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Opening the morning paper or browsing the web, routine actions for us all, rarely if ever shake our fundamental beliefs about the world. If we assume a naïve, reflective state of mind, however, reading newspapers and surfing the web offer us quite a different experience: they provide us with a glimpse into the kaleidoscopic nature of the modern era that can be quite irritating.

The post The quest for order in modern society appeared first on OUPblog.

Ezra Pound was a major figure in the early modernist movement. During his lifetime he developed close interactions with leading writers and artists, such as Yeats, Ford, Joyce, Lewis, and Eliot. Yet his life was marked by controversy and tragedy, especially during his later years.

The post How well do you know Ezra Pound? [quiz] appeared first on OUPblog.

The New York Public Library has opened a pop-up exhibit called “A Writer’s Christmas: Dickens & More.”

This program was organized to celebrate the holiday season. Some of the items being displayed include a Christmas card from James Joyce, a Christmas-themed book by T. S. Eliot, and ceramic figurines associated with A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

According to the press release, visitors will only be able to see this exhibit at the McGraw Rotunda inside the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. The closing date has been scheduled for Jan. 04, 2016.

Describe your latest book. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a fairy-tale of New York (well, mostly New York). New York with added genies (jinn). It's about a jinnia princess, Dunia, who acquires a large number of human offspring, and uses them to help her battle an invasion of our world by the [...]

It’s 91F/33C out and I’m a bit wilty. It isn’t supposed to be this hot in June; the end of July it is allowed but not early June. But no one ever seems to care about my opinion.

I recently began reading Portrait of a Lady by Henry James along with Danielle. I’m really enjoying the book. Today, however, I am not going to talk about that. Instead I am going to reveal how silly it gets at my house sometimes.

Bookman asked me the other day what I was reading on my Kobo. I told him I had just started Portrait of a Lady.

That’s by James Joyce, right?

No, Henry James. I replied

Well didn’t James Joyce write something with portrait in the title?

Yes, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

And then things got goofy.

Bookman insisted that Henry James and James Joyce were actually the same person, after all, had anyone ever seen them at a party together? The true name of the man is Henry James Joyce.

Oh yes, I exclaimed and the real title of the book is Portrait of the Lady as a Young Man, it’s one of the first transgender novels ever written.

We’ve finally set the literary record straight, so to speak.

Our work here is done.

Describe your latest book. Wages of Rebellion looks at the nature of rebellion, those who do it, why they do it, and the price they pay for being a rebel. There are interviews with great rebels, from Julian Assange to Mumia Abu Jamal, who have sacrificed enormously for their resistance. The book posits that these [...]

The Harry Ransom Center, an institution based at the University of Texas at Austin, has acquired the archive of the late Gabriel García Márquez.

The Nobel Prize-winning writer had passed on earlier this year. Some of the items in the García Márquez archive include letters, photo albums, typewriters, computers, scrapbooks, drafts of his 1982 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and the manuscripts for One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Memories of My Melancholy Whore.

Here’s more from the press release: “Highlights in the archive include multiple drafts of García Márquez’s unpublished novel We’ll See Each Other in August, research for The General in His Labyrinth (1989) and a heavily annotated typescript of the novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981). The materials document the gestation and changes of García Márquez’s works, revealing the writer’s struggle with language and structure…The archive will reside at the Ransom Center alongside the work of many of the 20th century’s most notable authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, and James Joyce, who all influenced García Márquez.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Fade in on the Mission Dolores, the fictional gravesite of Carlotta Valdes in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. One block away, two writers with their first jobs teaching creative writing (okay, it was us!) decide to collaborate on a book of short stories that respond to classic and cult movies. We try — and fail — to [...]

Shakespeare and Company has been profiled in an Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday short film. We’ve embedded the entire piece in the video above—what do you think? Past patrons of the famous Parisian independent bookstore include Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

By Meghann Wilhoite

American composer and self-proclaimed “bad boy of music” George Antheil was born today 114 years ago in Trenton, New Jersey. His most well-known piece is Ballet mècanique, which was premiered in Paris in 1926; like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, from which Antheil seems to have derived quite a bit of inspiration, the premiere resulted in audience outrage and a riot in the streets. The piece is scored for pianos and a number of percussion instruments, including airplane propellers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Though he died at the age of 58, polymath Antheil managed to accomplish quite a bit in his relatively short life both in and outside the field of music. Here are some highlights:

