Bloomsday has just passed. Here are two articles on one of RAW's favorite writers, maybe his all-time favorite.
At A Building Roam, PQ reprints his earlier posting, "16 Reasons Why James Joyce is the Greatest Writer Ever." I thought I had linked to it before, but I checked, and I don't find a posting, so I'm glad to link to it now. I like these sentences, "His books (aside from Finnegans Wake) are highly detailed descriptions of the events of everyday life even down to minutely recording the flow of a character's thoughts. But at the same time there's always a sort of mythic, cosmic backdrop to everything brought about by the heavy use of symbolism and mythic correspondences and what this achieves (for me at least) is an experience such that the reader clearly sees their own everyday life as a mythic journey. Richard Aldington once wrote of Ulysses that it "made realism mystic."
Follow PQ on Twitter (@PQuadrino).
Meanwhile, Michael Johnson gazes into his navel (and everybody else's) as he reads Ulysses.
UPDATE: Happy Bloomsday from Bobby Campbell.
2 comments:
Thanks for the nod, Tom.
I stand in awe of the legion of hardcore Joyce scholars who write engagingly.
Just think: RAW published his "Joyce and Taoism" when he was 27!
Glad to be involved in this post, Tom, thanks! Michael's piece is awesome and the estimable Bobby Campbell crafted a masterpiece as well.
And Michael, that was actually the first RAW piece I ever read. I got into Uncle Bob through Joyce via Joseph Campbell by way of eastern religion. Was thrilled by that Taoism piece.
I'll be 27 in a month and am hoping to get my first Joyce piece (on his link with Dali) published soon!
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