Parisian Literary Salon

“I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we
are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an
utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to
believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just
for the pleasure of it. I miss civilization, and I want it back.”
- Marilyn Robinson, introduction to The Death of Adam

Doing a bit of Housekeeping here- looking forward to this weekend’s studies in Paris, fully immersed in the smokey, blinding, violent, oratorical and mirror-filled world of Invisible Man. Here are upcomming Salon standings:
In Paris this weekend:
Poetry Study at the American Library: space remaining: eight
Housekeeping Salon Saturday 6th December: space remaining: one

In London January 2009
King Lear Thursday Evenings (start 8 January): one space remaining
Hamlet Tuesday Evenings (start 13 January): registration open
email Toby (via the contact me plug) with questions or for registration details…

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.

Parisian Literary Salon Newsletter 20 October 2008
1. November/December Thursday evening & Tuesday day Salon: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
2. Salon Details & book notes
3. Reflections & a poem… for free!!

1. Invisible Man Salons
Although we had talked about studying King Lear in this series, the confluence of history and opportunity made Ellison’s masterpiece a more obvious choice. The Thursday evening Salon group just finished our intensive study of The Sound and the Fury- the issues around race and division between selves was part of this large conversation. With the historic possibility of a black man being elected as president of the United States, an examination of race as played out in an epic work offers an objective platform for consideration of this highly charged and difficult subject. Invisible Man is not simply about race, of course, here is a brief description of the text and selection of commentary from Saul Bellow. The Owl Bookstore in Kentish Town Road has copies of the recommended edition- please mention that you are purchasing for the ‘Toby Brothers book club’ to receive your discount.
2. Salon Details & book notes

SALON DETAILS
The November Salons will commence the week of November 3rd. As of today, there is room for three participants in the Thursday evening Salon; registration is open for the day time Salon. For registration details, please send me an email and I will confirm your place once I have received your deposit of 25£ (this is not necessary for those who have previously done a Salon). If you are interested in the day-time Salon, please include your available times and I will confirm meeting times as soon as I have enough participants. Reading schedule and opening notes will be sent as soon as you have registered.
Thursday evening Salon dates (7:45-9:45 PM): 06.11, 13.11, 20.11, 27.11, 4.12
Tuesday day-time Salon dates (either 11 AM -1 PM or 2PM to 4 PM): 04.11, 11.11, 18.11, 25.11, 2.12.
BOOK NOTES
Invisible Man - by Ralph Ellison.
I consider this to be one of the greatest works of American Literature. The unnamed protagonist’s search for identity in a world that will not see him gives us as readers an opportunity to try and understand the psychological devastation of racism in its subtle as well as its violent forms as well as to consider how each of us participates in the fate of all humanity. Ellison weaves in themes and images from Virgil, Dante, Emerson, and TS Eliot while also using the structure and transcendence of Jazz to create a work that haunts and stirs to the core of our experience.

From Saul Bellow’s essay:
“Man Underground”
Review of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
by Saul Bellow
published in Commentary (June 1952)

It is commonly felt that there is no strength to match the strength of
those powers which attack and cripple modern mankind. And this feeling
is, for the reader of modern fiction, all too often confirmed when he
approaches a new book. He is prepared, skeptically, to find what he
has found before, namely, that family and class, university, fashion,
the giants of publicity and manufacture, have had a larger share in
the creation of someone called a writer than truth or imagination that
Bendix and Studebaker and the nylon division of Du Pont, and the
University of Chicago, or Columbia or Harvard or Kenyon College, have
once more proved mightier than the single soul of an individual; to
find that one more lightly manned position has been taken. But what a
great thing it is when a brilliant individual victory occurs, like Mr.
Ellison’s, proving that a truly heroic quality can exist among our
contemporaries. People too thoroughly determined and our institutions
by their size and force too thoroughly determine can’t approach this
quality. That can only be done by those who resist the heavy
influences and make their own synthesis out of the vast mass of
phenomena, the seething, swarming body of appearances, facts, and
details. From this harassment and threatened dissolution by details, a
writer tries to rescue what is important. Even when he is most bitter,
he makes by his tone a declaration of values and he says, in effect:
There is something nevertheless that a man may hope to be. This tone,
in the best pages of Invisible Man, those pages, for instance, in
which an incestuous Negro farmer tells his tale to a white New England
philanthropist, comes through very powerfully; it is tragi-comic,
poetic, the tone of the very strongest sort of creative intelligence.
In a time of specialized intelligences, modern imaginative writers
make the effort to maintain themselves as unspecialists, and their
quest is for a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone. What
language is it that we can all speak, and what is it that we can all
recognize, burn at, weep over, what is the stature we can without
exaggeration claim for ourselves; what is the main address of
consciousness?

