Kicking off the Hypertext Chapbook this week is a link to the news about the reading group Infinite Zombies tackling Ulysses and currently around halfway through by the looks of things. Eight Weeks seems a bit ambitious! Eight months would be stretching things for this reader! Insights are to be gained therein on how the project was formed and what works have already been discussed. There’s nothing stopping you from joining in I guess and if not you can at least read what is already there. A lively conversation from the look of it.
An article in the Guardian last week throws Joyce and the modern novel into some kind of fresh context by reporting on the long history of the novel which is, apparently, much longer than we might have first thought. I shocked to discover the nature of that work which might previously have been said to kick-start the genre and first be called a ‘novel’. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela sounds a bit risqué to me!
Dublin has been declared a UNESCO City of Literature which should make all Joyceans proud of the impact their favourite author has had on that decision. It joins Edinburgh, Melbourne and Iowa in a short list of cities designated since the program began in 2004.
If you’ve all read your astrological stars for the day and made your plans accordingly then why not hop over to another ‘science’ based discussion based around character types and discover the true nature of Stephen, Leopold and Molly.
Likely new readers are always showing up here and there like so much cannon fodder. Here’s another one! And another one! Wish them luck. I know I do. Especially when, as it so often seems to, a reading begins to involve more people than just yourself. Whatever happened to the private pleasure of reading that we have to perform in tandem with other folk? I know, I know, but I have to declare myself a curmudgeon!
If you are as desperate as I am to circumnavigate the book in an easier style than just reading it you might, like me, try to search out the ‘film of the book’. That naturally means my first port of call in the Internet Movie Database. Hmm! Disappointingly thin and precious little detail. My affection for Milo O’Shea leads me to want to hunt down the 1967 film by Joseph Strick. Anyone care to recommend or warn me off?
The talk about Apple, the app store and censorship continues (and looks likely to continue for a good while longer) so I won’t feel too bad by linking to another story and another set of comments. This is more about Apple,the technology of digital distribution and the idea of censorship – so don’t expect much chat about James Joyce.
And now, just for the hell of it, a few quick links to what can only be described as internet stuff:
The word of the day is (or it was when he posted it last week) Artificer according to Michael Leddy’s blog!
If anything frightens me more than actually reading Joyce it has to be reading about Joyce, but for the dedicated masochists among you here is yet another book to buckle your bookshelf!
For those of you connected in an online manner try hooking up with the James Joyce Centre Dublin on facebook here. Forget all those privacy setting issues and ‘like’ it!
Finally another one of those links to blog posts that just require too much thought for my tiny mind to absorb all in one go, so I shall have to return to this intriguing set of ideas about Joyce and Ulysses and Dublin another time.
