Ulysses indeed!

When you go to another country you pick up a lot of the lingo; little words creep into your vocabulary. In America, I guess, it's I guess. Lots of other words too for example I never heard the word oxymoron used till I got there.

In Ireland there is a phrase “It's allowed.” You might say to someone “I'm going to the pub tomorrow” and they'll say “it's allowed.”

I remember years ago meeting my cousins in Sussex and every time I said I wanted to do something they would say “It's not allowed.”

One word, or expression I have picked up here since our return is the word indeed. “Is that your car?”

“Indeed!”

“Do you plan to go to work tomorrow?”

“Indeed.”

Now why is that?

Before we went away people were saying basically. Basically this and basically that. In fact it got to be a terrible habit to be honest – oh that's another one to be honest; know what I mean?

Of course when I write I try not to use any of these phrases unless it's in dialogue and even then it can be a bore – can you understand why, for instance, the Americans spell that without an 'e' on the end?

One word I try to avoid in my writing is suddenly. I don't know why but it just doesn't mean anything and that's another funny word – just. Paul McCartney said that if there was one thing he learned from John Lennon it was to never to use the word just.

It's true that some words are not poetic.

The other thing I have noticed is that most of the dialogue on British TV is in iambic pentameter – for example that last line: it's true that some words are not poetic.

So when you read Shakespeare don't be put off by the iambic pentameter it's only natural speech; I nearly said it's just natural speech but I resisted the temptation.

We have recently had a tribute on the radio here to James Joyce's famous novel Ulysses. It is one of the best selling novels of the 20^th Century and the least read.

There was a piece in The Guardian about it on Friday and on Saturday the whole of Ulysses was broadcast on the radio with all the 'f' words and 'c' words. Good old BBC; anything goes.

The fact that it is the least read best seller is strange; there are a quarter of a million words in the novel so one read is no good I'm afraid; you really need a few reads. What happens in the plot is not important; it's the style – or styles.

The novel is loosely based on The Odyssey only instead of wandering around the Greek Islands, Bloom wanders around Dublin; there are no chapter titles but the episodes are well known to Joyce scholars. Joyce, himself, put lots of symbols, innuendos and hidden clues to keep college professors busy for centuries; his words, by the way.

He has used many writing styles, first person narrative and third person narrative sometimes on the same page. Betimes it's great to hear it being read out loud but lots of other times the readings are very dreary; it's supposed to be a very lively novel.

The Stephen Dedalus character on Saturday's broadcast sounded strange; when I looked him up it was played by a very good actor. In fact he was very good in the TV series Sherlock but played Stephen Dedalus the same – so maybe that's him. The same with Mark Rylance (the greatest actor in the world!!); I saw him in Los Angeles in Measure for Measure and I thought it was the greatest Shakespearian performance I had ever seen but when I saw him in Jerusalem there were elements of the Measure for Measure performance in that.

But back to Ulysses; one of the episodes of Ulysses takes place in a maternity hospital; that episode is called Oxen of the Sun and in that episode Joyce writes in forty different writing styles. He traces the English Language from it's beginnings to the present day, parodying most of the famous authors through the various periods: he starts with the Latinate prose, and then alliterative Anglo-Saxon taking in medieval prose, Elizabethan prose, the eighteenth-century style of Oliver Goldsmith and so on and as it is set in a maternity hospital the number of styles he uses is forty - for the forty weeks confinement of a pregnant woman.

It really is a joy to read, talk about and observe – maybe the word joy is short for Joyce?

So read it if you get the chance and if it doesn't go to well read it out loud even if you can't do an Irish accent.

This year marks the year when the works of James Joyce go into the public domain; the first year when his grandson Stephen Joyce doesn't have his hands on them. There will be a lot of squabbling and fighting as to who owns what but at least we can see how the great man formulated his choice of words.

“The National Library of Ireland is marking the occasion by launching free online high-resolution versions of a huge range of Joyce's manuscripts, from letters and notebooks to a draft of Ulysses revealing Joyce's first thoughts about the novel's famous ending.

In the published version of the novel Molly's soliloquy ends the book: "yes I said yes I will Yes". But Joyce originally wrote "would" rather than "will".

In 2004 The Guardian asked readers to come up with a 'modern' Molly and they published what I wrote – and it's still on their web site with more punctuation than I have put in here.

