Paul Murray's "The Mark and the Void": Book Review

An Irish novelist, Paul, has an offer for Claude Martingale, a French research analyst working for a Dublin investment bank. Why not feature in his next book, depicting, a century after Ulysses, a citizen's everyday life? After all, Paul reasons, the "humanity in the machine" exists in such offices and towers, and "we're all being narrated" within not the printed page, but on screens by our media.

So begins Paul Murray's The Mark and the Void. His third novel continues the quirks of An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003) and the experiments of Skippy Dies (2010). The entrance of an author into his creation is not new. Fans of the film Adaptation, or the satire At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien, will recognize tropes as the inventor finds himself outwitted by those who resist his machinations. To keep such a tale convincing, a writer must convince us of his control over his satire.

Whether this works or not for The Mark and the Void challenges the reader. Paul through Claude and his colleagues at the Bank of Torabundo tries to capture the "narrow minds and broad hearts" of today's Dubliners, often immigrants to a city they make over and live within as if any other. Stripped of much of the local color that enlivened Joyce's epic, Murray's city has had its Monto "Nighttown" red-light quarter overshadowed and obliterated by the high rise mercantile powers and corporate multinationals. This context, after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger boom and during the austerity cuts imposed upon Greece and Ireland, darkens the sheen of those symbols of capitalism and speculation.

Complicit in these schemes, Torabundo's employees transform. They realize that business' true purpose aims "to replace the shifting, medieval labyrinths of love with the broad, sanitized avenues of materialism," rational reordering of the "lightless, involuted city of the self." Leopold's Bloom finds his concerns outmoded. Paul's Claude hears his calculating author argue for a shift to the web. There, the novel will be replaced "to preserve the illusion," where one can fall in love, and stay in a story forever. Paul tries to entice Claude into investing not in his next novel, but in a novel invention. Myhotswaitress.com attempts to provide a lonely searcher with a way to follow the waitress of his choice, by surveillance and by catering to his dalliances, discreetly and at a safe, tempting, distance.

A spin off of Cyrano de Bergerac's courting through another voice enters this narration. But Paul Murray appears as restless as his own stand-in, Paul. The Mark and the Void tries to take on the ethics of the gift economy, the plight of Dublin's poor as "zombies" haunting the banks who did them in, and how prostitution has morphed between Joyce's time and ours into servicing the rich and the greedy. Next to the Famine memorial by the river Liffey, paid for by wealthy sponsors, this novel reminds us that the banks still loom high. There, "the night sky is reflected and intensified in the louring windows of the corporate towers, as though they were mining darkness for the air, storing it within them." This passage demonstrates the force of Murray's prose, as it dissects Dublin's dire vista.

Havoc ensues late on. But the depiction of the River Liffey about to overspill those concrete banks, under the stolid gaze of the banks above, fails to convince, and Murray keeps piling on the intricacies of banking that lack a punch on the page. Claude and Paul want the Irish to succeed, but will they?

Near the end, a German colleague opines that given the clerical domination of Ireland for so long, the natives "already believe they are born in debt, a terrible sin, which they can never pay in full. A people like this is more comfortable wrapped in chains." The value of Murray's novel lies in the unsparing gaze he casts, through his alter ego Paul and through his narrator Claude, into the frail shell surrounding the glitz and the shimmer of Dublin. While it rambles and spins about in a manner not unfamiliar to readers of such self-referential and many-layered narratives, The Mark and the Void reminds audiences of the human costs beneath the rise to fortune of a few manipulators of our money. (1-7-16 to the New York Journal of Books)

"James Joyce in Context": Book Review

During most of the last century, critics presented James Joyce as above the cares of the world, devoted to his difficult craft, before and after his self-imposed exile from Ireland. Scholars promoted a view of Joyce as a troubled genius increasingly removed from daily life by his obsessive linguistic experiments. He lived in Trieste, Paris and Zurich many years, but he never escaped the streets and sounds of his native Dublin.

So goes received wisdom. Challenging this notion of a disengaged artist indifferent to his later surroundings, John McCourt edits essays from thirty-two like-minded academics who study James Joyce in Context. McCourt admits that Joyce "seems to us today a little less original and God-like, a little more accidental in his actions and choices, a more human author, happy to lift and to cut-and-paste carefully sifted material from a huge variety of sources before making it indelibly his own, a writer who was very much part of his world."

Starting with contributions on the composition history of his major works, on his biographers and his letters, this compendium places Joyce within our critical reception of his fiction and his facts. The dominance, Finn Fordham argues, of Richard Ellmann's 1959 biography endures fifty-odd years later. Fordham fears that tome limits Joyce studies to a specialist and "even isolationist" environment. He compares the few biographies extant to a "cityscape conglomeration" where Ellmann's structure looms tallest, even if it is not altogether still inhabitable. That slowly decaying monolith rises over a half-vibrant, half-moribund scene "so ripe for redevelopment but hindered from it indefinitely."

This essay must have been submitted before Gordon Bowker's 2011 biography appeared. Still, Fordham's remarks remain true. Joseph Brooker in his entry on "Post-War Joyce" concurs. Ellmann's monumental effort made that biographer "a tribal elder, a unique point of reference" resisting change.

In the second section of this anthology, various schools of theory and critical reception examine how we can interpret Joyce's works with more flexibility than his major biographer may have done years ago. Marian Eide targets Molly Ivers in "The Dead" to peer into how Joyce treated gender and sexuality. Eide's focus highlights her well-chosen case study. Eide avoids taking on too much in too little space. Each of these contributors has only a few out of these four-hundred-plus pages to devote to a particular theme, after all. In similarly brisk fashion, Jolanda Wawrzyca reports on Joyce's many varieties of translation exercises during his career. A lively look at Joyce's place within world literature enhances Eric Bloom's chapter. Other essays, as found in too many an academic volume, slow appreciation. Jargon and cant thicken. Critics dominate, not Joyce. Theory nudges aside insight.

Sean Latham repeats Fordham's frustration over another obstacle that impedes practical progress by Joyceans. The Joyce estate imposes strict standards on which post-1922 major works can be quoted. Deeper investigation of Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, correspondence and archived material is stymied. However, as Latham and Cheryl Herr demonstrate, media culture now and material culture in Joyce's era complement each other as methods to investigate the everyday milieu joining author with readers.

Herr's deftly chronicled observations of "engagement and disengagement" within Joyce and his characters open the third part of McCourt's collection. Background and historical topics comprise more than half of the book's chapters. Not only Dublin, Paris and Trieste, but British literary, Greek and Roman culture gain attention. Medicine and music receive scrutiny, along with modernisms and languages. Newspapers join philosophy, theology and politics as subjects relevant for Joyce's texts.

The variety of frameworks through which these contributors pore over Joyce and his works enable a reader familiar with this author's texts to delve deeper into current scholarship. By allowing Joyce to be more securely placed within his own life and times, James Joyce in Context shows how the writer emerged from his influences. It reminds us how he influenced the literary and cultural realms of modernism. While some entries may discourage the casual inquirer, others, all from experts, entice.

