#Bloomsday Round-Up

• At the Forward, I talk about Jewishness and feminist stuff in Ulysses.
• At VF.com, Juli recaps Ulysses in tweet-sized bits.
• Also, I'm tweeting #Bloomsday links all day!
• And here are my pictures from when I was actually in Dublin during Bloomsday festivities.

Falling softly, softly falling

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.

Another snowy day on the East Coast. I've been working on novel edits all day and my eyes are getting all bleary, so time to venture out into the whirling white flakes and try to stumble to the gym and grocery stores before it gets too dark.

My favorite literary snowfalls are the obvious ones: Robert Frost and James Joyce. There's a wonderful snowy night in "Emma" in which our characters dine at the Westons and poor Mr. Elton is rejected in the carriage home. And there are dozens more. "The Giver" "To Light a Fire" "Sarah Plain and Tall"...

What, to you, are the most memorable snow scenes in literature?

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Shakespeare and Joyce Predated Britney

(NSFW language follows, so be warned, ye prudes)

Via Slate, an examination of the deep-rooted literary tradition that prefigures "If You Seek Amy," Britney Spears' controversial new song that, when its title is spoken aloud, spells out an entirely different meaning.

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The Irish literary god does in fact appear to be the first person to have used this phrase; in Ulysses, Joyce included a bit of doggerel sung by the Prison Gate Girls:

If you see kay
Tell him he may
See you in tea
Tell him from me.

In the third line, Joyce manages to encode cunt as well. Take that, Britney!

Joyce isn't, however, the only great writer to encode dirty words in his work. Hundreds of years earlier, none other than English literary god William Shakespeare used a similar trick. In Twelfth Night, Olivia's butler Malvolio receives a letter written by Maria but in Olivia's handwriting; analyzing the script, Malvolio says, "By my life this is my lady's hand. These be her very C's, her U's and her T's and thus makes she her great P's." With the and sounding like N, Shakespeare not only spells out cunt, but gets pee in there as well.

And he didn't need a news anchor, or even a town crier, to explain it.

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Any Twelfth Night reference is guaranteed to win me over. Yellow stockings!
But seriously, it's always good to point out that "high" literature is, in fact, not that high, that Shakespeare wrote for the pit as well as the balcony and that Joyce was banned as pornographic, and that above all, Britney Spears is a golden leaf on a tall, verdant and flowering literary tree.

Happy Posthumous Birthday James Joyce

Let's celebrate with feminist heroine for the ages, MOLLY BLOOM's monologue. I contemplated putting up the end of Stephen's experience in "Portrait" or its moocow opening or a bit of "The Dead" (or even a youtube clip of the awesome John Huston "Dead" movie) or another short story, but there's no one like Molly, so here she is:

theres nothing like nature the wild mountains then the sea and the waves rushing then the beautiful country with the fields of oats and wheat and all kinds of things and all the fine cattle going about that would do your heart good to see rivers and lakes and flowers all sorts of shapes and smells and colours springing up even out of the ditches primroses and violets nature it is as for them saying theres no God I wouldnt give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all who ah that they dont know neither do I so there you are they might as well try to stop the sun from rising tomorrow the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night 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 the 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 was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

My favorite authors

Some of my Favorite Authors

Austen

Brontes, Emily and Charlotte

JK Rowling

George Eliot

Andrew Davies

Tolkein Society

Wilkie Collins

Dickens

Maeve Binchy

Toni Morrison

Anne Tyler

James Joyce

Alice Walker

Jhumpa Lahiri

Breaking news...Janet Maslin compares Stephen King to James Joyce!

That's why we love the Maslinator. It's a great day in egalitarian bookworm (chick?)-land.

Read it and weep with tears of righteousness: Her Story of Him, Both Tender and Terrible.

Choice Tidbits:

"...Mr. King has delivered his version of Joycean wordplay, idiosyncrasy, voluptuousness and stubborn, obsessive chronology in “Lisey’s Story."

"...this book is haunting even by Mr. King’s standards. And he knows a thing or two about haunting."

A side-by-side comparison of great Irish storytellers.

Welcome to my new blog, the aim of which is to talk about books, culture, and other fun bs, without the pressure of its being an "education-oriented" blog like my previous effort. I needed to free myself from those shackles.
Speaking of the shackles wherewith we bind ourselves, back when F-ette was an undergrad "studying" in Galway, Ireland, she spent a lot of time lugging around a massive copy of Ulysses purchased while hungover and visiting the Dublin writer's museum. What inspired me to read Ulysses was nothing more than being drunk on the streets of Dublin. Nonetheless, the book was so frikkin' difficult (if ultimately rewarding) that I took it upon myself to look down my nose at certain roommates of mine who were deeply engrossed in another thick tome of Irish life, Quentins, by larger-than-life yarn-spinner Maeve Binchy.
But all that changed when I finally picked up a Binchy novel myself, and I have to say I'm heartily ashamed. So that's the goal of the new blog, bookwormishness without judgement, snobbery, or hating. Just a plain old love of storytelling, on all levels.
On that democratic note, I present to you this chart:


IRISH WRITERS SMACKDOWN!