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Syntax of Spadework for a Palace (narrator: herman melvill following in footsteps of Herman Melville)

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Syntax of Spadework for a Palace (narrator: herman melvill following in footsteps of Herman Melville)

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I found this sentence so illuminating about sentence structure, style, and narrative approach:

"His narratives consist of single unbroken sentences that seem to have an almost infinite flexibility, swerving from labyrinthine philosophical musings to earthy humor. In his opinion, experiences such as love—particularly love that has taken time and courage to express—cannot be contained in short phrases. The full stop, he has said in the past, “belongs to God,” and the flow of his writing has a profound humanism. It isn’t the fragmented interiority of the old modernist “stream of consciousness,” but a kind of all-encompassing curiosity about the world, which carries the reader along in its current."

-posted by Vicki Madden

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László Krasznahorkai on hope, apocalypse, and his new short story

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Hari Kunzru interviews the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai.

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What’s the point of the past? Connecting Herman Melville & Lewis Mumford

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What’s the point of the past? Connecting Herman Melville & Lewis Mumford

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Why Reading History for Its “Lessons” Misses the Point

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On Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville, and the gentle art of looking back in time.

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Off to sea once more, old sea shanty about whaling, performed live by Jerry Garcia & David Grisman

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Off to sea once more, old sea shanty about whaling, performed live by Jerry Garcia & David Grisman

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Off To Sea Once More - Jerry Garcia & David Grisman - Warfield Theater, SF 2-2-1991 set2-15

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via Mauro, a Lit Hub Lit History note on the Essex and M-D

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via Mauro, a Lit Hub Lit History note on the Essex and M-D

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Good stuff!

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Rare Video Shows Sucker Fish Whale-Surfing on Humpbacks

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The fish quite literally feast on the skin of the whales while riding along across the ocean

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Freediver Cindy Yang shared her close encounter with a whale in a video she captured on camera

In the clip, she could be seen swimming horizontally on the top of the water, when a huge school of fish - and a large whale behind it - could be seen swimming up beneath her

Yang calmly dodges the whale as it comes within inches of her left hand "nearly swallowing me"

A freediver almost had her own Pinocchio moment - being swallowed up by a whale.

Freediver Cindy Yang, 45, a freediving coach and underwater photographer from Australia, had been diving off the coast of Norway when she had a close encounter with a large humpback whale that was captured all on camera, according to Caters News.

In the heart-stopping video, she could be seen diving horizontally into the water when a large school of herring fish could be seen swimming up beneath her. Seconds later, it was revealed what the fish were running away from as a large humpback whale came up from the depths of the water in a swirl of bubbles.

The whale narrowly missed Yang as it opened its mouth to eat a bunch of the fish. The freediver, who was at the ocean's surface at the time, appeared calm and collected as she swam out of the way.

However, her left arm could be seen dangling near the whale's open mouth at one point - showing just how close a call it was.

Yang described the whole incident to Caters News as "the most breathtaking and humbling moment of her underwater career."

"While freediving, a bait ball of herrings emerges suddenly and a humpback whale came from beneath to feed, nearly swallowing me," she wrote of the encounter.

Several people commented on the video, noting how crazy the whole thing was. One person said, "Omg Cindy, this is wild!"

Another noted how similar the incident was to the story of Jonah in The Bible - who similarly to Pinocchio - gets swallowed whole by a large fish. They joked to Wang, per Caters News, "You were about to be Jonah!"

This isn't the first time this year that a diver has had a close encounter with a humpback whale that nearly ended badly. Another diver, Timo Dersch, who had been swimming through the chilly waters surrounding Norway in early 2025, also came close to getting gobbled up.
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During one moment captured on the Dersch's footage, he was taken by surprise as the whale swam out from behind a school of fish in his direction. Before he could fully get his bearings, a second humpback whale charged past the diver with its mouth open, narrowly avoiding striking Dersch with its gargantuan maw and its tail as it swam away.

"I was freediving with orcas in Norway, taking photos of their feeding when a whale came up to swallow the bait," Dersch told Storyful about the clip. "I moved out of the way, not realizing another humpback came up behind me trying to do the same thing."

Read the original article on People

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Freediver Narrowly Escapes Being 'Swallowed' Whole by Large Humpback Whale in Heart-Stopping Moment Captured on Video

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"While freediving, a bait ball of herrings emerges suddenly and a humpback whale came from beneath to feed, nearly swallowing me," the freediver said

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https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/content/episode-8-herman-melville-extracted-wyatt-mason

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At Home Kid's Activity: What do Whales See? | Sailors for the Sea Powered by Oceana

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BBC video of Sperm whale mother and child swimming

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BBC video of Sperm whale mother and child swimming

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Swimming with Sperm Whales | Super Giant Animals | BBC Earth

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Some of the pictures described by Melville in Chapter 55 are here

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Some of the pictures described by Melville in Chapter 55 are here

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Chapter 55: Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales

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And now, for something completely different. After that incredibly long and detailed short story, that microcosm for the book as a whole encapsulated in a single chapter, it’s time for a good…

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I'm attaching a photo of a page from The Great Melody I mentioned today.

It's part of a speech by Edmund Burke in 1775, opposing the reintroduction of the Tax Act in the American Colonies. Burke was then Member of Parliament forBristol. He was born and educated in Ireland.

While he never travelled to America, his knowledge of the whaling industry, exhibited in this extract, is profound.

He was a prolific writer and his deep understanding of polictics made him an asset or a formidable foe, depending on whose side he was on.

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Whaling in Hudson. Melville's descendant tells the story.

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Whaling in Hudson. Melville's descendant tells the story.

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HAL YouTube channel: Whaling in Hudson? What!? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79xh4kLEd-I&list=PL15QipNIp74zgtnUUpmUmeXrXM88t8ibs&index=3

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Between the years 1985 and 1993, Stella produced a vast number of works inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, including Moby Dick Domes. The works are included within series such as The Waves, The Waves II and Moby-Dick Domes. Stella’s fascination with the novel spans various mediums, from collage and print to aluminum sculpture.

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From the mobydick community on Reddit: Albert Camus on Melville, written 1952

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Explore this post and more from the mobydick community

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Grave Stone of the parents of sailor who died on the Essex. Hudson Cemetery

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Grave Stone of the parents of sailor who died on the Essex. Hudson Cemetery

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The city of Hudson was founded by Whale ship Captains from Nantucket who were escaping the harassment from British ships before and after the Revolution. This Captain's name is Levi Joy. His son died on the Essex when it sank.

Annick de Bellefeuille, reading Moby-Dick

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grave stone parents of sailor on the Essex

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Fr the logbook of the Potomac at Fiji....

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Fr the logbook of the Potomac at Fiji....

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Detail, from the log book of the Potomac, docked at Fiji, documenting the jumping ship of several sailors (including Melville) from the whaleship Acushnet.

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Detail, from the log book of the Potomac, docked at Fiji, documenting the jumping ship of several sailors (including Melville) from the whaleship Acushnet.

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In January of 1841 the twenty-two-year-old Herman Melville shipped aboard the whaler Acushnet for a multi-year cruise. He had many motivations for doing this. There was, in the first place, a desire to see the world and test himself against its challenges; then there was a need to escape the stultifying confines and restrictions of...

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I was able to get the epub of the Pellar book about Melville's Antislavery narrative from NYU

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I was able to get the epub of the Pellar book about Melville's Antislavery narrative from NYU

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Thanks for telling us about this, Marty!

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this is the book we were discussing in this mornings 7 am flow, about MD being Melville's anti slavery allegory

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Subject: America-Literatures, Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / Historical & Comparative, Literary Criticism / American / General, Literary Criticism / General, Literary Criticism / Modern / 19th Century, Literature, Modern—19th century, Literature—History and criticism, American literature -- History and criticism -- 19th century, Antislavery movements -- History -- 19th century -- United States, Slavery in literature, America -- Literatures, Antislavery movements -- Criticism and interpretation -- 19th century, Literature, Literature -- History and criticism, Literature, Modern, Literature, Modern -- 19th centurySee more

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Power Moby-Dick -- lots of textual glosses and notes , recommended by Allison P.

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Power Moby-Dick -- lots of textual glosses and notes , recommended by Allison P.

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Full text of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, with notes to help the reader

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Chris Hedges interview with Nathaniel Philbrick

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Chris Hedges interview with Nathaniel Philbrick

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Moby Dick and the soul of American capitalism

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The classic novel by Herman Melville still offers a prescient glimpse into the American character—and perhaps our ultimate fate as a species.

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https://jessicamdestefano.com/chess-sets/181-moby-dick-chess-set/

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Same edition as Mauro’s! Still my mark-up copy. I began reading it in a sleeping bag on the floor at the West Virginia farm where I was visiting my good friend Marty. Does it still smell of woodsmoke, or is it my imagination? — Cliff

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I bought this used copy for $00.70 at a college bookstore in Jersey City. It was for my H.S. AP English class many years (decades!) ago. It was, I think, the only book I didn't finish in H.S. I took the book on camping trips, cross-country road trips, bike trips to Canada, then to Europe many time, to the Jersey Shore for vacations. It moved with me through my various apartments in college, grad school and beyond. I finally took a class at the Center for Fiction in 2013 and finished it! What a thrill. Definitely MD2.0 for me. Mauro

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Deadline October 15th!

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Orion is now accepting nonfiction story pitches for our Summer 2026 Whale Issue: The Deep Dive. Send us your ideas about cetaceans! We are particularly interested in stories that examine historical perspectives around conservation and industry. No orcas, please — we’ve already got them covered.
Please note that we are looking for nonfiction pitches, not full stories. Try to keep pitches to 500 words or so.
And in general, we’re not able to consider submissions for poetry, fiction, or AI-assisted works at this time.
For more information check out our submissions page.

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Re: 1776 (or 1766) date for Linnaeus (in Cetology)

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Re: 1776 (or 1766) date for Linnaeus (in Cetology)

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I found a discussion of the System of Nature reference in Ch 32, which Geoff Cohen had drawn our attention to in 2021. This site has full text with facsimile pages and very thorough footnotes. See the Linnaeus footnote in the screenshot attached here.

https://melville.electroniclibrary.org/editions/versions-of-moby-dick/32-cetology

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Novel Workhop writer billy ocallaghan's "Moby-Dick redacted to queer" ezine!

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Novel Workhop writer billy ocallaghan's "Moby-Dick redacted to queer" ezine!

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the forward part of the upper deck of a ship; the crew's quarters usually in a ship's bow... See the full definition

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Did anyone doubt the whole queer thing? A terrific book artist and writer in my current novel workshop, Billy Ocallaghan, created this cool artists book, included in a current exhibit Draw Me Ishmael! at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem MA -- another field trip? https://www.pem.org/exhibitions/draw-me-ishmael-the-book-arts-of-moby-dick

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Moby Dick* *redacted to queer — improper printing

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Moby Dick* *redacted to queer (printed 2019, released 2021)

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“Half Horse Half Alligator” — I Review Charles Olson’s Inimitable Melville Study, Call Me Ishmael

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The classical Greeks understood that literature is a form of competition. The eminent literary critic Harold Bloom folded a bit of Freudian psychology into this insight, describing the “anxie…

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Moby Dick, annotated

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Full text of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, with notes to help the reader

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Moby Dick in pictures, Matt Kish

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From the Norton Critical (Kindle) edition 

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Apparently Melville’s defense of idolatry in the name of brotherly love was more shocking to the puritanical times than almost anything else we might find in these pages.

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A poem...

September 28 Nancy

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Lines from the spoken-poem linked here:

I am the ancient witness...

This is the storm that does not end...

It is the beginning, the whale said. The end is beginning.

~Nancy Menning

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Putep Qotatokot-te Elewestaq (The Whale was Speaking)

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Putep Qotatokot-te Elewestaq (The Whale was Speaking) is a poetry film written and voiced by Mihku Paul, edited, composited and animated by Dawn Nye with sound engineering by Riley Pillsbury. This short piece is a poetic engagement with the world’s largest mammals, and uses whale song as a backdrop for both English and native dialect. The film comments on climate change and its effects on our planet’s sea life as well as on human survival.

