figuratively (illumination of the mind, the soul).

Like literature. It’s no stretch that I’m thinking about my favourite midsummer novel, Joyce’s Ulysses – not only 16 June, just a few days before the Summer Solstice in Dublin, but also the longest day in literature (Stephen Dedalus notes at the end of Proteus: “By the way next when is it? Tuesday will be the longest day.”)  It is indeed a long day for Bloom: it’s between 8 and 9.00pm in Nausicaa when he says “Long day I’ve had.”

Readers know there’s still a long way to go! It will be a few hours and a few hundred pages until “the heaventree of stars hung heavy with humid nightblue fruit.” This, my favourite line in the novel comes near the end of that long midsummer day and captures a moment of noticing. An observation of the glorious evening sky. For me, it’s something about seeing the cosmos as a tree that roots me in my tiny here and now every time. It’s perspective. And something about that humid nightblue fruit nourishes . . .

There is still time to book a place on Alison Cable’s three-session Midsummer Writing study running on 14, 21 and 28 June.

Calling all Joyce enthusiasts – Bloomsday looms!

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Salon Director Toby Brothers & salonista Sheila Fitzgerald celebrating Bloomsday 2021

Ulysses – the story of Leopold Bloom’s day-long Dublin odyssey on 16 June 1904 – was published in February 1922, making this year’s Bloomsday the one-hundredth anniversary.

A quick reminder of some of the Salon-related celebrations taking place over the coming week (click on links for more information):

Meanwhile, a group of enthusiastic salonistas will be visiting Dublin to join the festivities on location . . .

Enjoy!

Bloomsday – a play for radio

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James Joyce in 1888, age six

Have you noticed the way in which, when there is more than one child in a family, each of them tends to be given a particular role? In my case, my mother always used to say that she hoped I would become a banker, or a lawyer – someone who would earn enough money to look after her in her old age. My brother, by contrast, was expected to be ‘an Artist’. It wasn’t entirely clear what this should involve, but clearly included him being somewhat unstable but brilliant, bringing reflected glory to his parents because of his talent, even if the consequence might be a painful (and impoverished) life… It didn’t really matter than I wrote poetry (and had no interest in banking), or that my brother quite liked the idea of having a comfortable and stable life (and maybe even helping to look after his parents in old age). In both our cases, growing up involved us having to work out our own responses to the expectations we were born into…

It won’t come as any surprise, then, that when I started reading about the life of James Joyce, I quickly became fascinated about his relationship to his younger brother, Stannie. As the eldest son of an eldest son, James was his father’s favoured child, carrying all his father’s frustrated hopes for fame and glory. Stannie did his best to follow in his brother’s footsteps, but that meant he was always a step behind – looking up with admiration (and some envy) at his brother’s achievements. From his teenage years onwards, Stannie kept a diary, much of which was filled with commentary on his brother’s life. Some of this was published posthumously, as The Dublin Diaries. He became Joyce’s first reader and critic – and gathered materials for his brother to use in the short stories that were eventually to be published as Dubliners. When Joyce went into exile in Trieste with Nora Barnacle, Stannie followed them out there; working tirelessly to earn enough money to allow his brother to write, often ‘rescuing’ him from the bars of Trieste, where he feared his brother was dissipating his talents. Joyce never fully acknowledged his brother’s contribution. Indeed, he cut the character based on him (Maurice) almost entirely from the final version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Oh, and when it was finally published, he forgot to include the promised dedication to his brother in Dubliners.

Even today, with biographies and novels about the lives of Joyce’s father, John, his wife Nora, and his daughter Lucia, there is still no full-length book about Stanislaus Joyce. So when I joined the Lit Salon to re-read Ulysses, which I’d first had a go at when I was at university, it was no surprise that I also started to remember my fascination with James Joyce’s brother…

Eighteen months later, and I’m delighted to say that my radio play about the relationship between the brothers, Stannie and James Joyce, is going to be broadcast on RTE, to coincide with this year’s Bloomsday celebrations on 16 June. The play is called ‘Bloomsday’ and tells the story – in a fictionalized form – of the ten years when Stannie lived with James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in Trieste, between 1905 and 1915. Joyce wrote in Ulysses that ‘a brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella’, and in some ways my play was an attempt to bring Stannie back into the story – indeed, to tell his story, the one that he never really got to write.

