London Studies 2013 brief studies to six month odysseys…
REGISTER TODAY FOR ANY studies that sound interesting–your mind will thank you! Email me with questions or for further details…
22.01.13 Short Story study (one meeting) “The Liar” by Tobias WolffTuesday evening 8- 10 PM £30 “Short stories, like poems, demand a lot from their readers. Novels may be longer, but they don’t require the same compressed attention. They allow moments of relaxation; their narratives promise to hold you, however casual the concentration you invest.”
But Tobias Wolff, who is one of our great contemporary masters of the short story, says that the difficulty of the short story is its own reward. “The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story,” he once said. And the writer’s thrill is “working a miracle, making life where there was none” in the space of a few precisely and elegantly distilled pages.
04.02.13 Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf Four week study Monday afternoons 1-3 PM OR Monday Evenings 8-10 PM £65
Virginia Woolf’s lyric prose and gorgeous vision combine to consider the sense of exhaustion that punctuated the Modernist period leading up to WW II. Edward Mendelson describes the book: “Everything comes to an end in Between the Acts, and then, as the book itself comes to an end, something unknowable begins.”
31.01.13 The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner four week study 8- 10 PM Thursday Evenings £65
In William Faulkner’s first truly modernist work, he pushes to break through the confines of time and sequence to get at the essence of human nature- as Malcolm Bradbury explains, “Faulkner’s preoccupation with time has to do with the endless interlocking of personal and public histories and with the relation of the past to the lost, chaotic present.”
29.01.13 Ulysses starts week of January 28th–sign up now to get the notes and start reading! Choose either Monday afternoons 1-3 PM or Tuesday Evenings 8-10 PM From TS Eliot: I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.
I heard Howard Jacobson speak recently on Ulysses as the greatest Jewish novel of the 20th century. Ulysses shows us, Jacobson convincingly argued, ‘the healing power of creative exile into oneself…the dignity of the average damaged person.’ Leopold Bloom’s relationship with Molly is the relationship between the Jews and God: it goes on mostly in Bloom’s head while Molly herself is mostly upstairs and unavailable; it is built on the expectation of discomfort, and it is revolves on the deeply held belief that ‘it requires great potency to deserve great punishment’. His insightful, impassioned analysis of Bloom invoked how a complex character in literature may offer the reader insight into human psyche: one’s own pains and triumphs as reflected in another. So I was disappointed to read his rather simplistic rant against readers and reading groups in the Guardian this weekend.
I agree- emphatically- with his disgust at the limited response of readers who say, “I don’t like this book because I don’t sympathise with the main character.” Liking or sympathising with a character is not the point; understanding our own response, recognizing when a character has discomforted or engaged us gets the reader much further down the road to critical and engaged reading. But I disagree with his generalization that it is destruction of art to use reading to find ourselves–in fact, the discomfort or challenge offered by an authentic portrayal of human experience does help the reader ‘find themselves’–perhaps clarifying our own values in contrast, reflecting back to us our own narrow thinking, helping us expand our perspective by locating ourselves on a spectrum of human consciousness. This is certainly not the only purpose of a great read–and it would be solipsistic to limit the power of reading to simply understanding the self. But Jacobson’s cranky rejection of reading groups as ‘lacking the strong stomach’ necessary to understand and respond to difficult or unsympathetic characters reflects his own limited perspective. My experience with readers in the Salons demonstrates a variety of readers who, with courage and curiosity, explore the difficult aspects of human nature as reflected in the characters we study. My weekend reading partner also pointed out the great irony in a writer who is disgusted by readers who seek to find themselves in books as he is publishing a book about himself as a writer. Hmmmm…
The novel is in danger, according to Howard Jacobson, the Man Booker prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. But, he said, the fault lies not with novelists, but with the lack of good readers.
Describing his experience of appearing at reading groups – “sometimes they are lovely, sometimes they aren’t, and sometimes they are just staggeringly rude” – Jacobson said that he felt a sense of “heartbreak” when he heard readers say, “I don’t like this book because I don’t sympathise with the main character.”
He added: “The language of sympathy and identity and what we call political correctness is killing the way we read.
“That’s like the end of civilisation. That is the end. In that little sentence is a misunderstanding so profound about the nature of art, education and why we are reading, that it makes you despair. Who ever told anyone that they read a book in order to find themselves?”
Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Jacobson said that the reader needed a “strong stomach” and ought to be able to withstand the “expression of an ugly point of view” in a book. There was, he added, great danger in the “politically correct” pressure that urged “you can’t write about women like that, you can’t write about men like that, you’ve got to be careful what you say about gays, you’ve got to be careful what you say about Jews… But you have to be able to say of the novel that it has free rein – it can go anywhere.”
His latest book, Zoo Time, is a comic novel about what he called the “multiplying degradations” of being a writer. When he began it, immediately after finishing The Finkler Question, he was convinced the novel that went on to win the Booker would be a disaster.
Being a novelist, he said, is “the nicest way of spending your life but it’s full of indignities. These indignities were swarming after I’d finished The Finkler Question. I also felt that no one was going to read it: the subject matter was inimical to the taste of the times. I was over, I thought. So I thought, ‘I’ll go out in a blaze, I’ll write one more novel that makes fun of myself: make fun of my dreams, make fun of my fantasies.'”
He added: “The signs were very, very bad for The Finkler Question. If ever I were not going to win the Man Booker prize, this was the time. I so wasn’t going to win the Man Booker prize that it actually can’t be that I won the Man Booker prize.”
Zoo Time, then, is about the failure of the novelist and the ruination of the publishing industry. It begins with its hero, a novelist called Guy Ableman, being arrested, after addressing a reading group in Chipping Norton, for shoplifting one of his own novels from the local Oxfam. In the second chapter, Ableman’s publisher shoots himself.
He put aside the draft of Zoo Time when he won the Booker, thinking, “How do you go on writing a book about literary failure when that happens? I put it away thinking that will be the final joke against me: great novel ruined by Booker prize.”
After a matter of months, though, he was prompted to take it up in “a state of retrospective despondency… It all came back to me, if possible even sharper than before, the misery of my life before winning the Man Booker prize.”
“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.” —William Faulkner
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 good news: reading Ulysses is fun. And I don’t mean in a frustrating, overly-analytical see-how-much-you-know-way. The language is amazing—even when I don’t understand it. Perhaps, especially when I don’t understand it, because meaning sneaks in through more than my critical faculty. Meaning slides in through sound, through the lushness of the language, through the filmy and substantial images, and suddenly I find myself transported from a walk on a beach to a contemplation of the origins of man—thanks, James Joyce.
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.
“Joining the Ulysses salon was one of the best things I have ever done. This was a book I had wanted to read for years but never got past the first section. I had no idea what the salon would be like and was very apprehensive about joining up. But Toby so skillfully guided us through it, her knowledge of the text seemingly inexhaustible, that with her warmth and generosity and sensitivity she got everyone involved and the satisfaction of participating in the salon and in getting an understanding of this marvelous work was immense.”
This article titled “Howard Jacobson attacks the dearth of ‘good readers'” was written by Charlotte Higgins, chief arts writer, for theguardian.com on Friday 24th August 2012 17.25 UTC