Science and the cinema wrap this up. This volume concludes with sex. How one chapter connects to the other within this final section eludes me. Yet, the appeal of Joyce, far beyond the few who are lucky enough to make a living pursuing the mysteries of his verbal labyrinths, endures. Christine Froula reminds us that Ulysses is being read today in Tehran. She footnotes a sly explanation. The ban on this novel was lifted in 1999 by the Islamic regime. Its "more objectionable passages" can be printed in neither English nor Farsi. As a fluent Italian speaker who taught his native language to Berlitz students in Italy, Joyce would have relished the irony of this Persian proviso. It permits those passages, which have incited censorship so often over the past century, to be printed,if only in Italian.
(Spectrum Culture 6/8/15; Amazon US 6/13/15)

David Goodway's "Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow": Book Review

This fills a need among not only literary critics but political historians. It's an in-depth survey of eleven British-centered thinkers, most of whom attempted to put their written theories and favored tracts into practice. They pursued their commitment to varieties of left-libertarian and anarchist thought--always as individuals, but more often sympathetic to a syndicalist-union or especially libertarian-communist (as in common grassroots management of the resources we hold in common and the means of sharing them equitably) system. Goodway burrows in, and his notes show a meticulous analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of not only the main subjects of each chapter, but of their colleagues, foes, and critics. He calls to task a lazy scholar, he cites a conflicting tidbit in one account that clashes with another's assertion, and his attention to such detail is astonishing. It proves how seriously he takes this enterprise.

Yet, it moves along, given the generally hefty subject matter and the need to cover biography, literary themes, political clashes, economic models, religious and secular contexts, and philosophical digressions of the past century, quite well. This is not light reading, not should it be. It's important as a guide to how crucial ideas energize thinkers and encourage autonomy. It instructs one in many currents of the British intellectual contributions to an encouragement of a truly liberal individual. He starts with William Morris and the guild socialism of his later career, 1880-1920, and then he moves into the impact of Edward Carpenter, the first of a few whom Goodway champions who are now generally neglected by mainstream culture. It's inspiring to find in Carpenter such an insistence on forging and forcing from one's circumstances the means for personal and social transformation. His gay identity means that much of his contribution is seen retroactively by critics since as filtered accordingly through his necessarily then-somewhat circumspect expression of his sexuality, but the larger concerns, as with Oscar Wilde, remain open to all. Goodway delves into Wilde's anarchist statements and by archival investigation uncovers fresh material for research, no easy feat for an author whom, as he notes, has been scoured by respectively gay rights advocates and English Lit scholars, both of whom, one suspects, often misread his admittedly scattershot essay on socialism.

Socialism often tugs away many who occupy left-libertarian niches here. Those who resisted the allure of the new Soviet and survived suspicion or Red Scares remain sometimes on the fringes, at least as far as the once-celebrated lecturer and author John Cowper Powys. He earns two chapters, and Goodway makes no apologies. Originally issued in 2006, this preceded by a year Morine Krissdóttir's biography (reviewed by me), but Powys' novels ("baggy monsters") and prolific career earn devoted attention herein. So does his individualist anarchism, which for this friend of Emma Goldman retreats from the political platforms erected by most in this collection, and whose works (as with Joyce, who Goodway finds shares Powys' predilection for what he called "ecstasies" and Joyce "epiphanies") can be an acquired taste. Powys demands articulation by a patient critic, as evading (not the first or last herein) facile summation. While he claimed to be a "philosophical anarchist" (as did Joyce, according to Kevin Birmingham's 2014 study [reviewed by me] of the impact of Ulysses on the regimes of state censorship), Powys to Goodway appears more of a sympathizer with a delayed encouragement of anarchism as an ideal but an impracticable one for the present time. Powys retreated into a personal stance of defiance. This is what earns Goodway's attention and deep focus.

Herbert Read's similarly long career was even more diverse, as art criticism channeled his talents along with literature and politics. WWI shifted this medal-winning recipient soon after into pacifism: "The whole war was fought for rhetoric--fought for historical phrases and actual misery, fought by politicians and generals and with human flesh and blood, fanned by false and artificially created mob passions..." (loc. 4508 qtd.). One finds when reading Read here a man able to express ideas precisely.

Pacifism gets a separate chapter, if a brief one. Akin to George Orwell here profiled, this stance stirred dissent and debate as another conflict loomed, predicted by the Spanish predicament of the anarchists, trapped in Catalonia between fascists and the Stalinists. Both men have been cursed by some who regard their shifts as untenable or signs of weakness, but Goodway while cognizant always of their inconsistencies allows each critic his fair chance for rebuttal, or clarification, over careers that found them taking on many complicated issues. Same for Aldous Huxley, and the uneven nature of his fiction and the wide range of his non-fiction gain him a central stage in this thorough presentation.

Best known for his Joy of Sex, Alex Comfort is lesser known at least abroad and nowadays for his own commitments to libertarian leftism. Along with Huxley and Bertrand Russell, his high-profile stances gained him notoriety as a proto-countercultural icon before the hippies ever marched. On the CND Committee of 100, Comfort's lifelong pacifism guided him into a recognition of anarchism as the best fit for him, a trajectory shared by many in this collection. He avers that "centralized power should be reduced to the practical minimum and individual responsibility increased to the practical maximum" (loc. 6133), a sensible ambition. I'd have liked to find out more about how his sexual affirmations aligned deeper with his libertarian vision, as this Goodway elides.

E.P. Thompson, Marxist historian of Morris and of the English working class, also worked for nuclear disarmament along with these figures. He also taught often, and to many. Like Comfort, he is taken to task for blind spots. While chastising Orwell for premature anti-Stalinism and the like, this pioneering scholar ignores the many points of agreement he had with Orwell and other dissidents.

Christopher Pallis, as with Comfort, combined a prestigious medical career with a parallel one. For Pallis (whose cousin Marco wrote a memorable travelogue of mountaineering turned spiritual quest in Peaks and Lamas, reviewed by me), he had to disguise his dogged libertarian socialism under pen names Martin Grainger and Maurice Brinton. The excerpts here felt stodgy, more "poli-sci" than his comrades, but it's amazing how he and Thompson and Comfort pursued dual research so prolifically. Here, Goodway observes: "All the ruling groups in society encourage the belief that decision taking and management are functions beyond the comprehension of ordinary people." (loc. 7118).

One problem with anarchism, which flourished 1860-1940 and then, beaten down by Bolshevism and fascism, sensationalized for its violent minority, suppressed by spies and infiltrators in capitalist societies, is that "its numerical weakness inhibits its intellectual strength." (loc. 7389) Even after its countercultural resurgence (part due to Situationists, part libertarian socialists), few thinkers since have applied it to practical rather than historical or theoretical analyses, and few workers apply their leisure to advancing its real-world manifestations, given the great obstacles to implementation.

But, the final subject shows how it can work around us. Colin Ward, whose Anarchism: A Very Short Introduction I have reviewed, gains an affectionate tribute. No surprise as the book "Talking Anarchy" combines the two men's conversations and concerns. Like busy Pallis and Comfort, Ward as an architect recycles (a verb Goodway often uses, as he is very alert to all his subjects' printed records, and how they overlap, clash, and contend) much of his writings, given a demanding career. But this chapter feels ultimately perfunctory. One waits for Ward to step in, as an engaging comrade.

