Happy Bloomsday


9thdoctor

Recommended Posts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEuj4kOCmc&playnext=1&list=PL86D6934F83407E4B

The perfect night for a pint of Guinness. Too bad I can't find Murphy's in any local store.

Remember a while back someone did the "Read Ayn Rand" thing on Google maps? Well someone's gone to the trouble of disproving Joyce about whether it's possible to walk through Dublin without passing a pub.

http://www.kindle-maps.com/blog/yes-it-is-possible-to-cross-dublin-without-passing-a-pub.html

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Mulligan stew for Bloom, the only Jew in the room.

Molly's gone to blazes and Boylan's crotch amazes

any woman whose husband sleeps with his head

all buried down at the foot of the bed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Mulligan stew for Bloom, the only Jew in the room.

Molly's gone to blazes and Boylan's crotch amazes

any woman whose husband sleeps with his head

all buried down at the foot of the bed.

Still and all boys, when all's still and stillness is all she says the universal Yes.It could have been No as like as not and then where would we all be?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 11 months later...

Too bad I can't find Murphy's in any local store.

And here we are a year later and Murphy's is being stocked, right alongside the Guinness with the widget in the can so you get that proper nitrogenized foamy head. So if you want something, just ask for it on OL, they are monitoring and are eager to please. Winning lottery ticket, please?

Anyway, Bloomsday's tomorrow, but I thought I'd bump the thread now while it's on my mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oDLbjZTh4w&feature=related

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Shows what a lowbrow I am, never heard of Bloomsday...

Today is “Bloomsday,” the day when literature lovers around the world gather in bookstores and Irish pubs and other fitting places to celebrate James Joyce’s masterpiece of high modernism, Ulysses.

June 16, 1904 was the day Joyce first went out for a walk with his future wife, Nora Barnacle–a fateful day in his life, which he decided to commemorate in his great novel, first published in Paris in 1922. All the events in the book–more than 700 densely written pages of experimental prose rich in allusions and structured around Homer’s Odyssey–take place on that single day in 1904. Just as William Blake could hold eternity in an hour, Joyce could frame an epic in a day.

To celebrate the occasion we bring you a pair of videos. Above, the British actor and writer Stephen Fry speaks briefly about his love of Joyce’s book. Below is Ian Graham’s 2000 documentary, James Joyce: The Trials of Ulysses, which provides some fascinating background and commentary on the novel. To find out if there are any events near you, visit the Rosenbach Museum & Library’s Bloomsday Central Web site. And to dive into the book, you can find copies in our collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

Henri Matisse Illustrates 1935 Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

James Joyce’s Ulysses: Download the Free Audio Book

James Joyce Reads ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ from Finnegans Wake

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 year later...
  • 2 years later...

You die for your country, suppose. (He places his arm on Private Carr's sleeve.) Not that I wish it for you. But I say: Let my country die for me. Up to the present, it has done so. I didn’t want it to die. Damn death. Long live life!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

. . . I love flowers Id love to have the whole place swimming in roses God of heaven theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 11 months later...
  • 1 year later...

Happy Bloomsday from John Horgan!

bloomsday2018-4.png

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 11 months later...

Gibberish.  The book is garbage. So who, who I say, who would promote such anti-Semitic crap as the world’s greatest literature around 1920? Who? Nazi sympathizers? Who? Left wingers extoling communism? And who to this day would say this unreadable book is great literature? And pleeeese, as you answer give me no pseudonyms. Peter

from Wikipedia. Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It was first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920 and then published in its entirety in Paris by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's 40th birthday. It is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature . . . . 

At first glance, much of the book may appear unstructured and chaotic; Joyce once said that he had "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant", which would earn the novel immortality. The two schemata which Stuart Gilbert and Herbert Gorman released after publication to help defend Joyce from the obscenity accusations] made the links to The Odyssey clearer, and also helped explain the work's internal structure.

Joyce and Homer. Joyce divides Ulysses into 18 episodes that "roughly correspond to the episodes in Homer's Odyssey". Homer's Odyssey is divided into 24 books (sections). It has been suggested by scholars that every episode of Ulysses has a theme, technique and correspondence between its characters and those of the Odyssey. The text of the published novel does not include the episode titles that are used below, nor the correspondences, which originate from explanatory outlines Joyce sent to friends, known as the Linati and Gilbert schemata. Joyce referred to the episodes by their Homeric titles in his letters. He took the idiosyncratic rendering of some of the titles, e.g. "Nausikaa" and the "Telemachiad" from Victor Bérard's two-volume Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée which he consulted in 1918 in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich.

