Parisian Literary Salon

ON the weekend of December 5th/6th I will be offering an afternoon/evening Salon study of Marilyn Robinson’s hautning first work, Housekeeping. Each line is so carefully crafted and ice-sharp- through Ruth’s narration we learn more about the impermenance of things- people, places, home- and watch her struggle to adulthood with the awareness that nothing stays in place. Ruth’s Aunt Sylvie tries to guide her, but Sylvie cannot break the habits of transcience: crackers in her pocket, coat always worn inside, shoes under her pillow- ultimately the home they share welcomes the outdoors- leaves rattle in the corners, birds nest in the cupboards. There is a freedom found here- and this book reveals profound possibilities in a spare world. To register please email me at litsalon@gmail.com. There are only a few places remaining…books available at The Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore.

On Friday the 5th, I will be facilitating a Poetry study at the American Library- Robert Frost’s Birches, Elizabeth Bishop’s Sestina and Leanne O’Sullivan’s The Cord will be in our hands for discussion and understanding. For details and registration for the Poetry study only, see the American Library website at: http://www.americanlibraryinparis.org/

Parisian Literary Salon January 2009
The New Year gallops in and suddenly it is January- is your desire to open up your reading to greater challenges and stimulating conversations? The current Salon group is thick in the reversals, boomerangs, music and violence of Invisible Man. The energy produced there has me looking towards the New Year- what insights might be discovered in our coming studies! If there is enough interest, I hope to offer a daytime Salon as well as the Thursday night Salon. To register: send me an email (let me know if your preference is for the day time or evening Salon) and I will send you details to hold your place. Cost is 65£ for the five week study including copies. The Salons will commence the week of January 5th. I will send out opening notes, edition suggestions and auxiliary material once you have registered. Please email me with questions and future requests: do check out the “What we are Reading” page on the Salon website- these are recommendations gathered from the Paris Salon community- I would love to add others.
See you in the pages-
Toby

King Lear- Parisian Literary Salon offering Jan. 2009
- by William Shakespeare
King Lear is regarded by many as Shakespeare’s greatest tragic work, looking at the nature of love and loyalty in its rawest manifestations. The goals of the Salon are to acquaint or re-acquaint you with the language of Shakespeare, consider how theater becomes literature, and to develop an appreciation for Shakespeare’s ability to speak of the human condition in ways that ring like a choral bell across four centuries. This Salon will provide the opportunity for performance and presentation. The work is meant to be understood first and foremost as theater, and we will do our best to honor Shakespeare’s intention in the Salon. We will also view clips from film versions of the work to help bring the words to life, and use Issac Assimov’s meaty background information to help us understand the historical context and allusions of the play.
Part of the beauty of this play is found in the honest exploration of parent-child relationships. This fundamental unit is based on a love so elemental as to be almost inarticulate- at the same time, the parent-child relationship can be fraught with power struggles, issues of entitlement, betrayals that run as deeply as the love, and the disorganizing pressures of the outer world. Shakespeare offers a study of a variety of these relationships, from the absolute filial loyalty of Cordelia (which traps her in its inarticulateness) to the twisted love (which one might read as love’s opposite) of her sisters- and others- Kent’s love of Lear, Edmond and Edgar of their father- that help give the reader a field of inquiry for this most essential human experience.
King Lear brings us to the depths of human suffering- to madness, torture, betrayal and death- but not in a way that distances us from the experience. The language allows us to continue to be within the emotions of the characters, even as the events become almost hyperbolic in their tragedy. Frank Kermode describes the universal nature of the tragedy in Lear:
“In King Lear we are no longer concerned with an ethical problem that, however agonizing, can be reduced to an issue of law or equity and discussed forensically. For King Lear is about suffering represented as a condition of the world as we inherit it or make it for ourselves. Suffering is the consequence of a human tendency to evil, as inflicted on the good by the bad; it can reduce humanity to a bestial condition, under an apparently indifferent heaven. It falls, insistently and without apparent regard for the justice they so often ask for, so often say they believe in, on the innocent; but nobody escapes.”

- Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language, pg. 184

And a poem by Sharon Olds where I found some thematic connections with Lear – perhaps a lighter stance? Enjoy….
Little Things
by Sharon Olds

After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a small
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the beautiful blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this tiny image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have—as if it were our duty to
find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.