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Post by sparklingblue on Jun 16, 2004 1:29:43 GMT -5
www.rejoycedublin2004.com/For millions of people, June 16 is an extraordinary day. On that day in 1904, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom each took their epic journeys through Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses, the world's most highly acclaimed modern novel. “Bloomsday”, as it is now known, has become a tradition for Joyce enthusiasts all over the world. From Tokyo to Sydney, San Francisco to Buffalo, Trieste to Paris, dozens of cities around the globe hold their own Bloomsday festivities. The celebrations usually include readings as well as staged re-enactments and street-side improvisations of scenes from the story. Nowhere is Bloomsday more rollicking and exuberant than Dublin, home of Molly and Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan, Gerty McDowell and James Joyce himself. Here, the art of Ulysses becomes the daily life of hundreds of Dubliners and the city’s visitors as they retrace the odyssey each year. Although Bloomsday is a single day, Ireland is planning a world-class, five-month festival lasting from 1 April 2004 to 31 August 2004. The Minister for Arts, Sport, and Tourism, Mr John O'Donoghue has appointed a committee to oversee and coordinate this important celebration of one of the nation's greatest literary masters. Everyone from literary neophytes to Joyce scholars will find a range of programmes suited to their interests. In addition to a number of spectacular exhibitions and events, street theatre, music programmes, and family fun will fill the city for everyone to enjoy. Dublin itself takes centre stage in ReJoyce Dublin 2004. Joyce captured the soul of Dublin in all its gritty glory and immortalized it in Ulysses. Its blend of sophistication and old-world charm engages the imagination of its citizens and visitors. ReJoyce Dublin 2004 and Ireland invite the world to help celebrate James Joyce, Bloomsday, and Dublin!
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Post by Ace on Jun 16, 2004 6:07:03 GMT -5
Ah! Thanks for reminding me. Maybe I'll pull down Ulysses tonight and read though some of the "ads" section which is my favorite part. There's also usually a reading on one of the radio stations by some of the NY theater scene, and this being the 100th anniversary there should be one tonight.
Ace
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Post by Ace on Jun 16, 2004 13:06:53 GMT -5
DUBLIN CELEBRATES ’BLOOMSDAY’ 17.6.2004. 09:09:35 Ireland has launched its biggest-ever literary party as thousands gathered in Dublin for the centenary of "Bloomsday" - the day immortalised by James Joyce in his novel Ulysses.
The Irish capital drifted back in time to retrace the steps that Leopold Bloom took 100 years earlier in Joyce's epic novel.
The 700-page book charts the adventures of Bloom, a Jewish advertising salesman, and young poet Stephen Dedalus as they wandered the streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904.
Hundreds of Joyce fans turned out in Edwardian attire for a day of festivities, starting with a Bloom-style breakfast.
But Bloom's preferred fried kidneys were accompanied not by tea, but by ample supplies of Dublin's own Guinness beer.
"It's as good an excuse as any to drink a pint of Guinness early in the morning," said Bob King from Nebraska.
Other festivities included a "plum parade" to mark one of the most famous parts of Ulysses when two old women climbed Dublin's Nelson column to spit plum stones down on the crowd below.
Excerpts from Ulysses were read aloud on the street, including lines of monologue from Bloom's wife Molly, once deemed pornographic by well-heeled Dubliners.
Paul Harty, born in Dublin but now living in Britain, and impeccably attired in a dark striped jacket and boater hat, raved about his favourite author.
"Ulysses is like the mystery of life," he said. "To me, it (Ulysses) is the ABC of life — absurdity, brevity, complexity."
"Bloomsday 100" was launched on February 2 — Joyce's birthday — and brings together around 80 events, from art exhibitions and symposiums, to concerts and stand-up comedy.
"Joyce's genius was to communicate perfectly, particularly what it means to be a human being," said Aine Larkin, a literature lecturer at Trinity College.
Published in Paris in 1922, Ulysses was denounced by the Irish as un-Christian filth, banned in Britain and burned by US censors.
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Post by Ace on Jun 16, 2004 13:07:58 GMT -5
Yes we said yes -- today is Bloomsday's centenary, 100 years since Leopold Bloom's odyssey in Joyce's 'Ulysses' 100 years since Bloom's Dublin ramble
David Kipen, Chronicle Book Critic Wednesday, June 16, 2004
The word "Bloomsday" doesn't appear in James Joyce's "Ulysses." Sometimes it seems the only word that doesn't.
Bloomsday is a coinage of the Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach, who published the 1,000-copy first edition of Joyce's novel on Valentine's Day 1922 and helped invent the holiday observed around the world in its honor. That holiday isn't Feb. 14 -- not so much because St. Valentine already had dibs on it but because "Ulysses" takes place on a different day: June 16, 1904. (Though if some Joyceans want to hoist a centennial glass and roister again on Valentine's Day 2022, talking them out of it might prove inadvisable.)
