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.
A recent surge in Proust references, responding to the 100th anniversary of the writer’s death on 18th November 2022 has given me a moment to reflect on all the Proust studies I have led – and all the wonderful minds (more than 70!) that have joined along the way. Some have stayed for the whole two-and-a-half-years/seven volumes, some for just parts of that, some returning to revisit, some expanding into other literary realms. All of you have moved the discussion forward, giving me so much richness in my own grappling with our Marcel. Along the way I have peeled back layers in my own mind about the mind and memory, prejudice, the aquarium of social relationships, social power, the space between sleep and waking, the unknowable, multiple self, the unfathomable beloved . . . and I have become more attentive to the wonder of the world (and hawthorns).
I am currently running two Proust cycles. The Proust 5s are in the agonising pages of The Captive, we are at the Verdurins’ and Morel has just finished playing Vinteuil’s unknown Septet . . . Proust 6 have just started The Guermantes Way and we are alive to the sound of the fire, the stimulus of a soldier’s life in Doncieres. I am hoping to host a Salon special with Lucy Raitz whose new translation of Swann in Loveas a standalone novella has just been published. She is a friend of Salonista and facilitator Keith Fosbrook and we are lucky to have that connection!
My dear friend Sheila, who curates the wonderful Swimming by the Book posted this loveliness to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the passing of Marcel Proust, while current Proustians (thanks Kaye, Sue, Caroline, et al) alerted me to the following (thanks Kaye, Sue, Caroline…)
Please see below a piece on Proust being best left to ‘snobs’ – you will giggle, i think.
The Guardian had this lovely piece which includes:
Although Marcel – after four years I can call him that – and I are separated by a century and by nationality, class, sexuality and sensibility, and despite regularly finding him exasperatingly obsessive and neurotic, I did come to regard him as a friend, though not one I could open my heart to fully. He watched me too sharply for that. I was in awe of his unending desire and unmatched capacity to recreate each moment, each fluctuation of existence – I just wouldn’t trust him once I’d left the room.
The reading pleasure was not to do with the narrative, which despite being at times, mind-meltingly slow, did eventually form an intricate pattern, nor the fascinating and often hilariously repellant characters, it was the sudden moments of what I can only call “satori”, the Japanese word for a sudden jolt out of the mundane surface into a the bright clarity of awareness of being.
. . . As it is read aloud, every moment hangs in the air, an extraordinary architecture of light, always in flux but always precise . . .
I hope that wherever you are, life is full of orangeade and hawthornes, madeleines and humming memories. I leave you with this last reflection from Nabokov on reading and re-reading.
See you in the pages…
Good Readers and Good Writers
Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.
Vladimir Nabokov, 1948
N.B. The complete essay is gorgeous, and it’s hard to just choose one passage or line!
In troubled times we all hope for better things. The current state of the world and its problems – global warming, pandemics, political extremism, economic crises to name just a few – lead many of us to speculate with dread about a dystopian future.
So, could there be a better time to reflect on the concept of Utopia, the perfect and ideal state? Seductive but unobtainable, what did Thomas More, the originator of Utopia (literally ‘no place’) really mean when he wrote his most famous work, published in 1516? How much have things changed over the centuries? How much can they change when the fundamentals of human nature and motivation remain the same?
Vivien Kogut’s four-week exploration of Thomas More’s Utopia will discuss society, power and freedom. Subjects of relevance in the sixteenth century remain just as topical in today’s world: social inequality, individual freedom, the motivation of politicians, how to limit power.
Ultimately the study will consider whether a more egalitarian society is viable, what would an ideal world look like and where we are today.
Vivien Kogut’s Thomas More’s Utopia (part of a series on The Renaissance through texts and objects) begins on 18 October 2022.
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:
I had the wonderful opportunity to study two of the works of Javier Marías in Valencia in the years before the pandemic. Veteran Salonista Robin Tottenham hosted our gatherings on her lovely terrace overlooking Valencia’s glorious Mercado Centrale; Salonistas Keith Fosbrook and Ellie Ferguson had been emphatic in their urging me to dive into the works of Marías—and I am so glad that I did.
At first, I struggled to get a grip on his aesthetic vision. With his works, I often felt that I was a voyeur observing the lives of contemporary people struggling in spaces of passion and betrayal—his characters felt like people I had come to know, the entanglements dramatic but recognisably arising from all-too-common blindspots in human behaviour. But the work of studying Marías with a committed group paid off: I came to understand that what Marías offers is an acute understanding of how human consciousness is revealed in all the forces that press upon our fragile integrity: desire, history, injustice, guilt, betrayal…and how we employ narrative to give a shape to what has happened—even when we cannot shape what has happened into coherence.
