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

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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
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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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Famous Writers’ Report Cards: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, E.E. Cummings & Anne Sexton

in Literature | June 13th, 2014

“It’s not about the grade,” I’d say to perturbed students asking me to change theirs: “it’s about what you learned.” No one will care what you got in first-year English Composition; they’ll care if you can write a sentence, a paragraph, a professional, elegant, or moving text. All of this is true, and yet (of course I never told them this) I still remember every grade I earned in every class I took in high school, college, and graduate school. Obsessive? Maybe. But it’s also symptomatic of that same compulsion that drives students to try, by any means, to get professors to bump their grades up at the end of the semester—fear of the “permanent record.” Like Seinfeld’s Elaine, struggling to expunge a black mark from her medical chart, we all fear the reams of documents—or archives of data—that catalogue our every misstep, stumble, failure or faux pas.

In many cases, this anxiety is justifiable, but as you can see here, the occasional bad mark didn’t stop famed writers Norman Mailer or E.E. Cummings from achieving literary greatness, even if those grades remain, in ink, on record today. See Mailer’s first-year Harvard College report card at the top of the post, academic year 1939–40. The bearish novelist did well, but for the C in his second semester of Engineering Science. Just above, we have Cummings’ report card from what is likely his fifth grade year given his age of 11 at the time. The 1905-06 grading system looks foreign to us now, but the C that Cummings received that year probably did not put him at the top of the class. Nor, I’m sure, did his 61 absences.

Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, had little reason to hide the high school report card above, but if you look closely, you’ll see that the column of straight A’s does not mean what we might think. The Oak Park and River Forest Township High School only gave two letter grades, A for “Accepted” and D for “Deficient.” Still, Hemingway’s numerical percentages show his scholarly aptitude, though his 75 in Latin may have haunted him.

Hemingway’s modernist contemporary William Faulkner, you may know, struggled in school after the fourth grade, and eventually dropped out of high school after the 11th (though his father’s job at Ole Miss meant he could enroll there for the three semesters he attended). The seventh grade report card above does not show us his grades, and Faulkner’s teacher neglected to fill in the “Especially Good In” and “Especially Poor In” boxes. Nevertheless, Faulkner (then William Falkner), did well enough to move up, and his mother signed off on each month of the term but the last.

Finally we bring you the report card of Anne Sexton—née Harvey—for a 10th grade American Literature class at the Junior-Senior High School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, from which Sylvia Plath also graduated. As you can see, Sexton received a C in the class, with an F for effort in the first quarter. According to Beth Hinchliffe—a Wellesley native who conducted one of Sexton’s final interviews—the poet remembered the grade. She also remembered her teenage self as “ ‘a pimply, boy-crazy thing’ who was obsessed with flirting.”

Most of these report cards come from collections at the University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center, a trove of historical and literary documents that, unlike some other archives, I’m very glad keeps permanent records. Anne Sexton’s report card comes to us via the always information-rich Brain Pickings.

via The Wall Street Journal

The Art of William Faulkner: Drawings from 1916–1925

Two Childhood Drawings from Poet E.E. Cummings Show the Young Artist’s Playful Seriousness

Anne Sexton, Confessional Poet, Reads “Wanting to Die” in Ominous 1966 Video

How Famous Writers — From J.K. Rowling to William Faulkner — Visually Outlined Their Novels

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

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The Hobbit: The First Animation & Film Adaptation of Tolkien’s Classic (1966)

in Animation, Literature | June 10th, 2014

If you come to the first film production of J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 novel The Hobbit expecting anything like a reverent rendition of the story, prepare yourself for disappointment. Produced in 1966, the 12-minute animated short takes elements of the classic work of fantasy and adapts—or corrupts—them to fit a different story, one with a dragon, a hobbit, a wizard, and an Arkenstone, to be sure, but with a great many odd liberties taken with Tolkien’s world. Instead of the great Smaug, we have a dragon named “Slag.” Instead of pillaging The Lonely Mountain, he steals the treasure of the village of Dale. Instead of a troupe of dwarves, we have one General Oakenshield, a princess named “Mika,” and an unnamed watchman. Trolls and goblins become “Groans” and “Grablins,” and Gollum appears as “Goloom.”

Is this some off-brand knock-off, you may ask? Not exactly. Producer William Snyder became the first person to acquire rights to Tolkien’s book, and he originally intended a feature length film. The project failed, but when the novel’s popularity soared, Snyder contracted Prague-based comic illustrator and animator Gene Deitch to create the short film you see above. Snyder’s motives, it seems, were mercenary: he wanted to extend his license, which he then sold back to Tolkien’s publishers for $100,000. But the film itself has a certain charm, despite the narrative butchery. Deitch hired Czech illustrator Adolf Born for the project, and he renders the story in the colorful, folk-art style of Eastern Europe (some of the drawings remind me of the lurid caricatures of German artist George Grosz, some of Rocky and Bullwinkle).

