(Roughly) Daily

Posts Tagged ‘Joyce’

“They get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing”*…

 

From the 1817 handbook The Philadelphia Medical Dictionary (available on the Internet Archive, via the U.S. National Library of Medicine)…

This book was edited by John Redman Coxe, a Philadelphia physician, sometime professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and pharmacist. Coxe published several other medical references, including one on smallpox vaccination. (He was a proponent of the practice and vaccinated himself and his infant son in 1801, write the editors of Penn Biographies, “as encouragement for others to do the same.”)

The book, Coxe wrote in a preface, was meant to be a quick reference for both the novice and the practiced physician, who might need a dictionary “to recal [sic] to his memory the explanation of some medical word.” The reference aimed for complete comprehensiveness, and the advertising copy used to sell the book in England boasted: “We have endeavored to include every Latin and technical term that has ever occurred in the PRACTICE of MEDICINE, SURGERY, PHARMACY, BOTANY, and CHEMISTRY.”…

More on this proto-DSM at “Lists of Types of Mania and Melancholy, Compiled for Early–19th-Century Doctors.”

* Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

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As we reach for the Xanax, we might recall that it was on this date in 1945 that Ezra Pound was turned over to the American Army by surrendering Italian forces; Pound, who’d been branded a traitor, was transferred back to the U.S., and committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Washington, D.C., where he was imprisoned for 13 years.

A poet who was a major figure of the early modernist movement, Pound was the developer of the “Imagist” school, and the “godfather” of a number of now-well-known contemporaries– among them,  T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway.  He was responsible for the 1915 publication of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the serialization from 1918 of Joyce’s Ulysses.

Deeply troubled by the carnage of World War I, Pound moved to Paris, then to Italy in the 1920s, and embraced the fascism of Benito Mussolini, whose policies he vocally supported.  

While in Army custody, he began work on sections of The Cantos– that became known as The Pisan Cantos (1948)– for which he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949 by the Library of Congress… igniting an enormous controversy.

His release in 1958 was the result of a campaign by writers including Archibald MacLeish, William Carlos Williams, and Hemingway.  Pound, who was believed to be suffering dementia, returned to Italy.

The best of Pound’s writing – and it is in the Cantos – will last as long as there is any literature.

-Ernest Hemingway

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April 29, 2015 at 1:01 am

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“If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever”*…

 

In A System of Elocution, with Special Reference to Gesture, to the Treatment of Stammering, and Defective Articulation (1846), Andrew Comstock set out to illustrate the proper gestures to adopt when public speaking.  Comstock emloyed a figure “acting out” a section from Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Satan, expelled from Heaven and finding himself in Hell, delivers a speech to awaken his legions…

A physician and professor of elocution at the Vocal and Polyglot Gymnasium in Philadelphia, Comstock was hugely influential in the burgeoning science of elocution in mid-nineteenth-century America.  Among other questionable creations, he invented his own phonetic alphabet to improve the speech of his pupils, an alphabet which was also used to transcribe documents, including the New Testament.

More at “Speech of Satan to his Legions… (with Gestures).”

* Winston Churchill

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As we e-nun-ci-ate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1921 that Jane Heap And Margaret Anderson were sentenced by a federal court.  Heap and Anderson were publishers of The Little Review.  In 1918, they received a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses from their mutual friend Ezra Pound, and undertook to serialize it in their magazine.  Ulysses ran in the periodical– which also published  Pound, Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, William Butler Yeats, Sherwood Anderson, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Malcolm Cowley, Marcel Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford, Emma Goldman, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Francis Picabia, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Arthur Waley, and William Carlos Williams– until 1920, when the U.S. Post Office seized and burned four issues of the magazine and charged Anderson and Heap with obscenity.  At the conclusion of the trial, in 1921, the women were fined $100 and and forced to discontinue the serialization.

 source

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February 14, 2015 at 1:01 am

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“The past is always tense, the future perfect”*…

 

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Predicting the future of the English language is rather easy, in the short term.  The odds are, over the next few decades its New World dialects are going to gain increasing global dominance, accelerating the demise of thousands of less fortunate languages but at long last allowing a single advertisement to reach everybody in the world.  Then after a century or two of US dominance some other geopolitical grouping will gain the ascendancy, everyone will learn Chechen or Patagonian or whatever it is, and history will continue as usual.  Ho hum.  But apart from that… what might the language actually look like in a thousand years time?  For comparison, the English spoken at the turn of the last millennium looked like this:

1000 AD: Wé cildra biddaþ þé, éalá láréow, þæt þú tǽce ús sprecan rihte, forþám ungelǽrede wé sindon, and gewæmmodlíce we sprecaþ…
2000 AD: We children beg you, teacher, that you should teach us to speak correctly, because we are ignorant and we speak corruptly…

(1000 AD, from”The Colloquy of Aelfric.”)

So how far will another thousand years take it?…

Peek over the linguistic horizon at “FUTURESE- The American Language in 3000 AD.”

* Zadie Smith

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As we envision emergent etymologies, we might spare a thought for a wicked bender of English words, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce; he died on this date in 1941.  A poet and novelist best known for Ulysses, he was the preeminent figure in the Modernist avant-garde, and a formative influence on writers as various as (Joyce’s protege) Samuel Becket, Jorge Luis Borges, Salmon Rushdie, and Joesph Campbell.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Ulysses No. 1, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man No. 3, and Finnegans Wake No. 77, on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.  The next year, Time Magazine named Joyce one of its 100 Most Important People of the 20th century, observing that “Joyce … revolutionized 20th century fiction.”  And illustrating that Joyce’s influence was not confined to the arts:  physicist Murray Gell-Mann used the sentence “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” (in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake) as source for the elementary particle he was naming– the quark.

Photo of Joyce included in a printed subscription order form for Ulysses, published Paris, 1921

 

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January 13, 2015 at 1:01 am

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Valentine’s Day Special: Where the Magic Happens…

 

Where the Magic Happens is an upcoming documentary that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of professional magicians. For the past two years, filmmakers Marcie Hume and Christoph Baaden have been following five magicians as they passionately pursue their unusual occupation. The filmmakers are raising funds for the project on Kickstarter.

We are fascinated by the life of the professional magician: from grand stage performances and celebrity parties to the day-to-day of booking gigs and making ends meet, but most importantly, why they dedicate themselves to a life in the magic arts. You will see behind the curtain into the world of magic, learn about the mystery of how magic works on our minds, and why we need magic and mystery… but also why our magicians have found magic, and why they need it just as much as we do.

TotH to Laughing Squid.

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As we reach for our rabbits, we might recall that it was on this date in 1921 that Jane Heap And Margaret Anderson were sentenced by a federal court.  Heap and Anderson were publishers of The Little Review.  In 1918, they received a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses from their mutual friend Ezra Pound, and undertook to serialize it in their magazine.  Ulysses ran in the periodical– which also published  Pound, Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, William Butler Yeats, Sherwood Anderson, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Malcolm Cowley, Marcel Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford, Emma Goldman, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Francis Picabia, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Arthur Waley, and William Carlos Williams– until 1920, when the U.S. Post Office seized and burned four issues of the magazine and charged Anderson and Heap with obscenity.  At the conclusion of the trial, in 1921, the women were fined $100 and and forced to discontinue the serialization.

 source

 

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February 14, 2013 at 1:01 am

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