… UD shared a Guinness with Mr UD at the dinner table (pad thai with shrimp from Noodles and Co., since you ask). Holding her little glass aloft, she said A toast to the greatest English-language writer the modern world has ever seen. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, I love you, and I will never stop reading you.
Mr UD went on a bit, during the meal (pad thai without the shrimp), about Habermas, and the rather different form of communication about which he’s obsessed. Joycean internal monologues are all well and good; the stories we endlessly tell ourselves about ourselves as we walk around all day are all well and good; but the understanding of rationality to include communicative rationality, and, on that foundation, the elaboration of a discourse ethics, is just as crucial…
All day, UD‘s been playing and singing songs that appear in Joyce’s work (she just performed Sweet Rosie O’Grady).
UD has read from Joyce at the Irish Embassy, at the Cosmos Club, and at lots of other venues around DC. But some years seem to call for something more quiet. One year she took two of her GW students to an Irish bar. Sipping Guinness, we took turns reading favorite passages from Ulysses.
James Joyce is Mr UD‘s ninth cousin, twice removed.