Sandymount

The waves lap like joyous pride,
And all the different skaters and pram-pushers,
Whisper messages across sea-spitting time.

Two salty memories of the stop of Joyce.

I wish I was on the miles,
And miles,
And miles of shore.

Towards black ship horizon testimonies,
The tide comes and in its ineluctable way,
Shifts,
Shifts,
And shifts.

Two lips of waves kiss me.

And oh,
The day of kisses is living.

Threads of sand-lines,
Two wormy-wrigglers,
A toe-mail brush of love.

Ode de Joyce

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

Gerty

Sand on me and me oh my he can't see my secret I see him watching and then I see him sitting here with his leg cocked and just the tiny tilt of his head and then he sees the pink-shin of skin. When he sees me I feel sad with crying eyes because I think he will be another another, yes another, who will turn away and not see me for who I really am and well, when he gives me the respect of his eyes I think that I shall burst with joy and tears. In my heart I just think that he notices me and that he will perhaps walk away and never return but then he lays back on his shoulders, grey. The eyes, yes, you can see eyes. They are bright for a moment. Pickle-eyes. With wet ginger bottle spirit. White vinegar. I said to my ma that I could see the look sometimes but then they see the fault, the physical, damning fault and they walk away. Get off on the side view the soft view, the wide-angle view and don't take note of the physical. If I just show a bit of. That. Yes, that part is ok. And it holds you back and you cannot do the things that you want to do and the face is pretty but they say oh no when they see it all. The big eyes and the laughing smile and sometimes the glint of sparkle. But, even though they don't want to admit it, when they see the whole picture, they aren't wanting you anymore. I'll give him a glimpse. A glimpse, of sand-calves. And soft, white skin. And little dark patches. And rubies. And all the girl. He can see in there. He watches from the pebble-seat he has there. I am sideways, over the shoulder at you. In rock-pools I hide. Star-fish secrets, all by myself, always.

Fragmento-Finnegans Wake

Poverty and Bad Grammar

Syphilis-tremponema-pallidum, gonorrhoeal-mitochondriosis, discharge of stout and lager; Soave-of-bitters for the cockle and moan, embalmer’s-oil to encourage blistering and clottage, a most inaccurate science of alchemy and dross, but a science nonetheless; trackman’s-harp, tympanic-foil, {musical frottage} not for the weak-kneed, bubonic or deckle {flail-skin-of-feta}, a ghetto of dilettantism, poverty and bad grammar.

It’s 2:23 in the morning; Sartre’s wristwatch set to naught. My goodness-me, how time flies. Beanery and Time: what an extraordinary treatise, scrota in C-minor with fluting, a deontological jumpstart without cable and handsaw. Its 2:37 in the morning; a Profurn in D-major, sans flutes and oboes, but accompanied by a French horn and Basque bassoon. I must say, I do prefer the oboe, such a pleasant non-cons-anal refrain.

Brodhead grinds powders to talc, metallurgy of substance; felon-ash to prevent loss of abject.

Molloy, off-cantor and bilious with ale, his Monteux soiled with mud-wagon, bilge and cockney, trying to dissuade the constabulary from running him in said ‘you dear sire are a dupe, a mountebank and a fool!’ The detective shoved Molloy with the curd of his boot, saying ‘and you, my imprudent man, are a taproot and a burbler, a roughneck and a thug’.

Morton Salk had skinned knees, a pug-nose and wore Birkenstocks and calf-tripe gloves, regardless of the weather. He ate celery-rot, frozen parsnips, glue and pastry-sugar, and was a wee bit taller than a Lagerkvist’s dwarf and twice as cunning. He disliked people who wore sunbonnets, capes, strapless shoes and a doctor of philology named Karl Millermanstein. He penned a book on cattery, a style-manual for those absorbed with stupid notions and catcalls. He scorned and belittled dog-grooming, chivalry and cock-sniffing; as he felt roosters were God’s scourge on man and chivalry for imbeciles. Morton Salk died in a brothel-fire in 1642, and was found day’s later eating celery-rot, frozen parsnips, glue and pastry-sugar, and wearing a sunbonnet, cape and strapless shoes twice his size.

