Joyce, James

Joyce (jois), James
1882-1941
Irish writer whose literary innovations have had a profound influence on modern fiction. His works include _Ulysses_ (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
- Joyc´ean (joi´sê-en) adjective

Jesus Christ

He comes into the world God knows how, walks on the water, gets out of his grave and goes up off the Hill of Howth. What drivel is this?
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Stephen Daedalus, in Stephen Hero, ch. 21 (1944; rev. 1975).

James Joyce

In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject. I hope it may prove successful.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Anglo-Irish playwright, critic. Letter, 10 Oct. 1921, to Joyce's publisher (published in Letters of James Joyce, vol. 3, 1966). Shaw, commenting on Ulysses, called it a "revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but it is a truthful one," though he refused the invitation to purchase a copy. In The Table Talk of G.B.S., Shaw wrote, "I could not write the words Mr. Joyce uses: my prudish hands would refuse to form the letters."

The Church

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being.
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Letter, 22 Nov. 1902, in which Joyce declared his intention of leaving Ireland for good; from a private collection (an inaccurate text, taken from a typescript of this letter, is printed in Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, 1957).

Buddhism

Our civilization, bequeathed to us by fierce adventurers, eaters of meat and hunters, is so full of hurry and combat, so busy about many things which perhaps are of no importance, that it cannot but see something feeble in a civilization which smiles as it refuses to make the battlefield the test of excellence.
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. "A Suave Philosophy," in Daily Express (Dublin, 6 Feb. 1903; repr. in Critical Writings, sct. 12, ed. by Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, 1959), reviewing H. Fielding Hall's The Soul of a People (on Burmese society and Buddhism).

Ireland and the Irish

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch. 5 (1916).
 

Artists

The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish author. Stephen Dedalus, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ch. 5 (1916).

"So the pun on names is also a pun about existence and the pun is Joyce's stock in trade ...the pun, verbal emblem of coincidence ... makes all the quirky particles of the world stick to each other by hook or by crook."

- Richard Ellmann - _The Consciousness of Joyce_

the breaking up of tradition, which is the work of the modern era, discountenances the absolute and . . . no writer can escape the spirit of his time.

-- James Joyce, 1903

James Joyce, echoing Vico, once told Frank Budgen that "imagination was memory" (Myselves 187), and a remarkable number of those who have written their own reminiscences of Joyce describe his "marvellous" or "prodigious" memory. Frank Budgen once told Clive Hart that Joyce "prized memory above all other human faculties" (Structure 53), and Sylvia Beach recalled that Joyce had consciously developed his own powers of memory, once keeping himself amused while recovering from painful eye surgery by memorizing "The Lady of the Lake." Joyce, she explained, had practiced such "memory exercises" since his "early youth," which "accounted for a memory that retained everything he had ever heard. Everything stuck in it, he said". Joyce's friend Jacques Mercanton claimed that: "Joyce's company forced me to train my memory: he expected people to recall things precisely, and in detail" (206). Joyce spent his life recalling, re-imagining, and revising his memories of Dublin. "The daughters of memory," Richard Ellmann says, "received regular employment from Joyce. . . . He was never a creator ex nihilo; he recomposed what he remembered, and he remembered most of what he had seen or had heard other people remember" (JJII 364-5).

"mama matrix most mysterious" - _Finnegans Wake_

• 604 release _Mama Matrix Most Mysterious_ CD  by Nervasystem & Aether on Elektrik Orgasm (1999)
• (Joyce used the phrase "mama matrix most mysterious")
• sound: highly overlooked non-intrusively mixed cd that has touches of fusion... very psychedelic, and not always full on.   my only complaint is that track 2 is misplaced and kind of spikes through you in the beginning, of what is otherwise a nice herb filled vibe throughout... - @Om* 10/19/01
• _Arouser_ MP3 (160k)
• _Triple Edged Ektoplasmo Funk_ MP3
• _Technicolour (Lost & Found)_ MP3
• _Gonzo_ MP3 (160k)
• _Beelzedub_ MP3 (160k)
• _Many Anamans Atomik Space Jam..._ MP3
• _... The Grinding Lenny Liquid Light Show_ MP3
• _The Self Transforming Machine Creatures Of Hyperspace_ MP3 (160k)
• _The Unknown Controller_ MP3 (160k)
• _The Klangummwandler_ MP3
• _Coda_ MP3 (160k)
• sample: "the many moments... when you feel as if, your own boundaries are dissolving... as if, somehow you're,  merging into the universe...  at the end, i felt a great weight had been taken off me... instead of feeling like it was the end of something, i felt like it was the beginning... like it was something had opened up... that things could be seen in a different light..."

authored:

• _Finnegans Wake_
  • "...(for after a goodnight's rave and rumble and a shinkhams topmorning  with his coexes he was not the same man)..."
• "With a nip nippy nip and a trip trippy trip so airy. For their heart's right there. Tip."
• Irish folk track _Finnegans Wake_ MP3 by Trickster
• _Ulysses_

• "3 quarks for muster mark!" - James Joyce in _Finnegans Wake_ - coined by Murray Gell-Mann, a Cal-Tech (located in Pasadena, California) physicist
• relation to Lewis Carroll's "the hunting of the snark"
• Joyce was once part of the London Chapter of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn along with Yeats, Wilde, & Crowley.
• track _Finnegan The Folk Hero_ MP3 (160k) by Momus off of _Folktronic_ on Le Grand (1998)
• book _Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake_ by Joseph Campbell
• In 1956 Mary Ellen Bute  spent the next decade working on a live-action feature based on  _Finnegans Wake_.