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Here, as Elizabeth suggested, is my short story "Everything Shifts. Allow." from the Summer 2025 issue of Ploughshares. I played around with punctuation and other conventions, and at one point formatted it as an inconveniently long poem. The piece I submitted had italicized sections running into the right hand margin, and we had a couple of discussions about how to manage the title tagline, which Ploughshares' style sheets had no protocol for.

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An excellent discussion of the Extracts & Etymology from Michigan Quarterly Review

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An excellent discussion of the Extracts & Etymology from Michigan Quarterly Review

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This also discusses the controversy over the Hebrew word חן [hen] — which actually means "grace" not "whale"!

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In January, I shared with regular readers of this blog my experience reading as many editions of Moby-Dick as I could get my hands on in a university small town. I found fancy illustrated versions,…

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For Prompts, Craft Notes & Log, jump over to Accountability 

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For Prompts, Craft Notes & Log, jump over to Accountability 

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<—— POST ANY NEW M-D THOUGHTS, LINKS &C. IN THE COLUMN TO THE LEFT!

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<—— POST ANY NEW M-D THOUGHTS, LINKS &C. IN THE COLUMN TO THE LEFT!

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(This column is an archive of 2021 "Further Reading" and discussion.)

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Kafka's Metamorphosis made me think again of the great Ursula K. Le Guin, and her feminist essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.  And also, Shaman, a book I recently read by Kim Stanley Robinson, who I think I read somewhere was a student of hers... 

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Kafka's Metamorphosis made me think again of the great Ursula K. Le Guin, and her feminist essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.  And also, Shaman, a book I recently read by Kim Stanley Robinson, who I think I read somewhere was a student of hers... 

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Big questions about the origins of consciousness and culture may not be everyone's cup of tea, but if these are things you find yourself thinking about, there's nothing like a seriously composed and compelling novel about prehistoric life - both for illumination, andfor some of the most intelligent entertainment you can find.

In the past half-century or so, we readers have been treated to a handful (well, maybe two hands full) of novel-length fictions that focus on these fascinating problems: William Golding's The Inheritors; the Finnish paleontologist Bjorn Kurten's The Dance of the Tiger; a trilogy, beginning with Reindeer Moon,by the American ethnologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas; and the best-selling Clan of the Cave Bear series by Jean M. Auel.

To this group of thoughtful and engaging novels - some better written than others, but most of them growing out of a certain amount of research - comes a new addition, from the wonderfully gifted and entertaining science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. Shaman is his 16th novel, and it departs from his usual penchant for imagining the future to take up the equally difficult task of recreating the far-distant past.

Robinson has chosen a broad and effective means for including everything that he knows and everything he imagines about the world of 30,000 B.C. It was a crucial period in the establishment of human society, when Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon lived in an uneasy sort of co-existence, and Robinson presents it in the tried and true narrative form we think of as the novel of education. An adolescent - Robinson calls him Loon - who has been orphaned and taken under the wing of his tribe's shaman and his wife, hits the road and discovers all he needs to know in order to survive. Well, of course there's no road, only a few paths into the deeper wilderness that surrounds the wilderness where the clan already lives. Loon sets out on one of these, into the greater forest on an initiation resembling an aboriginal walkabout - these people think of it as a "wander" - naked, weaponless and without means for making fire, for a good number of days.

He survives the perilous journey, which is narrated for us by a disembodied voice that announces his/her/it's presence as "the Third Wind." This mysterious force, like Athena in The Odyssey, comes to assist the hero whenever he seems to have completely exhausted his human powers. And believe me, he needs help - as does the entire tribe - to get through a hard winter and rekindle the fires of spring, hunt for fat-restoring game, and weather the weather that frequently serves as the dangerous backdrop to all sorts of tribal woes and misfortunes. It's all set against a landscape that Robinson describes with the exact and loving care of an inspired geographer: hills, valleys, streams and rivers make up the home of Loon's struggling clan, led by the aging shaman - Thorn - whom, as it turns out, he is destined to replace.

As Loon comes of age as a hunter and a man, makes his kills and takes a wife, the endless round of days and seasons assume a palpable urgency; just when it seems as though the boy become adult will triumph over natural adversity, a party of "northers," a separate people who live mostly in snow and ice and have trained wolves to help them track and hunt, kidnap his wife.

The perilous trek to find and reclaim Loon's wife makes up only part of this gorgeous book that - like the best of its kind - gives you a feel for a life we might dream about but will never otherwise know. It's rich with a sense of natural forces ruling beyond the visible, with bridges to the world of the departed, and a deep and abiding feeling of life powerfully fixed in earth, water, sky and air, while at the same time attuned to changes in the seasons. It's a connection that these days we no longer feel much of - but Robinson brings it vividly alive, as when on the verge of spring the ice of winter begins to melt, so that "upstream and downstream the river was groaning ... crying out for release, for the chance to run free and see the sun again. ... Big jagged plates were rising out of the shattered patches of river ice, as if something underneath was pushing to be free..." The sight of this pushes Thorn the shaman to push Loon in turn to say the appropriate poem in which knowledge of the changing of the seasons is transmitted from year to year and beyond. "Great salt sea deep trail of the dead," Loon recites as the river unlocks before his - and our - eyes. "We burn holly for you to break the ice."

As you can hear, Robinson keeps stylization of the language to a minimum, without stooping too low, so that the story itself can break free of the page and linger in the mind - which worked for me. Maybe it's because the world he creates feels so authentic and complete, but for several nights running, something happened to me that's never happened to me before, in all the years I've been reading novels. I dreamed I was living in Loon's world, traveling in the same tribe, along streams and rivers, through forest and over hills in an ancient state of mind.

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'Shaman' Takes Readers Back To The Dawn Of Humankind

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Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, Shaman, paints a vivid portrait of life in 30,000 B.C. It's the story of young Loon, who's destined to become the new shaman of his tribe. Reviewer Alan Cheuse says the world of Shaman is so authentic, he dreamed he was living in it.

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Whoa, if you didn't know much about LMS, this is a remarkable conversation to start with. This woman is my new hero. What a radical.

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Whoa, if you didn't know much about LMS, this is a remarkable conversation to start with. This woman is my new hero. What a radical.

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The author of “Ceremony” and “Almanac of the Dead” is thinking about different ways to write her next book.

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My age has given me back my sense of absurdity and humor. Revisiting Mr Franz K. reminds me to laugh more often and and not to take life so seriously. The saddest thing about the Welles film for me on revisiitng is how seriously they took themselves and their 'insights". But then, that was the downfall of the fat guy in the end.

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Check out Nabokov’s remarkable literary-entomological take on Gregor Samsa.  (This is the full text, replacing the previous attachment.)

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Check out Nabokov’s remarkable literary-entomological take on Gregor Samsa.  (This is the full text, replacing the previous attachment.)

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Nabokov FRANZ KAFKA (1883–1924) “The Metamorphosis” (1915).pdf

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F. KAFKA FRONT MATTER to The Schocken/B. Mitchell translation

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F. KAFKA FRONT MATTER to The Schocken/B. Mitchell translation

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Thanks to Jane for scanning!

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There is so much in this poem, I wanted to share the whole thing

Kathy

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The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The plowman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r

The moping owl does to the moon complain

Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r,

Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,

Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,

Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,

The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed,

The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,

No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,

Or busy housewife ply her evening care:

No children run to lisp their sire's return,

Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,

Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;

How jocund did they drive their team afield!

How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;

Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile

The short and simple annals of the poor.

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,

And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,

Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,

If Mem'ry o'er their tomb no trophies raise,

Where thro' the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault

The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

Can storied urn or animated bust

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,

Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;

Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,

Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page

Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;

Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,

And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast

The little tyrant of his fields withstood;

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,

Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

Th' applause of list'ning senates to command,

The threats of pain and ruin to despise,

To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,

And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes,

Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib'd alone

Their growing virtues, but their crimes confin'd;

Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,

And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,

To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,

Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride

With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,

Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;

Along the cool sequester'd vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

Yet ev'n these bones from insult to protect,

Some frail memorial still erected nigh,

With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,

Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd muse,

The place of fame and elegy supply:

And many a holy text around she strews,

That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,

This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd,

Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,

Nor cast one longing, ling'ring look behind?

On some fond breast the parting soul relies,

Some pious drops the closing eye requires;

Ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,

Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires.

For thee, who mindful of th' unhonour'd Dead

Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;

If chance, by lonely contemplation led,

Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,

Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,

"Oft have we seen him at the peep of dawn

Brushing with hasty steps the dews away

To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.

"There at the foot of yonder nodding beech

That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,

His listless length at noontide would he stretch,

And pore upon the brook that babbles by.

"Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,

Mutt'ring his wayward fancies he would rove,

Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn,

Or craz'd with care, or cross'd in hopeless love.

"One morn I miss'd him on the custom'd hill,

Along the heath and near his fav'rite tree;

Another came; nor yet beside the rill,

Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;

"The next with dirges due in sad array

Slow thro' the church-way path we saw him borne.

Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay,

Grav'd on the stone beneath yon aged thorn."

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth

A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.

Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth,

And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.

Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,

Heav'n did a recompense as largely send:

He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear,

He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend.

No farther seek his merits to disclose,

Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,

(There they alike in trembling hope repose)

The bosom of his Father and his God.

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Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas... | Poetry Foundation

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The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

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The funeral scene in The Invisible Man reminded me of these lines from Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard

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The funeral scene in The Invisible Man reminded me of these lines from Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard

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"Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;

Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,

Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page

Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;

Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,

And froze the genial current of the soul."

Kathy

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Lucy Gayheart, by Willa Cather, free ebook

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Very interesting essay on the Trueblood chapter and incest and women in IM

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Very interesting essay on the Trueblood chapter and incest and women in IM

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Just planning to dive into this essay about Ellison's interest in electrical wiring and its impact on his formal innovation in Invisible Man....sounds fascinating....

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Just planning to dive into this essay about Ellison's interest in electrical wiring and its impact on his formal innovation in Invisible Man....sounds fascinating....

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DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest

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People are discovering the truth about their biological parents with DNA—and learning that incest is far more common than many think.

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One of the most unforgettable scenes in 20th century American literature is the battle royale in the first chapter of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man."

The unnamed narrator, a diligent and hopeful Black high school student, has been invited to a gathering of the town's leading men to recite a speech about how "humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of progress." Before he speaks, though, he is invited to take part in a battle royale featuring several of his classmates. He agrees and is issued a pair of boxing gloves.

I was shocked to see some of the most important men of the town quite tipsy. They were all there - bankers, lawyers, judges, doctors, fire chiefs, teachers, merchants. Even one of the more fashionable preachers. ... Suddenly I heard the school superintendent, who had told me to come, yell, "Bring up the shines, gentlemen! Bring up the little shines!" ...

Everybody fought hysterically. It was complete anarchy. Everybody fought everybody else. No group fought together for long. Two, three, four, four one, then turned to fight each other, were themselves attacked. Blows landed below the belt and in the kidney, with the gloves open as well as closed. ...

The men kept yelling, "Slug him, black boy! Knock his guts out! Uppercut him! Kill him! Kill that big boy!" ... The harder we fought the more threatening the men became.
Ralph Ellison, "Invisible Man"

When I read "Invisible Man," first in high school and again as an adult, I assumed Ellison had invented the battle royale for literary effect. It was not until recently that I learned these events were in fact regular occurrences around the turn of the 20th century - including in Rochester.

Consider this Democrat and Chronicle headline and sub-headline from the Aug. 2, 1898: "Won a Watch and Stole a Melon; Too Much Temptation for a Colored Fighter." That was written on the occasion of the first notable battle royale to take place in Rochester. The prizes were a gold watch for first place and a watermelon for second.

This is how the Union-Advertiser began its story:

"No more amusing bout has ever been given before the Rienzi Athletic Club than that furnished by last night's 'battle royal' between four darkey scrappers," the Union-Advertiser reported. "The crowd was by far the largest which has attended any of the popular price bouts and it is safe to say that another battle royal will pack the house."

