.... I think Joyce would deeply understand where Philip Harvey, one of this city's leading Joyceans, is coming from. I suggest the following recently published article is in the zone, broad church and embracing, Joyce so cheerfully mapped:
see http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=29189
Congratulations on a fine essay, Philip, full of its own poetry, and with an implied practical policy....
Does it strike chords with other Joyceans?
Enjoy. Frances.
Monday, 28 November 2011
Thursday, 10 November 2011
Synchronicities
Bloomsday was fortunate, through its theatre director, Brenda Addie, to secure the talents of Deborah Kayser, singer, and Nick Tsavios, contrabass, and Paul Goddard, an actor for its most recent fundraiser. It was a concert style performance with three elements: Nick and Deb sang their own composition, 'Me Eba/ I Am Eve', a medieval Irish poem which reviles Eve's womanliness and reads it as sinful and destructive. They also performed some medieval French chansons with an Arcandian flavour, and Nick performed on his magnificent 170 year old contrabass a punk minimalist piece. He also accompanied Paul's reading of 'The Nightingale and the Rose'.
Oddly, we found all sorts of synchronicities with the Oscar Wilde stories read so beautifully by actor, Paul Goddard. We were pleased Oscar was not as perverse as his Irish antecedents, and it was interesting to ponder whether or not his father, the antiquarian collector of Irishry (also a distinguished Dublin surgeon), might have known of 'Me Eba.' The deep depressiveness generated by the old poem was slightly alleviated by 'The Nightingale and the Rose' and comprehensively banished by 'The Remarkable Rocket' with its plethora of voices, which Paul rendered so remarkably.
The event worked well at the Celtic Club, and despite the weather (the contrabass had to be protected from it), the acoustics of the verandah were even more exciting than the Club. Our Arcadian setting, close to the garden, meant that we got some unanticipated bonus notes from very entranced birds.
The music was a challenge, but a delight for many of our patrons. One of them, James, expressed his appreciation of the event very eloquently and with his permission, you may enjoy sharing in his pleasure:
Too often ... through laziness or diffidence, I don't express my thoughts about something which feels really important to me, and then, as time goes by, I let it lapse and be swept unrecorded into a hazy collection of memories. But even though it's late at night now, I feel an urge to say something to you about this evening's entertainment. ...
The programme notes were so helpful- .... Paul's readings were splendid, he has very lovely voice and style and he does sport an Oscar-ish look, no? maybe a MacLiammoir to be?- and what about the Box Hill blackbird?- no nightingale he, but his timing was perfect, and his whistle was a welcome complement.
But it's about that beautiful couple Deborah Kayser and Nick Tsiavos that I wanted to say a word to you.
As you know, I don't move in artistic circles, and I am a true neophyte when it comes to anything slightly out of the ordinary in music or theatre.
But from the very first moment when those two unlikely looking artists started to make their music together, I was spellbound.
He, a hirsute Hellenic, with a Ulyssean grasp of his rosin'd oar in one hand and the mast of his massive contrabass in the other; she a gazelle elegant Siren, with alabaster skin and dreamy brown eyes, I sensed there was something special coming up, and so I had a good grip on my chair.
And then his chunky fingers seemed to slim out in to extensions of the bow as he drew out those graceful mahogany notes from that huge wooden barque- they throbbed in my guts, those notes, as he caressed, stroked and plucked his accompaniment. And then her exquisite swan's throat leant in to the wind, spinning and drawing out and bending ductile silver yarns, those dreamy filigree eerie threnodies as she portrayed the evil Eve as depicted by self-tortured ancient Irish monks, or the sweet plaintive bergere chansons of mediaeval France.
I crashed on her rocks, let me tell you. As all would have seen, it was so clear that they were making more than music together, and that she was firmly tied to his mast, as they turned their barque to Ithaca. May their journey be a long one.
That was an inspirational experience for me, I thank and congratulate [Bloomsday].
Another fundraiser to remember. It's like may never be seen again.
Oddly, we found all sorts of synchronicities with the Oscar Wilde stories read so beautifully by actor, Paul Goddard. We were pleased Oscar was not as perverse as his Irish antecedents, and it was interesting to ponder whether or not his father, the antiquarian collector of Irishry (also a distinguished Dublin surgeon), might have known of 'Me Eba.' The deep depressiveness generated by the old poem was slightly alleviated by 'The Nightingale and the Rose' and comprehensively banished by 'The Remarkable Rocket' with its plethora of voices, which Paul rendered so remarkably.
The event worked well at the Celtic Club, and despite the weather (the contrabass had to be protected from it), the acoustics of the verandah were even more exciting than the Club. Our Arcadian setting, close to the garden, meant that we got some unanticipated bonus notes from very entranced birds.