The 5th Member of the Clash

Joyce's Sandinista

I may be stretching commonsense and good manners (not that that’s a stretch for me) but something, London Calling perhaps, tells me that James would have liked the Clash. I imagine him pogooing in some underground club, a bottle of Porter in hand, ‘daddy was a bank robber’ ringing in his ears, his hat toppling off his head, hats and Mohawks are an unlikely fit, feet shuffling, greatcoat tigered between his legs. James would have appreciated the Clash’s anger and forthrightness; they’re political incorrectness, the swirl and punch of they’re lyrics, they’re in-your-face-ness. If James had been a Punk, Ulysses would have been his Sandinista, ‘Cut the Crap’ his motto, ‘should I stay or should I go’ the last words he uttered before fleeing the Eyre.

Rathmines, Sandymount Green

IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS

Before Nelson’s pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold’s Cross. The hoarse Dublin United Tramway Company’s timekeeper bawled them off:

—Rathgar and Terenure!
—Come on, Sandymount Green!

Right and left parallel clanging ringing a doubledecker and a singledeck moved from their railheads, swerved to the down line, glided parallel.

—Start, Palmerston Park!

THE WEARER OF THE CROWN

Under the porch of the general post office shoeblacks called and polished. Parked in North Prince’s street His Majesty’s vermilion mailcars, bearing on their sides the royal initials, E. R., received loudly flung sacks of letters, postcards, lettercards, parcels, insured and paid, for local, provincial, British and overseas delivery.

GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS

Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince’s stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince’s stores.

—There it is, Red Murray said. Alexander Keyes.
—Just cut it out, will you? Mr Bloom said, and I’ll take it round to the TELEGRAPH office.

The door of Ruttledge’s office creaked again. Davy Stephens, minute in a large capecoat, a small felt hat crowning his ringlets, passed out with a roll of papers under his cape, a king’s courier.

Red Murray’s long shears sliced out the advertisement from the newspaper in four clean strokes. Scissors and paste.

—I’ll go through the printingworks, Mr Bloom said, taking the cut square.
—Of course, if he wants a par, Red Murray said earnestly, a pen behind his ear, we can do him one.
—Right, Mr Bloom said with a nod. I’ll rub that in.

Canon Fodder

When I think of Joyce I think of spindle-elm, rectors’ benches and ash-switches, the thrash and wail of God’s will into the seats of little boy’s knee-pants. Joyce’s inimitable understanding of Aquinas is evident throughout A Portrait, Ulysses and the Wake, Stephen’s exegesis on substantive form, Jesuit dogma and surplice, a Hegelian kick at the merciless mercy of a higher Jesuit education. As I am rereading Aquinas, under the tutelage of an inimitable Thomistic scholar, I can see the connections that Joyce makes between religious messianicism and dogs’bodies; James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Young Hegelian, slayer of transubstantiation and dogma, canon fodder for the intemperate and Guinness-weary.

http://www.ulysses.ie/home/default.asp

The trailer for the film is breath-taking: the Irish Sea, Molly, lemony-scented soap and Bloom in commode with Sears and Roebuck.
http://www.ulysses.ie/home/default.asp

Molly, dearest Molly

Serial and Guinness

Matisse on the Liffey

J.J. O'Molloy

A Joyous Joyce Site

http://www.uwm.edu/Library/special/exhibits/clastext/clspg158.htm/

It goes like this

It goes like this when you lie there and then you say to Boylan go on go on and he goes and he wakes his head up and there it is and his eyes are all lilting and he makes you go like that he knows every time doesn't he and then throwing down the gauntlet you won't sleep at my feet like my boy no my boy he sleeps at my feet and he takes in the smell of me I know he likes it the vulgar brutes of my toes and the flesh pickle of sunken hollows of aspiring soles I know what you like my boy likes to think of us together and when we walk along the Sandymount he takes me in his arms and he raises me up and he lets wind drive my hair up into the air sharpening me like a brute you were his place my place all hot and full of cuisine of my buttocky lovegloves I shall hang you in my mouth and taste you and swallow you and then I shall replenish you all and we will go again again and again you shall always come back to me and find me waiting in my red shift yes my red shift and you paint me with your tongue you do you do sorceress I am for you oh

The Spanish Bawd

Parmeno: And she concocted other cosmetics from powdered asphodel, senna, snakeroot, gall, sour grapes, and new wine, distilled and sweetened with sugar. For softening the skin she used lemon juice, turpeth, deer and heron marrow, and other confections. She manufactured toilet waters from roses, orange-blossom, jasmine, clover, honey-suckle, carnation, and reseda, powdered and soaked in wine…You would never believe what face-washes she distilled from storax, jasmine, lemon, melon-seed, violets, benzoin, pistachio-nuts, pinekernels, grape-pips, jujube, fennel, lucerne, vetch, sunspurge, and chickweed. And she always carried a little balsam in a flask, to rub into the sore she has on her nose. As for maidenheads, some she repaired with bladders and others with a few stitches. She kept a stock of fine furrier’s needles and waxed silk thread in a little painted box on her shelf; and hanging from it were roots of spikenard and red sumach, squill and cardoons, with which she worked marvels.

