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 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 [...]
A few weeks ago, a reader posted a comment asking, in essence: How do I do it? A burning question for many fcrp fans, I know. A question that surely calls to mind Elvis Costello’s “My Science Fiction Twin”: His almost universal excellence Is starting to disturb me They asked how in the world he [...]
[It's late Thursday, and tomorrow's post should be a Mystery Science Auditorium post; and ordinarily, I don't post until 5:00 a.m. PST. But I have exciting news today, big enough to break both of those self-imposed rules, just this once. So here's Friday's post, on Thursday night.] For reasons both professional and personal, it’s a [...]