It's 99 years today since James Joyce had his first date with Nora Barnacle. He chose the auspicious date to set the actions of Ulysses. Reading in the Ellmann biography over the weekend, I was thinking about where we might be for the centenary (probably still in Brazil) and it occurred to me that, hey, Monday was the day itself.
I Googled around a bit and found that there are some commemorations going on, far from the streets of Dublin. Me, I will be reading on in the bio, missing out on a pint of Guinness.
Made the short trip out to Ilha do Mel this weekend. The island is located just off the Parana coast, less than two hours' journey from home. We've been here almost a year and this was our first trip to the island - wishes we hadn't waited so long, although no regrets for everything else that we've crammed in instead.
The island is a park. All motor vehicles are prohibited, which gives it a wonderful quiet. We stayed at a fairly secluded pousada on Fortaleza beach. You are remote enough (4km from what passes for town) that the pousada meets all of your needs. We had some walking on wide-open beaches, made a climb to the lighthouse and had time for lunch at a little bar named after the vultures on the island.
I spent the past weekend with my nose in the Ellmann book. It is hard to take it out, actually. Reading Joyce (and I've only read Ulysses) is a labour of love. It took me three tries (and two guidebooks) to get through Ulysses, but once you get up the momentum and get an idea of what is going on, it is an absolute treasure trove of detail.
Reading Ellmann, you relive Joyce's life in intense detail (I am up to about the age of 25 now), learning how his education, his lonely sense of genius and his needy and often quarrelsome relationships with his friends and family provided him with the raw material for his writing.
I was particularly taken with Joyce's decision to be an exile from Ireland. Ellmann writes of how he was neither asked to leave nor forbidden to return, but how he felt more at home outside of Ireland, living with a perpetual bone to pick with the intellectuals of the day. It made it hard for him to network, hard to earn a living and hard to get published, but it also forced him to apply himself through his own talent, repeatedly polishing his works until they shone.
I still have a long way to go. I hope to finish this month, and I can't wait to get to the section covering the writing of Ulysses.
I spent a long hot summer in Syria in 1992 and thus was very interested to read this article by William Dalrymple in the New York Times (link via Body and Soul).
Imagining Syria only by the face our media allows it to show to the world, most people have no idea either of the state of religious tolerance or of the cultural richness of Syria and its people. It is definitely far off the tourist track. On the cultural side, I expect the same is true of Iran, although they get lower marks for religious tolerance, at least at the headline level.
We are far too easily led to forget such things in the search for the next villain in the endless war. The Bush administration's taunts to Syria made me cringe. It suits our leaders to focus their propaganda on the leaders and ignore the millions of citizens of these countries who have no bone to pick with everyday Americans and want nothing more than to get on with their ordinary lives. If we outsiders, or rather, if our leaders cause their pots to boil over, how can we pretend to be peacemakers?
I used to walk in my small city in Syria and the locals, who knew who I was, knew I was foreign, and knew specifically that I was American, used to come up and speak to me in their best broken English (which was better than my best broken French or my non-existent Arabic), "My name is X, and you are very welcome to Syria!" Hospitality is an Arab virtue that passes beyond and between any faith.
I was also somewhat interested by what Jonathan at The Head Heeb says, in a comment linked by Body and Soul. Until the formation of Israel, Syria's Jews were a prosperous and integrated community, as were Jewish communities
in so many Middle Eastern countries. Today the few who remain live on protected, generally unmolested but more or less shunned. That any remain at all is again a reflection of the relative tolerance and multiculturalism of Syria.
As our worldview is twisted by years of conflict into thinking of the Middle East as homogenous masses of angry Muslim Arabs, we risk the loss of the richness of history that millennia of existence at a crossroads of commerce and the cradle of three world religions has left us. Humankind will be poorer for our ignorance. This is what passes for wisdom amongst our leaders.
I finished reading Victor Klemperer's diaries from 1933-1941 on Saturday. If at times they are a bit slow, a bit introspective, a bit focused on the real and alleged maladies of Klemperer and his wife, they are kept compelling by the creeping progress of the Nazi policy against the German Jews that is an unavoidable and constant theme throughout these years.
You get a real sense of Germany's slide into war at the same time - of the logic used by the Nazis to pick fights with their neighbours, then play off as innocents aggrieved by the aggression of their neighbours. And of the marshaling of resources into the war effort - taking from those like the Jews, rationing away those of the Germans, until the majority of the country was hungry and hurting and whipped into a propagandistic rage against its enemies.
And yet in all this you have Klemperer's quiet resistance. To do any more, he would no doubt have been eliminated. But he got on as best he could, refusing the 'Heil Hitler' and other declarations of loyalty except when left with no alternative. Scrapping together enough to live on while his pension is repeatedly assaulted by the newest taxes and tributes. Enjoying the goodness of people who respect his station in life (as a university professor cast out of his job by a combination of anti-semitism and the Hitlerite purge of academics).
A worthwhile read; I've ordered the next volume covering 1942-45. Next up: Richard Ellmann's highly-regarded biography of James Joyce. My copy is of the 1982 revision released for Joyce's centenary.