Joyce chose June 16, 1904, to commemorate his first meeting (to put matters discreetly) with Miss Nora Barnacle, his wife-to-be. So it is that today we celebrate the centenary not only of the day on which Joyce's masterpiece transpires but also of the day he met his muse. We also mark the 50th anniversary of the day the great Irish novelist and newspaper columnist Flann O'Brien and four friends made their maiden tramp around Dublin in Leopold Bloom's footsteps: the first Bloomsday. For that reason, today may also solemnize the 50th anniversary of the first time a Joycean ever was asked, "Isn't this rather a lot of fuss for a book most people never finish?"
There's never any shame in admitting the blind spots in one's reading life.
But when a novel takes you over, you can't help wanting to proselytize for it. Part of the fun of a classic that's more talked about than read is the lure, probably illusory, of finding something in it that nobody's ever found before. It's a little late in the day to be fishing out fresh nuggets from, say, "Pride and Prejudice." "Ulysses," though, still beckons with the promise of secret passageways.
Take for example, the chapter in which Joyce predicts the rise of Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie and postcolonial writing, then throws a wink at all his future readers here in San Francisco.
Drawing a blank? It comes in the novel's 14th of 18 chapters, the one commonly referred to as "Oxen of the Sun." Bloom is out wandering the streets of nighttime Dublin when he stops in at the Holles Street Maternity Hospital. There he finds a host of medical and other students, mostly toasting their own intelligence and virility, while poor Mrs. Purefoy labors upstairs to bring forth her umpteenth child. Father to a long-dead infant son, Bloom lapses in and out of melancholy as the boisterous, one-upping clamor around him takes a decided turn for the strange.
For Joyce has chosen this chapter to recapitulate the entire history of English literature. As prodigious encrustations of scholarship have shown, Chapter 14 loses little time in creating a creditable stab at alliterative Anglo-Saxon poetry. "Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship," Joyce writes, sounding like some lost bard straight out of "Beowulf." Next Joyce is doing Chaucer, then Spenser, then Marlowe, then Shakespeare, then Jonson, plus lots of obscure poets we pretty much have to take the Joyce industry's word for. As Mrs. Purefoy strains to bring her pregnancy to term, Joyce is doing the same with the long-gestating English language, giving us a whirlwind rundown of all the developmental stages leading up to its culmination in "Ulysses."
The perfect way to film this scene, I've always thought, would be to recap the evolution of movie technique while Joyce rewinds the full parade of English lit. One would shoot the earliest Anglo-Saxon stuff as if with a stationary Edison camera, then graduate to the kinetic energy of a D.W. Griffith chase, German Expressionism, primitive talkies, studio polish, film noir, '50s melodrama, European experimentation, post-studio independence, on up through the bland, crass international style of today. Joseph Strick made a reputedly leaden film of "Ulysses" almost 40 years ago. Has the time finally come for someone to take another whack?
But even if Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique doesn't exactly lend itself to the narrative demands of the movies, his perspective on the 20th century's other epic art form -- the modern novel -- looks almost prophetic. After recapitulating the history of English literature from anonymous Anglo-Saxons through Dickens and Carlyle, what's left for Joyce to do but to sneak himself into the picture? Sure enough, at the very moment Mrs. Purefoy delivers a healthy baby, an unnamed speaker compliments her husband as "the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding farraginous chronicle. Astounding!" ("Chaffering," by the way, means chattering, and "farraginous" means all mixed together, like a farrago.) By referring to the "progenitor" of "this" chattering, all-inclusive, mixed-up chronicle, Joyce is essentially giving himself a cameo in his own book.
You'd think that would be the end of it. What in English literature is left for Joyce to describe, once he's caught up to himself in 1922 at the moment of composition? But instead of stopping there, Joyce does a curious thing. He sends Bloom, his surrogate son, Stephen, and all the students back out into the Dublin streets for a nightcap, where they meet up with English literature's post-"Ulysses" future: the eventual cross-pollination of English with other traditions from around the world, resulting in the healthy blowback of postcolonial literature.
From the moment Bloom and his friends step outside, their conversation incorporates snatches of several foreign languages, including German, French, Latin and Spanish. Some of it wafts through from the polyglot hubbub of passing immigrants, but most belongs to the capering students themselves. We hear ad slogans, pidgin, slang and dialect -- alas, not much of it flattering. "Lou heap good man," somebody says, burlesquing American Indian speech. "Allee samee dis bunch," comes a pseudo-Chinese voice. "Ludamassy! Pore Piccaninnies!" frets a third. And, in a sentiment we might well echo, "Where's that bleeding awfur?"
