June Update
The only thing is to walk then you’ll feel a different man. It’s not far. Lean on me. –L. Bloom,
I am packing my bag to head for Dublin to celebrate Bloomsday with some of the intrepid Joyceans. We have just finished a six month study of James Joyce’s Ulysses- and what a ride! What a group! I will post feedback from the participants next week…at the moment, the heaventree of stars hung with humid blue nightfruit sings in my head along with Love’s Old Sweet Song. We struggled with the cantering styles shifting, the aesthetic philosophy of Stephen, the ineluctable modality of the visible, the difference between transubstantiation and consubstantiation, but mostly found the book to be about intimate love, grief, parents and children and the lonely cry of the self. Would I do it again? You betcha.
Now I am putting together the fall Salon schedules for both Paris and London. Paris may include Jonathon Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredible Close with another big Russian novel to be studied with a visiting expert in November. The London group is deciding what life looks like after Joyce: Virginia Woolf, Faulkner or a something completely different-Shakespeare, post-modern- or post-modern Shakespeare? Check back here in a few weeks to see what we have decided.