Fernando de Rojas, ‘La Celestina’, (Tragiccomedia de Calisto y Melibea), 1499, some 500 years before Ulysses.

Grammacide and Chicanery

Below, below the grammar-line, I have cut and pasted an exegesis on the not-so-fine art of semantic no-nonsense and, might I add, under no duress, ill-will, coercion or chicanery of any kind. I culled a selection of small pieces, all written days, weeks, months apart, and basted them together as a unified text. What I noticed, against my will and better judgment, is that by some alchemy they seem to fit together, unfittingly so, but together nonetheless. This speaks more to my state of mind than to craftsmanship, or the fact that I have obsessive compulsive disorder, the need to find randomness in order and order in randomness. As with anything done in a stream-of-consciousness style, freely-associated, the sense is in the senselessness, the meaning in the meaninglessness, the text hidden and revealed within the text. Doffing my boatmen’s cap to Lacan, I have purloined a letter, stamped it, signatured it and sent it on its merry way. Where it goes is incidental to the randomness of chance, judgment, craftsmanship, OCD or chicanery. Though I did send it off in my boatmen’s cap, so there must be some guile and hew to it, unfitting as it may be.

Chattelblueskyblue

A Portobello blue sky, a blue chattel dress blue sky blue. A sharecropper’s yellow moon; this substantial form; goodness me, so this is what has become of me, corruptibility, incorruptibility, a sharecropper’s oxen scythe taking me off just above the knee. A spoiled milk sky, a creamery of blue-steel, pox-clouds sullying a plainness of sky, whey separated from curd; lactose bigoted. No; a bowery sky, scullery with grime and sludge, a mire of brown-sky, a stain of sky; a debasement. Skeletal trees tonsured with pre-solstice fretting, branches at arms-length, a crapulence of rot and wither. Today I will purchase draperies for my bedroom window. And these nasty polemarks: [and] jammy tarts, the ones great aunt Alma made in the summer kitchen, crimping pastry into taffeta frills, and my great uncle Jim standing on the front porch, his good eye threaded with sweat, waving at tourist’s cars, and my dad eating date squares and rarebits of toast, and me, sitting on the back stoop counting to one hundred backwards, making daisy chains with whistle grass and nettle fens, the afternoon fading into August night. As a meat caracole disgusts me, as does fleet-footed dancing and luncheon pork, the kind with macaroni and pimento, olives and soy by-products, tiny nubs of gristle and bone, I abhor it all, all of it all. Caracole, of course, is an equestrian move performed by horse and rider, feet clacking in stirrups, bridle pulled back to prevent bucking and off cantor, an elegant pas de duet. In Mexico the caracole is performed by a picador, topknot pomade, feet splayed to form a plea-A, dodging boxthorn and lancet, a hurrah, hurrah issuing from the Mescalero’s. This is ridiculous, as I know nothing about Mescalero’s, caracole, pimentos, olives or gristle. Please, I abjure you, repress and re-censor this Grammatik infanticide, for he knows not of what he speaks, and, might he/I add, Holden Caulfield was a crummy bastard, I/he much prefer Ackley, the great Nietzschean tightrope walker, imbiber of cocktails and gimlets. Cigarette paper leaves stained nicotine brown, yellow, the advent of death and wither. In decay and perish, such life and advent, an august autumn, the time of fester and blain. Having written myself into a teleological wasteland, a Bradley(lian) corner, I must seek out an erasure, an epistemic wipecloth. If I could but close my eyes and rethink the process, all would be well, but as I can’t (Kant) I have no other recourse than to Oedipal-eyes. I asked today what the difference is between something that given to us by God and something that is inherent, or not given to us by God. Are they the same thing, a twinning, two sides of the same coin? If we are given free-will by God, then can we know who the giver is? If we can, then aren’t we giving back what the giver gave us, the ability to exercise our will freely? It seems to me that give and inherent are the same thing, identical twins with identical nominal value, a given give giver. All things, then, are given and therefore not inherent, unless inherent means to be given, which I doubt it does. If God is the giver of all things, free-will, intellect, will and the capacity to exercise said gifts, the given gives, then are we really given anything at all, or is the given really the give, the God who gives give to the given? I am giving myself a splitting headache, a give given by me the giver, given my capacity, or gift, to exercise my free-will, which is given freely, but never given back to the giver, the give given giver given. Now the words give, given and giver have lost all meaning for me, they are as senseless as the free-will I have been given, yet can never give back to the giver, or for that matter, know who the giver is, because if I knew who the giver was, or is, I would be the giver, identical to the give given giver give. I hate metaphysics and the fact that I am so darn crappy at it. I best stay with counting and recounting, tabulating and re-tabulating, correlating and re-correlating, as they are things, actions of my not-so-free-will, that I seem to have some control over, albeit a puerile and vacuous one, a not-yet-given given control of.

