News from the US last month about growing numbers of students at elite universities who can’t read whole books (revealed in The Atlantic magazine) was immediately echoed by UK academics. Earlier in the year a report from UK charity the Reading Agency (whose mission is to empower people of all ages to read) found that half of UK adults don’t regularly read and almost one in four young people aged 16-24 say they’ve never been readers.
While some people find the prospect of reading literature simply overwhelming, others find it difficult to overcome barriers including lack of time, as well as competing distractions from electronic devices and bite-size chunks of instant entertainment. Fortunately, there are also many who remain convinced that reading is a unique way of expanding our understanding of the world and our empathy for others. Sharing the experience of individuals in different times, places and circumstances through reading expands our consciousness, our sensitivity and our imagination in unique ways.
We continue to offer opportunities to be part of a community reading wonderful books from authors writing originally in a range of languages, from places real and imagined, and covering milliennia from the ancient world to the present day. Already on the menu for 2025 are new studies of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and James Joyce’s Ulysses starting in January. Also booking now are Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, not to mention travel studies reading Homer’s Iliad and Euripides’ Trojan Women in Greece, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick on board a traditional sailing ship. Much more – poetry, drama, philosophy, history of art – will follow soon. Join us if you can!
If you are thinking about joining our Proust or James Joyce studies check out these lectures and discussions led by Toby Brothers and coming up in the next few weeks (the cost is redeemable against the study price if you decide to sign up):
As 2023 begins we are launching ‘Wide Open Reading’, a series of occasional studies that will be slightly different to those we have traditionally offered, embracing a broader and more diverse variety of writers and texts. Initially focusing on fiction and poetry, every study will comprise 2-4 weekly meetings in London led by facilitators who are continually exploring and developing their in-depth knowledge of these relatively new works.
Our goal is to feature writers ranging from the mid-twentieth century to the present day, traditional or experimental in style, voicing the experiences of people from an unlimited range of places, communities and perspectives. This may include South Asia, the Caribbean, Africa (north, south and central), the Middle East, people of colour, displaced peoples, indigenous peoples, post-colonial experience, exiles, migrants, LGBTQ+ and more . . .
We aim to be genuinely wide open and invite you to join us with a correspondingly wide open mind. Our first title is Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, with meetings starting in February.
Co-facilitator of the study, Sarah Snoxall, expressed concerns shared by all of us that we should consider carefully the possibility of withdrawing it and the extent to which the proposed boycott might be relevant to our work. After much discussion, we agreed that we all oppose the idea of cancelling any kind of cultural activity unless it can be shown to be harmful. On reflection, we also concluded that reading what Freud described as “the most magnificent novel ever written” and examining, within the study group, the profound moral questions posed by Dostoevsky, would do nothing to flatter Putin’s regime or to undermine the right of Ukraine to resist invasion.
Much has been written about Russia and Ukraine since the launch of Putin’s ‘special operation’ earlier this year, but a 2014 article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, written in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea, draws on images from The Brothers Karamazov of two intertwined and opposing abysses – the basest and the highest – to portray the essence of the Russian soul, underlining the political and moral relevance of this work to the contemporary world.
Dostoevsky is allegedly (with Tolstoy) Vladimir Putin’s favourite author, and The Brothers Karamazov is reputedly his favourite novel. Sarah’s co-facilitator, Keith Fosbrook, makes the point that the meaning of a work of art is always contestable and, as a result, art can always be used for the purposes of political propaganda . . . An article on Lit Hub, Dear Vladimir Putin: If You’ve Read Dostoevsky, You’ve Tragically Misunderstood Him examines this in more detail, the author, Austin Ratner, concluding: “Those who have read and understood The Brothers Karamazov know exactly how to measure Dostoyevsky—and how to measure Putin.”
If you would like to decide for yourself, there are still a few places left on The Brothers Karamazov, which promises to be an engrossing exploration of this extraordinary work of art.
Everything we do at the London Literary Salon is in some way about the power of words. Often this means reading and sharing responses to literature with others, but we are also committed to the idea of providing opportunities for people to use writing as a means of promoting their own mental wellbeing and resilience.
Our ‘Reading and Writing for Wellbeing’ workshops led by Alison Cable help participants to write, with the primary aim of encouraging self-development. Some people regard it as a kind of literary yoga!
The focus is always on process rather than product. People may be invited to share their work with others in the group – and many choose to do so – but this is entirely voluntary. Sessions often begin with a short free-writing warm-up which Alison describes as “a continuous blurt” with no worries about grammar, spelling, content, form or audience. She explains “Start with your grocery list, or a doodle, if that’s where you are. Anything at all. No one will read it unless you want them to.”
