Some Joyce/Pound 'News' items...

 

 

 

The Politics of Modernist Poetics: Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell and Imagism:

Imagism was the poetry of directness and distillation championed by Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in the first years of the 20th century, reacting against the flowery verse of late Romanticism and urging poets to look to earlier models—like Sappho in ancient Greece and Li Po in 8th century China—to create a poetry of precise and powerful images, without any superfluous words or ornaments.

http://poetry.about.com/b/2011/10/19/the-politics-of-modernist-poetics-ezra-pound-amy-lowell-and-imagism.htm

Great literature will live on with or without a prize

With readability the watchword for the Man Booker prize, it's unlikely any of the literary greats would even get on to the shortlist

• Editorial
• The Observer, Sunday 16 October 2011  
Would James Joyce have ever made the Man Booker shortlist? Not, you guess, if the current crop of judges had anything to do with it. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man might have squeaked on, but Ulysses? Not a chance. "Readability" is the watchword of this year's panel, apparently, led by the former spy mistress, Dame Stella Rimington. Fellow judge and ex-MP Chris Mullin likes something with a "bit of zip".
Given that the Booker is at heart a speed-reading contest for judges – 100-odd novels to read in a couple of months – it is not surprising that those poor unfortunates faced with the task favour books that can be tackled in a few swift hours. Eighty books in and counting, who would want to be confronted with Finnegans Wake?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/16/observer-editorial-man-booker-prize?newsfeed=true 




"Poetic possibilities
Review by MARTIN SPICE

Poet/editor Ezra Pound’s contribution to what we now know as The Waste Land was profound and is well documented. Many years ago, British publishers Faber & Faber released a facsimile transcript showing his comments and crossings out and he is frequently referred to, rightly or wrongly, as the architect of the poem. Those amendments and alterations are included in the app and can be seen alongside the final version of the poem. There are hours of interest here in examining just what Pound left in and took out.

http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2011/7/5/lifebookshelf/9009337&sec=lifebookshelf






Mad about the girl: Tate Liverpool's Alice in Wonderland show
Alice Liddell inspired Lewis Carroll, whose books inspired a thousand art works. But are they any good? Adrian Searle heads down the rabbit hole at Tate Liverpool's new show
• • Adrian Searle
  • guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 November 2011 21.31 GMT
  • Article history

 

The real Alice … Alice Pleasance Liddell taken by Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery London

 

Lewis Carroll, or rather the fictive world of Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, is firmly embedded in our culture. I am surprised no one has made a religion out of Alice. Perhaps they have.

She is also very much at large in Tate Liverpool. Here she is, here she isn't: in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and in Jorge Luis Borges; in Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, and in the surrealist works of Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. Alice captivated Virginia Woolf and Walt Disney, inspired Robert Smithson, Sigmar Polke and a host of better and worse visual artists. Characters from the Alice books, or rather their putative ancestors, can be found, according to Alberto Manguel (writing in a brilliant, short catalogue essay), in Hamlet and Don Quixote, in Kafka, Homer and the Bible. The influence of Carroll's creation can be found in sci-fi, detective fiction and philosophy, in pre-Raphaelite painting and in hard-arsed conceptualism. You can't shake Alice off.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/02/alice-wonderland-tate-liverpool-review?newsfeed=true

Johnny Depp is reading a bit of 'Finnegans Wake' so it goes...
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/10/14/looking-for-a-guy-for-your-book-club-may-we-recommend-johnny-depp/?mod=google_news_blog

McLuhan's Dream Solliquoy (Final sequence)


McLear Dream Solliquoy (Final sequence)


The night of the 1st of August 1936, Mclear’s dream.

Mclear’s father drinks some tea from a chalice, and then climbs a ladder set against a house to fetch down the toad that is stuck up high, the pet toad of his cousin, and, while on his way down he slips, on a snake mimicking the wrong of a ladder, falls and crushes his head, and the toad in the process. Brains, Toad slime, jewels and flies merge together.



Mclear’s cousin turns into Alice through the looking glass, in wonderland, and shrinks down to the size of a small rodent, she begins munching on Lotus petals that have suddenly sprung up around his father/mothers corpse, where a fly swoons and across the body that is now wearing a white gown and has breasts 

A bomb comes whistling out of the sky, changing into a figure resembling Cuchulain, a giant with twelve arms, and each hand holding an object: A boomerang, a Robert Johnson 78’ disk, a golden jewel encrusted chalice, a smoking pipe styled into the shape of a toad, a totem pole, A telephone receiver/speaker, a printing stamp-press, a calendar, an Umbrella, A TV set, a Video-Camera.

The smoking pipe was now in the giants mouth and the clouds of smoke drifted up and up to become huge clouds, nebulous, ten miles high or more. 

One cloud takes the form of a giant mushroom and descends back to the scene of the accident, pitching itself next to the androgenous corpse. The mushroom then morphs again into a small Santa Claus doll, and proceeds to administer coca-cola to the body, pouring it up the nostrils and letting it fizz all over the face, the body begins to shake. 

[due to a disturbance in the dream sequence, ultimately down to an early lecture with G.K Chesterton, but setting his alarm clock one full hour earlier than he needed]

Mclear’s father/mother, his cousin and himself were now up and running from the house, jumping away from the garden on pogo sticks, away from where the toad-corpse ooze had now released a green fog into the air, that set everybody laughing uncontrollably.

