There was a man of double deed
Sowed his garden full of seed.
And when that seed began to grow
'Twas like a garden full of snow.
When the snow began to melt
'Twas like a ship without a belt.
When the ship began to sail
'Twas like a bird without a tail.
When the bird began to fly
'Twas like an eagle in the sky.
When the sky began to roar
'Twas like a lion at the door.
When the door began to crack
'Twas like a stick across my back.
When my back began to smart
'Twas like a penknife in my heart.
When my heart began to bleed
'Twas death and death and death indeed.

(Anonymous)

It is well known that the ceiling of one room is the floor of another, but the household ignores this ever-downward necessity and continues ever upward, celebrating ceilings but denying floors, and so their house never ends and they must travel by winch or rope from room to room, calling to one another as they go.
The house is empty now, but it was there, dangling over dinner, illuminated by conversation and rich in the juices of a wild duck, that I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.

-Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

There was talk of witchcraft but what is stronger than love?

-Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

Recession Song (by Justin Quinn)

Sage is just the thing
for snakebite, bee sting, 
and keeping all the bad at bay.
The bush stands guard through ice and snow
and when warm winds begin to blow
it draws mauve flowers out of dark clay.

 They steeped it in a tea
with rosemary, 
garlic, horehound, baby's breath,
and called it Four Thieves Vinegar,
convinced its perfume could deter
the swelling horrors of Black Death.

But it will do, good herb,
to salve and curb
a common cold or nerves, and I
these days, with everybody's eyes on
the grim news banked on the horizon,
like how its leaf spears face the sky.

Book haul from Goodwill yesterday. All good finds. The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency has long struck me as charming and adorable -- now to put it to the test!

The real highlight of this trip, though, was finding a first printing of Bored of the Rings, one of the unfunniest piece of classic humor ever recorded. It's so dumb but it's an awesome bit of weird nostalgia.

I love book shopping at Goodwill (this one is in Milford, CT) because I always find such an odd assortment of stuff -- and there's no organization or sorting, which makes it quite fun to browse!

I was also glad to find Portrait of a Lady, not because I love Henry James or anything, but because every time I look at it I think of this moment from Harriet the Spy, which always makes me chuckle:

"There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.'" 

Ole Golly said this steadily and sedately, then leaned back in her chair with a satisfied look at Sport. 

Sport looked completely blank. 
"Henry James," said Ole Golly, "1843-1916. From Portrait of a Lady." 

"What's that?" Sport asked Harriet. 
"A novel, silly," said Harriet. 
"Oh, like my father writes," said Sport, and dismissed the whole thing.

(source: archive.org)

Richard Brown, Molly Bloom's Gibraltar, and Derrida's Yes in Joyce's Ulysses

I delivered this presentation last year in a seminar on Joyce. I guess I'll put it here -- I just bought Acts of Literature and I'm so excited to reread "Ulysses Gramophone" that revisiting this little review is my kind of fun.


Molly Bloom's Gibraltar, Gendered Narration, and Derrida's Yes/Oui

In his essay “Molly's Gibraltar: The Other Location in Joyce's Ulysses,” Richard Brown argues that Gibraltar has a strong “atmospheric presence” in Ulysses, and that Molly's memory of it evokes the communicative, potent yes which begins the “Penelope” episode and ends the novel. Gibraltar's unfamiliar geography becomes a site of mythic inheritance and transformation, ambivalent desire, and authentic pleasure. Marked by gendered and ethnic alterity, Molly's memory of Gibraltar provides a different perspective, and a perspective of difference, than what has been experienced so far in Ulysses. 
 

To call Molly's speech in Episode 18 a monologue is, according to Derrida, “to display a somnabulisitic carelessness” (53-4). The episode's genre may resemble a monologue, but the narrative method is much more involved as it resists the one-sidedness of monologue, opening out into an engagement with otherness and subjectivity. This profusion evokes the fluid association and coincidence within Joycean narrative, which is vital to remember when looking at Molly's Gibraltarian origins.

