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Monday, December 1, 2014

1B: James Joyce (1882-1941)




Want to read a biographical sketch of James Joyce? Take a look at the Joyce biography page at The Brazen Head: A James Joyce Public House, the self-proclaimed best Joyce page on the web, and www.biography.com. The latter has a good written overview and video of Joyce's life. There is also the video, below, about Joyce that you might find of interest; however, if you are in the mood for watching a video, try the www.biography.com first; you might find it a little--a lot!-- more livelier.  I did.



From The New York Times, July 6, 1961, Ernest Hemingway's admiration of James Joyce is highlighted: "Hemingway was quick to see the merit in the work of James Joyce. . . . In a letter to Sherwood Anderson dated March 9, 1922, Hemingway wrote:

"'Joyce has written a most goddam wonderful book (Ulysses) * * *. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving, but you can find the whole Celtic crew of them in Michaud,' (then a moderately expensive Paris eating place).


"Nevertheless, on several occasions Hemingway contributed to the funds raised to aid Joyce, with whom he did a considerable amount of stout drinking in Paris. When Joyce's Ulysses was pirated in the United States, Hemingway was one of the organizers of the protest which bore the names of many of the most distinguished figures in world literature."





James Joyce: "A small, thin unathletic man with very bad eyes," the narrator
 of the above video says, so Hemingway stood between Joyce and a punch.



Joyce is known for four works of fiction, beginning with the collection of short stories Dubliners (Joyce attempted to publish in 1905; finally published in 1914), which contains 15 stories, including "Araby." Many of the stories have been staged in the theatre and made into films.  John Huston directed "The Dead" in 1987, based on the last story in the collection.  You can see a trailer of the film, or watch the complete film at Veoh. Here is an excerpt from The Dead's stage production from 2000.

News about Joyce's Dubliners, from "Joyce's Town"The New York Times: "In 1905, James Joyce wrote to the publisher Grant Richards: 'I do not think that any writer has yet presented Dublin to the world. It has been a capital of Europe for thousands of years, it is supposed to be the second city of the British Empire, and it is nearly three times as big as Venice.'

"But Joyce’s view of the city in Dubliners, his landmark collection of stories, had less grandeur than that pitch. The Dublin-based writer Mark O’Connell recently wrote on Slate that Dublin in the book 'is a claustrophobic place, a place of entrapment and congenital disappointment, filled with frustrated people living thwarted lives. It is in every sense a small city.'

"On Tuesday, Penguin Classics is publishing a centennial edition of the book with a new foreword by Colum McCann, who writes that Dubliners, published nearly a decade after Joyce wrote the stories in it, 'was ripped up, burned, bowdlerized, rejected, resurrected, lost, dismissed, forgotten, thrown away, flogged, flayed and eventually celebrated.' A century later, it’s all celebration. In June, the fledgling Irish publisher Tramp Press will issue Dubliners 100, in which contemporary writers reimagine the collection’s 15 stories. Contributors include Patrick McCabe, Paul Murray, Eimear McBride and, perhaps bravest of all, Peter Murphy, who takes on 'The Dead,' considered by some the best story ever written." (Source: The New York Times, "Joyce's Town," by John Williams, May 23, 2014)


Joyce also wrote three novels: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922), and Finnegans Wake (1939). You can read Joyce's Ulysses here. 

Ulysses tells the story of Leopold Bloom as he travels around Dublin one June 16, 1904, known as Bloomsday, and fans of the novel celebrate it with public readings of its more than 700 pages. Influenced by Homer's poem The Odyssey, Joyce also pays homage to numerous literary styles.  It was published to much acclaim for its sophisticated stylistic achievement and daring experimental features, including the so-called ""stream of consciousness," which takes the reader inside the mind of its characters. It has also attracted much controversy from the days of its publication when it was serialized in a literary magazine.  Frequently banned and considered obscene for its depiction of a character masturbating the U.S. Post Office burned copies of it during the 1920s upon its arrival in the U.S.

Finnegans Wake, a novel that Joyce worked on from 1922 until its publication in 1939, is far more experimental. Read it here.






Marilyn Monroe, unlike many dedicated readers, read to the end of Ulysses, we are to believe.