I think this quote from a Guardian article on Marías in 2013 gives a sense of his profound probing:
“As a columnist I write as citizen and maybe have too many opinions” – he has published a whole book of just his football articles – “but writing as a novelist is different. I don’t like the journalistic kind of novel which is now rather fashionable. If a book or film takes a good subject from the everyday press – say domestic murders in Spain, which are a historic disgrace – everyone will applaud, but it is easy applause. Who will say it is bad? People say the novel is a way of imparting knowledge. Well, maybe. But for me it is more a way of imparting recognition of things that you didn’t know you knew. You say ‘yes’. It feels true even though it might be uncomfortable. You find this in Proust, who is one of the cruellest authors in the history of literature. He says terrible things, but in such a way that you know that you have experienced those thoughts too.”
Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian, 22 February 2013
We have lost a wonderful writer and philosopher in the death of Javier Marías. I hope to re-visit the works I have read and expand my knowledge of his writings in the coming year. I am grateful to Robin, Ellie and Keith who inspired the Marías studies—and I look forward to more.
“Marías also wrote movingly about old age, and cast an unflinching eye on male-female relationships. The novels often begin with a shocking scene – an unexplained suicide, the sudden death in bed of a lover, a complex love triangle – plunging reader and narrator into the plot-to-be.
The main characters are often translators or interpreters – or, latterly, spies – people who have renounced their own voices, but who are also, in a sense, interpreters of people, which is, of course, precisely what any good novelist aspires to be. In Your Face Tomorrow, the narrator, Deza, is recruited to become exactly that, “an interpreter of people”, whose job it is to write detailed reports on the people he has seen only in videos or via a two-way mirror.”
Margaret Julla Costa, The Guardian, Obituary 15 September 2022
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!
With so many books available in a multiplicity of forms, and the impossibility of reading everything we might be attracted to, why pick up The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad?
Conrad has long been admired and loved by readers and we may wish to see for ourselves why this is so. For me, he has an unusual and arresting literary style, a penetrating, realistic (some say pessimistic) view of human behaviour and experience, offering analysis on both individual and socio-political levels. He has outstanding, sometimes complex, narrative powers and a persuasive empathetic understanding.
On a less general level, some features of Conrad’s writing serve to define his sensibility as modern and of clear relevance to our twenty-first century preoccupations. Globalisation was getting into its stride as he wrote his tales, and they are saturated with issues which still concern us today. His profound confrontation of terrorism, racism, colonialism, alienation and the power of international capitalism often appears startlingly prescient. From his writer’s desk, he reflected on the rapidly changing world of his time, drawing on his early experiences on board the ships which facilitated the development of intercontinental communications.
Living at a time of such rapid innovations, he was profoundly aware of flux and change in human life. A child of the nineteenth century, he was stunned by the discovery of entropy, and the concomitant view of our earth as a planet which will eventually wind down and die rather than being preternaturally favoured by a benevolent divine being. In Conrad’s lifetime the so-called ‘Death of God’, trumpeted by Nietzsche, was still a fledgling idea, jostling to establish itself. In adopting the positivist stance of his time and a non-religious viewpoint, Conrad faces towards the twentieth century. He lived when the times they were a-changing, and this is reflected in his creative response to developments in the novelistic arts. Some critics, rather patronisingly, think of him (along with Henry James) as forming a bridge between realism and modernism, condescendingly suggesting that he is neither one thing nor the other. They seem to regret that he cannot be pigeon-holed more precisely!
Finally, there are also some very specific reasons for reading this book now. A terrorist action is at its heart, and many contemporary readers – made shockingly aware of terrorism in our own century – have turned for enlightenment to Conrad’s novel. Whether they have found it, I cannot say, but the instinct of turning to literature in the hope of gaining some understanding of such a disturbing phenomenon seems to me to be a good one. I am also convinced by my reading of both this book and Under Western Eyes that Joseph Conrad, if magically resurrected today, would instantly recognise Putin’s strategy and sense an astonishing continuity in Russia’s current foreign policy.
