Digital Dubliners: Free, 21st Century Ways to Read Joyce’s Great Story Collection on its 100th Anniversary

in Literature | June 26th, 2014

Read nearly any critical commentary on James Joyce’s Dubliners, his 1914 collection of short stories that chronicle the lives of ordinary Irish residents of the title city, and you’re sure to come across the word “epiphany.” This is not some academic jargon, but the word Joyce himself used to describe the way that each story builds to a shock of recognition—often in the form of painful self-awareness—for key characters. Short-circuiting the typical climax-resolution-dénouement of conventional narrative, Joyce’s epiphanies give his stories a verisimilitude that can still feel very unsettling, given our typical expectations that realist fiction still obey the rules of fiction. Dramatic moments in our lives rarely have neat and tidy endings. But in stories like “Eveline,” “Araby,” “A Little Cloud,” and the collection’s capstone piece, “The Dead,” the often feckless characters find themselves paralyzed in states of existential dread by sudden flashes of self-knowledge, unable to assimilate new and painful insights into their limited perspectives.

That final story (adapted into John Huston’s final film) “elevates the book to the level of the supreme artworks of the 20th century,” writes Mark O’Connell in Slate. O’Connell’s essay commemorates the centenary of Dubliner’s publication this month. Dubliners remains, he writes, a book that “writers of the short story form seem basically resigned to never surpassing.” Written in the author’s early 20s, the stories, as Ulysses would eight years later, “reveal something profound and essential and unrealized about the city and its people”: “Dublin can feel less like a place that James Joyce wrote about than a place that is about James Joyce’s writing.” All of us non-Dubliners can enter the city through Joyce’s exquisite stories, and in an increasing variety of ways, thanks to digital technology. At the top of the post, find a digitized first edition of Dubliners. Just above, we have a reading of “Eveline” by “velvet-voiced” Dubliner Tadhg Hynes, and below, hear Irish actor Jim Norton read “The Sisters.”

You’ll find many more readings of Dubliners’ stories online, such as this deadpan reading of “Araby” from one of our favorites, Tom O’Bedlam, a Bloomsday reading of “Eveline” by award-winning Irish playwright Miriam Gallagher, and this Librivox collection of readings from various voices. I think Joyce would have very much appreciated the use of technology to keep his work alive into the 21st century. Part of his literary mission—certainly in many of Dubliners’ stories—was to illustrate the stultifying effects of clinging to the past. An eager adopter of new technologies, Joyce in fact brought the first cinema, The Volta, to Dublin in 1909. So it seems fitting that 100 years after the publication of Dubliners, his book receive the multimedia app treatment in the form of Digital Dubliners, a free, “engaging and authoritative edition” of the book designed by Boston College students and featuring “three hundred-odd images, seven hundred or so notes and explanations, two dozen videos, critical essays and hyperlinks, interactive maps sourced from contemporary newspaper, sound, film and photographic archives, with essays, film, recordings, background and expert discussion.” Watch a short promo video for Digital Dubliners below, and download the book on iTunes here.

Finally, you may wish to read the text in a more late-20th-century, and more open, format with this fully searchable “hypertextual, self-referential edition” prepared for Project Gutenberg. Whichever way you read Joyce’s Dubliners, you should, I presume to suggest, read Joyce’s Dubliners. And if you have read these stories before, even “somewhere in the double figures,” as Mark O’Connell has, then you’ll know how richly they reward re-reading, or hearing, or studying along with other readers and lovers of Joyce and a well-worn map of Dublin, or its shimmering touch-screen digital equivalent.

Dubliners also appears in our two collections, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free and 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices.

James Joyce’s Dublin Captured in Vintage Photos from 1897 to 1904

A Free Playlist of Music From The Works Of James Joyce (Plus Songs Inspired by the Modernist Author)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Jorge Luis Borges: “Soccer is Popular Because Stupidity is Popular”

in Literature, Sports | June 24th, 2014

Image by Grete Stern, via Wikimedia Commons

I will admit it: I’m one of those oft-maligned non-sports people who becomes a football (okay, soccer) enthusiast every four years, seduced by the colorful pageantry, cosmopolitan air, nostalgia for a game I played as a kid, and an embarrassingly sentimental pride in my home country’s team. I don’t lose all my critical faculties, but I can’t help but love the World Cup even while recognizing the corruption, deepening poverty and exploitation, and host of other serious sociopolitical issues surrounding it. And as an American, it’s simply much easier to put some distance between the sport itself and the jingoistic bigotry and violence—“sentimental hooliganism,” to use Franklin Foer’s phrase—that very often attend the game in various parts of the world.