Still, the closing section which channels anarchist theory into current currents, stays fluid. Goodway holds that "a society which organizes itself without authority" always exists, "like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism." (loc. 7469)  Recalling in this titular metaphor Gustav Landauer's vision, which guided Ward, Goodway finds an anarchist today widens the old thinkers' perspectives. It "is selective, it rejects perfectionism, utopian fantasy, conspiratorial romanticism, revolutionary optimism,; it draws from the classical anarchists their most valid, not their most questionable, ideas." (loc. 7644)

In conclusion, I return to Goodway's introduction. He acknowledges his own life spent immersed in Marxism as much as anarchism, and admits his conviction that the latter proves more urgently relevant for our own challenges. Rather than utopian, it is rather "the belief that voting for a political party--any party--" that is unbelievable if one believes that by voting one "can bring about significant social change": after all as he quotes, "if voting changed anything, it would be abolished." (loc. 133)

Nestled near the end, we find a reminder of the modesty and ambition that combine for anarchism: crucial it "is for individuals to be able to take command of their everyday circumstances and determine the course of their lives, almost certainly collectively: to institute personal and communal autonomy, so far as they are possible, and to exercise individual responsibility." (loc. 7956) A little share of property and the control of one's means of production, combined with a social control over resources that all need to share in common: this may appeal to a few and more, if they read this book.
(Amazon US  5-10-14)

Kevin Birmingham's "The Most Dangerous Book": Review

Not a biography of its author but of his most famous novel, Kevin Birmingham's study of Ulysses emphasizes what nine decades and eight major biographies of James Joyce have not. The "rapture and pain" of its creator and his creation, this Harvard professor avers, energized its modernist impact. The Most Dangerous Book, therefore, skims past much of Joyce's by now exhaustively documented life, to saunter past some of his literary influences, and to connect Joyce vs. censorship to the new century's unrest.

While much is familiar to students of Joyce, Birmingham's endnotes attest to his archival research. He examines eye disease treatments, anti-Catholic tracts, and subversive newspapers, for instance, along with many Joycean contributions, standard and marginal, that help us understand this context. He writes with admirable directness. He efficiently guides readers through the difficulties for Hoyce and his supporters which loomed as the forces of censorship by the various state authorities fought those who challenged pieties and proprieties. For example, Birmingham fills in the early twentieth-century reactions to obscenity by depicting how Britain was under siege, according to the Crown forces, from a violent, bomb-throwing and knife-slashing faction with a dangerous radical ideology. Against this, Scotland Yard invested in the latest technology to keep Londoners safer. The culprits were suffragettes, and the counter-terrorist ploy was the department's purchase of their first camera.

How Joyce fits in, Birmingham shows, comes via not only his patron and inspiration Ezra Pound, as is well known, but by Dora Marsden, whose militant feminism radicalized Pound. In turn, Emma Goldman's anarchism squares off against the publisher of The Little Review, Margaret Anderson, to deepen the tension in the Vorticist (radical) and then the Egoist (apolitical) movements for artists. Pound wrote for that fledgling review, while patron John Quinn had boosted the Armory Show in Manhattan, a vanguard for the forces from the art world parallel to emerging talents within literature. Going beyond the Irish setting for the novel itself, this attention stirs up the ideological debates by which Joyce and his associates took up the protests and demands of their restive, brooding era.

Modernist magazines afforded writers a platform akin to today's blogosphere. Such bold support confirmed Joyce's resolve, as he joined his own "philosophical" anarchism to a "literary" form, in Birmingham's interpretation, to undermine the tyranny of a ruthless state. "Individuals were crushed by big ideas." Joyce countered by obscenity (as defined by the state) apparatus) to protest.

In Trieste, as the Great War broke out, Joyce began his big book, superimposing the Dublin he had left behind on an Homeric grid, and elaborating in increasingly experimental chapters and styles of prose, his take on ancient myth reborn in his home city. Birmingham finds that Ulysses opens with choppy, fragmentary rhythms of conscious awareness. These ebb and flow, as if "a rusty boot briefly washed ashore before the tide reclaims it." As the novel in progress was serialized in the little magazines, large forces grouped against its supposed obscenity, and part two narrates the showdown.

Fearful of Reds and Germans, before the FBI as we know it now, the vigilant U.S. Post Office clamped down on any material deemed dangerous. Joyce's anarchy might be far more philosophical than overtly political, but it fell into the net cast by the Federal trawlers in the wake of the Espionage Act. Birmingham connects the Comstock Law and nineteenth-century jitters about pornography to twentieth-century unease over radicalism: Joyce's work-in-progress appeared to violate restrictions against lewdness in the U.S. Mail, as sent to subscribers of The Little Review, whose editors had defended the reviled Emma Goldman. With Joyce's content flagged, its May1919 issue was banned.

Meanwhile, Harriet Weaver had also been serializing the novel, in The Egoist. T.S. Eliot through Pound and Virginia Weaver through Weaver begin to pay attention to Joyce. They may also be some of the first readers as bewildered by its increasingly daring departures from conventional narrative as generations since--who after all have industrious scholars and encouraging interpreters to guide them. As Birmingham reminds us, Joyce sought to write not a story for a million readers, but one a single reader could read a million times. The playful prose burst forth as its author grew more confident. As the scholar finds in its subject, who began when writing erotic letters to his Nora Barnacle an entry into the "unwritten thoughts that go on in his mind," so Joyce treats "readers as if they were lovers."

Despite Joyce's painful eye surgeries (and see Gordon Bowker's 2012 biography for more of the "pain" that accompanies the "rapture" in Joyce's Parisian and Zurich years in exile as he labors on), success beckoned. In postwar Paris, the milieu of the novel's printing during the Lost Generation grounds it in the Left Bank's "café culture." But America, frightened by bombings, cracked down with a Red Scare. Ulysses would soon be linked not only with obscenity but to "parlor Bolshevism."

Anthony Comstock had fulminated against contraception in the mail, and his successor John Sumner, newly appointed to suppress vice on behalf of New York, extended his control over Red propaganda in The Masses and anarchist rabble-rousing to attack The Little Review for a salacious episode, Gerty MacDowell's "fireworks" on Sandymount Beach in what would be known as the Nausicaa chapter.

The New York City District Attorney's Office required John Quinn, a lawyer too, to mount a defense, but his disgust appears to have overwhelmed his earlier sympathies for Joyce and his disreputable companions. For, Quinn's reservations about the Nausicaa portion notwithstanding, he and Pound had tired of the "unreasonable" stance asserted by a Joyce whom, with his novel yet to be completed, refused to assuage the censors, while incurring legal costs and penalties nobody could easily resist.

"Greenwich Girl Editors" Anderson and Jane Heap were summoned against the State's charges of obscenity for their magazine's contents. Ironically, as Birmingham nudges the reader to remember, those on the stand seemed to have failed to notice that Leopold Bloom was masturbating as he watched Gerty during the fireworks on the strand. Or, they chose not to notice, if they were the editors of the passage. Typically daring, Joyce then rewrote it after the 1921 conviction of the magazine for distributing lascivious material in the mail, to highlight Bloom's surreptitious activity.

On the author's fortieth birthday early in 1922, Ulysses was published by Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Joyce could not stop fiddling with it. Even during temporary blindness a few months earlier as a time away from the manuscript, he kept tinkering mentally with refining its elaborate structures. With the novel out, more troubles rushed in, for now, the typos massed and worried him. But the revolutionary nature of it, which to us dims nearly a century later, cannot be denied: "It demanded complete freedom. It swept away all silences." Shattering verbal boundaries, it rises.

