Parisian Literary Salon

Parisian Literary Salon to become London Literary Salon
Quick news and September/October schedule
14 July 2011

Happy Bastille Day to all…hope to see you at this evening’s celebrations at Bankside and Borough Market. We had a thoughtful conversation this week on James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”, about the mutable nature of our ideas around lightness and darkness and how this might be connected to the racial insights Baldwin suggests. Here is a snippet from the story—really, it is worth spending some time reading…

Then Creole stepped forward to remind them that what they were playing was the blues. He hit something in all of them, he hit something in me, myself, and the music deepened, apprehension began to beat the air. Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death in order to find new ways to make us listen. For while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.
-“Sonny’s Blues”, James Baldwin (found in Going to Meet the Man, 1965

The amazing LJ Filotrani is in the process of remaking the Salon website…and among other exciting features, the name of the Salons will finally catch up to our work here—so get ready for the launch of the London Literary Salon website. In the meantime, I have had many requests for a rough September schedule so here are the current proposals and time slots. You are welcome to sign up now—previous Salon members may do so simply with an email registering your participation (please understand this does represent a commitment) and then may pay at the first meeting. First time participants are asked to pay a deposit to guarantee their registration: email me and I will send along details.

September/October Proposals:
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf starts week of September 12; runs for five weeks: £70
o Monday afternoons 12:30- 2:30
o Tuesday Evenings 8-10 PM
• Paradiso by Dante starts week of September 12; runs for five weeks: £70
o Thursday afternoons 1-3 PM (celebratory dinner to be scheduled in October)
• Frankenstein INTENSIVE one session Friday September 9th : £40
• Midnights Children Three sessions: Thursday evenings Sept. 22, 29 October 6 7:30-10 PM £60
• Young Writers’ Workshop for writers 12-16 years old: Wednesdays 4:30-6 PM runs five weeks: £70
• Measure for Measure Intensive Sunday October 9th & October 16th 7-10 PM £50

Details for most of these can be found in the ‘What we Might Read’ section
of the website.
Please let me know if you have any questions about the Salon structure or timing or logistics…use the ‘Contact Me’ form on this site. We are headed for Joyce’s Ulysses in January 2012: in preparation we will study the Odyssey in October followed by a quick Hamlet (can’t you soliliquize a bit faster?) and a dip into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. That should keep us out of trouble.

I hope where ever you are over the summer holidays you have an opportunities for reflection, reading and adventure. I look forward with great excitement to our work in September!