Ulysses – Page 7 – { feuilleton }

Word games

Wordle is a Java-based web toy which generates random arrangements of words from any text input. This is the result after pasting in the opening of the “Sirens” chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses and playing around with the colour and font settings. Fun, but as far as web-based toys go I prefer the abstractions of Bomomo.

While we’re on the subject of word-scrambling, Weird Tales magazine has announced a writing contest: write a story— 500 words or less—based on a spam headline you’ve received. The spam waiting to be purged in my trash folder doesn’t offer much in the way of inspiration: “Paris Hilton charges for pussy”, “Tyra to go undercover ass a man iin a rapper’s posse”. More interesting is the recent comment spam I received (none of which you ever see here, thanks to Akismet), a funny conflation of Bible quotes, porn links and stray words from a novel. Once the links are removed, all the text runs together and the result looks like this:

45:4 And Joseph said unto his brethren, Come near to me, I pray you. be fulfilled which was spoken by Esaias the prophet, saying,
12:18 cam chat donne live mature web Selah. a stranger, he shall both wash his clothes, and bathe himself in mature mistresses london
5:19 Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to
17:20 And when Absalom’s servants came to the woman to the house, they fucking hairy mature plump a look at you, dear, and see that we start right. Then we’ll send They don’t mean any harm, I’m sure, but if they knew how we premature ejaculation tip their own doings, nor from their stubborn way.
3:19 Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them. hand job mature impotent man answered him, Sir, I have no man, when the water is
4:13 Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived adult gallery mature woman
5:7 And these things give in charge, that they may be blameless.
9:13 So Mephibosheth dwelt in Jerusalem: for he did eat continually at mature photo galleries thing be? And he said, Behold, thou shalt see it with thine eyes, but
5:21 Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen. armpit hairy mature
5:29 And Levi made him a great feast in his own house: and there was a unto the LORD God of their fathers. mature women younger girls 8 them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear by God, saying, times that I have formed it? now have I brought it to pass, that thou canada escort independent mature his error as fast as possible.
5:12 And we beseech you, brethren, to know them which labour among busty mature movie sample the men of Israel, Because the king is near of kin to us: wherefore
12:4 Ye shall not do so unto the LORD your God. anal black mature sex presence of mind. swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your mature gay sex video “Did the spider accept the old fellow’s invitation?” asked Laurie, according to godliness;
6:4 He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting walk for premature baby open fields, or a dead body, or a bone of a man, or a grave, shall be
4:11 These things command and teach. mature suck black cock O my soul, the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. of the question.” mature lezbos and unto the supplication of thy people Israel, to hearken unto them
33:1 Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign, and he mature fellatio there. “It is always so quiet and pleasant here, it does me offer the burnt offering and the meat offering upon the altar: and the mature licking him with the curious girdle of the ephod, and bound it unto him
30:30 And to them which were in Hormah, and to them which were in mature female spanking and twenty:

Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake

Ubuweb continues to come up with the very obscure goods. Mary Ellen Bute’s Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is the kind of thing you would have been lucky to see on television even in the days when non-Hollywood fare was screened regularly. Joyce is almost the definitive example of the unfilmable author although that didn’t prevent Joseph Strick from having a go at Ulysses in 1967 and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ten years later. Ulysses if it was filmed at all should probably be done as eighteen hour-long films rather than Strick’s truncated skate through the novel. Some passages work better than others but I’ve never been able to accept Milo O’Shea as Leopold Bloom. Bosco Hogan on the other hand is permanently fixed in my head as Stephen Dedalus having seen Portrait before reading the book.

As to the success of Mary Ellen Bute’s opus, I still haven’t watched it properly so you’ll have to go and look for yourself. It’s little more than an illustrated reading but that’s not necessarily as misguided as it seems. Finnegans Wake for many people is one of English literature’s impregnable fortresses; anything that helps break down the doors is surely worthwhile.

Passages from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
Directed by Mary Ellen Bute
Screenplay by Mary Manning
Cinematography by Ted Nemeth
Music by Elliot Kaplan

Cast (in alphabetical order)
Ray Flanagan . . .Young Shem
Peter Haskell . . . Shem
Page Johnson . . . Shaun
Martin J. Kelley . . . Finnegan
Jane Reilly . . . Anna Livia

There are currently no copies of this film availabe on VHS or DVD; but a 16 mm print is available for museums, universities, and Joycean institutions. Contact Mrs. Cecile Starr at (802) 863-6904; rental is $180.

A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce’s polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion – 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances – she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel’s nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure.

With Passages from Finnegans Wake Bute was the first to adapt a work of James Joyce to film and was honored for this project at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 as best debut.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Wyndham Lewis: Portraits
• Picasso-esque
• Books for Bloomsday
• Finnegan begin again

Wyndham Lewis: Portraits

James Joyce by Wyndham Lewis (1921).