In brief, battle royales were no-holds-barred boxing matches among groups of inexperienced fighters, almost always Black and almost always in front of a white audience. They could be brutal but at the same time were intended mostly as comic relief as the undercard of the main boxing event.

The history Randy Roberts described them in "Papa Jack," a biography of Jack Johnson:

Their sole function was to reinforce racial stereotypes. Like the blacks in minstrel shows, blacks in Battle Royals conformed to white expectations. Blindfolded or tied together, blacks were made to look more comical and less dangerous. It was difficult to take seriously one whose masculinity and dignity were so totally compromised. Emasculated before each other and the white audience, the black youths were given painful lessons about the nature of caste.
Randy Roberts, "Papa Jack"

The spectacles originated in the antebellum South, where slaveowners used them to identify and recruit men who could fight against other enslaved people in matches organized for gambling purposes. After the Civil War they evolved to serve as a "de facto boot camp for black boxers," according to Colleen Aycock and Mark Scott in their biography of Joe Gans, a famous early Black boxer who, like Jack Johnson, got his start in battle royales.

"Potential boxers needed to attract attention," they wrote. "For black boxers in particular, one way of getting noticed was to sign up for a battle royale. The reality of limited educational and professional opportunities at the time meant that boxing offered someone like Gans the rare opportunity to fight his way out of poverty and attain 'visibility.'"

The same was true in Rochester for the Smith brothers. Their family came from Culpepper, Virginia, in 1929, and the brothers soon established themselves in the west side fighting scene.

Several of the brothers went on to gain renown on the local boxing scene. Adolph Dupree wrote about them in "Roots/Routes," his 1984 history of Black Rochester:

Although classified as amateurs in the early part of their careers, the Smith Brothers were able to earn money for their family by participating in "battle royals" - a fight to the finish among several boxers in the same ring at the same time - picking up coins tossed into the ring by boxing patrons at smokers, banquets and other affairs.
Adolph Dupree, "Roots/Routes, Part III," in about...time magazine, Sept. 1984.

An apparent distinction for Rochester-area was that battle royales sometimes included white fighters as well, usually Italian, Irish or other ethnic minorities.

A photo accompanying Dupree's article shows five of the young Smith brothers alongside three white boys. All eight are described as "Battle Royal participants."

Here is a description from a fight in Geneva in 1906, attended by about 800 people:

A battle royal which produced much merriment was between three white youngsters from Rochester, Welch, Noris and Riley, and a huskey boxer named Smoke. ... It went the limit with no decision, ending with all three white boxers hitting the negro all round the ring.
Democrat and Chronicle May 30, 1906

The same combative interracial dynamic existed outside the boxing ring as well, of course.

"When we first got (to Rochester) there weren't hardly no colored people at all," Hank Smith said in 1978. "Any time you hit the street you had to fight; those kids would call us (n-word) in a minute."

In 1912 the New York State Athletic Commission formally outlawed battle royales. It found them to be overly dangerous for the fighters involved and "a detriment rather than a help" for the growth of the sport.

That ruling seems to have had little effect in Rochester. In fact, most of the newspaper citations I could find for battle royales take place after 1912.

A 1922 Knights of Columbus event featured "five husky sons of Ham mixing it up." (D&C 11/22/1922)

A battle royale in Webster in 1924 lasted more than an hour. (D&C 8/4/1924)

Five Black boys fought in front of more than 1,500 Rochester-area American Legion members in 1930. (D&C 2/5/1930)

A 1932 boxing match included an intermission with a "free for all slugging bee between a flock of colored lads." (D&C 12/27/32)

The six Smith brothers all paid their battle royale dues after their arrival in Rochester in 1929, 17 years after such bouts were formally banned. (Dupree; D&C 1/21/1936)

The last mention I could find come from a 1936 Democrat and Chronicle story about the Smith brothers: "(They) got into the fight racket via the 'battle royal' route. They used to throw seven or eight colored boys into the ring and let 'em go at it." Conservatively Rochester had battle royales for at least 34 years, from 1898 to 1932.

Another demeaning spectacle was the barrel fight, where Black boxers fought while all standing within a large barrel. I haven't found evidence of such a fight taking place in Rochester.

It was uncommon for newspaper stories about battle royales to include the fighters' names; more often they were simply referred to by their race. This was part of a dehumanizing effect that also sometimes included blindfolding the fighters (as in "Invisible Man").

"Use of the blindfold at these bloody events was popular perhaps because it evoked the relationship a lynch-mob has with the victim," Aycock and Scott wrote. "Hoods over a face during a lynching help to hide identities, dehumanizing the event."

It is also important to place battle royales within the broader context of minstrel-like entertainment that thrived in Rochester and other cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Traveling professional musicians often featured "coon songs" in their repertoires, while both professionals and amateurs were likely to blacken their faces to perform minstrel burlesques. Even philanthropic events could take on a minstrel sheen: a 1921 parade for the city's orphans included a watermelon-eating contest for Black children.

In "Invisible Man," the narrator finally is allowed to give his speech but struggles to get his words out with his mouth full of blood.

"I closed my ears and swallowed blood until I was nauseated," he says. "The speech seemed a hundred times as long as before, but I could not leave out a single word."

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The racist spectacle of battle royales in Rochester

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One of the most unforgettable scenes in 20th century American literature is the battle royale in the first chapter of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." The unnamed narrator, a diligent and hopeful B...

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Tangential to Invisible Man: A Photography Exhibit in Seattle

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Tangential to Invisible Man: A Photography Exhibit in Seattle

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From Jenny D: After listening to today's Flow Reading, I opened my email to read an announcement of a new photography exhibit at MOHAI (Museum of History & Industry) by Al Smith, a Seattle native who captured images of Seattle back in the day. I enjoyed reading about his story and falling into the rabbit hole of links within. https://blackartslegacies.cascadepbs.org/articles/al-smith

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Al Smith: Reflecting Black life in Seattle

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For much of the 20th century, the “on the spot” photographer captured striking images, from jazz clubs to boxing matches to community celebrations.

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Internet Archive Access, till your copy arrives....

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Internet Archive Access, till your copy arrives....

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Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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An essay written in 2016 describing IM as a parable of our time ... which it is more than ever now, 8+ years on...

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An essay written in 2016 describing IM as a parable of our time ... which it is more than ever now, 8+ years on...

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In 2012, I was a high-school English teacher in Prince George's County, Maryland, when Trayvon Martin, a boy who looked like so many of my students, was killed in the suburbs of Florida. Before then, I had envisioned my classroom as a place for my students to escape the world's harsher realities, but Martin's death made the dream of such escapism seem impossible and irrelevant. Looking for guidance, I picked up Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, "Invisible Man," which had been a fixture of the "next to read" pile on my bookshelf for years. "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me," Ellison writes in the prologue. The unnamed black protagonist of the novel, set between the South in the nineteen-twenties and Harlem in the nineteen-thirties, wrestles with the cognitive dissonance of opportunity served up alongside indignity. He receives a scholarship to college from a group of white men in his town after engaging in a blindfolded boxing match with other black boys, to the delight of the white spectators. In New York, he is pulled out of poverty and given a prominent position in a communist-inspired "Brotherhood" only to realize that these brothers are using him as a political pawn. This complicated kind of progress seemed to me to accurately reflect how, for the marginalized in America, choices have never been clear or easy. I put the book on my syllabus.

The school was situated inside the beltway of Prince George's County, and my classroom was filled with almost exclusively black and brown students, many of them undocumented immigrants. While Ellison wrote of invisibility as a black man caught in the discord of early-twentieth-century racism, this particular group of students read the idea of invisibility not as a metaphor but as a necessity, a way of insuring one's protection. I was expecting that the class would relate the novel to the current climate of violence toward black bodies. But, as they often did, my students presented a compelling case that broadened the scope of the discussion.

Before my time in the classroom, immigration was rarely at the forefront of my consciousness. I did not come from a family of immigrants but from a group of people who had been brought to this country involuntarily, centuries ago. I cannot point to a map and say, "That is the country I came from"; our ancestry lies in the cotton fields of Mississippi and in the swamps of southern Florida. The repercussions of immigration did not feel as concrete to me as they did to the more than eleven million unauthorized immigrants across the country.

The day after Donald Trump was elected, one of my former students, from that same class, sent me a text message. We had not spoken in some time. She wrote, "I know I shouldn't be, but I'm a little scared. Unsure of what's going to happen." She continued, "I know I wasn't born here, but this has become my country. I've been here for so long, with a lot of shame, I don't even know my own country's history, but I know plenty of this one." In his interview with "60 Minutes," Trump reiterated that he would move immediately to deport or incarcerate two to three million undocumented immigrants. As for the rest, he said, "after everything gets normalized, we're going to make a determination." After I listened to the interview, I began looking over the essays from a writing assignment I had given a different group of students, years ago. The students were asked to write their own short memoirs, and many of them used the exercise as an opportunity to write about what it meant to be an undocumented person in the United States. Their stories narrated the weeks-long journeys they had taken as young children to escape violence and poverty in their home countries, crossing the border in the back of pickup trucks, walking across deserts, and wading through rivers in the middle of the night. Others discussed how they did not know that they were undocumented until they attempted to get a driver's license or to apply to college, only to be told by their parents that they did not have Social Security numbers.

One student stood up in front of the class to read his memoir and said that, every day, coming home from school, he feared that he might find that his parents had disappeared. After that, many students revealed their status, and that of their families, to their classmates for the first time. The essays told of parents who would not drive for fear that being pulled over for a broken taillight would result in deportation; who had never been on an airplane; who were working jobs for below minimum wage in abhorrent conditions, unable to report their employers for fear of being arrested themselves. It was a remarkable scene, to witness young people collectively shatter one another's sense of social isolation.

"Invisible Man" ends with the protagonist being chased by policemen during a riot in Harlem, and falling into a manhole in the middle of the street. The police put the cover of the manhole back in place, trapping the narrator underground. "I'm an invisible man and it placed me in a hole-or showed me the hole I was in, if you will-and I reluctantly accepted the fact," he says.

I imagine that if I were to read this book with my students now, our conversation would be different. I wonder if any of my students would ever stand up in class to read their own stories, or if they would instead remain silent. I think of all the young people who, because of DACA, had emerged to be seen by their country as human, as deserving of grace, as deserving of a chance. I think of how they turned over their names, birth dates, addresses to the government in anticipation of a pathway out of the shadows. I revisit the final pages of "Invisible Man" and think of how many things that once existed above ground in our country might now become trapped beneath the surface.

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Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" as a Parable of Our Time

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In 2012, I was a high-school English teacher in Prince George's County, Maryland, when Trayvon Martin, a boy who looked like so many of my students, was killed in the suburbs of Florida. Before then, I had envisioned my classroom as a place for my students to escape the world's harsher realities, but Martin's death made the dream of such escapism seem impossible and irrelevant.

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Helen King · That Stupid Pelt: Wolf’s retelling of Medea

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Recent interpretations of Medea have tended to focus on issues of gender and race, portraying her either as a feminist challenging Jason’s misogyny, or as a freedom fighter on behalf of the oppressed Colchian immigrants in Corinth. In what remains the best-known version of her myth, the one created by Euripides in 431 BC, her actions turn out to be as violent and tyrannical as those of her oppressors, as she kills her own children in a quest for revenge. Modern productions have tried to provide a reading of the play that makes sense of her appalling crime.

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Euripides, Medea - The Center for Hellenic Studies

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Translation by E.P. Coleridge Revised by Roger Ceragioli Further revised by Gregory Nagy Newly revised by the Hour 25 Medea Heroization Team (Jessica Eichelburg, Hélène Emeriaud, Claudia Filos, Janet M. Ozsolak, Sarah Scott, Jack Vaughan) In front of Medea’s house in Corinth. The Nurse comes on stage from the house. Nurse If only the Argo […]

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The Argonautica by Appollonius of Rhodes (3rd c. BCE)

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The Argonautica by Appollonius of Rhodes (3rd c. BCE)

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APOLLONIUS RHODIUS, ARGONAUTICA BOOK 1 - Theoi Classical Texts Library

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APOLLONIUS RHODIUS was a Greek epic poet and scholar of the library of Alexandria who fourished in the C3rd B.C. He was the author of a celebrated epic entitled the Argonautica which described the journey of the Argonauts in their quest for the Golden Fleece. The key episodes of the myth were sourced from older poets such as Hesiod and Pindar.

