For anyone interested in hearing Toby talk about how the LitSalon came into being, what it’s all about today and a little bit about swimming in icy waters, listen to her interview with Pendarvis Harshaw, a former student of hers at The Athenian School in California, here on Rightnowish.
Photo by Ayo Ogunseinde on Unsplash
Snow was falling when I arrived in Athens, which will be my home for the next two years. The hills around the city stayed white for a whole week, making the trees loaded with oranges which line every street seem even more magical. The move has been complicated and much delayed, necessitating a break from the LitSalon. It’s by very happy coincidence that my first new study will be on the island of Agistri, to read the Odyssey and The Oresteia, with lots of familiar faces (and some new) joining me in my new home.
In the meantime, I am enjoying Athens’ incomparable museums before the onslaught of summer visitors. Museums, like literature, have always captivated me – just as words help us to make sense of the past, objects can do something similar, bringing us a closer connection to history.
For a lover of the Homeric legends, the National Archeological Museum is the highlight of an Athens visit. The first two rooms house the contents of the graves from the palace at Mycenae, including the famous gold ‘Mask of Agamemnon’. Here are the hauls of treasure that Odysseus kept acquiring and losing, which Homer described so meticulously even though, a hundred lines later, they would end up at the bottom of the sea. They are gleaming inside their glass cases, seemingly ready to be loaded on to a ship.
There are gold drinking vessels, tripods and bowls for mixing wine, all of them splendidly decorated. Objects made to be desirable as well as useful. Real hands lifted these cups, or wound the strands of gold beads around their necks and admired themselves in mirrors shaped like lotus flowers. Everything is rich with detail, even the smallest objects contain secret worlds. The blade of a knife is inlaid with a picture of a striped cat stalking water birds, a large gold signet ring shows a masted ship with full crew and two couples hailing it from the shore. Although so much of the Odyssey is fantastical, a myth, the people that Homer sang about never seem more real, or more like us, than when looking at the treasures they collected in life, and brought with them on their journeys to the afterlife.
When the weather turned sunny and warmer a few weeks after we arrived, we spent Saturday on Aegina, an island familiar from last year’s study – the whole group made a day trip to see the temple there. The tables and chairs where we had a long, lingering lunch were all packed away for the winter, but the museum was open. Everywhere in Greece has museums, and even the tiniest are full of treasures. One of my favourite objects is here, a terracotta jug from the 6th century BC showing Odysseus and his companions escaping form the cave of Polyphemus. I like it even more because, compared to some of the other objects on display, it’s not particularly well made: the painting is pretty crude, cartoonish. It is probably best described as fan merchandise – somebody bought it because they thought the Odyssey was really, really cool. I feel the same way!
This time in Athens has given the Odyssey and Oresteia such a fresh new context, and has already increased my anticipation of sharing the joy of reading them when the study starts.
See you in the pages!
Photo by Nareeta Martin on Unsplash
My mother frequently told me that I lacked patience. As in, utterly and completely, almost like I was missing an internal organ. I turned the criticism into a kind of badge – of course I had no patience, but look at how much I can do all at once! Frantic movement as a superpower . . .
But high speed has its issues and one of the gifts of passing years is more time for thinking – and re-thinking. So, when Salon facilitator Mark Cwik first named and developed the ‘Slow Reading’ practice, I was intrigued but not quite certain this was my style.
And then came Finnegans Wake.
I had resisted the Wake knowing that it is considered by many to be unreadable, but since a few honoured Salonistas kept nudging – even (Rachel) putting an excerpted book of Shem and Shaun in my hands – well I thought, what the hell: I have spent enough time with James Joyce and really, how long can I avoid the Wake? We began in 2017 and some iteration of the Wake group continues to trip through its ‘appatently ambrosiaurealised’ pages, seeking earwigger references and disappearing down the most unexpected rabbit holes – sometimes intoxicating, sometimes infuriating, but always opening up my understanding of the underlying structures of human history and identity. We read 3-5 pages a week. Some of the group have managed an entire read of the book already and we are re-Cycling-Vico-like through. And always learning.
Thus the Wake work led me to consider other Slow Read possibilities – and Ulysses was the obvious next choice. Although new readers may at first baulk at the six-month study, once they are rolling in the Bloomian pages, most chime in that we need MORE time! But once through a first read – once the arc of the book is in your mind – you are ready for a more thoughtful approach, where we can really discuss each paragraph with attention.
In the Slow-Read Ulysses that started in September 2022, we have wonderful readers from all over the world, contributing expertise on philosophy, Jewish traditions and scholarship, psychological theories, economics, gender relationships, music, Irish history, aesthetics, narrative form, medical practices, modernism . . . we are truly eating with relish.
This week’s discussion of six pages, for example, included reflections on the Language of Flowers; desire as articulated in masochism; the Mary/Martha story from the Gospels of Luke and John, and how these are reflected in our Martha and Mary (Molly) characters; the use of the colour yellow to signal treachery; the figuration of Black people in missionary narratives; Marxism; Matzoh; what motivates people to turn to faith; relationship between colonial and religious projects; the geography of interior thoughts; the narcotic quality of sexual fantasies; pious frauds (echoing Pope Pius X); the relief of Sophocles on no longer being driven by lust . . .
The Ulysses Slow Read – like the Wake – is not a three or five year commitment. Rather, it invites participants to dip in and out as their lives allow and interests demand. Anyone who has previously read Ulysses can dive in to a 6-8 week series of study sessions (as long as there is space) and pick up the thread wherever we are. Each week, about half the participants adopt a particular passage and present this to the group with their own research or reflections.
After years of reading and teaching Ulysses, I am so thankful for this practice of reading slowly and thoroughly. I am discovering gems that I have previously skipped over, and finding correspondences that I only now realise. The Slow Read also gives me time to explore more thoroughly the secondary literature, especially useful as there was a tremendous flowering of new work to coincide with the centenary celebration of the book in 2022.
I would not say I have yet learned patience, but my mother would be surprised at my increasing ability to cultivate it. I have a practice – in both the Wake and Ulysses Slow Read sessions – that builds my capacity for attention and (the reward of exercising patience?) complexity. And I have learned so much: my sense of wonder expands with each dive into the realms of art, history, human nature, and the weird and beautiful intricacy of the human mind.
© The London Literary Salon 2024