Joyce fans: tomorrow is 100th anniversary...

[ghost of miles]

The day that Joyce and Nora went on their first date--more famously, the day upon which he set ULYSSES:

Joyce's Dublin in Spotlight on 100th 'Bloomsday'

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Irish writer James Joyce once boasted that if Dublin were ever destroyed it could be rebuilt from the pages of "Ulysses," his epic novel which will be celebrated across the city on Wednesday.

By Kevin Smith

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Irish writer James Joyce once boasted that if Dublin were ever destroyed it could be rebuilt from the pages of "Ulysses," his epic novel which will be celebrated across the city on Wednesday.

The book charts the movements of Joyce's unlikely hero Leopold Bloom through the Dublin of June 16, 1904, a date celebrated as "Bloomsday" and about to mark its centenary.

Joyce was in self-imposed exile when he wrote his masterpiece -- for many the greatest novel in the English language -- and made close use of a Dublin street directory to ensure the precision of his locations.

However, while most of the banks, churches, pubs and public buildings mentioned in the book still stand, the city has changed dramatically in the intervening years, hit by political violence, civil war and more recently by rapid new development during the country's "Celtic Tiger" boom.

Frank McDonald, author of several books on the planning and architecture of Dublin, said Joyce's city had altered radically.

"What we have now is an increasingly European-style city center surrounded by a vast American-style suburban sprawl," he said. "Joyce's Dublin was a much smaller, more intimate city."

McDonald dismissed the notion that Dublin could be recreated from Joyce's famous tome.

"He never described a building -- the book is just full of addresses and the names of buildings. You would have as much chance of rebuilding 1904 Dublin from the street directory."

Nevertheless, many of the thousands of Joyce aficionados in Dublin this week for the 100th Bloomsday will set out to follow in Bloom's footsteps, ticking off landmarks along the way.

They will find that the city-center site of the department store Brown Thomas in whose window Bloom admires "cascades of ribbon" and "flimsy China silks" is now occupied by British retailer Marks & Spencer.

Thornton's shop in the same street, where Blazes Boylan, the lover of Bloom's wife, buys port, potted meat and fruits for her, is now part of Irish retail chain Dunnes Stores.

The Clarence Hotel, which Bloom passes on his journey, was bought and refurbished in the 1990s by members of Irish rock group U2 and now provides a chic watering hole for the city's well-heeled young professionals.

Number 7 Eccles Street, the protagonist's house in the book, has gone, along with the "Freeman's Journal" newspaper office -- where Bloom calls briefly on business.

However, Olhausen's, the butcher's where Bloom purchases "a lukewarm pig's crubeen" (trotter), and Sweny's chemist shop, where he buys lemon soap for his wife, are still trading.

Many of the grand Georgian houses from Joyce's time fell foul of town planners who regarded them as reminders of British colonial rule.

While attitudes have largely changed, the council continues to make controversial decisions, most recently approving the demolition of the riverside Ormond Hotel where Bloom indulges his appetite for "the inner organs of beasts and fowls."

Other aspects of Joycean Dublin are coming full circle. Trams, on which Bloom travels during his day, are due to begin running in the city again this month after a 55-year absence.

In commemoration, I heartily recommend that all Joyce devotees consume 6-8 bottles of Guinness Stout tomorrow and then read FINNEGANS WAKE aloud to friends & colleagues... B)

Edited June 15, 2004 by ghost of miles

[brownie]

In France, the nationwide radiostation France Culture devotes most of the day to a series of shows about 'Ulysses'. The evening shows will be broadcast live from the Paris Left Bank Rue de l'Odeon adress of the Adrienne Monnier bookshop which published the first edition of the book in 1922.

There is also a brand new translation of the book, the first since the original French edition of 1929, out now.

Nice to see Dublin celebrate a writer the city largely ignored for decades.

[Brownian Motion]

[ghost of miles]

Nice to see Dublin celebrate a writer the city largely ignored for decades.

