Mr.Yeats

Happy birthday William Butler Yeats
and Tyler Nolan.










James Joyce tried to emulate Yeats not in
writing but in music making.

One of Joyce's early ideas was to be a
traveling minstrel, sort of a 20th century
O’Carolan. He had heard that Yeats had recently
puchased a hand made lute. Here’s how he
explained it in a letter to Gogarty written
June 3rd, 1904:
“My idea for July and August is this - to get
Dolmetsch to make me a lute and to coast the
south of England from Falmouth to Margate,
singing old English songs”

And he told Padraic Colum that the tour would be
“personally conducted, like the Emperor Nero’s
tour in Greece.”

The plan didn’t work out. Dolmetsch, the one who had
made a similar instrument for Yeats, was hesitant
to make another one. He told Joyce that making a
lute would be highly expensive and “I could hardly
say when it would be finished. The lute is moreover
extremely difficult to play and very troublesome to
keep in order.” He recommended Joyce use a spinet
or harpsichord. Joyce gave up on the idea instead.

A Good Day at Work for Ms. Beach

The first Frenchman to purchase a copy
of Ulysses was Andre Gide. (Actually, by
purchase, I mean fill in an order blank at
Shakespeare and Co to receive a copy of
the book when it arrived. )









The first American: Ernest Hemingway,
one of Sylvia Beach’s best customers.









Later that same day, Ezra Pound personally
delivered a subscription blank filled in
by W.B. Yeats and put in his order.









Imagine Andre Gide, Ernest Hemingway
and Ezra Pound all coming in your book-
store on the same day. That’s what I call
a good day at work.

Early Bloomsday in Lisbon

PORTUGAL’S IRISH Association holds Joyce
festivities on June 6th including a reading
from Ulysses by Joycean scholar, David Norris.

Admission is free and the evening will start with
a reception hosted by Vincent Herlihy of the Irish
Embassy. The performance will start at 7.30pm
and will finish by 9pm.

The Irish association is located at Casa Fernando
Pessoa, Rua Coelho da rocha N˚16, Lisbon.

Ulysses Reviewed

UK paper The Independent ran a review of
Ulysses this weekend entitled:

Book of a Lifetime: Ulysses by James
Joyce

Chosen by Michael Horovitz who wrote:

“For liberation of language, imagery,
punctuation and sound effects; for stream
of subconscious and shifting points of
view; for dream realities and inner
monologues; for the incorporation of every
extreme of parody, play, epiphany, and
uncensored speech or thought, in a
wondrously ebullient wordhoard that
celebrates the continuity of 3,000 years
of literature. “

Today is Bloomsday! (If you live in Spokane
Washington and have no idea who James Joyce
is.) Very sad.

Molly Bloom and Her Classmates

Someone named their daughter Molly Bloom!
Well done! Not only that, but Molly goes
to school with a number of classmates
whose names would fit right into one of
Joyce’s works including:
Justice Snickles, Kelly O’Keefe, Olivia Goode,
Brittany Casino and Caroline Augustiniak -
all of whom play on the girls basketball team.

A Win For Scholars!

Congratulations to Schloss and her legal team! Schloss fought notoriously tight fisted Stephen Joyce and won the rights to use the excerpts she needed. More here.

And the IRE's take here.

Here's an interesting review of The
Departed which discusses the film's minor Joyce
connection.

An excerpt:


" Second, one of the key secondary characters
in the film, played by Mark Wahlberg, is named
Dignam. As befitting an ironic literary allusion,
Dignam, whose funeral is one of the central plot
points of Joyce’s Ulysses, turns out in The
Departed to essentially be the last man standing..
... Aside from the theme of losing one’s soul (or
the secular equivalent), the only connection
between “The Dead” and The Departed seems to be
that everyone is very Irish. Either Monahan wanted
to re-imagine Finnegans Wake as an American crime
epic, or he mistook James Joyce for James Ellroy."

"I cited the Book of Joshua because
of the grotesque thirst for blood of
our own Old Testament deity--far
uglier than anything in the Koran
(which is simply stream-of-
consciousness nonsense--Mohammed
should sue James Joyce for
plagiarism). 


A Quote from retired Army Lt.
Colonel Ralph Peters in a 911
Symposium that can be found
here, if one wanted to read such
a thing.

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 acquaintance. Finn's Hotel
still stands in Dublin. (Photo here thanks
to The Modern Word)

A big day to day in legal history. It’s
the day that the case of United States
vs. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James
Joyce was found not to be obscene by the
Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
(Judge Manton dissenting). For those of
you with Westlaw of Lexis access, here’s
the citation: 72 F.2d 705 (1934)

For those of you without, here’s
a bit more information and an excerpt:

But many passages show the trained hand
of an artist, who can at one moment
adapt to perfection the style of an
ancient chronicler,and at another become
a veritable personification of Thomas
Carlyle. In numerous places there are
found originality, beauty, and distinc-
tion. The book as a whole is not porno-
graphic, and,while in not a few spots it
is coarse, blasphemous, and obscene, it
does not, our opinion, tend to promote
lust.

There's an interesting article here
that addresses (AGAIN) the ongoing troubles
with Joyce copyright, particularly as involves
Stephen Joyce. Excerpt below:

In 1994, Stephen learned that Carol Shloss, an
English professor at Stanford, was working on a
biography of James Joyce's mentally ill daughter -
Stephen's aunt Lucia - who died in 1982. Shloss
was exploring the theory that there was a link
between Lucia's madness and the language of
Finnegans Wake - and was also probing possible
unsavoury explanations for Lucia's condition.

Th 20th International James Joyce Symposium
is being held in Hungary this year. In
honor of that event the Ujilpotvarosi
Klub Galeria is having a Joyce exhibit with the
translated title of "James Joyce - Tender Exhibition".
Isn't that lovely?

WHAT TO DO??

My second Bloomsday out of California is coming
up and I'm looking for suggestions as to how
to spend the big day. After ten years as music
director of the Chico Bloomsday, I ended up
going to Portland last year. One of my favorite
people in the world lives there and it ended up
being a good distraction. But this year...what
to do? Can't make it here.


Your input is welcome

Irish Copyright Act foils Stephen Joyce

The Republic of Ireland's Copyright Act was
(hastily) introduced when James Joyce's
grandson, Stephen Joyce, objected to the
Irish Government's intention to display 500
sheets of the famous author's written work -
which they had purchased in 2001 - in the
National Library's Ulysses exhibition, as
the Joyce family still held the copyright
to James's work and that would be in breach.
This 2004 Act now allows the Government to
exhibit James Joyce's work without legal problems.

Read the whole thing here.

The National Library of Ireland acquired
new Joyce papers this month. Among them, the
handwritten beginnings of what would become
Finnegans Wake. Read more here.

After a hiatus of a few months, I tried to post
last month in honor of Joyce's birthday.

I was prevented from doing so by technical
problems with my host server.

So a belated Joyce birthday greetings to
all. Nice to have access again

test

Birthday Alert



Joyce's birthday is coming up this Thursday
(Feb 2). Must think of something special to do
that day to celebrate ... Call in sick perhaps?
Input welcome.

Found this today:

"Joyce to the World - a celebration of
Bloomsday. A documentary celebrating
James Joyce's Ulysses, the greatest
novel of the 20th century that no one's
actually read. This DVD format will
play in all regions worldwide.

Please inquire about discounted pricing
for bookstores and classes, and
screening fees for larger events.
E-mail: screenings@joycetotheworld.com"

I thought the "no one's actually read"
a bit odd.