A small coda however. After finishing work on the play, and having had so much pleasure reading Ulysses again, I decided to have a go at reading Finnegans Wake with Toby in the Lit Salon. Although I hadn’t known about it at the time I was writing my play, it turns out that Finnegans Wake puts the relationship between two brothers – Shem and Shaun – at the heart of the book. Shem is an artist; and Shaun is a postman, one who can only deliver letters, not write them. So even in his final work, the family roles were still being played out. But I think Finnegans Wake is also a reckoning with these family scripts too. Indeed, despite the contempt in which Shem seems to hold his brother, and the sense of disapproval that Shaun shows towards his irresponsible sibling, in the end they both recognise that they need each other. And love each other. The family roles each were asked to play is part of what makes them who they are; but in questioning and challenging those roles, they also each become the person they should truly be.

Nick Midgley’s radio play, ‘Bloomsday’, will be broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday 12 June at 8.00 pm (BST) and will be available online at rte.ie/dramaonone.

More about James Joyce . . .

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Continuing my long association with the City Lit, starting on 13 June I am leading a four-week ‘sampler’ course introducing the first four chapters of Ulysses.

For those who can’t get enough of Joyce – or for those who would like to know what all the fuss is about – this course will immerse you in the realm of Modernism and Joyce’s experimentation with language. Ulysses is the huge book that sits atop most ‘best novels of all time’ lists, but few people have actually managed to read this work. The writing is challenging – but when discussed with a group of readers, with carefully chosen resources, you will be amazed at how much this work will develop your perspective on language, love, nationhood, identity, history and lemon soap. And funny – it is a deeply humorous and at times absurd book. We will consider just the first four chapters of the work: this will introduce readers to the vast wealth of material that the book offers. Most readers, once they have engaged with the book the first time, return repeatedly, finding more with each read.

More Joyce reminders:

  • On Sunday 12 June Nick Midgley’s radio play Bloomsday will be broadcast on RTE’s Drama on One.
  • On the same day in London the Balloonatics (joined by, ahem, me) will enact the second annual Tufnell Park Bloomsday Walk.
  • Meanwhile, a group of Ulyssians and Wakians from the Salon will head to Dublin to experience the carnival in the streets that celebrates this bounding work.

Bloomsday 2022

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The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit…

Photo (Brownstown Head, Co Waterford) by Will Francis on Unsplash

Those who have not YET read Ulysses may wonder what all the fuss is around Bloomsday, 16 June. There are those books you read that shift your world view – adding more intense colours to the interior and exterior landscape, have you rolling a favourite line or two sweetly in your mind – and then there are those few works that blast the mind right open: frustrating, challenging and ultimately symphonically exploding your understanding of what language can do, of what we might be able to understand about ourselves, each other, through the medium of language. Ulysses is the latter. 

Having stumbled, trotted and slip-slided through this beautiful work many times now with such wonderful minds, Ulysses is in my bones – constantly reminding me that any given day, for any regular person, can be epic when we attend to the mind’s stream…Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all….

On this, the 100th year anniversary of Joyce’s publication, the Salon is proud to highlight some of the many ways readers and would-be readers celebrate this work that warmly embraces the rhythm of life. 

  • On Sunday 12 June Nick Midgley’s radio play Bloomsday will be broadcast on RTE’s Drama on One (more to follow on this).
  • On the same day in London the Balloonatics (joined by, ahem, me) will enact the second annual Tufnell Park Bloomsday Walk.
  • Meanwhile, a group of Ulyssians and Wakians from the Salon will head to Dublin to experience the carnival in the streets that celebrates this bounding work.

News from the Salon community

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Our very own Kaye Seamer (who spans Joyce and Proust gracefully) has also sung for twelve years with the Royal Choral Society, which is staging a concert at the Royal Festival Hall on 1 June to mark its 150th Anniversary. The concert will be particularly special because the RCS gave the premier British performance of the work at the Royal Albert Hall in 1875, conducted by Verdi himself.

Tickets are available through the Southbank Centre and a 20% discount can be obtained by using the code RCSVERDI.

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