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Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 7 (1st c. CE)

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Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 7 (1st c. CE)

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Jason and Medea

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OVID, METAMORPHOSES 1 - Theoi Classical Texts Library

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and the recording

; https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/p00gmw3z?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

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Found this piece this morning after the flow reading - thought you might find it interesting too. - Jenny

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Agnes Smedley: On Proving What Her Worst Enemies Had Claimed (Much to My Regret)

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My acquaintance with Agnes Smedley began in 1976 with a reprint edition of her 1929 novel, Daughter of Earth, but it was not until the mid-1980s that I took up my sojourn with this now largely forgotte

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Since its publication, a century ago, James Joyce's epic has acquired a fearsome reputation for difficulty. But its great subject, soppy as it may seem, is love.

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The Twitter account UlyssesReader is what programmers call a "corpus-fed bot." The corpus on which it feeds is James Joyce's modernist epic, " Ulysses," which was published a hundred years ago this month. For nine years, UlyssesReader has consumed the novel's inner parts with relish, only to spit them out at a rate of one tweet every ten minutes. The novel's eighteen episodes, each contrived according to an elaborate scheme of correspondences-Homeric parallels, hours of the day, organs of the body-are torn asunder. Characters are dismembered into bellies, breasts, and bottoms. When UlyssesReader reaches the end, it presents the novel's historic signature, "Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921," intact, like a bone fished out of the throat. Then it begins again, arranging, in its mechanical way, the tale of a young Dubliner named Stephen Dedalus and an older one named Leopold Bloom, brought together in a hospital, a brothel, a cabmen's shelter, and, finally, the kitchen of Bloom's home-on June 16, 1904, "an unusually fatiguing day, a chapter of accidents."

My relationship with UlyssesReader is intense and, I suspect, typical. Waking up, sleepy and displeased, I roll over to see what it has been up to during the night. Sometimes it greets me with a sentence whose origin and significance I know with the same certainty that I know my name. The beginning of the novel, say:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air.

Placing these sentences is simple. It is eight in the morning at the Martello tower in Sandycove. The tower, an obsolete British defense fortress, overlooks the "snotgreen," "scrotumtightening" Irish Sea-"a great sweet mother," Buck Mulligan intones, playing the roles of both priest and jester before an unamused Stephen Dedalus, who is grieving the death of his mother. Grasping whose point of view these sentences issue from is trickier, but key to the novel's technical ambitions. The passage is marked by Buck's rhetorical bombast-"stately," "bearing a bowl"-but deflated by the gently ironizing description of him as "plump." It was on the back of this observation that the critic Leo Bersani claimed that "Ulysses" brought to modern literature its most refined technique: a narrative perspective that was "at once seduced" by its characters' distinctive thoughts and "coolly observant of their person."

From these two sentences, a whole history of literature beckons-a sudden blooming of forms and genres, authors and periods, languages and nations. Why is "dressinggown," like "scrotumtightening," a single retracting word, as if English were steadying itself to transform into German? (A triviality, you might protest, but the trustees of the Joyce estate once sued the editor of a "reader friendly" edition of "Ulysses" that severed it into "dressing gown.") Is the yellow gown an afterimage of Homer's Dawn, flinging off her golden robe? What to make of that peculiar word "ungirdled"? The cords of the ungirdled gown draw my mind to the ungirdled tunics of the warriors in the Iliad; to Shakespeare's fairy Puck, who boasts that he can "put a girdle round about the earth / in forty minutes"; to the plump, ungirdled Romans in "The Last Days of Pompeii," by the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. How many novels encourage such wanderings?

"Ulysses" is all about wandering, of course, and about the loneliness that attends it. While running errands that same morning, Leopold Bloom summons a memory of his wife, Molly, thrusting into his mouth a crushed seedcake on the day he proposed to her: "I lay, full lips open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: Joy." Yet the sweetness of his memory is soured by a sudden recollection. This is the day, he suspects, that Molly is going to have sex with the businessman Blazes Boylan, the "worst man in Dublin." Bloom is adrift from his wife, adrift from his past self, and alone with his memory-just as readers, devouring the novel with pleasure, look up to realize that they are alone and adrift on its thrashing sea of references. "The anxiety which 'Ulysses' massively, encyclopedically struggles to transcend," Bersani writes, "is that of disconnectedness"-the "traumatic seductions" of desiring to read all one would have to read to master those references. How many people have read not just Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Sterne, Fielding, Blake, Goethe, Wilde, and Yeats but also Irish, Indian, and Jewish folklore? How many are proficient in French, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin? Whom do you share these connections with?

Seduced and abandoned, the reader makes one connection after another, but they affirm nothing more than Joyce's appetite for knowledge, a cultural literacy presented as godlike in its extent. "Ulysses," Bersani concludes, is "modernism's most impressive tribute to the West's long and varied tribute to the authority of the Father." The Father's most dutiful offspring are known as Joyceans, and the churn of the "Joyce industry" has spawned a vast apparatus of commentary that even they have deemed oppressive. "Those of us who love Joyce must also hate both him and the industrialized critical tradition that now trails in his wake," the scholar Sean Latham has written, attempting to shake Joyce's hold on his acolytes. But everyone knows that hating a father only strengthens his power over you.

What about those mornings when I wake up and the bot's nocturnal emissions are unplaceable? "Desire's wind blasts the thorntree but after it becomes from a bramblebush to be a rose upon the rood of time. Mark me now. In woman's womb word is made flesh but in the spirit of the maker all flesh." What? I could fetch a rumpled copy of Don Gifford's "Ulysses Annotated" and find an allusion lurking beneath the brambles. Or I could reach for Sam Slote, Marc A. Mamigonian, and John Turner's forthcoming " Annotations to James Joyce's Ulysses" (Oxford), which, with some twelve thousand entries, is more than twice the length of the novel. But I like the idea of a hole in my knowledge of literature's history. And I like the idea that someone, in some other fleshwarmed bed, is making connections I cannot. This is the pleasure of surrender and passivity. Or, as Bloom thinks, when he returns home that night to a bed bearing "the imprint of a human form, male, not his," it is the pleasure of feeling "more abnegation than jealousy, less envy than equanimity." This surrender is love. If desire is the pain of ignorance, then love, as the scholar Sam See proclaimed in a stirring response to Bersani, "is the pleasure of ignorance: the pleasure of renouncing our desire to fill the hole of knowledge, to make knowledge whole, to master those to whom we bear relation." To relinquish mastery is to sing, as Molly does, "love's old sweet song."

Knowledge and ignorance, desire and love, control and submission-these are the straits that "Ulysses" asks its readers to navigate. There are more technologies of navigation available today than when Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach's bookshop in Paris, first published the novel. There are studies, among which Anthony Burgess's " Re Joyce" (1965) and Richard Ellmann's " Ulysses on the Liffey" (1972) remain the most unapologetically joyous. There are the audio and visual recordings: the thrill of hearing Pegg Monahan's low, husky voice merge with Molly's consciousness in the 1982 Irish-public-radio production; the wonder of watching a windswept Rob Doyle atop Dalkey's Martello tower during the Thornwillow Centennial Reading. There are the illustrations, from Matisse's comically irrelevant ones-having never bothered to read "Ulysses," he just drew scenes from the Odyssey-to Eduardo Arroyo's enchanting Surrealist cartoons for " Ulysses: An Illustrated Edition " (Other Press) and John Morgan's beautiful, fragile "Usylessly," which replicates the physical form of the first edition but erases all the text. If all these projects make new ways of taking in "Ulysses" desirable, then they also retrieve the pleasure of loving it from the maw of the machine.

"Ulysses" is often described as an encyclopedic novel. "Encyclopedia in the form of farce," Ezra Pound pronounced, comparing it to Gustave Flaubert's " Bouvard and Pécuchet," whose zany title characters fail to complete their delightfully stupid quest to master all knowledge. "Ulysses" does not depict anyone stringing together entries, yet the novel's repetition of certain terms and phrases is hard to miss. They rise from the page like "wavewhite wedded words shimmering," gaining in intensity and significance.

"Desire" is one of these words. If there were entries for it in "Ulysses," sexual desire would attach to Bloom-who receives flirtatious letters, reads erotica, masturbates on the beach, and scrutinizes the mirabilis anus of nearly every female he encounters-while literary desire would attach to Stephen, the aspiring writer. "All desire to see you bring forth the work you meditate, to acclaim you Stephaneforos," his fair-weather friend Vincent Lenehan jeers in the fourteenth episode, while they are sitting in the Holles Street Maternity Hospital, waiting for a baby to be born. Childbirth and writing, the essence of creation myths, emerge as twinned rituals in "Ulysses."

It is tempting to think that the desire to create, whether a life or a novel, demands mastery-the exercise of control over the materials of one's mind and body. Stephen is pricked by both this desire to master and a melancholy revolt against the artifice of knowledge. The novel's first three chapters extend the largely autobiographical arc of the Künstlerroman project that Joyce began with the publication, in 1916, of " A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Then Stephen was merely youthful and dilettantish. Now he is young, unwashed, grieving, too clever by half, and incapable of writing. "He is going to write something in ten years," Buck Mulligan laughs. "Will write fully tomorrow," Stephen slurs, extremely drunk, toward the end of "Ulysses." "I am a most finished artist."

Only a stranded writer would make such a conceited claim. Stephen's frustrated desire is a creative longing in search of a subject. The desire is spurred by the absence of Stephen's own creator: his mother, who has died between the end of "Portrait" and the beginning of "Ulysses," while he was living in gloomy, penurious self-exile in Paris. " Amor matris: subjective and objective genitive," Stephen thinks. The double meaning of the Latin-a mother's love and love for a mother-doubles his sense of loss. He can neither possess nor be possessed by his creator, and he can find no pleasure yet in this unknowing, can recover nothing but pain from the wake of death. "Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart," the narrator observes. Lines of Yeats that Stephen set to song at his mother's deathbed chime through his head: "And no more turn aside and brood / Upon love's bitter mystery."

Stephen ignores this advice. How could a grieving child help but brood? Like Hamlet, he spends the day lost in rumination, unable to master his thoughts, and incapable of using his knowledge to create something that will fill the hole opened by death. The next episode, "Nestor," finds him teaching history in a classroom. The children must memorize and repeat names, dates, and places of battle. Their performance of knowledge breeds cruelty; their laughter when a classmate answers incorrectly is "mirthless but with meaning." "Yes," Stephen thinks. "They knew: had never learned nor ever been innocent." His mind flashes to a library he frequented in Paris, where students seemed like "fed and feeding brains about me: under glowlamps, impaled, with faintly beating feelers." In this vision, both readers and books are irradiated, dissected, and bled dry.

"To learn one must be humble," Stephen's employer, Mr. Deasy, declares. "But life is the great teacher." Deasy, though pompous, is not incorrect. Life, in "Ulysses," is the experience of the body, from tip to toe, as it wanders through the world. It is sensation mediated by language, and language refined by sensation. This is what the lovely and challenging beginning of the next episode, "Proteus," tries hard to seize. It opens with Stephen walking along the beach, looking around:

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy.

Joyce's telescoped words-seaspawn, seawrack, snotgreen, bluesilver-create the illusion of descriptive precision. But the illusion dims when it comes time to fix definitions or concepts to them. What is seawrack? What is the essence of bluesilver? The reader can knock her sconce against these questions, but her head will crack in half before the words do. She can contemplate them only as an aesthetic experience-an invitation to rub up against the sound-images, vowels and consonants dilating luxuriously over time. Lest we become too complacent in our aestheticism, Joyce pushes his word-painting to the point of absurdity, with a "fourworded Wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos." Reading the sound of the sea is no match for riding seaward on the waves.

