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Category Archives: James Joyce
“Tennyson’s rank is too well fixed and we love him too much.” — Oscar Wilde
He was not only a minor Virgil, he is also with Virgil as Dante saw him, a Virgil among the Shades, the saddest of all English poets. – T.S. Eliot It’s Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s birthday, born on August 6, 1809. … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers
Tagged A.S. Byatt, Camille Paglia, Dorothy Parker, Ellen Terry, England, Ezra Pound, George Orwell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, Ireland, Jeanette Winterson, L.M. Montgomery, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin, poetry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ralph Waldo Emerson, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden
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“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.” — William Faulkner
Happy Bloomsday to those who celebrate. I’ve been celebrating Bloomsday for 20 years, in the real world, and here on my site. If you’ve been visiting here for any length of time, you know this. There are too many posts … Continue reading
Bloomsday past and present
For my Substack, I wrote about the Bloomsday celebration I’ve been going to (more or less) for 20 years, and my history with the book, and Dad, and lovable finance bro, and meeting people where the sole bond is knowing … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce, Personal
Tagged Bloomsday, family, newsletter, Ulysses
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“I am the most famous unknown of the century.” — Djuna Barnes
When Barnes called herself a “famous unknown” she may have been being elliptical or ironic, or she may have been just telling it like it is. Her writing didn’t have literal chronological through-lines and some readers found it challenging. So … Continue reading
“Before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.” — Austin Clarke
“He cleared a non-Yeatsian space in which an Irish poet might build a confident poetry in English for which the term ‘Anglo-Irish’ is meaningless.” – Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets Austin Clarke was born in Dublin on this day … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers
Tagged Austin Clarke, Edna O'Brien, Ireland, Irish poetry, John Montague, Michael Schmidt, poetry, Robert Frost, Thomas Kinsella, W.B. Yeats
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This is what James Joyce has made me do.
A list of Molly’s so-called lovers (debatable), and where they are mentioned in the text, and what Bloom imagines, and then what Molly says about these men later … which reveals Bloom’s ratcheting paranoia – I mean, the organgrinder? Really? … Continue reading
Kidney of Bloom, pray for us.
Bloomsday 2023 at Ulysses pub. The pub opened its doors on June 16, 2003. I have no idea how I heard about it back then (I just looked it up: Aedin told me.) – but I did. The pub opened … Continue reading
Rejoyce. It’s Bloomsday.
Some men send flowers to commemorate an anniversary. James Joyce wrote Ulysses. Overachiever. On June 15, 1904, young James Joyce sent a note to Nora Barnacle, who was a waitress at Finn’s Hotel. Barnacle (what an apt name) was a … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers
Tagged Bloomsday, E.M. Forster, Edna O'Brien, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford, Frank McCourt, George Bernard Shaw, Gertrude Stein, Ireland, John Banville, Katherine Mansfield, Stefan Zweig, Sylvia Beach, T.S. Eliot, Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams
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