Travel Studies

“Here came the sun—an illimitable rapture of joy, embracing every flower, every leaf. Then in compassion it withdrew, covering its face, as if it forbore to look on human suffering. There was a fecklessness, a lack of symmetry and order in the clouds, as they thinned and thickened. Was it their own law, or no law they obeyed?”                         —Between the Acts

** THREE SPACES REMAINING as of August 1st***

SALON DETAILS: 

• Weekend Meeting with Tuesday preparation:October 18th-20th 2019; prep meeting Tuesday October 15th 7:30-9:30
• Meeting at Kentish Town Salon & St Ives Cornwall; facilitated by Salon Director Toby Brothers
• Cost £160 includes notes and critical resources
• RECOMMENDED EDITION: Oxford World Classics 2008 (ISBN-10: 0199536570)

To register for the Salon study, please use the Paypal button below to pay £165: (Please pay for the  room directly to No4St Ives once your registration has been confirmed):

*Previous St Ives studies have been oversubscribed- if you do not get into this study, there will be another St Ives excursion in early April 2020– five days study of The Years  expanded with essays

 This is something I have dreamed of doing since I first read Woolf’s magical book To the Lighthouse— it has haunted me always. The opportunity to study Woolf’s writing with a keen group of minds in the place that is so inspired her writing is simply delicious…HUGE thanks to Sharon for being the organisational force here. 

Virginia Woolf:  “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 doubt stands upon this memory.  It is of lying in bed, half-asleep, haf 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 then breaking, one, two, one two, behind a yellow blind […}.  If I were a painter I should paint these impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green.  There was the pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers.”

“Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank.”

“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surace of a deep river.  Then one sees through the surface to the depths.  The past sometimes presses so close that you can feel nothing else.”

—“Sketch of the Past,” begun in June 1939.

Virginia Woolf spent much of her childhood in St. Ives.  The London Literary Salon invites you to join us in St Ives to explore this lovely coastal town and have it serve as a prism through which we will explore Woolf’s perspectives on landscape, domesticity, historical inheritance and identity in her novel Between the Acts. We have already completed four magical weekends with Woolf’s writings in the environment that inspired it– this is an incredible experience!

You will have the opportunity to  visit the iconic Tate St Ives gallery overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, built between 1988 and 1993 on the site of an old gasworks, and there will be an optional boat trip to Godrevy Lighthouse.

We may also look at Talland House, now privately owned, her childhood summer home.  For several months of the year the elegant house overlooking St Ives Bay would be the Stephens’ family home until 1895 when Virginia’s mother Julia Stephen died.  Although the complete family never returned to St Ives following their mother’s death, her children travellled back in 1905 following the death of their father in 1904.

Accommodation:  We are working with No4 St Ives which is just steps from Talland House and has an elevated position overloooking St Ives Bay.  It is a 5 minute walk from the beach and St Ives Town Centre.

Approximate cost: 

 Rooms at No4 St Ives range from £110-£140 per night– if the room is shared, the cost is halved; breakfast included. Some of us plan to stay Sunday night as well to be able to enjoy an extra day in this beautiful site. The entire cost is to be paid upfront. If for some reason you are unable to attend, we will work to find someone to replace you & reimburse you for the room but can not guarantee that is possible. The Salon cost may be applied to a later study. 

Train cost is approx.  £70  each way(cheaper if bought earlier) 

Salon cost is  £165– this includes a two-hour meeting Tuesday October 15th to start the study before the trip — as well as copious notes & critical resources. We will meet around eight hours over the weekend. The first meeting starts at 5:45 Friday evening; the last meeting is scheduled for 9:30-11:30 Sunday morning. On previous trips, many have stayed in St Ives through Sunday evening to have time for further exploration and reflection. Please discuss this option with Sue and Mike from No4 St Ives if you are interested. 

We will enjoy dinner out on Friday and Saturday…other costs will include the optional boat trip & visit to the St Ives gallery. 