• His name appears alongside the actress Hedy Lamarr’s on a patent, granted in 1942, for an early type of frequency hopping device, their invention for disrupting the intended course of radio-controlled German torpedoes.
• In 1937 he published a text on endocrinology called Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Criminology. The book includes chapters on “How to read your newspaper” and “The glandular rogue’s gallery”.
• His music was championed by the likes of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, W.B. Yeats, Erik Satie, and Pablo Picasso.
• Under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop, he wrote Death in the Dark, a detective novel edited by T.S. Eliot, the hero of which is based on Pound.
• After spending the majority of the 1920s and 30s in Europe, he settled in Hollywood and wrote dozens of film, television and radio scores, for directors such as Cecil B. DeMille and Fritz Lang (and with such titillating titles as “Zombies of Mora Tau” and “Panther Girl of the Kongo”).
• Last, but not least, here is Vincent Price narrating Antheil’s “To a Nightingale” with the composer himself on piano: George Antheil – Two Odes of John Keats – To A Nightingale: Vincent Price, narrator; George Antheil, piano

Meghann Wilhoite is an Associate Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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The Rosenbach Museum & Library is currently hosting an exhibit called “I’ll Make a Ghost of Him: Joyce Haunted by Shakespeare.” This display showcases pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses alongside William Shakespeare’s plays and poems.

Visitors will be able to explore the scenes that directly influenced Joyce in writing his beloved novel. This curators hope that bibliophiles will learn “how the living Joyce was haunted by Elizabethan literary history.” This exhibit will run until August 31, 2014.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

For months before I read it, coworkers would rave during meetings, send me glowing emails, or stop me in the hall to tell me how much they loved All the Light We Cannot See. We couldn't keep advance reader copies in the office for more than a few hours. I had long been a fan [...]

By Kirsty Doole

With today being St Patrick’s Day, we’ve taken the opportunity to recommend a few classic works of Irish literature to dip into while you’re enjoying a pint (or two) of Guinness.

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

Joyce is one of the most famous figures in Irish literature, and Finnegans Wake is infamous for being one of the most formidable books in existence. It plays fantastic games with language and reinvents the very idea of the novel in the process of telling the story of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and his wife Anna Livia, in whom the character of Ireland itself takes form. Around them and their dreams there swirls a vortex of world history, of ambition and failure, pride and shame, rivalry and conflict, gossip and mystery.

A Tale of a Tub and Other Works by Jonathan Swift

This was the first major work written by Jonathan Swift. The author explains in a preface that it is the practice of seamen when they meet a whale to throw out an empty tub to divert it from attacking the ship. Hence the title of the satire, which is intended to divert Hobbes’s Leviathan and the wits of the age from picking holes in the weak sides of religion and government. The author proceeds to tell the story of a father who leaves as a legacy to his three sons Peter, Martin, and Jack a coat apiece, with directions that on no account are the coats to be altered. Peter symbolizes the Roman Church, Martin (from Martin Luther) the Anglican, Jack (from John Calvin) the Dissenters. The sons gradually disobey the injunction. Finally Martin and Jack quarrel with the arrogant Peter, then with each other, and separate.

The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays by J. M. Synge

In The Playboy of the Western World, the action takes place in a public house, when a stranger enters and is persuaded to tell his story. Impressed, the admiring audience thinks he must be very brave indeed to have killed his father, and in turn the young tramp blossoms into the daring rollicking hero they believe him to be. But then his father, with a bandaged head, turns up seeking his worthless son. Disillusioned and angry at the loss of their hero, the crowd turns the stranger, who tries to prove that he is indeed capable of savage deeds, even attempting unsuccessfully to kill his father again. The play ends with father and son leaving together with the words “Shut yer yelling for if you’re after making a mighty man of me this day by the power of a lie, you’re setting me now to think if it’s a poor thing to be lonesome, it’s worse maybe to go mixing with the fools of earth.”

Dracula by Bram Stoker

One of the greatest horror stories ever written. This is the novel that introduced the character of Count Dracula to the world, spawning a whole host of vampire fictions in its wake. As well as being a pioneering text in horror fiction, it also has much to say about the nature of empire, with Dracula hell-bent on spreading his contagion into the very heart of the British empire. Fun fact: Bram Stoker’s wife, Florence Balcombe, had previously been courted by Oscar Wilde.

The Major Works by W. B. Yeats

W. B. Yeats was born in 1865 and died in 1939. His career crossed the 19th and 20th centuries, from the Romantic early poems of Crossways and the symbolist masterpiece The Wind Among the Reeds to his last poems. Myth and folk-tale influence all of his work, most notably in Cathleen ni Houlihan among others. The importance of the spirit world to his life and work is evident in his critical essays and occult writings, and he also wrote a whole host of political speeches, autobiographical writings, and letters.