No no no here he is coming in now expecting me to be awake and waiting for him at this hour of the morning after he watched the bleedin football at some bleedin kip it wasn't enough to watch Greece he had to watch the Russians as well well im not going to be ready for him why does he always come home excited after watching bleedin football and drinking the night away with his pals and their women why amnt i allowed to go but not all of his pals were with him tonight he was one pal short one pal that looked for a different kind of sport tonight than the bleedin euro championships that theyre all glued to like bluebottles on a butchers bench its not as if Ireland is in it so why would they want to watch the real sport took place in here tonight and i can still smell his manliness on my sheets can still feel his thrust and strength in me thats left me here flat and relaxed and satisfied and not ready for the gobshite that i can now hear trying to mount the bleedin stairs he will know as soon as he gets in that that will be the only thing he will be mounting tonight here he is now through the door as if it was a hole him bouncing of each side of it come in you shite the bed is here but i am not oh jasus feel him setting his heavy arse onto the side of the bed which would wake me if i wasnt already awake now he cant untie his bleedin laces so i have to pretend to be asleep a bit longer as im not having him on top of me tonight theyre off thanks be to God so now hell struggle with his trousers ah the shite has them off well and good and look i can see a stain on his knicks hes been using that somewhere today more than likely his favourite self inflicted right hand girl friend that he always uses id give everything to know who he fantasises about not me im sure but i dont need him now now that i have had his pal inside my bed and inside me and giving me the satisfaction that this galloot never gave me with his bleedin football and horses and jawing in Maddigans with his cronies whilst im here saying yes to your man and yes if he wants to come again and yes if he wants me to go anywhere but this gobshite has shot his bolt with me so when comes again for me he can use his favourite self inflicted right hand girlfriend again as he has used today and he can watch the football and the like and the next time he comes at me and looks at me with those eyes he will see in my eyes no and he will ask me again and i will say no i will say no he will not have my mountain flower and no i will not put my arms around him again and i wont draw him down to me again and he will never feel my breasts again and he will never smell my perfume again and i dont care how much he gets excited and pants or how mad he goes i will say no and will say no i will No.
Chris Sullivan

Indeed!!

Read my novel, if you get the chance; it's called Alfredo Hunter: the Man With the Pen.

It has a connection to James Joyce and it's on Amazon.

audio Books, James Joyce and Mark Zuckerberg.

There they are above and left - James Joyce and Mark Zuckerberg - which one would you rather be?

I have always liked to write and this little outlet allows me to vent my avocation without getting into too much trouble; I am admonished now and again, mainly by my brother, for using Americanisms and American spellings but I plead not guilty; The Guitar Center is spelled like that because it is a company who spell it that way. I know he didn't pull me up on that one but he has on others in the past.

So what am I on about here? Well nothing to do with the above; I was thinking that apart from writing I like reading; my last novel is on all the various media available to it: audio book, electronic book and paperback. I suppose it could have been in hard back but I didn't get that kind of a deal.

My latest is up on Amazon's Kindle and this week I am starting to record the audio version and I hope that Audible take it.

The first one sold better as an electronic book than anything else with a few selling on Smashwords but the majority to Kindle. Personally I haven't tried any of the electronic books as a reader but I have tried audio books.

Audio books are an acquired taste; if you like the book at bedtime on Radio 4 in the UK the audio book is for you. Personally, when I read, I like to see the punctuation and it's hard to see that when someone is reading it to you. The great thing about reading James Joyce is that you can see where genius Jim puts his semi-colons, his full colons and when he uses commas for parenthesis. In Ulysses, for example, he doesn't use inverted commas for speech; he uses a dash and then a comma before 'he said' for example and it's interesting to see where he puts an exclamation mark.

So it's hard, sometimes, to know whether the book has been written well or not when you are listening to a reader. So I tend to listen to biographies and read the novels.

Sometimes you only want information from books and I have been reading the hard back version of The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn and to be honest I don't care how well it was written. It was well written, by the way, but it is a heavy book and I don't mean the subject; it must weigh a good few pounds from its 800 pages so I am having a break from it and reading Dubliners again by James Joyce.

In Dubliners he used inverted commas for speech (quotation marks in American) and it's very hard to believe why it wasn't published in Ireland; it was turned down by George Roberts of the publishers Maunsel – Joyce certainly had a go at him in Gas From a Burner his famous poem. He wasn't a great poet, even though some of his poetry is beautiful, but he certainly gets to the point in the aforementioned poem.

George Roberts was a red headed Scot from Ulster; Joyce mentions a Belfast man in one of the stories in a derogatory manner so you never know; that might have been the reason.