The music was a challenge, but a delight for many of our patrons. One of them, James, expressed his appreciation of the event very eloquently and with his permission, you may enjoy sharing in his pleasure:
Too often ... through laziness or diffidence, I don't express my thoughts about something which feels really important to me, and then, as time goes by, I let it lapse and be swept unrecorded into a hazy collection of memories. But even though it's late at night now, I feel an urge to say something to you about this evening's entertainment. ...
The programme notes were so helpful- .... Paul's readings were splendid, he has very lovely voice and style and he does sport an Oscar-ish look, no? maybe a MacLiammoir to be?- and what about the Box Hill blackbird?- no nightingale he, but his timing was perfect, and his whistle was a welcome complement.
But it's about that beautiful couple Deborah Kayser and Nick Tsiavos that I wanted to say a word to you.
As you know, I don't move in artistic circles, and I am a true neophyte when it comes to anything slightly out of the ordinary in music or theatre.
But from the very first moment when those two unlikely looking artists started to make their music together, I was spellbound.
He, a hirsute Hellenic, with a Ulyssean grasp of his rosin'd oar in one hand and the mast of his massive contrabass in the other; she a gazelle elegant Siren, with alabaster skin and dreamy brown eyes, I sensed there was something special coming up, and so I had a good grip on my chair.
And then his chunky fingers seemed to slim out in to extensions of the bow as he drew out those graceful mahogany notes from that huge wooden barque- they throbbed in my guts, those notes, as he caressed, stroked and plucked his accompaniment. And then her exquisite swan's throat leant in to the wind, spinning and drawing out and bending ductile silver yarns, those dreamy filigree eerie threnodies as she portrayed the evil Eve as depicted by self-tortured ancient Irish monks, or the sweet plaintive bergere chansons of mediaeval France.
I crashed on her rocks, let me tell you. As all would have seen, it was so clear that they were making more than music together, and that she was firmly tied to his mast, as they turned their barque to Ithaca. May their journey be a long one.
That was an inspirational experience for me, I thank and congratulate [Bloomsday].
Another fundraiser to remember. It's like may never be seen again.
Thursday, 3 November 2011
Oscar on my mind....
Sitting in on a rehearsal the other night in preparation for Rapture in Three Keys, I began to think about a superb novel by A.S.Byatt, The Children's Book, which I read in recent years. It's a book to cherish in the memory, documenting as it does the period from about 1880-1914, the period of the rise of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Golden Age of Children's Literature (the narrator is a woman who writes for and about her children), the building of the Victoria & Albert, the trial of Oscar Wilde, the first-wave of feminists, and the first generation of sexologists, and much much more. As well as being ferociously well-researched, it's a tender book, but one which makes much of the contrasts of what writers like Barry and Lewis Carroll had as their ideal of childhood, and its inevitable crushing by Experience.
The rehearsal, of course, was bringing to life Oscar's tales written for his beloved sons Cyril and Vyvyan. Cyril, like many of the young men of the Byatt novel, did not survive the war, but Vyvyan did, and his son Merlin was to become one of the torchbearers for Wilde in the period of occlusion and beyond. The stories give a whole new perspective on the complex creature that is Wilde. They give miraculous insight into the depth of his love for his children, which is all the more moving when one knows, in retrospect of course, that Wilde, once incarcerated, did not see his children again, though he longed to. I suspect that the stories may have been Vyvyan's lifeline to the father he never had. Something has to explain his subsequent advocacy for him.
The first of the stories we will perform, 'The Nightingale and the Rose,' for me, works best as an education in feeling, which is one of the functions that the new genre of literature for children in the second half of the nineteenth century performed. Moralism is out, and refinement of sensibility is the game. It's a game that is perhaps undervalued in our age when the shock of the new is so highly valued. There are glimmers in this story of the wickedly funny comedian of manners, because Oscar, being Oscar, cannot forgo a soupcon of wit and railery at the absolutism of the young Romeo and his posturing.
The other story, 'The Remarkable Rocket', is Wilde in a very different key, high comedy/farce, and one that bears much closer relationship to the plays. Although finally a moral tale, it's the journey through a field of very naughty double-entendres that will entrance and the moralism takes a back seat to the comedy. I love the story's cast of fireworks. Ask any pyrotechnist and you'll find that fireworks have their own language and personalities. I know. I had the rare pleasure of talking to one quite recently. Chatting animatedly about his passion, he adopted a tragic mien when he informed me that not even theatre companies at the biggest end of town could afford him. He should exist, but what a pity as 5 November approaches, that catherine wheels and rockets and squibs are not the commonplace experiences they used to be.
