Bloom's Day!
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paigerella
Jun 15, 2007, 5:37:49 PM6/15/07
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Bloom's Day is Tomorrow!!!
Are you guys doing anything to celebrate? I have to find someone willing to go to the bars with me for a pint! (everyone drinks red wine these days... but I love the pint ;).
Here's a great article about Bloom's Day, Ulysses, and whether people really love it or not. I love Ulysses and some of the lines in the article were hard to take! I mean, the text itself is so beautiful! It's sheer beauty should carry it into every generation with pleasure. I don't understand how people think it's torture!
Ciao tutti,
-paigerella
----------------------------------------------------------------------
This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SFGate.
The original article can be found on SFGate.com here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/06/13/INGE972TTT1.DTL
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, June 13, 2004 (SF Chronicle)
Love, hate still stick to 'Ulysses'/Bloomsday coming, not without debate
Tim Cavanaugh
A favorite myth of musical history -- that Johann Sebastian Bach's "St.
Matthew Passion" was forgotten until Felix Mendelssohn found a copy of the
sheet music being used as a fish wrapper -- contains a truth about how
changeable artistic reputation can be.
Although America's campuses are again at peace after a two-decade "Canon
War," and we still have plenty of self-selected guardians of culture like
St. John's College (where students bone up on a strict playlist of Great
Books) and Yale professor Harold Bloom (whose study "The Western Canon"
measures classics by the metric ton), the hard truth is that even the
classics rise and fall with the needs and whims of every age of readers.
Nobody watching the 20th century prominence of the 16th century poet John
Donne would have imagined that Donne had been little regarded for two
centuries, until T.S. Eliot and others resurrected him in the early 1900s.
The "Divine Comedy" of Dante Alighieri, that most solid literary monument,
was for nearly 500 years largely unread outside Italy and owes much of its
reputation to 18th and 19th century champions like scholars Karl Witte and
Henry Boyd and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (whose work may be due
for a rediscovery of its own).
Wednesday will mark the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, the date in 1904
on which James Joyce's "Ulysses" (published in 1922) takes place, and this
anniversary comes as the author's reputation is in something of a lull. A
year- by-year search of references to the seminal modernist novel in the
Arts and Humanities Citation Index indicates a gradual dwindling of
academic interest since the late 1970s. The more general Nexis database
tells a similar story: While the book is still referenced several hundred
times a year, most of these are placeholder allusions that cite "Ulysses"
as an example of a difficult classic, the kind of book only a college
professor could love.
This placeholder status was cemented a few years back when the Modern
Library placed "Ulysses" atop its list of 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th
century -- the kind of superlative that ensures nobody will ever have to
read or think about it ever again. Interviews with Joyce scholars turn up
frequent admissions that the book is no longer as "central" as it once
was, and doesn't command as much cultural capital as it did twenty years
ago.
Many readers who have encountered "Ulysses" would probably treat a decline
in the book's status as welcome news. As this year's Bloomsday loomed, a
notable backlash formed, as writers including the Irish novelist Roddy
Doyle, the critic Dale Peck, and several authors of lesser prominence
published various declarations of independence from the novel's oppressive
reputation.
"Ulysses' " extraordinarily challenging blend of stream of consciousness,
literary parody, cultural encyclopedia and a structure based on Homer's
"Odyssey" turns off more than just contemporary writers, however. In a
typical user comment at Amazon.com, one reader writes: "Anyone who tells
you they've read this so-called book all the way through is probably lying
through their teeth. It is impossible to endure this torture. In fact the
military would have already made POW'S read this waste but, I think such
cruel and unusual punishment would violate the statutes of the Geneva
Convention."
The strangest aspect of "Ulysses' " continuing reputation, however, is not
that an impossible book has ossified in academia, but that it has won
devoted, non-academic fans more akin to Trekkies than to literary snobs.
Irish tourism officials estimate 50,000 fans will make it to Dublin this
Bloomsday; a new film, "Bloom," with Stephen Rea playing Joyce's
long-suffering hero Leopold Bloom, is playing in Europe; "Ulysses"
allusions turn up in such unexpected places as a Dutch dance hit by the
singer Amber and the films of Slacker director Richard Linklater; a new
documentary, "Joyce To the World," gives a look at Bloomsday celebrations
on every continent. It is June 16, not April 23 (Shakespeare's birthday)
or Feb. 23 (John Keats' death), that has become the world's de facto
literary holiday.
Whether any work of literature will still speak to readers a few decades
from now is always an open question, but with "Ulysses," there is an
additional wrinkle: whether the book's reputation will be maintained by
teachers and scholars who have some authority to impose the work on
students, or by fans who keep it alive through sheer force of enthusiasm.
(There's also a question of how much these two groups overlap; Michael
Groden, a professor of English at the University of Western Ontario and a
longtime Joyce scholar, laments that so many scholars avoid discussing the
book from the standpoint of simple personal enthusiasm.)
