Barbara Pym Newsletter May 2011
Spring Garden Party: The Barbara Pym Society will be hosting a spring garden party at the home of Denise Marois-Wolf, 5 Blue Heron Way in Acton, Massachusetts, on Sunday, 26 June 2011 from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m., rain or shine. You may bring finger food to share or contribute $10 for beverages and paper goods, and you may bring guests if you wish. Come and enjoy light refreshments, summer beverages, a Pym trivia game, and the always-delightful company of fellow Pymians.
If you plan to attend, please reply using the form on our web site no later than Monday 20 June. If you will be driving to the party and can offer a ride to someone nearby or along the way, or if you would like to attend but need a lift, please let us know so we can arrange carpooling. We will send directions to everyone who is coming.
Spring newsletter: The spring issue of Green Leaves is in press and we hope to mail it before the end of May. The May 2009 issue will be added to the online archives at that time.
Membership renewals: A friendly reminder -- Barbara Pym Society memberships expire on 1 April every year. If you have not already done so, please renew now for 2011. You can renew online and pay using a credit or debit card, or fill out and print the form and mail it in with a check. (If you paid dues any time after 1 January, you are in good standing for this year. If you are unsure of your status, just send us an e-mail and we'll gladly check our records.)
Finally, one for, or actually from, the books: Demeter Fragrances has a scent called Paperback, which they describe on their web site as follows: "A dusty old copy of a Barbara Pym novel did it for us. This Demeter scent is sweet and just a touch musty, a lot like Pym's world come to think of it. Read her if you haven't. Her writing is wonderful, if slightly musty, English satire from the 60s and 70s."
Best wishes,
Tom Sopko
North American Organizer
Miss Pym and a Friend
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Monday, May 2, 2011
Sappho, reviewed
Roald Tweet of Rock Island Lines, WVIK 90.3fm, had early praise for Sappho: “In the title poem for this collection, Ellen Tsagaris muses that she should have listened to Sappho (a reference to her Greek roots). Fortunately, she did not. She realizes, as she says in the poem, ‘River Lines,’ the wine-dark seas and white beaches are not for her. Her heart, her inspiration, and her home is the Mississippi with its beer-colored water and its gritty, graveled banks. Rather than the flute and pan pipes of high poetry, she brings a whole orchestra of instruments: praise, parody, satire, romance, irony, awe, metrical and free verse. Perhaps Sappho should have listened to Ellen Tsagaris.”
Sappho, I Should Have Listened.
Try out the 918Studio Blog! The launch party was a success, as was the reading at Venus Envy this weekend. There is another book signing set for May 14th. We are, as they say, in business, boys and girls! There are poems Ms. Pym would approve, and some Miss Bronte would, and some both would, and some neither would.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
New Book by Dale Salwak, Noted Pym Author and Editor
See below, from the excellent Dale Salwak:
New Book Conjures The Literary Dead
Posted at 11:20PM Wednesday 20 Apr 2011
If you could meet one deceased literary figure, who would that be? What would you ask? What would you say, and why? In AFTERWORD: CONJURING THE LITERARY DEAD (May 1st, University of Iowa Press), edited by Dale Salwak, eighteen distinguished authors respond to this challenge by creating imagined conversations with a constellation of British and American authors, from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett to Edith Wharton.
Each chapter embarks on an intellectual, emotional, and often humorous voyage as the layers of time are peeled away, letting readers experience authors as they really were in their own era or, on occasion, transported to the present. As eccentric as it is eclectic, this collection takes the audience on a dizzying descent into a literary Inferno where biographers, novelists, and critics eat the food of the dead and return to tell the tale. Readers will take great pleasure in seeing what happens when scholars are loosed from the chains of fact and conduct imaginary interviews with deceased authors.
Covering 200 years of literary history, the essays in AFTERWORD draw upon the lifelong, consuming interest of the contributors, each fashioning a vivid, credible portrait of a vulnerable, driven, fully human character. As contributors appeal to what Margaret Atwood calls the deep human desire to "go to the land of the dead, to bring back to the living someone who has gone there," readers are privy to questions that have seldom been asked, to incidents that have been suppressed, to some of the secrets that have puzzled readers for years, and to novel literary truths about the essential nature of each author.
Contributors:
Catherine Aird (on Rudyard Kipling), Brian Aldiss (on Thomas Hardy), Margaret Atwood (on negotiating with the dead), William M. Chace (on Ezra Pound), Nora Crook (on the Shelleys), Paul Delany (on George Gissing), Colin Dexter (on Alfred Edward Housman), Margaret Drabble (on Arnold Bennett), Peter Firchow (on George Orwell), Alan W. Friedman (on Samuel Beckett), Eugene Goodheart (on Jane Austen), John Halperin (on Edith Wharton), Francis King (on Oscar Wilde), Jeffrey Meyers (on Samuel Johnson), Cynthia Ozick (on Henry James), Jay Parini (on Robert Frost), Carl Rollyson (on William Faulkner), Dale Salwak and Laura Nagy (on literary imagination), Alan Sillitoe (on Joseph Conrad), and Ann Thwaite (on Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edmund Gosse, A. A. Milne, and Emily Tennyson).