Oscar has been a very rewarding obsession for Bloomsday since 2009. We've cast him as Buck Mulligan in Wilde about Joyce, and performed Earnest in part and in full. Paul Goddard, who will be performing in Rapture in Three Keys, is Bloomsday's Oscar and he is once again relishing the challenge (by the way and being really trivial, we think he looks like Oscar would have in his wildest dreams loved to look). Wilde is such a contrast to Joyce, but as we've argued before, Joyce owed him a huge debt and had more than a passing intellectual engagement with him, even in an early essay casting him as a persecuted Christ figure.
See you on Friday or Sunday, I hope. And if not, think of revisiting the stories. Project Gutenberg has them or you might be lucky enough to chance on a deluxe illustrated verrsion. f.
The rehearsal, of course, was bringing to life Oscar's tales written for his beloved sons Cyril and Vyvyan. Cyril, like many of the young men of the Byatt novel, did not survive the war, but Vyvyan did, and his son Merlin was to become one of the torchbearers for Wilde in the period of occlusion and beyond. The stories give a whole new perspective on the complex creature that is Wilde. They give miraculous insight into the depth of his love for his children, which is all the more moving when one knows, in retrospect of course, that Wilde, once incarcerated, did not see his children again, though he longed to. I suspect that the stories may have been Vyvyan's lifeline to the father he never had. Something has to explain his subsequent advocacy for him.
The first of the stories we will perform, 'The Nightingale and the Rose,' for me, works best as an education in feeling, which is one of the functions that the new genre of literature for children in the second half of the nineteenth century performed. Moralism is out, and refinement of sensibility is the game. It's a game that is perhaps undervalued in our age when the shock of the new is so highly valued. There are glimmers in this story of the wickedly funny comedian of manners, because Oscar, being Oscar, cannot forgo a soupcon of wit and railery at the absolutism of the young Romeo and his posturing.
The other story, 'The Remarkable Rocket', is Wilde in a very different key, high comedy/farce, and one that bears much closer relationship to the plays. Although finally a moral tale, it's the journey through a field of very naughty double-entendres that will entrance and the moralism takes a back seat to the comedy. I love the story's cast of fireworks. Ask any pyrotechnist and you'll find that fireworks have their own language and personalities. I know. I had the rare pleasure of talking to one quite recently. Chatting animatedly about his passion, he adopted a tragic mien when he informed me that not even theatre companies at the biggest end of town could afford him. He should exist, but what a pity as 5 November approaches, that catherine wheels and rockets and squibs are not the commonplace experiences they used to be.
Oscar has been a very rewarding obsession for Bloomsday since 2009. We've cast him as Buck Mulligan in Wilde about Joyce, and performed Earnest in part and in full. Paul Goddard, who will be performing in Rapture in Three Keys, is Bloomsday's Oscar and he is once again relishing the challenge (by the way and being really trivial, we think he looks like Oscar would have in his wildest dreams loved to look). Wilde is such a contrast to Joyce, but as we've argued before, Joyce owed him a huge debt and had more than a passing intellectual engagement with him, even in an early essay casting him as a persecuted Christ figure.
See you on Friday or Sunday, I hope. And if not, think of revisiting the stories. Project Gutenberg has them or you might be lucky enough to chance on a deluxe illustrated verrsion. f.
Wednesday, 2 November 2011
Rapture in Three Keys
Our first fundraiser for 2012 Bloomsday is Rapture in Three Keys, a program that combines Deborah Kayser and Nick Tsavios's original music, and in particular their setting for an ancient Irish poem, 'I Am Eve' with Paul Goddard's reading of two exquisite poetical Oscar Wilde stories. Patrons have met Nick and Deb's music in recorded form, as the musical introduction to this year's Bloomsday theatrical event, 'An Irishman and a Jew went into a Pub'. Paul was a much-loved Oscar for Bloomsday 2009 at the State Library.
If you go to the Events page about this, you will get the details about times and venues. It is necessary to book for the event on Sunday, for catering purposes, and desirable to book for Friday night as well. And now you can book online as well. How easy is that?
In preparing for this show, we've come to realise how special the Oscar stories are, and how superbly they can be enhanced with music. They belong to the Golden Age of Children's Literature, the mid- to late c19, when childhood became a golden estate in its own right, rather than a pre-adult stage, and when superb writers of the calibre of Lewis Carrol, Charles Kingsley, J.M. Barry spared children moralism and entranced them with fantasy. Oscar Wilde is not as well known as some of his contemporaries as a children's writer, and we think you'll be fascinated by his skill in walking the line between knowing adults and innocent understandings of the same material. Our artists promise a treat, or indeed several.