Brown compares Gibraltar's function in the “Penelope” episode to the yes-function that Derrida describes in “Ulysses Gramophone.” Derrida shows that yes in Ulysses is more than a performative speech-act – it is a state of being in itself, a state of affirmation and an announcement of the speaker's existence. At the same time it is an intimate acknowledgement and asking of the Other, like the “Shema Israel” prayer that appears in the Aeoleus episode. Like the prayer, yes functions as both a question and an answer, a “person-to-person call” (38), this time not between Israel and God, but between the speaker and the Other. Such a call reverberates in memory and desire (44) as an event continually being replayed and transferred through the text—like the sound from a gramophone, which is experienced in hearing, memory, and repetition. Thus, Molly's memory of Bloom on Howth, that “I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I say yes to yes” recalls the doubled question and affirmation of yes; it is an echo being transferred between herself and Bloom (“would I say yes to yes”), affirming their separateness while asking them, in turn, to connect (as with a telephone, gramophone, or umbilical cord) and to engage (pun intended). But this connection is suspended in Ulysses; whether Molly and Bloom do end up experiencing “complete mental intercourse” (17.2285) is a question for June 17^th. 
 

For Brown, Gibraltar appears in Ulysses as a place where just such a prolific and sustained relation with the other can occur, and where racial and gendered alterities can exist without facing violence or homogenization. The Gibraltar passages in Episode 18 transform the masculine narratives that the novel has so far enacted through a narration of female interiority, racial otherness, and experienced pleasure; this rewriting constitutes an alternative to, and a critique of, the conventional discourses that the novel might presuppose, especially concerning Gibraltar's status as a colonial state.
 

In 1904 Gibraltar had already been occupied by the British for 200 years. Some critics have suggested that Gibraltar's colonial history marks the island as another colonial state, like Dublin, and Molly as an example of “colonized subjectivity” (158) in the manner of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, or Ashis Nandy. Brown seeks to complicate this characterization, claiming that Joyce's weblike allusiveness disrupts any easy category. He argues that Molly's mixed background and difficult-to-define standing among both Gibraltarian and Dublin society makes her more complex in terms of ethnicity and social position.

Furthermore, the source book most used by Joyce on Gibralter, an 1889 study by Henry Field, emphasizes the integrated ethnic demographic of the peninsula, where Jews, Christians, Moors, Turks, and so on seem to exist heterogenuously and harmoniously. Brown suggests that Joyce may have been interested in Gibraltar as a “multi-ethnic utopia” that is juxtaposed with the exclusion and racism that, for example, Bloom encounters in the Cyclops episode (167). Thus, the imaginative landscape of Gibraltar is a political “other” to Bloom's experience: instead of being “just another colonial state” it is an other colonial state to Dublin, where racial and political oppression is replaced by mythical allusiveness and layers of association invoked by memories of pleasure, belonging, and emotional promise. 
 

Brown stresses that the question of politics, colonial history, and race in Gibraltar is affected by the emotional and libidinal energies that Molly's memories invoke. Molly's complex alignments with the colonial military garrison exist simultaneously with her position as gendered and racial other in Dublin. Her exotic Spanish looks sexually excite Bloom (and other Dublin figures). This eroticized Spanishness seem to merge with cultural artifacts and backgrounds: popular song and literature, Orientalist fantasies about exotic women, and ethnic and religious alterity within Gibraltar itself begin to create Molly as an exotic object of desire. But Molly's own memories of her origins diverge from this erotic fantasy, empowering her to create a place in “remembered reality” (170) that communicates direct, authentic, experienced pleasure. This Gibraltar is also strongly linked to the pleasures of writing and reading (170), a connection that might challenge dualistic assumptions about Molly's determined bodiliness at the expense of intellectual sophistication. Brown also suggests Molly Bloom as the novel's “boldest traveler,” a female Odysseus figure exiled from her Mediterranean home. 
 

Most of all, Molly's Gibraltar “provide[s] a powerful alternative to or double critique of the conventional discourses” of history and nation, by evoking a place of gendered, ethnic, and emotional otherness. This place is at once remembered, experienced, and recorded textually; it is also a utopia or no-place that blends memory and subjectivity by encountering otherness directly, and always in the framework of desire. Gibralter's function in the novel is, for Brown, part of Joyce's modernism; its mythology, referentiality and ambivalence exemplify the modernism of Ulysses. Gibraltar is constructed as a “significant other place and [liminal] site of meaning” (157) where nationalist discourse and mainstream narrative can be questioned in a utopian field of memory. The question “Where?” at the end of the “Ithaca” episode demonstrates this liminality. The living Gibraltar, like Derrida's living yes, must always point back to itself in all of its capacities, as both question and reply, self-affirming signature and outward-looking exchange. The intrusion of its otherness calls the speaker and the hearer together in a mutual and never-conclusive question of difference, an unfolding of self and other that is not unlike the process of translation. Gibraltar in Episode 18 asks us to consider alternatives to the militaristic, exclusionary, and tortured narratives that we have seen ever since Mulligan's false Mass on the Martello tower in Episode 1. 
 