The Wild Irish Girl by Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan)

This is the story of the son of an English lord, Horation, who is banished to his father’s Irish estate as punishment for gambling debts, he adopts the persona of knight errant and goes off in search of adventure. On the wild west coast of Connaught he finds remnants of a romantic Gaelic past a dilapidated castle, a Catholic priest, a deposed king and the king’s lovely and learned daughter, Glorvina. In the process he rediscovered a love for the life and culture of his country. Written after the Act of Union, The Wild Irish Girl (1806) is a passionately nationalistic novel and an essential novel in the discourse of Irish nationalism. The novel was so controversial in Ireland that the author, Lady Morgan, was put under surveillance by Dublin Castle. There is a bust of Lady Morgan in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the plaque mentions that Lady Morgan was “less than four feet tall.”

In a Glass Darkly by J. Sheridan Le Fanu

This dark collection of five stories was said by none other than Henry James to be “the ideal reading… for the hours after midnight”. Indeed, J. Sheridan Le Fanu himself had a reputation for being both reclusive and rarely seen in the daytime. His fascination with the occult led to his stories being truly spine-chilling, drawing on the Gothic tradition and elements of Irish folklore, as well as on the social and political anxieties of his Anglo-Irish contemporaries.

Kirsty Doole is Publicity Manager for Oxford World’s Classics.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the OUPblog. Subscribe to only Oxford World’s Classics articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

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Image credit: James Joyce. By Djuna Barnes. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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The iconic actress Marilyn Monroe may have played the role of a ditzy blonde in many films, but she was actually quite the bookworm whose reading preferences included books by James Joyce and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Open Culture has more: “Once married to playwright Arthur Miller, Monroe stocked about 400 books on her shelves, many of which were later catalogued and auctioned off by Christie’s in New York City.”

Library Thing has made a list of 261 titles that were a part of Monroe’s personal library. Books on the list include: Out Of My Later Years by Albert Einstein; Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert; The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner; as well as poetry collections from Robert Frost, John Milton, and Edgar Allen Poe, among others. (Via Gothamist).

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By Finn Fordham

Joyce was obsessed with birthdays.  Today, February 2^nd, is his. An emerging secular saint’s day, it will be remembered and alluded to round the world – especially in Dublin — in the corners of newspapers and pubs, in blogs (like this one), tweets and the odd talk. Born in 1882, Joyce’s cake — if he could have one, let alone eat it — would have a hundred and thirty one candles; a hundred years ago, therefore, he would have been celebrating his 31^st birthday. The image of candles is suitable, since Joyce’s birthday fell on ‘Candlemas’, a holy day which commemorates Christ’s first appearance in a synagogue with his mother, forty days after his birth, in part by the lighting of candles. Mary was following the Mosaic law which says that, after giving birth, a mother is not clean for forty days, at which point she is to be purified through sacrifice. 

‘Celebrating’, however, might be too strong a word: in 1913, Joyce was, artistically, in something of a lull, and life might well have been frustrating. He was teaching English in Trieste, with two small children, aged 5 and 7. He was struggling to get Dubliners past timid publishers and printers; A Portrait…, begun some nine years before, was unfinished; Ulysses was not yet begun. He was writing the odd bit of journalism, but the high artistic ambitions he had cherished as a young man had taken a battering. He’d spent his twenty-first in Paris, receiving a letter written by his father John Joyce, which he would carefully keep wherever he went:

My dear Jim, May I be permitted to offer you my best wishes for your future which I, at one time, fancied may have been more rosey on your attaining your majority [i.e becoming 21]… I hope you will beleive [sic] me that I am only now, under I may tell you, very trying times, endeavouring to do my little best, but Jim you are my eldest Son I have always looked up to your being a fitting representative of our family one that my father would be proud of. I now only hope that you may carry out his ideas through your life and if you do, you may be sure you will not do anything unbecoming a gentleman.

John Joyce, here and in general, was, like Simon Dedalus in Ulysses, strong and open in his expression of emotion. He is not the stereotypical cold and detached Victorian father. On the other hand, the complexity of his warmth borders on ambiguity, and its intensity must have brought some pressure to the young and, by all accounts, lonely Joyce: the father feels responsible for failing his son, but implies that his son was failing, or in danger of doing so; he seeks forgiveness while sending his son on a guilt trip; he says he looks up to him, while also establishing a role model in his own father, thus reaffirming the patriarchal hierarchy of genealogy. Self-pityingly unable to help materially, he adopts the role of civic mentor — urging him to behave like a gentleman, as Polonius did to Laertes when the latter was about to go to Paris (and its fleshpots).  Larkin’s term for such ambivalence was ‘sloppy-stern’.

