A writing program named after Joyce’s novel.
I couldn’t do it.
Or… maybe I could do it, if I got one pomegranate martini per reading.
It’s taken awhile – 13 years to be exact – but the “Finnegans Wake’’ Reading Group has finally finished James Joyce’s famously long and difficult novel. Formed by serious fans of the Irish writer, the group has been meeting weekly to read a page or so of the convoluted work of comic fiction. The uncommon exercise, which began at the Thirsty Scholar in Cambridge, concluded this week at the Corrib in Brighton. Published in 1939, “Finnegans Wake’’ begins with the last half of a sentence and ends with the first half of the same sentence. To mark the end of the marathon reading, the group’s members raised their glasses and ritually chanted the entire completed sentence.
Here are the initial and final phrases united:
A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
This is a new one on me. Along with the worldwide celebration of Bloomsday on June 16 every year, there’s a Dead Dinner.
On the January night James Joyce’s story “The Dead” takes place, Joyceans in New York and Washington dress up in period clothes and reenact the big Christmas dinner and the singing at the center of the tale.
… [Stella] O’Leary recalls starting her Dead dinners the year John Huston’s film came out. It takes [guest] Ambassador Michael Collins just a few seconds to find the year of Huston’s film on his iPhone. O’Leary gasps and crosses herself, saying “‘87, 97 . . . so it’s 22 years”. Guests sing the lyrics of Thomas Moore’s Endearing Young Charms from their iPhone screens.
As [a guest] reads Gabriel Conroy’s closing speech, a website news photo on a phone of snowy Ireland is passed around the table.
… In New York, consul general Niall Burgess and his wife Marie also hold an annual Dead dinner.
… O’Leary’s guests were from the business and diplomatic community. New York is the capital of culture, though, and Burgess’s friends include the novelist Colum McCann, who won the National Book Award in November, the Tony award-winning actor Jim Norton and Gabriel Byrne.
… “Just as the English have A Christmas Carol and the Welsh have A Child’s Christmas in Wales, The Dead is our Christmas story,” [says] Burgess…
A few years ago UD wrote about the final paragraph of “The Dead.”
My first outing with the Welsh Labour leader, in September last year, was pure Rhodri.
There we were on a flight to Louisville, Kentucky for the prestigious Ryder Cup golf tournament.
From my seat in economy, I could see him up ahead, reading James Joyce’s fiendishly difficult novel, Ulysses. And wearing the scruffiest pair of jeans I have ever seen in business class…
The man who’s led the Welsh Assembly Government for nearly 10 years has no time for the modern obsession with image.
His advisers, though, would have loved him to have given it a bit more thought, especially when trying to boost Wales’ standing abroad.
On arrival at Louisville airport, his battered old suitcase actually began to fall apart as his welcoming party helped him get it into the waiting limo…
In particular, the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society’s Fair Use Project, which has successfully defended Lucia Joyce scholar Carol Shloss against venal, vindictive Stephen Joyce, who controls the Joyce Estate, and has blocked her work.
The Stanford scholar who wrote a controversial biography of James Joyce’s daughter has settled her claims for attorneys’ fees against the Joyce Estate for $240,000. The settlement successfully ends a tangled saga that has continued for two decades.
As a result of an earlier settlement reached in 2007, consulting English Professor Carol Loeb Shloss already had achieved the right to domestic online publication of the supportive scholarship the Joyce Estate had forced her to remove from Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (2003). She also had achieved the right to republish the book in the United States with the expurgated material restored. After that settlement was reached, Shloss asked the court to award the attorneys’ fees and costs she had incurred in bringing her suit, and the court granted that request. The parties eventually settled the amount of the fees and litigation costs Shloss and her counsel were to receive at $240,000.
… Shloss said that the suit is a game-changer because now literary “estates know they can get hurt.”
“They know that scholars have resources now. They just can’t be bullies,” she said. “We’ve established that if you don’t pay attention to the rights of scholars, authors and researchers the copyright laws protect, you might have to pay something as the Joyce Estate has had to pay.”
