Even though I haven't read this month's selection, I've decided to attend this morning's meeting of the book club in Liverpool.

It's been a couple of months since I last attended and, as I explained in a text to my grandson, it's one of the few things I do, these days, to maintain contact with anyone outside of the family.

So, the phone will be off and I'll be some distance away from the goings-on here. In the hope that I'll actually be getting, in some sense, closer to myself.

Hope everyone has a good day...

LPK
Dreamwidth
5.24.2018 

I had decided, earlier in the day, that I MUST finish reading the Virginia Woolf biography by this evening. Because, after today, I have only 10 days to read the Virginia Woolf novel, Mrs. Dalloway, which will be the subject of this month's book club meeting at the Liverpool Library.

However, having gotten to Friday, March 28th, 1941, and then a paragraph beyond, I've had to pause. It's, you know, one of those things that you know is coming but there's always some little twist which finds that weakness in your emotional preparation and exploits it.

For me, I think it was this:

                                                Leonard [her husband] dealt with the necessary inquest and arranged
                                                a cremation, which he attended alone. He buried the ashes in the gar-
                                                den at Monk's House, under one of the two elm trees they had named
                                               "Leonard" and "Virginia." [Alexandra Harris, Virginia Woolf, Thames &
                                                Hudson, 2011, p. 157.]

IDK if they had discussed this, in the months during which they endured The Blitz, saw their house in London destroyed, and experienced Virginia slipping into another depression which they both feared she might not survive.

They had in the meantime decided that, should Hitler's forces successfully invade England, they would die together by ingesting a drug supplied by Virginia's younger brother. So that this, as events had actually unfolded, had not been the plan.

And yet, I thought it brave of them both. Leonard, for living out his life and courageously managing her legacy, and Virginia for wanting to spare him what she was certain would be her slow and exhausting decline and death.

The first time I encountered her last letter to him, I simply couldn't finish it. But now, as I read it again, I sense the comfort that I'm very sure she'd hoped that Leonard would find in reading it.

And so, after a pause, I'll be reading on, hopefully having gained an appreciation of the writer's life which will likewise enhance my understanding of her novel and enable me to contribute to the discussion of it in Liverpool at the end of the month...

LPK
Dreamwidth
9.17.2017

For the past several days, I've been preparing for the reading group which I've decided to try in the village of Liverpool. It meets at 11 AM on the last Thursday of every month, except June and December, at the public library where, several years ago, I belonged to a writer's group.

Liverpool, as a whole, is a fairly affluent community with a decent school system and an extensive library program. It belongs to the county library system but offers many programs and activities which other towns and villages within the same system do not. It's also the village where I came to teach many years ago when I first graduated from the state university.

When I began settling into my new home, in the western suburb where my daughter and her family live, I first looked for a writer's group somewhere nearby. And what I discovered was that all the ones that I'd known about in the past had, for various reasons, met their demise, the only evidence of their once having existed being the abandoned websites which eerily float like ghost ships on the digital waters of the internet.

I then decided that I'd try searching out a book club, something I'd never done in the past, and found that the largest and most active seemed to be a Meet-Up group which calls itself the Syracuse Book Club. However, after preparing myself for the April meeting by reading Sharon Guskin's The Forgetting Time, I decided that their choice of venue, a bar which was also located, coincidentally, in the village of Liverpool, was not really my, er, cup of tea. Or whatever one's beverage of choice might happen to be.

After searching for something associated with a church or library or bookstore closer to home, I settled on the one at the Liverpool library. They seemed to have a format that made sense for an organized reading activity and met in surroundings that suggested a focus on books rather than the bottom of a beer mug. Not to be overlooked, of course, were the improved chances of a safe drive home.

By the time I made that decision, I had only a week or so to locate and read the upcoming selection, which I did, only to discover, a couple of days later, that I'd taken a wrong turn on the library's extensive website and had actually been reading the selection from May of the previous year. Which was unfortunate because I found myself quite comfortable with the book, Willa Cather's classic My Antonia, but also because, by the time I discovered my mistake, I had only 4 days to read the current selection, Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize winner, The Underground Railroad. 

However, I did find it to be an easy, if uncomfortable read and so, if I can grab a quick shower after dropping my grandson off at school in the city, I'll be fully prepared for my first meeting with what they call the Thursday Morning Book Klatch.

I do feel compelled to mention that, along with the reading, I've found myself speculating as to who and what a "Thursday Morning Book Klatch" might look like. I guess it's kind of a natural thing, on the eve of a new social as well as intellectual venture. But because I'm sometimes a bit unsparing in my assesment of my fellow man, to a degree which might be off-putting to some who might happen by here, I won't get into that just now.

Besides, if I don't allow time for that shower, my membership in this group may be embarassingly short-lived...

LPK
@Dreamwidth
5.25.2017

I think I'm finally closing in on the piece that I'm gonna read if I ever get back to the writers' group at the LPL. You know, so that I can have another 10 minutes of that ego-inflating fame that local wannabe writers so ardently crave.

But hey, I look at it this way. Since I've already done this on two previous occasions, one more will make a total of 30 minutes. Which is exactly double the 15 minute standard for delusional egomania.

So, in a world where more is, well, more... apparently I've got it.

LPK
LiveJournal
2.27.2012 (a)