I was keenly aware, as I read this book, of a very significant kind of
independence in the writing. For there is a way for Negro novelists to
go at their problems, just as there are Jewish or Italian ways. Mr.
Ellison has not adopted a minority tone. If he had done so, he would
have failed to establish a true middle-of-consciousness for everyone.
3. Reflections & a poem… for free!!

How did we get to the end of October? The autumn colors- even in London as it slips and stumbles into winter- can so distract me that suddenly I awake to the rushing sound of holidays approaching- in spite of tumbling economies, impending elections and continuing carnage in Iraq - and I am amazed.
Perhaps a poem…

Try to Praise the Mutilated World
By Adam Zagajewski
Translated by Clare Cavanagh

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days,
And wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
The abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
One of them had a long trip ahead of it,
While salty oblivion awaited others.
You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere,
You’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
In a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in the autumn
And leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.
Praise the mutilated world
And the gray feather a thrush lost,
And the gentle light that strays and vanishes
And returns.

This poem reminds me- in delicate, careful language, how fragile the balance between what is wonderful and what is horrific- and how both are inexorable woven together. This will come as no surprise to those who just finished our immersion in Sound & The Fury. I am still grappling with the question as to why study tragedy when for many it is to escape the violent world that we turn to literature. But Faulkner’s evocation of love amidst family ruins gives a shard of light- and I pursue that. As much as I worry about the coming US election results and the crumbling economy, a part of me needs confirmation of my continuing life- a swim in a chilly lake, a pungent glass of wine, tickling my daughter- not to disregard world events but to make some room in the joy of life to hold what is horrible, indigestible.
The poem also commands and implores (“You must praise…Try to … You should…”) which I think recognizes the difficulty of the task- how hard it is to be thankful of what we want to reject, what causes us despair. Within the poem as well is necessity to return to what gives us balm- “remember the moments when we were together…” the small sensory experiences that make up a life and make us whole in the presence of a ‘mutilated world’. What do you think?

Romeo & Juliet Hampstead School Literary Salon
* This is a change from the Midsummer Night’s Dream Proposal! (We will save the study of Mid-summer for when we need it in mid-winter) *
“Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk’st of nothing. “ –Romeo
“True, I talk of dreams.” –Mercutio, Act I, sc iv

The Romeo & Juliet Salon will be starting on Tuesday October 7th at the Hampstead School. This Salon- supported by the Community Learning Centre at HS- is particularly designed to inspire parents by using the texts their students are studying. We never stop learning from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens- why should our young people have all the fun? Over the course of the year we will study the works being read for the GCSEs and A Levels- the study of any of these works will enhance the ability of the participant to discuss other works of literature- to use the terms of analysis, to read deeply and critically. Of course, HS Literary Salon is not limited to parents…all members of the community are welcome. This Salon will meet at the Hampstead School Tuesday evenings from 7-8:30. Enrollment is happening now…email me at litsalon@gmail.com to register.

I have chosen Romeo & Juliet because I think it provides an accessible introduction to both the language and themes of Shakespeare. Even if your student has already studied this work, our discussions and investigation of the play will aide your work in the more complex plays. I will provide you with background readings on Shakespeare, his art and the play itself while we work our way through the play over the course of the next four weeks.

Romeo & Juliet is traditionally thought to be an ‘easy’ play- a straightforward love story. But even though it is an earlier work, Shakespeare is playing with some of his favorite themes: appearance vs. reality, paradoxical equations (“My only love sprung from my only hate”), and the energy of disorder threatening human relationships. There is much to be considered in this play about our inability to see beyond in-born prejudices to accept those outside our experience- and of course the all-conquering nature of love.

To register: The Salon is full when ten participants have registered. To register, please send me an email at litsalon@gmail.com . I will confirm your place and send you further details. The cost is 65£ for community members, reduced cost for Hampstead School Parents. Cost includes all copies and supplementary materials.

