May 7, 2011

@11ysses

When the first earthquake hit Japan this year, I realized that it was surprisingly difficult to get up-to-date news. The New York Times was still making tsunami predictions for times that had already passed and I felt like I was missing out on a ton of information. So I reluctantly joined and it. was. great. Ever since, I've been boring my partner to death with long rambles about how Twitter gets you participating in a larger conversation, whereas Facebook asks you to shape your message to your specific imagined audience. And then Jack Layton said "hashtag fail" in the Canadian Leaders Debate, and I was done for. I love twitter AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHY:

@11ysses

This Bloomsday (July 16, 2011), the twitterverse - okay, a very small portion of it - will work in tandem to tweet Ulysses. 96 Brave Cast members are needed in order to tweet the 96 sections of the book. Each tweeter will work for 15 minutes, tweeting the entire assigned section in this time, then the next person will continue, thus completing the entire book in 24 hours.

For a book that is mostly known for its length, verbosity and difficulty, attempts to condense the text down to 140 character snippets is genius and I can't wait to see how it will turn out. My guess is that each Brave Cast member will have slightly different interpretations of the text and ways of conveying the message and plot. The whole thing will be expertly orchestrated and definitely worth following closely, or at least tuning in to.

I would obviously love to sign up for this, but I'll be in Dublin on Bloomsday and will be not only limited to my iPhone but perhaps out of wireless/3G range...and I think iPhone/Twitter Ulysses would cross over into the TOO abstract.

If you are interested in giving up 15 minutes to what is in my opinion the coolest technology-meets-lit project ever, sign up here before May 28th!

April 5, 2011

Recent Rumblings from the Joyce Estate

As you may remember from my blog post on Hugh Kenner, the Joyce estate has a history of getting its knickers in a knot over pretty much anything that brings up Joyce especially publications, public use of his works, and anything that might reveal new (or already known) information about his life. Kind of puts a damper on everything exciting about Joyce, but of course, their protests are often pretty interesting themselves.

Making news this week is another estate protest, this time of the use of a Joycean quotation ("To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life") in the production of a synthetic genome, which I blogged about a few months ago. Unfortunately, a lot of the articles out there on this story make the main scientist Craig Venter seem a bit witless. This one, Craig Venter's Genetic Typo, with the title as a bit of a slam already, has him feebly stating "We thought it fell under fair use". If only Carol Schloss would speak up now! Luckily, once you breed life, I think it's pretty much a done deal, and as I said before, his words are probably already decayed and mangled through genetic mutation.

However, in shocking news, Kate Bush has the green light from the estate itself to use Molly's soliloquy in her music! She had originally intended to use Molly's words in "The Sensual World" but unsurprisingly wasn't granted permission. Apparently, unlike Craig Venter and Alicia Jo Rabins (who also uses Molly's text in song), she actually asked. I guess it paid off though, because over 20 years later, she's remaking the song the way she intended and "Flower of the Mountain" will be featured in her new album Director's Cut. Stay tuned!

March 23, 2011

A Joycean "I Do"

As James Joyce would say, "spring has sprung in spickness" (Finnegans Wake) here in Vancouver and I am already dreaming of lounging on the beach reading books, despite the fact that's it's (unsurprisingly) going to start raining again tomorrow. Yet while I might be prepping for sangria on patios, the blog/fashion/magazine world is starting in on wedding season. 

This wedding-mania is fairly awkward for me on a number of levels, including the pervasiveness of heterosexual stereotypes, abundant consumerism, holding on to tradition to the point of incredible boredom from guests... And I'm not the only one who worries about the warm weather setting off an onslaught of wedding articles in my Google Reader feed: "Wait till spring has sprung in spickness and prigs beg in to pry they'll be plentyprime of housepets to pimp and pamper my. Impending marriage."

What was that, Joyce? Did you say "Impending marriage" or "Impending doom"? 

Of course, the secret is that I'm totally stoked about actual weddings. My oldest friend is getting married this summer and I can't wait. I think it's the best that when you have a wedding you can add all kinds of great personal touches on what results in a fantastic party with everyone and everything you like best! If Joyce was alive today, even he could marry Nora Barnacle at a wedding infused with his absolute favourite thing in the whole world - his own works of literature. The Los Angeles Wedding Officiant provides a fairly expansive list of readings to choose from and nestled in there right in between "Love is courteous/Love is kind" and Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" is a Ulysses reading! I have to say, I was pretty nervous that it was going to be Molly's soliloquy ("yes I said yes") or the Gerty McDowell and Bloom fireworks encounter ("and everyone cried O! O! in raptures") and I'm not sure if I'm relieved to say that the reading is actually from "Cyclops":
Love loves to love love.  Nurse loves the new chemist.  Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly.  Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle.  M.B. loves a fair gentleman.  Li Chi Han loves up kissy Cha Pu Chow.  Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant.  Old Mr. Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs. Verschoyle with the turnedin eye.  The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead.  His Majesty the King Loves Her Majesty the Queen.  Mrs. Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor.  You love a certain person.  And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.
I mean, I guess. But I think there's some subtext in "Love loves to love love" that's being overlooked here and "The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead" doesn't exactly invite enthusiasm for tying the knot. I actually find myself wishing for a little "flower of the mountain" here! 