In a tartly worded Feb. 24 filing to determine attorneys’ fees and costs, Shloss and her legal team argued that “the cost of litigating this case, which was substantial, was a direct result of the Estate’s assiduous and energetic efforts to prevent Shloss from exercising the rights the U.S. copyright laws encourage, and its ‘scorched earth’ approach to litigating the early stages of the case to see if it could bully Shloss into capitulation.”
The whole account is worth reading.
… Lars Russell, a San Francisco-based writer, starting reading the entirety of Finnegans Wake out loud at Civic Center [last Wednesday] … and hasn’t slept since.
Michael Edison Hayden’s The Books [will] play Aug. 14-27 as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.
… According to production notes, “An offbeat love story of a professional dominatrix, Mistress Chimera, and her agoraphobic client, Mark, The Books chronicles the unique development of their relationship. After Mark loans Helen a copy of James Joyce’s ‘Dubliners,’ their personal relationship deepens, complicating their sadomasochistic rituals…”
The Polish capital joins in the worldwide tribute to James Joyce’s Ulysses.
The place to go is the Warsaw University Library which, together with the Irish Embassy, is organizing the event. The programme includes a lecture on Joyce’s civic imagination, a recital of traditional Irish songs used in the writer’s books (by Fran O’Rourke of University College, Dublin) and a multi-media show by Emilia Gowin-Pacuła Leopold Bloom’s Phantasmagories.
The show combines photographs from the Bloomsday celebration in Dublin in 2004 with a selection of quotations from Ulysses, in English and Polish.
The first Polish translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, by Maciej Slomczynski, was published in 1969.
This was UD‘s toast, at Ireland’s Four Fields, to James Joyce on Bloomsday. She raised her pomegranate martini; Courtney and Mary Anne raised their Guinnesses.
The bar was pretty quiet; UD wanted a quiet Bloomsday this year. Her tattered and taped up copy of the book sat on the table by the shepherd pie and the apple pie. While waiting for her friends (both were once students of hers at GW), UD read the opening pages of the book, puzzling as ever over why the words
the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak
have such surpassing beauty. They’re like these lines from a James Merrill poem:
I hear the ferrous, feather-light diluvian / Lava clink at a knife-tap from our guide.
What is it? The delicate combination of hard Ks and gentle Ls?
My students – my friends – were
brimming with life. We laughed.
At the Cleveland Park metro we
embraced and said goodnight.
One, James, told me today about a new novel by Don DeLillo, Point Omega, due to be released next year. The great DeLillo website, DeLillo’s America, has a short plot summary:
A young filmmaker visits the desert home of a secret war advisor in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man’s daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn.
The other, Mary Anne, will meet up with UD at an Irish bar tomorrow night, where they’ll drink to James Joyce for Bloomsday.
Colum McCann has a pleasant little Bloomsday piece in the New York Times.
… The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.
… The book carried me through to the far side of my body, made me alive in another time. I was 10 years old again, but this time I knew my grandfather, and it was a moment of gain: he was so much more than a forgotten drunk.
Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”
This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be…
… UD, as always, treats you to a series of posts about James Joyce and his novel, Ulysses.
Here’s something from an article in Thursday’s Guardian:
If you’re going to read any of Ulysses then it might as well be the racy bits at the end. And so it was with a fabulously rare first edition of the James Joyce novel which today sold for £275,000, the highest price recorded for a 20th-century first edition.
The astonishingly well-preserved and previously lost edition of the book, bought surreptitiously in a Manhattan bookshop despite it being banned in the US, was sold to a private buyer in London on the opening day of one of the world’s biggest antiquarian book fairs.
… The more salacious bits are in the last episode, where Molly Bloom’s long stream-of-consciousness soliloquy ends in her orgasmic “yes I said yes I will Yes”.
This first edition is unopened – apart from that last episode. The copy is number 45 of the first 100 and is printed on fine Dutch handmade paper.
