It was about this time fifty years ago today, another Saturday, that I hadn't long come home from hospital where my mum had died.
Fifty years is a long time. I think I should feel something but I don't. Maybe it's the long passage of time or maybe it's just me. I certainly felt it at the time.
Anyway, today also sees the beginning of the Six Nations rugby tournament, which I first watched with my mum, although in those days it was the Five Nations as Italy didn't join until about 2000. As I said previously, much of this afternoon will be spent sitting in front of the television.
This morning though I've been very efficient, doing 'stuff'. Efficient by my standards anyway, and while listening to Ella Fitzgerald. She really has a magnificent voice.
And I'm reading The Paris Bookseller by Keri Maher. I'm really enjoying it. It's the fictionalised story of Sylvia Beach who opened an English bookshop in Paris in the 1919. Her shop, Shakespeare and Company, was frequented by many famous authors including Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. It was a home from home for many. It was Sylvia Beach who was the first to publish Ulysses in its entirety as its publication had been banned in America following an obscenity trial.
Ms Beach endured a lot of hardship along the road to publication but was determined to persevere because she believed so strongly in the book and was convinced it was a masterpiece.
I haven't read Ulysses. Have you? If so, would you recommend it? I think it's hard to read so that's probably put me off.
Stephen King allegedly said if a book is banned you should make sure you read it. Correction, he did say it. Here it is:
"Read whatever they're trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain, because that's exactly what you need to know."
However I'm not convinced I need to know what it says in Ulysses.
5 comments:
I must confess that I've never read "Ulysses." When it comes to largely unintelligible stream of consciousness writing, I have, however, read some of Gertrude Stein's works from that same free-wheeling period of expat authors in Paris. That's enough for me. Although Sylvia Beach made James Joyce's literary fame possible by publishing what no one else would, he treated her quite terribly in the long run, that ungrateful bastard.
He did indeed, Debra, a most pathetic man. And Gertrude Stein refused to have anything to do with her for a long time because of Joyce.
The hundredth anniversary of the pub of Ulysses was this week. I mark Bloomsday every year by reading some of Ulysses. It's brilliant, so full of references and allusions you can't read fast. But people treat it with great reverence, overlooking the endless comedy in it. It's very very funny but I think you had to have relatives like his characters, with an Irish sense of humor to get it. Also an upbringing involving church Latin.
Anyway it's worth a try, I'd say.
I'm sorry to read about your mother, but 50 years is a long time I suppose. Now that both my parents are dead, my mother dying November last year, I do occasionally feel like I'm an orphan. Which is a weird emotion to feel.
Enjoy the rugby.
I read the first 100 pages or so of Ulysses before the taste in my mouth grew to be so sour that I could not go on. Why the book is considered great literature escapes me, but I'll defend anyone's right to access it.
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