Email me if you have any questions-
See you in the pages-
Toby

Here is a succinct & inspiring quote from a Sound & Fury Salon participant regarding the quest for knowledge:

…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience
with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions
themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign
language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you
now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live
everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the
future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into
the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet

And in response, from another S&F Salon participant:
The books image in that quote conjured up ideas of existentialism and the
shadowiness of Jorge Luis Borges — and I found these 2 tangential quotes
from him on the net:

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

“Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries
me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the
tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”

25th September 25, 2008 - Exciting times in the Salon world-
1. At the moment- London Parisian Salon, Paris Parisian Salon
2. Looking forward-
a. London Salon starting 7th October @ Hampstead School- new structure!
b. London Salon starting 6th November (Thursday nights) requests welcomed now…
c. Parisian Weekend Salon 6th December
d. Bourgogne Spring Salon Retreat Reading the Body

3. A poem for anyone who has traveled…Faulkner’s Nobel Acceptance Speech …(Two readings for the price of one!)

4. Some recent feedback from Salon participants

1. At the moment…
The London Parisian Salon is up and running with an intensive study of The Sound & the Fury. The lively group of readers have been examining the narrative of Benjy that opens the book, discovering a world where time is collapsed and events are held together not by chronology but sense & image connection. One of the readers wants to know how a writer who seems to be seeking and advocating for hope in mankind (see Faulkner’s beautiful Nobel Prize Speech which I quote from below) can write a work with so much apparent despair and tragic characters. Of course, we have only begun our study…

The Paris Parisian Salon had an intensive weekend studying Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls & Women. Thirteen folks gathered in the elegance and grace of our hostess’ home and we explored the voice of the narrator as she traced her twisting way through adolescence to the eve of womanhood- encountering along the way sex, death and God- although not in the expected places. Some of us participated in a writing workshop led by Lizzie Harwood which gave us the opportunity to play with the themes and the style of the writing using our own experiences. We were also privileged to have a (real! Live!) Canadian playwright who not only shared her knowledge of the Munro’s homeland but evoked the authenticity of Alice Munro by describing her own encounters with the writer. All that and we came up with a list of what everyone is reading- please email me for a copy: the span of genre and subjects reflect the lively minds that gathered last Saturday.

2. Looking forward…

In London, a new Salon will be starting on Tuesday October 7th at the Hampstead School. This Salon- supported by the Community Learning Centre at HS- is particularly designed to inspire parents by using the texts their students are studying. We never stop learning from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens- why should our young people have all the fun? This is a new twist on the Salon structure, created with the vision of the Community Learning Staff. I am hopeful that those participating in these Salons will model for their students their own investment in the lifelong learning process. The Salon study will also provide the parent with ideas and insights to enrich the work that the student is doing in the classroom- a bridge between home and school. Over the course of the year we will study the works being read for the GCSEs and A Levels- the study of any of these works will enhance the ability of the participant to discuss other works of literature- to use the terms of analysis, to read deeply and critically. Of course, HS Parisian Salon is not limited to parents…all members of the community are welcome. This Salon will meet at the Hampstead School Tuesday evenings from 7-8:30. The first text will be William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Enrollment is happening now…email me at litsalon@gmail.com to register.

The Thursday night Salon in London will start the next series on the 6th of November. I am currently welcoming requests for study. King Lear, anyone? Or Invisible Man? Now is the time to make your request known (check out the choices listed on the Salon website) - I will announce the choice the first week of October and start registration then. I have also had requests for a daytime Salon. Please let me know if this is of interest to you and particular times/days you would prefer as well as the works you would like to study. I am in the process of setting up a one-time poetry study with the Tufnell Park Parents Support Group as well as a poetry study at the Hampstead School. These are also open to the Salon community- I will post the dates and times as soon as those are confirmed.

In Paris After the energy and commitment (9hours!) shown last weekend, I am organizing another weekend Salon which will occur (tentatively) the first weekend of December. The study will be Marilyn Robinson’s Housekeeping or V. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Vote now. Either way, we can’t lose.

A Salon participant who is also a choreographer & Prana stretch teacher has offered to join forces for a weekend Salon retreat in Bourgogne next spring. The theme will be ‘Reading the Body’ and will involve the exploration of the link between our physical selves and our hungry minds. We will study a text that considers this link, do some Prana yoga and breathing work, eat well (Susan L.?) and wander the woods of the Parc Morvan. Details to follow…

3. Many thanks to the widely traveled Susan L. for this donation- it is poem I have been trying to write for years but Gregory of Corkus nailed it- now I don’t need to…

The Traveler’s Grace

Nothing like landing in a foreign city
early morning, Preferably in weekday hubbub.
Everyone with the local character of demeanor,
going about their business, lost in themselves, lost
in the routine, not a thought of how alien,
foreign, strange their lives are, blindfolded by drudgery.
The glaucoma of routine is the most tragic
condition of humans, perceiving their world
as normal, par for the course, nothing out of the ordinary. How
unusual we are, how abnormal to think it rather normal to find ourselves on a spinning ball
traveling around a star at 67,000 miles per hour
in a galaxy speeding at approximately 600 miles a second from who knows where
to who knows where. How odd. How outlandish. How priviledged I am to catch a glimpse of
this normal world, blest by the grace of displacement.
A traveler’s boon. It’s as if I am one of the sacred dead,
allowed to return to this world, released from the underworld
of the mundane, the banal. Behold the normal.