Birthdays may be a universal convention, but they are not universally liked.  One pressure that birthdays bring is the inevitability, almost the duty, of self-reflection — a pressure which the Joyces, father and son, must have been aware of in 1903. The attention of others — fathers, mothers, friends, colleagues, wishing us well, presenting a gift, raising a glass — may exacerbate processes of self-examination and even pernicious comparison. Relative to where we were, or where we hoped to be, relative to our peers, or where our role models once were — where have we got to, or to what have we sunk?  Birthdays are ciphers that multiply whatever condition we’re in. The potential trauma of birthdays repeats, perhaps compulsively, the trauma of the day of birth. The twitching nervous checking during labour of the condition of mother and child – how are they doing, what are their heart rates? — becomes a twitching nervous checking on birthdays of whether one has yet become oneself.

For an ambitious person, for someone intent on establishing a mythology of themselves, for someone superstitious, birthdays, especially their own, and other anniversaries are crucial. And so they were for Joyce, for these very reasons. He habitually made awkward deadlines for himself and his publishers, by wanting his books to appear on his birthday or, failing that, his father’s. The day on which Ulysses is set (itself the day of the troubled birth, though fictional, of Mortimer Edward Purefoy), is supposed to be the day of Joyce’s first date with Nora Barnacle, though their encounter is not in fact recorded in the fiction.

Through the cyclical repetition of dates, days become haunted, charged with the meaning of the events of the past, implicit in their dates: Armistice Day, Guy Fawkes, the Battle of the Boyne. The different calendars of the global village, now shared in multi-cultural societies, show the space of the year as an environment that is densely built up with official anniversaries which are the signs and the foundations of institutions, of nations, states, religions, organisations, movements.

Anniversaries seem inevitable because of the cycle of the year, but they are not guaranteed: different anniversaries can coincide on the same day, so that one feast day ousts another; secular festivals push out saints’ days. Joyce cheekily engineered such a coincidence in the birthday of Molly Bloom, which was September the 8^th, the same day as the Virgin Mary’s birthday. Joyce’s love of birthdays is in part a wish to appropriate this map, a symptom of an eternal struggle he identified between the individual and society: ‘the state is concentric; man is concentric. Thence arise an eternal struggle.’

We have a Bloomsday, on which the institution of Joyce studies (and Joycolatry) are built. But there is no Wake-day: Finnegans Wake does not seem to happen on a single day, though for one critic it is a dream dreamt on 28 March 1938. For others the events of the Wake happen everyday and anyday. Unlike Ulysses, it has not been so easily institutionalised. Either way, it is certainly worth celebrating and lighting candles for: and Joyce’s birthday is as good as any to do so.

Dr Finn Fordham is Reader in 20th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Along with Robbert-Jan Henkes and Erik Bindervoet, he has edited the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. Finnegans Wake is a book that reinvents the novel and plays fantastic games with the language to tell the story of one man’s fall and resurrection; in the intimate drama of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker and his wife Anna Livia, the character of Ireland itself takes form. Joyce called time and the river and the mountains the real heroes of his book, and its organic structure and extraordinary musicality embody his vision. It is both an outrageous epic and a wildly inventive comedy that rewards its readers with never-ending layers of meaning.

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more. You can follow Oxford World’s Classics onTwitter and Facebook.

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Image credit: By Paweł Cieśla Staszek_Szybki_Jest (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons

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What’s your favorite kind of book? We’ve created a giant flowchart to help you browse the top 50 free eBooks at Project Gutenberg.

Click the image above to see a larger version of the book map. Your choices range from Charles Dickens to Jane Austen, from Sherlock Holmes to needlework. Below, we’ve linked to all 50 free eBooks so you can start downloading right now. The books are available in all major eBook formats.

Follow this link to see an online version of the flowchart, complete with links to the the individual books.

continued…

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Tomorrow is Bloomsday, the worldwide celebration of James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses. To help you celebrate, a group of Boston college students have built JoyceWays, a city guide app to Dublin based on the novel.

The iPhone app was formulated with university studies and designs from Irish software developer Big Top Multimedia. The literary tour app, which is part study guide, part tourist tool, goes live in the App Store today.

AppNewser has more: “It took almost three years for the students to build the app, which started as a Kickstarter project. And you can see why. It’s full of photos, literary criticism, cartoons and posters. It’s got 100 places to visit including 15 pubs.”It also has offline maps, real-time GPS tracking and four hours of spoken commentary. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Faber & Faber, the storied publisher that published T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, James Joyce, Tom Stoppard and Sylvia Plath, now offers online writing creative courses.

The publisher launched Faber Academy Online, a 28-week course that costs £2800 (about $4,400). The publisher first offered writing courses in 2008. What do you think–should publishers offer creative writing classes?