In Argentina, as in many soccer-mad countries with deep social divides, gang violence is a routine part of futbol, part of what Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges termed a horrible “idea of supremacy.” Borges found it impossible to separate the fan culture from the game itself, once declaring, “soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.” As Shaj Mathew writes in The New Republic, the author associated the mass mania of soccer fandom with the mass fervor of fascism or dogmatic nationalism. “Nationalism,” he wrote, “only allows for affirmations, and every doctrine that discards doubt, negation, is a form of fanaticism and stupidity.” As Mathews points out, national soccer teams and stars do often become the tools of authoritarian regimes that “take advantage of the bond that fans share with their national teams to drum up popular support [….] This is what Borges feared—and resented—about the sport.”

There is certainly a sense in which Borges’ hatred of soccer is also indicative of his well-known cultural elitism (despite his romanticizing of lower-class gaucho life and the once-demimonde tango). Outside of the hugely expensive World Cup, the class dynamics of soccer fandom in most every country but the U.S. are fairly uncomplicated. New Republic editor Foer summed it up succinctly in How Soccer Explains the World: “In every other part of the world, soccer’s sociology varies little: it is the province of the working class.” (The inversion of this soccer class divide in the U.S., Foer writes, explains Americans’ disdain for the game in general and for elitist soccer dilettantes in particular, though those attitudes are rapidly changing). If Borges had been a North, rather than South, American, I imagine he would have had similar things to say about the NFL, NBA, NHL, or NASCAR.

Nonetheless, being Jorge Luis Borges, the writer did not simply lodge cranky complaints, however politically astute, about the game. He wrote a speculative story about it with his close friend and sometime writing partner Adolfo Bioy Casares. In “Esse Est Percipi” (“to be is to be perceived”), we learn that soccer has “ceased to be a sport and entered the realm of spectacle,” writes Mathews: “representation of sport has replaced actual sport.” The physical stadiums crumble, while the games are performed by “a single man in a booth or by actors in jerseys before the TV cameras.” An easily duped populace follows “nonexistent games on TV and the radio without questioning a thing.”

The story effectively illustrates Borges’ critique of soccer as an intrinsic part of a mass culture that, Mathews says, “leaves itself open to demagoguery and manipulation.” Borges’ own snobberies aside, his resolute suspicion of mass media spectacle and the coopting of popular culture by political forces seems to me still, as it was in his day, a healthy attitude. You can read the full story here, and an excellent critical essay on Borges’ political philosophy here.

via The New Republic

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Norton Lectures On Poetry (And Everything Else Literary)

Jorge Luis Borges’ Favorite Short Stories (Read 7 Free Online)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Vladimir Nabokov’s Script for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita: See Pages from His Original Draft

in Film, Literature | June 24th, 2014

The tag line for Stanley Kubrick’s sixth feature was “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” And it’s a good question. Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel, first published in 1955, is a delirious account of a middle-aged sophisticate’s obsession with a 12 year-old “nymphet.” The book was both praised and pilloried when it came out. Graham Greene called it one of the best books of the year while an English newspaper called it “sheer unrestrained pornography.” With press like that, Lolita quickly became a best-seller.

So when Kubrick, along with his producing partner James B. Harris, bought the rights to the book in 1958, they first had to prove that it could be filmed in a way that could get past the censors. The Hays code was still in effect in Hollywood, which suppressed any hint of sex between two adults. A love story between a prepubescent girl and a middle-aged pervert was going to be a tall order. “If I realized how severe the [censorship] limitations were going to be,” Kubrick stated later, “I wouldn’t have made the film.”

Eventually, Kubrick had to bow to reality; they changed Lolita’s age from 12 to 14, casting the teenaged Sue Lyon for the part. As Richard Corliss noted in his study on Lolita, “The book is about child abuse; the movie is about the wiles a teenage girl might have learned in those two years: an awareness of her power over men.”