This is a very special event and we hope you enjoy it in the comfort of the Celtic Club or in the garden amphitheatre. Sunday's weather looks a little unstable at present, so we may need to confine the number of bookings we take in case of having to move under cover. We'll provide the mozzie repellant (not that we've noticed any yet), but suggest you rug up in case of a dramatic turn for the cooler. At present, it promises to be a very warm day, but rain is also possible.
If you go to the Events page about this, you will get the details about times and venues. It is necessary to book for the event on Sunday, for catering purposes, and desirable to book for Friday night as well. And now you can book online as well. How easy is that?
In preparing for this show, we've come to realise how special the Oscar stories are, and how superbly they can be enhanced with music. They belong to the Golden Age of Children's Literature, the mid- to late c19, when childhood became a golden estate in its own right, rather than a pre-adult stage, and when superb writers of the calibre of Lewis Carrol, Charles Kingsley, J.M. Barry spared children moralism and entranced them with fantasy. Oscar Wilde is not as well known as some of his contemporaries as a children's writer, and we think you'll be fascinated by his skill in walking the line between knowing adults and innocent understandings of the same material. Our artists promise a treat, or indeed several.
This is a very special event and we hope you enjoy it in the comfort of the Celtic Club or in the garden amphitheatre. Sunday's weather looks a little unstable at present, so we may need to confine the number of bookings we take in case of having to move under cover. We'll provide the mozzie repellant (not that we've noticed any yet), but suggest you rug up in case of a dramatic turn for the cooler. At present, it promises to be a very warm day, but rain is also possible.
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
Joyce on their minds....
James Joyce seems to crop up a lot in despatches recently. Just today, in the email/letters page, he is used to browbeat the CEO of Qantas, who is assumed to be family. He is not as far as I'm aware. However, what I want to draw attention to is the slur of James Joyce's 'impenetrability' which the mainstream media loves to apply to Joyce, especially around Bloomsday. It's not the fault of Mr. Langsam (of Flemington - great address on 1 November and Melbourne Cup Day) that he thinks this, because he has simply internalised unquestioningly the unrelenting and insidious diet of mainstream press utterances about Joyce. The subtext is 'you'll never be able to read him. Why bother? Too hard. Too show-off-y. A wank.' Lots of people, including literary academics, have not read Joyce because of such self-serving mystification of him, engaged in, I hate to admit it, by academics, and fuelled by a press that loves to treat Bloomsday as a kind of literary St. Pat's Day, and similarly booze-fuelled.
It's balderdash. Nonsense. Legions of readers, Bloomsdayers, and you don't have to be an egg-head to be one of those, find Joyce engaging, funny, wise, not to say radical, subversive, revolutionary. Those of us who do get off on Joyce know it's a slow read, one for the bedside table, and one that's never done because the pleasures of Joyce come slowly. The characters unfold slowly.The experiments get more convoluted, but gradually, while he primes you up for the outrageous and teaches you how to read him as you go. The ideas he playfully tosses around, teases and turns upside down, inside out, in the end begin to mess with your brain, and life is never the same after Ulysses. So has it been for several generations of writers and thinkers. My splendid Aunt El taught me to keep it by the bed and dip in. It's advice I've transmitted to generations of students of Joyce. A book for our times, for the secular age,a touchstone for thinking about what it is to be human.
Two other contexts cropped up for Joyce this week. In re-reading Flann O'Brien for a Conference on 11 November (at University of New South Wales), to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth, there was Jim Joyce, large as life and incognito, pulling Guinness in a pub in Skerries, reports of his death having been 'greatly exaggerated'. Joyce is in flight from his admirers, claims that he did not write Ulysses (subject to literary identity fraud), and seems to be quite unaware of even the existence of Finnegans Wake. Flann resurrected him to deal with his own writing demons, I suspect. Escape as he might try, Joyce is everywhere in Flann's differently outrageous corpus, and being written back to, in a spirit of adolescent rebellion. Flann seems to me to need to contradistinguish himself from Joyce, to turn his back resolutely on Europe, to struggle with a church he loves and hates, and with the loss of the Irish language. What amused me most is that he even has Joyce return to Ireland to take the road he chose not to take - to become a Jesuit. How life in the c20 and beyond would have been different had that happened. Generations of thinkers and revolutionaries would have had to find another touchstone. He would not have become the rallying point that he became for thinkers about systems and how they are made and how they can be dismantled.