The dealer who made the sale, Pom Harrington, said the book was one of only four copies of that first edition print run, all signed by Joyce, which had been unaccounted for. “In terms of collectability, Ulysses is considered to be the number one 20th-century book. This is such a find and it is in such fabulous, pristine condition.”
Throughout the 1920s the book was banned in the UK and the US and any import or sale involved a degree of subterfuge.
This copy was sold at the subversive Manhattan bookshop Sunwise Turn, an eclectic shop where patrons could also pick up Peruvian fabrics or the mystic teachings of Gurdjieff. It was bought by a Mrs Hewitt Morgan and then passed down the family, stored in its original box, unopened and away from the light.
“The colour is amazing – this lovely Aegean Sea, Greek flag blue which would normally have darkened into a more dirty blue but because it has been in a box it is a complete thing of beauty,” said Harrington….
Here’s a bit from the racy, salacious, orgasmic section. We’re inside the head of Molly Bloom, an attractive Irish woman in her thirties who’s in bed at night, lying beside her sleeping husband. She’s had rough sex a few hours earlier with one of her lovers, her singing partner — she’s a performer — Blazes Boylan, and she’s thinking back to that.
yes when I lit the lamp yes because he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has I thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst though his nose is not so big after I took off all my things with the blinds down after my hours dressing and perfuming and combing it like iron or some kind of a thick crowbar standing all the time he must have eaten oysters I think a few dozen he was in great singing voice no I never in all my life felt anyone had one the size of that to make you feel full up he must have eaten a whole sheep after whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you with that determined vicious look in his eye I had to halfshut my eyes still he hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull it out and do it on me considering how big it is so much the better in case any of it wasnt washed out properly the last time I let him finish it in me nice invention they made for women for him to get all the pleasure
Ulysses is notorious for its difficulty, but really, how – er – hard is this? No punctuation, true, but Joyce is capturing the endless stream of her half-asleep consciousness as she drifts off, so punctuation wouldn’t be realistic. As you read, though, ain’t it pretty clear where the periods, commas, and question marks go? Let’s paraphrase, with punctuation.
When I lit the lamp I was amazed to realize that he must have had three or four orgasms with me. What an enormous penis he has! Erect, it was so enormous I thought it would explode. Since I believe the size of men’s noses indicates the size of their penises, I’m surprised his nose is so small.
I’d gone to a lot of trouble to perfume and dress myself for him, but he just threw me down and did me.
And really – his penis was so hard and big. Like iron, like a crowbar. He must have eaten a dozen oysters — oyster being an aphrodisiac — to get that sexually aroused.
He sang during some of this. And he sang well.
But back to his penis. It was so big it totally filled me up. Afterwards, he must have eaten a whole sheep.
As for my anatomy: Why did God make women with a big hole in the middle of them? Men are so determined to get in there and drive it up in you – they’re like horses panting away. It’s quite bestial, not human at all, and the vicious look in his eyes as he was at it so disconcerted me that I half-shut mine.
Considering how big his penis is, he doesn’t produce that much come. Which is just as well, since I don’t want to get pregnant.
It’s quite annoying to me that men get all the pleasure.
There’s a Martello Tower in Key West. Dates from the Civil War.
When UD visited it, she thought of the much more famous Martello Tower on the Irish coast, the tower in which James Joyce briefly lived. He made it the setting of the opening scene of Ulysses.
The last time UD was in Ireland, she stood on top of the tower and looked out over the snotgreen sea.
In Key West, she stood below the tower, looking at Florida’s sky-blue sea. She chatted with one of the gardeners at the Key West Garden Club about how most of the planting around the tower was only a few years old. “Last hurricane really wiped us out. Only the biggest palms survived.”
But even as she spoke with the gardener, UD thought of Stephen Dedalus waking up in his tower to begin his journey through one day and one night. She heard Buck Mulligan say The aunt thinks you killed your mother. She heard Dedalus say Someone killed her.
UD‘s head it simply swirls with that novel, and she’s not alone. Every year hordes of people all over the world honor Ulysses on Bloomsday, June 16, the day the story takes place.
Mark your calendar.
A poster from last year’s Bloomsday in Brazil.