When you get past a static Great Books view of literature, you can see
what a deft balancing act between academic and popular appeal the
"Ulysses" industry is. "The academy always plays a role in keeping these
books going," says James A. W. Heffernan, professor of English at
Dartmouth. "It would be very hard to find a case where the academy has
effectively sold a bad writer for an appreciable amount of time to a
public that just didn't want to swallow it. People have to feel a reward
for the effort."
But it hasn't hurt that virtually every critical theory in recent decades
-- feminist, queer theory, postcolonial studies, etc. -- can be profitably
applied to the novel. James Joyce Quarterly editor Sean Latham notes that
the current trend in academia is to place the book in its context of Irish
colonial history, a process that partly redeems the book's least lovable
character -- "The Citizen," the bullying, anti-Semitic, patriotic villain
of the "Cyclops" chapter. "There's almost a rule with any new theory that
you see first if it works on "Ulysses," then apply it to other works of
modern literature," Latham says.
At the same time, it's unlikely all those fans pub-crawling around Dublin
in Edwardian costume are giving much thought to poststructuralism.
"Underneath the difficulty there's something warmly human about the book,"
says Kevin Dettmar, a professor at the University of Southern Illinois.
"Now that the difficulty has faded a bit, you're struck by Bloom's
decency, his humanity and his heroic qualities."
But doesn't that make the style just an elaborate cover for a sentimental
work? Dettmar refers to the infamous "Gertie MacDowell" chapter, in which
an episode of seaside exhibitionism and masturbation is described in the
coyly romantic terms of a novelette for young ladies. "You can't really
separate the style from the story," he says. "There's something very
touching about the way this girl has built up a romantic dream about
what's pretty clearly not a very happy life."
There may even be a continuing appeal among readers who only remember how
much they hated the book in the first place. "Somehow, each of us in the
last 50 years has encountered the book and was maybe fascinated or daunted
or repelled by it," says Robert Spoo, a Tulsa, Okla., attorney and Joyce
scholar, "but nobody's been left cold by it."
It could be that the Bloom kitsch being celebrated this week in so many
cities (including this one) is the true path to donnish immortality. Art
may or may not be eternal, but fandom is forever.
Tim Cavanaugh is a San Francisco writer. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2004 SF Chronicle
This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SFGate.
The original article can be found on SFGate.com here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/06/13/INGE972TTT1.DTL
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, June 13, 2004 (SF Chronicle)
Love, hate still stick to 'Ulysses'/Bloomsday coming, not without debate
Tim Cavanaugh
A favorite myth of musical history -- that Johann Sebastian Bach's "St.
Matthew Passion" was forgotten until Felix Mendelssohn found a copy of the
sheet music being used as a fish wrapper -- contains a truth about how
changeable artistic reputation can be.
Although America's campuses are again at peace after a two-decade "Canon
War," and we still have plenty of self-selected guardians of culture like
St. John's College (where students bone up on a strict playlist of Great
Books) and Yale professor Harold Bloom (whose study "The Western Canon"
measures classics by the metric ton), the hard truth is that even the
classics rise and fall with the needs and whims of every age of readers.
Nobody watching the 20th century prominence of the 16th century poet John
Donne would have imagined that Donne had been little regarded for two
centuries, until T.S. Eliot and others resurrected him in the early 1900s.
The "Divine Comedy" of Dante Alighieri, that most solid literary monument,
was for nearly 500 years largely unread outside Italy and owes much of its
reputation to 18th and 19th century champions like scholars Karl Witte and
Henry Boyd and the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (whose work may be due
for a rediscovery of its own).
Wednesday will mark the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, the date in 1904
on which James Joyce's "Ulysses" (published in 1922) takes place, and this
anniversary comes as the author's reputation is in something of a lull. A
year- by-year search of references to the seminal modernist novel in the
Arts and Humanities Citation Index indicates a gradual dwindling of
academic interest since the late 1970s. The more general Nexis database
tells a similar story: While the book is still referenced several hundred
times a year, most of these are placeholder allusions that cite "Ulysses"
as an example of a difficult classic, the kind of book only a college
professor could love.
This placeholder status was cemented a few years back when the Modern
Library placed "Ulysses" atop its list of 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th
century -- the kind of superlative that ensures nobody will ever have to
read or think about it ever again. Interviews with Joyce scholars turn up
frequent admissions that the book is no longer as "central" as it once
was, and doesn't command as much cultural capital as it did twenty years
ago.
Many readers who have encountered "Ulysses" would probably treat a decline
in the book's status as welcome news. As this year's Bloomsday loomed, a
notable backlash formed, as writers including the Irish novelist Roddy
Doyle, the critic Dale Peck, and several authors of lesser prominence
published various declarations of independence from the novel's oppressive
reputation.