Ernest Hemingway, with perfect timing, enters Sylvia Beach's Parisian bookshop to assist smuggling the novel into the U.S., by way of his contact, Chicago socialist editor Barnet Braverman, who by 1922 under the restrictions of Red Raids had to work at an ad agency to get by. Joyce's patron Harriet Weaver, in London, founds the Egoist Press to print the novel. During 1922, the allure of a censored import, coming from London now and Paris, increases overseas demand for a forbidden book.

Then, the Port of New York authorities swooped in. Customs authorities in London did too. Eight editions followed, but distribution lagged due to censorship. Officials aiding a single copy's importation into America faced a fine of ten thousand dollars and up to ten years in prison. It took Bennett Cerf's Modern Library imprint at Random House--which marketed classics old and new to a discerning readership on campuses and after graduation-- to defend the novel in the U.S. The cover, shown on the cover of Birmingham's book, did not appear until 1934 after another legal battle. Random House took on not the Comstock Act but the Tariff Act prohibiting the importation of obscenity. One charge was easier to disprove in court than the many dangers the Comstock Act listed. Cerf , a wit and a pundit too in the quest (and indirectly his roguish predecessor whose corrupted "Paris" edition was used illegally in the U.S., the literary pirate Samuel Roth), finally triumphed.

Birmingham provides a lively, learned, yet accessible and welcoming survey of this struggle. He intersperses enough of the novel to orient readers, and he blends in the difficulties of Joyce's life as he weakened in vision and endurance, to prove the heroic nature of his artistic achievement despite his personal tetchiness. This may encourage readers to begin or return to Ulysses, their next book to read. (Amazon US 4-28-14 and with some editing and revamping 7-15-14 to Spectrum Culture)

Jim Gavin's "Middle Men": Book Review

When I read Jim Gavin’s "Costello" in the New Yorker, I recognized my father, my city, and his stoicism. Gavin and I share the same ethnic, religious, and class background, as well as a native Southern Californian affiliation. Gavin and I attended the same Catholic college as English majors, if fifteen years apart. As I type this, I work within sight of the Holiday Inn near the Long Beach Airport, both a few minutes’ walk away. That annoyingly circular venue opens "The Luau," a companion piece to "Costello" that concludes as a diptych Middle Men, Gavin’s debut 2013 story collection portraying terrain and people he and I know well.

I preface my article with this to show how closely I find mirrored Gavin's sensibility in my own reactions. As greater L.A. is a locale often stereotyped (a stand-up comic two months in the city is cited; the gist of his routine reduces to: 1) a lot of phonies, 2) what about that traffic), it's instructive to see a local's take. What has not been discussed in the positive reviews and author profiles promoting Middle Man is the Irish Catholic sensibility of Gavin’s Californians, however diminished by assimilation and distance. 

Gavin's background (including a stint assisting Jeopardy as well as working for a plumbing firm and other odd sales jobs presumably not the usual background for a Stegner Fellow at Stanford) enables him to present "middle men" striving to get by or get ahead as equals, but never from a position of condescension, parody, or romanticism. Gavin provides an appropriate colophon from James Joyce's Ulysses: “Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves." Gavin depicts ordinary folks, like Bloom or Stephen, Molly or citizens, some Irish once-removed at least, in another metropolis, pursuing their feckless dreams or tangled business. And as with Scylla and Charybdis, collisions and close calls with rivals frequently loom.

"Play the Man" opens with Catholic high school locales I could pinpoint (even if names are changed) to show a teenaged basketball player's struggle in South Orange County and then Long Beach (their regional and class difference is apparent if subtly marked). "The coaches described me as 'heady' and 'deceptively quick,' both of which meant I was 'white.'" Nearly all of his protagonists are Irish Catholic, although nearly all live in the Southern California; they appear deracinated and torn from any ancestral solidarity with their motherland. Parishes (names seem accurate here) endure as markers, but there's no diffident Jesuit or lesson-toting nun to comment on moral conundrums. No theological intrusions, no cassocked wise guys, no crones with novenas. It's as if the wry Catholic sensibility of a master storyteller such as J.F. Powers half a century and more ago has diminished. So, what ethnically or culturally or even spiritually distinguishes the pale, freckled Nora (the one character who connects with Ireland by her visits) from the Irish-emigrant barkeep--beyond accents--stands out very little in today's San Francisco.

For Brian, narrating "Bermuda," an "Araby"-type of longing endures in musician-boho Echo Park, along with familiar Los Feliz faux-Spanish gothic architecture surviving from the heyday of James M. Cain. A fellow bohemian is not a star, but "cosmic debris," as all angle on the make.  Karen takes the bus there to stay at the decrepit home of an aging Argentinian selling off her piano. But she is no Gloria Swanson on Sunset Boulevard. Neither is Karen Barbara Stanwyck enticing Fred MacMurray into any Double Indemnity.  Brian meets her at the house, ready to buy the old woman’s piano: “’Are you a nurse or something?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m nobody.’ ‘I didn’t know how to respond to this statement. She didn’t say it offhand; she seemed to mean it. In Los Angeles this was a rare thing to confess.’” Like many in this story collection, Karen lacks roots.

While in a landscape far from Dublin’s streets for Scylla and Charybdis, for Brian, an immersion into a similar confusion of intersection and misdirection ensues. He’s a lovelorn protagonist wandering across another ocean in search of his soon-distant lover Karen. But, on his limited budget, the "twin beasts of reality: logic and finance" intrude. Gavin out of this mismatched tale of romance creates a welcome detour, a labyrinth via a pursuit to balmy but pricy Hamilton, Bermuda. There Brian chases down Karen, the mismatched love interest (victim of a "platonic gangbang" as always the only female among a male crowd), who beckons from another lotus land, where her swain will pursue her to diminishing returns.

The "longest running quiz show in television history," with an antagonist obsessed with Walloon history (who is "not" Alex Trebek), enlivens the setting for a new production assistant: Adam Cullen, "Gaelic for 'drunk'"--as he tries to introduce himself on the studio set. His delivery fumbles, and his endeavor to succeed at an open-mike comedy club receives merciless and cruelly funny recital. Gavin's in his (former) element here in "Elephant Doors" to witty, satirical effect. A cow's udder is made pinker by a stagehand: "Like everyone else who had made it on to the lot, the cow seemed willing to put up with anything." As Max, the host, takes Adam down to the Valley's "stucco ranch homes," the star cringes; Adam bristles: he grew up in such a place.

The next story, "Illuminati," shows Sean, who's moved up from Adam's status in Hollywood, but whose screenplay sale failed to land him success. He endures his uncle's schtick. "Alcohol, for Ray, was a kind of a charm, allowing him to barge through doors and announce his place in the world." This story's more of a sketch, and shorter. Still, the range and control Gavin demonstrates attests to his ear, his patience, and his craft. His skill finds its surest expression in longer stories: these manage to suggest more than they describe.

Nora Sullivan has a screen saver with her photo taken at the Cliffs of Moher. Relocated to the Inner Richmond district of San Francisco, she despises its posing progressives (they don't donate to causes but they "identify" with them) among the "corduroy mafia." However, with a lucrative job selling software, she can visit Ireland, “paying top dollar to recapture the glory of her family’s destitution. It was her bizarro way of establishing legitimacy, like some derelict countess tracing her bloodline to an ancient king.” So reasons her mooching cousin from their native Huntington Beach in Orange County. Flunking out of Cal a decade earlier, he bums around Berkeley. “Bobby didn’t understand why someone born and raised in Southern California cares so much about a wet, miserable country she had no connection to, but she always came back from her trips seeming refreshed, like she had gone home,” he admits. 