–Gregory of Corkus, The Greek Anthology, Book XVII Greg Delanty

Although the S&F Salon folks have already seen this, I can’t help but offer this now. In these frightening economic & political times, when the instinctive urge is to draw the wagons closer- to turn inwards, to be selfish, Faulkner reminds me of the importance of hope- and fellowship.

“I decline to accept the end of man.”
William Faulkner: Nobel Prize Speech
Stockholm, Sweden
December 10, 1950

“All his life William Faulkner had avoided speeches, and insisted that he not be taken as a man of letters. ‘I’m just a farmer who likes to tell stories.’ he once said. Because of his known aversion to making formal pronouncements, there was much interest, when he traveled to Stockholm to receive the prize on December 10, 1950, in what he would say in the speech that custom obliged him to deliver. Faulkner evidently wanted to set right the misinterpretation of his own work as pessimistic. But beyond that, he recognized that, as the first American novelist to receive the prize since the end of World War II, he had a special obligation to take the changed situation of the writer, and of man, into account.”
Richard Ellmann

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work–a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed–love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

4. Some recent feedback from Salon participants

….good to see you in action
(actually not far off the enthusiasm and analysis you deploy in civilian
life) — pleasurable to have a pleasant yet rigorous approach and share
ideas. I can see what’s drawn you to create then sustain these Salons!

I enjoyed very much attending this salon. The discussions were intense, enhancing the complexity and subtleties of her writing. The feelings of adolescence echoed in my memory. Thank you for having me discover a wonderful author…The main purpose for me is to hear people speaking in an elaborate way, and I was not disappointed.

Thank you Toby- You woke up my mind and helped me appreciate a great work of literature. Everyone brought insights to the table and the atmosphere supported questioning and exploration. Brilliant book choice- I had never heard of it before the Salon. Any book, any time- you just let me know.

The Salon was great fun for me. A bigger group than usual, so a bit more difficult to manage (?) but I didn’t feel that anyone got left out….

My brain is buzzing with thoughts and excitement thanks to our stimulating first meeting of the salon.
Thank you so, so much!

Fantastic day/night. Wonderful to get into LoGW (Lives of Girls & Women by Alice Munro) more and I thought everyone had great insights and thoughts on the book, which is so packed with goodies it would seriously take weeks to really do it justice….

I think sitting in a circle the way we did promoted a very good climate for everyone to participate.
Our efforts were rewarded.
Big Time.

Just before retiring wanted to say what a most enjoyable and knowledgeable evening it was indeed.
I believe Kentish Town has found a pearl which we shall jealously guard.

Fall 2008 Parisian Literary Salons in London:
The Sound & the Fury by William Faulkner
1. Intro to The Sound & the Fury Salon study
2. Details & Registration
3. Schedule choices
4. Recommended Edition
5. Reading Schedule
6. Further Notes on The Sound & the Fury

1. Intro to The Sound & the Fury Salon study
There is a story of a celebrated Russian dancer who was asked by someone what
she meant by a certain dance. She answered with some exasperation, ‘If I could say it in
so many words, do you think I should take the very great trouble of dancing it?’
It is an important story, because it is a valid explanation of obscurity in art. A
method involving apparent obscurity is surely justified when it is the clearest, the
simplest, the only method possible of saying in full what the writer has to say.
This is the case with The Sound & the Fury. I shall not attempt to give either a
summary or an explanation of it: for if I could say in three pages what takes Faulkner
three hundred there would obviously be no need for the book. All I propose to do is offer
a few introductory, and desultory, comments, my chief purpose being to encourage the
reader. For the general reader is quite rightly shy of apparently difficult writing. Too
often it is used, not because of its intrinsic necessity, but to drape the poverty of the
writer: too often the reader, after drilling an arduous passage through the strata of the
mountain, finds only the mouse, and has little profit but his exercise.
As a result of several such fiascos I myself share this initial prejudice. Yet I have
read The Sound & the Fury three times now and that not in the least for exercise, but for
pure pleasure.
- Richard Hughes, Introduction to
The Sound & the Fury, Picador Classics Edition

I use this quote because I have found it difficult to explain why it is useful to attempt to read a text that seems aloof or unreachable at first. Those who have studied
Beloved or To the Lighthouse in previous courses or Salons may know what I mean when I say that the work comes easier when we consider it as a dynamic and motivated group each person’s question or insight adds to our understanding. I also think that the Salon allows us to make the very private act of reading a part of the public world, and in so doing helps each of us understand our own thoughts about the work more precisely.

