What did Q interrupt here?
An incipient digression on my part about a long-running scholarly discussion over the relationship between the names "Hamlet" and "Hamnet" always interchangeable back in the 16 th century? Was there anything else you liked about Ulysses you're holding back on? Well, the spelling of the sound the cat makes in the opening of the Leopold Bloom chapter.
OK, everybody likes the opening of the Leopold Bloom section: Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fouls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crust crumbs, fried hencod's roes. I'm not hearing anything here about the cat sound.
Welcome to Ambling along the Aqueduct
The "cat-echism," you might say, comes just a couple paragraphs later. Joyce renders a hungry morning cat's imploration as "Mrkgnao! Let's get back to the Ithaca episode. Why do you like it so much? Well, consider the four questions it opens with. I've omitted the answers.
Joyce's Ulysses: The only chapter worth reading.
What is it you like so much about a narrative proceeding this way? Well, I think the signature of bad writing or writing that hasn't been polished is the false or the forced transition. And what makes that different from ordinary narrative? Well for one thing it introduces two new characters, Mr. A, who hover namelessly over the two previously established protagonists' wanderings and converse about their personalities and past and present situations.
After a while Mr. A turn out to have divergent personalities of their own—and divergent situations, in the metaphysical scheme of things. Whatever do you mean by that? A know so much, is he the Creator of everything in the book? Does A stand for author? And Q's questions as well? Q seems to be in some different space or place than Mr. Well, ordinary narrative often takes these things for granted or makes you feel unsophisticated for wondering about who the narrator is and how much he or she knows. There's something touching about the way this narrative seems to care that you know certain things.
Ordinary narrative acts as if it doesn't care what you care about, only what it cares about and acts all superior by making you guess why. It's not about piling on literary tricks, so much as dismantling them to see how they're done. What's the most revealing of the first four questions? The answer to the fourth question on what points their view diverged: What has that got to do with the price of eggs? Well, it suggests the comfortable interchange of two people who differ in many ways but are both erudite in a geeky way and the spiritual communion their geekdom affords them.
I also love that he slips that "Odyssus" reference in. Mrs Grace at No. A draper at No. My wife has now lived in London — many miles away from the cemetry at Kilbroney, Co. I often wonder what similarities and differences there are between the Irish neutrality and the Swiss. Joyce spent most of the First World War July to October in Zurich, as well as getting the permit for entry from occupied France in late A few weeks ago there was a big art robbery just outside Zurich from another Foundation — the Emil Buhrle Foundation.
Buhrle was a Zurich-based, German born industrialist who sold arms to the Third Reich. After the war 13 paintings in the collection, which was raided in February by armed masked men, appeared on a list of art looted by Nazis from Jews and eventually he handed them over, getting some compensation from the Swiss government.
The provenance of other works in the collection remains shady. So one has limited sympathy for the Emil Buhrle Foundation as whose work the masked raiders with the Slavic accents actually stole is a moot point. I recently came across this quotation by the writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner and man behind another foundation, this one a Foundation for Humanity, which bears his name Elie Wiesel through A. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
Warum bin ich ich und warum nicht du? Warum bin ich hier und warum nicht dort? It is the latest incarnation of the Big 4 , a 40 foot high figure 4 marking the 25th anniversary of the Channel and the advent of the Big Art Project , a bold cross-platform TV, web, mobile, real-life initiative focused on Pubic Art. His approach involves punctuating the metal skeleton of the 4 with slogans in a style derived from trade union banners.
Into the upstroke of the 4 is built a video booth, with echoes of the Right to Reply one at 60 Charlotte Street back in the day. Passers-by, staff or anyone who wants to can pop in and leave a message with their thoughts about Television. A selection of these is played out each week on the TV screens that pepper the framework. The main slogan reads: What was most inspiring about hearing Mark talk was the eclecticism of his inspirations.
In art history these ranged from Renaissance depictions of religious ecstasy to Duchamp op-art, from 60s psychedelia to contemporary advertising. And then beyond the art world he used everything from record labels to the aforementioned trade union banners, from the Black Panther movement to corporate mission statements from which to springboard ideas.
Apart from turning me on to literature I ended up studying English, French and German literature , it made me realise how interconnected all these disciplines are and how essential those connections are to creativity. And, of course, the art of advertising Leopold Bloom is in the business which brings us full circle back to Find Our World in Yours which, like Channel 4, has advertising in its life-blood. By all accounts the man was an alcoholic for years. It certainly done him in.
When it all began!
He looks like a brawler in the photos, even with those 50s Irish woolly jumper and tie arrangements. He seems to have got caught a lot but I suppose at least it gave him raw material for his writing.
His first stretch, the time he did in borstal, was for republican activities, specifically a half-baked attempt to blow up Liverpool docks. His first writings, poetry and prose, were published in Fianna, the magazine of Fianna Eireann, the youth organisation of the IRA. I get the impression he eventually grew out of the IRA and came to doubt political violence. I stumbled across this rather neat link last night: Clarke [who wrote So all set for a lively night on 23rd Street.
Came across an astonishingly beautiful piece of music this week thanks to my friend — writer, music-lover, and fellow enthusiast for creative thinking — Doug Miller. I really, really love the title. It comes from the very beginning of Under Milk Wood: Proved a bit too much to live up to. Tracey worked outwards from the titles which I really love as a working method — titles can be key and inspiring.
Which brings us round to the Simple Pleasures — an outdoor piss after a great night out; an inspirational read; and a musical surprise. Enter your email address to follow Simple Pleasures and receive notifications of new posts by email. Asterix Chez les Bretagnes. Doing its level best to speak. That door too is creaking, asking to be shut. Something perhaps not dramatic nor humorous, not tragic: Like nearly all beginning readers of Ulysses , Woolf is befogged.
But she dimly perceives that what she calls indecency is precisely where the road of complete psychological realism leads. Is it not possible that the accent falls a little differently, that the moment of importance came before or after, that, if one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot,the moment of importance came before or after, that, if one were free and could set down what one chose, there would be no plot, little probability, and a vague general confusion in which the clear-cut features of the tragic, the comic, the passionate, and the lyrical were dissolved beyond the possibility of separate recognition?
The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel.
James Joyce Criticism - File 4: Tables of Contents - 2 of 2
From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself; and to figure further as the semi-transparent envelope, or luminous halo, surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not perhaps the chief task of the novelist to convey this incessantly varying spirit with whatever stress or sudden deviation it may display, and as little admixture of the alien and external as possible? Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.
Faced, as in the Cemetery scene, by so much that, in its restless scintillations, in its irrelevance, in flashes of deep significance succeeded by incoherent inanities, seems to be life itself, we have to fumble rather awkwardly if want to say what else we wish; and for what reason a work of such originality yet fails to compare. If we wonder how such a statement could be made about a novel that deeply plumbs the inner lives of two distinctly different characters who are each exceptionally observant of the world around them, the answer lies again with indecency.
Here we can only guess what Woolf means: But she cannot stop thinking or writing about him. But she knew nothing of him personally, so it can only be her version—possibly distorted— of what she was told about Joyce by Eliot. But a major clue can be found in her diary for September 26, , where she writes again of the visit paid by T.
Eliot a week before. This strikes me as a revelation. What then could she conclude?