Count Julian

Juan Goytisolo

Juan Goytisolo’s Count Julian, one of the truest to form in the Joycean form of forms. Read what you can pilfer, pinch, nick, filch, embezzle, pocket and thieve of this under-read genius.

The Rector's Breath (a portrait)

But Mr Harford was very decent and never got into a wax. All the other masters got into dreadful waxes. But why were they to suffer for what fellows in the higher line did? Wells had said that they had drunk some of the altar wine out of the press in the sacristy and that it had been found out who had done it by the smell. Perhaps they had stolen a monstrance to run away with and sell it somewhere. That must have been a terrible sin, to go in there quietly at night, to open the dark press and steal the flashing gold thing into which God was put on the altar in the middle of flowers and candles at benediction while the incense went up in clouds at both sides as the fellow swung the censer and Dominic Kelly sang the first part by himself in the choir. But God was not in it of course when they stole it. But still it was a strange and a great sin even to touch it. He thought of it with deep awe; a terrible and strange sin: it thrilled him to think of it in the silence when the pens scraped lightly. But to drink the altar wine out of the press and be found out by the smell was a sin too: but it was not terrible and strange. It only made you feel a little sickish on account of the smell of the wine. Because on the day when he had made his first holy communion in the chapel he had shut his eyes and opened his mouth and put out his tongue a little: and when the rector had stooped down to give him the holy communion he had smelt a faint winy smell off the rector’s breath after the wine of the mass. The word was beautiful: wine. It made you think of dark purple because the grapes were dark purple that grew in Greece outside houses like white temples. But the faint smell of the rector’s breath had made him feel a sick feeling on the morning of his first communion. The day of your first communion was the happiest day of your life. And once a lot of generals had asked Napoleon what was the happiest day of his life. They thought he would say the day he won some great battle or the day he was made an emperor. But he said:

—Gentlemen, the happiest day of my life was the day on which I made my first holy communion

Shadows by the Film Folk - a Meditation on Joyce

Shadows By The Film Folk

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The Yes Concealed Behind the NO.

My own experience with psychoanalysis has taught me what I think I say I say is often mistaken, a faulty transcription of a symptom, a manifest expression of something inexpressible. Within (or outside) the inexpressible lies the etymology of the symptom that is the expression of the expressed; the expression of the yet-to-be; the inexpressibility of expression. Free-association is the evocation of the symptom (the faulty transcription) of the inexpressibility, the manifest latency of rebus, dream and memory. Joyce, in his masterful use of stream-of-consciousness, expressed this inexpressibility, the night-terrors and shades, the hurt and anger, the cuckoldry that lies veiled behind the faulty transcription, the Heideggerian unconcealing, the expression of the inexpressible, an evocation of the symptom of the unconscious wish, the yes concealed behind the no

James Joyce and the Problem of Psychoanalysis

Luke Thurston, University of Wales, Aberystwyth

From its very beginning, psychoanalysis sought to incorporate the aesthetic into its domain. Despite Joyce's deliberate attempt in his writing to resist this powerful hermeneutic, his work has been confronted by a long tradition of psychoanalytic readings. Luke Thurston argues that this very antagonism holds the key to how psychoanalytic thinking can still open up new avenues in Joycean criticism and literary theory. In particular, Thurston shows that Jacques Lacan's response to Joyce goes beyond the 'application' of theory: rather than diagnosing Joyce's writing or claiming to have deciphered its riddles, Lacan seeks to understand how it can entail an unreadable signature, a unique act of social transgression that defies translation into discourse. Thurston imaginatively builds on Lacan's work to illuminate Joyce's place in a wide-ranging literary genealogy that includes Shakespeare, Hogg, Stevenson and Wilde. This study should be essential reading for all students of Joyce, literary theory and psychoanalysis.

