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