2. DETAILS AND REGISTRATION:
Sound & The Fury Salon to start 18 September 7:30 PM near Kentish Town Tube
As of 04 September, there are FOUR remaining places for this Salon.

Address and further details will be sent once your participation is reserved with a cheque- see below. A wonderful neighbor has offered her home for one of the meetings-and as I live quite close to the Kentish Town tube, we will start in my home. If you know of others who might be interested in the Parisian Literary Salon, please forward the information along to them or send me their email address. I look forward to hearing from you: all feedback is helpful!

Cost is 65£ for the four week study- this includes photocopies. If you are a member of the Hampstead School Parent community, your cost is reduced. Please let me know your preferences in terms of schedule- if all of the following works for you, please let me know that as well. Your participation is reserved with a cheque for 20£ sent to T. Brothers, 9 Falkland Road NW5 2PS. I will not cash the cheque until the first week of
Salon meetings to ensure the time and location that generates the most participants works
for you. I limit the Salons to ten members.

3. Salon SCHEDULE
Time: Thursdays evenings 7:30-9:00 PM
Start date Sept. 16 (meetings will continue every Thursday for four weeks)
Location : Highgate/Kentish Town

4. Recommended Edition
Yes, I know it is big and the print is small, but the Norton Critical Edition
Sound & The Fury (edited by David Minter, ISBN 0-393-96481-7) has a
vast resource of textual notes, annotations and an appendix of Faulkner’s
notes and critical essays by all sorts- Sartre, Ralph Ellison- you will be
keeping good company with this edition. Since much of our work in the
Salon is focused on considering particular passages, having everyone on the
same page is quite useful- however, if you are using a different edition, I
will make copies of the key essays from the Norton.

5. Reading Schedule
• Session One- discuss section one: April Seventh 1928 Benjy’s narrative pgs. 3-48
Thoughts to bring for discussion: what makes this hard reading? What do you discover
without needing to be told? How do you work to make meaning from the garbled narrative? What
questions still nag you?
• Session Two- Discussion section two- June Second 1910 pg. 48-113 Quentin’s narrative
• Session Three- Discussion section three- April Sixth 1928 pgs. 113- 165 Jason’s narrative
• Session Four- Discussion section four- April Eighth 1928- pgs. 165-199 Dilsey’s narrative
• Optional Final meeting to share writings and further thoughts
We will start very slowly and work to get everyone out of the darkness, so to speak.
For those who sign up, I will email an appendix that some texts might have and might be useful
for your reading. Faulkner wrote this appendix in 1945 and as the intro caution says, not
everything in the appendix is consistent with the text. Ah well, if we are looking for consistency,
we shall have to look elsewhere. PLEASE note that reading through the appendix (which is a
series of character sketches that evolve into short stories) will give away some of the dramatic
moments of the book- but could help clarify the murky nature of the first chapter. Your choice….

6. Further Notes on The Sound & the Fury
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.” The Sound and the Fury uses the interior world of its narrators to expose a crumbling world, through inference and allusion rather than through direct social critique. In the Modernist method, Faulkner employs stream of consciousness, symbolism as a connecting fiber and several interior realities (that show how one can see the world as absolutely in one’s way, and directly in contrast to others) that must compete
for authority. This Salon will draw upon individual’s questions and ideas to shed light on this complex text. The reading load should allow for re-reading as we study the work,
enabling the first time reader access to Faulkner’s complex vision. Upon a first reading, the narratives appear jumbled and opaque but as the pieces start to fit together, one can see the complex and careful planning that Faulkner has used- and to what end? This is what we must grapple with for the Salon. The (optional but strongly encouraged) writing assignment for this Salon will include the use of subjective first person narrative and a close examination of the limits of perspective.
I am including some introductory comments from Richard Hughes that I think
will help orient the reader in the opening chapter of the text:
Mr. Faulkner’s method in this book is successful, but it is none the less curious.
The first seventy pages are told by a congenital imbecile, a man of thirty-three whose
development has not advanced beyond babyhood. Benjy has no sense of time: his only
thought process is associative: the event of the day, then, and what it reminds him of in
the past are all one to him: the whole of his thirty-three years are present to him in one
interrupted and streamless flood. This enables the author to begin by giving a general
and confused picture of his whole subject. He offers a certain amount of help to the
understanding, it is true, in that he changes from roman to italic type whenever there is a
change in time: but even then I defy a reader to disentangle the people and events
concerned at a first reading. But the beauty of it is this: there is no need to disentangle
anything. If one ceased to make the effort, one soon finds that this strange rigmarole
holds one’s attention on its own merits. Vague forms of people and events, apparently
unrelated, loom out of the fog and disappear again. One is seeing the world through the
eyes of an idiot: but so clever is Mr. Faulkner that, for the time being at least, one is
content to do so.

