All I can say to this one is: woah.
James and Nora Joyce. Look at his smoking jacket thing. And the eye patch. And her expression!!
Nora was always insulted when everyone assumed that she must be Molly Bloom. She scoffed, “Molly was much fatter.”
Love Nora. I want to have a copy of this photograph on my wall. Next to my photograph of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, another couple I admire.
And I think Nora might have the final word on her husband, “Sure, he’s a genius, but he’s got such a dirty mind, hasn’t he?”
Forgive my ignorance, was Molly Bloom an actual person or a character in one of his books? I am assuming it’s not just the name of the bar where I asked my wife to marry me.
“Molly was much fatter.” HA!!
Much better endowed as well. Joyce encouraged Nora to drink cocoa in order to enlarge her breasts, and I have often wondered if she might have been rather resentful of Lenehan’s description of Molly’s “hell’s delights.”
I know I’m being impossibly vulgar here, but I just couldn’t resist. It’s been way too long since we had a discussion about boobs on your blog. ;)
By the way, ladies, don’t bother with the cocoa. It doesn’t work.
Hi Blogger Formerly Known as Dave,
There’s a bar named “Molly Bloom”? That’s great!
Molly is the primary character in Joyce’s Ulysses.
Thanks Bryan –
The bar is an (obivously) Irish type pub. What’s really cool about it, is that it is smack in the middle of the area in the city where all the student bars are. All of the other bars are techno-dance type places. Molly Bloom’s has a traditional Irish band – and people sing along and dance on the tables to “Tied Up In A Black Velvet Band” all that sort of good fun stuff. Thoroughly enjoyable!
Hey Bryan:
Beer works, but it makes everything else fatter too. I’ve often thought about taking out an ad in the back of Rolling Stone: “Send two dollars for secret breast enhancement diet. Increase cup size in one month!”
Then I’d mail them out this long-winded pamphlet that essentially said, “Dring more beer!”
–Chai-rista
Or . . . Drink More Beer!
Sorry.
The end of Ulysses is given to Molly Bloom. She has a 40 page runon monologue, lying in bed, waiting for her husband.
The book ends with:
I’ve done readings of this on Bloomsday, and all the Irish people in the audience know that last bit by heart and shout it out, as a chorus, punctuating the “Yes”s (if you read it out loud – then you get what’s going on, and what Molly is doing, lying in bed by herself):
But anyway, the Irish crowd knows it by heart, and chant it as one, shouting the “Yes”s:
“and first I put my arms around him YES and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume YES and his heart was going like mad and YES I said YES I will YES”
amazing. makes me wish it was bloomsday again.
… the crowd doesn’t do the actions too – do they?
What actions? There are no actions. It’s all about the words. Everything else is IMPLIED. Joyce HADN’T written pornography, even though his feckin’ book was banned left and right. He wrote literature.
But actually – in thinking about the rowdy Bloomsday celebrations I have attended: Yes. People do do the actions. If they’ve had enough Guinness. It’s awesome. Yes. They do the actions. YES they do YES they do I say YES.
Chai-rista,
I like it!
You’d probably make a good bit of money, too, if the God Almighty’s truth was known.
I don’t really need the cocoa or the beer, if truth be told. the gazungas are large enough.
Sheila,
Sounds like you’re a woman Joyce could appreciate.
Now there’s a thought. What if instead of Joyce and Nora it had been Joyce and Sheila? If instead of the Molliloquy Joyce had given us the Sheililoquy? How different the face of modernist literature might have been!
Bryan – there was some piece in the Guardian, I think, on the event of the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday – where they had invited readers to send in altered versions of that last paragraph. Some of them were so funny that tears of laughter streamed down my face reading them.
One that I remember very well had Molly saying “no” as opposed to “yes” through that last paragraph … which … when piled up cumulatively – just gets funnier and funnier.
“no I said no I won’t no”
I wish I had seen that. That sounds hilarious!
Bryan – I’m crazy. I just did a quick search on my blog – I had a feeling I linked to the Guardian’s contest, and I had!
here’s the “no” version:
HAHAHAHAHA
Here’s the rest of them, Bryan, my Joycean friend. Enjoy! Maybe write your own! Actually – I am definitely going to write my own. It’ll be fun.
OMG!!!!!! HAHAHAHAHA!!!
And how could I refuse such a request from my favorite redheaded Joycean? I’ll give it my best effort and send you the results.
I saw the headline James and Nora and thought instead of Nick and Nora, another couple with a first name for a last name. The photo thus looked to me like a caricature.