Getting there:  The train from London takes just over five hours, with one change at St Erth for the branch line to St Ives.

More on the study Of Between the Acts:   

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.” The book includes a pageant composed of imaginary episodes from 1000 years of English history, and a close examination of the intricacies of village life in England in the days leading up to WW II. As always, it is Woolf’s penetrating consideration of intimate relationships and the places where language fails—but something else transcends—that lift this work from “the doom of sudden death hanging over us” as one of her characters describes.


Part of the challenge when reading Woolf is to understand it is not the action that matters but the impression of thoughts; it is by attending to the pattern and signification of thoughts and impressions that we will uncover meaning, innovation. While Woolf was writing this novel, she had written in a letter to Stephen Spender: “I think action generally unreal. It’s the thing we do in the dark that is more real; the thing we do because peoples eyes are on us seems to me histrionic, small boyish” (Letters Volume 6, April 1937). Although Woolf was to invoke the illumination of light, it is the darkness in the human mind that she was becoming more fascinated with as she witnessed Europe spinning towards war as she wrote this, her last book.  As Julia Briggs comments,

Oh beautiful and bounteous light on the table; oil lamp; ancient and out-of-date lamp…are the first words that Woolf typed out in April 1938 (as she began BTA)…

The lamp traditionally stands for illumination…yet this novel seeks for the darkness that lies beyond and beneath light and reason: lust, jealousy, contempt, the eruptions of anger and desire that are part of the night world…( J. Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life, p. 373)

As one of the primary modernist writers, Woolf plays with language; testing its ability to truly reflect human experience by recording the life of the mind not just action. Her narrative form reflects one of the characteristics of Modernist writing in its shifting centre of narrative perspective reflecting a questioning of ultimate and moral authority that characterized the time with the dissolution of Imperialism and absolute values.

Writing from the edge of the violent shift from Victorian to Modernist era, the loss of an old world in the violent destruction of war and massive social change, Woolf’s ambivalence is demonstrated in her work. She struggles against the boundaries and structures of the Victorian era while holding a great longing and nostalgia for the noble traditions of the time. Between The Acts reflects this ambivalence in its nostalgia for a lost English idyll, celebrated in the world of Pointz Hall as well as the pageant itself.  Studying this work in 2019, we may find much to consider about our current struggle to understand ourselves in reflection of the past: how we might create an idea of a simpler time that edits out the struggle of many whose story does not figure prominently in the revised history. I suggest Woolf in Between the Acts engages this historic myopia and reflects the discomfort and internal hypocrisies that result.

To understand this book, you will want to read with a wide awake mind and then re-read once you have played on the surface of plot and character. Notice how the descriptions along the edges—the fragments, the other stories invoked, the pastiche of the pageant—all comment on and expand the central narrative.

If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

November 15 – 17  2019, Valencia Spain

About A Heart So White

Javier Marías is a Spanish writer steeped in the literary canon, and particularly influenced by Shakespeare, Sterne, Proust and Faulkner. Our initial study of ‘The Infatuations’ in Valencia was so enriching that a second Marías novel has been selected for a salon in Valencia in November.

‘I did not want to know, but I have come to know’ is the famous first phrase of ‘A Heart so White’ (the title is a highly apposite quotation from ‘Macbeth’).  What the narrator did not care to investigate was the death, before he was born, of his aunt which led to his own existence as his father then married his deceased wife’s sister. As in many of his closely interlinked novels, Marías begins with an account of a violent episode; its repercussions form the highly discursive ‘plot’ of the book, an underlying structure which allows Marías free rein to dissect, in Proustian sentences, human behaviour,  our relationships, our loves, our jealousies, our dissimulations, our betrayals, our need to know what sometimes we might more comfortably ignore, the power of language to inform or confound.

Marías writes at a time when Spain is at last confronting its civil war and the repercussions of a policy, post-Franco, of ‘forgetting’ the horrors committed on both sides in order to avoid further bloodshed and to democratise the country:  no ‘truth and reconciliation’, no accountability, and therefore no justice. And democracy was swiftly adopted, but every Spanish family carries the effects of that war, and Marías, with others of his generation, explores in his fiction the ambiguities of memory, the question of guilt, the need to enter the narrative and to take responsibility for one’s action – or inaction.