Another line in the poem:

I printed the great John Milicent Synge
Who soars above on an angel's wing
In the playboy shift that he pinched as swag
From Maunsel's manager's travelling-bag.

Well I don't know what he knew about John Millington Synge but he is saying something about him there; suggesting he is effeminate?

Synge's most famous play was The Playboy of the Western World and when the word shift was used in it, there was a riot at the Abbey Theatre. Shift!!!! What would they say if they used the language they use these days?

Of course they would accept it - eventually.

But I didn't start to write this to write about Jimmy Joyce; I just kind of drifted into it; I wanted to say I like reading and writing and also talking to people and I like to talk as opposed to texting – there we are I knew it; no such word! The same as texted.

I suppose there will be one day but I should have said I like talking as opposed to sending texts!

Yesterday Facebook added something else. A way to keep the history of all your e-mails in the same place – at your facebook page, of course.

In ten years time all the history of every e-mail you have ever sent will be there with the guy who owns facebook; Mark Zuckerberg.

It will be the most comprehensive list of information ever and facebook, in competition with Google, are trying to get it all into another place - your mobile phone; and I am wondering . . . where is it going to end?

The more sophisticated it all gets the less exciting I am about it; I check my e-mails on my computer when I log on; I don't want Instant Messenger, I don't want a text to let me know when I get an e-mail and I don't really want my friends and relations to know when I'm on line – am I the only one?

Here's the poem from a literal time – it has a good rhythm and Billy Walsh, by the way, was the Lord Mayor of Dublin.

Gas From a Burner
by James Joyce (1912)
Ladies and gents, you are here assembled
To hear why earth and heaven trembled
Because of the black and sinister arts
Of an Irish writer in foreign parts.

He sent me a book ten years ago.
I read it a hundred times or so,
Backwards and forwards, down and up,
Through both the ends of a telescope.

I printed it all to the very last word
But by the mercy of the Lord
The darkness of my mind was rent
And I saw the writer's foul intent.

But I owe a duty to Ireland:
I held her honour in my hand,
This lovely land that always sent
Her writers and artists to banishment
And in a spirit of Irish fun
Betrayed her own leaders, one by one.

'Twas Irish humour, wet and dry,
Flung quicklime into Parnell's eye;
'Tis Irish brains that save from doom
The leaky barge of the Bishop of Rome
For everyone knows the Pope can't belch
Without the consent of Billy Walsh.

O Ireland my first and only love
Where Christ and Caesar are hand and glove!
O lovely land where the shamrock grows!
(Allow me, ladies, to blow my nose)
To show you for strictures I don't care a button
I printed the poems of Mountainy Mutton
And a play he wrote (you've read it I'm sure)
Where they talk of 'bastard', 'bugger' and 'whore'
And a play on the Word and Holy Paul
And some woman's legs that I can't recall
Written by Moore, a genuine gent
That lives on his property's ten per cent:
I printed mystical books in dozens:
I printed the table-book of Cousins
Though (asking your pardon) as for the verse
'Twould give you a heartburn on your arse:
I printed folklore from North and South
By Gregory of the Golden Mouth:
I printed poets, sad, silly and solemn:
I printed Patrick What-do-you-Colm:
I printed the great John Milicent Synge
Who soars above on an angel's wing
In the playboy shift that he pinched as swag
From Maunsel's manager's travelling-bag.

But I draw the line at that bloody fellow
That was over here dressed in Austrian yellow,
Spouting Italian by the hour
To O'Leary Curtis and John Wyse Power
And writing of Dublin, dirty and dear,
In a manner no blackamoor printer could bear.

Shite and onions! Do you think I'll print
The name of the Wellington Monument,
Sydney Parade and Sandymount tram,
Downes's cakeshop and Williams's jam?

I'm damned if I do-- I'm damned to blazes!
Talk about Irish Names of Places!
It's a wonder to me, upon my soul,
He forgot to mention Curly's Hole.

No, ladies, my press shall have no share in
So gross a libel on Stepmother Erin.
I pity the poor-- that's why I took
A red-headed Scotchman to keep my book.

Poor sister Scotland! Her doom is fell;
She cannot find any more Stuarts to sell.
My conscience is fine as Chinese silk:
My heart is as soft as buttermilk.
Colm can tell you I made a rebate
Of one hundred pounds on the estimate
I gave him for his Irish Review.
I love my country-- by herrings I do!