New Book Conjures The Literary Dead
Posted at 11:20PM Wednesday 20 Apr 2011
If you could meet one deceased literary figure, who would that be? What would you ask? What would you say, and why? In AFTERWORD: CONJURING THE LITERARY DEAD (May 1st, University of Iowa Press), edited by Dale Salwak, eighteen distinguished authors respond to this challenge by creating imagined conversations with a constellation of British and American authors, from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett to Edith Wharton.
Each chapter embarks on an intellectual, emotional, and often humorous voyage as the layers of time are peeled away, letting readers experience authors as they really were in their own era or, on occasion, transported to the present. As eccentric as it is eclectic, this collection takes the audience on a dizzying descent into a literary Inferno where biographers, novelists, and critics eat the food of the dead and return to tell the tale. Readers will take great pleasure in seeing what happens when scholars are loosed from the chains of fact and conduct imaginary interviews with deceased authors.
Covering 200 years of literary history, the essays in AFTERWORD draw upon the lifelong, consuming interest of the contributors, each fashioning a vivid, credible portrait of a vulnerable, driven, fully human character. As contributors appeal to what Margaret Atwood calls the deep human desire to "go to the land of the dead, to bring back to the living someone who has gone there," readers are privy to questions that have seldom been asked, to incidents that have been suppressed, to some of the secrets that have puzzled readers for years, and to novel literary truths about the essential nature of each author.
Contributors:
Catherine Aird (on Rudyard Kipling), Brian Aldiss (on Thomas Hardy), Margaret Atwood (on negotiating with the dead), William M. Chace (on Ezra Pound), Nora Crook (on the Shelleys), Paul Delany (on George Gissing), Colin Dexter (on Alfred Edward Housman), Margaret Drabble (on Arnold Bennett), Peter Firchow (on George Orwell), Alan W. Friedman (on Samuel Beckett), Eugene Goodheart (on Jane Austen), John Halperin (on Edith Wharton), Francis King (on Oscar Wilde), Jeffrey Meyers (on Samuel Johnson), Cynthia Ozick (on Henry James), Jay Parini (on Robert Frost), Carl Rollyson (on William Faulkner), Dale Salwak and Laura Nagy (on literary imagination), Alan Sillitoe (on Joseph Conrad), and Ann Thwaite (on Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edmund Gosse, A. A. Milne, and Emily Tennyson).
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
The Subversion of Romance in the Novels of Barbara Pym
Available from the author at etsag1998@aol.com. Also, in the true spirit of Pymian indexers and proofreaders comes A Bibliography of Doll and Toy Sources, Mixed Media, Electronic, Musical, Artistic, and a new Poetry Chapbook, Sappho, I should Have Listened.
Fragment by Sappho:
Sappho,
When some fool
Explodes rage in your breast,
Sappho,
Stop that yapping tongue!
Fragment by Sappho:
Sappho,
When some fool
Explodes rage in your breast,
Sappho,
Stop that yapping tongue!
Barbara Pym Society on Facebook
Pym on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Barbara-Pym-Society/326965535031?sk=wall#!/pages/Barbara-Pym-Society/326965535031?sk=wall#!/photo.php?fbid=10150529901870032&set=pu.326965535031&type=1&theater
Pym Conference on line
See below and enjoy! I will also post some photos.
Photos from the 2011 North American Conference have just been posted on our Facebook page, and the papers are on our web site.
Remember, BPS memberships expire on March 31 every year. To renew for 2011, click here. You can now renew online and pay by credit card if you wish.
We will be having a Summer Garden Fête on Sunday June 26 at 3:00 p.m. at the home of Denise Marois-Wolf in Acton, Massachusetts. Details will be forthcoming soon.
Best wishes,
Tom Sopko
North American Organizer
The Barbara Pym Society
Photos from the 2011 North American Conference have just been posted on our Facebook page, and the papers are on our web site.
Remember, BPS memberships expire on March 31 every year. To renew for 2011, click here. You can now renew online and pay by credit card if you wish.
We will be having a Summer Garden Fête on Sunday June 26 at 3:00 p.m. at the home of Denise Marois-Wolf in Acton, Massachusetts. Details will be forthcoming soon.
Best wishes,
Tom Sopko
North American Organizer
The Barbara Pym Society
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)