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Category Archives: Uncategorized
Just in time for Bloomsday!
Throwaway Horse and Stoney Road Press Present James Joyce’s The Dead.
Bloomsday Bookmarks
ULYSSES “SEEN” is moving to Dublin!
It is true. We’re Dublinbound.
When this website first began in 2009 all of us here at Throwaway Horse tried to envision it as a place where interested people could come to learn about and discuss the work of James Joyce through his novel ULYSSES. We set up a pretty large challenge for ourselves with the initial idea of adapting that novel into a comic with the hope that each page and panel could serve as a window into Joyce’s deeper mysteries and his world of Dublin on June 16th, 1904. As the cartoonist behind that crazy idea, this website, and the people we’ve met through it, have been invaluable to me in understanding and interpreting the novel for a new audience. I couldn’t have done the work without it.
But running a website, a good one, can be a full time job in itself and Josh and Mike and I have never really had the time to manage the regular and recurring content this kind of a forum deserves. With the release of our iPad app and other delivery methods now in full swing we’ll be spending a lot more of our time making the comic. Blogging is all very fun, but I’ve got to concentrate on making the work.
So I’m very pleased and excited to announce that the comic, readers’ guide and blog forum on this website will continue as a part of the James Joyce Centre in Dublin with the reboot of their website next month. We’re all very happy to working more closely with the Joyce Centre in bringing this project to Dublin and the world in an open and free environment. Now we can deliver the kind of regularly updated and ongoing content this kind of a website deserves.
So what does this mean to you, our readers and subscribers?
Well, it means that starting September 24th the comic and reader’s guide pages will move over to the Joyce Centre website. The comments sections will remain intact, but we’ll be starting from page one of “Telemachus” again to give new readers a chance to catch up and add to the conversation. Along the way we’ll be dropping in additional blogposts on the Joyce Centre site about what’s happening in the new chapters we’re working on, “Nestor” and “Lotus Eaters”, and a whole lot of news from Joyceanna around the world. I’ll also be asking fans for help in solving some deeper visual mysteries of the novel like, “what stamp might’ve been on Martha Clifford’s letter?” or, “what, exactly, does a ‘cheeseparing nose’ look like?” (I really couldn’t draw this thing without your support on questions like those…)
It also a chance for this work, and all of you Joyceheads who’ve been such a big part of building it, to interact with the very real Dublin of today; to see ways of sorting the fiction and allegory of Joyce’s view of the city from the very real experience of Dubliners living there now. We are in a fairly interesting time now as this novel is being more openly embraced by the city of it’s origin than it ever has before and my suspicion is that this will make for new and exciting discourse.
But mostly it means that this project gets to live and breathe in the environment of Joyce’s imaginings. It gets to be more about Dublin and about understanding and discussing the city as Joyce saw it.
Exciting times for all of us,
-Rob
What you should do while you’re waiting for Bloomsday
Hello and welcome back!
If you’re a regular subscriber on on our facebook or twitter feeds you may know that I and the original pages from the comic will be in Dublin for the first time this BloomsDay.
(Yes. I will be in Dublin for the first time. Yes. My wife as well. Anyone no where to buy a good seedcake?)
You may’ve therefore heard that there will be new pages of the coming “Nestor/Lotus Eaters” chapter going online for the holiday… but I’m not allowed to tell you where yet.
Today’s news isn’t about the comic, however. Today it’s about telling you all how I and my partners at Throwaway Horse are getting behind the folks at Boston College who are developing an smart-phone based walking tour of Dublin with ULYSSES as the key. It’s called JoyceWalk and it looks fantastic.
Professor Nugent and his students have created a tour of the town that accesses the paths of Stephen and Mr Bloom and gives you all of the relevant spots, the deeper histories, the most significant monuments and the truly outstanding pubs, complete with related images and quotes, all in time for my first-time visit to dirty, dirty Dublin. Now we need to help him out a bit so we can get it on our phones by Bloomsday.
The tech has been designed and the content work is done, but there hoping for a little kickstarter push to get code written and submitted in time. As someone who’s dealt with this before… I feel the worry.
