Starting to think about Bloomsday 2004 in Chico.
Today I took a look at 2002’s list of song possibilities .

* indicates songs I ended up using

Bloomsday possibilities:

Girls choir: Rings on fingers*-fw or harrigan-fw

Mens choir-mcnamara’s band-fw
i’m a rambling wreck (son of a Gombolier)-fw

Kelly
cruiskeen lawn-u/fw

KB - little brown jug-fw

Kim -sweet rosie o grady *-p/fw

???
ballynure ballad
all around my hat
bonny labouring boy-fw
croppy boy-u
de profundis-fw
dixie-u/fw
for he’s a jolly good fellow-d/dead/fw
goodnight ladies-fw
marble halls-d
o you new york girls, can you dance the polka-fw
molly brannigan - u/fw/j
toot toot tootsie*-fw
turkey in the straw-fw
yes we have no banana- fw

Calico is the name of the cotton which was
sometimes used to tie the wrists of those
who are taken off to mental institutions.

Calico is also the name of a new play written
by Michael Hastings. Currently playing in
London, here’s a brief description from
a ticket selling website

“Calico...

By Michael Hastings,
Directed by Edward Hall

1928 - The Paris apartment of James Joyce and
his family. A world of secret lives and secret
dreams.

A young student named Samuel Beckett arrives
and an unusual love begins.

CALICO is a fictional story inspired by fact. It is
a captivating and exuberant play about a family
in crisis. Scrupulously researched, Calico mixes
sadness and great compassion to explore love
almost to the brink of insanity.”

I have to decide by March 1st if I will be
attending the James Joyce Conference in
Dublin this year. I’m supposed to present
at the conference (New York State of Mind:
James Joyce and the Music of Tin Pan Alley),
something that made me feel quite proud.
But I’m entering my third month of
unemployment and haven’t the funds to
pay for the necessities of life, much less a
week in Dublin. So I’m adjusting to the
fact that unless a miracle happens, I won’t
be going. Just another ripple in my
depression pond.

My current state of mind has led me to
thoughts of Joyce and depression. I think
the worst years for him were his later years
in Zurich. His eyes were getting progress-
ively worse, the reaction to Finnegans Wake
was not what he had hoped and it looked
like Lucia would have to spend the rest of her
days in an institution.

I guess I shouldn’t complain.

Robert Spoo has an interesting theory on Ulysses
copyright in the US: Ulysses lacks a US copyright
and is therefore in the public domain. So while
people in Dublin will be unable to utter words
from Joyce’s works this Bloomsday, Americans
can have at it.

Here’s an excerpt:

Under that law (U.S. copyright law in force
in 1922), Joyce would have had to deposit
a copy of the book at the copyright office
within two months of publication in France,
and then, within another four months, have
the book printed on American soil by a U.S.
printer. Spoo says Joyce did not meet these
requirements, thus relinquishing his novel to
the public domain. It was transformed from a
private monopoly into a public resource, and
the benefits once enjoyed by the creator passed
to the user.

......He points out that in a sworn deposition in
Paris in a case involving an American publisher
who had printed a pirated version of Ulysses
in 1926, Joyce was asked if he had ever tried to
secure an American copyright. Spoo said Joyce
answered under oath that he had not.”

I’ve written about Stephen Joyce and his
greedy ways before in this blog. He’s on
the warpath again, this time in regards
to the big 100th anniversary celebration
planned for Dublin this summer.

Here’s an excerpt from an article
Mondo Sismondo sent me on SJ :

The city has planned a three-month festival
of celebrations costing about £700,000.

Unfortunately, the only living direct
descendant of Joyce has promised to disrupt
the festival by banning any public readings
of his work.

Stephen Joyce, the writer’s grandson, has
informed the Irish government he will sue for
breach of copyright if any recitations take place.
The septuagenarian who lives in Paris, has made
millions of pounds from the proceeds of copy-
right of Joyce’s work and from suing for its
infringement......

The Joyce estate has warned other organisations
planning to use Joyce’s words as part of their
celebrations to tread carefully. These include the
Irish National Library, Irish national television,
RTÉ, and the James Joyce Centre in Dublin.

Happy Valentine’s Day

“....... anyhow its done now once and for all
with all the talk of the world about it people
make its only the first time after that its just
the ordinary do it and think no more about it
why cant you kiss a man without going and
marrying him first you sometimes love to
wildly when you feel that way so nice all over
you you cant help yourself I wish some man
or other would take me sometime when hes
there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing
like a kiss long and hot down to your soul
almost paralyses you .......”

The famous “dark, gaunt house” at
15 Usher’s Island has been rescued
from deterioration just in time for the
100th anniversary of Bloomsday.
Purchased by Joyce fan Brendan Kilty
a few years ago, the four story house
was in major disrepair.

