Bloomsday Society great performance!!!! Some singers and readers of "The Dead". Irish Christmas Tradition in the Ateneo de Madrid. 'Nollaig Shona Duit'

The word ‘Ateneo’ comes from the name of the Greek goddess of wisdom Athena and an Athenaeum is a center where culture is disseminated. It is a particularly Spanish phenomenon and in Spain, from the mid-nineteenth century, both the bourgeoisie, with the Ateneo de Madrid and the Ateneo de Barcelona, and the working classes, created their own Athenaeums, where cultural and intellectual activities took place. Their slogan was "culture as a means towards the emancipation of the people."

Created in 1820 the first Ateneo de Madrid brought together all the liberal philosophers, writers and politicians of the day, but when Fernando VII reinstated Absolute Monarchy in 1823 most of these men went into exile, and it was not until the Regency of Maria Cristina in 1835 that the Ateneo was restored. It occupied various different buildings in Madrid but finally in 1884 a new building was created in Calle del Prado to become its permanent headquarters. The Ateneo became the centre of intellectual life. The writers of the Generation of ’98, such as Unamuno, Machado, Pio Baroja, Azorín, all the Spanish Nobel prize winners – Ramón y Cajal, Jacinto Benavente, Juan Ramón Jimenez, Severo Ochoa, Vicente Aleixandre and Camilo José Cela - were members of the Ateneo.

Today’s Ateneo is a place to see, hear and experience a wide variety of cultural activities from a talk on a particular topic, to poetry readings, musical recitals or discussions of books or exhibitions of art. The cultural activities of the Ateneo are not restricted solely to its members, but are open to all those who wish to participate.

James Joyce's THE DEAD 2000 Tony Awards

In the beginning was the Word

The Word Became Flesh

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4 In him was life,[a] and the life was the light of men. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. 8 He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

9 The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. 10 He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to his own,[b] and his own people[c] did not receive him. 12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God,13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son[d] from the Father, full of grace and truth. 15 (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”) 16 For from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.[e] 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. 18 No one has ever seen God; the only God,[f] who is at the Father's side,[g] he has made him known.

Spanish Lady Lyrics Celtic Woman

Puca Og Rolling Home. We are grateful to Chris and John

Joyce by Cesar Abin (spaniard)

Brancusi´s Simbol of Joyce

Finnegans Wake Chapter 1 Part 1

Abha an tSuláin

John Cage: The Wonderful widow of eighteen springs (1942)

Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake, experimental novel by James Joyce. Extracts of the work appeared as Work in Progress from 1928 to 1937, and it was published in its entirety as Finnegans Wake in 1939.

SUMMARY: The book is, in one sense, the story of a publican in Chapelizod (near Dublin), his wife, and their three children; but Mr. Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, Mrs. Anna Livia Plurabelle, and Kevin, Jerry, and Isabel also represent every family of humankind. The motive idea of the novel, inspired by the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, is that history is cyclic; to demonstrate this the book begins with the end of a sentence left unfinished on the last page. Languages merge: Anna Livia has "vlossyhair"-w?osy being Polish for "hair"; "a bad of wind" blows-b?d being Persian for "wind." Characters from literature and history appear and merge and disappear. On another level, the protagonists are the city of Dublin and the River Liffey, which stand as representatives of the history of Ireland and, by extension, of all human history.

As he had in his earlier work Ulysses, Joyce drew upon an encyclopaedic range of literary works. His strange polyglot idiom of puns and portmanteau words was intended to convey not only the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious but also the interweaving of Irish language and mythology with the languages and mythologies of many other cultures.

DETAIL: James Joyce’s last book is perhaps the most daunting work of fiction ever written. Yet it is also one of the funniest, bringing pleasure to generations of readers willing to suspend the usual assumptions that govern the novel. Instead of a single plot, Finnegans Wake has a number of kernel stories, some of them occurring in hundreds of versions, from a word or two long to several pages. The most ubiquitous is a story of a fall that turns out not to be entirely negative, including the Fall of Man; an indiscretion in Phoenix Park, Dublin, involving an older man and two girls; and a tumble from a ladder by an Irish builder, Tim Finnegan.

In place of characters, the novel has figures who go by many different names, each figure consisting of a cluster of recognizable features. In place of settings, it merges place names from around the globe. Joyce achieves this condensation through the "portmanteau": the fusing together of two or more words in the same or different languages. Thus "kissmiss" is both the festive season and something that might happen during it, with a suggestion of fatefulness; the Holy Father becomes a "hoary frother"; and an old photo is a "fadograph."