The other challenge of adapting Lolita was the book itself. There’s an old truism in Hollywood that mediocre books make great movies and great books make for lousy films. After all, a novel like Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is all about story, characters and suspense – the same stuff as a good script. Authors like James Joyce, William Faulkner and Nabokov, on the other hand, foreground elements that are particular to literature — interior monologues, unreliable narrators, and a musicality of language – elements that are damned tricky to reproduce on the silver screen. If you don’t believe me, compare The Great Gatsby with its numerous dreadful movie adaptations.

Doubtless aware of such pitfalls, Kubrick approached Nabokov, the author himself, to write the script. After their first meeting, Nabokov turned the offer down. “The idea of tampering with my own novel caused me only revulsion,” Nabokov later wrote in the foreword to the published version of his Lolita script. Kubrick, however, is not a person to be dissuaded easily. He sent Nabokov a telegram renewing the offer a few months later, just as the author was beginning to regret passing on the offer and its generous paycheck.

So Nabokov traveled back to Los Angeles to meet with Kubrick, beginning what he would characterize as “an amiable battle of suggestion and countersuggestion on how to cinemize the novel.” By the end of the summer of 1960, Nabokov delivered his first draft – a 400-page behemoth. The script would require some serious editing. After that, Nabokov’s meetings with the director became more and more sporadic.

True to form, Kubrick was secretive about the film. The author had little idea what shape the final movie was going to take until he saw it a couple of days before the premiere in 1962. “I had discovered that Kubrick was a great director, that his Lolita was a first-rate film with magnificent actors, and that only ragged odds and ends of my script had been used.” Kubrick took the script and stripped out all the backstory and most of the narration. He expanded the character of Quilty to give Peter Sellers more to do. While Nabokov was generally complimentary about the film, he still had some complaints. “Most of the sequences were not really better than those I had so carefully composed for Kubrick, and I keenly regretted the waste of my time while admiring Kubrick’s fortitude in enduring for six months the evolution and infliction of a useless product.”

Nonetheless, Nabokov got a single screenwriter credit for the movie and he ended up getting an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. You can see some of Nabokov’s script of Lolita, complete with margin notes, below. (The margin notes apparently don’t appear in the published version.) You can click on each image to view them in a larger format. They come to us via Vice.

Note: You can download essential works by Vladimir Nabokov as free audiobooks (including Jeremy Irons reading Lolita) if you sign up for a 30-Day Free Trial with Audible.com. Find more information on that program here.

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Stanley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Created)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

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A Free Playlist of Music From The Works Of James Joyce (Plus Songs Inspired by the Modernist Author)

in Literature, Music | June 23rd, 2014

Last week we quoted a review that Carl Jung wrote of James Joyce’s Ulysses in which the psychologist called the labyrinthine modernist novel an “aesthetic discipline.” Jung’s phrase can describe equally the reader’s experience and Joyce’s own highly sophisticated artistry. The author himself produced a detailed schema of Ulysses’ structure for his friend Stuart Gilbert: in addition to primary fields of reference like human biology and color symbolism, Joyce connects each chapter to a particular “art”—theology, rhetoric, architecture, and medicine, to mention but a few. But for all this rigorous schematization of each episode, music spills out into every chapter and fully permeates the novel: advertising jingles, hymns, sonorous high oratory, sentimental ballads, brooding folk songs…. Joyce heard music everywhere.

And it’s no surprise, given that the novelist once aspired to a career as a performer. Joyce composed his own songs, played piano and guitar, sang in his high tenor, and championed the work of fellow Irishman and tenor John Sullivan. He was also, again unsurprisingly, a scholar of music. Sunphone Records, which released a two-volume set called Music From the Works of James Joyce, remarks that he had an “encyclopedic mastery of music of every type and genre, rivaling his vast knowledge of world literature. As a writer, he nevertheless incorporated music into all his works in increasingly complex ways.” (For detailed info on the music that inspired Joyce, visit the Sunphone Records site and click through the links.)

Music From the Works of James Joyce compiles many of the songs Joyce alluded to in his poems, stories, and novels (such as music-hall ballad “Finnegan’s Wake”). It also includes Joyce’s own work—his collection of poems, Chamber Music—given “musical settings” by composer Ross Lee Finney. Inspired by this enlightening collection of Joyce’s favorite music, blogger ulyssestone of Spotify Classical Playlists compiled the playlist above of all the songs available to stream. This playlist includes not only songs that influenced the author, or were written by him; ulyssestone also added several songs that Joyce inspired, such as Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair,” based on a poem from Chamber Music, Kate Bush’s “Flower of the Mountain,” based on Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy, and Jefferson Airplane’s “Rejoyce,” a “highly selective cap of Ulysses.” John Cage’s Roaratorio appears, as does the work of several other Joyce-inspired classical composers.