According to Brown, Molly's voice of ethnic and gendered otherness, expressed through her memories of Gibraltar, functions as an alternative to colonial history, and a critique of urban space and masculine narrative. But Molly's Gibraltar, like her exuberant yes, also asks an extended, precarious question about connection, intercourse, and incorporation with the other. As Derrida writes, “all the risks crowd together from the first breath of yes” (68), therefore the question of alterity and otherness in Episode 18 involves risk as well as resistance, the danger in intimacy and relation as well as their pleasures. Molly's so-called monologue is never spoken, or experienced, alone (63), and this way of speaking is an unstable and potentially transformative state of being. As well as a liminal location of otherness and utopian resistance to urban alienation, Molly's Gibraltar is also an expression of her desire to participate in unmediated and fertile communication with the world around her, and a rewriting of Ulysses from its liminal outskirts.

--Liz Light 8/5/2014

Works Cited
 Brown, Richard. "Molly’s Gibraltar: The Other Location in Joyce’s Ulysses." A Companion to James Joyce (2008): 157-73.

Derrida, Jacques. "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce." Acts of Literature.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York: Vintage, 1986.

Today's book haul from Harrisburg, PA's Midtown Scholar bookstore, one of my favorite bookstores in the US. It's huge, it's well-curated, it's labyrinthine, it's beautiful, it's reasonably priced (considering the excellence of the stock, anyway -- cheapskates may be loath to pay $10-20 for a UP book in perfect condition, but I know how much those books cost at list price, so I'm willing to shell out)... Oh, and its literary criticism section is amazing. Midtown Scholar also has multiple performance spaces, a balcony (!!!), comfy chairs and tables scattered throughout the store (depending on what level of quiet/privacy/comfort you're looking for), a children's play area, and 2 small cafes. I would have gotten WAY more today, but I was on a budget and I really wanted the Levinas and Medieval Literature book (it's seriously an awesome compilation and a terrific convergence)... but it was a little pricey. But--I found so many other amazing books today that I am super excited to keep looking for them elsewhere.

My husband and I go to Midtown Scholar every time we're in Harrisburg, which is usually about twice a year. It's thrilling every time.

I'm also very excited to read Derrida's "Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce's Ulysses," which is one of the most formidable essays of literary criticism I have ever read.

I'll be teaching Banana Yoshimoto's collection Lizard this semester, so I'm looking forward to reading her novel Kitchen.

Queering the Renaissance is simply an excellent collection. I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in queer theory and literary studies, particularly renaissance/early modern.

No idea if that's a good bio of Salinger. I've seen it around but I haven't read any reviews. Salinger studies is very tricky because it's hard to do him justice, he's often misunderstood, and his writing has such a weird role in American culture. We shall see.

Good haul all told. And a great way to start the New Year!