I am looking forward to our adventure and work together- I hope to see you in September ….
Questions?
Toby

It was a hot day of clashing. My daughter is rounding the corner from childhood to adolescence; the interior struggles in her body often come out fully armed against me. We had spent the day cleaning her room. I had hoped the promise of the swim in the Pond would push her along, would give speed to her careful rearrangement of dried-out markers and scattered beads in one of her desk drawers before she even contemplated the mounds of dirty clothes, school papers, partially read books and flotsam that provide a nesting ground for the clothes moths. Every time I went up to help, the frustration escalated to a metallic simmer – cartoon samurai warriors floated in the air between us, clashing their swords together, as I struggled not to scream at the glacial pace of progress. I was hot and sticky from cleaning the rest of the house and scratching at being inside on one of the first (perhaps the only) warm and thick day of June. Showers came and went all day but the hot density of the air taunted, begged to be plunged through towards the waters of the Pond so close.

7.30… Almost too late to go, my unbelievably patient husband holding off dinner, both of us trying to help her along but wanting her to make the project her own… finally she comes to me in tears and I realise again I can no longer scoop her up off the ground; her body has grown too long and gangly for me to gather her as I once did in my arms – an embrace or containment that made me feel as though I could hold her in, make it better, cleanse her in my holding before returning her to the rough ground. Now when I try to pick her up, her feet scrape the floor and she is already moving away when I let her go. All together we make a last assault on the room – and miraculously the floor is clean, the clothes put away… so on the bike.

As we push up Highgate Hill, I welcome the sweat that stings my eyes; with each pump of the pedal the conversation between us eases in confrontation, relaxes into reflection. The air is thick with humidity and evening bugs, scent of roses and lilacs and grasses, the green of
the Heath swarms us as we get closer to the Pond. The air feels like warm cloud around us – saturated with the evening sun and heavy with humidity – if it were actually raining it would not feel so different.

Into the changing room at the Women’s Pond, we peel off sweaty clothes and our angers and finally… the velvet thickness of the water is just sharper than the air – I push away from the roped ladder and merge every fragmented piece of me with the tangy pond. I watch my daughter collapse into the water, and see her smile just for herself as she too relaxes, shudders, elongates. The thickness of the air, the hushed voices of the other swimmers, the call of the mother ducks, the color and calm of the lifeguards – all combines into one gorgeous fluid moment on this Saturday evening in early summer when the velvet air prologues the water and the Pond gives my daughter the clean embrace I wished for her.

Poems from Answering Back ed. by Carol Ann Duffy
Answering Back: Living poets reply to the poetry of the past, edited by Carol Ann Duffy : Classic poems chosen by contemporary poets who then write a poem ‘back’. Here are two poems that I found to articulate the tension between the painful nostalgia of home as idea up against the vibrancy of home as lived.

Home is So Sad
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
the music in the piano stool. That vase.

by Philip Larkin, chosen by Vicki Feaver

Her response:
Home is Here Now

Home is here, now
at this table with its gouged
and scratched wood
where I peel an orange,
the spray from the zest
sending shivers up my nose.

I can see my hands’ blue veins
and swollen red knuckles,
and the diamond highlight
on the blade of my knife,
and bright rind falling
in a long curl.

It’s the quiet time
at the end of the day:
no birdsong, no wind;
just my in and out breaths
and the faint tearing
of pith parting from flesh.

Parisian Literary Salon Update July 2008
1. London Salon choices for September/October London 08
2. Paris Salon Lives of Girls & Women September 20th
3. Reflections

1. London Salon choices for September/October London 08
TITLE CHOICES(see What Might We Read for book descriptions):
The Sound & The Fury by William Faulkner
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Beloved by Toni Morrison

SCHEDULE CHOICES
Tuesdays or Thursdays, afternoons 2-3:30 PM or evenings 7-8:30 PM
Location Choices: Hampstead School or Highgate/Tufnel Park
Cost is 65£ for the four week study- this includes copies. If you are a member of the Hampstead School Parent community, your cost is reduced.
Please let me know your preferences in terms of books and schedule- if all of the above works for you, please let me know that as well. Your participation is reserved with a cheque for 20£ sent to T. Brothers, 9 Falkland Road NW5 2PS. I will not cash the cheque until the first week of Salon meetings to ensure the time and title that generates the most participants works for you.