Bobby chats with the Irish émigré who staffs the local pub. “Where in Ireland are you from?” He doesn’t get far. “A small place. You’ve never heard of it.’ But she knows Nora. She always plays “Fairytale of New York,” the Pogues song, on the jukebox. The bartender prefers hosting Beatles night for a covers band rather than U2, all the same. Nora flies down for a trade show in L.A. There, as she hates the tapas bar set-up, she flees for the street. "Part of her was hoping to get mugged--a major trauma would simplify everything." Her relationship, speaking of "platonic," with hapless Bobby comprises the bulk of the lengthy story alternating between the two cousins’ perspectives as "Bewildered Decisions in Mercantile Terror."

While this story (like its baggier title) lagged more than others in its sprawl and doubled point-of-view, it conveys the Silicon Valley-Bay Area start-up blather in managerial-speak relentlessly. Listen to Dave, her boss: “I know things are a little…right now. But still. We need confirmation on how our brand is being restructured. And if we’re serious about sustaining an effective solution environment, then we need to create a strategy for platform leveraging that prioritizes integration. That’s the reality. “ Meanwhile, she remains confused whether she is staying on or not. “I thought I was moving to a liaison role with sales.” 

Her efforts to assist feckless Bobby and her own frustration with the gap between her privileged position and her lack of fulfillment in its duties deepen her malaise. As a counter to the start-up setting, pumped up with casual but sneering pomp from managers from “third-tier MBA programs,” this story depicts Nora as an Irish American in California trying to grasp her cultural sustenance. A fragile success despite a history of mediocrity and a junior college degree, Nora with her six-figure salary fails to sustain her soul.  Brief Irish memories encourage her, if in typically self-deprecating fashion. Tasked by her manager with delivering meager sales prospects to Los Angeles, as the firm undergoes “restructuring,” she reflects on this “suicide mission.” “Nora, who had always taken great comfort in the endless sorrow of Irish history, thought of De Valera sending Michael Collins to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty.” She (as with many in these stories) scarfs down Del Taco. The cultural difference is that she puts down her BlackBerry to pick up Liam O'Flaherty's grim narrative of the Great Hunger, re-reading his harrowing novel Famine.

The paired stories of son Matt in "The Luau" and his father Marty for (what was justly accepted by the New Yorker [12-6-10] unsolicited) "Costello" conclude the collection. I drive the same "blind and savage freeway" daily between my home north of downtown L.A. and where I teach in Long Beach, so the very familiar sights and sounds resonate for me in paved or dusty "landscapes bright, hazy, and inscrutable" in industrial sprawl and the "quilted" patterns of settlement from body shops, futon stores, and strip malls. Matt and Marty will differ on how they rise to the challenge of getting suppliers to take orders, and pay for them, in the kind of blue-collar behavior and sales-grinding patter that wears men down. Of one plumbing fixture outlet at the end of a long drive in a grimy, industrial, East-of-L.A. suburb: "They've been going out of business for twenty-five years," Marty reflects.

That last story shows a jauntier, more allusive sensibility as a tribute to an Everyman. The tone shifts noticeably, and suggests hope for the elder Costello. Marty compares himself to a navigator; like Joyce’s figures where the Liffey meets the sea, Marty stays fascinated by the "watery places of the world." However, he's never been to Catalina Island, twenty-three miles off of Long Beach. Like many in this insular, congested, dirty, and sunny terrain, Marty wonders what keeps him here, and makes him face another day on the freeway. Gavin's driven the same roads and done the same tasks, and his debut dramatizes, in odd or mundane circumstances, the surprises that quiet epiphanies can present to the attentive wanderer. (Amazon US 1-15-13 in shorter and altered form; altered and condensed differently again 2-11-13 for PopMatters)

Oona Frawley's "Memory Ireland: Vol. 2": Book Review

How do emigrants remember the old sod? Do an immigrant's sons and daughters commemorate their ancestral, often distant, homeland? Can such a place endure as home within a diaspora?

Within the motherland, how do natives transform what was left behind? Both those overseas and those at home perpetuate "memory practices" through souvenirs, stories, song, and celebrations. Images on walls as pictures or photos commemorate traditions and concoct new trinkets, kitsch, and art. These make up the material for the professors and poets who contribute here. 

In my NYJB review of this series' predecessor, I explained: "This first of four volumes explores the replacement of chronological historiography with a more fluid, less rigid approach that investigates what is remembered from the Irish past." Oona Frawley edits eighteen mainly academic submissions to volume two. While "rhizomes" and "chronotopic" feature in two of the first three essay titles, visits to Irish fairs abroad, examinations of tattoos, and excursions to Gaelic games, cooking, and "the eviction photograph" explore more familiar contexts for most readers. Aimed at the Irish Studies and historiographical fields, alternating between theoretical concerns and accessible examples, this collection will intrigue audiences seeking a serious study of Irishness in popular culture--more serious than the blarney and blather which constitutes much of what passes for Irishness in culture. 

Nostalgia, Frawley observes, "has fed into the construction of the cultural memory that Ireland embodies at home as well" as abroad. Until the independence of most of the island, Ireland hid many national ideas through symbolic representation. Therefore, memories themselves "spoke" in acts, words, and emblems.

Aidan Arrowsmith looks at British-Irish writing as "postmemory" and finds many romantic cliches. Chad Habel relates from Irish-Australian novels of ancestral memory more trauma, perhaps due to such immense distance, to separate from the homeland as well as a desire among some to recover relationships and attachments from dormancy and attenuation. Katrin Urschel peers into Irish-Canadian "physical manifestations" of the homeland within the vast, multicultural dominion.

From America, James P. Byrne challenges the usual derivation of nostalgia as "homecoming" + "pain". He locates a revisionist nostalgia which advances political and cultural power for emigrants. While Frawley appears to overstate as "mostly unaddressed" the problem of race in Irish contexts as if able to be confronted or depicted more outside the island, Maureen Reddy uses Jim Sheridan's film In America and Roddy Doyle's novel Oh, Play That Thing and story "Home to Harlem" as case studies that expand the attention given by current Irish Studies scholars to "race-inflected" accounts. Spurgeon Thompson's "The Kitsch of the Dispossessed" excavates as "signifiers" artifacts of "cultural loss" from Irish America alongside Patrick McCabe's and Neil Jordan's versions of The Butcher Boy.

Other objects, as jewelry, souvenirs, and tattoos, Maggie Williams shows, emerge as "icons of Irishness". The great fairs in the 1890s and 1900s in Chicago and St. Louis featured simplified "Irish villages, and such visual displays of a less complex "recent past" endured in the recollections of visitors, along with mementos. Jewelry temporarily and tattoos indelibly show an identification--to the public or to intimates--as "signs of membership in a constructed ethnic and cultural community".

In the early days of New Zealand, St. Patrick's Day celebrations invoked, Tanja Bueltmann reports on varying memberships for the small emigrant community there. For the eminent Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, her shift from childhood among immigrants to Lancashire dramatically changed when she was "fostered out" to her Gaelic-speaking aunt's family in West Kerry. Ní Dhomhnaill feels as if, when she returns to England as an adult, a "doppelganger" hovers, "the person I would have been if I stayed".