For many of the writing exercises Alison uses prompts from poetry and prose by well-known writers which members of the group read together. For example, the theme of ‘place’ inspired by Virginia Woolf’s eerie and puzzling story The Haunted House in which a ghostly couple search for their ‘hidden joy’. Writers are free to use fantasy, reality, metaphor – anything that works – with no pressure to label or focus on personal experience.
These workshops provide a safe and supportive environment in which to cultivate self-exploration and expression. The groups are guided by principles embodied in the acronym CARE – confidentiality, attention, respect and empathy. Participants are welcome to share their writing and reflections without judgement or criticism, Alison stresses that “whatever you write is right!”
Some feedback from past participants:
“Alison Cable creates such a safe, fun, non-judgmental space that even I can’t turn it into a struggle . . . In this space both reading and writing are joyful.”
“A great experience. Alison strips away the pressure and self-criticism often associated with writing and enables participants to write first and foremost for themselves.”
Writing for Wellbeing workshops currently booking:
For Ulysses readers past, present and future who didn’t catch Adam Low’s film James Joyce’s Ulysses on BBC2 last night, it will remain available to view online for the next eleven months.
Over an hour and a half the film visits Trieste, Zurich, Paris and Dublin, telling the tale of how Joyce came to write his masterpiece, the struggle to get it published and how he and Nora Barnacle lived their lives together. With archive footage and contributions from scholars and writers including Salman Rushdie, Colm Tóibín, Anne Enright, Howard Jacobson, Eimear McBride, Paul Muldoon, John McCourt, Nuala O’Connor, Vivien Igoe and many others. Apologies to those who can’t access the BBC but catch it if you can!
June rolls on, and suddenly it’s the middle of summertime in the northern hemisphere – longest day of the year, midpoint of the year. The peak of solar energy, the green stuff bursts forth. Celebrating the Solstice means observing fire and our great living sun, not just literally (our inexorable connection to the sun as a life source), but also figuratively (illumination of the mind, the soul).
Like literature. It’s no stretch that I’m thinking about my favourite midsummer novel, Joyce’s Ulysses – not only 16 June, just a few days before the Summer Solstice in Dublin, but also the longest day in literature (Stephen Dedalus notes at the end of Proteus: “By the way next when is it? Tuesday will be the longest day.”) It is indeed a long day for Bloom: it’s between 8 and 9.00pm in Nausicaa when he says “Long day I’ve had.”
Readers know there’s still a long way to go! It will be a few hours and a few hundred pages until “the heaventree of stars hung heavy with humid nightblue fruit.” This, my favourite line in the novel comes near the end of that long midsummer day and captures a moment of noticing. An observation of the glorious evening sky. For me, it’s something about seeing the cosmos as a tree that roots me in my tiny here and now every time. It’s perspective. And something about that humid nightblue fruit nourishes . . .
There is still time to book a place on Alison Cable’s three-session Midsummer Writing study running on 14, 21 and 28 June.
Salon Director Toby Brothers & salonista Sheila Fitzgerald celebrating Bloomsday 2021
Ulysses – the story of Leopold Bloom’s day-long Dublin odyssey on 16 June 1904 – was published in February 1922, making this year’s Bloomsday the one-hundredth anniversary.
A quick reminder of some of the Salon-related celebrations taking place over the coming week (click on links for more information):
Sunday 12 June, Nick Midgley’s Radio play Bloomsday will be broadcast on RTE Radio 1
Have you noticed the way in which, when there is more than one child in a family, each of them tends to be given a particular role? In my case, my mother always used to say that she hoped I would become a banker, or a lawyer – someone who would earn enough money to look after her in her old age. My brother, by contrast, was expected to be ‘an Artist’. It wasn’t entirely clear what this should involve, but clearly included him being somewhat unstable but brilliant, bringing reflected glory to his parents because of his talent, even if the consequence might be a painful (and impoverished) life… It didn’t really matter than I wrote poetry (and had no interest in banking), or that my brother quite liked the idea of having a comfortable and stable life (and maybe even helping to look after his parents in old age). In both our cases, growing up involved us having to work out our own responses to the expectations we were born into…
It won’t come as any surprise, then, that when I started reading about the life of James Joyce, I quickly became fascinated about his relationship to his younger brother, Stannie. As the eldest son of an eldest son, James was his father’s favoured child, carrying all his father’s frustrated hopes for fame and glory. Stannie did his best to follow in his brother’s footsteps, but that meant he was always a step behind – looking up with admiration (and some envy) at his brother’s achievements. From his teenage years onwards, Stannie kept a diary, much of which was filled with commentary on his brother’s life. Some of this was published posthumously, as The Dublin Diaries. He became Joyce’s first reader and critic – and gathered materials for his brother to use in the short stories that were eventually to be published as Dubliners. When Joyce went into exile in Trieste with Nora Barnacle, Stannie followed them out there; working tirelessly to earn enough money to allow his brother to write, often ‘rescuing’ him from the bars of Trieste, where he feared his brother was dissipating his talents. Joyce never fully acknowledged his brother’s contribution. Indeed, he cut the character based on him (Maurice) almost entirely from the final version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Oh, and when it was finally published, he forgot to include the promised dedication to his brother in Dubliners.
