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.

Joycean Illustrations Abound

Shockingly, Ulysses has been in the news quite a bit lately, and not even just the Nerd News that I've been following to bring you these posts! The very cool and much read Apple news (which as I recently learned is completely dominating all tech news) has recently been featuring a story about Ulysses Seen, an online graphic novel version of Ulysses, drawn by Robert Berry. iPad was in the process of developing a Ulysses Seen app, but this picture:

was deemed inappropriate and Apple attempted to censor Berry's graphic novel - an outrageous throwback to when Ulysses was first taken to court for obscenity almost a century ago. Luckily, Berry and Ulysses Seen prevailed, and the image remains in the app. All this caused quite a fuss, though I will admit, much more in the iPad than the Joycean community!

The less-known but equally exciting Joyce imaging being produced right now is Stephen Crowe's illustration of Finnegans Wake at Wake in Progress. He is putting together some amazing work, choosing to highlight certain passages of the book in a true Joycean manner, utilizing different styles for each image. The opening line of the book evokes medieval manuscripts:

This is actually a very interesting choice, illuminating the "r" of "riverrun" - especially choosing to use the capital letter. If you only know one thing about Finnegans Wake (okay, two things, since everyone knows it's long and nearly incomprehensible!) it's that the book begins mid-sentence with a lowercase letter and ends mid-sentence with no punctuation, serving as an invitation to begin the story again, and reinforcing the idea of the textual rivverrun - the flow of words in a continually moving stream despite the book's being set in print. In recreating the medieval illuminated manuscript, Crowe is directly stepping away from this feature of the text, but is interestingly evoking the "Oxen of the Sun" episode of Ulysses, where the history of the English language is recreated through the twinning of text and time: as the text flows from page to page, the language subtly shifts from the Old English ("deshil holles eamus") that begins the chapter, to Middle English ("rising with swire ywimpled"), through to modern slang ("who the sooty hell's the johnny in the black duds?"). Crowe then moves on to much more modern, industrial images, following the "Oxen of the Sun" language shift:

In another image, Crowe focuses on creative inking to intertwine text and image, as the words of Finnegans Wake morph into both poem and and visual art: the movement of text as seen in the English words, and the use of the non-Latin based characters to create the ground, smokestack and tree:

His blog has many more wonderful images, both for readers of the Wake and for any art enthusiast! A lot of these would look wonderful on a wall, I think, though he unfortunately doesn't have a store (yet). Not to worry - Postertext, which makes posters using the text of famous books (Pride and Prejudice, Metamorphosis, Peter Pan...) and featuring a silhouetted image, has just released a Ulysses poster:

Thanks, world, for making all of this wonderful art! But maybe put the brakes on a bit until I move into a house with more wall space. 

Hugh Kenner

Hugh Kenner, along with Carol Schloss, is arguably one of the most famous Joyce critics of the 20th century. Now Carol Schloss' story is unbelievably exciting. Throughout the writing process and publication of her book on Joyce's daughter (Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake), she was constantly intimidated and threatened by Stephen Joyce, James Joyce's grandson. This is not at all unusual - my professor once told me that you couldn't consider yourself a Joyce scholar without having faced the wrath of this man. He himself had received an angry fax, which we all tried to encourage him to frame and put up in his office. But when Stephen Joyce insisted that Carol Schloss delete significant material from her book (pretty much anything that James or Lucia had written to each other), she fought back, took him to court, and won. To me, this is tops in Joycean thrills.

In comparison, I always found Hugh Kenner useful and interesting in his criticism (he alone could have gotten me through every single modernism class with his work on Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and so many more) but I always imagined a disappointingly boring professor who with his middle-class privilege and tenure, was able to churn out these books and be instantly well-received. Some parts of my image are depressingly true - he is a strong social conservative, against abortion, gay rights and feminism. Shockingly, I discovered today that not only does he look like this:

...but he has a pretty good story under his belt! As it turns out, even in the 40's, Kenner had to go to great lengths to even get a copy of the book he became so famous for writing on. Jeet Heer, in an article written just after Kenner's death, writes:

More contemporary books were not only disdained, they were often forbidden by the government...One modern masterpiece that Kenner did have access to was Joyce's Finnegans Wake, tolerated because it was deemed incomprehensible. 

Excited by Wake, Kenner discovered that Joyce's Ulysses, otherwise verboten in Canada, could be found in the restricted access section of the University of Toronto library. However, in order to take a look at the illicit text, Kenner needed to secure two letters of reference: one from a religious authority and one from a medical doctor. Kenner knew a priest who could vouch for his morals, but, unfortunately, was not able to find an MD who could attest that reading Joyce would not corrupt him. Ultimately, Kenner had a family friend, a Jesuit priest, smuggle into Canada a copy of the greatest novel of the 20th century. 

Looking at my bookshelf, with numerous copies of Ulysses and other Joyce materials (see the banner at the top of the page!), it's shocking to think that I probably couldn't have read this book had I been studying 50 years earlier (I would be done for when it came to the priest's recommendation). Every once in a while, banned books cases crop up in Canada, but those where a book is banned from a library branch, a private school, or a certain store. I can barely imagine what it would be like to so badly want to read a book and truly not be able to get a copy.