  

"In _Finnegans Wake_ such a space is called the 'merry go raum,' from the German word 'raum', for 'space.'  The room is actually going around, and in that space one feels like a child, though one has come out somewhere in eternity."

 -Terence McKenna - _Archaic Revival_ describing the onset of a DMT trip.

"There are many good literary studies of Joyce, but the best introduction to _Finnegans Wake_ is probably Dr. Stanislaus Grof's _Realms of the Human Unconscious_, a study of the head spaces experienced under LSD.  In particular, Grof's term 'coex systems' should be understood by everybody who writes about Joyce or tries to read him.  A 'coex system' is a condensed experience montage, E.G., you are reexperiencing the birth process, remembering prebirth interuterine events, reliving ancestral or archaelogical crises of people/animals from whom you are descended, seeing the subatomic energy whorl from which Form appears, previsioning the Superhumanity of the future, and suffering horrible guilt over your unkindness to another child when you were four years old... all at once!

• Anomalog: James Joyce's Descendants Plan To Sue Public Readings
• _Surfing On Finnegan's Wake and Riding Range With Marshall McLuhan_ audiotape x2 by Terence McKenna

  

"Critics have tried to explain _Finnegans Wake_ by means of Freud and Jung, but Joyce was a quantum jump ahead of the psychology of his time.  Everything in _Finnegans Wake_ is a coex system in Grof's sense.  We can only understand it in terms of the latest findings in neurology, genetics, sociobiology and exopsychology.  To learn to read _Finnegans Wake_ with easy and pleasure is to learn to think with your whole brain, 'conscious' and 'unconscious' circuits included, in holistic coex systems."
  -Robert Anton Wilson - _The Illuminati Papers_ 

• track _Writing For The Second Time Through Finnegans Wake_ MP3 (192k) by John Cage
• "the greatest book i have never read..."

"We are living in the world of James Joyce's _Finnegans Wake_: Here comes everyone. And I believe the number of people living in 1949 has doubled and in '49 it was as many people living all at once on the planet as had ever lived in history on it. And it is now in the process of doubling again, so that we are coming toward four times as many people as ever lived on the planet before 1950 and we don't know how to behave. And I think that these texts--not all, but some of them--suggest a way to behave, or a way to think what the values are. In each one of our lives, our attitude--if we are conscientious--change. "

- John Cage
  

_Finnegans Wake_ by James Joyce - p. 293

• depiction of vesica piscis - on the left hand column caption: "Uteralterance or the Interplay of Bones in the Womb.";  "The Vortex.  Spring of Sprung Verse. The Vertex."

I asked the spirits to show me Shakespeare. They said, "okay" (they are not always so accomodating). He was a magical being of great size and power, made of energy. There were a million spirits in the form of fizzy colored lights dancing around him, like tiny Japanese lanterns or candleflames, helping him as he wrote, his pen scrawling across the quantum Void. James Joyce was there as well - he was like a little pendant resting on Shakespeare's desk. I recognized that part of the artist's spirit went directly into their creations. Their spiritual power depended on the earthbound public's continued desire for their work. That is the deeper meaning of the artist's quest for immortality.

- Daniel Pinchback - _Breaking Open The Head_ (online version)

Usenet: alt.books.james-joyce

first mention of James Joyce in Usenet:

From: ihuxl!jej (ihuxl!jej)
Subject: I'm In With the In Crowd...
Newsgroups: fa.unix-wizards
Date: 1981-08-23 17:28:29 PST

Subject: Cybercrud Part Two?

Ted Nelson, in his book *Computer Lib*, spends considerable time (and rightly so) blasting those people who design hard-to-use systems; the most notable example of this is Obscenity System/3[67]0 (my term, not his). *Computer Lib* came out when Unix was doing the same, so he had only a short blurb about it, but therein he praised it. He did the same in *The Home Computer Revolution*.

That too was proper; Unix is indeed a powerful tool and one that encourages tool-making by its users. It would certainly be a shame if a priesthood of hackers developed around Unix with the same point of view as the author of the "Unix is not for sissies" crack.

Tool developers seem to forget whether terms are common English, from common use in the aisle where they work, or from their own heads--James Joyce may have gotten away with the latter in *Finnegan's Wake*, but supposedly documentation of programs has different ends. What is one to make of  "...on some other systems, [the offset fseek(3S) returns] is a magic cookie..."

?

                                James Jones (ihuxl!jej)

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