Here's a summary of Ulysses, with a particular focus on Molly Bloom, wife of the protagonist Leopold Bloom, and the book's legal and moralistic reception.  Roger Marsh explains  that "[T]he final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses is one of the most famous – some would say notorious – pieces of writing in 20th-century literature. It’s famous because, although very long, it’s written entirely without punctuation, as a so called ‘stream of consciousness’. It’s notorious because it was this chapter, principally, that got the book banned for 12 years following its first publication.

"In 1922, the arbiters of taste and decency in the English speaking world were not yet ready for explicit and intimate discussion of sex, especially from the mouth of a woman (even if they were put there by a male author). Nowadays, such explicit material is less remarkable and even the lack of punctuation seems less challenging in a world of text-speak. Even so, it’s hard to read, because Molly’s sleepy interior monologue drifts realistically from topic to topic, introducing thoughts and fragments of thoughts without warning, as they occur in real life. . . . 

"Molly, meanwhile, remains at home, mostly in bed. The highlight of her day, as [her husband Leopold] Bloom well knows, is the arrival at 4pm of her most recent lover, Blazes Boylan. Boylan is a concert impresario who has organised a concert tour for Molly, and he has arranged to come over to her house and ‘go through the programme’ with her. Bloom knows full well what this means, and so, it seems, does the whole of Dublin. More than one of Bloom’s associates, when he informs them of the impending tour, asks him knowingly ‘who’s getting it up?’

"Normal marital relations between Leopold and Molly have, we learn, been non-existent for some years, ever since the death of their young son Rudi, which tore them apart. Molly, however, is a passionate, sexual woman in her prime, and the list of her lovers, all known to her husband, is long. Thus when Bloom climbs the stairs and prepares for bed in the early hours of 17 June, he takes up his usual position, his head at the foot of the double bed, muttering vaguely about eggs.

"At this point begins the long interior monologue – 22,000 words – which closes the novel. Bloom’s day is done, but Molly – having spent the day in bed, one way or another, is not finding sleep easy. Her mind races, first taking up the half-heard comment about eggs, and then quickly moving on to reminiscences of the distant and recent past. She recalls her husband’s pathetic attempts at infidelity, and her own rather more successful ones – these in very graphic detail. She assumes that Bloom ‘came somewhere’ – he did, but not in the way she imagines – and speculates about his latest liaisons. Often her mind drifts back to Gibraltar, where she lived as a girl, and to her father and other characters of those days. From time to time the songs she is to perform on the concert tour come into her head. In particular, the popular ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’ pre-occupies her – how to enunciate certain words, and the protracted note on the word ‘so-o-o-ong’, which seems to be echoed by passing trains: ‘frseeeeeeeefronnnng train somewhere whistling…’. Unable to move much in bed for fear of waking her husband, she also wrestles with bodily discomforts (wind, the onset of her period) and eventually finds it necessary to slip out and use the chamber pot beside the bed.

"Finally, towards dawn, she begins to succumb to sleep. Romantically, her final thoughts are of the day that she agreed to marry Bloom (‘well as well him as another’) lying in the grass up on Howth Head above Dublin Bay, and she remembers how she got him to propose to her. There is an inevitability about her answer, for throughout the soliloquy Molly has punctuated her stream of consciousness with the word ‘yes’, thrown in almost as a marker for a new topic or a change of mood. As the chapter reaches its closing lines, the appearance of the word ‘yes’ increases in regularity, until the final line reads: ‘he could feel my breast all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.’ And here Joyce writes the chapter’s only full stop."



Joyce visiting with American expatriate Sylvia Beach,
 proprietor of the celebrated bookstore Shakespeare & Co.,
 in Paris, circa 1922. Beech was a champion of Joyce's Ulysses.