So good for you, Kenner. Not only did you have to read Finnegans Wake FIRST, but you cared enough about Joyce to really put in the effort. And you have awesome hair.

Mkgnao

I'm currently in the process of adopting a kitten, who I've named Cranly after Stephen's friend (/secret lover?). So, though this is a little late for Bloomsday, when I came across this comic at Hey Pais, I thought it was perfect.

Ulysses Seen is currently working on putting the entire novel into comic/graphic novel/artistically rendered form, but I'm still so happy for little comics like these that take up little parts of Joyce and deliver them out of context to people who otherwise wouldn't necessarily come across them.

Bloom's cat on Hey Pais:

And my own little companion, Cranly:

Thanks, Lisa, for the comic!

Molly Bloom's Song

June 16th always inspires a number of videos of people reading from Ulysses, but I particularly like this one, where Alicia Jo Rabins of Golem (a New York City klezmer band) sings Molly's final monologue.

Alicia Jo Rabins sings Molly Bloom from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

Thanks to Katie F for the link! 

í dyflinni

So I got you all excited about my new blog, and then took off to Iceland for three weeks! This sadly meant that I missed Bloomsday, which was celebrated enthusiastically amongst my friends back home, but I did at least have a celebratory beer in Neskaupstaður in the East Fjords.

I really didn't expect this trip to have anything to do with James Joyce, especially when I found out that all Icelandic translations of his work are out of print. However, on my second-last day in Reykjavík, my travel companion Jenn and I were at the Kolaportið weekend flea market and I found an Icelandic copy of Dubliners! It turns out that I'm in good company, and many Joyce-lovers around the world seek out Icelandic books for their collections. It made me feel very serious! But I was extremely glad to get a copy, because Iceland is my new favourite place and this book feels like two of the best things in the world combined. Now I just have to learn Icelandic so I can read it!

The photos below are the cover and the first page of "The Dead". You can't see this on the first page, but my favourite part the names, which are kept the same but with accents added, like Gabríel and Júlía.

James Joyce in the Genome

James Joyce has been encoded into a synthetic cell!

This isn't the first time Joyce and science have overlapped - in one of my favourite examples, Murray Gell-Mann, one of the physicists who proposed the quark model of elementary particles, named his discovery after a line from Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!".

Recently, the scientists who produced a synthetic cell inserted a Joyce quotation into their genome. The experiment was to copy the code of a natural microbe, and inserting the synthetic genome sequence into a host cell, which would then replicate the synthetic code in each subsequent division. To test this, the scientists placed what they call "watermarks" into the cell - areas of programmed code that do not affect the cell's function, but can be tested for to see if the synthetic genome sequence really did replicate. One such watermark was "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!".

The full quotation, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man(Ch. 4) reads: "Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!"

One of my favourite parts about this article on the synthetic genome is that it describes how Joyce's quotation is slowly changing - with each cell division, tiny DNA slippages cause mutations in the cell's genome sequence, including the watermarks. While these small mutations have not affected the function of the cells, they have forever altered Joyce's words. The author of the article states that soon, the quotation will not even be recognizable. I like to think that Joyce would appreciate this homage more than any which carved his words in stone, or set them in indelible ink. Joyce himself described errors as "portals of discovery" and in this case, when read through the scientific progress of this new synthetic cell, this remains true. Joyce's texts are hardly static as it is, and I believe that he would like to see his words further altered as more people play with them, interpret them, and use them in their own ways.

Thanks to Cole for alerting me to this story.

Joyce in Comics

Joyce references in internet comics are my FAVOURITE. Here are a few appearances (click on the links to see the full comics):

Hark! a Vagrant

You can find these letters here but seriously, you might not want to read them! I was alone in my room, in my house when I read them and I was as embarrassed as if I was reading them aloud to an auditorium of exes. Kate Beaton is not kidding.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

James Joyce in Sgt Pepper Album Cover

James Joyce is hiding in the Beatles' Sgt Pepper album cover!

Whose is the face hiding below Bob Dylan?

It's James Joyce! Apparently, in the original test photos for the shoot captured the images at different angles, and you can see his whole face (bottom right).

Thanks to The Lennon Prophecy and The Sgt Pepper Album Cover Shoot Dissected for the images and the discovery.

Stephen Colbert Reads From Ulysses in Vancouver

During the Olympics, Stephen Colbert and I switched places (he came to Vancouver to tape during the Olympics, while I was in New York finding Finnegans Wake mosaics) but that he brought Ulysses to my city!

At the Irish House downtown, he asked the crowd "Who wants to celebrate Irish culture?" After cheers from the audience, he pulled out a copy of Ulysses and began reading. My favourite part is when he tells them to "get comfortable, this is going to take a little while" and, after he's skipped to the end and read the "yes I said yes I will Yes." he asks the crowd to "break off into discussion groups". Skip to 1.39 in the video below - the sound quality is pretty poor, but Colbert is hilarious!

Finnegans Wake in the New York Subway

In February, my roommate Angie and I went to New York to escape the Vancouver Olympics and also my Joyce thesis. Coming out of the subway station at Bryant Park near Times Square, we saw this quote from Finnegans Wake tiled into the wall.

The text, from Chapter I section 8, reads "Tellmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!"
- Finnegans Wake p. 216