“He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.“
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Owens is a fanatic Evangelical, which leads me to this godly cosmic convergence: Sex addict, voyeur, alcoholic, fraudster, Falwell Jr introduces her as an honored speaker at a Liberty University convocation.
The two of them together! There’s so much – intellectually, morally, spiritually – for Liberty students to be proud of.
Don’t miss her delight at “the gift of Kanye West,” another great Christian.
Buffalo NY not only has a massive James Joyce mural
and, at the University of Buffalo, the world’s largest Joyce collection. Now the university has received $10 million from the state for a James Joyce Museum, which is very cool. They are still looking for donations.
See if I can steady myself here. Check hair dye. Time was I could put my penis no questions asked in those hot jeans behind me now I’m practically impotent marrying a new wife every few years for the same reason Rupert does make the world think we’re still getting it up don’t think we’re fooling anyone. Look at me miserable old hunching holding myself steady against a trash bin outside another courtroom yada same old same old. Every day I’m in court getting sued. Wonder if the statement I just made about the fascist state going after me cuz of Don was a smart move did I sound like a hippie or something fascist state fascist state don’t know. Does that black policeman on the other side know the two women I defamed are black hope not. Anyway he doesn’t look friendly look what’s come of my life. Hero 9/11 now sloppy perv just trying to get some while fourteen ex-wives, fourteen strangers, forty ex-staffers, and the federal government go after me with everything they’ve got. Fuck ’em all I’ll die and then let’s see ’em recover any of my money. Fuck ’em. I know at least Andrew will be at my deathbed forget Caroline she hates me none of my wives will show up who cares born alone die alone money goes to Andrew if there’s any left after the fascists go after my estate fuck Don I guess he’s the reason all this happened where can I hide my assets what’s the name Credit Suisse I’ll go there God I’m tired
Yes, it’s a word. An old, rare word for sure — from the Latin for “soft” — but mollitude is still out there, still kicking.
Also still kicking is the only novel great enough to have its own annual, global celebration – James Joyce’s Ulysses, whose centennial we mark this year. It’s a book full of invigorating wordplay, as in the wordplay of my title, which not only takes off on another great novel (Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude), but puns on the name of one of Joyce’s most important characters, Molly Bloom.
Bloomsday, today, gathers Ulysses lovers from all over the world to reread portions of the book while nursing a Guinness and singing along to songs like, well, My Irish Molly. Molly Malone.
Molly’s famous stream of consciousness closes out Joyce’s book on a note of life-loving human resilience. Her monologue always makes me think of yet another Molly – the real-life Unsinkable Molly Brown, famous for helping save passengers on the Titanic, and for rallying her terrified fellow survivors in the lifeboats.
Its inventive use of language, its theme of unsinkability despite the sorrows and perils of life – this only begins to get at the ultimately unaccountable power of Joyce’s novel. Read with an open heart and an open mind, the book clearly transports many of us to a place of exhilarating aesthetic freedom, where we ourselves, our language, and even our world can somehow be renewed.
It’s true that Joyce’s two main characters – Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus – seem stuck in a depressive paralysis; but even they, once their paths cross and they find fellowship with one another, demonstrate a capacity for regeneration.
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Everything in Ulysses draws us away from deadly, mendacious people and language, and toward the pulsing authentic generous words and personalities of particular, vulnerable, human beings. The novelist/hero of Don De Lillo’s novel Mao IIsays of such language that
it made his heart shake to hear these things in the street or bus or dime store, the uninventable poetry, inside the pain, of what people say.
Ulysses conveys – with deep conviction and persuasion – its belief in the recuperability of a kind and even beautiful world, founded on our recognition of one another’s complexity and uniqueness. And how else to convey this humanity but through our words, our songs, our sympathetic encounters with one another?
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One can also convey authentic humanity through its negation, through language whose paranoid mechanical quality (as in the novel 1984) makes us aware, as we mark authenticity’s appalling absence, of our instinctual human connection.
This Bloomsday, if you want to know how far we have fallen from Joyce’s vision of empowering human mutuality, read our last president’s twelve-page response to the January 6 committee. See how far you can get with his dead bleats of dead cliches until you can’t take it anymore. And then laugh at it. Laugh at it with all the strength that a conviction of the greatness of humanity can give.