My Favorite Joyce Photo

Second Favorite (but it's close)

(Microwaveable) Joyce

James Joyce (1882-1941)

Dubliners (1914) [ read download ]
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) [ read download ]
Ulysses (1922) [ read download ]
Finnegans Wake (1939) [ read download ]
The following works are available from Project Gutenberg:
Chamber Music [ read download ]

© 2006 The University of AdelaideLast Modified 18/10/2006CRICOS Provider Number 00123M
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http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/j/joyce/james/

Stephen's Penance

Jawbone biscuits, currants and arrowroot, a slough-pump rum-cake, packet of crisps; seedy soppy loll; Howth Head penance, Graveclothes coiled in Guinness, a stone bowled into the rope of the sea.

Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man

Ulysses, on the technical side, is an immense exercise in style, an orgy of ‘apeishness,’ decidedly ‘sedulous’. It is an encyclopaedia of English literary technique, as well as a general-knowledge paper. The schoolmaster in Joyce is in great evidence throughout its pages. (Lewis, 1957, p.76)

The method that underlies Ulysses is known as the ‘telling from the inside.’ As that description denotes, it is psychological. Carried out in the particular manner used in Ulysses, it lands the reader inside an Aladdin’s cave of incredible bric-a-brac in which a dense mass of dead stuff is collected, from 1901 toothpaste, a bar or two of Sweet Rosie O’Grady, to pre-nordic architecture. An immense nature-morte is the result. This ensues from the method of confining the reader in a circumscribed psychological space into which several encyclopaedias have been emptied. (Ibid, p. 91)

Martello

I climbed the tiny,
Stone steps,
To the place where,
You slept.

Looked at your thin,
Wooden cane.

Traced your lives,
In the gold embroidery,
Of your waistcoat.

Shed a tear,
At the intimacy of it all.

Climbed to the summit,
Traced my finger,
Along mortar joints,
Looked out at the bathing lake,
Where old age swam.
The chip! chop! waters,
Icy and treacherous.

I put in my toe,
And my whole body,
Tingled,
As I flip-flopped,
Out to sea.

You could see the top of Howth Head,
From here,
The swell of,
Cliff,
And Nora's walking boot cloud above.

I near froze to death that day,
In the water,
Looking up at where once you lay,
Moving and spitting seeds,
On the ledge of life.

I try to,
In my clumsy way,
Swim it all in.

Touch a blade of grass on the path.

I hold the giant handle,
Of that Eccles Street door,
Only it is not,
whole.

All black and brooding it is,
Angry at being,
Propped up in a tiny tea shop,
In a dusty corner.

Tea-sets and quiet.

[? August 1932} Kusnacht-Zurich, Seestrasse 228

Dear Sir,

Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don't know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn't help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn't.

Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,
Yours faithfully, C.G. Jung

Ulysses by James Augustine, Aloysius Joyce

Overlooking the Irish Sea

She lived on the Barbary Coast with a three-legged dog and a tailless cat. She had fret marks on her brow, just below her hairline, and a birthmark shaped like a curlicue. She spoke gibberish and Gaelic, wrote in hieroglyphics and Braille, never once misspelling a word or forgetting her grammar.

For Seamus Heaney

cocks wither in the summer heat
necks wrung like washing rags
languid socks of skin and thew

your hair twisted into cornrows
a quarrel of pale yellow sun
tracing the crib of your lips

cats prowl the silage for mice
tails scab with viscera and douse
the summer heat spun into shadow

my uncle’s gore callused hands
chucking necks like slough rags
into the silage trap

I lift the barrows of your skirt
revealing a warrant cat
a severed cockscomb in its mouth

Joycean Transubstantiation (dog'sbody)

Ulysses can be read as transubstantiation: Dog’sbody, Dignam’sbody, Molly’sbody and Stephen’s dearly departed mother’sbody pleuritic with coalman’s lung. The juxtaposition of lifelessness with the immanence of the living, the dead rising, corseting the black Irish Sea. There is a no separation between the dead and the living, but simply an inversion of language, a distance that never recedes into the background (foreground), an opposable unity of language, separation and line; transubstantiation of body and soul (life and death) sung in a tenebrous, lilting Irish brogue.

Float on a River (Forever and Ever)

FLOAT ON A RIVER (FOREVER AND EVER)

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