—by Elspeth Ferguson

About Valencia:

Land of paella and palm trees, Beaux Arts buildings , Moorish influence , exotic and joyously authentic… the third largest city in Spain, Valencia is still largely unspoiled and  literally has everything: a vibrant food scene (and oh, the wine!), a pristine Mediterranean beach, cultural attractions including the architecturally stunning City of Arts and Sciences, churches galore (this is Spain, after all) and, for foodies, the glorious Mercat Central – at 8,160 sq. meters, the largest covered fresh food market in Europe.  But what really shines through is the juxtaposition of the general atmosphere of ‘joie de vivre’ – Valencians love a fiesta- and the soul of the city, concealed amongst cobbled alleys and hidden squares, magnificent and crumbling and lit by a most extraordinary light… every stroll an adventure, every vista a revelation, so much to discover.

Ooh- this just in from Forbes magazine:

Five Reasons Why Valencia, Spain Should Be Your Next Holiday Destination

Valencia on the east coast of Spain is the country’s third largest city (after Madrid and Barcelona) and offers many of the same attractions of these two better known cities. If the birthplace of paella with its seven kilometers of sandy beaches and virtually year-round sunshine wasn’t already on your radar, it might be now due to a major exhibition by Spain’s best known impressionist artist Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (born in Valencia in 1863) …

About the writer:

It is an intellectual journey to consider literature outside of my own cultural view…not realising how limited my understanding of Spanish writing is until pressed to come up with a title other than Don Quixote or Lorca. I have been turning over ideas about the category of national identity for writers: how much is a writer’s voice a product of a particular time & culture, how much does the reader need to understand (or gain an understanding of) a culture’s history and unique concerns through a novel? Contemporary Spanish writers share the global genre evolutions of realism and modernism; their country’s history of violent upheaval, fascism and a re-born democracy imprint the literature. Yet the shared struggles around love, loss, jealousy, betrayal move me into this lesser-known world.

And this:

“Once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with.”  From Infatuations by Javier Marais

SALON DETAILS

• Dates: 15-17th Nov First discussion @ 5:30 Friday afternoon; last discussion Sunday 12- 2 ending with Paella meal on the beach
• 6-8 hours of discussion spread over three days
• Participants organise flight and accommodations; our host Robin will provide suggestions (overall, Valencia is quite affordable)
• We will share some meals (Robin is offering to prepare a grilled feast Saturday evening with fresh market offerings—we will share cost); Friday eve & Saturday morning is open for you to discover the city for dinner and wandering
• Cost for the Salon study is £130—includes supporting notes & introductory materials

Please use the Paypal button below to pay £130 and  register for this study. Price includes six hours of discussion and supporting materials.

If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

Drawing on the success of the LLS, we are excited to expand the studies by offering retreats that place participants in locales that reflect and expand the literature. By taking participants to beautiful places, the LLS retreat offers a more intensive immersion in the book while opening the mind to a part of the world illuminated through the beauty of the language.

The Greek Odyssey study for May 2020 will use Homer’s epic poem to consider closely the guest-host relationship, the defining struggle of humans against overwhelming nature, the struggle to know ourselves in foreign spaces, our understanding of the heroic and the role of myth and epic in lived experience. Actor Jane Wymark and Poet Caroline Donnelly will be assisting Salon Director Toby Brothers in this week-long study, sharing their insights into the spoken word, metre and translation.  In an era where the epic poem is in eclipse, the novel and film having taken over as the preferred vehicles for  complex narratives, we will explore aspects of the Odyssey as a work in the oral tradition.

We have found the perfect site to host this study providing the ideal combination of a local space run by someone who understands our mission & can provide us room & board that has some cultural and adventure offerings — and is easy to access. We will be staying at Rosy’s Village on the stunning Island of Agistri. The study is scheduled for the 3rd (arrival) to the 11th (departure) of May 2020.

