Ulysses as you've never Seen...

Can anyone truly doubt that had the technology existed, James Joyce would have written Ulysses as an illustrated web comic?

I didn't think so... To our great relief, Robert Berry has done a brilliant job adapting Joyce's tome to web-comic form at Ulyesses, "seen". It is worth every minute you spend with it.

Ulysses meets Twitter...

Two lovers of Joyce's brilliant Ulysses have taken chapter 10, "Wandering Rocks" and adapted it to Twitter. They chose the chapter because it follows 19 Dubliners going about their daily activities.

...have dubbed their performance "Twittering Rocks," a play on the chapter's title that could also mean Twittering is awesome. They have registered 54 of the novel's key characters as Twitter users, and Bogost built a software program that tweets their first-person utterances at the correct moments in the chapter.

See, e.g. http://twitter.com/leopoldbloom; http://twitter.com/StephenDedalus

Pilgrimage...

Well, as we wander back toward Maine, we stopped to make a visit to the Rosenbach Museum & Library. It is truly one of the sacred places of the book world (at least of my book world). We took the tour with a lovely docent and had a great time. I have a feeling we will be back soon, as I would really like to see the Dracula event they are planning.

There are two lovely row houses on the same block currently on the market. It would be far too much fun...though I just heard that the Bauman's are renovating a house on the block already. In short, between the RM&L, Bauman's (and others), the Mudder, and the Phil. Library, it is really and amazing book town. Sorry so brief, still on the road...urgh. With luck, photos and cogency might follow...

Evidence of a tainted youth...

My father just forwarded this image, circa 1969. I am two years old and already attempting to pull Ulysses off the shelf for a quick read. I thought my downfall was writing a book report on Finnegan's Wake at 15 (cyclically and using Joyce's style/language).

It begs an interesting question, are bibliophiles born or taught? Both, I think.

To tie back to the dealbreaker/dealmaker post, this reminded me of going to an acquaintance's house one, long ago. He was a very strange egg, very serious code monkey and math genius. His bookshelves were packed with math and programing volumes with one exception. The *only* fiction in his house (and out of approx. 1000 volumes) was one long shelf, dead center, with a copy of pretty much everything Joyce produced between boards. It was, of course, arranged chronologically...as I recall, "Holy Office" through "Finnegan's Wake" with the three volume set of Joyce's letters finishing the shelf. Absolutely and completely changed my opinion of him...we have been friends ever since.

How does it feel to be a genius, Sir?

TiL made my day with the following:

On this day in 1928 Sylvia Beach hosted a dinner party in order that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who "worshipped James Joyce, but was afraid to approach him," might do so. In her Shakespeare and Company memoir Beach delicately avoids describing what happened, although she perhaps suggests an explanation: "Poor Scott was earning so much from his books that he and Zelda had to drink a great deal of champagne in Montmartre in an effort to get rid of it." According to Herbert Gorman, another guest and Joyce's first biographer, Fitzgerald sank down on one knee before Joyce, kissed his hand, and declared: "How does it feel to be a great genius, Sir? I am so excited at seeing you, Sir, that I could weep." As the evening progressed, Fitzgerald "enlarged upon Nora Joyce's beauty, and, finally, darted through an open window to the stone balcony outside, jumped on to the eighteen-inch-wide parapet and threatened to fling himself to the cobbled thoroughfare below unless Nora declared that she loved him."

... Joyce was alarmed at [Fitzgerald's] falling-angel side -- "That young man must be mad," he later told Beach. "I'm afraid he'll do himself an injury some day" -- but he handled the American exuberance with Old World charm. When Fitzgerald sent him a copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man a few days later, asking for a dedication, Joyce sent back this note: "Herewith is the book you gave me, signed, and I am adding a portrait of the artist as a once young man with the thought of your much obliged but most pusillanimous guest."

I have just spent several pleasing minutes drinking coffee and contemplating which limb (or, possibly, two) I would forgo to possess a copy of Portrait inscribed by Joyce to FSF. And happy belated Bloomsday. I have clearly been too busy.

An importand day...(far more than my slow crawl toward death)

Finnegans Wake was published on this day in 1939.

I am passing out. O bitter ending! I'll slip away before they're up. They'll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms, I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs! Two more. Onetwo moremens more. So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I'll bear it to me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he'd come from Arkangels, I sink I'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There's where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone at last a loved a long the
~James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939, IV

I read FW for the first time when I was about 15 at my Grandfather's mildly malicious suggestion. I wrote a book report about it, using (to the best of my stunted ability) Joyce's language and cyclical style. Years later the English teacher I wrote it for told me that they had read the first two pages, understood *what* I had done, but didn't understand any of it...gave me an A+ and moved on. Somewhere, it is still kicking around...I need to find it and see if it is as horrid as I think it probably was...

I quoted the above (near the end of the novel) because it so summed up my grandfather's death. My grandfather was a lay Joyce scholar (born and raised in Belfast, Ireland and a great lover of Irish lit.). He woke one morning, did not wake my grandmother. He went into the kitchen and got a glass from the cabinet, got poured himself a glass of orange juice and returned the container to the fridge. He sat down at the kitchen table and died. My grandmother woke a hour or so later, went into the kitchen and found my grandfather sitting at the table with a full glass of juice in front of him, dead. Leave it to my grandfather to have such a wonderfully Joycean death.

Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!