The playlist begins with the voice of James Joyce, not singing alas, but reading from Ulysses’ “Eolian” episode. DJ Spooky (alias of Paul D. Miller) mixes the author’s voice with Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes. To hear the unadulterated Joyce reading, check out our post on the only two recordings of his voice.

Note: If you need to download Spotify in order to hear the playlist, you can find/download the software here.

James Joyce Plays the Guitar, 1915

Carl Jung Writes a Review of Joyce’s Ulysses and Mails It To The Author (1932)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Marcel Proust Fills Out a Questionnaire in 1890: The Manuscript of the ‘Proust Questionnaire’

in Literature | June 19th, 2014

Marcel Proust, the author of the great modernist work À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), was the very definition of the sensitive artist. Perpetually battling bouts of depression and ill health, Proust lived at home with his parents until their deaths. Though he became a recluse later in life, sleeping by day and writing feverishly at night, he poured his soul into his epic novel, detailing his struggles in a manner that has connected deeply with generations of readers. Proust has become over the years an icon of artistic sincerity.

In the late nineteenth century, the confession book was all the rage in England. It asked readers to answer a series of personal questions designed to reveal their inner characters. In 1890, Proust, still a teenager, took this questionnaire, answering the questions with frank sincerity. The original manuscript was uncovered in 1924, two years after Proust’s death, and in 2003, it was auctioned off for roughly $130,000. You can see the original 1890 manuscript above and, if your French isn’t up to snuff, we have a translation below.

Many decades later, French TV host Bernard Pivot started using this exact type of questionnaire to interview thinkers, leaders and celebrities. It proved to be a great device for getting a glimpse into the inner workings of a star’s mind. James Lipton adapted the questionnaire for his own show, Inside the Actors Studio (watch above), while misattributing its origins to Proust. Nonetheless, the name ‘The Proust Questionnaire” stuck. The quiz is also a regular feature in the magazine Vanity Fair. You can read the responses from the likes of Rachel Maddow, Harrison Ford and Louis CK, whose answers read like an extension of his stand up routine. And if you’re eager to take the test yourself, you can do so here.

The principal aspect of my personality:
The need to be loved; more precisely, the need to be caressed and spoiled much more than the need to be admired.

The quality that I desire in a man:
Manly virtues, and frankness in friendship.

The quality that I desire in a woman:
Feminine charms.

Your chief characteristic:
[Left Blank]

What I appreciate most about my friends:
To have tenderness for me, if their personage is exquisite enough to render quite high the price of their tenderness.

My main fault:
Not knowing, not being able to “want”.

My favorite occupation:
Loving.

My dream of happiness:
I am afraid it be not great enough, I dare not speak it, I am afraid of destroying it by speaking it.

What would be my greatest misfortune?
Not to have known my mother or my grandmother.

What I should like to be:
Myself, as the people whom I admire would like me to be.

The country where I should like to live:
A country where certain things that I should like would come true as though by magic, and where tenderness would always be reciprocated.

My favorite color:
The beauty is not in the colors, but in their harmony.

My favorite bird:
The swallow.

My favorite prose authors:
Currently, Anatole France and Pierre Loti.

My favorite poets:
Baudelaire and Alfred de Vigny.

My heroes in fiction:
Hamlet.

My favorite heroines in fiction.
Bérénice.

My favorite composers:
Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann.

My favorite painters:
Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt.

My heroes in real life:
Mr. Darlu, Mr. Boutroux.

My heroines in history:
Cleopatra.

My favorite names:
I only have one at a time.

What I hate most of all:
What is bad about me.

Historical figures that I despise the most:
I am not educated enough.

The military event that I admire most:
My military service!

The gift of nature that I would like to have:
Will-power, and seductiveness.

How I want to die:
Improved—and loved.

My present state of mind:
Boredom from having thought about myself to answer all these questions.

Faults for which I have the most indulgence:
Those that I understand.

My motto:
I should be too afraid that it bring me misfortune.

