Dateline 2003 - James Joyce Censored - AGAIN

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."
Stephen Dedalus

A must read article by Jonathon Wallace entitled
DirtyGerty:James Joyce , Censorship and the Net can
be found here. He writes of the censorship trial of the
Little Review after carrying the Nausicaa chapter in their
publication and gives up nauseating information on current
censorship :

“Go into the Austin, Boston or Loudoun County public
libraries and try to access the page of excerpts from Molly
Bloom's soliloquy at http://www.dimensional.com/~randl/
molly.htm. You won't be able to, because the SpaceTime
Portal site is blocked by CyberPatrol and X-Stop. (Its also
blocked by Surfwatch.)

Various other Joyce resources on the Web have been
blocked by CyberPatrol. For some time, you could not
access the Fileroom, a site which summarizes incidents
of censorship around the world... Similarly, you could not
get to the Wiretap server to read Donald Theall's essay
on James Joyce and the Prehistory of Cyberspace.

And X-Stop, the product installed in the Loudoun County
library, blocks a Banned Books page which has the entire
text of Ulysses.”

August 11th, 2003

Finn’s Hotel

Joyce considered "Finn's Hotel" as a title for Finnegans
Wake. Finn's was the hotel where Nora worked as a
chambermaid when James Joyce first made her acquain-
tance. Finn's Hotel still stands in Dublin and you can see
a photo of it (thanks to The Modern Word) here.

August 10th, 2003

Dante

Mrs. Riordan from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was
based on Mrs. Conway, a distant relative of John Joyce’s who
lived with the family in Dublin for several years. The children
called her Dante, which was a childish derivation of “Auntie”.

She considered joining the nunnery when she was in her late
20s but her brother died and left her a large sum of money.
So she passed on being a Bride of Christ and instead married
a solemn, bald man who worked at the Bank of Ireland. A few
years afterwards her husband left for South America, taking
most of her fortune with him. The original plan had been for
her to meet him there, but after a few letters between them,
he stopped correspnding with her and she never heard from
him again.

Stanislaus Joyce describes her as the “most bigoted person I
ever met”. In his book My Brother’s Keeper, Stannie tells of a
morning when he and James were walking with Dante and
they passed a house where a small coffin was being carried
out the front door. They could hear the hysterical mother
screaming and crying inside. The nursemaid of the dead baby
talked to Dante and explained that the mother was distraught
because the child had not been baptized. As Dante and the two
boys walked home, she explained , “So now you see what
happens. That child can never go to Heaven. Now you see what
comes of not baptizing immediately”.