Reading Finnegans Wake—best done aloud and if possible in a group—means allowing these suggestions to resonate, while accepting that many will remain obscure. The work’s seventeen sections have their own styles and subjects, tracing a slow movement through nightfall and dawn to a final unfinished sentence that returns us to the beginning of the book.

Derek Attridge

The pub features in Dubliners, and more centrally in Finnegans Wake, where the hero, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, is described as its owner. A plaque erected by Dublin Tourism on its front wall reads: "Home of all characters and elements in James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake."

Richard Wagner: "Tristan und Isolde" (Trailer) | Wiener Staatsoper. Chapelizod?

"Passages from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake" (1965) -- d. Mary Ellen Bute

Dear friends, I am looking forward to seeing you...

James Joyce Read by Jim Norton Finnegans Wake Book One Chapter One (1)

 "a way a lone a last a loved a long the / riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." 

John McDermott- Oft In The Stilly Night

"Groves of Blarney" (Theme & Variation) for Harp

I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls (M.W.Balfe) / MIDI

FINNEGANS WAKE

Finnegans Wake - The Irish Rovers

The Irish Rovers - Finnegans Wake

The Irish Rovers - Finnegans Wake

DON'T PANIC: it's only Finnegans Wake - thunderword #3

James Joyce reads “Anna Livia Plurabelle” Finnegans Wake WORDS ARE HERE ...

ALP

Robert Anton Wilson △ On Finnegans Wake and Joseph Campbell (1988, Audio)

Burgess: operetta, libretti. Blooms of Dublin: A Musical Play Based On James Joyce's Ulysses' (1986)

James Joyce: caught up in a scandal?

James Joyce: caught up in a scandal?

The author of ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, ‘Ulysses’ and, most importantly in this context, ‘Finnegans Wake’, was no stranger to controversy. But Margot Gayle Backus’s new study is less than the sum of its parts 

Scandal and James Joyce are closely intertwined: his work was scandalous, first in one way (dirty), then in another (unreadable, and probably dirty if it could be read). Aspects of his life (such as his marital status and his drinking) were scandalous. And scandal pursues him to this day, for instance in the things done with, and to, his texts. Margot Gayle Backus is therefore certainly on to something when she devotes a book to the relationship between Joyce’s work and the scandals publicised by what she calls the new journalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Backus focuses on three big scandals of that epoch, in which newspapers were heavily involved: Parnell, Wilde and the less well-known but important exposé by WT Stead of child prostitution in 1880s London (a scandal in which Stead himself got caught up). She argues, interestingly but probably controversially, that the British press learned its techniques of scandal (the tone of false outrage, the “sensational” revelations, the seizing on fragments of a life and blowing these up to encompass the entire person, and so on) from some of the tactics of the Parnellite press in the 1880s, notably in exposing alleged homosexual activities in Dublin Castle.

Interesting as this is, one has to ask about its relevance to Joyce and his work. Parnell’s importance needs no arguing. Wilde is indeed a presence, but a crucial flaw in this book, as a study of Joyce, is its omission of the work in which Wilde most heavily features: Finnegans Wake. Backus is well aware that Finnegans Wake is the work in which scandal and homosexuality are most obviously prominent: she writes that Finnegans Wake “would call for a book in itself”. That may well be true, but its omission does leave a major gap in the text. 

Having outlined the “scandal work” of the new journalism, Backus, an associate professor of English at Houston University, goes on to consider what she calls Joyce’s own scandal work. By this she means the way that Joyce, as a modern artist, approached the scandal-ridden discourse of his time, incorporated it into his work, and transformed it in crucial ways.

ParalysisThat the fear of scandal, of exposure in all senses, is one of the factors creating the paralysis of Dubliners is made impressively evident. As the discussion moves on to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses an aspect of this work that has been present all the time (though not indicated in its title) becomes more evident: male homosexuality, especially homosexual scandal (hence the emphasis on Wilde). Much is made of the “smugging” episode in A Portrait and of what does sound very like a declaration of love by Cranly to Stephen towards the end of the book. Similarly, Mulligan’s attitude to Stephen in Ulysses is taken to be an implicitly (at least) homosexual one. This emphasis does not come from nowhere: it is part of the discourse of “queer theory”, of which Backus, with her colleague Joseph Valente, is a leading Joycean exponent. 