But, we are talking about a work of the imagination and we can never be sure where it may lead us. The central character in Conrad’s novel is a refugee/immigrant, trying to forge an identity for himself in a strange country. This is, of course, rather like Conrad himself, but current preoccupations may mean that the themes of immigration and identity strike us more strongly than any others. Who knows? The only way to find out is to read this extraordinary book . . .
The jacket of the first edition of Midnight’s Children
I have taught Midnight’s Children for three decades, in three countries and to readers of many ages and nationalities. The humour and poignancy of the work – as well as its epic vision – buoy the reader through complex history and multiple cultures. The strongest aspect of the book is how Rushdie uses the body and mind of his protagonist Saleem as a canvas on which to illustrate the birth of India as an independent nation, with all its bloody communal tensions and its incredible possibilities. Although it is given to a cruel teacher to point to how Saleem’s physiognomy symbolically represents the continent of India, this is just the more crude slippage between symbol and actuality that Rushdie employs. Saleem’s ongoing struggle for identity and agency – and his cry that the blows he suffers are “not fair” – these more crucially reflect the struggle of India for independence against the forces of other national and tribal power struggles.
This is what narrative can do: in a deft way, a carefully crafted narration makes comprehensible and digestible the huge political and historical forces that impact us all.
The brutal attack on Salman Rushdie, as he was preparing to speak about the importance of providing sanctuary to exiled writers – and appreciating the United States for this – is a reminder of just how threatening free speech is seen to be by regimes of intolerance.
As usual, the author himself says it better:
‘We are engaged in a war of narratives, incompatible versions of reality, and need to learn how to fight it. A tyrant has arisen in Russia and brutality engulfs Ukraine, whose people, led by a satirist turned hero, offer heroic resistance and are already creating a legend of freedom. Meanwhile America is sliding back toward the Middle Ages, as white supremacy exerts itself not only over black bodies, but women’s bodies too. False narratives rooted in antiquated religiosity and bigoted ideas from centuries ago are used to justify this, and find willing audiences. In India, religious sectarianism and political authoritarianism go hand in hand. Violence grows as democracy dies. False narratives of Indian history are at play that privilege the majority and oppress minorities, and are popular, just as the Russian tyrant’s lies are believed.
‘This is the ugly dailiness of the world. How should we respond? It has been said that the powerful may own the present but writers own the future, for it is through our work—or the best of it the work that endures—that the present misdeeds of the powerful will be judged. How can we think of the future when the present screams for our attention, and if we turn away from posterity and pay attention to this dreadful moment, what can we usefully or effectively do? A poem will not stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. Not all satirists are heroes.
‘But we are not helpless. Even after Orpheus was torn to pieces, his severed head, floating down the river Hebrus, went on singing, reminding us that song is stronger than death.
‘We can sing the truth and name the liars.
‘We can stand in solidarity with our fellows on the frontlines and magnify their voices by adding our own. Above all we must understand that stories are at the heart of what’s happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have attracted many.
‘So we must work to overturn the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories in which people want to live. The battle is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are also contested territories. Perhaps we can seek to emulate Joyce’s Dedalus, who sought to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. We can emulate Orpheus and sing on in the face of horror, and not stop singing until the tide turns, and a better day begins.’
Salman Rushdie’s words delivered at PEN America’s 2022 Emergency Writers Congress
August is the moment when I breathe in and gaze across the previous months of studies and work. This August feels particularly welcome: the Salon has grown with the incredible energy of the new facilitators (new as in going from myself and Mark a few years ago to a current staff of 13) and Nicky Mayhew keeping the Salon ship moving with communications, strategic advice and administrative support. We are also indebted to Sophie and crew at TPR media who have helped raise the Salon profile with interviews and news on Start the Week, BBC London and more.
At the heart of our work is always the experience of the studies themselves: the magical and enriching journey through the words into the blossoming spaces of imagination and contemplation. I am sharply aware that all around me the world is challenged with wars and violence, with climate change and suffering. I am also aware that the monsters of intolerance and prejudice are swelling, greedy in their appetite for discord. Sometimes I realise the Salon discussions offer an escape—an immersion in the artistic rendering of the human mind that emphasizes the lyric and generous visions of writers able to illuminate all aspects of our living.
But it is more than an escape. Within Salon discussions we learn to form and speak our insights to provocative ideas. We learn to hear each other and even—perhaps especially—to disagree respectfully, opening our minds to differing views and the reflections of others. Stepping out of our individual perspective and entering into the mind of an author, a character, another being—this is the practice of empathy. I experience this both in deep reading and discussion of the literature, and also in focused engagement with the participants in a Salon discussion.