The most evocative allegory for contemplation in "Proteus" is provided by Tatters, a dog whom Stephen watches sniff the carcass of another dog that has washed up dead on the beach: "He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell." The sight is grotesque in its physical closeness and touching in its metaphysical distance. The fear, of course, is that Tatters will start to eat his brother, consuming the dog's body just as the feeding brains in the library consume books. But Tatters is playful, curious, and tender. The way he approaches his brother-a light touch from his wet nose-answers Stephen's silent plea toward the end of "Proteus": "I am lonely here. O, touch me soon, now. What is the word known to all men?"

"Love, yes. Word known to all men," Stephen says later, answering his own question. This is in the novel's ninth episode, "Scylla and Charybdis," which takes place in the library. Here Stephen feeds the brains of his friends with his theory of how Shakespeare, cuckolded by his wife, projected his dispossession onto " Hamlet," splitting his psyche between Hamlet and the ghost of Hamlet's father. Proudly self-conscious of his mastery of storytelling, Stephen unfurls his schema of Shakespeare's creative spirit as both "bawd and cuckold. He acts and is acted on. Lover of an ideal or a perversion." The chapter provides a handy gloss on "Ulysses" itself. Bloom's marital dilemma echoes Stephen's theory; words and images from previous chapters are dragged into his boastful speech.

A librarian, unimpressed, asks, "Do you believe your own theory?" "No," Stephen responds. Love remains a word known to all in theory but an ethic unknown to these young men. Like the most pedantic readers, they remain stuck in preening performance of their knowingness. Getting us to believe in love requires Joyce to put his older, more experienced character into action.

The entry for "love" in the "Ulysses" encyclopedia would be naughtier and more allusive than the entry for "desire." It would begin with the portmanteaus: lovekin, lovelock, lovelorn, lovephiltres, loveshivery, lovesoft, lovesome, and lovewords. Then the characters: the Reverend Hugh C. Love, who reveals "his grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot is stuck"; James Lovebirch, the author of "Fair Tyrants" and other sadomasochistic erotica. They are followed by the books ("The Beaufoy books of love"), the songs ("Love's Old Sweet Song"), and the epigrams ("Love laughs at locksmiths," "Plain and loved, loved for ever they say," "Wilde's love that dare not speak its name"). The entry, to borrow Stephen's phrase, "dallies between conjugal love and its chaste delights and scortatory love and its foul pleasures"-the limbo where "Ulysses" lets its readers dally, with Bloom as their guide.

Love, soppy as it may seem, is the novel's great subject. But it is not great in the way imagined by romantic young Gerty MacDowell, who, in "Nausicaa," rapturously exposes her bottom to Bloom as he masturbates. "Her every effort would be to share his thoughts," Gerty thinks, weaving a thick shroud of fantasy around this stranger. "For love was the master guide." But these are a young girl's ideals, and grownup love in "Ulysses" does not strain for perfect and possessive communion. Gerty's clenching fantasy of Bloom evokes the schlocky story printed on the newspaper with which he wipes his ass in the fourth episode, "Calypso." He has just delivered a note to his wife from Blazes Boylan, who Bloom knows will come to the house that afternoon.

Love is also the answer to a narrative problem: What do you do on the day you suspect, but do not want to confirm, that your wife is getting "fucked yes and damn well fucked too"? Run some errands, perhaps. Receive a flirty letter from a woman named Martha. Attend a funeral. Go to a museum. Do some work. Eat lunch. Bloom will not, as Stephen claims Shakespeare did in response to his cuckolding, write "Hamlet." But "Ulysses" will amass a great deal of its antic, thrilling language through Bloom's attempt to not think about and to not know about his wife's transgression. In the eighth episode, "Lestrygonians," Bloom, as he eats lunch, will conjure a stammering memory of the night Boylan first took Molly's hand: "Glowworm's la-amp is gleaming, love. Touch. Fingers. Asking. Answer. Yes. Stop. Stop." And later: "Today. Today. Not think." Choosing dispossession requires distraction. It makes Bloom hypervigilant toward his surroundings, opening his consciousness to the sensual gratification of words-"glowworm's la-amp," "touch"-that are borrowed from the novel's idiom, gyring into Bloom's mind. They fill the hole in his knowledge.

Bloom becomes an increasingly passive character as the day progresses, his voice and consciousness drowned out by the city and its inhabitants. In the eleventh episode, "Sirens," he sits in a tavern and tries to respond to Martha's letter, but the suspicion of Boylan's imminent arrival mingles with some music he hears, shattering the privacy of his thoughts: "Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup." This, the novel proffers, is the "language of love," and its insistence (tup, tup, tup) makes it, as Bloom responds, "utterl imposs. Underline imposs. To write today." Nearly every one of Joyce's narrative techniques is pressed into the service of deriving pleasure-for Bloom and for the reader-from Bloom's pain.

The climax of his passivity comes in the twelfth episode, "Cyclops," which takes place in a pub at the same hour Boylan is at Bloom's house. An anonymous first-person narrator watches as the belligerent, drunken anti-Semites of Dublin, led by an Irish nationalist known as "the citizen," goad Bloom for being half Jewish. This is the only moment in the day when he loses his composure, lashing out:

-Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction in Morocco like slaves or cattle.

-Are you talking about the new Jerusalem? says the citizen.

-I'm talking about injustice, says Bloom. . . . Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.

-What? says Alf.

-Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

Everything that "Ulysses" is said to be "about"-colonial politics, capitalist exploitation, animal ecologies, men and women, marriage and sex-is bound up in Bloom's affirmation of love and the virtues of turning the other cheek, or a blind eye. He is, at this juncture, being plundered by Boylan and insulted by his fellow-citizens. But he asserts himself by pulling out from a fight, "as limp as a wet rag." His Christian heroics are at once absurd and courageous.

The metaphorical cheek becomes a literal one in "Circe," the hallucinatory fifteenth episode, set in a brothel, where the passivity of love metamorphoses into a furious masochistic desire. Bloom has spent the day indulging his love of bottoms-spying the "white button under the butt" of his cat's tail, ogling the "mesial groove" of a Venus statue in the museum-but in "Circe" he becomes everybody's bottom. The brothel turns into a courtroom, and the novel into a play with stage directions and an invisible director. Bloom is tried and convicted for his lewdness; whipped and spanked; ridden like a horse, before blooming a vagina and giving birth to eight children; and then forced to drink piss. It is both painful and pleasurable not to know what happens where-whether the carnivalesque action of "Circe" lives in the story's reality or its dreamworld, in its characters' conscious or unconscious minds; who is in control and who has submitted; who acts and who is acted on.

The brothel is where the man with the theory of love and the man manifesting it finally come together, with Bloom helping Stephen after he has been knocked out in a brawl. It is common to see Bloom as a father in search of a son-his son, Rudy, who appears at the end of "Circe," died years ago, eleven days after he was born-and Stephen as a son in search of a proper father. But if "Ulysses" teaches us anything it is that nobody is ever only a father or a son, and the musk of the brothel still clings to both men when they arrive at the cab shelter to have a cup of coffee. In "Circe," Bloom offers to serve as Molly's "business menagerer"-an offer that he later appears to pursue when he presents a seductive picture of Molly to Stephen: "Ah, yes! My wife, he intimated, plunging in medias res, would have the greatest pleasure in making your acquaintance." The beauty of the intimation is that it is impossible for the reader to know with certainty whether it is an innocent or an illicit proposition.

It is probably a betrayal of the feminist literary tradition to pronounce the final episode of "Ulysses," "Penelope," the best-the funniest, most touching, arousing, and truthful-representation of a woman anyone has written in English. But it is, and the eight long, unpunctuated, and outrageous sentences of Molly Bloom's silent monologue make much of the feminist canon look like a sewing circle for virgins and prudes. In what is often described as a gush of thought, she thinks of her husband, her past lovers, Boylan, her childhood, her children-of every experience of life.

If the earliest feminist critics of "Ulysses" were, for better or worse, struck by Molly's eroticism, then today I am struck, and moved, by how her sexual frankness and fluidity circle around her fear of pregnancy and, nested within that fear, the death of her baby boy. Molly and Bloom share a certain horror at reproduction. "Fifteen children he had," Bloom thinks of Stephen's "philoprogenitive" father-the blind rutting with which people bring children into a world that cannot provide for them. In Molly's mind, reproduction is tied to the one and only memory she actively refuses to brood upon: "I suppose I oughtnt to have buried him in that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same since O Im not going to think myself into the glooms about that any more."

"Could never like it again after Rudy," Bloom thinks of his wife. It is common for critics to say that Molly and Bloom have not had sex since their son's death, but this assertion only shows how limited the sexual imaginations of critics can be. He came on her bottom only two weeks ago and regularly kisses the "plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump"; judging by his attention to her "mellow yellow furrow," he would welcome Molly's invitation to "drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part." The hole she does not want filled is the one that reproduces-the hole that produces direct connections. "Theyre all mad to get in there where they come out of youd think they could never go far enough," she thinks, relieved that Boylan, despite his size, "hasnt such a tremendous amount of spunk in him when I made him pull out."

Unlike the rest of "Ulysses," in which characters' thoughts are regularly interrupted-by other people, the city, the narrator-Molly's consciousness largely retains its privacy and integrity. The monologue has no time stamp, no constraints of pace or length imposed by the rest of the novel. The interruptions come from her body-she pisses, farts, and starts having her period-and the whistle of a distant train, "frseeeeeeeefronnnng." No one seems to get far into her interiority. The connections she creates between past and present, mind and body, belong only to her. Yet she shares memories with her husband-the passing of the seedcake, for instance-without knowing that they share them. These experiences are elemental to each one's sense of self, connecting them on an ineffable plane, deeper than knowing.

But if the event of the memory is the same, its presentation is not. Whereas Bloom's recollection of the day he proposed is stupidly sensual ("Yum"), Molly's is framed by her mastery of his desire. "I got him to propose to me," she remembers. "I gave him all the pleasure I could lead him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first." She withholds her yes, and, as the episode rushes to its famous ending, an older series of memories, which Bloom does not share, nestles into the space of her withholding.

I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls . . . and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

How many novels end with a woman coming? And where is she coming? In bed next to her husband, who does not know what she is doing, or in her memory, where he does not know what she is thinking? In these unknowabilities, "Ulysses" ends on a cry of loving pleasure.

"What else were we given all those desires for Id like to know," Molly thinks. This is, if not the oldest question in the book, certainly the one that has been asked with the most ardor and angst since the rise of both the novel and conjugal marriage. How do we put these desires-maternal, paternal, filial, marital, and illicit-into action without force, injustice, insult, or hate? When do we yield, with love, to the pleasure of ignorance? These are the questions which keep a reader coming back to "Ulysses," as Molly keeps coming to the love letters she remembers receiving, sometimes "4 or 5 times" a day. Or 9 or 10, depending on the reader's appetite. ♦

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Since its publication, a century ago, James Joyce's epic has acquired a fearsome reputation for difficulty. But its great subject, soppy as it may seem, is love. Save this story for later. Save this story for later. The Twitter account UlyssesReader is what programmers call a "corpus-fed bot."

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A performance of the musical passages from pp 690 & 691, the antisemitic Ballad of Little Henry Hughes

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A performance of the musical passages from pp 690 & 691, the antisemitic Ballad of Little Henry Hughes

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LITTLE HARRY HUGHES

1

The rain rained high and the snow snowed low around the college wall
And all the boys from the merry green woods came playing with a ball.

2

They kicked it high and they kicked it low, they kicked It up against the wall;
And they kicked it long and they kicked it short, and they broke the Jew's windows all.

3

Then the Jew's daughter she came out and she was dressed in green,
O come you here, you little Harry Hughes and we'll have another game.

4

She took a red apple out of her pocket and hurled it across the plain
And little Harry Hughes he picked up the apple and hurled it back again.

5

She took him by the lily-white hand and she led him through the kitchen and the hall
Until they came to a dark back room where no-one would here him call.

6

She sat him in an armchair and she pinned him with a pin And then she got a silver bowl for to catch his heart's blood in.

