Bloomsday 2022 Gift Guide

Hoyced the Bloomingdayl sailes!

Joyceans do not live by exegeses alone; we crave congenials with our genealogies. For your general all-round touch-of-the-poet Joycean, I warmly recommend these recent manifestations of congeniality.

Pride of Essex and host of hosts David Collard has wrangled online salons weekly since early 2020. And while David was saving (or at least boosting) my and other attendees' socially-distanced sanity, he was, on the side, sustaining his own (and now yours, purchaser-to-be) with the fresh-off-the-Sagging-Meniscus wonderworker Multiple Joyce, an addictive yet fat-free jumbo heart-shaped box of Joyce-friendly and Joyce-adjacent bonbons.

(There is a slight difference of opinion between myself and the grand Collard insofar as I prefer Gabler's edition of Ulysses to its precursors — taking for granted that all editions are and will be mistaken, Gabler's errors have the advantage of being volitional and explicit, and "Nother dying" and "Mity cheese" more than compensate any doubts about the word known to all men — yet [as David says] we can all unite to expel a chorus of raspberries at Danis "Usurper" Rose.)

My favorite Joycean, Fritz Senn came from the fannish pre-academic-respectability era of Joyce scholarship, and remains a model of rectitude, generosity, and wit — not as trademarkable a regimen as Silence, Exile & Cunning Ltd., but awfully attractive all the same. I'm now enjoying the dadblanged heck out of his third book in English, Joycean Murmoirs ("once more a book that I have not really written comes out under my name"), a good old fashioned voice-driven fan history. If you find this first page excerpt charming, give it a try:

But I never had any doubt that my preoccupation with Joyce — and I always mean the works and far less the author — is a substitute (or "Ersatz") for a satisfactory life or the kind of success one dreams of in adolescence and can never stop desiring. Maybe a term like "sublimation" comes close to it. [...] One has to cling to something, I imagine.

And if you don't, at least try some of Senn's more traditional critical essays. I see he's got a new collection coming in a month or two, Ulysses Polytropos, available to pre-order for only, er, $120. Senn's no academic but I guess his current publisher is.

For this season's primary source re-reading, I decided to pass my blearing eyes over every page of Finnegans Wake for the first time since 1979. Even with the widely-spaced benefit of McHugh's Annotations (published 1980), it was rough going — literally, since more-extended-than-usual subvocalization soon strangled my sixty-three-year-old throat into a persistent dry cough.

To my rescue came a McHugh upgrade, FWEET, and a vocal upgrade, last year's audiobook. Barry McGovern's performance is unprecedentedly skillful, unlikely ever to be approximated, and although costar Marcella Riordan outclasses most rivals, I can't help wishing McGovern had been granted the whole. These our troubled times are such that their recording's most easily obtained in streaming form, but unless you plan to stay awake, finger tracing pages, for thirty hours straight I'd recommend either the 23-disk CD set or the 105 low-quality high-convenience MP3 files. "Responsible" corporate entities have not seen fit to provide any placeholders, cue sheets, or titles to connect recording to book.

Update: I've indexed the audiobook's MP3 files with a TSV spreadsheet containing track number, traditional page number (and starting text, to help with nontraditional page numbering), and file duration (to help with other audio formats).

the hour of the twattering of bards in the twitterlitter

My fine fleshy friends have already had quite enough of this corny story, thank you, but since it's the only thing I'll ever write that would please James Joyce, and I know Hell and Purgatory have solid internet connections — that being the explanation for Facebook — I should document it.

Our back yard, relatively large, with some beds of diggable soil, has served as home or vacation rental to several generations of scrub jay. We may have established a reputation as contemplative, quiet types; at any rate, the scrub jays (unlike the mockingbirds, crows, and hummingbirds which contest the territory) show no dismay or annoyance in our presence, and we're comfortably domestic together, or anyway as comfortable as birds and neurotics get.

When shade is available and a paper book is underway, I often go to the yard to read. In early June, I brought Finnegans Wake along, settled myself on a wooden chair by the back fence, and began subvocalizing away. Elsewhere, the adolescent jay — its blue come in, but still scruffy and lanky — was poking around the mulch.

After laboring over a page or two, I heard a low flutter, looked up, and saw the jay hopping in my direction. It paused to give me the twice-over we get as they decide whether they mind us knowing the location of their peanut cache. I kept reading, it hopped to my feet — and then began a murmuring croon. (Jays use a range of soft affectionate vocalizations with their intimates, like unto the secret language of ducks but harder for us to mimic.)

We duetted a bit, and then went on to other things, including (in my case) a coughing fit.

I later assigned the toughest job to Barry McGovern, and I, he, and the book all visited the yard a few times, phone speaker low and muffled in my shirt pocket. The jay came calling all the same, so it would appear to be the song, not the singer.