"Ulysses' " extraordinarily challenging blend of stream of consciousness,
literary parody, cultural encyclopedia and a structure based on Homer's
"Odyssey" turns off more than just contemporary writers, however. In a
typical user comment at Amazon.com, one reader writes: "Anyone who tells
you they've read this so-called book all the way through is probably lying
through their teeth. It is impossible to endure this torture. In fact the
military would have already made POW'S read this waste but, I think such
cruel and unusual punishment would violate the statutes of the Geneva
Convention."
The strangest aspect of "Ulysses' " continuing reputation, however, is not
that an impossible book has ossified in academia, but that it has won
devoted, non-academic fans more akin to Trekkies than to literary snobs.
Irish tourism officials estimate 50,000 fans will make it to Dublin this
Bloomsday; a new film, "Bloom," with Stephen Rea playing Joyce's
long-suffering hero Leopold Bloom, is playing in Europe; "Ulysses"
allusions turn up in such unexpected places as a Dutch dance hit by the
singer Amber and the films of Slacker director Richard Linklater; a new
documentary, "Joyce To the World," gives a look at Bloomsday celebrations
on every continent. It is June 16, not April 23 (Shakespeare's birthday)
or Feb. 23 (John Keats' death), that has become the world's de facto
literary holiday.
Whether any work of literature will still speak to readers a few decades
from now is always an open question, but with "Ulysses," there is an
additional wrinkle: whether the book's reputation will be maintained by
teachers and scholars who have some authority to impose the work on
students, or by fans who keep it alive through sheer force of enthusiasm.
(There's also a question of how much these two groups overlap; Michael
Groden, a professor of English at the University of Western Ontario and a
longtime Joyce scholar, laments that so many scholars avoid discussing the
book from the standpoint of simple personal enthusiasm.)
When you get past a static Great Books view of literature, you can see
what a deft balancing act between academic and popular appeal the
"Ulysses" industry is. "The academy always plays a role in keeping these
books going," says James A. W. Heffernan, professor of English at
Dartmouth. "It would be very hard to find a case where the academy has
effectively sold a bad writer for an appreciable amount of time to a
public that just didn't want to swallow it. People have to feel a reward
for the effort."
But it hasn't hurt that virtually every critical theory in recent decades
-- feminist, queer theory, postcolonial studies, etc. -- can be profitably
applied to the novel. James Joyce Quarterly editor Sean Latham notes that
the current trend in academia is to place the book in its context of Irish
colonial history, a process that partly redeems the book's least lovable
character -- "The Citizen," the bullying, anti-Semitic, patriotic villain
of the "Cyclops" chapter. "There's almost a rule with any new theory that
you see first if it works on "Ulysses," then apply it to other works of
modern literature," Latham says.
At the same time, it's unlikely all those fans pub-crawling around Dublin
in Edwardian costume are giving much thought to poststructuralism.
"Underneath the difficulty there's something warmly human about the book,"
says Kevin Dettmar, a professor at the University of Southern Illinois.
"Now that the difficulty has faded a bit, you're struck by Bloom's
decency, his humanity and his heroic qualities."
But doesn't that make the style just an elaborate cover for a sentimental
work? Dettmar refers to the infamous "Gertie MacDowell" chapter, in which
an episode of seaside exhibitionism and masturbation is described in the
coyly romantic terms of a novelette for young ladies. "You can't really
separate the style from the story," he says. "There's something very
touching about the way this girl has built up a romantic dream about
what's pretty clearly not a very happy life."
There may even be a continuing appeal among readers who only remember how
much they hated the book in the first place. "Somehow, each of us in the
last 50 years has encountered the book and was maybe fascinated or daunted
or repelled by it," says Robert Spoo, a Tulsa, Okla., attorney and Joyce
scholar, "but nobody's been left cold by it."
It could be that the Bloom kitsch being celebrated this week in so many
cities (including this one) is the true path to donnish immortality. Art
may or may not be eternal, but fandom is forever.
Tim Cavanaugh is a San Francisco writer. ----------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2004 SF Chronicle
Denis T. Kirk Jnr
Jun 16, 2007, 10:05:27 AM6/16/07
to Ulysse...@googlegroups.com
Happy Bloomsday!
Love,
Den.xxx
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paigerella
Jun 17, 2007, 2:32:28 PM6/17/07
to Ulysse...@googlegroups.com
Happy Bloomsday!!!
Did you do anything to celebrate? I had a Guinness, but that was about it :). Did you hear about Ireland on the news??? Anything interesting going on in the U.K.?
Ciao bello!
-paigerella
Did you do anything to celebrate? I had a Guinness, but that was about it :). Did you hear about Ireland on the news??? Anything interesting going on in the U.K.?
Ciao bello!
-paigerella
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