I wish you could see what tears I weep
When I think of the emigrant train and ship.
That's why I publish far and wide
My quite illegible railway guide,
In the porch of my printing institute
The poor and deserving prostitute
Plays every night at catch-as-catch-can
With her tight-breeched British artilleryman
And the foreigner learns the gift of the gab
From the drunken draggletail Dublin drab.

Who was it said: Resist not evil?
I'll burn that book, so help me devil.
I'll sing a psalm as I watch it burn
And the ashes I'll keep in a one-handled urn.

I'll penance do with farts and groans
Kneeling upon my marrowbones.
This very next lent I will unbare
My penitent buttocks to the air
And sobbing beside my printing press
My awful sin I will confess.
My Irish foreman from Bannockburn
Shall dip his right hand in the urn
And sign crisscross with reverent thumb
Memento homo upon my bum.

James Joyce, Bloomsday and Shakespeare.

It's going to be Bloomsday this week – June 16th – and on Bloomsday I think I'll put up here on the blog the 'Bloomsday' episode from my novel Alfredo Hunter; the Man With the Pen.

Of course I have changed the title of my novel from The Storyteller and on Amazon.com you can see excerpts from it under the former title. In fact on Google they have the whole novel somewhere in their library of all books ever written – or whatever it's called.

Bloomsday is taken from the novel Ulysses which takes part in the day of June 16th 1904 and the leading character therein Leopold Bloom – not Leo Bloom from The Producers by the way.

James Joyce set Ulysses on June 16th 1904 because that was the day he met the love of his life Nora Barnacle; well he did not actually meet her on that day but it was the day they first walked out; it was the day she did a small sexual favour for him which might have affected his mind; he thought if she can do that for me on the first day she would do it for anybody. It wasn't necessarily true, of course – what do I know? - but it led to bouts of jealousy and anxiety from the genius Jim which would upset Nora.

They left Dublin soon after and never returned to live there again – everything he wrote about Ireland he wrote from abroad. At one time they lived in London where they married – some time during the 1930s.

There is a lot of James Joyce in my novel; number one the leading character writes a play about him, there are various references to Ulysses and the prologue is actually a pastiche of his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. That novel starts off with 'Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocaw coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy called baby tuckoo . . .' and my novel starts off with 'Once upon a time and a long time ago it was in the city of Dublin in the land of Ireland there was a man with a pen' – and then there are other phrases I use in the prologue; Joyce talks of the world being 'a great ball surrounded by clouds' and I use that phrase adding 'as the great man once said' and he also uses the phrase a 'greasy leather ball' which I also use to denote, as he did in the novel, the way some boys from the past were forced at school into sport and I remember at school trying to head that greasy leather ball they call a football.

But even though James Joyce is a subject of my novel I don't think I am influenced by him at all. I know every writer, especially the Irish ones, feels James Joyce looking over their shoulder as they write but I am more influenced by Charles Dickens, if anybody, or even William Shakespeare. Now that might sound as if I am comparing myself to Shakespeare and Dickens but nothing could be further from the truth.

I can't remember ever learning anything at school; I never did any work at school I didn't have to and the only subjects I liked had to have a story to it – like stories from the bible; the English Literature was non existent unless you want to count Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) being passed from pupil to pupil to read out loud in schoolboy monotones and turning into Seven Pillows of Sleep for me!

So I didn't do English Literature till years later after I'd read lots of books and even been to drama school – I was a mature student studying D.H. Lawrence (surprising what one letter makes), William Golding and First World War Poetry by a teacher who loved the subject.

At drama school I was reading and trying to perform Shakespeare when I hardly knew English!! Of course I was in a lot of trouble as I hadn't heard of any of the plays or even the characters and the only way I could even understand it was by sorting out his use of parenthesis and semi colons; without sorting those out I would have been up the creak without a paddle.

I eventually did Shakespeare professionally although not as much as I would have liked to; I earned a lot of money once doing a Shakespeare play for the BBC, even though it was a small part, and when I first came over here I 'workshopped' Richard III playing Richard which went very well – I guess some of the training must have gone in.

When I write I bear in mind Shakespeare's use of the English language – again I am not comparing myself to the greatest genius that has ever lived or the two greatest novelists in the English language but I would recommend anybody who wants to write to follow them as opposed to Dan Brown.

So remember on Wednesday that it is Bloomsday; there will, more than likely, be something on near you, if you look for it, and if you are in Dublin go on the walking tour if you can; go to Mulligan's Pub in Poolbeg Street and drink a pint of the best Guinness in the world and then come back and read my blog about my two leading characters celebrating Bloomsday in Los Angeles which was based on a true incident in 1995.