So I’m sending out this call for help to all of you who have helped us so much before. Making this novel more accessible relies strongly on making people see how Mr Joyce’s love and humor is still part of our everyday experience and that his Dublin and our own modern cities are not so very far apart. Bringing that idea to a new audience means meeting them, intelligently and calmly, in the forum digital application, something I believe Joyce would’ve loved.
I’m committing new drawings and original art from the comic as rewards to this wonderful kickstarter drive and I’m hoping all of you who have supported us in the past will send the love to Professor Nugent and his students. You can receive original drawings from my Dubliners sketchbook there for a donation of just $35. There will also be pages of original art from our “Calypso” chapter offered there for a $300 dollar pledge of support.
I really, really would like to see this project make it. As a Joycehead like yourselves, I really want someone to just say, “hey, sure it’s hard to understand. But if you bring it up on your phone there then I think we can give you a little glimmer of just why you’ll want to read it.”
Thanks so much and standby for further updates as Bloomsday draws nearer,
-Rob
Birthday changes and beyond
Happy Cinqo De Mayo, mis amigos!All of us here on ULYSSES “SEEN” are pretty sensitive to important calendar dates. Maybe it comes from keeping pace with Bloomsday (just 42days away!) and the yearly reminder it carries that this is an important novel to read (and read again). Maybe we feel this way because Joyce himself was such a stickler for the importance of dates and rather famously had the first copy of the novel delivered to him on his birthday. Stories like that are laced throughout the man’s life and in his works and serve, to me at least, as a good example of how chance and the universe often conspire to tell us things. Omens and portents and the like are something we’ve been inclined to take pretty seriously with this project.
May 1st is a kind of birthday for us on ULYSSES “SEEN”. While Josh and Mike and I were playing around with using digital comics to adapt Joyce’s novel in 2007, it’s in May of 2009 that our company, Throwaway Horse launched the website your using now. Well in advance of the iPad’s release we were looking forward to a way to get a community of the novel’s fans into a forum that makes sense for first time readers and help generate the kind of interaction that I need as an artist for drawing the adaptation. I think we’ve built a strong learning tool here with just these two chapters and look very forward to seeing how we can bring new and more experienced fans into the deeper mysteries of the novel.The launch of our iPad app in 2010 brought renewed attention to old battles for artistic freedom that Joyce’s novel waged in the past and still, 90 years later, seem go on today. Quite a lot of new readers found their way into the novel in these past two years of the iPad app and we’re certainly proud of that.
Quite a few of you subscribers to the site also supported us in a successful kickstarter fundraising drive at the end of 2010. This allowed us to keep the lights burning in the studio throughout last year and complete second chapter for release on both the web and iPad. As a small start-up company working on a very, very big project I can’t express to you enough how important that support was at a crucial time last year.
Now, with another BloomsDay fast approaching, its time to start planning for the future material and income needed to keep us going. While our first two chapters will remain open here on the website the ULYSSES “SEEN”iPad app will no longer be free. Beginning next week will be charging $7.99 for the app. We think that’s a pretty reasonable price for 123 pages of comics, as many pages of notes and the interactive discussion forums people have on their iPads through our app. As the first direct revenue stream we’ve set up for ULYSSES “SEEN” this income will go a long way towards funding the next 16 chapters as well as new interactive features we’ve got planned along the way.
To any of you who have already downloaded the app this change in price won’t have any effect on the content or updates you’ll be receiving. For those of you haven’t downloaded it yet, or have friends who’ve not, we’d like to encourage you to get the app this week while it’s still free. Maybe not the strongest business strategy on our end, but we’d like to give our supporters, subscribers and friends here on the website the chance to stay ahead of the crowd.
Right now, just 42 days from BloomsDay, we’ve got a lot more news and lot more fresh pages of the comic ready to come your way. But for today, Cinqo De Mayo, we suggest you trade in your pint of Guinness for a couple of Coronas and kickback in the sunshine while downloading the free ULYSSES “SEEN” app. There’s a lot more still to come…
-Rob
We’re making April less cruel
We hope that as fans of Ulysses “Seen”, and presumably Ulysses, you share our love of modernist literature at large. We also hope you share our sense of humor, our desire to hack through the thornier patches of this stuff, and our wish that more people read it so that we could talk more about it and demonstrate how bloody clever we are.