Watch Monty Python’s “Summarize Proust Competition” on the 100th Anniversary of Swann’s Way

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Free eBooks: Read All of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past on the Centennial of Swann’s Way

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

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Carl Jung Writes a Review of Joyce’s Ulysses and Mails It To The Author (1932)

in Letters, Literature, Psychology | June 18th, 2014

Feelings about James Joyce’s Ulysses tend to fall roughly into one of two camps: the religiously reverent or the exasperated/bored/overwhelmed. As popular examples of the former, we have the many thousand celebrants of Bloomsday—June 16th, the date on which the novel is set in 1904. These revelries approach the level of saints’ days, with re-enactments and pilgrimages to important Dublin sites. On the other side, we have the reactions of Virginia Woolf, say, or certain friends of mine who left wry comments on Bloomsday posts about picking up something more “readable” to celebrate. (A third category, the scandalized, has more or less died off, as scatology, blasphemy, and cuckoldry have become the stuff of sitcoms.) Another famous reader, Carl Jung, seems at first to damn the novel with some faint praise and much scathing criticism in a 1932 essay for Europäische Revue, but ends up, despite himself, writing about the book in the language of a true believer.

A great many readers of Jung’s essay may perhaps nod their heads at sentences like “Yes, I admit I feel I have been made a fool of” and “one should never rub the reader’s nose into his own stupidity, but that is just what Ulysses does.” To illustrate his boredom with the novel, he quotes “an old uncle,” who says “’Do you know how the devil tortures souls in hell? […] He keeps them waiting.’” This remark, Jung writes, “occurred to me when I was plowing through Ulysses for the first time. Every sentence raises an expectation which is not fulfilled; finally, out of sheer resignation, you come to expect nothing any longer.” But while Jung’s critique may validate certain hasty readers’ hatred of Joyce’s nearly unavoidable 20th century masterwork, it also probes deeply into why the novel resonates.

For all of his frustration with the book—his sense that it “always gives the reader an irritating sense of inferiority”—Jung nonetheless bestows upon it the highest praise, comparing Joyce to other prophetic European writers of earlier ages like Goethe and Nietzsche. “It seems to me now,” he writes, “that all that is negative in Joyce’s work, all that is cold-blooded, bizarre and banal, grotesque and devilish, is a positive virtue for which it deserves praise.” Ulysses is “a devotional book for the object-besotted white man,” a “spiritual exercise, an aesthetic discipline, an agonizing ritual, an arcane procedure, eighteen alchemical alembics piled on top of one another […] a world has passed away, and is made new.” He ends the essay by quoting the novel’s entire final paragraph. (Find longer excerpts of Jung’s essay here and here.)

Jung not only wrote what may be the most critically honest yet also glowing response to the novel, but he also took it upon himself in September of 1932 to send a copy of the essay to the author along with the letter below. Letters of Note tells us that Joyce “was both annoyed and proud,” a fittingly divided response to such an ambivalent review.

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

With this letter of introduction, Jung was “a perfect stranger” to Joyce no longer. In fact, two years later, Joyce would call on the psychologist to treat his daughter Lucia, who suffered from schizophrenia, a tragic story told in Carol Loeb Schloss’s biography of the novelist’s famously troubled child. For his care of Lucia and his careful attention to Ulysses, Joyce would inscribe Jung’s copy of the book: “To Dr. C.G. Jung, with grateful appreciation of his aid and counsel. James Joyce. Xmas 1934, Zurich.”

via Letters of Note

The Very First Reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses: “A Work of High Genius” (1922)

Virginia Woolf Writes About Joyce’s Ulysses, “Never Did Any Book So Bore Me,” and Quits at Page 200

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Everything You Need to Enjoy Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloomsday

in Literature | June 16th, 2014

Since its publication in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses has enjoyed a status, in various places and in various ways, as The Book to Read. Alas, this Modernist novel of Dublin on June 16, 1904 has also attained a reputation as The Book You Probably Can’t Read — or at least not without a whole lot of work on the side. In truth, nobody needs to turn themselves into a Joyce scholar to appreciate it; the uninitiated reader may not enjoy it on every possible level, but they can still, without a doubt, get a charge from this piece of pure literature.

Today, on this Bloomsday 2014, we offer you everything that may help you get that charge, starting with Ulysses as a free eBook (iPad/iPhone — Kindle + Other Formats — Read Online Now). Or perhaps you’d prefer to listen to the novel as a free audio book; you can even hear a passage read by Joyce himself.