7

And the day was done and the night came on and all the scholars were at home
And every mother had her own wee son but Harry Hughes' mother had none.

8

So she went walking down the street with a little rod In her hand.
Saying "If I catch you, little Harry Hughes, I'll surely beat you home".

9

And she walked 'til she came to the Jew's house, but the Jews were all asleep,
So she walked 'til she came to the Jews' draw-well, it was fifty fathoms deep

10

- If you be there you little Harry Hughes, and God forbid you just speak one word to your own dear mother who is lonely in search of thee.

11

The Mass was sung and the bells were rung and all the scholars were In bed
And every mother had her own wee son but Harry Hughes he was dead
Little Harry Hughes was dead.

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Little Harry Hughes by Malcolm Wray, released 01 February 2018 LITTLE HARRY HUGHES 1 The rain rained high and the snow snowed low around the college wall And all the boys from the merry green woods came playing with a ball.

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Agnes Smedley Collection and Exhibition Archive | PRISM

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Till you can get your copy from the Feminist Press (isbn 9781936932788), here's a pdf.

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Some entertaining scholarship on how translators deal with the funny names in Ulysses Chapter 12! (Cyclops)

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Look for your Ulysses songs in this Spotify playlist

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Not recommended until after we finish reading!

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Not recommended until after we finish reading!

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Here's the movie I was talking about but I would NOT recommend it until after we finish. Learning how to destroy a great work of art by film translation would be an interesting exercise.

Oh,well.

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Decoding Dedalus: Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. — Blooms & Barnacles

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“Stephen disdains the subtle resuscitation of the Victorian bardolatry in the Revival’s aspiration to model the creation of Irish national culture on the use of Shakespeare for British national consolidation. Both efforts, to him, are grounded in the almost religious glorification of the poet.” - Ir

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The chattering masses these days are always on about the demise of publishing, by which they mean the vast ramshackle apparatus that churns out hundreds of thousands of inexpensive titles each year, many of which will see the light of fewer than a hundred pairs of eyes. Focussing on the macro is often depressing, any way you approach it: it's sad that the industry is shrinking, because casting a wide net perhaps ensures that the best fish are caught; but casting a wide net also means that a prize catch might not be properly fileted (to take the metaphor a bit too far). If you spend much time, as I do, talking with writers of books that have been published, you will soon acquire the ability, during a conversation about their experience, to predict what they are going to say, even to have their side of the conversation for them. "I had to do my own copy-editing," "I wanted a different title," "I hate the cover art," "It took three years to get my book out." Et cetera. On the other hand, some of the most brilliant people I know are book editors, who work quite literally day and night on behalf of their authors. They have, of course, their own set of complaints.

But that, as I say, is literary suffering writ large. I find it much easier to comprehend and be inspired by suffering on a case-by-case basis. Every Carver needs his Lish, every Lish needs his Carver, and every thinking person (myself and the readers of this blog included) needs to be reminded that great books are often the result of encounters between individuals-sometimes within a larger institutional framework, but sometimes not, meaning that they will continue to occur so long as there are writers and readers, however small the "industry" becomes. To that end, I'm launching a new category on the blog which will present harrowing but touching stories of great literary partnerships, and if you have any that are particularly meaningful to you, please feel free to e-mail me.

First up, Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, as told by Janet Flanner, a.k.a. Genêt, who wrote the Letter from Paris for this magazine from 1925 to 1975. Recently, I picked up a copy of Flanner's " Paris Was Yesterday." In her introduction to the 1972 edition, Flanner describes the process by which "Ulysses," snippets of which had been available to the expat community that frequented Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, leading up to its publication in toto in 1922, was brought about:

Over the years, Ulysses, though read only in its early fractions, had established itself as part of our literary life to come, when and if eventually completed and published. Thus long before our eyes had ever seen Sylvia Beach's entire printed text in Paris and before our hands had ever lifted the full weight of its 730 pages, Joyce's Ulysses had become part of the library of our minds. As we learned by listening to and watching Sylvia in her bookshop, to accomplish her publishing feat she became Joyce's secretary, editor, impresario, and banker, and had to hire outsiders to run her shop. She organized international and local subscription lists for the book to help finance its printing. After typesetting had begun at Dijon, in a kind of postscript ecstasy of creation, Joyce scribbled some ninety thousand words more on the costly, repeatedly reset proofs, making a four-hundred-thousand word volume, of which Sylvia managed to have two copies printed for his birthday on February 2, 1922-one for him, one for her.

Soon, Joyce was living the lush life, but not, however, with poor, long-suffering Sylvia. Flanner goes on:

Ulysses was the paying investment of his lifetime after years of penury, Sylvia said, while hardly acknowledging the fact that the publishing costs almost wiped out her Shakespeare and Company. The peak of his prosperity came in 1932 with the news of his sale of the book to Random House in New York for a forty-five-thousand-dollar advance, which, she confessed, he failed to announce to her and of which, as was later known, he never even offered her a penny. "I understood from the first that, working with or for Mr. Joyce, the pleasure was mine-an infinite pleasure: the profits were for him."

Further reading: " The Letters of Sylvia Beach," edited by Keri Walsh, due out next month.

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Books and Their Makers: Sylvia Beach and James Joyce

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The chattering masses these days are always on about the demise of publishing, by which they mean the vast ramshackle apparatus that churns out hundreds of...

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from Nancy!

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The chattering masses these days are always on about the demise of publishing, by which they mean the vast ramshackle apparatus that churns out hundreds of thousands of inexpensive titles each year, many of which will see the light of fewer than a hundred pairs of eyes. Focussing on the macro is often depressing, any way you approach it: it's sad that the industry is shrinking, because casting a wide net perhaps ensures that the best fish are caught; but casting a wide net also means that a prize catch might not be properly fileted (to take the metaphor a bit too far). If you spend much time, as I do, talking with writers of books that have been published, you will soon acquire the ability, during a conversation about their experience, to predict what they are going to say, even to have their side of the conversation for them. "I had to do my own copy-editing," "I wanted a different title," "I hate the cover art," "It took three years to get my book out." Et cetera. On the other hand, some of the most brilliant people I know are book editors, who work quite literally day and night on behalf of their authors. They have, of course, their own set of complaints.

But that, as I say, is literary suffering writ large. I find it much easier to comprehend and be inspired by suffering on a case-by-case basis. Every Carver needs his Lish, every Lish needs his Carver, and every thinking person (myself and the readers of this blog included) needs to be reminded that great books are often the result of encounters between individuals-sometimes within a larger institutional framework, but sometimes not, meaning that they will continue to occur so long as there are writers and readers, however small the "industry" becomes. To that end, I'm launching a new category on the blog which will present harrowing but touching stories of great literary partnerships, and if you have any that are particularly meaningful to you, please feel free to e-mail me.

First up, Sylvia Beach and James Joyce, as told by Janet Flanner, a.k.a. Genêt, who wrote the Letter from Paris for this magazine from 1925 to 1975. Recently, I picked up a copy of Flanner's " Paris Was Yesterday." In her introduction to the 1972 edition, Flanner describes the process by which "Ulysses," snippets of which had been available to the expat community that frequented Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, leading up to its publication in toto in 1922, was brought about:

Over the years, Ulysses, though read only in its early fractions, had established itself as part of our literary life to come, when and if eventually completed and published. Thus long before our eyes had ever seen Sylvia Beach's entire printed text in Paris and before our hands had ever lifted the full weight of its 730 pages, Joyce's Ulysses had become part of the library of our minds. As we learned by listening to and watching Sylvia in her bookshop, to accomplish her publishing feat she became Joyce's secretary, editor, impresario, and banker, and had to hire outsiders to run her shop. She organized international and local subscription lists for the book to help finance its printing. After typesetting had begun at Dijon, in a kind of postscript ecstasy of creation, Joyce scribbled some ninety thousand words more on the costly, repeatedly reset proofs, making a four-hundred-thousand word volume, of which Sylvia managed to have two copies printed for his birthday on February 2, 1922-one for him, one for her.

Soon, Joyce was living the lush life, but not, however, with poor, long-suffering Sylvia. Flanner goes on:

Ulysses was the paying investment of his lifetime after years of penury, Sylvia said, while hardly acknowledging the fact that the publishing costs almost wiped out her Shakespeare and Company. The peak of his prosperity came in 1932 with the news of his sale of the book to Random House in New York for a forty-five-thousand-dollar advance, which, she confessed, he failed to announce to her and of which, as was later known, he never even offered her a penny. "I understood from the first that, working with or for Mr. Joyce, the pleasure was mine-an infinite pleasure: the profits were for him."

Further reading: " The Letters of Sylvia Beach," edited by Keri Walsh, due out next month.

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Books and Their Makers: Sylvia Beach and James Joyce

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The chattering masses these days are always on about the demise of publishing, by which they mean the vast ramshackle apparatus that churns out hundreds of...

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I've been following this fellow's podcast for his literary content some time as a paid subscriber. I think his lectures are quite good. He says the paywall is down for the first episode of his Ulysses series (it covers the first few chapters but includes a good introduction). give it a listen!

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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture, free in its entirety, is the third in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. Its topic is the first three chapters of Joyce's Ulysses: "Telemachus," "Nestor," and "Proteus." I first make some general remarks about the novel's context, its structure and form, and its textual history. I also discuss the nature of the book's notorious difficulty. I summarize the first three chapters for first-time readers and then closely examine select passages. Themes raised in "Telemachus" include Stephen's mourning for his mother and search for paternity, his sense of himself as a servant to three masters (the British Empire, the Catholic Church, and Irish nationalism), and his complex revision of Irish nationalist myth in the figure of the Shan Van Vocht; I also consider the formal interplay between stream-of-consciousness and more conventional narrative prose. In "Nestor" I dwell on history as nightmare and the affinity Stephen perceives between the Irish and the Jews as a usurped and oppressed people. In "Proteus," with its much more thoroughgoing stream-of-consciousness narration, I consider the war in Stephen's mind between Plato and Aristotle, idealism and empiricism, Romanticism and realism, and their synthesis in the very form of this novel; I further investigate Stephen's relations-filial, sexual, and amicable-with men and women; and I pause to remark on the unparalleled beauty and significance of Joyce's language. This episode is the only free one in the Joyce sequence. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!-and please offer a paid subscription so you don't miss the rest of this summer's tour through the most consequential novel of the 20th century, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, a forthcoming sequence on Middlemarch, and the fall focus on American literature, including Moby-Dick. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:

James Joyce's Ulysses (1): Signatures of All Things I Am Here to Read

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THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: James Joyce's Ulysses (1)

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signatures of all things I am here to read

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The Value of Not Understanding Everything: Grace Paley’s Advice to Aspiring Writers

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“Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious.”

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Gracw Paley - The Art of Fiction No. 131

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From the Morgan Library….

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"The important thing is not what we write, but how we write . . . the modern writer must be an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared to founder in his effort. . . . In other words we must write dangerously." -James Joyce, from Arthur Power's
Conversations with James Joyce

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One Hundred Years of James Joyce's Ulysses

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Browse works in the exhibition and listen to the audio guide.

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There are a ton of podcasts that cover Joyce. Here is a goodie:

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episode 0 - introduction to joyce's ulysses

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‎Frank Delaney's Re: Joyce: Episode 0 - Introduction to Joyce's Ulysses on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show Frank Delaney's Re: Joyce, Ep Episode 0 - Introduction to Joyce's Ulysses - Jun 14, 2010

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When photography arrived in the world, or so I've heard, painting had to reconsider itself. "What can I do that photography can't?" painting asked itself, in its alarmed French accent. "How may I yet be essential?"

The prime quality of literary prose-that is, the thing it does better than any other form (movies, songs, sculpture, tweets, television, you name it)-is voice. A great writer mimicking, on the page, the dynamic energy of human thought is about as close as we can get to modelling pure empathy.