If Deitch’s Hobbit short fails to move you, consider it at least a minor entry in the career of a fascinating character in the world of comics, animation, and folk music. Deitch produced cartoons for Columbia, 20th Century Fox, MGM, and Paramount (including some Tom and Jerry and Popeye shorts) and made recordings of John Lee Hooker and Pete Seeger, as well as the recently re-discovered wonder Connie Converse. He also wrote the popular guide How to Succeed in Animation and fathered three cartoonist sons, the most well-known of whom, Kim Deitch, holds a special place in the history of underground comics. But I offer none of this information to excuse the flaws of Deitch and Snyder’s Hobbit short. Fans of comic art may love it, Tolkien purists not at all. Deitch tells the full story of the “Hollywoodized” short film’s slapdash making on his blog, and it is well worth a read. The film itself can be found in the Animation section of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

For another, much more faithful—albeit wordless—illustrated take, see Anna Repp’s Endless Book Project (screen shot above). A Metafilter user describes it as “one continuous scroll, with new artwork added almost every week.” Each panel has a unique look—some in the intricate style of German Renaissance engraving, some resembling woodcuts, some inkwash drawings. And of course, you cannot go wrong with Tolkien’s own original illustrations for The Hobbit, some published in the first edition, and many more lately discovered among the author’s papers. See Tolkien’s drawing of The Lonely Mountain at night below, and visit Brainpickings for more.

C.S. Lewis’ Prescient 1937 Review of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien: It “May Well Prove a Classic”

Listen to J.R.R. Tolkien Read a Lengthy Excerpt from The Hobbit (1952)

Soviet-Era Illustrations Of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1976)

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

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Botticelli’s 92 Surviving Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1481)

in Art, Literature | June 9th, 2014

Every true Renaissance man needed a wealthy patron, and many Italian artist-inventor-scholar-poets found theirs in Lorenzo de’Medici, scion of a Florentine dynasty and himself a scholar and poet. Lorenzo either sponsored directly or helped secure commissions for such 15th century art stars as Michelangelo Buonaroti and Leonardo da Vinci.

Among Lorenzo’s many artist friends was a painter who mostly disappeared from history until the late nineteenth century, when the rediscovery of his Primavera and Birth of Venus made him one of the most popular of Renaissance artists. I’m referring of course, to Sandro Botticelli, portraitist of Lorenzo de’Medici, his father, and grandfather and also, it turns out, illustrator of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.

In 1550, the so-called “father of art history” Giorgio Vasari recorded that “since Botticelli was a learned man, he wrote a commentary on part of Dante’s poem, and after illustrating the Inferno, he printed the work.” The painter also made a portrait of Dante, Vasari tells us, and drew sketches for engravings in the first Florentine edition of The Divine Comedy in 1481.

It seems, however, that Botticelli’s interest in Dante went much further than even Vasari knew. Sometime late in his career—after he had already achieved local renown in Florence—Botticelli promised his patron Lorenzo an illustrated Divine Comedy on sheepskin with a separate image for each Canto, something no artist had yet attempted. 92 of those illustrations survive, in various stages of completion, such as the two above, “Panderers, Flatterers” (top–the only drawing in color) and “Giants” (above), both from the Inferno.

These are two of the most fully realized of the collection. According to art historian Jonathan K. Nelson, “Botticelli completed the outline drawings for nearly all the cantos, but only added colors for a few. The artist shows his ‘learning’ and artistic skill by representing each of the three realms each in a distinctive way.” Many of Botticelli’s drawings for the Purgatorio and Paradiso survive as well, but—like the books themselves—these are increasingly less detailed (and arguably less interesting). See “Dante’s Confession” from the Purgatorio above, his “Map of Hell” at the top, “Jacob’s Ladder” from the Paradiso below, and the remaining 88 illustrations at World of Dante.

Alberto Martini’s Haunting Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1901–1944)

Salvador Dalí’s 100 Illustrations of Dante’s The Divine Comedy

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

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In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Internet, 3D Printers and Trained Monkey Servants

in Literature, Science | June 6th, 2014

“If by some miracle some prophet could describe the future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would sound so absurd, so far-fetched that everyone would laugh him to scorn.”

That was Sir Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction author best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey, describing the inherent folly of predicting the future in a 1964 BBC documentary. Of course, he then goes on to do exactly that – with remarkable, unnerving accuracy. Part one of the documentary is above. Part two is below.