The work may stand as a remarkably rich textual achievement, but it also has a visual history: we’ve previously featured, for instance, Henri Matisse’s illustrated 1935 edition of the book, Joyce’s own sketch of protagonist Leopold Bloom (below), and Ulysses “Seen,” a graphic novel adaptation-in-progress.

Even Vladimir Nabokov, obviously a formidable literary power himself, added to all this when he sketched out a map of the paths Bloom and Stephen Dedalus (previously seen in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) take through Dublin in the book.

Other high-profile Ulysses appreciators include Stephen Fry, who did a video expounding upon his love for it, and Frank Delaney, whose podcast Re: Joyce, as entertaining as the novel itself, will examine the entire text line-by-line over 22 years. Still, like any vital work of art, Ulysses has drawn detractors as well. Irving Babbitt, among the novel’s early reviewers, said it evidenced “an advanced stage of psychic disintegration”; Virginia Woolf, having quit at page 200, wrote that “never did any book so bore me.” But bored or thrilled, each reader has their own distinct experience with Ulysses, and on this Bloomsday we’d like to send you on your way to your own. (Or maybe you have a different way of celebrating, as the first Bloomsday revelers did in 1954.) Don’t let the towering novel’s long shadow darken it. Remember the whole thing comes down to an Irishman and his manuscripts — many of which you can read online.

James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Recordings (1924/1929)

Henri Matisse Illustrates 1935 Edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses

Read Joyce’s Ulysses Line by Line, for the Next 22 Years, with Frank Delaney’s Podcast

The First Bloomsday: Watch Dublin’s Literati Celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses in Drunken Fashion, 1954

James Joyce, With His Eyesight Failing, Draws a Sketch of Leopold Bloom (1926)

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Samuel Beckett Draws Doodles of Charlie Chaplin, James Joyce & Hats

in Art, Literature | June 16th, 2014

Samuel Beckett was a playwright, a novelist, a Nobel Prize winner and the chauffeur for a school-aged André the Giant. He was also, apparently, a compulsive doodler. The original manuscripts of his first and second novels, Murphy and Watt respectively, are covered in marginalia.

The manuscript for Murphy, comprising six notebooks, was auctioned off last year by Sotheby’s to the tune of £962,500 (or over $1.6 million). The book was written between the years of 1935 to 1936 and the manuscript shows numerous revisions. It also contains this doodle (above) of Charlie Chaplin, who would later influence his seminal play Waiting for Godot. Beckett’s doodle of James Joyce appears beneath it.

For someone who made a career exploring heavy themes like nothingness and futility, his drawings are nothing like the stark, angular doodles of Franz Kafka. Beckett’s pictures are curvy, light-hearted and whimsical. Look at the drawing below. I really don’t know what’s going on there but it sort of looks like a man in earmuffs giving birth to a hat.

And this one is of a couple golfers.

Beckett’s second novel Watt, the last book he wrote in English, also took up six notebooks. According to Beckett’s recollections, Watt was written “in drips and drabs” while he was in living in France during WWII. In the first notebook, alongside an X‑ed out page of text is this odd drawing of a long-haired centaur in a top hat.

And this page, in the second notebook, features a bunch of terrific, strikingly graphic doodles including one that looks like Morley Safer in an Asian cone hat. (Again with the hats.)

via @SteveSilberman/BrainPickings/Harry Ransom Center
Related Content:

Samuel Beckett Directs His Absurdist Play Waiting for Godot (1985)

Monsterpiece Theater Presents Waiting for Elmo, Calls BS on Samuel Beckett

Rare Audio: Samuel Beckett Reads Two Poems From His Novel Watt

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Digital Dubliners: Free, 21st Century Ways to Read Joyce’s Great Story Collection on its 100th Anniversary

Jorge Luis Borges: “Soccer is Popular Because Stupidity is Popular”

Vladimir Nabokov’s Script for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita: See Pages from His Original Draft

A Free Playlist of Music From The Works Of James Joyce (Plus Songs Inspired by the Modernist Author)

Marcel Proust Fills Out a Questionnaire in 1890: The Manuscript of the ‘Proust Questionnaire’

Carl Jung Writes a Review of Joyce’s Ulysses and Mails It To The Author (1932)

Everything You Need to Enjoy Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses on Bloomsday

Samuel Beckett Draws Doodles of Charlie Chaplin, James Joyce & Hats

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