FQ has been recorded for the Blind. About ten years ago I spoent at least an hour awekk long distance suggesting poronunciations for the actor recording it. I could call on Monday to see what they have. It is just doewn the street from me. tpr
----- Original Message -----
From: THOMAS HERRON <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Saturday, October 22, 2005 4:41 pm
Subject: Re: more like Dante, less like Joyce? or like both? => sadness
> If it's any comfort, on Jan 11th, 2001 I stepped into my freezing
> car in
> Northfield, MN, turned on the radio (set to the public radio
> station run by
> St. Olaf College) and the first words I heard were "The Faerie
> Queene." It
> was a recording of the service given that previous Sunday wherein
> an English
> faculty member had lectured the congregation on the moral and ethical
> virtues of Book I of FQ. It was humanely done and spellbinding,
> and though
> I requested a copy from the station, I never got it. In any case,
> predominantly Lutheran Minnesotan college kids are taking FQ
> seriously now,
> I suspect, as many of our students must be.
>
> Let me renew a call also for someone/company to tape the whole of
> FQ so we
> can all listen to it on the interminable drive to Kalamazoo.
>
> --Tom
>
> Ps. Guilty as charged re the Wake... Thanks, Tom Roche, I
> apologize...Although it has shot itself in the foot as far as the
> general public is
> concerned, even in its home country; Ulysses less so but it too is an
> intellectually elitist work with universalist pretensions (not the
> worse for
> that!)... Don't forget that Joyce faced the hard and embarrassing
> childhoodof declining gentility in a city and country of similar
> circumstances and so
> dreamed of past, operatic glory... is that not what "The Dead" is
> all about?
> I was at a play during a Kilkenny arts fest some years ago, called
> "BlackBox" or something like that, about hunkering down during
> nuclear war, and
> act two opened with an average suburban man reading the lines "Yes
> I said
> yes" and dropping it down and saying "Thank Jaisus that's over"...
> Muchlaughter... By then I assume he had run out of everything else
> to read in
> his library and was forced to confront books from high school.
> Dublin City
> has since built a statue of Joyce adjacent to O'Connell St
> (nicknamed "the
> prat in the hat" by fond locals... busty Molly Malone at the base
> of Grafton
> St. is "the tart with the cart") but gone is the fountainous Anna
> Livia,"the floozy in the jacuzzi," she of the continuous wake
> bubbling up beneath
> her, who once lay where Nelson's monument stood on the same street
> (cf. "A
> Pisgah's Sight of Palestine"); a celtic female poke in the eye of
> empire, I
> guess; now a big steel spike stands where she was, a fingernail of the
> Celtic tiger. Anna too often became trashy in public and had to be
> removed.Adam and Eve's stills stands by the running river, however.
>
>
>
> On 10/21/05 8:47 PM, "Kevin Farnham" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > The original source of some of my Joyce/Spencer thinking:
> >
> > "Finnegans Wake, Joyce's masterpiece, presents so many initial
> > difficulties that one has to be anxious about its survival. I
> > suspect that it will find company in Spenser's great poetic
> > romance, The Faerie Queene, and that both books will be read,
> > for the rest of time, by only a small band of enthusiastic
> > specialists. That is a sadness..."
> >
> > "[Joyce] does not so much desire Shakespeare's gifts and his
> > scope -- Joyce believed that he was equal to Shakespeare in
> > those -- but is rightly jealous of Shakespeare's audience. That
> > jealousy makes the Wake a tragicomedy rather than the comedy
> > that Joyce intended. The reception of the book discouraged the
> > dying Joyce, yet how could it have been otherwise."
> >
> > -- Harold Bloom, "The Western Canon"
> >
> >
> > When I first read Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce almost 30
> > years ago (when I was in my early 20s), I felt so sad for Joyce
> > -- it seemed that only the period when he was writing Ulysses
> > was truly happy. Reading about Joyce's "agon" with Shakespeare
> > in Harold Bloom's writings, which make it sound so much like
> > Joyce was overwhelmed / swallowed up by Shakespeare, truly
> > troubles me. As does walking into book stores and checking how
> > many and which Joyce books are still on the shelves, something
> > I've done regularly over the past 3 decades...
> >
> > I did not intend to "put down" Finnegans Wake or Joyce. And I
> > don't believe I did that.
> >
> > The topic of my original message was Spenser, with Joyce and
> > Dante as contrasts. But my minimal comments on Joyce were all
> > that interested people...
> >
> > Kevin Farnham
> >
> > --- "Thomas P Roche ([log in to unmask])"
> > <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> >> I am somewhat saddened by the recent comments on Joyce's
> >> Finnegans Wake. It is a difficult but brilliant book--the
> >> last gasp of the epic tradition in the 20th century, pushing
> >> language as far as it can go. Listen to the old recording of
> >> Joyce readng it, and you are suddenly in the world of oeratic
> >> song. I first read it fifty years ago in a seminar given by
> >> Matthew Hodgart at Pemboke College Cambridge. Among the
> >> participants were Harold Bloom and Ted Hughes and a good many
> >> otheers who have not attained such fame., but it was fun and
> >> delight for a 22 year old beginner. . I have taught it
> >> several times in an eic course that began with Virgiland went
> >> though Ariosto, Tasso , Spenser , Milton, Blake and Joyce. It
> >> was a killer, but no student died from the exposure. The
> >> Wake is a masterpiece-- and to me a delight. I do not like it
> >> to be put down on this website. tpr
> >>
>
|