Bloomsday

[Otis Westinghouse]

A hundred years to the day. There's a fierce debate in Dublin over whether the 'Disneyfication' of Joyce/Irish culture is representative of an evil dumbing-down or to be celebrated a way of making 'high art' more accessible. There was an excellent Observer article this weekend by Sean O'Hagan on this: http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articl ... 56,00.html

As a lover of Joyce and of Ulysses in particular, I think the irony of a book that was banned and thought of as filth now being celebrated in the name of lit tourism is hilarious, and Joyce would have loved this excessive immortalisation. Better than it/him being obscure and ignored, no? It is true that most people celebrating won't have read it, but so what?

What gets my goat is the backlash mob making it seem unreadable. Of course it has huge amounts of dense and complicated allusion in it, uses an immense kaleidoscope of styles (such as the newspaper office scene with headlines above every paragraph, or the night scene written as a question and answer catechism), but there is so much fun to be had with it. If you fancy reading it, don't let prejudice hold you back. Give it a go. No need to worry about the complexities and obscurities, it can be enjoyed on many levels.

Joyce met Nora Barnacle on June 10 1904, and June 16 was the day they first got it together, allegedly with her giving him a hand-job on the seafront. The symbol of the polyglot genius determined to make himself a literary immortal being given a hand-job by the Galway chambermaid he would go on to spend the rest of his life with is applicable to the range of Ulysses. From the obscure and thoroughly highbrow to the most base and mundane. The idea of taking one day and filling it with allusions to a huge span of western civilisation, as well as as much of the local context as possible, and base the peregrinations of Bloom and Dedalus on those of the Homeric epics was both utterly radical and simple in essence.

A day of celebration for the celebration of a day.

[martinfoyle]

Lou Reed, a Joycean scholar, says the best way to read Joyce is out loud, if that's any help.

[Otis Westinghouse]

And someone, Gavin Friday, maybe, recommended the audio book. I think it's 27 hours long! Would be worth it if well done. The only way to have a hope with the truly impossible Finnegan's Wake is to try and imagine hearing it. It helps to hear Joyce read the Anna Livia Plurabelle section in his lovely musical voice.

[lapinsjolis]

Ah so it does make you blind. . .but lovely signature Mr. Westinghouse.

[BlueChair]

I wonder whatever came of this:

http://www.elviscostellofans.com/phpBB2 ... ight=joyce

[Poppet]

anybody up for a reading club of <u>ulysses</u>? i've not read it, and i've gone slightly insane for harry potter lately (rereading them all) but i could give <u>ulysses</u> a shot.

could use help figuring it out. anybody game?

if i get nibbles here, i'll start a topic for it.

[spooky girlfriend]

Anybody seen the google logo today for a tribute to Joyce?

[Otis Westinghouse]

Ah so it does make you blind. . .

Not when someone else does it for you! he was obviously a prodigious onanist.

but lovely signature Mr. Westinghouse.

A tribute to to you, dear Lapin, as you gave me the idea!

I'd be well up for a Ulysses reading club! I haven't read it in full since I studied it, which was a section (or two, with shorter couplings) a week over c. 10 weeks. This was in a seminar led by reasonably acclaimed and highly funny (on the page, less so in person) novelist David Lodge. He's a true enthusiast and was a great teacher, despite his fame. (He was less well-known then, but had to go for the Booker prize awards in London, and a gushing classmate said 'I know you're going to win', but sadly he didn't.)

We'd have to have a few people interested. I'd happily moderate by saying how much we'd read each week and then we could have a deadline for discussion. You'd have to do it over several weeks, it just wouldn't work otherwise. I'd love to re-read it properly anyway, and I have a very good 60s title 'Allusions in Ulysses' which can help with most of the obscurities.

Any takers?

[Poppet]

me and otis, whoo HOO!

aw, cmon, you KNOW you want to slog thru this book....i mean...uh....

[maria]

It's like art. You use a different part of your brain to read Ulysses. Start with Dubliners & Portrait of Artist As A Young Man. Then school yourself to deliberately switch off all "think and analyse" buttons in your head, try and forget everyone else's opinions, and then just float in Ulysses. That's what I think anyway. Good idea to try an audio recording: Jim Norton's done several fab selections from all Joyce's works.

[mood swung]

I'm in if I can sit in the back of the class looking surly and disinterested. and if I can just listen and the most I'll be expected to contribute is an occasional 'I see' or maybe a 'neato-bandito'. and if I can find the damn book.

[lapinsjolis]

Otis Westinghouse-Joyce was a fallen Catholic and perhaps he was taught Aquinas' view on it-a graver sin than sex and his subconscious could not reconcile the subtly of someone else rather than himself preforming the act. That a day is celebrated for it is interesting.

I'd join but after the above observation I'd doubt I'd be welcome and I don't have the book.

[maria]

Ulysses deals with mainly banal things in taking place in a very ordinary day. Leopold Bloom is Jewish, which was unusual in Dublin. Leopold Bloom is the inside of Joyce's head. I think his Jewishness is mainly for that reason: to set aside the workings of the subconscious as special, rich: to elevate and remove him, even alienate him, from other events in the book. some of which may represent lapsed- Catholic guilt Leopold Bloom was a bit of a sex fiend, as most men are. So was Molly too, as most women are. All part of the very ordinary, very banal everyday stuff of life, which can render up magic betimes, as well as grime and slime too. There is nothing sanitised or clean about Leopold or Molly, or their pretensions or observations. The only extraordinary thing is the elevation of the incredibly ordinary to art through his language.