Soooo, if you haven’t heard, we launched a Throwaway Horse take on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, called Martin Rowson’s The Waste Land Seen. We took acclaimed political cartoonist Martin Rowson’s take on The Waste Land, added our Reader’s Guide to it, and launched it as another iPad app. A set of five sample pages can be found here. We’ve been selling the app for $9.99, but for the month of April only we are reducing the price to $7.99. Please consider purchasing this app and recommending to your friends. It would make our April slightly less cruel.
Thanks!
To read sample pages: http://throwawayhorse.com/home/projects/wasteland-seen/sample-pages/
To download the app: http://itunes.apple.com/app/martin-rowsons-the-waste-land/id438535843?mt=8
New Joyce-related comic, Joyce and a Little “Sirens” MS, Joyce and the Turntables
Just some odds and ends from the James Joyce world this week:
The occasion of Joyce’s 130th birthday this past Thursday meant that there was a lot of Joyce-related news:
First, Mary and Bryan Talbot’s collaboration — The Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes — was published this week by Dark Horse Comics. The comic tells the parallel stories of the relationships of Lucia and James Joyce and that of Mary Talbot and her father, James Atherton. Atherton was a prominent Joyce scholar – his “Books at the Wake“ is still a standard reference to Finnegans Wake. Here’s a story from Sex, Drugs & Comic Books about the book launch in London.
Sarah Funke Butler from Glenn Horowitz Bookseller wrote an interesting piece for The Paris Review for Joyce’s birthday. I don’t agree with all of her analysis of copyright law, necessarily, but there’s a great image of a manuscript note from “Sirens,” with an interesting discussion of Joyce’s writing process & the circumstances around the creation of Ulysses.
Old friend Damien Keane writes about Joyce and the resurgence of vinyl here.
Happy Birthday Old Artificer!
Today, February 2, 2012, is the 130th anniversary of Joyce’s birth, and the 90th anniversary of the publication of *Ulysses.* Steve King’s account of the holy day in Joyce’s life gets the point across: it was very important that the book be delivered to him on this day, and his friends made sure that it was. While Joyce suffered at the hands of those who were afraid to publish his work, he also benefited greatly from the generosity of his friends — Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier – the couple who published it; Harriet Shaw Weaver, who supported him financially and emotionally; Valery Larbaud, who was one of the books first and best critics… not to mention Frank Budgen, or Joyce’s brother Stanislaus, or his Aunt Josephine. It’s a good day to give thanks for all the people around Joyce who made his creation of the book possible – and in that list we would have to give his wife Nora the highest place.
We have great things in store for you in this coming year — the great year of the public domain. Currently we’re working on the “floor plans” of “Nestor” and “Lotus Eaters” – two episodes that take place at the same time on June 16, 1904, so we’re having fun creating them at the same time as well. Many great coincidences and opportunities for interweaving of details. In the final months of writing *Ulysses* – the summer and fall of 1921, Joyce would work on several chapters at the same time — editing page proofs for early chapters as he was still drafting the final ones. (Add to the list of those who suffered that we might read the name of the printer, Maurice Darantiere, who set and reset and reset again the pages of the novel [in letterpress, no less] as Joyce made his thousands of changes to the text).
Stay tuned, friends, and take a short dip into the book today. As with any great work, a lot of people made it happen, not all of whom are found on the cover!
Photo: Courtesy of Wim and Chrissie van Mierlo
More Public Domain News – What’s This About Letters?
Mark O’Connell has a very interesting piece in the New Yorker’s “The Book Bench” about the new public domain status of much of James Joyce’s work. A lot of people have been waiting many years for this day, but the piece makes the important point that the Joyce Estate is not out of the picture entirely. The most widely used edition of Ulysses (up until now, anyway), the Gabler Edition, is still protected by copyright. Finnegans Wake is still protected in the United States. And then there are the works like Stephen Hero that were published after his death, and then there are the letters, published and unpublished. Sean Latham, the editor of the James Joyce Quarterly, has some tantalizing things to say about editions of heretofore-unpublished letters that are in the works! We will stay tuned.
If you want an exhaustive, if somewhat headache-inducing, guide to Joyce works and copyright, check out this FAQ from the International James Joyce Foundation. Short Version: There is no short version. But if you read the section on unpublished works, you can see where there’s a surprising bit of daylight that may explain why there are editions of unpublished letters in the works.