“ The top floor had been torn down to
save its then owners the trouble of
patching up a leaking roof, while the
back wall was bowed to the point of
near collapse.

"We removed two buckets of syringes
from the ground floor alone -- it was
a total squat," said Kilty, who set
about transforming what he considers
one of the world's premier literary
addresses.

Check out the entire article at Reuters.

Have recently discovered Savoy Comics and
their series of Hard Core Horror comics which
include James Joyce as a regular character. He
is described in one review as “mystically affected
sadist James Joyce”. (Surely Joyce was closer to
being a masochist than a sadist...)

I haven’t gotten a good grasp on the Lord
Horror series yet but here’s an excerpt
from a description:

"But the real shit started to fly in 1989,
when Savoy published Dave Britton's
own surreal and picaresque book Lord
Horror, a Burroughsian, Swiftian satire
recounting the exploits of various persons
in the form of distorted caricatures of
actual historical persons such as Cosimo
Matassa (who ran the New Orleans studio
where all the great black Rock'n'Roll
records of the '50s were cut: Little Richard,
Fats Domino, etc.), Hitler, and the
eponymous British wartime traitor 'Lord
Haw Haw'—William Joyce, here embodied
as Lord Horror."

February 2

It’s James Joyce’s Birthday (2/2/82)

It’s also Groundhog Day, St Bridgets Day
and Candlemas.

And the birthday of:

1650 - Nell Gwynne, actress, royal mistress,
1895 - George Halas, American football player, coach,
co-founder of the National Football League,
1901 - Jascha Heifetz, musician,
1905 - Ayn Rand, author,
1923 - James Dickey, poet, author,
1937 - Tom Smothers, comedian,
1942 - Graham Nash, musician
1947 - Farrah Fawcet, actress
1947 - Melanie, singer
1977 - Shakira, singer

Have recently been exploring John Cage’s
connection to James Joyce.

--Can’t afford this: “John Cage Performs
James Joyce”, a VHS going for $150 on
Amazon.com but imagine it would be quite
something to see.

- Missed this in 2002 at Berkeley:
Cage’s “Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce,
Eric Satie: An Alphabet”

- Found the following on the Modern Word
website, an excellent Joyce site:

John Cage (1912-1992)
John Cage was an American composer who
forever changed the face of modern music.
A musical revolutionary, Cage believed,
among other things, that chance played
just as an important role in our life as design,
and that music was to be found everywhere
-- it was all in the ear of the beholder. His
music was iconoclastic, often difficult, always
surprising, and probed the limits of human
imagination and preconceptions.

"The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs" --
(1942) A song adapted from the "Isobel"
passage from Finnegans Wake.

Roaratorio -- (1979) This large and chaotic
work incorporates phrases from Finnegans
Wake into a tapestry of noise, voice, song,
and Irish traditional music.

Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans
Wake -- (1979) The "libretto" of the above
work, Roaratorio. Spoken by John Cage.

Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Eric Satie:
An Alphabet -- (1982) A radio play featuring
James Joyce as a character.

"Nowth Upon Nacht" -- (1984) A song with
lyics directly adapted from Finnegans Wake.

On January 13, 1941, James Joyce died,
following an operation for a perforated
duodenal ulcer. Below are excerpts from
the NY Times obituary, or you can read
the whole thing here if you don’t mind
taking the time to register.

January 13, 1941
OBITUARY
James Joyce Dies; Wrote 'Ulysses'
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Associated Press
James Joyce, June 1939
URICH, Switzerland, Monday, Jan 13- James
Joyce, Irish author whose "Ulysses" was the
center of one of the most bitter literary
controversies of modern times, died in a
hospital here early today despite the efforts
of doctors to save him by blood transfusions.
He would have been 59 years old Feb. 2.

Joyce underwent an intestinal operation
Saturday afternoon at the Schwesternhaus
von Rotenkreuz Hospital. For a time he
appeared to be recovering. Only yesterday
his son reported him to have been cheerful
and apparently out of danger.

During the afternoon, however, the writer
suffered a sudden relapse and sank rapidly.
He died at 2:15 A.M. (8:15 P.M., Eastern
Standard time).

His wife and son were at the hospital when
he died..... (note: Nora & Stephen actually
arrived at the hospital after Joyce died.
He died alone.)

.....Was Born in Dublin

The writer was born Feb. 2, 1882, in Dublin,
Ireland, the son of John Stanislaus Joyce
(The Simon Dedalus of "Ulysses" whom Bloom
hears singing in the Ormond bar) and Mary
Murray Joyce. His father supposedly had one
of the finest tenor voices in Ireland. James
Joyce had an equally fine voice.....

