More news and oddments from around the wonderful world wide web-o-sphere! Let’s get the painful stuff out of the way first – and finally a real Joycean I’d like to meet! *Winks* After that opening the rest of this post may seem rather dry, but I’ll try my best.

An amusing piece from today’s Guardian on the lasting impact (or not) of literature on the popular consciousness. Can anyone imagine a future where Dan Brown is regarded as ‘one to study’? No? Me neither. But will Joyce be on any ‘list’ one hundred years from now. Fashions turn so who really knows. And do auction prices only go up? Apologies for this late link again from the Guardian.

Also Tom Parker Bowles (almost royalty) in today’s Mail contemplates breakfast a la Bloom with a piece of devilled kidney or two. I think I’ll stick to my usual tea and toast thanks.

Is Rob’s comic moving a little too slowly for you? It is a big project so you can’t expect to race through it. However if you’ve the attention span of a gnat you might try this interpretation which moves a little faster! Hang on tight!

You Joyceans probably already know all this but as a newbie I’m positively shocked to read the Joyce had any impact on the world of physics! This blog post on Quantum Moxie reveals a tiny particle of fact I must have missed – things are more interesting than I first thought on planet Joyce!

This article on freedom from the New York Times mentions Ulysses only in passing but sounds a worrying note for people like myself who ‘live’ on the internet. A kind of anti-technology technology is upon us and may G have mercy on our souls.

Still on the tech side of things I wonder if any readers with an iPhone can tell the meaning of reviews like this one from the appropriately named TechReviews site. It’s all meaningless to a Luddite like me – I still like my small concession to tech to be somehow useful. And a book is still a thing made out of paper in my house.

I don’t think I’ll be reading this essay any time soon but the first paragraph I have some sympathy with. Ulysses is monstrous, but sometimes monsters can be useful – even a little beautiful. And you can always fall back on the fact (as I do) that at the very least Joyce is thankfully not Proust!

Not Ulyssean(!) but interesting enough for scholars and newbies alike is this review of a lecture on The Dead and the Potato Famine. Ah but I later discover Ulyssean is a perfectly good word and as I should’ve known there’s a perfectly good society to go along with it! But now – this is what I’ve been after. If there’s only one link you click on here today – make it this one from the unlikely sounding AnzLitLovers! This is the kind of in-depth dissection of an individual chapter (Hades in this case) that I’ve been looking for – bookmarked for reading after my own virgin experience!

Naturally not every mention of James Joyce has a connection to literary criticism – sometimes it crops up in everyday pop culture. Last week it was Cheryl Cole, now it’s Westlife! A fan writes, and I quote “but i used to want to be irish so bad because of them, lmao. i legit researched everything i could about ireland lmao. my hs english teacher and everyone in that class used to be so impressed when we read seamus heaney and james joyce and i knew shit like the easter uprising and the name of the irish language and the capital of n. ireland and some of the county names and that wb yeats is buried in SLIGO lolololol.” Ah, makes you proud of your heritage doesn’t it!

Finally, is “Mistakes are the portals of discovery” a real quote? He must have written that one for me! More next week at our new time of Monday – it’s a real portal to your Joycean week!!!