Posted on: June 29, 2012
No more words! A funny thing for a writer to demand. Not for an artist or a composer, necessarily. But it’s a strange call coming from an author, who obviously depends on words for his/her brick and mortar.
Silence. The fear of. The desire for. The demand, the scream, the crying out loud. Stop!!!
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
“The silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”
— Blaise Pascal
When asked the fourteen unanswerable questions, the Buddha remained silent.
Chatter. Is it an escape from mortality? Do we talk, write, think in language to avoid silence? And do we associate silence, consciously, unconsciously, with death?
If we remain silent, and do everything we can to avoid thinking in language, but still hear other humans, we can not avoid thinking in words.…
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Posted on: June 16, 2012
County Clare. Photo by Douglas Pinson. 2003
It’s that day again. And there have been so many since 1904. Well, that makes it, what? One hundred and eight years now? Molly and Leopold Bloom. Molly, Bloom and Stephen. Molly and Blazes Boylan. James and Nora. Sam and Diane.
Ulysses, the greatest novel in the English language, and perhaps the greatest novel of obsession ever written. The obsession was with the novel itself, with its possibilities, with the haunting, nagging, agonizing sense that Joyce could be at all places at one time, cubist, in his head and on the page. He could be back in the Ireland of 1904, with Nora Barnacle, and also all the days that led up to its publication in 1922, a year that saw one of the most amazing outpourings of literature, philosophy and Comparative Myth in the 20th century.…
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Posted on: June 15, 2012
Great website for festivities this week. From the James Joyce Centre
in Dublin.
Shows a listing for events all over the world. If you’re lucky enough to be in Ireland this week for the celebration, and would like your phởtography displayed on the web, please drop us a line, or two, or three.
* * * * *
On a somewhat related note …
The Celtic Twilight
Was more than a dark ruse
More than a way
To craft an independence of mind
And spirit
Free from English dominance
And Big Houses
And colonial rule
It was a way to remind the British
That their land had once been
A Celtic Twilight too
And that another imperial power
Had once done what it could to crush
The life out of druid and muse
In the land of Stonehenge
Eternal Rome!…
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