Good Students, Good Colleges


The New York Times, November 29, 2014

For Accomplished Students, Reaching a Good College Isn’t as Hard as It Seems

by Kevin Carey
Earlier this year, Harvard announced that it had accepted 5.9 percent of the nearly 35,000 students who applied for admission to the class of 2018. The next day, Stanford announced an even more exacting 5.07 percent admission rate, the lowest in the university’s history.
Statistics like these have come to dominate the national narrative of elite college admissions, with each new batch of ever-more-minuscule success rates fueling a collective sense that getting into a good college has become a brutal, “Hunger Games"-style tournament that only the fittest survive.
That story is wrong. For well-qualified students, getting into a good college isn’t difficult. It probably isn’t that much harder than it was generations ago. The fact that everyone believes otherwise shows how reliance on a single set of data — in this case, institutional admission rates — can create a false sense of what’s really going on.
To start, it’s worth noting that the headline-inducing single-digit rates reported by Harvard and Stanford are unusual even for elite institutions. Washington University in St. Louis, ranked 14th nationally by U.S. News & World Report, admitted 17 percent of applicants this year. Notre Dame admitted 21 percent, Wellesley 28 percent, and the University of Michigan 32 percent. Still, those numbers are low and have been declining in each case.

Photo

CreditHisashi Okawa

They don’t, however, represent the true odds of a well-qualified student’s being admitted to a top school. That’s because anyone can apply to college, well qualified or otherwise. Selective colleges immediately toss the long shots and dreamers from the admissions pile in order to concentrate on students with a legitimate shot at getting in. But they don’t parse their admissions statistics that way, in part because it’s in their best interests to seem as selective as possible. Admission rates are among the most closely watched barometers of institutional prestige. The fact that Stanford’s rate beat Harvard’s for the last two years has been cited as prime evidence that Palo Alto may be eclipsing Cambridge in higher-education glory.
Institutional admission rates also don’t account for the number of applications submitted per student. Enabled by technology that makes it easier to copy and send electronic documents and driven by the competitive anxiety that plummeting admission rates produce, top students have beensending out more applications. In May, for example, a Long Island high school senior named Kwasi Enin was briefly famous for having applied to, and been accepted by, all eight Ivy League schools.
But while the best students are sending out more applications for the same number of slots at elite colleges, the slots themselves aren’t becoming more scarce and the number of students competing with one another isn’t growing. In essence, the growth in applications per student creates a vicious cycle, causing admission rates at the best schools to artificially decline, students to become more anxious, and the number of applications per student to grow even more.
Finally, the most important priority for most highly qualified students isn’t getting into a particular elite school. It’s getting into at least one, because elite schools are generally pretty similar in their eliteness, and you can attend only one at a time.
That’s why some students are applying to 20 or more schools: to increase their odds of making a single match. The most important elite college admissions statistic, then, is not the percentage of applications top schools accept. It’s the percentage of top students who are admitted to at least one top school. And that number isn’t 5 percent or 20 percent or even 50 percent. It’s 80 percent. It turns out that four out of five well-qualified students who apply to elite schools are accepted by at least one.
These numbers come courtesy of Parchment.com, a website that helps students submit college transcripts electronically and navigate the admissions world. Services like Parchment and the Common Application are among the reasons it has become easier for students to submit more applications and drive down institutional admission rates. This year, 800,000 students used Parchment to send more than 1.6 million transcripts.
Parchment began by identifying a subset of students with combined SAT scores (or an ACT equivalent) of at least 1300. Then it identified high-scoring students who had applied to at least one of the 113 schools identified by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges as the most selective. The average overall admission rate among those schools was about 32 percent. Yet 51 percent of the applications submitted by top Parchment students to the same colleges were accepted. Why? Because top schools receive a substantial number of applications from underqualified students who are almost always summarily rejected. Once the wheat and chaff are separated, the success rate for the wheat looks much better.
And the real odds of success were even higher than 51 percent. The top students in the Parchment database applied to 2.6 elite colleges, on average. Flip a coin twice and, according to probability theory, you’ll get heads at least once 75 percent of the time. Sure enough, 80 percent of top students were accepted to at least one elite school.
Since there has never been a time when 100 percent of well-qualified students were successful in the college admissions market, the truism that elite colleges are far more difficult to crack than in years gone by can’t be correct: 80 percent is too close, mathematically, to nearly everyone.
This doesn’t mean that aspiring students can drop out of the college admissions rat race entirely. There’s a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses aspect to sending out applications. The Parchment data suggest that students who apply to many schools are more likely to strike gold than those who apply to only one or two, which makes sense given the idiosyncrasy of the admissions process.
But this is mostly a matter of optimizing odds that are very good to begin with. So the next time you read about terrifyingly low college admission rates, don’t panic: If you work hard and get good grades and test scores, there is very likely a place in the best schools for you.