Yesterday was Bloomsday, an event UD has in the past celebrated in very high style (see her posts about it); but this covid year has meant a much quieter commemoration. As in, she stood for around five minutes late last night in her new garden (dedicated to Mr UD‘s sister, whose willingness to buy our share of our country house freed up funds for the project)
and thanked whatever gods there be for James Joyce, forUlysses, for the late night scene in Bloom’s garden when two damaged sensitive men pee together.
The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom’s longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter, who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen’s higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vesical pressure.
I have said that the mad, sad world should never settle us into despondency; but, you know, easy to say that when you’ve been blessed by – those same gods? – with a silly, high-spirited disposition. Art and nature are, however, there for all of us, sorrowful and euphoric.
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I mean, man oh man. Listen to Saul Bellow read the end of Henderson the Rain King (start at 37:30) and try not to weep with joy.
‘I have come to the conclusion that it is about time I made up my mind whether I am to become a writer… I foresee that I shall have to do other work as well but to continue as I am at present would certainly mean my mental extinction. It is months since I have written a line and even reading tires me. The interest I took in socialism and the rest has left me. I have gradually slid down until I have ceased to take any interest in any subject. I look at God and his theatre through the eyes of my fellow-clerks so that nothing surprises, moves, excites, or disgusts me. Nothing of my former mind seems to have remained except a heightened emotiveness which satisfies itself in the sixty-miles-an-hour pathos of some cinematograph or before some crude Italian gazette-picture. Yet I have certain ideas which I would like to give form to: not as a doctrine but as the continuation of the expression of myself which I now see I began in Chamber Music. These ideas or instincts or intuitions or impulses may be purely personal. I have no wish to codify myself as anarchist or socialist or reactionary…‘
The notes I took are gone, but I remember certain things. The pleasant disorientation of watching Augie March teach Nathan Zuckerman, for example. And the week we discussed Ulysses. That morning, we sat nervously as Bellow took his seat. “Have you finished the book?” he said. Had we read every page of one of literature’s most famously difficult offerings? In a week? Not one of us had gotten to that last Yes. Bellow laughed — not the marvelous, head back, teeth-bared laugh for which he was famous, but a small laugh — and brandished an ancient copy of the book, which, he said, had been smuggled into the country for him in the 1930s. And for the next hour, he read to us from Ulysses and, without notes, annotated it. Bellow’s deep recall, fluency, and confidence seems, now, to be a beautiful, cerebral high-wire act.
… but as a writer you want to remain calm and control your prose as you discuss the upcoming HBO movie. This prose has too much figurative language all over the place, creating the chaos of mixed metaphors. SOS has helpfully italicized the problem areas:
Make no mistake: there’s plenty of material to be mined for the HBO drama. The firestorm that ensued following the 2011 arrest of Sandusky nearly tore the Penn State community in half and caused a flurry of controversy in all areas of public conversation. Resurrecting these events and examining the tense subject matter through the lens of famed director Barry Levinson and the prowess of Pacino will be mighty fascinating.
This prose literally runs hot and cold, as we venture from a firestorm that neatly cuts a community in half to a snowy flurry. Mining and resurrections are thrown in for good measure, leaving the reader all of a mucksweat (to quote Bella Cohen).
You’d think the story of Stephen Dedalus working his way clear of sexual guilt, Catholic hell, a suffocating family, and of course Ireland itself, would skew antique these days; but just as we’re all susceptible to the New Year, we’re all susceptible to the New Life. Portrait is the ultimate successful makeover.
Put aside your awareness that Stephen’s flight beyond the nets of family country and religion will, in Joyce’s next book, crash-land him back into the same hot mess; recall instead your excitement on first reading this liberation song.
A veiled sunlight lit up faintly the grey sheet of water where the river was embayed. In the distance along the course of the slow-flowing Liffey slender masts flecked the sky and, more distant still, the dim fabric of the city lay prone in haze. Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man’s weariness, the image of the seventh city of christendom was visible to him across the timeless air, no older nor more weary nor less patient of subjection than in the days of the thingmote.