[Poppet]

lapinsjolis, anywhere i am, you are welcome to be.

it's a thick dense book, it's one of those things that get thrown about as if everyone knows it somehow, figured if i have time to slog thru it someone might like to join me in an attempt to figure it out.

anybody can play, far as i'm concerned.

used copies are around $10 on amazon.com

[lapinsjolis]

Maria-I read some Joyce a very long time ago and now the description of elevated ordinariness intrigues me. I have a enough pretense for Joyce and the characters combined!

Awww Poppet you're sweet-let me know when I need to get the book by!

[Goody2Shoes]

I would love to do this, but I am a deathly slow reader and I woud doubtless hold you all up. I've read it, but it was years ago, and in addition to being slow, I am thick, so I have to read things several times before I remember them.

I'll just sit in back and pass notes with Moody.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Course you'd be welcome! And the Catholic perspective would be useful. The aformentioned Professor Lodge always asked his Joyce classes how many of us were Catholics (like him). He relished, as Bloom did 'the inner organs of beasts and fowls', the prospect of a class full of them. I was sorry to disappoint him!

The idea of a reading group doesn't sit with Maria's 'don't analyse it, swim in it' approach, but I agree that not getting too caught up in complexities is the best thing to do. We could still have lots of fun discussing it. Anyone who's into reading moderately complex novels can easily grasp most of what's going on in the book, it really ain't that obscure or linguistically challenging.

I do think it's handy to know the Homeric backbone of the book, this isn't explicit in the book, though many editions will carry notes on it. The manuscript carried the headings until Joyce deleted them at proof stage and they are always referred to this way, and of course the book's title retains this element. The reference back to them often explains the tone or context of a chapter, e.g. the Cyclops episode starts off with a person talking about nearly having his eye put out by a sweep. I love the fact that Joyce used the Homeric epics this way, to take the sense of Odysseus/Ulysses and his journey and return and set it in an everyman, modern urban context. It makes the book very humanistic, very grounded.

[maria]

Otis: not pooh-poohing group idea at all. Definitely good plan for non Dubliners especially to get a backdrop. My swim-in-it notion is simply from my own experience. It took me years to realise that I needed to just go with it to "get" it. I don't purport to be anything approaching a Joyce expert - for that reason, but also for all the hifalutin talk that surrounds it, I found it too intimidating to even approach for yonks. It shouldn't be that way: it IS very accessible, when it's approached the right way. Suddenly the scales fell and it just clicked with me a few years ago. The main reason was that I stopped trying so hard with the logical part of my head: I just read it and re-read it: I skipped the bits I couldn't get into at the time, then suddenly THEY slotted in on another reading... and actually every time I have another go, I find something new. It's that kind of book: incredibly complex, but deceptively so. (His pictorial rendition alone of Dublin on that day is breathtaking: he mentions eight-hundred and something streets, and with all the details as he walks about, doing his very ordinary business. To those who haven't tried, it's mind bending, truly it is.

LJ: I really recommend it to you: you seem to me from the little I know of you on the board to have a poetic lean and I think you'd get on the wavelenth very easily. Otis obviously has studied it, and with the benefit of a great Oxford lecturer too, and would be a wonderful guide. Then just osmose, to coin a phrase! Good luck

[Otis Westinghouse]

Oxford? Birmingham, actually! I'm a redbrick boy. Is it really 800+ streets. Wow, that's amazing. It's corny, but I have a Ulysses map that I got at the Guinness brewery (tourist, moi?) which shows key locations. A lot of ground is covered! I've always wanted to work out the ssupposed '?' shape that Bloom's wanderings take him in, suspect it might be a little conjectural.

Was wathcing the 'Bloom' film with Stephen Rea in it. someone was telling me in Ireland that it was tosh and withdrawn swiftly from cinemas or something, and it did seem pretty hopeless. I have the original 60s film on tape, and at least Milo O'Shea was just right for the part, Rea didn't seem so at all. (Apparently he lives in Donabate now and he was pointed out to me when there ambling out of the off-licence!) I saw the original one introduced by none other than the definitive biographer of Joyce, Richard Ellman, some 20 years ago (in Oxford, in fact!).

[bobster]

Wish I had time to do this right now -- read up to about half-way in college...wish I had time/brain power -- now or then (it happened to be concurrent with the class where they used to say, "Okay, kid, you say you wanna make a film, then make one...." Therefore, my one and only incomplete -- but even then I couldn't finish it!")

On my reading before death to do list...along with Proust, though I'm not sure they make enough coffee to get me through "Remembrance"...after that, I don't know, the entire "Human Comedy" by Balzac and the complete "La Morte d'Arthur" (I've only read Robert Graves great edited version).

[miss buenos aires]

Oh, bobster, in grad school I had this professor who had read the whole Human Comedy multiple times. He had also read Madame Bovary so many times that if you read him a sentence, he could recite the rest of the page.

[bobster]

Sort of like a school friend who had memorized the entire script to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".

[lapinsjolis]

Maria-I will! I will! Thank you. I hope you join in as you know the material so well and would keep us grounded.

When does it begin?

[Poppet]

okay, the ulysses read is ON

see thread **ulysses** for info.

AND THERE ARE LINKS DIRECTLY TO THE TEXT. you don't even hafta buy the book if you don't want to/can't find it.

[Jack of All Parades]

A blessed "Bloomsday" greeting to all- perhaps my favorite non- holiday of the year! Right now these three passages are affixed upon my inner eye and ear:

“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.


Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush, crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a'.

Won't you come to Sandymount,
Madeline the mare?

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs marching. No, agallop: deline the mare.

Open your eyes now. I will. One moment. Has all vanished since? If I open and am for ever in the black adiaphane. Basta! I will see if I can see.

See now. There all the time without you: and ever shall be, world without end.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.”
-James Joyce, Ulysses

These three are the essence of the book for me- they capture its enduring elements succinctly.