January stretches out before us like a desolate wilderness raging with inclement weather. What better way to fill the hours than filming your own adaptation of Ulysses and uploading it to the Internet? Other writers who died 70 years ago with works now in the public domain include Virginia Woolf, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Bergson. Read More
Fans of James Joyce — and fans of open bars — flocked to Ulysses Folk House yesterday to celebrate Bloomsday with traditional Irish food, pints of Guinness, plenty of Jameson, Irish dancing, readings from Ulysses and piles of oyster shooters served, for some reason, through an ice luge with a Guinness logo.
Bloomsday has always Read More
Today is Bloomsday, that time-honored literary commemoration involving college professors, former English majors, and Irish people of the date on which all of the action of James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place (June 16, 1904). In New York City every year since 1981, Symphony Space has hosted a marathon Bloomsday event featuring all sorts of famous Read More
The word "dazzle" appears often and in many forms in Adam Thirlwell’s boldly self-indulgent The Delighted States (FSG, $30), which turns the history of the novel, from Cervantes to Nabokov, into an enchanted, borderless, timeless playground for the amusement of Mr. Thirlwell and any reader who succumbs to his charms (which I did, mostly). Much Read More
We knew we shouldn’t have bothered torturing ourselves through a reading of Ulysses! N+1 magazine is publishing a pamphlet for ungraduates titled What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions. The topic, as Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed.com explains, is the relationship between education and regret – Read More
In art circles, it’s sometimes forgotten that the first generation of Abstract Expressionist painters in the 1940′s were indebted to the modernist writers of the 1920′s, who elevated an interest in myth and symbolism to the level of an aesthetic imperative. James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, both published in 1922, were Read More
Craigslist Community
Fertile Ground for Hucksters
Craigslist bills itself as an “online community.” Unfortunately, online communities are apparently no less prone to crooks than their brick-and-mortar brethren, as nine apartment hunters who were bilked out of rent deposits by a smooth-talking con artist masquerading as a rental agent have all discovered in recent weeks. Read More
Contemporary American modernist artists have not, for the most part, taken a keen interest in the work of modernist writers as a subject for their own creations. While a number of our poets have written about the paintings of their contemporaries, few painters have based their work on modern literary classics. My guess is that Read More
The modern mind has tended to balk at art on an epic scale. We simply are not used to it; it is alien to our entire outlook on art and life. Generally speaking, we have preferred the small to the large-the easel picture rather than the mural, the short lyric rather than the lengthy narrative Read More
Dear Reader: Have you ever wondered when, exactly, what we call “contemporary art” began? Forgive me if this sounds like a foolish question. Like myself, you have probably not given much thought to assigning a specific date to what is generally said to be new art, or to art that was recently new and, for Read More