Joop Leerssen opens part two. He studies as "internal memory transfer" the gap as the Irish language receded in the nineteenth century and a historic cultural break found partial repair--as with James Joyce's Dublin reconstruction in Ulysses-- through determined active and archival intervention. Of course, Joyce used music as one keen method to evoke memory, and Katie Brown tackles his mid-nineteenth century predecessors, who blended a nationalistic mix of static and dynamic shifts of modes and lyrics which filled Ireland's linguistic breach. Steve Coleman continues with traditional sounds which embody history variously, and which stir contested innovation into musical legacies.

The "eviction photograph" codes a powerfully charged image into this history, as Gail Baylis scrutinizes their arranged depictions of peasant expulsion by landlords and their agents. In the 1890s, one series of "protracted evictions" was exploited for publicity by the Land League for foreign journalists, English politicians, and "radical sympathizers". Baylis compares historical with recent appearances, in the press and on genealogical sites, of "visual coding" from such charged images.

Related images resist the "outsider" condition given to Travellers, opposed to what Mícheál Ó hAodha surveys as its emerging "rearticulations" from within its community to the "anthropological canon". Sara Brady's analysis of Gaelic sports looks at games in Ireland and overseas as a primary marker "to stage identity, ethnicity, and place". Hasia Diner sums up the Irish portion of her book on "foodways in the age of migration" a century and more ago--the Famine may have contributed as well as the dependence on the potato to "disassociation of food from identity, family, and community" but the Irish predilection for alcohol fueled much of their social life--and anti-British subversion as such beverages eluded taxation, so the rationalization developed-- no matter where the bonding transpired.

Cooking at the "traditional Irish cottage" proliferates as a commemorative subject. Rhonda Richman Kenneally seeks to redress the emphasis on the hearth and not the housewife. Cookbooks reveal the incorporation of international and modernizing influences into the island's "gastronomic heritage" as defined and delineated by three cooks' narratives from the past seventy years. 

Paul Muldoon, in typically allusive prose segments, starts with rum and Treasure Island and after forays into matters piratical and puritanical regarding that demon drink and other brands, and skirting the Troubles of his native turf, ends with a confrontation, suppressed in part as in many Irish families, with the coded mention in Robert Louis Stevenson, of alcoholism. With this memory, so frequent in histories recorded or erased by the Irish over the sea or back on the island, this collection closes. 

Frawley--a New Yorker teaching at an Irish university--alludes to the position of not only the caricatured American tourist looking for his or her roots, but the Irish who are tourists in their own country. When Irishness is globalized, what does this do to caricature the natives? Perhaps the third or fourth volume will include an essay on franchised Irish bars with mass-produced "old-fashioned" decor, this unforgettably marketed "kitsch of the dispossessed" as icons of the diaspora and beyond. (NYJB 5-15-12 with minor editing.)

Bill Cole Cliett's "Riverrun to Livy: Lots of Fun Reading Finnegans Wake": Book Review

From a layman's, not a scholar's perspective, this lively explication of the first page of the Wake will entice many into delving deeper. As Bill Cole Cliett tells us, it may become your favorite book, with no other able to match its evocation of the dream-language and the illogical, circular, and echoing structures which comprise its famously daunting contents. He offers a friendly way into the labyrinth.

As Gordon Bowker notes in James Joyce: A New Biography (see my review), Joyce spent a third of his life on this endeavor. Part of what made him so obsessed filters down to the community of those equally maddened and enchanted by the project. As one who found "Ulysses" above any other fiction in terms of the competition, and which after I first read it at twenty-one seemed to ruin all other novels, Cliett's appeal that the Wake represents another, even more astonishing, accomplishment that reverses Bloom's day into HCE and ALP's nighttime carnival, with its reference to both license and limit, celebration and condemnation, may entice new readers. After Bowker, I picked up a reference Cliett naturally cites often (he does from many scholars, skillfully yet casually, not to impress but to explain or elucidate), James Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson's pioneering A Skeleton Key to FW (see my review). Even finishing that just before finding Cliett's guide did not convince me.

I've tried, as an admirer of Joyce, but I've found the Wake too tedious. So, how does Cliett try to convince a reader like me otherwise? Chapters One and Two begin with an overview of the intentions of Joyce, the reactions by critics, and the sounds that matter as much as the words. The oral nature key to appreciating Joyce, especially in tricky and allusive passages, emerges. Cliett deftly sums up the previous works and the life of Joyce in chapter three, although I think his passing reference to Nora's free hand with Joyce on the day of their date enshrined as Bloomsday does not need to be so coy, given the evidence from Joyce's letters to her.

Chapter Four takes on the title and the song that inspired it; the fifth looks at "the"--it's that level of depth. Part Two allots a chapter to each sentence of the first page of the Wake. The long thunderword is dissected, we learn about Parnell and Kitty, the use of stuttering, tea, whiskey, and the Liffey among hundreds more observations. He lists at the end many academic studies, and as with words or phrases interspersed from the Wake itself within every page, he integrates his research impressively.

Part Three proved the most rewarding. After a chapter summing up the "rust" of the story deftly, a great one followed on the Wake as a "Hole." That is, as a black hole involving the quantum physics that emerged during the long decades of the composition of what appears perhaps to beam in as if a ten-dimensional, or at least five-dimensional communication into our post-Bang world limited to three and four-dimensions. Cliett sums up a lot of science again in everyday terms with aplomb, and as I read this immediately after Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow's "The Grand Design" (see my review), I admit I learned that conjectural factoid about the five- or ten-d universe before our own origins from Cliett, no small achievement.

It closes with a "ricorso" referring to subsequently published minor works of Joyce; I felt as if Cliett did not want his study to end, and this indeed can accompany a life spent with Joyce. I found this direct, conversational, and accessible guidebook more engaging than much of Campbell and Robinson's handbook, and throughout, references as varied as to Eminem, "The Beverly Hillbillies," a porn star's name, and teaching middle school show how Cliett connects Joyce's revelations to our own pop culture realm and our own daily duties. Cliett writes with enthusiasm and lots of puns, as his subject did, and while a few typos and what seems to me as a student of Irish a few misspelled source words--unless he draws on dialects or earlier spellings from his references--must be acknowledged, all in all, this is an impressively vibrant and enthusiastic account. I recommend it to you. (Kindle review to Amazon US 7/7/12)

Lá faoi Bhláth aríst

Bhí an lá faoi Bhláth aríst i mBaile Átha Cliath ar 16 Meitheamh i ómós do laoch an leabhair Leopold Bloom ó "Ulysses" ar ndóigh. B'fhéidir go d'fhéadfaidh a bheith Sherlock Holmes nó Huck Finn chomh coitanta fadó. Ach, measaim go mbeadh an fear uasal Bláth agus bean a tí Mollie go mbeadh anois.

Ar an laghad, sílím seo ar ár domhain féin. Faoi deireadh, scríobh mé léirmheas ó beathnáiséis nua le Gordon Bowker faoi Séamus Seoighe anseo. Go minic, ceapaim mé go cumhacht mhór na Seoighe.

Mar sin féin, nílim ábalta léamh go heasca "Muscail Sochraide i ndiadh Fhionnagáin." Thósaigh mé treoir-leabhar lé Seosamh Mac Cathmhaoil agus Enri Morton Mac Roíbín areir. Léigh mé timpeall a leath de.

