Archival Joyce

BoingBoing links today to the Atlantic Monthly, who has entered the 21st century by making its digital archive available for free.

Here's Harry Levin's 1946 review of Joyce's collected works:

"Joyce renews our apprehension of reality, strengthens our sympathy with our fellow creatures, and leaves us in awe before the mystery of created things."

I had initially thought that I would be able to find HG Well's famous review of Portrait in the archives, but it turns out that that was in the New Republic, not The Atlantic Monthly. That review is now also available on line here. The Wells review is a much more interesting document because it captures the tides of modernism in the moment rather than upon its demise. Wells' comment that "Mr. Joyce has a cloacal obsession," is no doubt one of the pithiest lines in the critical literature on Joyce (as well as somehow prescient of the new academic interest in "excremental postcolonialism" [I swear I didn't make up that tag]). But the most famous part of this review is Wells' characterization of the Irish hatred of the British:

And a second thing of immense significance is the fact that everyone in this Dublin story, every human being, accepts as a matter of course, as a thing in nature like the sky and the sea, that the English are to be hated. There is no discrimination in that hatred, there is no gleam of recognition that a considerable number of Englishmen have displayed a very earnest disposition to put matters right with Ireland, there is an absolute absence of any idea of a discussed settlement, any notion of helping the slow-witted Englishman in his three-cornered puzzle between North and South. It is just hate, a cant cultivated to the pitch of monomania, an ungenerous violent direction of the mind. That is the political atmosphere in which Stephen Dedalus grows up, and in which his essentially responsive mind orients itself. I am afraid it is only too true an account of the atmosphere in which a number of brilliant young Irishmen have grown up. What is the good of pretending that the extreme Irish "patriot" is an equivalent and parallel of the English or American liberal? He is narrower and intenser than any English Tory. He will be the natural ally of the Tory in delaying British social and economic reconstruction after the war. He will play into the hands of the Tories by threatening an outbreak and providing the excuse for a militarist reaction in England. It is time the American observer faced the truth of that. No reason in that why England should not do justice to Ireland, but excellent reason for bearing in mind that these bright-green young people across the Channel are something quite different form the liberal English in training and tradition, and absolutely set against helping them. No single book has ever shown how different they are, as completely as this most memorable novel.

What do you have against baboons?

Eddie Izzard does biblical history. Via Atheist Media Blog.

Today is the greatest . . .

Of course, today is MLK Day, and so it is incumbent upon conscious people to both remember the man and what he stood for. But this proves to be a tricky procedure, as it turns out, because the MLK remembered on television and in our culture at large is not the man himself, but the safe, historically triumphant saint of civil rights. We should remember, also, that he was an agitator who spent the last years of his life denouncing US foreign policy in general, and the Viet Nam war in particular. Fair.org has a link up about this version of MLK that we don't tend to remember today, the one that Ronald Reagan did not want to canonize.

So, how best to remember the man? First and foremost, we have to re-remember MLK in his totality--not as a historically isolated, single-issue spokesperson whose dream was "realized," as is often said. Rather, it behooves us to honor the man by acknowledging the failures of the civil rights era, the miles we still need to traverse, and the long-enduring and still active presence of racism in our society.

My favorite commentator on this topic has got to be Tim Wise, a public speaker and civil rights activist who has dedicated his life to unveiling the prevalence of racism and white privilege that remains in our society. In addition to being the absolute best rhetorician I have ever seen (I've heard him speak on three different occasions), Wise is the authority on institutional racism and the cultural inertia that has prevented MLK's dream from being realized. Watching Wise is always a potent and enervating reminder of the failures of civil rights, and the absurdity of how this holiday has become part of a self-congratulatory ideology of arrival rather than an impetus toward systematic reform.

Wise speaking on MLK Day in 2007:

Old

Just the other day, my friend Mitch was telling me that by the end of the year, the United States will likely have only one living veteran of the First World War. And today I saw this on the BBC:

France's oldest WW1 veteran dies

One of the last two surviving French veterans of World War I has died at the age of 110.

Louis de Cazenave, who fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, died in his sleep at his home in Brioude, central France, his son Louis said.

Mr de Cazenave's death leaves Lazare Ponticelli, also 110, as the last "poilu", or French WWI veteran.

You probably feel the way about this that I did--surprise that there are any surviving veterans. Wikipedia has a full entry on the remaining veterans, though it should be noted that many of those who are "veterans" never saw action, or, in the case of the US soldiers, ever set foot on the continent.

Update: Mitch informs me that we just lost a WWI veteran.

Lunacy

Salon's got an awesome article up about lunar resources, and asks the question, "Who owns the moon?" (Hint: It's not you.)

Lunar soil is rife with platinum group metals, which are exceedingly rare on Earth and are key to helping hydrogen fuel cells operate efficiently. Then there's the real golden ticket: helium-3, deposited on the moon's surface by radioactive solar winds. When combined with deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen, helium-3 can initiate fusion reactions so potent that scientists estimate a single space-shuttle load of the stuff could power all the homes and businesses in the United States for a year.

"The moon contains 10 times more energy in the form of helium-3 than all the fossil fuels on the Earth," former Indian President Abdul Kalam told attendees at 2004's International Conference on Exploration and Utilization of the Moon. Gerald Kulcinski, director of the University of Wisconsin's Fusion Technology Institute, thinks helium-3 could potentially power future long-distance space travel, though it could take decades before a commercial helium-3 reactor becomes available.

Via Geraldo Canavan.

Friday links

A few nice links from BoingBoing today:

If the NC drought doesn't entirely prevent me from having a garden this summer, bee colony collapse will. At least we'll get a fine documentary film about it.

A Japanese team aboard the International Space Station is to release a paper airplane into the earth's orbit. That's called comedy.