One notion the theory sets great store by is that of “homosexual panic”, the panic allegedly generated in those mired in heterosexuality when exposed to the awareness of an alternative form of sexuality. A problem here, even if one accepts that Mulligan’s relation to Stephen has a homosexual dimension, is that Stephen displays very little homosexual panic: his response to Cranly’s apparent overture in A Portrait – “Of whom are you speaking?” – displays not panic so much as cold indifference (it is unsurprising that Cranly desists), and again his reaction as a child to the “smugging” allegation seems to be more puzzlement than panic. 

And he has multiple reasons for an aversion to Mulligan, homosexual panic being the least of them. Backus would actually be on firmer ground if she looked more closely at Bloom’s feelings about Stephen. The problem with Ulysses, for Backus, is that only one aspect of the book is overtly to do with scandal (the Phoenix Park murders are much more than a “scandal”), and that is the fantasy sequence in the Nighttown episode in which Bloom is indeed publicly exposed and humiliated in multiple ways. Backus does discuss this sequence and makes some valuable points. But the fantasy nature of this descent, and the episode’s inherently comic tone, make it difficult to accommodate it within her theoretical framework.

Her real interest is in the ways in which Joyce, through the persona of Stephen, negotiates a different way of addressing scandal than that of the press. He does it via what she calls, rather well, ambiguous self-disclosure, and he does it chiefly in the library episode of Ulysses, which receives the most sustained reading here of any of Joyce’s texts. The argument is that Stephen accepts “homosexual desire as a literal part of his and others’ makeup”, thereby undoing the power of scandal to destroy him. Much of this is predicated on the unquestioned assumption of homosexual attraction (at least) between him and Mulligan, despite the scant overt evidence of this in the text. Pursuit of this chimera leads Backus to mistake thoughts of Stephen about Richard Best, another of those involved in the episode, for thoughts about Mulligan, and similarly to mistake a remark of Stephen as being addressed to Mulligan when it is not. (A 17-page bibliography is indeed impressive, but the basic task of reading Ulysses accurately matters more.) 

This is a book of parts that come to less than their sum. There is the new-journalism scandal machine. There is the much- insisted-on homosexual thread. And somewhere there is the work of James Joyce, juxtaposed uneasily with these other two. That work does indeed have connections with Backus’s concerns, and some of these connections she illustrates very well, but ultimately the work is being at least partly distorted to fit these concepts. And, sadly, the book where both of these – scandal and male homosexuality – feature much more prominently goes unread, ironically confirming its outsider status.

Terence Killeen is the James Joyce Centre research scholar.

No More to Say & Nothing to Weep For: An Elegy for Allen Ginsberg (FULL ...

Allen Ginsberg reads "Howl," (Big Table Chicago Reading, 1959)

Analysis of Howl.

La muerte de Jacinto, 1752-1753, de Giambatista Tiepolo.

J. J. Fisher sings "In Old Madrid" on Edison cylinder 7007 (1905). "(...) Stephen, obviously addressed, looked down on the photo showing a large sized lady with her fleshy charms on evidence in an open fashion as she was in the full bloom of womanhood in evening dress cut ostentatiously low for the occasion to give a liberal display of bosom, with more than vision of breasts, her full lips parted and some perfect teeth, standing near, ostensibly with gravity, a piano on the rest of which was In Old Madrid, a ballad, pretty in its way, which was then all the vogue. Her (the lady's) eyes, dark, large, looked at Stephen, about to smile about something to be admired, Lafayette of Westmoreland street, Dublin's premier photographic artist, being responsible for the esthetic execution (...)".

BLOOMSDAY 2017 in Madrid. Farewell Party for Ambassador David Cooney and his wife Geraldine. Members and some artists took part. Reading and singing.

Dada and Cabaret Voltaire

James Joyce to Frank Budgen

"I want," said Joyce, as we were walking down the Universitätstrasse, "to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book."

(Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses," pp. 67-68 / p. 69)

I enquired about Ulysses. Was it progressing?
"I have been working hard on it all day," said Joyce.
"Does that mean that you have written a great deal?" I said.
"Two sentences," said Joyce.
I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of Flaubert.
"You have been seeking the mot juste?" I said.
"No," said Joyce. "I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. There is an order in every way appropriate. I think I have it."
"What are the words?" I asked.
"I believe I told you," said Joyce, "that my book is a modern Odyssey. Every episode in it corresponds to an adventure of Ulysses. I am now writing the Lestrygonians episode, which corresponds to the adventure of Ulysses with the cannibals. My hero is going to lunch. But there is a seduction motive in the Odyssey, the cannibal king's daughter. Seduction appears in my book as women's silk petticoats hanging in a shop window. The words through which I express the effect of it on my hungry hero are: 'Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.' You can see for yourself in how many different ways they might be arranged."

(Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses," pp. 19-20 / p. 20;
Joyce refers to "Lestrygonians" 8:638-39, p. 138)

Shane MacGowan - An Irish Airman Forsees His Death (Yeats)

...my ideal audience is people who always wanted to read the book but felt daunted...

https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/whats_on/event/ulysses/

Ulysses

The Abbey Theatre presents Dermot Bolger’s brilliantly adapted, vibrant version of Joyce’s classic in a thrilling production for theatre.

Bloom’s odyssey is a pandemonium of live music, puppets, dancing, clowning, bowler hats and kazoos. It’s Ulysses as you’ve never imagined it before, a superbly theatrical homage to Joyce’s chronicle of Dublin life and the greatest novel of all time. Created by Abbey Theatre Director Graham McLaren, our production is absurd, brilliant and oodles of fun.

‘my ideal audience is people who always wanted to read the book but felt daunted. They may be surprised to find that it remains a book about themselves and people they know. They will not leave knowing everything about Joyce, no more than I’ll ever comprehend the fullness of his vision. But I hope they are sufficient engaged by the human drama; by Bloom’s subtle triumphs; Molly’s all too human contradictions and Stephen’s isolation on the eve of departure, to again start to read this superb chronicle of our capital city: one of the greatest and truest novels of all time.’ – Dermot Bolger

https://www.abbeytheatre.ie/whats_on/event/ulysses/

Seaside Girls

Happy Summer Solstice

... Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon.

Bloomsday 2017, en Madrid. Fotos de "familia".

DD&SC

Bloomsday 2017, en Madrid. Richard Carlow. Great performance.

Bravo!!!

Bloomsday 2017, en Madrid. Pedro Pérez Prieto (en rojo) traductor de Yeats.

Bloomsday 2017, en Madrid.

Bloomsday 2017, en Madrid.James Duggan.The Portrait, chapter 3. Great performance.

Bloomsday 2017, en Madrid. Bill Dixon, Richard Hunter, Richard Carlow and David Butler

Bloomsday 2017, en Madrid. Valeria, in white, ( beside Pedro Pérez Prieto- Yeats´s translator), lecturer on Joyce from Buenos Aires

Bloomsday 2017, en Madrid. Some members of the Bloomsday Society.

Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming - Bloomsday 2017 en Madrid. Bill Dixon. From Cyclops

Bloomsday 2017 en Madrid. From KS

Dear Sara,

              Thank you for such a great evening! I really enjoyed the selection of readings and songs that were performed with wonderful talent and depth of feeling. Congratulations on the perfect organization which, despite the brutal heat, made it a night to remember. As the ambassador said, the special thing about  Bloom's day

Is knowing that it is being celebrated in cities and counties all over the world. Thank you for helping to keep Madrid a little bit Irish!

       I would be grateful if you could keep me informed about future events.

                             With kindest regards,

                                                     KS

Bloomsday 2017 in Madrid. Ambassador Cooney

Songs of Joyce - Invisibility

BLOOMSDAY 2017

BLOOMSDAY IS COMING. John McCormack - Love's Old Sweet Song (Just a Song at Twilight) (1927)

GUR MILIS MORAG ~ KATHLEEN MACINNES ~ CILLIE BHRIDE

Eveline by James Joyce [Full Audiobook]

Si Do Mhaimeo i; cailleach an airgid; Irish Wedding Song. Lyrics. gaeilge

Ateneo de Madrid. Books donation from the Irish Embassy to the Library. April 4th,2017

Farallón nº1 (Cliff nº1), by Amaya Bozal.

Dos brotes sobre la nieve, de Amaya Bozal

http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2017/01/31/actualidad/1485853588_146070.html

Ateneo de Madrid. Books Donation from the Embassy of Ireland to the Library. Ambassador David Cooney and César Navarro, President of the Ateneo de Madrid. April 4th, 2017.

The Dubliners 2: An Encounter Audiobook by James Joyce

John Spillane - Seamuisin