While the action of Joyce's novel takes place during one ordinary day in early twentieth-century Dublin, Ireland, in Homer's epic, Odysseus, "a Greek hero of the Trojan War ... took ten years to find his way from Troy to his home on the island of Ithaca".[18] Furthermore, Homer's poem includes violent storms and a shipwreck, giants and monsters, gods and goddesses, a totally different world from Joyce's. Joyce's character Leopold Bloom, "a Jewish advertisement canvasser", corresponds to Odysseus in Homer's epic; Stephen Dedalus, the hero also of Joyce's earlier, largely autobiographical, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, corresponds to Odysseus's son Telemachus; and Bloom's wife Molly corresponds to Penelope, Odysseus's wife, who waited twenty years for him to return.[19]

Episode 1, Telemachus James Joyce's room in the James Joyce Tower and Museum. It is 8 a.m. Buck Mulligan, a boisterous medical student, calls Stephen Dedalus (a young writer encountered as the principal subject of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) up to the roof of the Sandycove Martello tower where they both live. There is tension between Stephen and Mulligan, stemming from a cruel remark Stephen has overheard Mulligan making about his recently deceased mother, May Dedalus, and from the fact that Mulligan has invited an English student, Haines, to stay with them. The three men eat breakfast and walk to the shore, where Mulligan demands from Stephen the key to the tower and a loan. Departing, Stephen declares that he will not return to the tower tonight, as Mulligan, the "usurper", has taken it over.

Episode 2, Nestor Stephen is teaching a history class on the victories of Pyrrhus of Epirus. After class, one student, Cyril Sargent, stays behind so that Stephen can show him how to do a set of arithmetic exercises. Stephen looks at the ugly face of Sargent and tries to imagine Sargent's mother's love for him. Stephen then visits school headmaster Garrett Deasy, from whom he collects his pay and a letter to take to a newspaper office for printing. The two discuss Irish history and the role of Jews in the economy. As Stephen leaves, Deasy said that Ireland has "never persecuted the Jews" because the country "never let them in". This episode is the source of some of the novel's most famous lines, such as Dedalus's claim that "history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" and that God is "a shout in the street."

Episode 3, Proteus Sandymount Strand looking across Dublin Bay to Howth Head. Stephen finds his way to Sandymount Strand and mopes around for some time, mulling various philosophical concepts, his family, his life as a student in Paris, and his mother's death. As Stephen reminisces and ponders, he lies down among some rocks, watches a couple whose dog urinates behind a rock, scribbles some ideas for poetry and picks his nose. This chapter is characterised by a stream of consciousness narrative style that changes focus wildly. Stephen's education is reflected in the many obscure references and foreign phrases employed in this episode, which have earned it a reputation for being one of the book's most difficult chapters.

Part II: Odyssey Episode 4, Calypso The narrative shifts abruptly. The time is again 8 a.m., but the action has moved across the city and to the second protagonist of the book, Leopold Bloom, a part-Jewish advertising canvasser. The episode opens with the famous line, ‘Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.’ Bloom, after starting to prepare breakfast, decides to walk to a butcher to buy a pork kidney. Returning home, he prepares breakfast and brings it with the mail to his wife Molly as she lounges in bed. One of the letters is from her concert manager Blazes Boylan, with whom Molly is having an affair. Bloom is aware that Molly will welcome Boylan into her bed later that day, and is tormented by the thought. Bloom reads a letter from their daughter Milly Bloom, who tells him about her progress in the photography business in Mullingar. The episode closes with Bloom reading a magazine story named Matcham’s Masterstroke, by Mr. Philip Beaufoy, while defecating in the outhouse.

Episode 5, Lotus Eaters Bloom makes his way to Westland Row post office where he receives a love letter from one 'Martha Clifford' addressed to his pseudonym, 'Henry Flower'. He meets an acquaintance, and while they chat, Bloom attempts to ogle a woman wearing stockings, but is prevented by a passing tram. Next, he reads the letter and tears up the envelope in an alley. He wanders into a Catholic church service and muses on theology. The priest has the letters I.N.R.I. or I.H.S. on his back; Molly had told Bloom that they meant I have sinned or I have suffered, and Iron nails ran in.[20] He goes to a chemist where he buys a bar of lemon soap. He then meets another acquaintance, Bantam Lyons, who mistakenly takes him to be offering a racing tip for the horse Throwaway. Finally, Bloom heads towards the baths. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just one more thought about JJ. He was an Elworth Tooey-ish Irish-ish huckster. He played the critics and his readers for fools because in the post WW1 and pre WW11 era when there was a movement to bring down Western, FREE Civilization and he was part of it. Remember some Ayn Rand maybe? His “stream of consciousness” technique was imitated and I think that because the reader has to think and even invent explanations as to what he is saying, so many people attribute their own rational explanations for his gibberish or to what the author is alluding to. He practically admits to being a Shyster, Gamer, and fill in the blank Framer of language. And you are lamer than thou if you ever praise him.

