|
|
MY INERESTS - not bumper stickers
(My second novel includes Joyce and several other writers involved in a murder mystery). JAMES JOYCE In 1922, on James Joyce's fortieth birthday, Ulysses was first published. Joyce was very superstitious, and very apprehensive of a hostile reception for the novel that had been seven years in writing and sixteen years in gestation; he chose the birthday publication for luck. Because mainstream publishers had been scared off by the obscenity issue, the first edition was a small press run of only 1000 copies, financed by Sylvia Beach's "Shakespeare and Company" bookstore. Joyce had overheard Mrs. Wallace, a dinner guest, in conversation repeating "yes" again and again, in different intonations, thereby providing the word which Joyce used to begin, end, and anchor the famous 45-page, 8-sentence, Molly Bloom monologue which concludes the book:
"...we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower 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 going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
Finnegans Wake was not published on Joyce's birthday, but a bound copy of the book was ready later in 1939, and a similar celebration was organized to toast the author and his seventeen years' labor. Joyce's daughter-in-law, Helen, arranged a cake in the shape of all his books, titled and laid in a row; invited by Joyce, she read the last of the Wake aloud:
"So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he'd come from Arkangels, I sink I'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. Yes, tid. There's where. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousands-thee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the..."
(My note: The strangely wonderful "The Skin of Our Teeth" written in 1943, by Thornton Wilder is said to be influenced by "Finnegan's Wake" and Wilder did love that book. It toys with nearly every dramatic convention one can think of. This was Wilder's third Pulitzer Prize; the other two were "Our Town," in 1938, and "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," 1928.) Also see Gertrude Stein on "yes." —c.s.
Some favorite art... |
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE VERY UGLY... He's just my pup...
So is he... At the end of the most recent Ice Age (about 10,000 years ago), a few arctic animals were frozen in large blocks of ice, preserved in death until thawed out by modern explorers. The most notable of these animals, and the most compelling to the imagination, is the woolly mammoth. A relative of modern elephants, the last mammoths went extinct more than 4,000 years ago, victims of the Earth's warming climate and the spread of early humans. Well-preserved mammoth specimens have been recovered from the ancient glaciers of northern Russia. Complete with remains of skin, hair, and possibly even internal organs, these mammoth carcasses could be better preserved than last week's tuna casserole.
You can measure the up/down speed of your browser by accessing this free test (no gimmicks):
|
Favorite Books
emily dickenson,mark strand, w.b.yeats, christina rossetti, pablo neruda, czeslaw milosz, frederick nimms, hemingway, poe,singer, and others.
Favorite Music
mozart, gershwin, classical music and some opera, and love songs from the the 30's and 40's;
frank sinatra, tony bennett, sarah vaughan, the mills brothers, the ink spots, the temptations, the bee gees, roy orbison, ella fitzgerald, phil collins, billie holiday, glenn miller, benny goodman, diana krall, songs of the beatles, etc.
American Writers from the 1950s and 1960s
James Baldwin: Collected Essays
James Baldwin: Early Novels & Stories
Saul Bellow: Novels 1944-1953
Saul Bellow: Novels 1956-1964
Paul Bowles: Collected Stories and Later Writings
Paul Bowles: The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House
Raymond Chandler: Later Novels & Other Writings
Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s
William Faulkner: Novels 1942-1954
William Faulkner: Novels 1957-1962
Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944-1961
Vladimir Nabokov: Novels and Memoirs 1941-1951
Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1955 - 1962
Vladimir Nabokov: Novels 1969 - 1974
Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works
Dawn Powell: Novels 1944-1962
Philip Roth: Novels and Stories 1959-1962
Philip Roth: Novels 1967-1972
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories: Gimpel the Fool to The Letter Writer
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories: A Friend of Kafka to Passions
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories: One Night In Brazil to The Death Of Methuselah
John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947-1962
James Thurber: Writings and Drawings
Eudora Welty: Complete Novels
Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, and Memoir
Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937-1955
Tennessee Williams: Plays 1957-1980
Richard Wright: Later Works
Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s
American Poets
Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry
Ralph Waldo EmersonPoems and Translations Emma Lazarus Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe Henry David Thoreau
Poets of the Civil War
Walt Whitman: Poetry and Prose
John Greenleaf Whittier
|
|