Obsession

I noticed something today. I often check
the index in Ellman’s Joyce bio to see if
Joyce has been through a similar exper-
ience to my own. Part of that is blog
related – wanting to write about something
I’m currently interested in but relating it
to Joyce. But today I remembered those
WWJD people . “What Would Jesus do?”
Could I be doing the same thing, but with
Joyce? Could I be obsessed?

I searched Google for a quiz titled “Are
you Obsessed” but all the quizzes were
topic specific, e.g. Are you obsessed with…
Clay Aiken, physical appearances, weblog
hits, sex.

Finally I found a Harry Potter quiz that
I thought I might be able to use, tweaking
the questions a bit to fit James Joyce.
Some of them were perfect as is:

10. Do you own more than one copy of
the books? Yes

18. Did you wear a costume? Twice

20. Do you find one of the characters
oddly attractive? Absolutely (Bloom)

21. Have you talked your friends into
reading the books? Yes

92. Do you participate in groups dedicated to
stopping such censorship? Yes

96. Have you ever bought overpriced
merchandise from e-bay? Yes

My score was 40% which qualified me as an
obsessed fan, though to my credit, there
were three higher categories that were more
obsessed than I. And actually, my plan is to
end this blog after Bloomsday this year.

No Bloomsday meeting this week due to several
committee members being out of town. I have
been working on the music. Tentatively plans
include: O, You New York Girls, Can't You
Dance the Polka (for the men's choir), Eileen
Aroon, maybe A Nation Once Again if I can get
my British neighbor with the great voice to do it.

I'm considering the Girls Choir making an ap-
pearance but if we go with the party-for-joyce
theme for the whole night I'm not sure how to
fit them in, at least, not in the way I have
planned.

Dylan had the idea to make the entire evening a
skit of a party for Joyce, featuring himself and his
friends and admirers. I like the idea but it puts a
damper on our usual method of everyone develop-
ing and presenting a separate thing, be it poem,
reading, scene or song. Maybe we could have only
the second half be the Joyce party. Hmmm.

Hope we get things settled soon. Time's a wastin'.

Joyce's letter to Heineman (see entry below)
sold for $59,000 at Christies ...

Joyce Auction Tomorrow

The Quentin Keynes Collection of Books and
Manuscripts will be auctioned off tomorrow
and Thursday by Christies’s of London.
Rueters calls this “One of the most significant
collections of manuscripts, books and draw-
ings relating to James Joyce “…One item that’s
expected to bring in big bucks is an early letter
of Joyce’s. Written on September 23, 1905 to a
W. Heinemann offering up Dubliners for
publication. Heinemann passed.

Joyce wrote in the letter: “The book is not a
collection of tourist impressions but an attempt
to represent certain aspects of the life of one of
the European capitals.”

The auction is expected to be quite pricey. For
thenon-millionaires out there, remember: I still
have a rare copy of the limited edition James
Joyce Yearbook for sale. Buddenbrooks is selling
their copy for $800. I’d take half that.

So our first meeting went well. Held at the lovely
Latimer home over a meal of duck and wild rice,
all were in good spirits and everyone got along fine.

There was a good, if muddled, idea of staging a
scene from Joyce's birthday party in 1922 - also
the day he received his first copy of Ulysses - and
having all our Bloomsday pieces evolve from that
event. It was believed that there was a festive
party on that day. I think it was actually a small
dinner celebration at a restaurant but need to
look into it with Mr. Ellman.

Talk also of doing the opening Martello Tower
scene. We meet again next Thursday.

Our first Bloomsday meeting for 2004 will be
this Wednesday evening. I'm looking forward to
it mostly..... I just hope we can keep things civil
and not let egos get in the way.

I've become less tolerant of egomaniacs
lately.

So, I haven't given a lot of thought yet to
the music. I'd like to do a scene featuring
Croppy Boy interspersed with Bloom's lunch
thoughts but not sure how that would come
across.

I usually use songs from all of Joyce's works
but may stick to Ulysses this year in honor
of the 100th anniversary. I'll decide after
I see what the others on the committee
have in mind.

Sean Walsh, Director of the Irish movie
“Bloom” has begun working with Paragon
Film Group to distribute the film (which
has just been nominated for four Irish
Academy Awards). Paragon is looking to contact
universities, museums and Bloomsday presenters
throughout the US in hopes of getting the film
showed in June 2004. If you or your group is
interested contact Scott Bedno at 818-845-7148.
email : info@paragonfilmgroup.com
You can also contact him through the mail at :
Paragon Film Group, LLC
209 East Alameda, #103
Burbank, CA
91502

There's a link to the Bloom website in
my links section.

HIP-HOP JOYCE

Hip-Hop writer CHZA likens Notorious B.I.G.
to James Joyce in his column. You can find it
at Filter Magazine.

“...one astounding, irrevocable truth: That
Biggie Smalls was the modern, Black rein-
carnation of James Joyce.”

CHZA insightfully sums up Mr. B.I.G. (and
Mr. Joyce) with a Sly and the Family Stone
reference: “He’s everyday people documenting
the everyday struggle”.

I don’t know much about B.I.G., but CHZA
and JAJ are off da chain.

I spoke with a friend from Chico's Bloomsday
committee yesterday. She is working on a script
for the opening scene of Ulysses - the tower
scene - which she thinks would be a good scene
for us to do this year.

I think so too, though the three gentlemen she
has in mind to perform are all in their mid-30s
or above. Stephen was 22 in Ulysses.

We'll have our first Bloomsday meeting later this
month. I vascillate between looking forward to it
and dreading it. The meetings can sometimes get
heated and confrontational due to egos. I hate
that part of it.

Damn the Times. I found a great article I’d like
to link to for you or even read myself but the
Times is subscription only.

The title begins:
Stephen Joyce: Protective grandson who
refuses to ...

The article, which ran on Feb 14, 2004, reads:
... his grandson called a press conference in a
pub in Zurich. While most Joyceans celebrate
the author on June 16 — Bloomsday — Stephen
Joyce insists that ...

You have to register AND PAY MONEY
to read the whole article

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.