2. Paris Salon Lives of Girls & Women September 20th
For the September One- day Intensive Salon we will be studying Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women. Despite the title, this Salon would certainly be enriched with the inclusion of men- of course we will talk about the experience of women (not exclusively) but other perspectives bring clarity. Munro is best known for her exquisite short stories (she has been called the best fiction writer in North America by Jonathon Franzen); LGW is incredibly readable & can be taken as a novel or series of shorts. Through her first person narrator Munro explores the passage from girl-child to adult in rural Canada without sentimentality but employing her laser eye. Each episode stands on its own both symbolically and psychologically. LGW has been described as the female version of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When I asked Salon regulars what they wished we had done more of in the Salon, the repeated comment was more writing. Towards this end, the talented, witty and creative writer (and Salon member) Lizzie Harwood will be facilitating a writing component to our Salon study. For those who choose to participate, the writing assignment may be prepared before the weekend in the form of a character study of a moment of adult awakening… this is just the first rush of ideas so we will confirm this piece later in the summer.
On re-reading Lives of Girls and Women, one of the pieces I am noticing is how much the narrator is using her relationships with others (mostly people, but also representations of faith) to chart her growth. She has said that one does not create identity: you have no privacy in small town Canada, others make your self. Most episodes are bounded by interaction with a particular character- and there is much that is hinted at rather than said- it is a book that requires careful attention to get all the reverberations. One way I might structure the discussion is ask each participant to take on an episode- with Fern or Mary Agnes, for example, and highlight what the narrator seems to take from knowing the character. There is much in the work about how a young girl stumbles into womanhood- the mother is enigmatic and complicated- classic Munro does not give easy assertions or answers. “Munro’s work has always been ambitious and risky precisely because it dares to teach, and by the hardest, best method: without giving answers”, says one New York Times reviewer.
Lizzie suggests: “ Maybe during the 2 hr writing slot we could do some free writing, look at the prepared pieces brought in (brave souls could read theirs out), or work on several small things during a 2hr slot so that people can go away with things to re-edit and polish and ruminate over? Could even do a few Surrealist ‘parlour games’ where someone reads a paragraph they’ve written and their last line can be the first line for everyone else to start something new and round and round. Maybe all of the above. I think we should make it as Salon-ish a writing slot as possible. And the Salons have always been about throwing ideas around and seeing what sticks…”
Details:
TIME: 3 Sessions from 1-3 PM, 4-6 then 7:30-9:30 The middle section will be devoted to writing work and will be adapted to consider writing done in advance as well as offer writing opportunities at the Salon.
PLACE: The lovely J. Butler has again generously offered to host- oh, bless her heart! We will order food for dinner for those who want to eat there. Address & contact info will be sent to participants.
COST: 45 Euro (does not include dinner)
3.Reflections

The hardest part is first: the choice to jump or dive, the purposeful, against base instinct launching into air towards a chill, shimmering, unknown surface. The body knows once the choice has been made, nothing will remain the same- submersion is never partial and the motion, once started, cannot be halted. But then you are in the water, and every surface receptor, your facial skin, arms, belly, skull cries out with the exquisite change in temperature and sensation and you are reborn.
This past weekend I had the chance to go swimming at the Women’s Pond in the Heath with a lively gang of women awake (I emphasize that as it was before most folks have rolled out of bed on Sunday morning, these woman choose regularly to hit the trails then the water in a breath -drawing ritual of immersion) to the wonders of the world around them. As I struggle to spark the Salon anew here in London, I am so sharply aware of place and self-propulsion, the launching out, the sensitivity to where I am, the way in which the widening circle around you is a keen interaction of what you create and offer melded to an awareness of where you are.
Andy, the ever-patient partner on the home front, gave me a gift of a book yesterday when I returned, electrified from my swim. The book is Wild Swim by Kate Rew and it is a beautiful testimony to all the lovely outdoor swims available in England- reading her descriptions of great swims across this Island makes me want to stay here. The introduction also got me thinking about how the act of plunging into water is that recurring, almost cliché metaphor for committing to a thing. Going more deeply (please excuse the punning- I cannot help myself), I think about how the moment of diving in means crossing boundaries, from our air-filled world to a watery realm, from the known experience of earth and stable objects to the fluidity and flux of moving liquid. My body knows I cannot live there, but I am hungry for the immersion, for the testing of time under water, for the discovery of what I cannot see on the surface, for the change in light and smell and feeling. How apt for any new undertaking, for any project or experience that requires the whole-hearted commitment of oneself without seeing where you will land!
So without having all the pieces in place, without knowing if it will work, the Salon dives in. The Salon offered above is hopeful: will enough people be willing to try? Is the location convenient enough? Too late- the body arcs, the earth is left behind.
I will be out of London from July 7 – end of August- travelling, writing, reading and swimming with Madeline- but will check email regularly. Please email me if you have questions, comments or feedback of any sort.