Books Read & Movies Watched in 2010

2010

Books
1. Little Kingdoms by Steven Millhauser
2. Endgame by Samuel Beckett
3. The Maker by Jorge Luis Borges
4. In Praise of Darkness by Jorge Luis Borges
5. The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges
6. Agamemnon by Aeschylus
7. The Libation Bearers by Aeschylus
8. The Eumenides by Aeschylus
9. The Book of Job tr. Raymond Scheindlin
10. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
11. The Cloud of Unknowing, tr. Clifton Wolters
12. Junk Bonds by Lucy Wong
13. Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles tr. David Grene
14. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
15. I Do Not Come To You By Chance by Adoabi Tricia Nwaubani
16. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
17. Philoctetes by Sophocles tr. David Grene
18. The Cocktail Party by T.S. Eliot
19. The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
20. In The Penny Arcade by Steven Millhauser
21. The Birds by Aristophanes tr. Moses Hadas
22. Little Flowers by Brother Ugolino
23. Orestes by Euripides tr. William Arrowsmith
24. The Bacchae by Euripides tr. William Arrowsmith
25. Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
26. The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations by Carol A. Newsom
27. Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides tr. Charles R. Walker
28. The Story of a Soul by St. Therese of Lisieux tr. John Beevers
29. Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard tr. Howard Hong and Edna H. Hong
30. Repetition by Soren Kierkegaard tr. Howard Hong and Edna H. Hong
31. Playback by Raymond Chandler
32. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville
33. All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
34. Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Doctor Who by the Women Who Love It ed. Lynne M. Thomas & Tara O'Shea
35. Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne tr. George Makepeace Towle
36. Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
37. The King in the Tree by Steven Millhauser
38. After Dark by Haruki Murakami
39. Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
40. The Barnum Museum by Steven Millhauser
41. Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams by Paul Hemphill
42. Our Animal Friends at Maple Hill Farm by Alice & Martin Provenson
43. The Goat Lady by Jane Bregoli
44. The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
45. Beowulf tr. Seamus Heaney
46. The Knife Thrower and Other Stories by Steven Millhauser
47. Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions by Neil Gaiman
48. Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan
49. Oracle Night by Paul Auster
50. The High Window by Raymond Chandler
51. John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead
52. Apex Hides The Hurt by Colson Whitehead
53. Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
54. The Devil's Dream by Lee Smith
55. Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) by Philip K. Dick
Books Reread:
1. Pearl
2. Oedipus the King by Sophocles tr. David Grene
3. Antigone by Sophocles tr. David Grene
4. The 13 Clocks by James Thurber
5. The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
6. The Lais of Marie de France, tr. Robert Hanning & Joan Ferrante
7. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, tr. Simon Armitage

Movies
1. Mary Poppins
2. Chaplin
3. Sherlock Holmes
4. Lilo and Stitch
5. Man On Wire
6. Heart and Souls
7. Whale Rider
8. To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar
9. Los Olvidados
10. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
11. Inglourious Basterds
12. Brief Interviews With Hideous Men
13. How to Train Your Dragon
14. Defending Your Life
15. La belle et la bete
16. My Cousin Vinny
17. A Serious Man
18. The Secret of Kells
19. Yojimbo
20. Bull Durham
21. The Brothers Bloom
22. The Secret of Roan Inish
23. Micmacs
24. Love and Other Disasters
25. Toy Story 3
26. Raising Arizona
27. Wonder Boys
28. Rachel Getting Married
29. The Orphanage
30. Blade Runner
31. Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows Part I
32. The Tempest
33. Man of La Mancha
34. True Grit
35. An Education
Movies Rewatched:
1. Let The Right One In
2. Peter Pan
3. Pocahontas
4. Sherlock Holmes
5. 101 Dalmatians
6. Clueless
7. Amelie
8. The Fellowship of the Ring
9. The Two Towers
10. The Return of the King
11. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
12. Princess Mononoke
13. Spirited Away
14. Whisper of the Heart
15. Drop Dead Fred
16. Drop Dead Fred
17. Heart and Souls
18. The Sound of Music
19. Cool Hand Luke
20. Beauty and the Beast
21. The Little Mermaid
22. The Lion King
23. In Bruges
24. The Song of Sparrows
25. Paper Moon
26. Inglourious Basterds
27. No Country For Old Men
28. The Brothers Bloom
29. The Secret of Kells
30. Holiday
31. The Sixth Sense
32. Drop Dead Fred
33. A Serious Man
34. Monsters, Inc.
35. Jumanji
36. Robin Hood
37. The Rescuers
38. Drop Dead Fred
39. Pee Wee's Big Adventure
40. True Romance
41. Amadeus
42. Sleepless in Seattle
43. Breakfast at Tiffany's
44. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
45. The Rescuers Down Under
46. Star Wars IV: A New Hope
47. Drop Dead Fred
48. Catch-22
49. Ghost World
50. Amadeus
51. Hannah and Her Sisters
52. The Sting
53. Cool Hand Luke
54. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I
55. Oliver!
56. Love & Death
57. The Big Sleep
58. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
59. It's A Wonderful Life
60. They Live
61. Wonder Boys
62. In Bruges
63. The Sound of Music
64. True Grit

Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.

-Steve Earle

back from hiatus?

so, I just finished Eliot's The Cocktail Party:


There is certainly no purpose in remaining in the dark
Except long enough to clear from the mind
The illusion of having ever been in the light.
The fact that you can't give a reason for wanting her
Is the best reason for believing that you want her.


It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous.
Resign yourself to be the fool you are.
That's the best advice that I can give you.
You will find that you survive humiliation.
And that's an experience of incalculable value.


We die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
To pretend that they and we are the same
Is a useful and convenient social convention
Which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember
That at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.