Even today, with biographies and novels about the lives of Joyce’s father, John, his wife Nora, and his daughter Lucia, there is still no full-length book about Stanislaus Joyce. So when I joined the Lit Salon to re-read Ulysses, which I’d first had a go at when I was at university, it was no surprise that I also started to remember my fascination with James Joyce’s brother…
Eighteen months later, and I’m delighted to say that my radio play about the relationship between the brothers, Stannie and James Joyce, is going to be broadcast on RTE, to coincide with this year’s Bloomsday celebrations on 16 June. The play is called ‘Bloomsday’ and tells the story – in a fictionalized form – of the ten years when Stannie lived with James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in Trieste, between 1905 and 1915. Joyce wrote in Ulysses that ‘a brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella’, and in some ways my play was an attempt to bring Stannie back into the story – indeed, to tell his story, the one that he never really got to write.
A small coda however. After finishing work on the play, and having had so much pleasure reading Ulysses again, I decided to have a go at reading Finnegans Wake with Toby in the Lit Salon. Although I hadn’t known about it at the time I was writing my play, it turns out that Finnegans Wake puts the relationship between two brothers – Shem and Shaun – at the heart of the book. Shem is an artist; and Shaun is a postman, one who can only deliver letters, not write them. So even in his final work, the family roles were still being played out. But I think Finnegans Wake is also a reckoning with these family scripts too. Indeed, despite the contempt in which Shem seems to hold his brother, and the sense of disapproval that Shaun shows towards his irresponsible sibling, in the end they both recognise that they need each other. And love each other. The family roles each were asked to play is part of what makes them who they are; but in questioning and challenging those roles, they also each become the person they should truly be.
Nick Midgley’s radio play, ‘Bloomsday’, will be broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1 on Sunday 12 June at 8.00 pm (BST) and will be available online at rte.ie/dramaonone.
Continuing my long association with the City Lit, starting on 13 June I am leading a four-week ‘sampler’ course introducing the first four chapters of Ulysses.
For those who can’t get enough of Joyce – or for those who would like to know what all the fuss is about – this course will immerse you in the realm of Modernism and Joyce’s experimentation with language. Ulysses is the huge book that sits atop most ‘best novels of all time’ lists, but few people have actually managed to read this work. The writing is challenging – but when discussed with a group of readers, with carefully chosen resources, you will be amazed at how much this work will develop your perspective on language, love, nationhood, identity, history and lemon soap. And funny – it is a deeply humorous and at times absurd book. We will consider just the first four chapters of the work: this will introduce readers to the vast wealth of material that the book offers. Most readers, once they have engaged with the book the first time, return repeatedly, finding more with each read.
More Joyce reminders:
On Sunday 12 June Nick Midgley’s radio play Bloomsday will be broadcast on RTE’s Drama on One.
On the same day in London the Balloonatics (joined by, ahem, me) will enact the second annual Tufnell Park Bloomsday Walk.
Meanwhile, a group of Ulyssians and Wakians from the Salon will head to Dublin to experience the carnival in the streets that celebrates this bounding work.
Those who have not YET read Ulysses may wonder what all the fuss is around Bloomsday, 16 June. There are those books you read that shift your world view – adding more intense colours to the interior and exterior landscape, have you rolling a favourite line or two sweetly in your mind – and then there are those few works that blast the mind right open: frustrating, challenging and ultimately symphonically exploding your understanding of what language can do, of what we might be able to understand about ourselves, each other, through the medium of language. Ulysses is the latter.
Having stumbled, trotted and slip-slided through this beautiful work many times now with such wonderful minds, Ulysses is in my bones – constantly reminding me that any given day, for any regular person, can be epic when we attend to the mind’s stream…Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all….
On this, the 100th year anniversary of Joyce’s publication, the Salon is proud to highlight some of the many ways readers and would-be readers celebrate this work that warmly embraces the rhythm of life.
On Sunday 12 June Nick Midgley’s radio play Bloomsday will be broadcast on RTE’s Drama on One (more to follow on this).
On the same day in London the Balloonatics (joined by, ahem, me) will enact the second annual Tufnell Park Bloomsday Walk.
Meanwhile, a group of Ulyssians and Wakians from the Salon will head to Dublin to experience the carnival in the streets that celebrates this bounding work.
