Bom dia

Joyce a dar música (às miúdas?).

Hee hee hee hee

Bald Pat who is bothered mitred the napkins. Pat is a waiter hard of his hearing. Pat is a waiter who waits while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. Hee hee. A waiter is he. Hee hee hee hee. He waits while you wait. While you wait if you wait he will wait while you wait. Hee hee hee hee. Hoh. Wait while you wait.

James Joyce, Ulysses

"absence is the highest form of presence"

The man continued his monologue. He seemed to have forgotten his recent liberalism. He said that if ever he found a boy talking to girls or having a girl for a sweetheart he would whip him and whip him; and that would teach him not to be talking to girls. And if a boy had a girl for a sweetheart and told lies about it then he would give him such a whipping as no boy ever got in this world. He said that there was nothing in this world he would like so well as that. He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said, better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him.

James Joyce, Dubliners, An Encounter.

a morte fica-lhe bem

"Did he... peacefully?" she asked.

"Oh, quite peacefully, ma'am," said Eliza. "You couldn't tell when the breath went out of him. He had a beautiful death, God be praised."

"And everything...?"

"Father O'Rourke was in with him a Tuesday and anointed him and prepared him and all."

"He knew then?"

"He was quite resigned."

"He looks quite resigned," said my aunt.

"That's what the woman we had in to wash him said. She said he just looked as if he was asleep, he looked that peaceful and resigned. No one would think he'd make such a beautiful corpse."

James Joyce, Dubliners, The Sisters. 

pequenas memórias

The reading of the card persuaded me that he was dead and I was disturbed to find myself at check. Had he not been dead I would have gone into the little dark room behind the shop to find him sitting in his arm-chair by the fire, nearly smothered in his great-coat. Perhaps my aunt would have given me a packet of High Toast for him and this present would have roused him from his stupefied doze. It was always I who emptied the packet into his black snuff-box for his hands trembled too much to allow him to do this without spilling half the snuff about the floor. Even as he raised his large trembling hand to his nose little clouds of smoke dribbled through his fingers over the front of his coat. It may have been these constant showers of snuff which gave his ancient priestly garments their green faded look for the red handkerchief, blackened, as it always was, with the snuff-stains of a week, with which he tried to brush away the fallen grains, was quite inefficacious. 

James Joyce, Dubliners, The Sisters.

Well it is a long rest. Feel no more. It's the moment you feel. Must be damned unpleasant. Can't believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to. I haven't yet. Then darkened deathchamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would you like to see a priest? Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you hid all your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his lower eyelid. Watching is his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the soles of his feet yellow. Pull the pillow away and finish it off on the floor since he's doomed. Devil in that picture of sinner's death showing him a woman. Dying to embrace her in his shirt. Last act of Lucia. Shall I nevermore behold thee? Bam! expires. Gone at last. People talk about you a bit: forget you. Don't forget to pray for him. Remember him in your prayers. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out. Then they follow: dropping into a hole one after the other.

James Joyce, Ulysses.

The Lass of Aughrim

  The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. 

 Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. 

 A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

 
James Joyce, Dubliners.

Meet Stephen Joyce

He warned the National Library of Ireland that a planned display of his grandfather’s manuscripts violated his copyright. (The Irish Senate passed an emergency amendment to thwart him.) His antagonism led the Abbey Theatre to cancel a production of Joyce’s play “Exiles,” and he told Adam Harvey, a performance artist who had simply memorized a portion of “Finnegans Wake” in expectation of reciting it onstage, that he had likely “already infringed” on the estate’s copyright. Harvey later discovered that, under British law, Joyce did not have the right to stop his performance.

Continuar a ler aqui (parece que os direitos para a obra de Joyce, até aqui detidos pelo seu neto, estão prestes a expirar.)

Small, thin, unathletic man

Pois

The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still unfallen but about to fall.


James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Bloomsday 2011

How had he attempted to remedy this state of comparative ignorance?
Variously. By leaving in a conspicuous place a certain book open at a certain page: by assuming in her, when alluding explanatorily, latent knowledge: by open ridicule in her presence of some absent other’s ignorant lapse.

James Joyce, Ulysses

------

Na fotografia: Eduardo Demidenko Sánchez, no Bloomsday de 2009. O Ulysses é meu, achado num alfarrabista.

Today is Bloomsday

Imagem gamada daqui.

Chalaça

And behind the door of one of the closets there was a drawing in red pencil of a bearded man in a Roman dress with a brick in each hand and underneath was the name of the drawing:
  Balbus was building a wall.
  Some fellows had drawn it there for cod. It had a funny face but it was very like a man with a beard. And on the wall of another closet there was written in backhand in beautiful writing:
  Julius Cæsar wrote The Calico Belly.