Arriving in a wooded area they eventually stop and slump down onto the ground leaning against a birch tree. Suddenly a wheel rolls into the clearing in front of them with a golden apple lodged inside the axis. Then, as Mclear recalls his dream, ‘we all eat a small piece of the apple and go sit down back under the tree again’ 

In a flash the dreaer has morphed into a Mushroom stood right there in the spot where he once sat.

His Father/mother had transformed into a fly, and his cousin Mary changed quickly from his grandmother, then to a toad who also sits where she once sat in the wooded clearing. 

At this point Mclear describes the sense of eternity passing, then a jumping of perceptions between the three shapeshifters, triangulated in their positions.

The mushroom had only single sight, a tiny periscope inside a wart, but it released a constant humming sound that Mclear heard as the sound of a tribal drum in his head when he looked at the fly and the toad looking at him.

Suddenly Mclear experienced total ESP with the others, plus he heard voices from the tress and the foliage and the leaves; a low chatter beneath the canopy, they sat motionless, in awe of the infinite stars above them.

In a flash, the fly lands on the mushroom, licks it, flies off towards the toad, who swiftly, and Ninja like, snatches the drunken fly out of the air, and swallows it in one gulp.

Cuchulain returns and lands in front of the Toad with a drawn sword and slices it in two. Gold and jewels fall-out from the toads head while the fly shakes, buzzes, flinches a little,  staggers up to gather itself and flies off, only a few feet to then land on a floating lotus flower upon the pond, and is swallowed by a huge salmon, which then in turn is fished out by Cuchulain and set free, plus Cuchulain discovers a golden ring inside the salmon that fits perfectly with his elaborate zoological breastplate.

Ants came marching into the clearing and gathered up the toads parts, and some Lapis Lazuli jewels and carried them back to their nest, where together with a beetle, a snake and a unknown miniature jellyfish-scorpion creature, they remade the toad with spittle, venom and special green fungus.

The toad jumps out of the nest and leaps back to the clearing, where he spits on the mushroom’s periscope, which then transforms the whole mushroom into a geodesic object, but still bejewelled crystallized and sparkling.

Cuchulain returned from a gap in a nearby tree trunk, plucked the mushroom, put it in his red sack, and sprang off into the air again back to the town, where he fairly divided the crystalized mushroom up between all the towns people, everyone got a piece and said a prayer:






http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxeter

Chase
Ichi
Vino


Steven James Pratt.


TTOTT SITUATION: 23

“Bucky" Ez said to Joyce,
“See you Down the old Vic’ Bucky said to Ez
“You’ll raise Merry Hell" Joyce said.
Narrator on Bruno: “The notion of verbal, spatial, numeric and “figurative” combinatorics.”

“I slice the heavens and soar to the infinite.” Bruno said.
Narrator “The purpose of Bruno’s lists appears to be satire”
In the town of Dalkey, on Vico road stands a man shouting “Where terms begin?”
McLuhan to James Joyce: “Trivialized and quadrivialized.

Ez “A Rhetorical generator?”


McLuhan: “Madison ave?”


McLuhan: “The Four part cycle creates the corners of a square!”

“A Cube?” Shouts a voice in the street.


Bruno: “To whom shall I address my beautiful play?


James Joyce: “a rhythmatick or other over Browne and Nolan's divisional tables.”


Yeats: “Sirius?”


Bruno: “Through sirius’s celestial influence in these sweltering days and nights called dog days.


RAW: “Sirius seems very important to me.”

Bruno: “The fixed stars rain down into my brain.


Ernest Fenollosa: “Stars for the final Asian man”

Bruno: “Beautiful lights of the firmament shower upon me, the ocean of twelve signs hit me in the head, and the seven wandering lights whisper into my ears.


Joyce: “And I shall be misunderstord if understood to give an unconditional sinequam to the heroicised furibouts of the Nolanus theory.


Vico: “There are in fact three lights of divine providence....
Ez to
Joyce: “See you Down the old Vic’

--Steven James Pratt 'TTOTT Situation.

Alice In Amrita-Land Dodgson

Alice in Amanita Land?

"Alice Pleasence Liddel or ALP, "Finnegan said simply, "is one aspect of Anna Livia Plurabelle or ALP, the superwomen who contains all women, in Joyce's Finnegans Wake."

"Oh," I said. It seemed the only adequate comment.

"I have wondered, "de Selby went on, "if one can equate APL with ALP on cabalistic grounds, since both equal 111, what of PLA? But that is an irrelevance, i've decided. What is important is that in 1932 not only did Alice P. Liddell and John S. Joyce die, but the atom was split for the first time, and the 92nd chemical element was discovered--the last natural element, you see. For the first time in history, humanity had access to the energy of the stars and possessed a full catalog of the basic building blocks of the universe." - Robert Anton Wilson, The Horror of Howth Hill, email to the universe.

 http://acrillic.blogspot.com/2008/01/alp-111-and-raws-wake.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland






"Be who,
farther potential? and so wider but we grisly old Sykos who have
done our unsmiling bit on 'alices, when they were yung and
easily freudened, in the penumbra of the procuring room and
what oracular comepression we have had apply to them! --James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, Pg 115.