Minute Particulars
His father and mother had walked where he would walk as a young man, drifter and dreamer, who would in his fiction delineate each footstep, each bird call, each oval of sand wet or dry,…
Tag: James Joyce
Portrait of the Artist as a Kid
In his new school James excelled at lessons and won prizes for the best English compositions. The money helped to buy clothes and food for the needy family and even allowed for little trips to…
Today’s One-Liner (#187)
I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Stephen Dedalus, in James Joyce, A Portrait of…
Today’s One-Liner (#141)
Marginalia are the immediate indices of the reader’s response to the text, of the dialogue between the book and himself. –George Steiner, “The Uncommon Reader” Susan Sontag, with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
Appreciating Jack Appreciating
Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1940-1956, v. 1 As I’m convinced of the the utility of “pulling”* from my reading, I found the following gems in some of Kerouac’s letters up till he had to deal…
While Browsing The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English, I Came across This Entry…
Joyce, James (Augustine, Aloysius) (1882-1941) … Upon graduating in 1902, Joyce left for Paris where he lived in poverty, ostensibly studying medicine, actually reading his way through the literature section of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Our Father
In the constellation of geniuses, he is a blinding light and father of us all. (I exclude Shakespeare because for Shakespeare no human epithet is enough.)… I think Ulysses is the most diverting, brilliant, intricate,…
Vitebsk, Yelets, Uglitch, Murmansk, Minsk
Dear Bella Levenshteyn The last twenty minutes I’ve been staring into space Above the computer screen After reading the notes you sent me From your mother’s recollections of Russia When you visited her recently in…
Querida Aryanna
At last After thousands of lectures Tens of thousands of test questions Innumerable essays, interviews, rotations You’re now an M.D. And in the first week of your residency!