James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Oxford University Press, 2000.

Sem nome #3

— You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.
  Cranly, now grave again, said, still gaily.
— Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend.
— I will take the risk, said Stephen.
— And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had.
  His words seemed to have struck some deep chord in his own nature. Had he spoken of himself, of himself as he was or wished to be? Stephen watched his face for some moments in silence. A cold sadness was there. He had spoken of himself, of his own loneliness which he feared.
— Of whom are you speaking?
  Cranly did not answer.


James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Oxford University Press, 2000.

É sempre tempo de reler Joyce

God, he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.

James Joyce, Ulysses

an ideal insomnia

and look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded, very like a whale's egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia: all those red raddled obeli cayennepeppercast over the text, calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignments

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

(boneco: H. Bosch)

Sylvia Beach e Margaret Anderson

Because while Sylvia Beach saw Ulysses and thought it was worth creating a wholly new publishing enterprise for, and Margaret Anderson thought, "This is the most beautiful thing we'll ever have. We'll print it if it's the last effort of our lives," the authorities looked down from their imperial heights and yelled, "obscene." When Anderson began serializing Ulysses, issues of Little Review were confiscated and destroyed. When Beach published Ulysses in her little bookshop and began exporting copies to the United States, they were seized at the border, and she had to develop new trade routes. She cleverly sent a man on a ferry between Canada and the United States, "a copy of Ulysses stuffed down inside his pants," over and over and over again. Anderson was brought up on obscenity charges, accused of "being a danger to the minds of young girls," but the American literary empire did not mount a protest or come to her aid. Stansell writes, "The trial provoked only mild interest in the press and brought no outcry whatsoever from New York literary critics." They lost in court, they were fined and fingerprinted, and Little Review never recovered. Anderson moved to Paris. The kingdom didn't know what it was missing, until, the groundwork laid, the market flooded with pirated copies and the reputation built, Random House came sweeping in to rescue Ulysses.

Continuar a ler aqui.

Bloomsday 2010

He rested an innocent book on the edge of the desk, smiling his defiance. His private papers in the original. Ta an bad ar an tir. Taim imo shagart. Put beurla on it, littlejohn.

Quoth littlejohn Eglinton:
- I was prepared for paradoxes from what Malachi Mulligan told us but I may as well warn you that if you want to shake my belief that Shakespeare is Hamlet you have a stern task before you.

Bear with me.
Stephen withstood the bane of miscreant eyes, glinting stern under wrinkled brows. A basilisk. E quando vede l'uomo l'attosca. Messer Brunetto, I thank thee for the word.

James Joyce, Ulysses

Há tantas coisas que eu queria escrever nos últimos tempos e não tenho tido [tempo]. Acho que tenho o vício das palavras, é uma coisa que já vem de trás e já não vai passar. Contudo, às vezes penso que há muito poucas coisas que se possa realmente dizer, que valham a pena. Acredito que o acto de falar é uma grande força que gera significado nos dias, os actos são a base disto mas a sua nomeação torna-os mais densos, mais presentes, a linguagem é a civilização dos actos. Queria escrever um post sobre Giges e Candaules e outra sobre Narrativas de Viagens.
Ando a ler o Joyce. Uma das coisas que salta à vista no exercício de leitura de Ulisses é o facto de tudo aquilo ser um imenso exercício de linguagem. Quanto num livro pode ser apenas linguagem pela linguagem, quase despida de factos? E quanto disso pode ser manipulado por um escritor? Stephen Daedalus conquistou definitivamente um lugar entre as minhas personagens favoritas de todos os tempos, uma impressão que tinha começado no Retrato do Artista Enquanto Jovem e que se confirma em Ulisses. Quero ler isto. (Está na estante há décadas.)

A vida desejável

- As pessoas não sabem como as canções de amor podem ser perigosas - avisou, às ocultas, o áureo ovo de Russel. - Os movimentos que as revoluções produzem no mundo nascem dos sonhos e visões no coração de um camponês, numa colina. Para eles a terra não é terreno explorável mas a mãe viva. O ar rarefeito da academia e da arena produz o romance de seis xelins, a canção de music-hall. A França produz a mais bela flor de corrupção em Mallarmé mas a vida desejável só se revela aos pobres de coração, a vida dos feaces de Homero.

James Joyce, Ulisses, João Palma-Ferreira (trad.), Livros do Brasil, 2000