So: Tweet < Facebook status update < Blog post < Magazine column < Journal article/Book chapter < Book I was thinking yesterday in terms of four or perhaps five different-sized portholes through which one peers out at the world, and the four or five writing genres to which they’re attached; today, I’m thinking it’s more [...]
I had a wonderful discussion with my “Literary Interpretation” students last week, about the detritus that is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. My friend Paul Saint-Amour has written about the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses as a kind of test case for fair use, testing the boundaries of copyright; many [...]
I’m sorry for the false start: I’d said I’d start posting again a week ago, and I really believed it when I wrote it. I suppose that my mother’s death has been more disturbing, more disruptive than I’d anticipated. I’m not immobilized; in part because she had a series of strokes over the past three [...]
As Robyn and I were making our way through security at LAX yesterday morning, a large advertising poster loomed over us. Not a bad spot for an ad: a captive audience, certainly, if not an entirely festive one. For the time it took us to remove our shoes, empty our pockets, put our laptops and [...]
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 [...]