Mohsin Hamid recently explored the dangerous progression he has witnessed towards binary thinking and how reading and writing literature pushes against it, read his article here.
“I wrote this novel to explore what it has been to be myself, and also to explore what it is to be other selves. I intend it as a means for readers to do the same. We risk being trapped in a dangerous and decadent tyranny of binaries. Perhaps fiction can help us investigate the space between the ones and zeroes, the space that presently seems empty, impossible, but then, when entered, when occupied, continues to expand and expand, bending and stretching and eventually, possibly, revealing its unexpected capacity for encompassing us all.”
Mohsin Hamid
August is also the time (well, of course, it should be July or earlier but, hey, we are all doing the best we can) when we plan and announce the bulk of the studies for the coming year. This has been a big year for Joyce and Ulysses (one hundred years since publication) and I am still basking in the afterglow of the three study groups—one for returning readers, with whom I was privileged to explore again, more deeply, this incredible work that celebrates curiosity, fantasy, and desire while skewering one-eyed prejudicial perspectives. The Bloomsday festivities—in London and in Dublin—were particularly sweet this year. The building Ulyssian energy has prompted a new ‘Slow Read’ of the great book, commencing in October, rolling forward in ten-week waves so participants can join along the way. This format echoes the Finnegans Wake approach that is now on its second cycle after four years of study, and it is so satisfying to dwell in such a complex text with the time and space for careful consideration.
There are so many wonderful and unique studies coming in the next few months. I am still harnessing the right words to express the particular magic of the travel studies—this past year in St Ives, Umbria and Greece—these adventures create on-going groups connected through their combined love of literature and adventure. We are working on the travel offerings for the coming year, and this year’s September/October St. Ives studies are in place with one remaining space for Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as I write.
Thinking across the variety of genres, historical and social contexts that we offer in the Salon, an old verse from the folk-rock duo Indigo Girls plays on the edges of my mind. My hungry brain seeks an answer, THE answer (how to fight inequities in power and resources, what is the best way to live, what confers meaning on our existence?), but the study of great writing bends my mind towards possibilities and means of expanding my understanding. Art can offer a gasp of insight to the big questions—not to stop the asking but to find a moment of solidity on the climb.
And I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains There’s more than one answer to these questions Pointing me in a crooked line And the less I seek my source for some definitive (The less I seek my source) Closer I am to fine, yeah
So, in the centenary year of Ulysses, this year’s Bloomsday on 16th June was – perhaps slightly confusingly – the 100th (from publication) or the 116th (from the setting of the book in 1904).
Either way, devotees of James Joyce and his most famous work continue to use the day as as a reason to celebrate all things Joycean and in particular the fabulous characters that populate Ulysses, most notably Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Below are some of this year’s highlights for the LitSalon.
‘Bloomsday’ by Nick Midgley on RTE Radio 1
Nick Midgley’s radio play Bloomsday, dramatising the relationship between James Joyce and his brother Stanislaus and their time together (with Nora Barnacle) in Trieste, was broadcast on RTE Radio 1 on Sunday 12 June and can still be heard online.
The Bootleg Balloonatics’ Bloomsday Walk in Tufnell Park, 12 June 2022
The Bootleg Balloonatics – organiser Chris Bilton, Paul Dornan and John Goudie – invited Toby Brothers to join them (playing Molly, Milly and Mrs Breen) for a two-hour recreation of Leopold Bloom’s Dublin perambulations in London’s Tufnell Park, performed for an appreciative travelling audience of around 50, ending with gorgonzola sandwiches in the Dartmouth Arms . . . Read more in the Camden New Journal here.
Bloomsday in Dublin, 16 June 2022
A group of intrepid Salonistas – including Sheila Fitzgerald, Leah Jewett, Paul Caviston, Zita Moran (to name just a few) – visited Dublin to enjoy Bloomsday celebrations in situ. The day included the Dublin Balloonatics’ Bloomsday Walk led by founder Paul O’Hanrahan, an early morning swim from the Forty Foot (that’s Toby diving in), a variety of period costumes, a visit to The James Joyce Centre, and an Eccles Cake (or perhaps it’s a toasted teacake) in Eccles Street . . . a good time was had by all!
At a specially convened celebratory lunch on the following day, Toby – who has guided so many in the Salon through this extraordinary literary journey – recited her poem about launching a new Ulysses study:
Launching Ulysses study
A new study begins… First time faces gather in Hollywood Squares Alarmed face asks me Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?