Bhuel, iarraim ag cur suim ansin. Bhí suim agam air nuair a d'fhóglaim mé faoi forógra de ALP (1.5). Is docha agam go raibh tugann díospóreacht leis an ollamh de reir an scóth den scéal!

Mar sin, is féidir liom mó cóip a fháil an roinnt sin. Go dtí seo, níl suim agam leis an chuid eile den abhar.  Níl foighne agam a léamh an chuid mór, freisin. Tá brón orm, an tUasal Seoighe. Béidh mé ag iarraidh, ceart go leor?

Bloomsday again.

It was "Bloomsday" again in Dublin the 16th of June in honor of the character in the book Leopold Bloom from "Ulysses" of course. Perhaps Sherlock Holmes or Huck Finn were as popular once. But, I reckon the gentleman Bloom and the woman of the house Mollie may be now.

At least, I think this in our real world. Recently, I wrote a review of a new biography by Gordon Bowker about James Joyce here. Often, I muse on the great power of Joyce.

All the same, I'm unable to read easily "Finnegans Wake." I started a guidebook by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson last night. I've read around half of it.

Well, I seek to find interest there. I had interest in it when learning about the manifesto of ALP (1.5). Most likely for me that I found about debate with the professor concerning it the best part of the tale!

Therefore, I may get my copy to find that section. For the most part, I don't have an interest in the rest of the material. I lack patience to read the larger share, still. Sorry, Mr. Joyce. I will try, o.k.?

(1939 Clúdach iris/magazine cover Time.)

Edna O'Brien's "James Joyce: A Life": Book Review

“Scalding” represents the most frequent adjective assigned one Irish writer by another in this lively, deftly rendered short biography. Edna O’Brien, as one of many heirs to perhaps the past century’s greatest influence upon writers in and beyond Ireland, recognizes James Joyce’s power and his passion. She renders the terrifying clashes of ego with talent, jealousy with commitment, which characterized his life. Feckless, vengeful, and petty, Joyce remained convinced of his genius, and tried as nearly every writer does to convince others of his gift.

Unlike nearly every other writer, Joyce merited acclaim. For all his difficulties, he remains the epitome of experimentation allied with sympathy, dissection matched to compassion, wit coupled with enigmas. Ms. O’Brien begins her account with a quick imitation of the start of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and while skillful, I feared that this biography would include many attempts to mimic or parody the master craftsman.

However, she soon matures, and immediately evokes the imprint of his parents on the very young man. “His mother and father had walked where he would walk as a young man, drifter and dreamer, who would in his fiction delineate each footstep, each bird call, each oval of sand wet or dry, the seaweed wet and olive, set them down in a mirage of language that was at once real and transubstantiating and would ever be known as Joyce’s Dublin.” He boasted that if his native city were destroyed, from his books it could be rebuilt.

Certainly he wished to destroy much in Dublin, not its birds or seaweed, but the reign of a corrupt system of Church and State that paralyzed its citizens. Ms. O’Brien briskly takes us through the familiar upbringing dramatized in Portrait, and soon we find ourselves next to an impecunious Joyce and his new love, Nora Barnacle, teaching English to Berlitz students in pre-war Trieste. Out of their contentious, erotic, hateful confrontations, their relationship, in the eyes of his biographer, appears ultimately as true as it is mysterious, as with any tangled couple.

Meanwhile, he gathered material in exile for his commemorations and excoriations of Ireland. Smarting from the criticisms of his former colleagues, he began to plot his retaliation. However, his fiction would surpass mere score-setting. “Were his works to be only that, they would be temporal; his scroll is far deeper—he compassed body and soul, high and low, seemingly faithful to his secret conviction that literature is, in its essence, violence and desire.” Ms. O’Brien astutely compares him to Jacobean dramatist John Webster, adept at vengeance and triumph.

Joyce’s unsparing stories to be collected as Dubliners brought him much anguish in the scuffle over their impropriety. As a sympathetic writer, Ms. O’Brien explains this collection’s pre-publication fracas well. Out of the 379 copies sold as of a year after its appearance, 120 were purchased by their impoverished author.

While she skims over their contents—as with all of his intricate works-- this book remains valuable more for its ability to comment in accessible, energetic prose on Joyce’s mindset and his machinations. She admits: “Anyone who touched Joyce seemed to get a bit carried away and makes us cry out as Molly did: ‘O rocks! Tell us in plain words.’”

This short life’s suited for audiences already familiar with his long books, so those who may wish a quicker summary of their creator than Richard Ellmann’s magisterial standard biography affords will find this a wise choice. One mark of Joyce’s pull on his reader is the urge, or necessity, that his works spark: one cannot read them for long free of commentary or guidance.

Ms. O’Brien retells the core plot of Ulysses wonderfully in a few pages, all the same. While she seems to stumble slightly in the next section, which conflates awkwardly the “Sirens” and “Nausicaa” chapters with the American obscenity trial of the book, most of these pages pack observations with summations neatly. She avoids in-depth criticism, regarding it as futile.

We see instead the author, nearing fame or infamy in Paris after his blue-and-white volume finds patrons, press, and buyers, still in a flat with a daughter growing mad, a son doomed to do his father’s whim to promote his talent, and a wife grown harried and weary of her imperious husband, who never stopped lording himself over his family, his friends, and the world. Within such internal occlusion, as he fought blindness, he began his phantasmagorical trip into the nighttime psyche, the linguistic wordplay of Finnegans Wake. “His exile was so complete within himself that interruption could not endanger it, only time could do that,” she opines.

Must writers be monsters to create? Ms. O’Brien thinks so, at least if they are of Joyce’s stature. “It is a paradox that wrestling with language to capture the human condition they become more callous, and cut off from the very human traits which they so glisteningly depict.”

As people receded into remoteness around his dimming vision, he retreated into the Wake’s words. His Parisian seclusion at least was secured by Nora’s ministrations. Unlike many writers, Joyce suffered his physical and mental pain with friends and family, who while they may have resented the burden he caused them, nonetheless felt compelled or resigned to support him.

He staked all on his texts, and he won at the cost of his health, his sight, and his life. The mad labor of five proof texts of his unwieldy, but greatest, novel, the endless revisions over which he bent with bleary eyes left him with a tenth of his vision. Twenty thousand hours of preparing Ulysses over seven years in poverty led to his worldwide renown, as well as his tragic cruelty towards his reckless father, his long-manipulated brother Stanislaus, and the neglect of his mother. His daughter failed to respond to even the treatments of Carl Jung, while his son faced the legacy of a father he himself could never live up to. His wife could not understand his books, and he wore himself out in disputes with enemies real but often imagined that he needed to rail against as part of his complicated inner reality that even a wise biographer cannot fully enter.

Still, for a glimpse into his shadowed soul and his demanding mind as well as his labyrinthine texts, Ms. O’Brien gives us a welcome portal into how the books emerged from such a man. (Featured at 11-29-11 at New York Journal of Books. P.S. J.J. was born 130 years ago today.)

Ag cloisteáil dhá leabhar le Seoighe

Bím ag cloisteáil leabhair eagsulaí faoi deireanach ann. Nuair ag tiomáint, éist mé go éisteo-leabhair difríulaí. Téann mé go mo h-áit na h-obair agus tagann mé ar ais go dtí mo bhaile ar an bealach fada, go minic. 

