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Category Archives: James Joyce
“The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority.” — Henrik Ibsen
It’s his birthday today. Some posts from my archive: This is a doozy, an excerpt from an amazing book made up of transcribed lectures on Ibsen, Chekhov and Strindberg, by legendary actress and acting teacher Stella Adler. It’s a great … Continue reading
Posted in James Joyce, On This Day, Theatre, writers
Tagged Clifford Odets, Henrik Ibsen, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler
4 Comments
“I couldn’t keep a dog and a James Joyce and a bookshop.” — Sylvia Beach
It’s her birthday today. Sylvia Beach is one of my heroes due to her influential bookshop in Paris (Shakespeare & Co.), and her nurturing of the writers of that time. You know, minor writers like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and … Continue reading
On This Day: February 2, 1882/1922
“I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone — me. In a … Continue reading
“I doubt sometimes whether a quiet and unagitated life would have suited me–yet I sometimes long for it.” — Lord Byron
— And who is the best poet, Heron? asked Boland. — Lord Tennyson, of course, answered Heron. — O, yes, Lord Tennyson, said Nash. We have all his poetry at home in a book. At this Stephen forgot the silent … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers
Tagged Camille Paglia, Christopher Hitchens, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop, Elvis Presley, England, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, Jane Austen, Jeanette Winterson, L.M. Montgomery, Lord Byron, Lord Tennyson, Mary Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Robert Graves, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Six Centuries of Great Poetry, Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden, Walter Savage Landor, war, William Hazlitt
10 Comments
“The people must grant a hearing to the best poets they have, else they will never have better.” — Harriet Monroe
“I started in early with Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, with Dickens and Thackeray; and always the book-lined library gave me a friendly assurance of companionship with lively and interesting people, gave me friends of the spirit to ease my loneliness.” – … Continue reading
“There were so many things I wanted to say, stream-of-consciousness things, designs and patterns while listening to music. I felt I might be able to say [them] if I had an unending canvas.” — pioneering experimental animator Mary Ellen Bute
If ever I was born to write a piece, it’s this one: For Film Comment, I wrote about experimental animator Mary Ellen Bute, and her 1966 adaptation of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”. She was a pioneer. Way out in front. … Continue reading
Posted in Directors, James Joyce, Movies, On This Day
Tagged animation, Finnegans Wake, Ireland, literary adaptation, women directors
1 Comment
“Something is gone and that’s why you write.” — Irish poet Eamon Grennan
“I have a double sense of things, but I tend to write about what’s under my nose. I write about here when I’m here and when I go back to Ireland I write about what’s there. I regard myself not … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers
Tagged Ireland, Irish poetry, poetry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Seamus Heaney
2 Comments
“I find that I cannot exist without poetry—without eternal poetry—” –John Keats
I was just beautifying him, don’t you know. A thing of beauty, don’t you know. Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says. – James Joyce, Ulysses Born in 1795 on this day, John Keats was orphaned at fifteen. Because his … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers
Tagged A.S. Byatt, Anne Spencer, Camille Paglia, Countee Cullen, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop, England, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, John Keats, Katherine Mansfield, L.M. Montgomery, Lord Byron, Louis MacNeice, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, Oscar Wilde, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetry, Robert Burns, Robert Graves, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Seamus Heaney, Six Centuries of Great Poetry, T.S. Eliot, Ulysses, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, William Faulkner
19 Comments
On This Day: August 7, 1934: “It must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring.”
On December 6, 1933, the US Court of Appeals (Judge John Woolsey) judged Ulysses by James Joyce to be NOT obscene and declared that the book could be admitted into the United States. There were then appeals to this decision. … Continue reading