When I was in college you could always tell the leftist, progressive professor by what they extolled. Only one of those professors at the time I went to college at Salisbury University, (George Walsh?) praised Ayn Rand. What does that tell you?  Peter  

From ThoughtCo. Ulysses by  James Joyce holds a very special place in the history of English literature. The novel is one of the greatest masterpieces of modernist literature. But, Ulysses is also sometimes seen as so experimental that it is completely unreadable. Ulysses records events in the lives of two central characters--Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus--on a single day in Dublin. With its depth and complexities, Ulysses completely changed our understanding of literature and language . . . . is endlessly inventive, and labyrinthine in its construction. The novel is both a mythical adventure of the every day and a stunning portrait of internal psychological processes--rendered through high art. Brilliant and sparkling, the novel is difficult to read but offers rewards tenfold the effort and attention that willing readers give it.

Overview. The novel is as difficult to summarize as it is difficult to read, but it has a remarkably simple story. Ulysses follows one day in Dublin in 1904--tracing the paths of two characters: a middle-aged Jewish man by the name of Leopold Bloom and a young intellectual, Stephen Daedalus. Bloom goes through his day with the full awareness that his wife, Molly, is probably receiving her lover at their home (as part of an ongoing affair). He buys some liver, attends a funeral and, watches a young girl on a beach.

Ulysses Quotes by James Joyce - Goodreads“Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” ― …

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” ― James Joyce, Ulysses. …

“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or …

“Love loves to love love.” ― James Joyce, Ulysses. Like.

Fast Facts: James Joyce. James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and died in Zurich in 1941. Joyce spoke numerous languages and studied at University College Dublin. Joyce was married to Nora Barnacle. Although most of Joyce’s works are set in Ireland, he spent very little time there as an adult. Joyce’s famous novel, Ulysses, was considered controversial when it was first released and was even banned in many places. James Joyce’s works are considered an example of modernist literature, and they use the “stream of consciousness” technique.

 

JJ: "The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."

(A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). "Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why." (letter to Fanny Guillermet, 1918) "A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." (Ulysses)

Ulysses - Shmoop James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is, arguably, the single most influential novel of the 20th century. Written in a wide variety of styles, chock-full of an encyclopedia's worth of allusions, rife with enough puns and jokes to fill a comedian's career, the novel focuses on one day – June 16, 1904 – in the life of Mr. Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged Jewish man living in Dublin, Ireland.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Peter said:

Gibberish.  The book is garbage. So who, who I say, who would promote such anti-Semitic crap as the world’s greatest literature around 1920?

It's anti-anti-Semitism.  Have you actually read it?  Sure, it features anti-Semitic people saying anti-Semitic things, just as Uncle Tom's Cabin is amply populated with pro-slavery characters.

5 hours ago, Peter said:

He was an Elworth Tooey-ish Irish-ish huckster.

It's spelled Ellsworth Toohey.  Try to calm down.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, Peter said:

Just one more thought about JJ. He was an Elworth Tooey-ish Irish-ish huckster.

Joyce also published a book of short stories in conventional literary form:  Dubliners.  It contains a sublime "The Dead," which it might profit you to sample.

"The Dead" was made into a film in 1987.

 

Edited by william.scherk
Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 hours ago, 9thdoctor said:

It's anti-anti-Semitism.  Have you actually read it?  Sure, it features anti-Semitic people saying anti-Semitic things, just as Uncle Tom's Cabin is amply populated with pro-slavery characters.

It's spelled Ellsworth Toohey.  Try to calm down.

Deep breaths. Uh. Uh. Thank's Nino. I read around 80 pages of it, long ago. I haven't watched the video but is it a likeable assumption that a dramatization with actors is a better way to appreciate this writer? Rand is the opposite. Now as to spelling, perhaps "Worthless Tooshy" would have been a more appreciated and remembered spelling.  

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now