Lunch with Joyce

And with that, readers of Ulysses back away, horrified. Food bloggers and eager diners rarely take up James Joyce in their writing, for abundantly obvious reasons:

Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables calling for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches...A man with an infant's saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his plate: halfmasticated gristle: gums: no teeth to chewchewchew it...Couldn't eat a morsel here. (Ulysses, )

And of course the famous 'all food is dead' section:

An obese grey rat toddled along the side of the crypt, moving the pebbles...One of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick the bones clean no matter who it was. Ordinary meat for them. A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk...Saltwhite crumbling mush of corpse: smell, taste like raw white turnips. (Ulysses, )

Interestingly, he continues on to make a case against vegetarianism ("only weggebobbles and fruit") but I'm going to spare you the full, visceral details of his argument.

Yet post-Ulysses, some brave souls have sought to reclaim Joycean-inspired food and drink. Of course, it helps that Joyce said a few oft-quoted things about alcohol, making drinks easy to Joycify:

"What is better than to sit at the table at the end of the day and drink wine with friends, or substitutes for friends?"

"Ireland sober is Ireland stiff."

In Ulysses, he also used a modified version of Oliver Gogarty's 1904 poem, "The Song of the Cheerful (but Slightly Sarcastic) Jesus" (retitled "The Ballad of Joking Jesus"), which features some excellent wine jokes:

If anyone thinks that I amn't divine
He'll get no free drinks when I'm making the wine
But have to drink water and wish it were plain
That I make when the wine becomes water again

Many pubs have boldly named themselves after him, no doubt more in reference to his Irishness and famousness than the content of his food-related work:

 Baltimore

Georgia

Paris

In this same vein, I recently came across a delicious looking James Joyce Cocktail with Irish whiskey, sweet vermouth, cointreau and lime. Wonderful!

Also, one can always just pick up a Guinness and claim homage...as I have done by baking this fabulous Chocolate Stout Cake, from Cooking With Sin. Notice how it looks like a dark stout and its head?

Yet overall, Joycean food has arguably fared less well. Notably, the closest relation of Joyce to food I have encountered is: in honour of the 'Bloom's cheese sandwich' section of Ulysses, a fellow student once threatened to gift my professor with casu marzu cheese (Sardinian sheep's cheese, infested with and processed through maggots). Between this and Ulysses itself, 'lunch with Joyce' still sounds like a horror. Yet while Joyce didn't always appear favourable to the whole process of eating, I really wouldn't say no to Bloom's eventual lunch, a gorgonzola sandwich, "good glass of burgundy" and a "nice salad, cool as a cucumber".

"accidental music providentially arranged" (Wake 222)

Adapting Joyce's work to music is hardly a stretch. As running theme throughout "The Dead", the musical style of the "Sirens" in Ulysses (which begins with a kind of overture, a sampling of the words from the rest of the episode), and of course, the very titles of Chamber Music (collected poems), "Araby" and Finnegans Wake, Joyce's books are already musical in themselves. Finnegans Wake goes further, with musical scores written into its text:

Los Doggies envisions Finnegans Wake as a Rock Opera. Mátyás Seiber, Hungarian composer, wrote two (sadly, unrecorded) pieces taking Joyce as inspiration: "Ulysses" (based on the "Ithaca" episode) and "Three Fragments from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". The American premiere performance of Ulysses took place at Carnegie Hall this year, in October. Mason Jennings sings about Ulysses: "I went into twelve bookstores looking for Ulysses..." (Is he Hugh Kenner? I must say, I have never found obtaining a copy this difficult! Anyway, he continues, "Now I have it here sitting on the table." Phew!) It's actually a nice song and can be heard here. Basically, music is so often based on Joyce's works that websites devote themselves to the subject.

But there are two musical Joyce projects going on right now that show how his works are still being used as artistic inspiration:

The James Joyce Quarterly blog (yes it's true! don't you wish all the academic journals you ever poured over had started writing awesome blogs?) recently wrote about the band Minus 3, who just recorded an album based on Ulysses. The album is titled North Strand, referencing Stephen's walk on the strand in the "Proteus" episode, and includes a track titled "Adiaphane" (opaque), referencing one of Stephen's topics of musing on this walk: "Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see."

Another track, titled "Yes", is a more common Joyce reference - the first and last word of Molly's monologue (and therefore the last word of the novel):

"...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." 

Throughout the song you can faintly hear a woman's singsong voice, but if you listen carefully, she the words are actually from "Finnegan's Wake".

Another Joyce music project is the band Boston Spaceships' latest album Our Cubehouse Still Rocks. Their title a line taken from Finnegans Wake:

What then agentlike brought about that tragoady thundersday this municipal sin business? Our cubehouse still rocks as earwitness to the thunder of his arafatas but we hear also through successive ages that shebby choruysh of unkalified muzzlenimiissilehims that would blackguardise the whitestone ever hurtleturtled out of heaven. (p. 5)

Boston Spaceships is composed of two musicians from Guided by Voices and John Moen from The Decemberists (known for using awesome words in their songs), so I'm not surprised to see this group interacting with Joyce in this way.

"Freedom Rings", a track from their new album:

I'm happy to hear sung recordings of Chamber Music (that's a lie - I'm often bored and/or horrified), but what I most appreciate is when musicians take Joyce as an inspiration, find a small part of him or his works that speaks to what they are trying to do in their own art, and then give him back to us as something new. And it's groups like Minus 3 and Boston Spaceships that really get this. For my profound closing line, I'm actually going to quote a YouTube comment: "James Joyce would be wicked pumped". I have to agree, skogmonkey.