SALON DETAILS

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers, Jane Wymark and Caroline Donnelly
• May 3rd-11th 2019; program will run approx. five to six hours per day (one day open) leaving time for other activities (optional kayaking adventure and trip to The Pidavros theatre or Temple of Aphasia
• Preparatory meeting April 27th 7:00-9:30 in London (Skype option available)
• Recommended edition: The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles AND the Emily Wilson translation
• £475 for the Salon study includes preparatory meetings, background materials and opening notes

Room and half board (two meals per day) will be paid directly to Rosy’s; after you register, you will receive details on payment.

Room Prices for seven night stay: (including Breakfast & Dinner)

• 574 euro  Single  (approx. £510)
• 413 euro    Double      (approx. £365)
• 392 eruo  triple/family room

Other costs: Flights (Right now can be found for £120-200 r/t British Air), ferry to Agistri (usually 14 euro each way but may be 30 euro for arrival if the group chooses private water taxi), one meal a day and extra trips. For flight purchase, please make sure you can be in Piraeus by 3 PM for May 3rd to make the ferry.  We will not be meeting on the 11th so you have choices about your return; ferry are frequent (one hour travel from Agistri to Piraeus).

To register and pay for the study or if you would like further information, please contact us . Opening notes will be sent after registration.

Participant reflections May 2019:

“And it was such stirring stuff! It transformed The Odyssey from ever so slightly a form of homework, the better to get to grips with Ulysses, into an unexpectedly powerful, truly immersive and poetic experience – a fascinating study in its own right.”

“The facilitators were great, particularly Jane, who is wonderful, for the readings. That was memorable, for me.

About the epic…      

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?

Many artists have used The Odyssey as an inspiration for their work as Joyce does with Ulysses and the Coen brothers did for their film(winning an Oscar for the best screenplay adaptation from Homer’s original)…the epic struggle to return home and exploration of the guest/relationship remain relevant across time.

David Denby, in his work Great Books, describes his engagement with The Odyssey as an essential exploration of the formation of the self for the reader as well as for Telemachus and Odysseus: “Even at the beginning of the literary tradition of the West, the self has masks, and remakes itself as a fiction and not as a guiltless fiction either. . .

The Odyssey is an after-the-war poem, a plea for relief and gratification, and it turns, at times, into a sensual, even carnal celebration.”

Further reading : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10833515/Alice-Oswald-how-to-read-Homer.html

And here, from Jane, a brief summary of some of the contemporary novels inspired by the Homeric epics….

“All of these books contain major spoilers of the plots of both The Iliadand The Odysseyand so are to be avoided if you’d rather approach the Homeric Epics completely innocent. On the other hand, without some background knowledge of the Greek Pantheon you will soon be at sea so you might consider sacrificing surprise for context…”

Silence of the Girls

Pat Barker

 ‘An important, powerful, memorable book that invites us to look differently not only at The Iliadbut at our own ways of telling stories about the past and the present, an invitation to listen for voices silenced by history and power.’

Emily Wilson

Pat Barker is the author of the much respected award-winning Regenerationtrilogy set during the First World War and is thus very well qualified to retell the story of TheIliadin a style that displays its mythic universality. The first time that Achilles says ‘OK’ it lands as a shocking anachronism, but as you read on you realise that Barker is deliberately showing that the Trojan War has similarities to all wars in all times. Her central character, Briseis, is mentioned no more than a dozen times in Homer: she is an enslaved woman regarded simply as plunder.

The Song of Achilles

Circe

Madeline Miller

 The Song of Achilleswas Miller’s first book and was a major bestseller, published in 23 languages. It retells the story of the siege of Troy from the point of view of Patroclus, whose death Achilles avenged by the killing of the Trojan hero Hector and defiling the corpse by dragging it around the city walls behind his chariot. The book was less popular in some quarters: the NYT described it as having ‘the head of a young adult novel, the body of The Iliadand the hindquarters of Barbara Cartland’ and there’s some truth in that criticism, despite its irritating snobbish tone. It’s certainly a very engaging read and Miller’s second book, Circe, is even more so. Circe is a nymph and witch whose island home Odysseus and his men land up on. The book manages to weave in an enormous amount of Greek myth and legend in palatable form.

