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!