Grace Paley is one of the great writers of voice of the last century. There's an experience one has reading a stylist like her that has to do with how rich in truth the phrase-or-sentence-level bursts are and how quickly they follow upon one another. An image or phrase finds you, pleases you with its wit or vividness, shoehorns open your evolving vision of the fictive world, and before that change gets fully processed, here comes another. You find yourself having trouble believing this much wit is washing over you. A world is appearing before you that is richer and stranger than you could possibly have imagined, and that world gains rooms and vistas and complications with every phrase. What you are experiencing is intimate contact with an extraordinary intelligence, which causes the pleasant sensation of one's personality receding and being replaced by the writer's consciousness.

Paley's approach is to make a dazzling verbal surface that doesn't so much linearly represent the world as remind us of its dazzle. Mere straightforward representation is not her game. In fact, she seems to say, the world has no need to be represented: there it is, all around us, all the time. What it needs is to be loved better. Or maybe: what we need is to be reminded to love it, and to be shown how, because sometimes, busy as we get trying to stay alive, loving the world slips our mind.

I'd always thought of Paley as a realist, but immersing myself again in her work, I find that she is actually a thrilling post-modernist, in cahoots with her pal Donald Barthelme to remind us that, yes, there certainly is a World, and there is the Word with which to describe it, and normally World and Word seem like two separate things, but with sufficient authorial attention, World and Word can be made to pop back into their proper relation, which is: unity.

What I mean by this is that, as you read a Paley story, you will find that it is, yes, set in our world (New York City, most often), and that, O.K., it seems concerned with normal-enough things (love, divorce, politics, a day at the park), but then you will start to notice that the language is . . . uncommon. Not quite of this world.

Here is a character in "An Interest in Life," speaking (at a normal-enough kitchen table) of his relation to the Church: "You know . . . we iconoclasts . . . we freethinkers . . . we latter-day Masons . . . we idealists . . . we dreamers . . . we are never far from our nervous old mother, the Church. She is never far from us . . . Wherever we are, we can hear, no matter how faint, her hourly bells, tolling the countryside, reverberating in the cities, bringing in our civilized minds the passionate deed of Mary. Every hour on the hour we are startled with remembrance of what was done for us. FOR US."

Not your normal post-breakfast speech.

Well, yes and no.

Like her hero Isaac Babel, the great Russian writer, Paley understood that just because such language doesn't normally get spoken aloud in the so-called real world, that does not make it unreal, or contrived. On the contrary: language like this is the real language going on in the head of man all the time, whether he can articulate it or not. I find a Shakespearean quality in Paley; the people are very real there on the stage, in their faded coats and crooked hair-bows and so on, but their talking is coming from a higher realm, and it has been elevated like that in order to parse and contemplate the big questions with maximal efficiency.

But all of this is done with a wondrous ear and a love for the vernacular. Have we had another American writer better at celebrating the poetry in which we Americans think, and into which we sometimes erupt? "You see I can crack a little joke because look at this pleasure," for example. Or: "No reason to worry about me, I got a lot of irons in the fire. I get advanced all the time, matter of fact."

Another writer might say, of a group of teachers just pre-Christmas, "They, each of them, were remembering some happy incident from their own childhood holidays, and this made them happy." (Very nice.) Paley says, "They teachers became happier and happier. Their heads were ringing like the bells of childhood." (Boom.) Instead of simply knowing that the teachers were happy pre-Christmas, we are, for that split second, happy teachers, pre-Christmas. (We smell the pine from the crookedly hanging wreath near the bulletin board that will be brown by the time school resumes, in January.) Another writer might have a character tell her mother to keep her opinions about men to herself; Paley has the narrator of "A Woman, Young and Old" advise dear mother to "keep your taste in your own hatch." Which of us, trying to communicate to our sister that we feel she somewhat underestimates the extent of our worldliness, would think to tell her, as Aunt Rose does in "Goodbye and Good Luck," that our "heart is a regular college of feelings and there is such information between my corset and me that (your) whole married life is a kindergarten." Well, take that, sister.

"You've used me in a bad way. That's not cool. That smells under heaven," Dennis the cab-driver/lover/songwriter says, par crapamundo, in "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute."

Or how about this, from "Ruthy and Edie"? "If you said the word 'city' to Edie, or even the cool adjective 'municipal,' specific children usually sitting at the back of the room appeared before her eyes and refused to answer when she called on them."

This is what I mean by the unity of Word and World: something about the arrangement of the words, read in the context of the story, will not (will no longer) let us experience these sentences as mere words on a page. The words sort of recede as you read them, or, maybe, our attention diverts from their wordness, to the "image" that appears in our head (although "image" is not quite right; it is something else going on up there), and suddenly-are we reading, or living "there" in that fictive moment?

Yes.

All these agitated manic New York voices explaining themselves! You feel the stress and pace and wild aspirations of the city as it was. And is. The city is the energy coming off a million hustling souls who have both forgotten they will die soon and are very actively feeling that, ah God, they most definitely will. So what do they do? They talk. They protest, explain, beg to differ. In Paley you hear America singing, yes, but also: belly-aching, kvetching, teasing, advocating, disowning, politicizing, explaining the states of their bodies, assessing friends, lovers, and their children with both clinical distance and aching love, sometimes in the same sentence. When I think to myself, "What was the world of American adults like, back before I was one, in the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies?" my mind turns to Paley's stories. All those desirous, active souls, with one foot in hippiedom/free love (singing crazy songs by bands named the Lepers-formerly the Split Atom, possibly soon WinterMoss), and the other in the Depression, dusty old progressive dreams in their heads (of Guthrie, of the Wobblies), so alive with the tremendous energy that generation expended to make things better ("the vigiling fasting praying in or out / of jail their lightheartedness which floated / about the year's despair"). However, these firebrands were sometimes depressingly human in their desire to wring the most out of life and one another. And now those people are old, going or gone. Paley's stories remind us that our present vitality-our sense of being the first humans ever, and permanent-will, too, someday seem "historical," and will have passed. But, in her particular, larger-than-life way, she also makes these people live forever: particularized receptacles of the eternal.

Any object, any human gesture, contains an infinity of language with which it might be described. But through habituation, or paucity of talent, or lack of originality, most of us, writing, reach for the most workaday speech-tools, and in this way the world is made dull. Here comes Paley: seemingly incapable of a banal sentence, a loose observation, or a distracted fictive moment.

Paley is, for me, a kind of secular saint. What is a saint? Someone particularly attentive to things as they are, and extraordinarily accepting of them. Paley honors every person and thing she creates by presenting it at its best, or at least its liveliest-which may be the same thing.

This quality of simple, accepting, energetic seeing makes Paley's world feel particularly egalitarian. I think of the family, for example, in "A Woman, Young and Old." They seem, well, working-class (in the general mayhem of their lives, and the way their collective eye keeps sliding over to questions of livelihood), but because the Paley-narrator does not hang that sign around their necks, the world they live in seems immense and mutable. Who are these people, and of what social class? Paley won't say, exactly. That would be rude. Also, not interesting. And reductive, and freedom-decreasing. Rather, she just shows them acting and talking and choosing happily enough within their limitations. They have autonomy, agency, desire, a right to their own feelings and flavor of understanding. "Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life," she wrote, in "A Conversation with My Father." This results in a fresh angle on things like "gender" or "class"-to the point of destabilizing them and giving the people trapped inside these constructs liberty, and a voice. In this sense, Paley is a Whitmanesque writer: she loves what she sees, just as it is, and is in favor of it being even more itself. How do we know she loves it? By how precisely she describes it. ("I am right next to the pickle barrel. My pinky is making tiny whirlpools in the brine.") Also, there is an extraordinary quality of freedom in these narratives. Her people do not "merely" behave like people in stories, but they also do not behave "merely" like people in the real world-they behave, satisfyingly, like people in a spectacularly mindful artistic purification of the real. An average writer writes toward a familiar vision, be it shocking or comforting; a genius like Paley creates an entirely new world by leaping from stone to stone, these "stones" being distinct, vivid, fictive moments-vivid in language, vivid in import. The route is not, it seems, planned or pre-vetted, but is continuously creating itself by asking the question, "Where is the life here?" which she answers with an essential sub-question, "Where does the language come most alive?" The resulting structure has the effect of startling and refreshing us; or, maybe, refreshing us via startling: the freshness of the world mimicked in the freshness of the shape of the story, the reader reminded of her susceptibility to, and yearning for, freshness.

All of Paley's work is marked by heart, precision, and concern for others, and surges with real, messy life, and the way life, lived, actually makes us feel: outgunned, befriended, short on time, long on regret, so happy we can't stand it, so in love we become fools. Moments in her stories, often her endings, cause me real sorrow, and, perhaps acclimated to the contemporary tendency toward compensatory lyrical updraft, I feel myself mentally looking over at the author, for, maybe a conciliatory little suggestion that all will be well? But no. She just shrugs. "It's like that sometimes," she says. I love her for this. She's not big on bromides. Her vision of things is complex, by which I mean: she knows that a person can feel irritated and happy at once; despairing and lucky; pleased to be a mother and sick to the core of being a mother. And she is O.K. with all of that.

Her stories, like all great stories, lead us into that uncomfortable holy of holies: ambiguity. How are we to feel, ultimately, about the intermittently racist Iz of "Zagrowsky Tells"? Or the fourteen-year-old who beds a soldier in "A Woman Young and Old," and the soldier who beds her right back? About all of these callow, absent husbands, who show up late and immediately start advising? Well, we feel fully about them, that's for sure. We walk away from her stories feeling, not, "Oh, he got his, or will," but, rather, "Yes, that's how it is in this world." We see them through the lens of her total acceptance of, and fascination with, them.

I love, too, her extraordinary happy frankness in all things; that is, her courage. She is unafraid, for example, to cry fraud re: that particular flavor of grinding American optimism. We Americans are addicted to the happy lie and to the associated notion that to critique something-to call it what it is-is a form of negativity; a defeatist buzzkill. Paley (happily, fearlessly) doesn't buy it. A character tells a dying friend, in "Living," that, well, "Life isn't all that great . . . We've had nothing but crummy days and crummy guys and broke all the time and cockroaches and nothing to do on Sunday but take the kids to Central Park and row on that lousy lake"-and we have to agree with her. "I want to see it all," the dying friend replies, and we agree with her, too. Paley, like her spiritual predecessor Chekhov, likes to have it both ways.

"Art does not have to solve problems," Chekhov said. "It just has to formulate them correctly."

"I'm artistic," a character says in "A Woman Young and Old," "and I sometimes hold two views at once."

Grace Paley has been gone for ten years now. What does a writer leave behind? Scale models of a way of seeing and thinking. Those of us still down here are always in need of these models, especially in times of trouble. (And all times are times of trouble.) We have, most of us, yet to find a way of seeing and thinking that works -that allows us to live comfortably and positively in all of this beautiful mess-but our writers, our dear passed writers, have put forth some pretty good models, so that we might suffer less, or at least suffer within some beautiful context. Faith, in the story "Friends," says something about the act of tutoring children that is also true of the conversation between reader and writer: "Though the world cannot be changed by talking to one child at a time," she says, "it may at least be known." A writer as good as Paley helps us (at least) know our world by modelling a certain stance toward it that is so pure and distinctive that it makes us go back into the world and take a harder, fonder look at it.

Paley's model advises us to suffer less by loving more-love the world more, and each other more-and then she gives us a specific way to love more: see better. If you only really see this world, you will think better of it, she seems to say. And then she gives us a way to see better: let language sing, sing precisely, and let it off the tether of the mundane, and watch the wonderful truth it knows how to make.

To see better means: more joy, less judgment. There is a roof on our language that holds down our love. What has put that roof there? Our natural dullness, exacerbated by that grinding daily need to survive. A writer like Paley comes along and brightens language up again, takes it aside and gives it a pep talk, sends it back renewed, so it can do its job, which is to wake us up.
This essay was drawn from the introduction to "A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry," which is out in April from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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The writer's literary approach is to make a dazzling verbal surface that doesn't so much linearly represent the world as remind us of its dazzle.