Wyndham Lewis: Portraits is an exhibition running at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until October 19, 2008. I’m still slowly reading my way through Ulysses so here’s Lewis’s sketch of Joyce, a drawing I’ve always liked for its curving lines. The exhibition notes mention Joyce as one of the subjects on display so visitors may be able to see the original there.

• Library of the lost | Iain Sinclair on Lewis’s portraiture.
• Banned TS Eliot portrait goes on show

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Picasso-esque
• Books for Bloomsday
• Finnegan begin again

Books for Bloomsday

Ulysses is a book to own, a book to live with. To borrow it is probably worse than useless, for the sense of urgency imposed by a time-limit for reading it fights against the book’s slow pace, a leisurely music that requires an unhurried ear and yields little to the cursory, newspaper-nurtured eye. Most of our reading is, in fact, eye-reading—the swallowing whole of the cliché, the skipping of what seems insignificant, the tearing out of the sense from the form. Ulysses is, like Paradise Lost, an auditory work, and the sounds carry the sense. Similarly, the form carries the content, and if we try to ignore the word-play, the parodies and pastiches, in order to find out what happens next, we are dooming ourselves to disappointment.

Thus spake Anthony Burgess in 1965. This year as Bloomsday rolls around again I find myself actually reading Ulysses on the day itself. I decided recently that enough time had elapsed since my last Joycean excursion and this time did something else I’d not tried before, reading Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses in sequence. The story of Leopold Bloom’s walk around the city was originally intended as a shorter piece for the Dubliners collection and many characters from Dubliners and Portrait turn up again in the later novel.

I first encountered Ulysses when I was about 17 and despite having read a fair amount of experimental or challenging fiction by that time still found it difficult and frequently nonsensical. A lack of context was the problem; one of the failings of the book—if we have to look for failings—is that it really does help to know something about Joyce’s intentions which otherwise remain opaque to an uninformed reader. So my first proper reading of the novel was helped considerably by the discovery in a library of Harry Blamires’ Bloomsday Book (1966) which goes through the entire novel virtually page by page, examining the symbolism and correspondences layered into the text.

Joyce’s alter-ego in Portrait and Ulysses was Stephen Dedalus, named after the mythological Daedalus who built the labyrinth for the minotaur. Anthony Burgess in Here Comes Everybody: An introduction to James Joyce for the ordinary reader (1965) describes Ulysses as Joyce’s labyrinth and both the Blamires and Burgess books are excellent guides to its literary maze. Blamires examines the minutiae (and occasionally overdoes the reading of religious symbolism) while Burgess takes a superb tour through the entire corpus, often bringing to Ulysses a quality of understanding which Blamires lacks. Here Comes Everybody is an ideal introduction for those curious about Joyce’s work and reputation but who feel intimidated when they pick up the books. It’s a shame that Burgess’s title—a phrase of Joyce’s lifted from Finnegans Wake—has been hijacked recently by a book about internet culture. Burgess’s book also appears to be out of print so anyone looking for a copy is advised to try Abebooks.com. Blamires’ book is still in print in a revised edition and for another notable writer’s view there’s Nabokov’s lucid exposition in his Lectures on Literature. And if all that doesn’t satisfy, there’s always The Brazen Head.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Finnegan begin again
• T&H: At the Sign of the Dolphin

The art of Jo Whaley

Papilio ulysses (2000).

Best. Insect Art. Ever. From a series entitled The Theater of Insects, also the name of a book devoted to Ms Whaley’s photographs which will appear from Chronicle Books later this year.

The photographs in this book are fantastic field illustrations. While the insects in these images are real, the backgrounds are imaginary altered habitats of my devising. Inspired by the old dioramas found in natural history museums, the pinned insects are arranged in constructed environments. The studio where I create the images is as much a theatrical scene shop as it is a photography studio. The prop room looks like an eighteenth-century cabinet of curiosities, in that it is filled with specimens of natural history and visual oddities of manufacture. I use free association and intuition to make decisions about arranging the insect with a particular backdrop. Looking at color, shape, and form, I move the elements about until the magic of the image appears. Lighting the scene is challenging as the sets are only about five by seven inches across with a depth of about an inch and a half. Yet the studio lighting is key to breathing a spirit into these pinned specimens and unifying the disparate elements within the mise-en-scène Finally, the performance of the image is concluded with a single click of the camera’s shutter. (More.)

Coleoptera (2003).

Via Fabulon.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Endangered insects postage stamps
• Robert Lang’s origami insects
• Lalique’s dragonflies
• Lucien Gaillard
• Wesley Fleming’s glass insects
• Insect Lab