Will they find their way? Will they stumble and fall into ineluctable modality of the impossible? This reader wants into the fray, but “I’m not a believer myself, that is to say… A believer in the narrow sense of the word.” And I want to say: Shut your eyes and See.
Another reader takes tentative steps forward Her reading wobbles but Buck draws her near “Are we supposed to like him – or not?” In Joyce, there are no easy answers. In the stilted dance of Telemachus I hope she will catch a grip And Joyce whispers close: “That’s the bucko that’ll organise her, take my tip.”
A frustrated reader who hasn’t yet learned to swim in Jim Scratches at the text But it is himself he fears Plenty to see and hear and feel yet. “The only thing is to walk, Then you’ll feel a different man. It’s not far – lean on me.“
I hope they will hear in a profound Ancient male unfamiliar melody The accumulation of the past.
I hope that they will hear The chant of a quick young male form The predestination of the future.
Look out—gender fireworks ahead Who will stumble? O, so many rocks! “Possess her once take the starch out of her” “O wept! Aren’t men frightful idiots!” “She does whack it, by George!“ So many cocks.
But if—o, but if they can find The ample bed-warmed flesh
Yes Yes FORWARD woozy Wobblers! Old Ulyssians – Make more room in the Bed!
Reading Ulysses is not only a wonderful literary adventure, it’s also great fun! Our next Ulysses studies (a six-month study beginning in January 2023 and an extended ‘slow read’ option starting in October 2022) are now open for booking.
Also in Dublin . . .
Meanwhile, Salonista Geoff Strange has kindly allowed us to publish below an account of his own independent visit to Dublin for Bloomsday 2022.
The day was long, starting with a brisk walk to the Martello Tower in Dalkey, then walking the strand in Sandymount, then Sweny’s, then The National Museum and for then what we hoped to be a relieving park bench in St Stephen’s Green before our next “appointment.” But could we find a spare park bench anywhere? No! Literally all benches were occupied and occupied, I might add, by a cacophony of bonnet/boater wearing Edwardians, some of whom were even playing American football! At last, we spied a shady bench and after a dash that would impress Usain Bolt, the bench was duly nabbed! We sat and napped only to discover on awakening that we were sat opposite non other than our very own Jim! There he was, plinthed and peering back at us with those dodgy eyes of his. It’s as if he had bequeathed his very own bench to a couple of foot weary flaneurs in our hour of need!
Suitably reinvigorated we left our bench, said bench soon to be taken up as temporary dug-out for those Edwardian garbed American footballers, and made our way to MoLI for a lecture by Paul Muldoon, Irish poet and general polymath about town. He was giving the inaugural Dedalus Lecture entitled, “Spinoza’s Shillelagh: Some Thorny Issues in Ulysses.” We were treated to an hour of poetic investigation of, wait for it, the first three words of the novel. Can you remember them? Of course: stately, plump, and buck. To Muldoon, the whole book is bound within those three words. It was a fanciful and entertaining romp through Irish and Classical literature!
The whole sixty minutes was, in a way, quite Joycean, not through design but in the way he was initially interrupted by the reggae band in the garden, then a stream of late attendees with himself, no less, showing them to their seats and then to cap it all, the gentle murmur of somebody’s mobile phone. All of us reached for our pockets but all but one was safe in the knowledge that it was not ours. For the poor eejit that discovered that it was his phone was bad enough but his woeful inability to firstly find the correct pocket and then work out how to switch the damned thing off, all the time the volume of its inane ringtone getting louder and louder, made me think of how Joyce would actually have loved this!
After that there was only one final destination on the agenda: pints and a toasted sandwich at Peter’s Pub. No, not mentioned by Joyce but this favourite Dublin haunt of mine is so redolent of a bygone era of manners, stools at the bar and none of that musak, maybe similar to Davy Byrne’s in its heyday. As you walk in, they say “how are yer, what’ll you have,” to which the response is two pints please (no need for clarification in this boozer). “No matter, you sit down, and I’ll bring them over. Toastie?” No need to tell you the answer to that!
Several hours later we are back on the DART speeding past Sandymount Strand with not a firework in sight! We look left across the sea denuded strand, peering into eternity.
What a day!
Hope your day was special!
And just to say, Toby, how grateful I am to you for your amazing guidance on this epic journey. You certainly opened an old door very carefully to another way of reading and I can’t thank you enough.