What do you guys think? Is there a hidden 'sexy Joyce' that isn't laced with religious cynicism, general romantic malaise, or fart jokes?

March 7, 2011

Don't Read Ulysses?

One of my good friends has started Ulysses four times and has always stopped at page 30, meaning to go on, but realizing a year or two down the road that she never quite got back to it. She told me just this weekend, that for her, reaching "Usurper." at the end of Episode 1 is such a satisfying experience that she feels like her reading experience is complete and she doesn't have to go on. Though she says she enjoys the first episode, I can't help but wonder if there's some voice inside of her whispering "Don't read Ulysses! One chapter is really enough."

The Hullabaloo has put this feeling into words for us, giving four reasons we shouldn't read this book:


  1. “Ulysses” is really, really long. The audiobook lasts 32 hours. The text clocks in at an absurd 260,000 words. Think of how many things you could say in 260,000 words and carefully consider whether you want to invest that much time into reading Joyce.
  2. Joyce made this book as complicated as possible, on purpose. He once said that he “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant” in order to make the novel “immortal.”  The stream-of-consciousness narrative is full of auditory puns, onomatopoeia and alliteration. The book begins in modern English (from 1914, when Joyce wrote it) and slowly degrades to Middle and Old English as the book progresses. Joyce wrote Episode 15 as a script interrupted with the main characters’ hallucinations. It ends with a 24,000-word stream-of-consciousness soliloquy featuring only eight sentences.
  3. After slogging through this difficult and long-winded prose, one would think the story would reward you with an interesting and clever insight into human experience with some climactic tale of love, death, and adventure. Nope! The story follows a day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he wakes up, eats breakfast, walks to the butcher’s, talks to his friends, reads the mail, goes to church and buys soap. The most exciting thing Leopold Bloom does is attend a funeral. Later, he adventurously consumes a gorgonzola cheese sandwich.
  4. There is no definitive edition of this work. Some people think William Shakespeare, with his folio and quarto versions, presents a peculiar problem in discerning what is actually the text. There are 18 different editions of “Ulysses.” The first revision, published in Joyce’s lifetime, should be the most accurate, but it still has more than 2,000 significant errors — if you can find them in the sea of confusing prose. Even trying to pick out which version to read leads to mountains of scholarly articles about the editing process, differences between French and Anglo-American scholarly editing and whether some sections even belong to Joyce at all. Do yourself a favor, and don’t bother.


First of all, point two isn't true at all. The book doesn't begin in modern English then 'degrade' as the book continues. Episode 17 is full of Bloom's current scientific inquiry into the cosmos, Episode 18 is slangy and modern in its discussion of female sexuality, and throughout, we meet a cast of characters from Mulligan to the barmaids in "Sirens" who certainly wouldn't be considered antiquated. Perhaps this author is referencing Episode 14: contrary to the devolution suggested here, "Oxen of the Sun" gives us the birth and development of language, tracing its history from Old English through Middle English to almost undecipherable modern slang.

Aside from that, points 2-4 are exactly why I love Ulysses! Though it really is long, and as much as I want to congratulate my friend for making it through Episode 1, I know that sadly, she's barely made a dent.

January 7, 2011

Portrait Tattoo

It seems I'm sinking into a slough of post-holiday relatively meaningless posts about celebrities. Many apologies to those who enjoy lofty lit crit. But look - Johnny Depp has a Joycean tattoo!



This references A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Stephen states in Chapter 5:

"Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me to do what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning."

I have to say, I'm not actually a huge fan of this tattoo itself - especially the font, which is a bit too Pirates of the Carribbean-y for me (by the way, can you believe they're making another movie?!). However, Johnny Depp has said about his many tattoos, "It's like what sailors used to do, where every tattoo meant something, a specific time in your life when you make a mark on yourself". This, and the "3" you can see on his hand in the second photo make me feel like there's something actually pretty authentic about this. It reminds me of the tattooed sailor from Ulysses, with an anchor, the profile of a man (Antonio), and the number 16 on his chest - each serving as a mark of his journeys.

January 6, 2011

Robert Pattinson...the Next Leopold Bloom?


A little too dashing for Mr. Bloom, I think, but he may indeed be our next! 

Movie adaptations of Ulysses are (thankfully) relatively rare. There's of course the original, 1967 Ulysses, which was actually nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The 2008 film, The Brothers Bloom, is seemingly based on the novel, with characters named Stephen, Bloom and Penelope, but in reading the plot it becomes clear that that's about as far as it goes. Nora (2000) is about the lives of the Joyces (Stanislaus included!) but despite starring Ewan MacGregor, it's pretty dull.

But not to worry - another film loosely based on Ulysses is coming! Cronenberg is adopting the Don DeLillo novel Cosmopolis, which so far sounds promising enough. Basically, a young rich assets manager makes a Joycean odyssey across Manhattan and encounters some serious obstacles and distractions along the way. 

I think this could be an interesting film, except that it stars Robert Pattinson who I'm still not entirely sure can pull of a convincing adult role...and his journey is to get a haircut. 

I hope to god he makes it.