Current reads:
Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice & Mind by M. F. Belenky, B.M. Clinchy, N.R. Goldberger & J.M. Tarule
Wild Swim by Kate Rew
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
Street Haunting by Virginia Woolf - Tiny collection of essays- the first is a lyric narration of a walk taken around London: “…here, under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, bear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down the stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.”
Modernism by Peter Childs Detailed and highly readable theoretical introduction to the Modernist movement. Gave me more ideas about Darwin’s revolutionary work: what if we come to discover human civilization is not a progressive development but an accidental, chaotic movement through history?
Answering Back: Living poets reply to the poetry of the past edited by Carol Ann Duffy : Classic poems chosen by contemporary poets who then write a poem ‘back’. I have posted two poems under “Poetry & Musings” that I found to articulate the tension between the painful nostalgia of home as idea up against the vibrancy of home as lived.
See you in the pages-
Toby

POETRY EVENINGS: June 19 & June 25
Hampstead School, Westbere Road 7-8:30 PM
…Poetry arrived
In search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
It came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when… —Pablo Neruda
This is the first London newsletter for the Salon. The Salon is experiencing all of the struggles and triumphs of the new-born- some wonderful discoveries and connections along with misunderstandings and missed opportunities. Will it swim? We shall see….the good news is that the Salon will be presenting two one night poetry studies this week and next; please contact me for copies of the poems. If you are interested, I have compiled some notes on the Demeter/Persephone myth which I think is resonant with the O’Sullivan poem- and it is rarely wasted time to brush up on your mythology!
The three poems I have chosen for this week do not have a clear thematic tie. I chose them as much for their variety- variety in tone, structure, narrative perspective, historical position- as for their individual interest. Although we will start the evening by reading aloud each poem before we discuss it, I encourage you to read the poems over in the next few days and bring them into yourself. Write down notes in the margins- ask questions of the poem, notice when your attention is drawn to a word or a collection of words. Consider how the form of the poem guides or influences your interaction with the words and the ideas presented.
As I was doing some research on The Cord- the most modern of the three- I came across a paper that analyzed the connection in O’Sullivan’s work between the female body, its distorted (particular in the realm of eating disorders) image and the inheritance of the beliefs of Catholic Church. Although I don’t think the poem we will consider has these themes at work as much as others in her oeuvre, the following quote struck me:
Trying to pull things out of affliction into the light of day and let them have their own space. Recovering things from your own past, or from a collective past, is to achieve freedom by the act of recovery.
Paula Meehan

I am interested in how poetry might be an act of bringing afflictions to the surface and therefore ‘achieve freedom by the act of recovery’.
The other author we will be studying, Elizabeth Bishop, had a very different view on the poets’ responsibility in the expression of suffering:
“…Bishop, while her own life was filled with suffering and loss, felt that the poet needed to do more than represent the particularities of such experience. (As she wrote to Robert) Lowell in 1948: “sometimes I wish I could have a more sensible conversation about this suffering business, anyway. I imagine we actually agree fairly well. It is just that I think it is so inevitable there’s no use talking about it, that in itself it has no value…” More to the point, she felt it was the poet’s responsibility not to exploit suffering, to use language with an awareness of its power to inflict as well as to expose pain.” (from Re-Reading Confessional Poetry…by S. Rosenbaum)

When we discuss poetry, we start with a close consideration of the words and how they are used. This may lead us to the larger question of what the poem does: does a poem, as some have suggested, work to capture human experience at so sharp and close an exposure that in reading a good poem we learn a bit more about the process of being human? Do these three poems act in this way? How does this differ from other media forms we encounter? Why should we do the work poetry requires?

Oh dear…I better hold back a bit.
The biggest challenge for the Salon is getting a critical mass. I hope you are able come this Thursday to the first Salon and play in the world of words and ideas. The Hampstead School Community Learning program was unable to offer the advertising they had proposed for this gathering- so if you are coming- spread the word! Bring a friend!! Bring several…The Ham & High Express is offering a feature article on the Salon this Thursday- hopefully that help get the word out. And for those of you ready to go- bravo- you will enjoy the journey.
See you Thursday…

Toby Brothers
Director, Parisian Literary Salon