Man, you're not kidding...

ReJoyce

Happy 100th Bloomsday to all fellow Joyce fans!

[ghost of miles]

PUBLIC LIVES

If It's June 16, This Must Be Bloomsday

By JAN HOFFMAN

Published: June 16, 2004

New York Times

STATELY, plump Isaiah Sheffer rises each morning around 6:30, but every June 16, it is his custom not to dress in green. That's the anniversary of the day in 1904 when Leopold Bloom, the fictional Irish Jew in James Joyce's "Ulysses," walks through the streets of Dublin and his own interior life. Although Joyce pungently described a certain green as the color of Irish poets, Mr. Sheffer explains that to wear it, especially on this centennial of Bloomsday, would be a faux pas.

"Joyce wanted the cover of 'Ulysses' to be blue and white, to represent the flags of Greece and the Jews," says Mr. Sheffer, the host of the NPR program "Selected Shorts," as well as a librettist, playwright, director, Yiddishist, impresario of the cultural center Symphony Space and host of the nation's largest celebration of Bloomsday.

So this morning, Mr. Sheffer will don white trousers, a blue shirt and a white tie. Then, for the 23rd year, he will head over to Symphony Space on the Upper West Side to preside over a noon-to-past-midnight exaltation of the novel that the undergraduate Tennessee Williams called "the most deliberately pretentious work of art I have ever come across." (The quotation comes from "yes I said yes I will Yes," a deliciously readable and, thankfully, slender new collection of commentary about Joyce himself, the novel and Bloomsday celebrations, edited by Nola Tully with an introduction by Mr. Sheffer.)

This year, "Bloomsday on Broadway," which will be broadcast on Pacifica stations in New York and San Francisco, will feature Irish music, a faint clatter of ale bottles and more than 100 actors reading snippets and swaths of the novel, concluding with Fionnula Flanagan's uncensored rendition of the almost unpunctuated Molly Bloom/Penelope soliloquy. Reactions to the book by Joyce's contemporaries will also be read. Mr. Sheffer will quote the analyst Carl Jung: "I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman. I didn't."

"I've been asked, 'Is it a serious literary event or a grand drunken reunion for all your actor friends?' " Mr. Sheffer says. "Yes!"

But the question is put to Mr. Sheffer, a Bronx-born son of immigrants from Russia, a child actor in the Yiddish theater and author of, among other works about Jewish life, a play about Isaac Bashevis Singer to honor the centennial of that writer's birth next month: Why Joyce? "Bloom is the greatest Jewish character in all of literature," Mr. Sheffer replies, in that loamy, mellifluous voice familiar from "Selected Shorts," his 20-year-old program of marquee names reading short stories. "Who's the competition? Shylock?"

As a young man, he entered the novel through Stephen Dedalus, the poet whose mother, like Mr. Sheffer's, had died; when Mr. Sheffer became the father of a daughter (he is married to Ethel, an urban planner), he entered "Ulysses" through Bloom, father of Milly.

"I'm not a scholar, I'm a passionate theater person," maintains Mr. Sheffer, who tracked down the original tunes for the song fragments woven into Molly Bloom's thoughts.

To take a four-hour stroll around the mind of Mr. Sheffer, 68, as he eases back on a couch in his office at Symphony Space - the two-theater home to a crazy salad of performers that he compelled, litigated and charmed into being - is to be left rather breathless from mental exercise. Now he's recounting Bloomsdays past ("One year we read the last three pages of Molly in 11 languages. Ah, the Russian: 'da!... Da!... DA!' "). Then he's on to his "Selected Shorts" literacy project; an opera about the Constitutional Convention; a cabaret of political satire; his Wall to Wall marathons; and the Singer play.

The talk is light and swift. For a person of accomplishment, Mr. Sheffer is the antithesis of pomposity. ("I regret never having learned to play a musical instrument," he says.) He is funny - one pen name is Jerzy Turnpike - and generous about credit. "I work with department heads who make me look good," he says. "I'm just the chief bottle washer." Small wonder that as a producer, artistic director and fund-raiser, he attracts so much talent and so very much money.