Here’s more from the release: “Chatrooms, topic forums and specially commissioned video content from Faber editors will be combined with one-to-one Skype feedback and podcasts to create a unique learning experience … The first offering to run on the new platform will be Writing A Novel, a 28-week programme based on the face-to-face course of the same name that has already brought huge success for the writers S. J. Watson and Rachel Joyce.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

On this day in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in its entirety, although the publication history of the book is nearly as complex as the novel itself. Initially serialised in The Little Review from 1918, publication of Nausicaä episode led to a prosecution for obscenity and no English-speaking country dared to publish more, and risk further prosecution. However, shortly after arriving in Paris in July 1920, Joyce met Sylvia Beach, proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop and friend to modern writers. On hearing of the collapse of Joyce’s hopes of US or English publication, Sylvia Beach offered to publish the book under the auspices of Shakespeare and Company, to have it printed in Dijon by Maurice Darantiere, and to finance it by advance subscription. Joyce agreed at once. Here, we’ve picked one of our favourite extracts from the Oxford World’s Classics edition (pp.226-227).

Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, then of Aristotle’s Masterpiece. Crooked botched print. Plates : infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere.  Mrs Purefoy.

He laid both books aside and glanced at the third : Tales of the Ghetto by Leopold von Sacher Masoch.

–  That I had, he said, pushing it by.

The shopman let two volumes fall on the counter.

–  Them are two good ones, he said.

Onions of his breath came across the counter out of his ruined mouth. He bent to make a bundle of other books, hugged them against his unbuttoned waistcoat and bore them off behind the dingy curtain.

On O’Connell bridge many persons observed the grave deportment and gay apparel of Mr Denis J. Maginni, professor of dancing &c.

Mr Bloom, alone, looked at the titles. Fair Tyrants by James Lovebirch. Know the kind that is. Had it? Yes.

He opened it. Thought so.

A woman’s voice behind the dingy curtain. Listen : The man.

No: she wouldn’t like that much. Got her it once.

He read the other title : Sweets of Sin. More in her line. Let us see.

He read where his finger opened.

— All the dollarbills her husband gave her were spent in the stores on wondrous gowns and costliest fillies. For him ! For Raoul !

–  Her mouth glued on his in a voluptuous kiss while his hands felt for the opulent curves inside her deshabillé.

—  You are late, he spoke hoarsely, eying her with a suspicious glare.

Warmth showered gently over him, cowing his flesh. Flesh yielded amid rumpled clothes. Whites of eyes swooning up. His nostrils arched themselves for prey. Melting breast ointments (for him ! For Raoul !) Armpits’ oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime (her heaving embonpoint !). Feel ! Press ! Crished ! Sulphur dung of lions !

Young ! Young !

An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of chancery, king’s bench, exchequer and common pleas having heard in the lord chancellor’s court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident a

Years ago after I read Don Quixote I read Nabokov’s lectures on the book and while I found them erudite and useful to my understanding of Cervantes’ masterpiece, I was too uptight yet from having finished the tale of the noble knight errant to actually enjoy the lectures. And that is all the Nabokov I have read. Until now. Add another lecture, the one on Ulysses from Lectures on Literature. And this time I fell in love.

Nabokov is no looker, though I suppose in his younger days before the jowls appeared he had a certain attractive intensity. Nonetheless, after reading his lecture on Ulysses I so want to be that girl in the first Indiana Jones movie who sat in the front row of Indy’s class and had “I Love You” written on her eyelids except I’d be in Nabokov’s class though being in Indy’s class wouldn’t be bad either (don’t tell Bookman about this though, he might get jealous). The man, Nabokov that is, had a brilliant mind, a definite opinion, the ability to explain complex things simply, and he was hilarious.

I wish I had taken the book off the shelf before I started reading Ulysses because Nabokov very nicely breaks his lecture up according to the chapters of Joyce’s book. But then reading it all afterwards has worked out just fine too because discussion or mention of other parts of the book necessarily creep in to chapters in which they aren’t a main part but have some import. I read Ulysses with Gifford’s Notes for Joyce always at hand. I am glad I did this but after reading Nabokov, I feel my reading was very small and detail oriented. Dear Vladimir was a lovely antidote to that because he goes big picture in his lecture. He includes details, certainly, but his main concern is how the details he does mention feed into the whole book and he manages to show the wonderful way in which the various elements weave through the book.

Nabokov also has the self-assurance to be able to criticize Joyce. He says things like:

Joyce can turn all sorts of verbal tricks, to puns, transposition of words, verbal echoes, monstrous twinning of verbs, or the imitation of sounds. In these, as in the overweight of local allusions and foreign expressions, a needless obscurity can be produced by details not brought out with sufficient clarity but only suggested for the knowledgeable.