Here’s Dedalus just having broken free of the church; here he euphorically strides farther and farther away from a conversation he’s just had with a priest about joining the Jesuits. Although Stephen’s terror of damnation (he has consorted with prostitutes) has propelled him into a piety so intense that he has now been invited to enter an order, the unfolding conversation about his vocation suddenly makes explicit the absurdity of trying to murder his appetite with metaphysics. “His destiny was to be elusive of social or religious orders.” It’s the artist’s silence, exile, and cunning now, all the way.
How does this newly transformed self see the false world he’s about to leave? What are his thoughts as – manically overwhelmed by his release – he rushes about putting distance between himself and the prisonhouse?
Run that paragraph by me again.
A veiled sunlight lit up faintly the grey sheet of water where the river was embayed. In the distance along the course of the slow-flowing Liffey slender masts flecked the sky and, more distant still, the dim fabric of the city lay prone in haze. Like a scene on some vague arras, old as man’s weariness, the image of the seventh city of christendom was visible to him across the timeless air, no older nor more weary nor less patient of subjection than in the days of the thingmote.
You hear the gentle lilting hyperpoetic music of the thing? He’s looking at a city he’s about to leave – the dead world of “The Dead.” This writing is valedictory, a bittersweet backward view. All is old (“veiled,” “gray,” “faint,” “slow-flowing,” “dim,” “prone,” “vague,” “old,” “weary”) and trapped (“embayed,” “patient of subjection”). The final long sentence ends with the odd obsolescence of thingmote – literally, a raised mound on which Viking settlers met to enact laws; yet a figure too for the tiny ancient vanishing thing Dublin’s about to become in the artist’s rear-view mirror. We’re told this is a modernist novel; but at the moment we’ve got a rhyme-happy Romantic poet hurrying himself up into a pose of nostalgia for beautiful delicate ruins.
A veiled sunlight lit up faintly
The grey sheet of water where
The river was embayed.
The dim fabric of the city Lay prone in haze.
In the days of the thingmote.
The gentle gorgeous insistent quality of these long A‘s underscores the delicacy and immobility of this arrière “arras” scene that hangs in “timeless air.” (And not to belabor the beauty, but look how the dull closed-off short I is everywhere as counterpoint: lit/river/dim/fabric/city/in.) Dublin has become a portrait for the artist. It is no longer an overpowering reality that hurts him, but an aesthetic thing “subject” to his powerful eye.
[T]he deployment of Irish Naval vessels which began in May 2015 with the LE Eithne to be followed by the LE Niamh, LE Samuel Beckett, LE Roisin and LE James Joyce, was an important element in Ireland’s response to the migration crisis in the Mediterranean.
… and makes her wonder what Joyce and Beckett would have made of it.
The little theater where UD just listened
to a couple of guys talk about why Ulysses is great.
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The day is overcast – typically Irish… But Joyce’s novel takes place on a freakishly sunny and warm June day in Dublin.
Chestertown’s old and charming and set along a river. After the lecture, UD strolled the waterfront (full of gray geese and black vultures), and now relaxes with a chai at Play it Again Sam. There’s an open mic (five minute limit) Ulysses reading next door in about an hour. Maybe UD will take part. Something morbid, she thinks; from the Hades chapter.
UD listened to the guys talk very intelligently about why the novel’s worth is far above rubies. Wearing her James Joyce sweatshirt, scribbling in her Essential James Joyce (she met the editor, Harry Levin, at the home of Wiktor Weintraub‘s widow), UD wrestled down her impulse to comment on virtually everything they said… When she did finally say something (about the nature of artistic genius and artistic originality), one of the guys said “That person is clearly a plant.” — meaning to suggest that somebody must have custom-ordered a commenter who would sound like an English professor who teaches James Joyce.
But really it’s hard to say why Ulysses reigns supreme. One spends a lifetime with the book, trying to figure out how Joyce was able to write like that. You feel like Salieri gazing at a Mozart score. Ultimately it doesn’t seem possible that a human being could write so well. Think and feel so well. If it were only beautifully written, dayenu. If it were only beautifully written and brilliantly descriptive of social life in a city, dayenu. If it were only wise and humane and hilarious and deeply accepting of our vileness and pathos, dayenu. If it were only steamy dreamy streams of consciousness, dayenu.
Your head it simply swirls.
Bloomsday exists because the peculiar over-excitement you feel reading this book is deep and specific and shared by others.
