For those of you in the neighborhood, the TS Eliot festival is about to get underway in London. I haven’t revisited Eliot in years, but reading The Wasteland was an early transformational experience for me. Should be ample incentive to dust off the old facsimile editon.
Festival details can be found here. It consists of a series of performances running from 20 November through 17 January, with a full production of The Family Reunion as the highlight.
Jeanette Winterson has also written an essay on Eliot in yesterday’s Guardian to mark the occasion. It’s a funny, personal piece in which she describes discovering Murder in the Cathedral one day when her mother sent her to pick it up from the library in the mistaken belief that it was a mystery:
Fatefully, when I was 16, and just as she was about to throw me out of the house for ever, for breaking a very big rule (not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex), my mother made a mistake. She sent me to the library to collect her weekly haul of mysteries – and on her list was Murder in the Cathedral . . . I hadn’t heard of TS Eliot, but I read the line about “sudden painful joy” and I started to cry.
(If you haven’t already, you may wish to check out “52: A Story in Installments,” which Winterson is writing in the Guardian in collaboration with Ali Smith A.M. Homes and Jackie Kay).