Typically, he ascribes his diverse résumé to restlessness and luck. The son of a Yiddish actress and a businessman of varying fortune, Mr. Sheffer studied theater at Brooklyn College and Michigan State. He jokes that he moved from performing to directing to writing in search of "something less passive that you could be in control of - hah!"

In 1978, he and Alan Miller, a conductor, rented the ragged Symphony Movie Theater to put on a Wall to Wall Bach program. Mr. Sheffer had found his professional parking space.

As he gives a tour of the gleaming premises, jumping with the sounds of a dance company rehearsal and last-minute Bloomsday minutiae (where to store Molly Bloom's brass bed? asks Bloomsday's director, Caraid O'Brien, a Galway-born, Boston-raised Yiddish translator), Mr. Sheffer's joy is radiantly apparent. He pauses on Upper Broadway, pointing to the guiding words carved on Symphony Space's supporting column: Music. Film. Dance. Literature. Theatre. Family.

And yes, in bold letters: Bloomsday on Broadway. "After every Bloomsday show, I'm exhausted. Do we have to do it again next year?'' Mr. Sheffer says. "But we have to! It's engraved on the wall that holds us up."

[connoisseur series500]

I never cared for Joyce's work.

Faulkner used a similar style to greater effect; and D.H. Lawrence was a much superior writer.

[Jazzmoose]

I never cared for Joyce's work.

Faulkner used a similar style to greater effect; and D.H. Lawrence was a much superior writer.

*GASP!!!!*

[alankin]

The Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia owns the original manuscript of "Ulysses." The museum consists of a couple three-story townhouses on a small residential street in center city.

Every Bloomsday, they have a public reading of excerpts from "Ulysses" on their front steps. A large number of people take turns. I couldn't make it this year, but walked over during lunch last year. I think that Joyce works better when read aloud.

I also learned that Naxos has put out a complete reading of Ulysses on CD (22 of them!) for the 100th anniversary:

I heard an interview with the reader, Jim Norton, on the radio. He sounded pretty good, using different voices for the different characters, etc...

Edited June 18, 2004 by alankin

[ghost of miles]

Faulkner used a similar style to greater effect; and D.H. Lawrence was a much superior writer.

Which Faulkner got, in part, from Joyce!

And I'd take DUBLINERS over anything that D.H. wrote.

So there.

[connoisseur series500]

Faulkner used a similar style to greater effect; and D.H. Lawrence was a much superior writer.

Which Faulkner got, in part, from Joyce!

And I'd take DUBLINERS over anything that D.H. wrote.

So there.

Check out DH Lawrence again, David.

No one in the first half of the century came near to him. Just look at his essays for a start.

"Dubliners" is actually very good; but I don't care for "Ulysses," nor "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man."

One could claim that Joyce took his stream of consciousness style from Proust and Virginia Woolf. Writers always borrow from each other.

Faulkner could actually tell a good story. Joyce did not achieve that with "Ulysses," I believe.

[connoisseur series500]

Lawrence, on fire, was indeed pretty goddamn hot, but his proflicacy & warming up on the page require a pretty devoted reader.

"proflicacy?"

Other than that, I think you're assessment of Lawrence is right on.

He had the propensity to get on his high horse, but he was unbeatable as a stylist. No one was better; not in the 20th century anyway. (I'll have to dig through my boxes to find some good examples, and really bore you guys... )

Think you're correct about my timeline in placing Virginia Woolf before Joyce. I'm not sure whom may have influenced whom, but they were contemporaries. No doubt, however, that Proust came first and influenced everybody.

Novel writing is still about stories. Take away that element, and it won't survive. Good writers have to be able to tell stories as well. Faulkner could tell a good yarn. Of course, a good story doesn't make a good novel; but a good novel needs to have a good story as well.