He calls certain parts of the chapter that take place at the newspaper office “corny,” gives permission to skim or completely skip certain parts of chapters, asserts that he can’t abide by Freud or any kind of psychoanalytic reading of the chapter that takes place in the whorehouse, and declares Finnegan’s Wake “one of the greatest failures in literature.” He also made me snort when he tossed out, “every new type of writer evolves a new type of reader; every genius produces a legion of young insomniacs.”

But he also says things like,

You will enjoy the wonderfully artistic pages, one of the greatest passages in all literature, when Bloom brings Molly her breakfast. How beautifully the man writes!

In that you hear the teacher talking to the student but also Nabokov the reader and Nabokov the writer expressing his joy and appreciation.

I could babble on and on and blink my “I love you” eyelids all night but I’ll leave it there. If you ever decide to read Ulysses you have to make Nabokov’s lecture part of the experience. And if you absolutely refuse to read Ulysses, read Nabokov’s lecture so you at least have an idea of what you are missing out on. And now I think you will be spared from any further Monday Ulysses babble. I can’t make any promises though.

I began Ulysses on Bloomsday, June 16th, and now I have turned the last page. This final chapter, episode 18, Penelope, is about as stream-of-conciousness as you can get. It is composed of eight “sentences” and has absolutely no punctuation. The only reason you know a “sentence” has ended is because there is a paragraph break. Even though there is no punctuation, the wonderful English language has a definite rhythm to it and separating out complete thoughts was not so very hard. The hard part was that there being no punctuation, it was difficult to tell at reading speed whether the word was “well” or “we’ll,” “were” or “we’re”? It’s surprising how something so small can catch a person up while a lack of commas and periods was no problem.

This final chapter is Molly’s thoughts as she lays in bed next to Bloom who has just come upstairs at 2 in the morning. I didn’t know what to expect from Molly since the whole book I have only seen her from other people’s point of view. That she is pretty, has a large bosom, a beautiful voice with which she has performed professionally, is from Gibraltar, the mother of two, a living daughter and a dead son, and is having an affair with another character in the book is what we know of her. A good deal, but these things don’t tell us about who she is, how she feels, what sorts of things she thinks about.

I ended up liking Molly quite a lot. She is funny. She likes men and sex. She thinks about seducing Stephen Dedalus. But she also is not pleased with a woman’s lot being that she has to take care of men. In fact, men frequently come off as big whiney, needy children.

We get some interesting insight into Bloom too. Apparently Bloom has a thing for women’s underwear, which explains why Gerty allowing him to see her underwear at the beach was such a turn on for our Leopold.

I thought you might like a little snip from the chapter to get some flavor:

I dont care what anybody says itd be much better for the world to be governed by the women in it you woudnt see women going and killing one another and slaughtering when do you ever see women rolling around drunk like they do or gambling every penny they have and losing it on horses yes because a woman whatever she does she knows where to stop sure they wouldnt be in the world at al only for us they dont know what it is to be a woman and a mother how could they where would they all of them be if they hadnt all a mother to look after them

But as much as Molly complains about men and Bloom in particular, she still loves him. The chapter and the book ends with Molly thinking about when Bloom proposed to her:

and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain 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 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.

Isn’t that one of the best ever endings to a book? I think so. Orgasmic definitely. But touching too. It even made me get a little teary. Or maybe those were tears of joy at being done with the book? Either way, I am so very glad I read Ulysses I didn’t expect to like it and I did. In fact, I liked it so much, I am certain I will read it again sometime.

Thanks for following along with my Ulysses journey. I have no idea what is next. I think a little break from big books is in order at least until the new year. Then, who knows?

It’s Monday so it must be Ulysses time! This week I read episode 17, Ithaca. And just as Odysseus eventually makes it home, so does our intrepid hero Leopold Bloom.

It’s about 2 in the morning and Bloom arrives home with Stephen in tow. Bloom realizes he forgot his key and has to break in to his own house. His wife, Molly, is upstairs asleep. Bloom and Sephen go to the kitchen where Bloom makes some hot chocolate. They sit and talk for a bit. Bloom invites Stephen to stay the night, but Stephen declines. The pair head outside and pee in the yard. Then Stephen leaves and Bloom goes back in the house and upstairs to his wife. As Bloom crawls into bed he realizes that Molly is having an affair with another man and that man had been in the bed before him. But Bloom is not upset by this, jealous, but not upset. Apparently he and Molly haven’t had sex in quite some time and Bloom is understanding about Molly finding someone who will satisfy her sexual needs.

The chapter is written in the style of a catechism, not in the sense of a religious catechism, but in the sense of questions and answers. The chapter moves along from question and answer to question and answer with lots of diversionary questions triggered by something in the answer. I am not managing to make it sound interesting, but it really is. And it has lots of funny bits and lots of wonderful language too. Shall I give you some examples?

