no he said no he won't No

an article about "Joyceans" - and the scrotum-tightening copyright
epiphany.
B.


The charge of the Bloomsday brigade
by Rosita Boland, The Irish Times June 16 2007

Stately, plump buck-naked Joyceans will have started their day today
at the Forty Foot by diving into "the snotgreen sea. The scrotum-
tightening sea." James Joyce's description of Dublin Bay from the
parapets of Sandycove's martello tower in the opening pages of Ulysses
may be famous, but it's not one that's likely to ever make it into the
copy of estate agents' ads when it comes to describing the view from
multi-million euro houses on the Sandycove seafront.


Today is Bloomsday. Again! Like Christmas, it comes around every year,
and, also like Christmas, it starts earlier every year. What used to
be a one-day event on June 16th, the anniversary of that fictional day
in 1904 when Ulysses is set, is now a weeklong shindig of walking
tours, readings, music, dressing up, theatre and consumption of offal
and Gorgonzola sandwiches. Bloomsday has become a brand, celebrated in
scores of cities around the world. As a Torontobased Joycean website
declares, "Bloomsday is a kind of literary Holy day celebrated around
the world". It can only be a matter of time before Hallmark starts
making cards to mark the occasion.


Bloomsday is synonymous with a particular kind of person, the Joycean.
The clothes maketh the Joycean man and woman. Dress code is composed
of Edwardian blazers, boaters, parasols and long dresses. Modes of
transport are eye-catching butcherboy messenger bikes and horsedrawn
carriages. Joyceans don't mind being stared at; in fact, what most
Joyceans really like is to be noticed. For instance, one would never
describe Ireland's most famous Joycean, a rotund, bearded man whose
house is on the same north Dublin street as the Joyce Centre, as
introverted.


There are a few distinctive types of Joyceans. There are the
mediafriendly academics, who are happy to be photographed looking like
extras from a period drama. Bloomsday is like a day off and a day out
for these academics: an excuse to raid the dressing-up box and act all
unconventional. It's their way of saying, we're so brainy (well, we
are Joyceans), surely we can get away with having a bit of fun in
public for one day of the year? Surely nobody will stop taking us
seriously?


Then there is the low-key Joycean, who loves the books, and knows a
lot about them, but who doesn't advertise their knowledge as if they
were wearing a billboard. These kinds of Joyceans like to make a
pilgrimage to Trieste, where Joyce lived on two occasions, and they
tend to think that these days Bloomsday is more a circus tent than a
temple of literature.


And, of course, there are the Joyceans who have never read a book of
Joyce's at all. Ulysses is often described as being at least as famous
for being unread as it is for being read, although it's a fair guess
that it's even less read by the general public than Finnegans Wake. So
there's the Joycean who only gets involved in Bloomsday because of all
the associated partying. The Joycean ligger, if you will, as typified
in 2004 when 10,000 Dubliners turned up for a free open-air Bloomsday-
themed breakfast on O'Connell Street. ON BLOOMSDAY, THE typical
Joycean engages in a full programme of rituals, of which food is a key
element. Ulysses was one of the first books to showcase what we'd now
recognise as product placements. What martinis and various brands of
vodka are to James Bond, Gorgonzola sandwiches and grilled mutton
kidneys with a fine tang of faintly scented urine are to Leopold
Bloom.


Breakfast features the inner organs of beasts and fowls, as eaten with
relish by Bloom, but perhaps not digested with as much ease by 21st-
century constitutions. One of these days, Gordon Ramsay, the
television chef committed to promoting the joys of offal in his
restaurants, will probably turn up tomake a Joycean-themed breakfast-
cheffing appearance.


The Joycean then goes on to lunch at Davy Byrne's on Duke Street,
where Gorgonzola sandwiches and the mild fire of Burgundy wine join
the offal already lodged within the Joycean stomach. The Joycean could
at this point conduct an experiment and see how many glasses of
Burgundy he needs to consume before his conversation transforms into a
stream of consciousness.


The unique thing about Joyce is that no other literary figure seems to
make people come over all strange for a particular day each year in a
similar way. It's somehow impossible to imagine, for instance, a Godot
Day - where presumably something would actually happen - to celebrate
the work of Samuel Beckett. Similarly with WB Yeats; Yeatsians don't
don Celtic Revival garb once a year and walk round the Abbey Theatre
reading passages about Kathleen Ní Houlihan and her four green fields,
or consult mediums and engage in annual attempts at automatic writing.
Mind you, a Dickens theme park, Dickens World, featuring the "Haunted
House" of Ebenezer Scrooge, a Victorian schoolroom, and Fagin's Den,
opened only this year in Kent, so if you wait long enough for your
favourite writer's reputation to grow, clearly anything is possible.


Joyce was famous for his epiphanies, where characters have a subtle,
but profound, moment of realisation or insight that transforms their
view of the world. All Joyceans, whether they realise they've had one
or not, will have experienced an epiphany in recent years. It's the
copyright epiphany, and it will have arrived into their stream of
consciousness in the form of Stephen Joyce, Joyce's grandson. Much as
the typical Joycean might like to stick their copy of Ulysses under
their oxter on Bloomsday and go out and start doing an impromptu
reading from the text, they will now know that this is a deeply
problematic issue. JOYCE, WHO DIED in 1941, came out of copyright in
1992. However, due to a complex change in the copyright laws in this
country, he went back into copyright again and does not emerge from it
until 2012. What this effectively means is that his surviving
relative, Stephen Joyce, has control over what does or does not get
read, broadcast or published of his grandfather's opus, no matter what
the circumstances are. However, public readings at the Joyce Centre,
which had been taking place when Joyce first came out of copyright,
can continue due to the coincidentally, but aptly-named
"grandfathering law". This allows exemption from current law, since
the readings had already been established previously. Hard luck,
though, for almost everyone else. Unless you have permission from
Stephen Joyce, you can forget about reading from his work in public
spaces.


In 2004, for example, the centenary of the fictional Bloomsday when
events were going on all round the world, he refused permission for
any text to be read in either English or French, at a celebration in
the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. Academic andwriter Séamus
Deane, who was present at the event, stated afterwards: "Joyce wrote
about possibilities of being Irish that were never realised. It is
something that can only be registered in a great work of art. We were
talking about the greatest emancipatory text, and we couldn't read a
word of it because of the Stephen Joyce handcuff. This is an example
of how a work of art can be squeezed, asthmatised and asphyxiated into
the notion of what constitutes copyright."


It's ironic that the famous closing words of Ulysses, from Molly
Bloom's soliloquy, are "yes I said yes I will Yes." The grandson of
the man who wrote those words has spent a lot of time in recent years
saying exactly the opposite.

On 17 juin, 09:54, henry....RemoveThis@eircom.net (Henry) wrote:
> <georgeorw....RemoveThis@email.com> wrote:
> > The charge of the Bloomsday brigade
> > by Rosita Boland, The Irish Times June 16 2007
>
> Thanks for this.
>
> cheers,
>
> Henry

cheers, Henry
B.