(Roughly) Daily

Posts Tagged ‘Ulysses

“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

“When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes”*…

 

From the proprietors of a second-hand bookshop in Brisbane, Australia, a collection of things they’ve found in the books they’ve bought…

More at Stuff in Old Books.

* Desiderius Erasmus

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As we riffle through the pages, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933, that Federal Judge John M. Woolsey, ruling on an action precipitated by Random House publisher Bennett Cerf as a test case, that the James Joyce’s novel Ulysses is not obscene.  Woolsey reserved judgement on the objects found interleaved therein.

1922 first edition cover

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December 6, 2014 at 1:01 am

“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others…”*

 

One of a wonderful series of Faces in Things.

* Jonathan Swift

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As we endeavor to follow Schopenhauer’s good advice, we might send amusing birthday greetings to Aron Ettore Schmitz; he was born on this date in 1861.  Much better known by his pen name, Italo Svevo (though not so nearly well known as he deserves to be), Schmitz was a successful businessman and aspiring writer who drew James Joyce as an English tutor during Joyce’s sojourn as a Berlitz instructor in Trieste.  Joyce admired Schmitz’s first (and largely ignored) novel Senilità. Years later Schmitz failed to find an Italian publisher for his second novel and ultimately self-published; Joyce, by then in Paris, had the text translated into French and intervened with his publisher to secure a release.  The novel, La Coscienza di Zeno (The Confessions of Zeno, or Zeno’s Conscience as a later English translation has it) was such a critical success that the then-dean of Italian critics, Eugenio Montale, discovered it, and Schmitz’s novel got a commercial release in Italy.  

Zeno Cosini, the novel’s hero, a businessman fascinated by Freudian theory, mirrored Schmitz– who was also a model for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce’s Ulysses.

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December 19, 2013 at 1:01 am

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.

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February 14, 2013 at 1:01 am

Judd the facts, ma’am…

Donald Judd, was an artist, designer, and teacher whose work (largely grouped with the Minimalists, though Judd hated that label) has been featured at the Tate Modern and other museums around the world, and is on display at the Judd Foundation, in both Manhattan and Marfa, Texas.

In addition to Judd’s art, the Foundation displays, and via a “subsidiary” sells, furniture manufactured to Judd designs…  and it displays Judd’s library.

And even cooler (especially for readers who can’t make it to the Spring Street location), the library is searchable online.  One simply clicks on a shelf in the diagram of the layout…

… and sees the shelf in question….

… Mouse over a shelf (on the site), and a tab pops up identifying the theme of that part of the collection; click on a volume to see the bibliographical details of that book.

Tres, tres, cool!

As remind ourselves of Groucho Marx’s insight: “outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend; inside of a dog it’s too dark to read,” we might recall that this is a bid date in the annals of English letters…  It was on this date in 1842, that Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published Poems.  While the future Poet Laureate had been writing for a decade, it was this two-volume release (which included “Ulysses” and Morte d’Arthur”) that made his name.

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And on this date in 1925, Virginia Wolfe published the story of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway– one of Time‘s “100 Best Novels since 1923” (2005).

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