At the beginning of the episode Bloom and Stephen are walking to Bloom’s house:

Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?

Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and glow-lamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen’s collapse.

Then there are follow up questions that ask what they agreed on and what they disagreed on, and whether Bloom had had similar conversations during nocturnal walks with others.

As I mentioned there is much humor in this chapter. One of my favorite bits comes early, Bloom and Stephen are in the kitchen. Bloom washes his hands and asks Stephen if he would like to wash up a bit himself:

What reason did Stephen give for declining Bloom’s offer?

That he was hydrophobic, haring partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water (his last bath having taken place in the month of October of the preceding year), disliking the aqueous substances of glass and crystal, distrusting aquacities of thought and language.

What impeded Bloom from giving Stephen counsels of hygiene and prophylactic to which should be added suggestions concerning a preliminary wetting of the head and contraction of the muscles with rapid splashing of the face and neck and thoracic and epigastric region in case of sea or river bathing, the parts of the human anatomy most sensitive to cold being the nape, stomach, and thenar or sole of foot?

The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius.

Heh.

There is also a long series of amusing questions with Bloom imagining what he would do if he were rich and thinking of ways he might become so. It begins by saying he doesn’t want much but as it goes along things get more and more elaborate as they often do in my own daydreams when the lottery jackpot gets really large and I actually buy a ticket.

There is a definite sense of homecoming in this chapter and a feeling that all the hard parts of the book are over, that things are winding down. And indeed they are winding down as there is only one more chapter left. I am both relieved and melancholy about the prospect.

My man Joyce really knew what he was about. After episode 15 and its bizarre hallucinations and adult content, I was weary. Every chapter of this book has been a different narrative style. It doesn’t let the reader relax and sink into the story, I have continually felt off kilter. Joyce must have guessed readers would be feeling that way by now because episode 16, Eumaeus, was plain old narrative, no tricks. Granted, even plain old narrative is challenging with Joyce. It took me about four hours to read about 50 pages because there is still the Irish slang and other non-English phrases and plenty of references to Hamlet and other literature and Irish history and politics.

At the end of the previous chapter, Stephen, drunk as a skunk, got punched in the face and knocked down. Bloom rescued him and got him up and moving. Now Bloom is looking for a place to go sit down, get Stephen some coffee and something to eat to help sober him up, and figure out where Stephen will spend the night because he is too far from his place to get back to it. Bloom finds them an open-all-night place where sailors and others with nowhere to go hang out. He orders Stephen some coffee and a roll, neither of which Stephen will eat. They listen to stories the sailors are telling and Bloom and Stephen have some side conversation.

Bloom and Stephen are a study in contrasts. Bloom is a practical fellow. He lives in the world and while intelligent, he is not a quick wit. He takes charge of Stephen because Bloom is friends with Stephen’s father and because he knows Stephen is smart and artistic and thinks that an acquaintance with him might help him raise his intellectual and artistic standing. But Bloom just can’t rise above his practical self. He lectures Stephen on the company he keeps, lectures him on not eating enough, lectures him a bit on religion and pacifism, and then, discovering that Stephen has a fine tenor singing voice, Bloom imagines for Stephen a life as a famous singer in which Stephen will be able to make a good living and still have time for his literary pursuits while also hobnobbing with well-bred company.

Stephen, however, is nettled by Bloom and his practicality. Stephen hasn’t had a substantial meal in two days and isn’t bothered or worried by it. To Bloom’s questions and comments he replies with drunken nonsense or makes literary or philosophical references that mean nothing to Bloom. Stephen lives in his head and Bloom lives in his body.

There are many lovely passages in this chapter but the one that struck me most was during one of the scenes with the sailors telling stories:

The sailor lugged out from a case he had a pair of greenish goggles which he very slowly hooked over his nose and both ears.
–Are you bad in the eyes? the sympathetic personage like the town clerk queried.
–Why, answered the seafarer with the tartan beard, who seemingly was a bit of a literary cove in his own small way, staring out of sea-green portholes as you might well describe them as, I uses goggles reading. Sand in the Red Sea done that. One time I could read a book in the dark, manner of speaking. The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment was my favourite and Red as a Rose is She

I love how the green glasses become portholes.

So now with this episode I feel a bit rested and ready for the final two. I can hardly believe I only have two chapters left to go. I have been enjoying the book very much but I am also ready to be done.

For awhile there I thought this evening’s adventures in plumbing were going to keep me from blogging but the crisis has been averted and we didn’t even have to call a plumber. Woo! So onward to Ulysses.

This weekend I embarked on episode 15, Circe. The chapter is written out like a play and I thought, hey, these 30 pages should read pretty fast! Was I ever wrong. First of all I assumed it was going to be 30 pages give or take because that’s what all the other chapters have been. Imagine my surprise when I discovered the episode is 150 pages! Second, it wasn’t faster or easier to read than any of the previous chapters. As a consequence, I managed half the episode over two days.

