Please find attached a very brief account of last night's session. It was a small group of about 10 but very effective. Do please add detail!

We went round in a our little circle and introduced the person to our left, and in true factory form, if we didn't know the person, or couldn't remember their name, we bluffed...(Monaco)
Fed: Beginning with "this person (name) has come in disguise today, the main features of their disguise include (list distinctive characteristics of that person.)

The evening kicked off with some hoop work whereby Lizzie led the rhythm and we then, in turn, said one thing that happens in each book whilst throwing our hoops to our partner.

The hoops were tricky, I mean, it's just hoops right?, we should be able to throw them so easily in a rhythm, together, but it's tricky...FOCUS...however when we started focusing on having to come up with something to say about a book, in order, the hoops took care of themselves a bit more as the trickier obstacle seemed to become the book telling.(Monaco)

We then went over Book 17 as a group, recalling the main events and adding 'footnotes' to anything skimmed over. (Federay commented that when giving a footnote we not only might add facts from the story but that the footnotes have the power to become the story, or become another story and take you away from the original story - this I think is a great note for where we are at right now, as we LEARN the books and are trying so hard to get the facts in we may not want to lock ourselves into the facts and take away from the journey of a little bit, a footnote, that can become the book itself in a moment - perhaps I haven't said this well at all and maybe Federay wants to add in her reference about footnotes and that author? that I can't completely remember...Monaco)
Fed: oh yes I was showing how well-read I am and banged on a little about David Foster Wallace who (among others) uses a footnotes and annotations in his fiction. This means the reading experience is active, I know Bloomer is reading Infinite Jest atm and needs more than one bookmark to get through it. There's no need for us to believe that "knowing" the Book is about being able to relate it in neat linear fashion, stories are rarely so neat, Homer backtracks and digresses and undercuts all over the joint. Those are powerful tools.

When we then used our knowledge (!) to put together a collection of short film trailers for the book, it was interesting that the main events to stand out for the group were 1) Argos, Odysseus's dog dying 2) Antinous throwing a stool at Odysseus 3) Penelope hearing how the 'beggar' would like to meet her away from the suitors.

We then used these points in the book to illustrate a longer short-film version of the the events. One group doing this in silence and using clapping rhythms and the other group using a series of snippets of action, with a hoop zooming in and out as through a camera lens.

We all discussed our different approaches and general understanding of the book work we are doing and then moved on the looking at 2 of Jay's pieces of writing and one of John Donnelly's and separated off to work through them.

A wonderful piece of seafaring song was performed by one group (Book 1) and then JD's 3-hander whereby lust and passion was explored in Book 12; the final piece of writing was another adventurous look at the interactions in Book 2 during the court meeting.

One comment/discussion that followed the new writing work was 'do we NEED to tell (all) the facts of each book?'...I think this is coming up often in the recent sessions and a valuable thing to think on. (Monaco)

I personally really enjoyed to be picking up new writing again and explore the text hand in hand through the eyes of fellow Factorians.

An enjoyable 3 hour session led by Fed, thank you.