Below is a beautiful painting of Joyce by
Pedro Mozsi, a Czech Romany Gypsy
now living and working as a painter and
illustrator in Broome. You can read his
James Joyce story here.

FOR SALE - My copy of A James Joyce Yearbook,
edited and with a foreword by Maria Jolas, Paris
Transition Press 1949. In fine condition with
original glassine wrappers. First edition, limited
to 1000 numbered copies only. Illustrated with
photographs and manuscript facsimiles, errata
slip bound in rear. Currently, another copy of
this book is being offered by Buddenbrooks for
$800.

Hate to let it go but economic circumstances
make it necessary - to a good home only.

Use the email link above to contact me if
interested. Here’s more information, gathered
from the internet:

A James Joyce Yearbook

Scarce, especially with the original publisher's
glassine wrapper. Despite the ambitious title of
"Yearbook," this was the only issue ever
published. Includes Stuart Gilbert's article,
"Sketch of a Scenario of Anna Livia Plurabelle,"
as well as articles such as "Last Meeting with
Joyce" by Heinrich Straumann, "In Memory of
Joyce" by Paul Léon, "Recollections of James
Joyce" by Phillipe Soupault, "The Finn Cycle" by
Clémence Ramnoux, and others.

-----

And more here:
In 1949, Maria Jolas and her Transition
Press published an extraordinary book called
the James Joyce Yearbook. History buffs and
Paris expat enthusiasts instantly acknowledge
the role that "transition" contributed to 20th
Century literature.

Hermione Lee reviews Carol Loeb Schloss’s
new book about Lucia Joyce here.

Here’s an excerpt from this interesting
review - two actually:

“ 'Lucia Joyce': No She Said No” :

“I quote so much because this sort of fervid
glop is served up on many pages. It is a
rhetoric that damages the book's credibility,
making it read more like an exercise in wish
fulfillment than a biography.......

......The best feature of Shloss's book is its
vivid, informed description of these experi-
mental dance groups in 1920's Europe, and
her account of how Lucia came into contact
with modernism and surrealism while her
father was writing the ''Wake.''

I did NOT get this book for Christmas, should
anyone be wondering.

The Punishment Book at Clongowes was
where the Jesuits kept track of all the
pandyings and other punishments meted
out to students. Bruce Bradley, author of
James Joyce’s Schooldays, searched through
Clongowes archives and found the Punishment
Book for the 1880s. Three pandyings of James
Joyce are listed including one on the 14th of
March 1889, when Joyce received four strokes
for the rare offense of “vulgar language”.
Joyce was seven years old.

Christmastime - A good time to cover the dinner
scene in Portrait or The Dead, but I imagine
if you’re reading this blog you know all about
both of those Christmas’s.

So here’s a piece of trivia:
James Joyce met Oliver St John Gogarty
on Dec 24th in 1902.

You can find a photo of Gogarty (aka Buck
Mulligan) here.

My opinion of Gogarty changed after I found out
about his involvement with Michael Collins. More
about this in my July 28th entry.

I found this quote here.

"The only demand I make of my reader," Joyce
once told an interviewer, "is that he should
devote his whole life to reading my works."

sorry for not posting.
down with the flu...
way down

Joyce's Places

Jorn Barger has a wonderful page on all
the places Joyce lived, with a numbered
map and information such as:

“Primary cities: Dublin (1882-1902), Paris
(1902-03), Dublin (1903-04), Pola (1904-05),
Trieste (1905-06), Rome (1906-07), Trieste
(1907-15), Zurich (1915-19), Trieste (1919-20),
Paris (1920-1939), Zurich (1940-41)”

And this generalization:

“- Youth (1882-1904): Ireland, with rare jaunts.
- Impoverished exile (1904-20): centers on
northern Italy
- Wealthy exile (1920-31): centers on northern
France and London
- Depressed exile (1932-41): centers on
Switzerland”

That Jorn Barger; what would we do without him? See
the whole lovely thing here.

In Finnegans Wake, the number 1132 appears
in each chapter in one way or another. In his
“Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake”, Campbell
attributes the use of this number as follows:
the number of the fall is 32 (The law of falling
bodies=32 feet per second); the number 11
represents renewal and redemption.

Later, Campbell changed his mind. While reading
Romans, he came across a verse that epitomized
what he felt Joyce had in mind in Finnegans Wake:
“For God has consigned all men to disobedience,
that he may show his mercy to all”. Campbell
thought - Oh I must write this down, this is
exactly what Joyce was talking about- and write
down “Romans, Chapter 11, verse 32”. Then it hit
him. He subsequently believed that Joyce had this
chapter/verse in mind when he worked 1132 into
Finnegans Wake.