At the end of episode 14 Bloom and Stephen Dedalus and company were all pretty drunk. Stephen and a few others headed to the red light district and for some reason Bloom decides to follow them. Perhaps he isn’t quite as drunk, or thinks he isn’t as drunk as the others, and being friends with Stephen’s father, feels a sort of obligation to keep an eye on his son. But they give Bloom the slip. Our hero eventually finds them in a whorehouse with a couple of scantily clad women carrying on the same sort of conversations they usually carry on except this time they are all drunk.

What makes the episode such hard going is that most of it so far is hallucination after hallucination in which bells and gongs and soap and doorknobs have lines. Bloom’s grandfather also makes an appearance during one delirious part of the episode and in another Bloom is on trial. It all reads like a 1960s LSD trip, endlessly fascinating if you are the one tripping but not always so much if you are the sober bystander.

As you might be able to tell, I am not enjoying this episode all that much. It made me tired and at one point I found myself wishing Joyce would quit with the endless experimentation and just tell the story straight for a change. I have 75 more pages of this chapter to read. I’ll get through it over the upcoming weekend and will probably by then decide that the chapter is actually amazing and wonder what I was thinking before. At least I hope that’s what happens. If not, it ends up being my least favorite chapter and I have an entirely new style to look forward to in episode 16.

Let me just get it out there right away, episode 14, Oxen of the Sun, is freaking awesome! Joyce was good at the parody before but he really outdoes himself here.

Okay, so it is 10 p.m., you’ve just masturbated on the beach and your shirt is cold and sticky against your stomach, what’s a man to do? Go to the maternity hospital to check in on the laboring wife of a friend of course! But this is 1904 so Bloom doesn’t actually get to see Mina Purefoy who has been in labor for going on three days. No, he finds out how she is doing and then ends up in the canteen drinking beer with Stephen and his friend Mulligan, who is a medical student, and Mulligan’s medical student friends. Not to stereotype the Irish, my mom’s side of the family has a healthy dose of Irish heritage, but wow, is there ever a lot of drinking in this book!

So Bloom meets Stephen for the first time. Bloom knows, and is friends with, Stephen’s father and is probably a good 10 years older than Stephen, but he takes a liking to him. And while the women are upstairs birthing babies, the men are in the canteen getting drunk and talking about sex and women and religion and sex until finally poor Mina gives birth to a healthy boy. The drinking party disperses to a pub just across the street but it is almost 11 and the pubs close at 11. Still, they have just enough time for one more drink.

What the men talk about isn’t so very interesting as how Joyce writes it. The chapter is written in a series of imitations of different prose styles in chronological order beginning with the Latin prose stylings of Rome directly translated into English and as such, nearly impossible to read. But not quite as impossible as the chapter ends with the drunken revelers talking in slang so dense that nearly every word is noted in my helpful book of annotations. And while the notes on the slang were helpful it didn’t help enough to make it all make sense. I bet though that the final bit would be most excellent to listen to.

Between Rome and slang comes delightful imitations of Anglo-Saxon alliterative prose, Malory in the style of Morte d’Arthur, John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, Edmund Burke, Charles Lamb, Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, and others. So what the chapter amounts to is a sort of evolution of prose style from past to present.

Perhaps my favorite section, and maybe it’s because I just read it and so it is still fresh in my mind, is the section that imitates Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. Of course, the characters’ real names get altered and often punned in the the imitations and much exaggeration and fudging of the facts of what is really happening is done in the interest of the style. So, for instance, here is a portion of the Walpole imitation (sorry so long but it needs to be so you can get the flavor):

But Malachias’ tale began to freeze them with horror. he conjured up the scene before them. Them secret panel beside the chimney slid back and in the recess appeared … Haines! Which of us did not feel his flesh creep? He had a portfolio full of Celtic literature in one hand, in the other a phial marked Poison. Surprise, horror, loathing were depicted on all faces while he eyed them with a ghastly grin. I anticipated some such reception, he began with an eldritch laugh, for which, it seems history is to blame. Yes, it is true. I am the murderer of Samuel Childs. And how I’m punished! The inferno has no terrors for me. This is the appearance is on me. Tare and ages, what way would I be resting at all, he muttered thickly, and I tramping Dublin this while back with my share of songs and himself after me the like of a soulth or a bullawurrus? My hell, and Ireland’s, is in this life. It is what I tried to obliterate my crime. Distractions, rookshooting, the Erse language (he recited some), laudanum (he raised the phial to his lips), camping out. In vain! His spectre stalks me. Dope

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