James Joyce

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 actors reading from the text, and radio station WBAI has broadcast the performances live on 99.5 FM. But The New York Times brings us news that tonight, for the first time since 1981, the theater and station “will go their separate ways as a result of apprehension about obscenity and government regulation.”  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 of the pleasure in Mr. Thirlwell’s book comes from the writers he quotes from and comments on—among them Laurence Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Chekhov, Joyce, Kafka, Witold Gombrowicz and Nabokov, who declared that masterpieces are made of "dazzling combinations of drab parts." Combine that dazzling crew in your playground, and you’re unlikely to have a drab time.  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 »