A Thousand Ships

Natalie Haynes

 ‘This subversive reseeing of the classics is a many-layered delight’.

Elizabeth Lowry

This is the most recent of the current crop of Homeric retellings. It is written in short chapters and covers the stories of many of the female characters, most of whom get fairly short shrift in Homer. Some are given more than one chapter – especially Penelope and the group Haynes calls The Trojan Women. Penelope’s chapters are written as letters to the absent Odysseus, a device taken from Ovid’s Heroides, but the dry witty tone echoes The Penelopiad written by the great Margaret Attwood fifteen years ago which is definitely worth a read.

If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.

Reading the Body Umbria Retreat: Mind & Body interplay

Providing space and material for thought and play towards greater connection to the world we inhabit-through expansion of the mind and body.

Jackie and Toby have both developed approaches to understanding the self in the world. Jackie’s work uses the body as a space of exploration & understanding, while Toby employs literature as a platform for discovery.

Each day will include two sessions of yoga and one to two sessions of literature study. This will leave hours across the day for down time: explore the local area, rest and resource, reading, swimming, hiking, stretching.

SALON RETREAT DETAILS

• Facilitated by Toby Brothers and Jackie Seigler
• May 31st- June 7th  2020; program will run approx. four to five hours per day (one day open) leaving time for other activities
• Recommended editions: The Portrait of A Lady by Henry James (Norton Critical Edition, ISBN-10: 0393938530);  The Silent Duchess by Dacia Maraini (Arcadia Books Jun. 2010 ISBN-10: 190641372X)

Fees: Includes all yoga and salon study, accommodation , 3 meals a day & tea/biscuits and fruit.

• £1,200 Single
• £875 Shared Double
• £785 Triple shared
• £750 for non-participating partners

  Not included: Travel to the retreat (flights to Rome)

Further queries and reservation instructions, please contact:  Jackie – Jackie@seigler.co.uk

Opening notes will be sent after registration.

 The Place– La locanda della Quercia Calante

In the heart of verdant Umbria, in Castel Giorgio, only hills and nature surround the Locanda della Quercia Calante, charming holiday farm in an old farm house, renovated according to natural architectural principles. 18 kilometers from Orvieto, in the province of Terni, it is the ideal spot for those who want a fully natural vacation, in an environmentally friendly atmosphere at a natural pace of life. Energizing water pool, holistic spa center with yoga room, restaurant with local and vegetarian cuisine, fourteen rooms without electromagnetic fields…

http://www.querciacalante.com/home-en/

• full board in single or double/twin rooms /triple rooms/ quadruple (family)rooms with services and private veranda on the park.
• two coffee-tea-herbal teas, fruit etc. Breaks each day.
• use of one of the large yoga studios
• free use of the large complex of two swimming pools (300 m2) and one large spa in the park (during the summer). Salt filtering systems without chlorine.
• excellent and fresh food, mostly organic, very well cooked. Possibility of traditional Italian, mixed, vegetarian or vegan food (one choice for the entire group).
• all the rooms are perfectly heated in winter and cooled during the summer.

In your free time you can visit the beautiful surroundings: art cities of Orvieto, Siena, Todi or Etruscan and medieval sites, Bolsena Lake and thermal springs.

The Yoga:

Jackie Seigler – Yoga teacher

Jackie’s teaching style is very much drawn from Ashtanga yoga.  Her practice is continually evolving; she describes her style of yoga modern postural yoga with an emphasis on core stability as well as flexibility. Her goal in teaching is for students across all ages and body types to establish a more regular and fulfilling practice.

Jackie continually reviews, investigates and modifies her self-practice to make her teaching practice more accessible to everyone.