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This schema for the novel Ulysses was produced by its author, James Joyce, in November 1921 in order to help his friend, Valery Larbaud, prepare a public lecture on the novel, which Joyce was still writing at the time. The lecture took place on 7 December 1921 at the Maison des Amis des Livres bookshop and lending library, owned and run by Adrienne Monnier. The schema was shown to intimates of Joyce during the 1920s and was eventually published by Stuart Gilbert in 1930 in his book, James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Study. (from Wikipedia)

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This was in the copy of Gracey Paley's Collected Stories I borrowed from the Cornwall Library! -Caitlin Lynch

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Here's Grace Paley reading her some of her stories 

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Here's Grace Paley reading her some of her stories 

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Enjoy! - Jenny

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Short story author Grace Paley reads and answers questions

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‎Writers and Company: Martin Amis on The Zone of Interest and Primo Levi’s unshakeable influence on Apple Podcasts

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Here is an amazing convo about Primo Levi- sadie

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‎Writers and Company: Martin Amis on The Zone of Interest and Primo Levi’s unshakeable influence on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show Writers and Company, Ep Martin Amis on The Zone of Interest and Primo Levi’s unshakeable influence - Mar 2, 2024

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BBC Radio 4 Dramatization of The Periodic Table

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BBC Radio 4 Dramatization of The Periodic Table

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Here is a radio play version of the book which was made in 2016! (Sadie)

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Scientist, resistance fighter and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi was one of Italy's greatest writers and an internationally renowned chronicler of human nature. In his masterpiece The Periodic Table, he charts his incredible life story through the medium of chemistry, using the titular list of elements - the building blocks of everything - as a prism to explore his experiences and search his soul.

In this superlative BBC adaptation, all 21 of the peerless stories in Levi's memoir are incorporated into 11 radio episodes, comprising both compelling dramatisations (starring Henry Goodman as the older Primo and Akbar Kurtha as his younger self) and eloquent readings by Paul Copley, Ben Crowe, Evie Killip and Henry Goodman. The chapters are preceded by a short introductory feature by Janet Suzman, discussing Levi's life and writing and featuring archive interviews with Levi himself.

We hear of Levi's student days in Fascist Italy, his battles as a partisan, his imprisonment in Auschwitz, his subsequent career as a professional chemist and his imagined meeting with his Piedmontese ancestors - as well as his job in a paint factory in the 1960s and an unsettling encounter with his past. Alongside these autobiographical meditations are fabulous fictional tales of a European prospector, a little girl enchanted by white paint, an 1820s captain living on a remote island with strange chemical properties and the incredible, centuries-long journey of a single carbon atom....

Named 'the best science book ever' by the Royal Institution of Great Britain, this astonishing compilation fuses autobiography and fantasy, science and emotion, to extraordinary effect. Vivid, powerful and breathtaking, it will surprise, amuse and move you, lingering in your imagination and changing the way you look at the world.

Written by Primo Levi

Dramatised by Graham White from the translation by Raymond Rosenthal

Introduced by Janet Suzman

Produced and directed by Emma Harding and Marc Beeby
Vanadium, Part 1
Older Primo - Henry Goodman

Cometto - John Rowe

Dr Muller - Erich Redman

Younger Primo - Akbar Kurtha

Lucia - Juliet Aubrey

Polish overseer - Chris Pavlo
Argon
Older Primo - Henry Goodman

Cesare - John Rowe

Jacob - David Horovitch

Moses - David Hounslow

Samuel - Sam Dale

Abigail - Jessica Turner

Zepora - Debra Baker
Sulphur
Read by Ben Crowe
Titanium
Read by Evie Killip
Lead
Read by Paul Copley
Mercury
Abrahams - Paul Hilton

Maggie - Amelia Lowdell

Hendrik - Nicholas Murchie

Willem - Leo Wan

Andrea - Chris Pavlo

Gaetano - George Watkins

Burton - Richard Pepple

Rebecca - Debra Baker

Woman - Katie Redford
Iron
Younger Primo - Akbar Kurtha

Older Primo - Henry Goodman

Enrico/Marchetti - Caolan McCarthy

Rina - Debra Baker

Lazzari - Sam Dale

Luca - Leo Wan

Giulia - Rebecca Hamilton

Caselli - Stephen Critchlow

Bettega - George Watkins

Rita - Katie Redford

Sandro - Andrew Rothney

Dallaporta - Richard Pepple

Antaeus - David Hounslow

Alida - Amelia Lowdell
Gold
Older Primo - Henry Goodman

Younger Primo - Akbar Kurtha

Vanda - Rebecca Hamilton

Silvio - Leo Wan

Lina - Evie Killip

Aldo - George Watkins

Militiaman 1/Prisoner - David Hounslow

Militiaman 2 - Caolan McCarthy

Fossa - Stephen Critchlow

Cagni - Nicholas Murchie
Cerium
Older Primo - Henry Goodman

Younger Primo - Akbar Kurtha

Alberto - Leo Wan

Guard - Erich Redman

Prisoner 1- David Hounslow

Prisoner 2 - Sam Dale
Arsenic and Silver
Older Primo - Henry Goodman

Younger Primo - Akbar Kurtha

Versino - Jessica Turner

Lentini - Nicholas Murchie

Bruni - David Horovitch

Cometto - John Rowe

Lucia - Juliet Aubrey

Gallery director/Emilio's father - Stephen Critchlow

Emilio - Caolan McCarthy

Farmer - David Hounslow

Customer - Ben Crowe

Bonino - Sam Dale

Gina - Rebecca Hamilton
Vanadium, Part 2
Older Primo - Henry Goodman

Younger Primo - Akbar Kurtha

Cometto - John Rowe

Dr Muller - Erich Redman

Lucia - Juliet Aubrey

Polish overseer - Chris Pavlo

Postwoman - Debra Baker
Carbon
Read by Henry Goodman

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Check out this great listen on Audible.com. Scientist, resistance fighter and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi was one of Italy's greatest writers and an internationally renowned chronicler of human nature. In his masterpiece The Periodic Table, he charts his incredible life story through the medium ...

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Online version of The Periodic Table (great for searching for something specific)

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Online version of The Periodic Table (great for searching for something specific)

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suggested by MJ! Posted here by Sadie

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THE PERIODIC TABLE - PRIMO LEVI : PRIMO LEVI : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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THE PERIODIC TABLE, PRIMO LEVI, NOVEL, HOLOCAUST

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This article discusses the concept of impurity in Levi's work as well as the two italicized fictional pieces in the middle of TPT ("Lead" and "Mercury")

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This article discusses the concept of impurity in Levi's work as well as the two italicized fictional pieces in the middle of TPT ("Lead" and "Mercury")

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An interesting discussion of whether Levi committed suicide...

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An interesting discussion of whether Levi committed suicide...

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Primo Levi’s Last Moments - Boston Review

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On that tragic Saturday, only his body was smashed.

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Well: Reading aloud, red wine’s changing reputation and the Presidential Fitness Test

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A few years ago, my youngest sister, Heather, had a monthlong stretch of migraines. She usually managed to get through her day as a teacher, but at night, she would retreat to a dark room so the light wouldn’t worsen her headache. To distract her from the anxiety and pain, I offered to read aloud to her on speakerphone while she closed her eyes.

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I'm not flowing with the group because it's early on my coast and I really treasure my quiet mornings. But wanted to point out this series and especially this discussion of LeGuin's "carrier bag" theory, which I've mentioned (too often perhaps) finding impactful. Of course y'all are probably onto the "crafting with ursula series" but just thought in case . . :) -- Cliff

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Today's conversation is about one of Ursula K. Le Guin's most iconic and influential essays: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, an essay that deserves an entire episode to itself. And who better to discuss it than Lidia Yuknavitch, whose latest novel Thrust follows a character who herself is a "carrier." Because this essay has influenced not only an incredible number of writers but anthropologists, visual artists, filmmakers, performance artists, scholars, and musicians as well, we weave in the voices of others, across disciplines, as we talk about and unpack this work of Le Guin's. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction interrogates questions of labor and economy, and interrogates gender in relation to inherited story forms, and looks at the power of story, both to tell and to silence. Le Guin's essay is her way to reimagine the shape of a story, to dethrone the hero to allow many less familiar and stranger stories to find their way. And she invites us all in to figure it out with her.

If you enjoy the Crafting with Ursula series consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener-supporter. Every supporter gets a resource-rich email with each episode chock full of things referenced in the conversation and things discovered in preparing for it. But there are a ton of other goodies, from rare Le Guin collectibles to the book Ursula and I did together, Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing, and much more. You can check it all out at the show's Patreon page.

And lastly, here is today's Bookshop.

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Crafting with Ursula : Lidia Yuknavitch on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction - Tin House

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Today's conversation is about one of Ursula K. Le Guin's most iconic and influential essays: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, an essay that deserves an entire episode to itself. And who better to discuss it than Lidia Yuknavitch, whose latest novel Thrust follows a character who herself is a "carrier."

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Hilton Als on Giving James Baldwin Back His Body

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Als’s latest exhibition is an attempt to give shape to a man who is too often celebrated as a writer-prophet of racial injustice but overlooked as an artist and a human being.

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This wonderful mapsite takes you through the various locations of Giovanni's room! - Sadie

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APS Together's GR discussion, led by Caryl Phillips

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APS Together's GR discussion, led by Caryl Phillips

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Day 2

Part 1, Ch. 1, pg. 13-27 (from "Years later, when I had become a man" to "if monkeys did not-so grotesquely-resemble human beings.")

September 18, 2020 by Carl Phillips

One of the things I love about Baldwin, but especially in Giovanni's Room and Another Country, is his ability to get at how much who we are is conundrum - he makes it almost palpable. It's something he has in common with the Greek tragedians. Every Greek tragedy occurs at the intersection of what society expects of an individual and what that individual in fact desires; there can be no resolution without terrible sacrifice, which is not resolution, just an outcome...Back to Baldwin. Intimacy and distance. David - our narrator, who now has a name - wants distance from his father, but what he gets is his father's intimacy forced upon him, and it makes loving his father impossible - because being intimate allows him to see his father for what he is. Meanwhile, David fled from the intimacy he had with Joey, and it has made it impossible for him to love himself; but the more distance he puts between himself and Joey, the more he craves/is tormented by the intimacy they enjoyed.

Day 4

Part 1, Ch. 3, p. 44-61 (up to "to reach out and comfort him")

September 20, 2020 by Carl Phillips

Day 5

Finish Ch. 3 (end of Part 1), p. 61-71 (from "Our oysters came and we began to eat" to "so many desperate and drunken mornings.")

September 21, 2020 by Carl Phillips

It's a curious moment, when David decides that the people he's surrounded by - the patrons of the restaurant, Giovanni, Parisians in general - are "people I would never understand." And his impulse is to go "home," as if that could prevent him from succumbing to "shameful" behavior. Yet he knows that his situation is nothing new for him. It's a kind of spiritual lost-ness, akin to Augustine (in the Confessions) finding himself in "the region of unlikeness," where he recognizes simultaneously what he believes he should do and his equal desire/inability to do it. It's one of the few moments where, almost, I feel sorry for David.

Day 10

Part 2, finish Ch. 4, p. 136-148 (from "I got to Giovanni's room very late" to "the sash of his dressing gown.")

September 26, 2020 by Carl Phillips

When Baldwin wrote this book - and when I read it - the general thinking was binary: you were a man or a woman, you were gay or straight. It was radical when Baldwin spoke almost matter-of-factly about bisexuality in Another Country. In Giovanni's Room, that subject doesn't come up specifically, but now we learn that not only did Giovanni marry a woman and have a child with her, but he was happy (including sexually) in that life. He didn't leave because of 'discovering' his sexuality, but because of grief and a suddenly-broken faith in God. It seems that his first sex with a man is out of necessity - he needs money, clothes, a job - and then it becomes, what, habit? Does that mean Giovanni isn't gay?

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Part 1, Ch. 1, pg. 13-27 (from "Years later, when I had become a man" to "if monkeys did not-so grotesquely-resemble human beings.") September 18, 2020 by Carl Phillips One of the things I love about Baldwin, but especially in Giovanni's Room and Another Country, is his ability to get at how much who we are is conundrum - he makes it almost palpable.