Scríobh mé agaibh faoi gníomhaíocht seo ní fada ó shin as Gaeilge anseo. Ar feadh an mhí seo caite, chuala mé "Cinmhíol an Chuilb Mar Óganach" a chum Seosamh Seoighe ag léithe le Jim Norton. Bhí maith liom seo go leor. 


Mar sin, lean mé leis {bíonn siad i gcónaí} "i mBaile átha Cliath" seo chugainn. Ar ndóigh, bhí brea liomsa seo freisin ann. Tá Norton léitheoir idéalach chomh de thógail na háite seo. 


Rúgadh agus tógadh Norton ina siopa grósaerí ina tSráid Grafton in aice leis an sean-ceantar Giúdach fós. D'fhoghláim sé chanúintí áitiúilaí. Fhreastail é scóil leis na Bráithre Críostaí i lár na cathrach, fósta. 


Ina theannta sin, chríochnaigh Norton i 2004 "Ulysses" go iomhlán. Tá sé fiche a seacht an chloig ar fiche a do dioscaí ann. Ba mhaith liom a cloisteáil seo a luaithe, go nádúrtha. Coinnighí an airdeall, leanúna dílis.


Hearing two books by Joyce.


I have been hearing various books recently. While driving, I listened to different audio-books. I go to my work place and I come back to my house often, on a long way. 

I wrote about this activity not long ago in Irish here.  During the past month, I heard "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" by James Joyce read by Jim Norton. I liked this a lot.

Therefore, I followed this with (the people living in)"Dublin" {~"Dubliners"?} next. Of course, I loved this too. Norton's an ideal reader as a native of this place.

Norton was born and raised in a grocer's shop on Grafton Street near the old Jewish quarter also. He learned various dialects. He attended school with the Christian Brothers in the city center, too. 


Furthermore, Norton finished in 2004 the whole of "Ulysses." It's twenty-seven hours on twenty-two discs. I would love to hear this soon, naturally. Keep alert, loyal followers!

Booktryst & Pickwick's: for book lovers

A break from my usual onslaught of reviews to promote a site full of an onslaught of welcome bibliomania. Stephen J. Gertz five times a week publishes a thoughtful and often witty article on his blog Booktryst. Yesterday, I saw the original dust jackets for "Ulysses," "Portrait," and "Dubliners", for example, at Superstar 1st edition of Ulysses to be auctioned by Sotheby's. A few days ago, a Rockwell Kent presentation package of "Moby Dick" appeared, and the various covers of the earliest versions of "The Great Gatsby."


He also keeps up a shaggy-dog tale about schnorrers, nebbishes, and gonifs in the old Tinseltown secondhand trade as if from an old pulp novel, which captures a raffish mood now vanished. I am surprised (but it may be since he's the inevitable bookish New Yorker transplanted to this sun-kissed, smog-shrouded outpost of vapidity) that he has not mentioned to date the Pickwick's on Hollywood Boulevard of my childhood, the first bookstore I remember and the one even my philistine parents regarded as the infallible purveyor of any volume out. Which it once seemed. 

(Postcard via GS Jansen, a bit before my time, Christmas 1946, but you can see Pickwick in green on the right. Reminiscence by a clerk who worked there in 1969, with a b/w photo of the store's vast interior.)

Julián Ríos' "The House of Ulysses": Book Review

A leading Spanish postmodernist novelist paraphrases, summarizes, and cites James Joyce’s modernist “mistresspiece,” most-loved of all that Irishman’s works. Ríos imagines a trio who meet to converse about Ulysses. The first is a mature reader, A; he is joined by a younger woman, B; third is an elderly critic, C. They gather in “The Ulysses Museum” and enter eighteen rooms as if in an academic library. Chaperoned by Professor Ludwig Jones, they wander through the book’s eighteen dense chapters. They study under the tutelage of a silent guide, the "man with the Mackintosh” whose computer projects overviews of the schemata used by Joyce in integrating Homeric correspondences into his tale of one day and night in the lives of three Dubliners and those whom they meet, dream of, contend with, and wonder about.

Immediately, in this first section, one must halt. If you have read Ulysses, then you recognize this enigmatic figure, the “man in the mackintosh,” whose identity still baffles scholars today. If you have not read the original book, you may need, as with a listener needing explanation of an insider’s joke, a brief commentary.

This places any reader of Ríos’s novel in a pleasurable bind. If you have made your way through Joyce’s verbal labyrinth once, or especially if more often, you may not need this fictionalized tour. If you have not read the original, this secondary narrative may leave less of an impact, as an echo of that compendium’s force. Its 260,000 words resist reduction into the few thousand words that Ríos summons in homage to that fictional classic’s major and minor characters and to the boundless imagination of its creator.

Even if it is difficult to recommend this when rival, if totally factual, introductions to the fiction of Ulysses more efficiently offer a complete guidebook to its Dublin labyrinth, there may be entertainment in this little novel. It offers an easy pace and conveys information with an affectionate tone. Nick Caistor’s smooth translation reveals few quotable lines from Ríos in what for English-speakers becomes a tertiary source, but the structure of first a summation of each chapter’s contents and then “passageways” that list a few observations made by the four (or one silent, five) observers in the Museum do allow, in relatively few pages, a quick guided tour through its contents. Especially for those fearful of more scholarly treatments of Ulysses, Ríos provides a neat compression of much academic insights, crammed into a small, portable, and accessible companion.

Not only beginners may benefit with Ríos as a guide. Study of this novel, as I was warned in college, can happily consume one’s spare time over a lifetime. In House, I learned a dozen fresh insights about the novel. Ríos reminds us that Joyce along with his protagonists Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus was baptized at the Church of the Three Patrons. Ríos pithily shows how “The Laestrygonians” within its passages of eating, its “peristaltic prose,” reverses King Midas’s touch. Ríos defends half-Spanish Molly Bloom’s “virago” and Madonna-whore tensions as necessary contradictions rather than binaries to be reduced to neatly drawn characterizations. He compares, if very briefly, Velásquez and Unamuno, as Iberian forces of the arts, along with an aside to Cervantes in tribute to the origins of his own novel. More Spanish references, in fact, would have been welcome to reflect the response of a novelist continuing Joyce’s own reinvention of prose; the Irishman’s influence enters the fiction of Ríos and his contemporaries.

This book failed to rise or fall to parody. While marketed as a send-up of the scholarship surrounding Joyce, it serves rather to document and transmit its findings efficiently. Ríos does adapt, as with “Aeolus,” “Nausicaa,” “Eumaeus,” and “Penelope,” the styles of the prose that Joyce celebrated and caricatured. Ríos’s own take on the Joyce industry may be less “slapstick” than the promotional material promises; I found its delivery rather steady. As any critic of Joyce without a sense of humor has found the wrong text to explore over a lifetime, the offhand remarks made sporadically by Ríos’s team of academically bent visitors were rather anodyne, on par with anyone who has lived and slept with, as one does, this text over any period of time.

Therefore, this fictional conceit fits better as a friendly, if a bit garrulous, companion. Any work that reminds us of the mastery and mystery of this modernist masterful “mistresspiece” succeeds in this measure. The essential function of The House of Ulysses is to direct our gaze away from its own pages. Holding a guidebook, we learn. Then we put it down, to look up (or down) again at its own inspiration.
(Featured at New York Journal of Books 11-9-10 and in shorter form at Amazon US and Lunch.com 10-28-10.