So as promised/threatened yesterday, three songs that operate roughly along the lines of the songs suggested by [correction!] faithful fcrp reader Steve: Songs that seem to be moving in one direction, carrying us merrily along, only to dart suddenly in another direction. Or in which a single word or phrase has an undue amount of [...]
I closed yesterday by saying I’d draw on some personal experience to try to flesh out the complexities of the Figes “fake reviews” scandal: his “praising his own work and rubbishing that of his rivals,” in the memorable words of The Guardian. I am, by training, a scholar of British & Irish literary modernism, and [...]
I headed back to Dublin in June 2007, where I spent six weeks directing an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on Ulysses. Actually, there’s another great story about Joyce tourism involved here: briefly, I was approached following a panel at that 2004 Joyce conference in Dublin about which I’ve already spoken, by [...]
If Bloomsday had not existed, we would have had to invent it—as indeed, of course, we have. Ulysses is, amongst other things, and extraordinary difficult novel; modernism is a difficult art. Indeed, as Leonard Diepeveen argues so persuasively in his book The Difficulties of Modernism, it’s probably the first artistic movement to make difficulty a [...]
Another familiar line of complaint attacks the commercialization of Joyce’s work. The Sunday breakfast was sponsored by a sausage manufacturer, who currently has its name all over the city, along with quotations of the one sentence in Ulysses in which their product is mentioned; the Wednesday breakfast was sponsored by Ireland’s largest exporter and most [...]
It was quite an organizing conceit: On June 13, 2004, 10,000 people assembled for a free breakfast en plein air on O’Connell (late Sackville) Street, Dublin, at tables and benches set up between the General Post Office, birthplace of the Irish Republic, on the west; the Millennium Spire, standing on the former site of Nelson’s [...]
After I had finished my undergraduate degree, I moved to Dublin for a year with my new wife, and did the postgraduate diploma in Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College. It just so happens, then, that I was living in Dublin in 1982, and witness to the many literary and more broadly public commemorations of Joyce’s [...]
Because I was traveling, perhaps, I allowed the commemoration of Bloomsday, June 16, to go unremarked at fcrp. As a blog ostensibly occupied with “the phony & the faux,” that’s a serious lapse: for in one sense, Bloomsday is about as fake as it gets. For those of you not in the loop on this: [...]
Today’s not our video Friday, kids—Mystery Science Auditorium—but this video is hosted at the Pitchfork.com site for this week only, so I thought I’d put it out here today, to give you a chance to have a look at it. Besides, I’m not really going to try to dig into the video itself (truth be [...]
I’m just back from a week on the road: Yeah, all those fcrp posts over the past week about the homoerotics of the power ballad, and about Jimi Hendrix—as well as Emily Dalton’s piece on bump ‘n’ grinding second graders—werr pre-loaded, scheduled for release as I traveled! The shape-shifting miracle of the Internet. At any [...]