The piece opens with a generic narration that describes a diorama of future society at the GM pavilion at the 1964 World Fair. Perhaps because it was a more innocent time or maybe because it was sponsored by an automaker, this vision of the future is touchingly oblivious to anything related to climate change. Machines with laser guns will clear jungles in hours flat and people will live in domed communities on the ice caps. (Ice caps in the future. Hilarious.)

Then the reedy, bespectacled author appears and starts to describe how he thinks the world in fifty years (i.e. 2014) will look. And this is where the movie starts to feel uncanny. He talks about how the advancement of transistors and satellites will radically alter our understanding of physical space.

These things will make possible a world in which we can be in instant contact wherever we may be. Where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth, even if we don’t know their actual physical location. It will be possible in that age, possibly 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London.

For the record, I’m writing this post in a coffee shop in Los Angeles, hundreds of miles from the massive Open Culture headquarters in Palo Alto, but I could just as easily be writing this on a beach in Sri Lanka or a hotel room in Dubrovnik. Clarke sounds here less like some pie-in-the-sky futurist than an aspirational lifestyle guru like Tim Ferris.

Clarke then describes how medicine might change. “One day, we might have brain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand.” The long-distance virtual surgery first was pioneered back in 2001 and it continues to improve as internet speeds increase.

And he predicts that at some point science will invent a “replicating device” that would create an exact copy of anything. That sounds an awful lot like a 3D printer. Clarke warns that this invention might cause massive societal disruption. “Confronted by such a device, our present society would probably sink into a kind of gluttonous barbarism. Since everyone would want unlimited quantities of everything.” In other words, 3D printers might turn the world into Black Friday at Walmart.

Some of his other ideas are just weird. Clarke proposes to tame and train armies of chimpanzees to cook, clean and do society’s grunt work. “We can certainly solve our servant problem with the help of the monkey kingdom. “ Planet of the Apes wouldn’t come out for another four years so Clarke could be forgiven for not realizing that that is one terrible idea. On the other hand, it’s hard to see how hiring monkeys could possibly make the customer service at Time Warner Cable any worse than it already is.

Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like Today — in 2014

Free Science Fiction Classics on the Web: Huxley, Orwell, Asimov, Gaiman & Beyond

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 ( 4 ) |

Cartoonist Lynda Barry Reveals the Best Way to Memorize Poetry

in Comics/Cartoons, Literature, Music, Poetry | June 6th, 2014

Cartoonist and Patron Saint of Honoring the Creative Impulse, Lynda Barry, believes that the secret to understanding poetry is to commit it to memory. Effortless recall is key. Get that poem lodged inside your brain as if it were a Top 40 hit of your youth.

That’s all well and good, but is there a secret to memorizing poetry?

According to Barry (or Professor Chewbacca, as she is known to students in her Making Comics course at the University of Wisconsin), the secret to memorizing poetry is to set it to music.

The work of Emily Dickinson, a Barry favorite, is particularly well suited to this tactic, as this Internet-sourced “hillbilly rendition” of “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain” proves.

As Barry demonstrates, above, the Belle of Amherst also lends herself well to “The Girl from Ipanema” and a certain movement of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”.

It does the soul good to see poetry offering this lady the sort of joyful release her dog experiences, rolling around in a dead squirrel.

Perhaps you, too, are in need of such an outlet. Odds are, we all are. Barry, who traces her passion for poetry to the 1974 anthology Mad Sad & Glad: Poems from Scholastic Creative Writing Awards, claims that the best poems deal with our darkest feelings. Dickinson, she posits, wrote what she did to stay alive, a theory she supports with a hilarious impersonation of Dickinson’s perceived handwriting versus Dickinson’s actual handwriting.

Dickinson wrote volumes, but as Barry points out, she also wrote short. Look at how many there are to choose from, were you to challenge yourself to learn one by heart today. (Don’t think about it. Just do it. Whatever happens, it’s sure to be a more gratifying experience than listening to the female robot charged with reciting “A Day! Help! Help! Another Day!” here.)

- Ayun Halliday believes that Lynda Barry has enough milk of human kindness & funk power supreme to be the Patron Saint of Everything. Follow her @AyunHalliday

The Second Known Photo of Emily Dickinson Emerges

Bill Murray Reads Poetry at a Construction Site

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

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

Famous Writers’ Report Cards: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Norman Mailer, E.E. Cummings & Anne Sexton

The Hobbit: The First Animation & Film Adaptation of Tolkien’s Classic (1966)

Botticelli’s 92 Surviving Illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy (1481)

In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Internet, 3D Printers and Trained Monkey Servants

Cartoonist Lynda Barry Reveals the Best Way to Memorize Poetry

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