When one becomes a yoga practitioner you become an eternal student.

The idea of our retreat together is ‘Reading The Body’:  our yoga and meditation practice in the morning will be a great place to begin that work.

The afternoon class will be a combination of Restorative yoga, yoga Nidra and technical alignment-based sessions so we can work and build on a specific pose.

Restorative yoga is all about slowing down and opening your body through passive stretching, the centring of your breath and body, and aligning the physical and mental by practicing stillness or gentle movement for extended periods of time. The props assist in helping you to hold poses longer. During the long holds of restorative yoga your muscles can relax deeply. It’s a unique feeling because props, rather than your muscles, are used to support your body. Restorative classes are very mellow, making them a good complement to more active practices and an excellent antidote to stress.

Yoga Nidra, a state of conscious deep sleep, is a simple yet profound technique that unwinds the nervous system and induces complete physical and mental relaxation with inner awareness.

The Literary Salon:

Toby Brothers – London Literary Salon Director

The London Literary Salon creates community around the study of great literature. The Salon offers unique and inclusive discussion-based studies of literature—weaving the ideas of participants with questions the books raise about what it is to be human. Carefully facilitated, each study is dynamic and expansive in scope.

Drawing on the success of the LLS, we are expanding the studies by offering retreats that place participants in locales that reflect and open up the literature. The LLS retreat offers a more intensive immersion in the book while opening the mind to a part of the world illuminated through the beauty of the language.

I am considering two works for this study: A Portrait of a Lady by Henry James and The Silent Duchess by Dacia Maraini. Both of these works consider Italy as both setting and cultural idea, and both explore the struggle for an independent mind to be authentic in stifling cultural roles and relationships.

A Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The book is a painted portrait or even a kaleidoscope.  We watch and guess what Isabel will do. But like a portrait, she is (perhaps) caught in a frame and frozen by the artistry –or the terms of her world.

Previous studies have included considerations of gender roles, the negotiated space between self and other, the corruption or freedom offered by privilege, the challenge of looking at nationalities in generalizations (and the tempting ease to do so), the ways in which humans reveal themselves…these Salon discussions are full of wonder: the meeting of the gathered minds and the provoking text is a powerful thing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson seems to echo in the lines and characters of Henry James, Isabel in particular.

“You think of me the child of my circumstances: I make my circumstance…I—this thought which is called I, –is the mould into which the world is poured like melted wax. The mould is invisible, but the world betrays the shape of the mould. You call it the power of circumstance, but it is the power of me.” –from Emerson’s essay The Transcendentalist 

Our study of PoAL may include a consideration of this quote in light of Isabel’s life and choices: how much do we make ourselves? How does the world impose itself on the individual in the act of self-creation?

The Silent Duchess by Dacia Maraini

Finalist for the International Man Booker Prize, winner of the Premio Campiello, short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award upon its first English-language publication in the UK, and published to critical acclaim in fourteen languages, this historical novel by one of Italy’s premier women writers has mesmerized readers globally.

In luminous language that conveys both the keen visual sight and the deep human insight possessed by her remarkable main character, Dacia Maraini captures the splendor and the corruption of Marianna’s world and the strength of her unbreakable spirit.

Maraini paints a vivid and unflinching representation of 18th century Sicilian Italy. It is often shocking in its honest portrayal of the inequalities at the heart of that society. From the excesses indulged in by the nobility while the majority lived in abject poverty or were subject to the most barbaric punishments should they err, to the utter powerlessness and abuse of women of any class.

The silent duchess of the title, Marianna, is deaf and mute. Her muteness is symbolic of all women of her time who had no say in anything at all. In the patriarchal system which prevailed, all decisions and choices were made for them. Not that many choices were afforded them; they either ended up in a convent or were married off at an appallingly young age for paternal gain. It seemed the convent was preferable, as Marianna’s sister thrived in her role as a healing nun.  (from Jenny Lloyd, Goodreads Review)

If you have any questions about this study, please contact us.