A Momentary Taste of Being

From a Dublin colleague--this potpourri of how to celebrate the day: Tweeting Ulysses How to Celebrate Bloomsday The Joyce Center: Bloomsday 2011 Enjoy!

Or Bloomsday as you prefer. This just in, sent from a friend: Yes, It is possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub!

"The Sensual World" becomes "Flower of the Mountain" I have long lived in blissful ignorance of Stephen Joyce's stranglehold on his grandfather's estate--one of the best reasons I can think of for systematic conscientious objection to our present ludicrous copyright laws.  But Kate Bush can now sing what she first had in mind when constructing her magnificent song. And what better tribute to Joyce himself than to take his most musical novel and make of a bit of it a piece of music. (Ah, I love Kate Bush--from Wuthering Heights to the present.)

Is Ulysses overrated? Ah, this is so simple--of course it isn't.  It may be liked more by some, less by others-but its fundamental influence on the shape of nearly all subsequent fiction--the one-two punch of Joyce and Woolf given us much of the restucturing and understanding of the way fiction works.  It is, in fact, impossible to overestimate the importance of Ulysses .  I would ask rather that in the shadow of Ulysses , have we underestimated the importance of some other works of twentieth century fiction?

Ugh--the Joycean Copyright trap.

Read all about it: Joyce inscribed on a synthetic genome.  Joyce's estate is not amused.

A view of Joyce's short fiction.

Beckett recalling Joyce through an interview And here, for my future edification and delight is the source of an anecdote that I had never truly trusted: He was very friendly. He dictated some pages of Finnegan's Wake to me at one stage. That was later on when he was living in that flat. And during the dictation, someone knocked at the door and I said something. I had to interrupt the dictation. But it had nothing to do with the text. And when I read it back with the phrase 'Come in' in it, he said, 'Let it stand.'

Audio Ulysses

From Ulysses While I admire the whole book, probably my favorite portion is the Laestrygonians because of that magnificent walk through Dublin that doesn't culminate in the Gorgonzola sandwich, but certainly features it.

Marvelous excerpt from Ulysses I have a vague recollection, as well, of Dedalus attempting to prove by algebra that Hamlet is his own father.

Parsing Quashed Quotatoes   for commentary Michael Wood on the Wake

Reading the Wake, seeing the Wake

"Ulysses Seen" continues with the first look at "Calypso"

Hmmm.  Finnegans Wake illustrated

Reading through Ulysses and going very, very slowly through the Circe episode--sometimes presented as a play and called "Ulysses in Nighttown."  But, as I've noted before, Ulysses is ultimate a day book.  That is, nearly all of the action of the novel (with the possible exception of the last episode with Leopold and Stephen and Molly Bloom, takes place in daylight.  Admittedly by Nighttown we're approaching sunset, but given the time and the date 10:00 at night in high summer (near the longest day of the year) is still pretty bright. Why do I go to such pains to make the point?  Well it is not original to me to refer to Finnegans Wake as Joyce's "book of night."  Nor, probably (not being a Joyce scholar I cannot say) to call Ulysses the "book of day."  What is interesting is that in this episode of Ulysses , Joyce begins to develop the nightlanguage that will show up in the Wake.  Just a sample: from Ulysses James Joyce VIRAG (Head a...

Joyce's Literary Tastes Robinson Crusoe as the English Ulysses. What a peculiar book and artist to choose for an apotheosis.  But then peculiarity tends to mark genius.

It is always a great pleasure to revisit an old friend and discover about it new and more interesting aspects. For those not intimate with the Joycean oeuvre, Dubliners is the earliest of the extant prose works and consists of a series of short stories, one of which has been called the finest short story in English in the twentieth century. As short stories, these are the most accessible of Joyce's work. This is not to mean that they are necessarily "easy."  But it does mean that on first approach the reader can make some sense of them and grasp the essentials.  As I've intimated, revisiting the stories allows one to encounter them in greater depth and breadth, and even simple tales like "Araby" develop (to use the florid language of the SCOTUS) emanations and penumbras. A quick tour reveals stories about new love, old love, mistaken love, lust, and modern unhappiness.  Dublin apparently wasn't a grand place to live at the turn of the twentieth centu...

Today was a lovely Dublin day--overcast in the morning, but clearing in the afternoon to give a fine view of the Dublin Mountains crowned with low lying, but puffy white clouds.  Not much rain, and what there was came after I had walked back from the office to my hotel--just enough to make going out to dinner a little dicey without an umbrella--but as I had one, I was not in the least perturbed.  I walked around to The Pig's Ear, which is a restaurant on Nassau that I favor largely for the really excellent shepherd's pie and a Dublin confection that is simply unmatched called a gur cake.  (Look it up, it is too difficult to describe, and too delicious to do justice to in the few words I have before resuming work. Wonderful thing about Dublin, you can work an entire work day, go out to dinner, and then work your American job as well, catching up on the events of the day.) Dinner was somewhat disappointing because as I had had ground lamb en croute for lunch, I chose Salm...

Once again, I find myself in Dublin for a week of work.  As a result my posts will be asynchronous, corresponding either to mid-afternoon (after work) or very early in the morning (before work).  As today was the first day after arrival, I slept in.  I never fail to be amazed at how easily my body accommodates the change moving west to east and how difficult it is to acclimate upon returning home.  I'm already used to getting up at two in the morning my time and the week should go very, very well indeed. On my last two trips here, I spent the time tracing the tracks of Ulysses and reading it when spending off-hours from work.  I also worked all of the major religious and historical attractions and many of the museums.  So far this trip I was able to take in the Irish National Art Gallery (Featuring Art by a lesser known, but very fine Irish artist--Jack Yeats) the Irish Natural History Museum--a kind of interesting museum of museums--the exhibitions resem...