The other context was so very different. A seminar at the Carmelite Centre in Middle Park on Famous Seamus Heaney, given by Philip Harvey and Peter Gebhart. Again, Joyce stalked the room. Philip's comments on 'Station Island' took me back to that longish poem. Seamus is famously generous, and his is less a struggle with a Literary Father than a loving tribute to Joyce as inspiring the forging of a vocation, that of writer. Curiously, the locale for this renewal of a sense of mission is St. Patrick's Purgatory, Lough Derg, the centuries-old penitential pilgrimage site in Co. Donegal, north-west Ireland. What Heaney remembers is not the overblown ending of Portrait, but a subtler moment from Ch.5:
there is a moment in Stephen's diary
for April the thirteenth, a revelation
set among my stars - that one entry
has been a sort of password in my ears,
the collect of a new epiphany,
the feast of the Holy Tundish.' 'Who cares,'
he jeered, 'any more? The English language
belongs to us....
...
That subject people stuff is cod's game,
infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage.
....it's time to swim
out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements
elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.'
Joyce's hydrophobic Stephen is here imaginatively changed, changed utterly. But it's not a terrible beauty. It's one that shows Heaney's debt to Joyce's imagining the world in all its particularity, earthedness and instability, its retreat from Certainty. Someone who doesn't find Joyce impenetrable, but rather empowering.
It's balderdash. Nonsense. Legions of readers, Bloomsdayers, and you don't have to be an egg-head to be one of those, find Joyce engaging, funny, wise, not to say radical, subversive, revolutionary. Those of us who do get off on Joyce know it's a slow read, one for the bedside table, and one that's never done because the pleasures of Joyce come slowly. The characters unfold slowly.The experiments get more convoluted, but gradually, while he primes you up for the outrageous and teaches you how to read him as you go. The ideas he playfully tosses around, teases and turns upside down, inside out, in the end begin to mess with your brain, and life is never the same after Ulysses. So has it been for several generations of writers and thinkers. My splendid Aunt El taught me to keep it by the bed and dip in. It's advice I've transmitted to generations of students of Joyce. A book for our times, for the secular age,a touchstone for thinking about what it is to be human.
Two other contexts cropped up for Joyce this week. In re-reading Flann O'Brien for a Conference on 11 November (at University of New South Wales), to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth, there was Jim Joyce, large as life and incognito, pulling Guinness in a pub in Skerries, reports of his death having been 'greatly exaggerated'. Joyce is in flight from his admirers, claims that he did not write Ulysses (subject to literary identity fraud), and seems to be quite unaware of even the existence of Finnegans Wake. Flann resurrected him to deal with his own writing demons, I suspect. Escape as he might try, Joyce is everywhere in Flann's differently outrageous corpus, and being written back to, in a spirit of adolescent rebellion. Flann seems to me to need to contradistinguish himself from Joyce, to turn his back resolutely on Europe, to struggle with a church he loves and hates, and with the loss of the Irish language. What amused me most is that he even has Joyce return to Ireland to take the road he chose not to take - to become a Jesuit. How life in the c20 and beyond would have been different had that happened. Generations of thinkers and revolutionaries would have had to find another touchstone. He would not have become the rallying point that he became for thinkers about systems and how they are made and how they can be dismantled.
The other context was so very different. A seminar at the Carmelite Centre in Middle Park on Famous Seamus Heaney, given by Philip Harvey and Peter Gebhart. Again, Joyce stalked the room. Philip's comments on 'Station Island' took me back to that longish poem. Seamus is famously generous, and his is less a struggle with a Literary Father than a loving tribute to Joyce as inspiring the forging of a vocation, that of writer. Curiously, the locale for this renewal of a sense of mission is St. Patrick's Purgatory, Lough Derg, the centuries-old penitential pilgrimage site in Co. Donegal, north-west Ireland. What Heaney remembers is not the overblown ending of Portrait, but a subtler moment from Ch.5:
there is a moment in Stephen's diary
for April the thirteenth, a revelation
set among my stars - that one entry
has been a sort of password in my ears,
the collect of a new epiphany,
the feast of the Holy Tundish.' 'Who cares,'
he jeered, 'any more? The English language
belongs to us....
...
That subject people stuff is cod's game,
infantile, like your peasant pilgrimage.
....it's time to swim
out on your own and fill the element
with signatures on your own frequency,
echo soundings, searches, probes, allurements
elver-gleams in the dark of the whole sea.'
Joyce's hydrophobic Stephen is here imaginatively changed, changed utterly. But it's not a terrible beauty. It's one that shows Heaney's debt to Joyce's imagining the world in all its particularity, earthedness and instability, its retreat from Certainty. Someone who doesn't find Joyce impenetrable, but rather empowering.
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