"Where's that bleeding author?" is right. Where's Joyce in all this? Has he been granted a presentiment of his own extinction -- the much-vaunted "death of the author," which so many literary theoreticians have spent decades wringing their hands about? More important, beyond all the dated dialect humor, which isn't so much offensive as antique, how does Joyce regard this infusion of new voices into English literature? Is it a breath of fresh air, or the beginning of the end?
At first blush, it doesn't look good for the Joyce buffs. The last thing we want is to have to spend half our time apologizing for our hero, the way admirers of his friend Ezra Pound forever do. Unfortunately, the evidence is there, in a Joyce letter sketching his plans for Chapter 14's conclusion: "It ends in a frightful jumble of Pidgin English ... and broken doggerel." Frightful and broken? It's hard to escape the conclusion that Joyce thought English literature was going straight to multicultural hell after he was out of the picture.
Of course, Joyce wouldn't be alone among modernists in regarding the muddying of national tradition -- and the rise of the middle classes and popular culture -- with a distaste bordering on revulsion.
Think of the T.S. Eliot's lines about "that Shakespeherian Rag/ It's so elegant/ So intelligent," in which he dolefully forecasts the victory of Scott Joplin over Shakespeare. Can it be that Eliot can't hear the harmony in his own poetry? In the words of singer-songwriter Jill Sobule, why are all our heroes so imperfect?
Thankfully, Joyce and Eliot's genius is too unerring to keep them in trouble for long. Even as Eliot is lamenting the death of the classics, he's borrowing Tin Pan Alley rhythms like a magpie. Even while Joyce thinks he's concocting a "frightful jumble" of foreign words and huckster come-ons, he's got them all doing backflips on the page.
Just look at how the chapter ends, with a parodied evangelist claiming to have "yanked to glory most half this planet from Frisco beach to Vladivostok."
In addition to name-checking our neck of the woods -- albeit in language Herb Caen might not have appreciated -- Joyce gives us a lily of a double entendre. This mock preacher closes Chapter 14 by saying of God, "He's got a cough mixture with a punch in it for you, my friend, in his back pocket. Just you try it on."
That's the Joyce I recognize. Not the mandarin classicist who finds slang and pidgin "frightful," but the omnivore who knew dirty jokes in 30 languages. My Joyce knows that the punchiest remedies are mixtures: of high and low, of songs and of tongues. Just you try it on.
Yes, Joyce probably envisioned the "Oxen of the Sun's" finale as some kind of cautionary linguistic Armageddon. Sometimes, though, a writer isn't as smart as his book.
A Bloomsday 100th Anniversary Celebration with readings by local Joyceans will be held at 6 p.m. today at the Mechanics' Institute, 57 Post St.; (415) 393-0100. E-mail David Kipen at kipen@sfchronicle.com.
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Post by sparklingblue on Jun 19, 2004 4:50:34 GMT -5
I received my very own copy of Ulysses in the mail today. Now I'm off to start reading it.
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Post by Ace on Jun 19, 2004 5:14:04 GMT -5
Congratulations and enjoy!
Ace
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Post by sparklingblue on Jun 19, 2004 5:32:24 GMT -5
Thank you! I will!
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Post by curious george on Jun 19, 2004 6:11:42 GMT -5
Hey! You have other things in line to read first, Sparkling Blue! By the way, speaking of things Irish...my brother, who honeymooned there a few years back, tells me I was incorrect about our ancestors building Blarney Castle. We owned it and were the ruling family of the area. cg
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Post by sparklingblue on Jun 19, 2004 10:23:18 GMT -5
Hey! You have other things in line to read first, Sparkling Blue! I told you I'm a parallel reader. Maybe you should consider translating your title of "Queen of Everything" into Irish. You already have your homepage to represent your residence: www.blarneycastle.ie/
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Post by curious george on Jun 19, 2004 15:30:45 GMT -5
Oh, wow! Those are great! :: starts saving pennies :: (even queens aren't automatically rich these days) cg Hmmm, perhaps I should re-title myself the Queen of Blarney. Nah, I think I'll stick with the original. ;D
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Post by sparklingblue on Jun 20, 2004 4:52:52 GMT -5
I hope you you don't plan to go there personally. Staff in Irish castles is known for presenting the owner with all kinds of bills.
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Post by curious george on Jun 20, 2004 7:20:42 GMT -5
I hope you you don't plan to go there personally. Staff in Irish castles is known for presenting the owner with all kinds of bills. I've heard that somewhere. ;D ;D ;D cg
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