And, the police are still taseing people. And it still manages to kill them, even though Tasers are not lethal. We swear.

Repent: The End is Near

Ut oh: This could spell the end of my goofing off (and end my reign of total lexicographical domination).

Facebook asked to pull Scrabulous

Facebook has been asked to remove the Scrabulous game from its website by the makers of Scrabble.

The Facebook add-on has proved hugely popular on the social network site and regularly racks up more than 500,000 daily users.

Lawyers for toy makers Hasbro and Mattel say Scrabulous infringes their copyright on the board-based word game.

Bang of Drum

People Aged 1 to 100 Banging a Drum. Via Cynical-C.

Scar Tissue

Ryan Vu sends along a link from Dennis Cooper's blog, The Weaklings, about facial prosthesis in WWI, a topic that Bitter Laughter broached early in its life. This post has a number of nice images, but I should warn you that they are a bit gory. To the right is an Otto Dix painting showing a facial injury.

The officers had a hard time explaining the concept of a machine gun or the power of an artillery shell to young soldiers who hadn't seen them. A soldier might stick his head out quickly to peek over the trench wall and get his nose shot off, or his chin or his cheek or his eyes and so on. This was a common occurrence on the front. Doctors had no idea how to deal with this swell of facial injuries.

These soldiers were called "The Men with Broken Faces" or "gueules cassées". There were so many of them during and after the war that in some combatant countries, a number of benches were painted blue indicating that the man sitting there would be distressing to look at. They endured total social isolation and alienation. Their faces were taken away from them and transformed on the battlefield to resemble the mud-churned pits of the trenches themselves. These men were the quintessential social pariahs of the day, not only for their specific disfigurement, but because their faces directly embodied the horrors of war and quite literally bore the inescapable reality of what we are capable of doing to each other. They often only found solace in each other and gave up any hope of leading a normal life. A unique brotherhood was formed where they pressed for their right to have underground social places of their own where they could be together without frightening the general public. Some of the veterans even took their families and started their own small communities far away from general society.

Part of what fascinates me about the facial prosthesis of the "Great" War is that it is in some ways the most extreme and spectacular form of prosthesis that proliferated after the war. I think it's hard to recover just how mended the streets of Europe looked in the mid 1920s--how many people would have donned crutches, fake arms, etc. But what's really striking about the facial prosthesis is that it is a cipher of the insane distance that science created between technologies of destruction and technologies of reconstruction. WWI inaugurated the century of technology and technological warfare, and the facial prosthesis that followed the war is a sign of just how gruesome this war was. And since we tend to think of World Wars through one of two images--mushroom clouds or gas chambers--the image of the reconstructed face is a reminder of all those figures that physically survived into the century, carrying the wounds of Continent on their bodies.

Joyce Industry

Gerry Canavan has a nice post up quoting a 1946 Atlantic Monthly review of James Joyce's major works, Portrait, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake:

Those who confuse a writer with his material find it all too easy to make a scapegoat out of Joyce. They make Proust responsible for the collapse of France because he prophesied it so acutely; and, because Joyce felt the contemporary need to create a conscience, they accuse him of lacking any sense of values. Of course it is he who should be accusing them. His work, though far from didactic, is full of moral implications; his example of aesthetic idealism, set by abnegation and artistry is a standing rebuke to facility and venality, callousness and obtuseness. Less peculiarly Joycean, and therefore even more usable in the long run, is his masterly control of social realism, which ingeniously springs the varied traps of Dublin and patiently suffers rebuffs with Mr. Bloom. The heroine of Stephen Hero, who has almost disappeared from the Portrait, says farewell after "an instant of all but union." By dwelling upon that interrupted nuance, that unconsummated moment, that unrealized possibility, Joyce renews our apprehension of reality, strengthens our sympathy with our fellow creatures, and leaves us in awe before the mystery of created things.

It seems to me that this post contradicts Gerry's approving citation of Stanley Fish's invective against the humanizing effects of education in the humanities. I think it's odd how Joyce is always held up as a paradigm of everything beautiful and great about everyday Life (even by post-humanist-minded professor-types), and yet asked to bear the weight of contemporary theory's sharp turn away from such saccharine notions of literature's ability to ennoble the soul. My personal feeling is that Joyce does the former much better than the latter, and perhaps the best argument against Fish is that the professional critics he cites as exemplars of literature's moral inefficacy are not average readers because they read with ill intent--to gain professional knowledge, as he says. But isn't that the hubris of the academy--to presume that everybody reads like professors, thinks (or should think) like professors, and that they have a monopoly on real truth? While I acknowledge my own indebtedness to Fish (he practically made the department in which I now study), I can't help but dismiss him as a curmudgeonly old coot whose own sense of intellectual heartburn discredits any and every pronouncement he makes about literature. That's not to say that I think we should indulge the kind of idealism of the above reviewer too deeply; everything depends on how we appropriate (or fail to appropriate) literary text--on how they are taught. But giving up on Joyce's ability to teach us something about how to live, about the intricate and mundane beauties of the everyday, of what Werner Herzog would call "ecstatic truth," is to relegate Joyce to the margins of the canon. And no matter how often a Fish attempts to discredit the ability of a Joyce to do this kind of work, Joyce continues to assert itself for just that purpose. And it is in this light, I think, that the 1946 review above seems not so antiquated as it does continually relevant.

Quote of the Day

Rick Santorum gets it. And you know when an idiot like Santorum gets it, the Republicans are really in trouble:

“It comes back to, O.K., Romney can’t win, Huckabee can’t win, McCain can’t win, Giuliani can’t win — the dynamic is you have a bunch of candidates who can’t win,” Mr. Santorum said. “I don’t see how we don’t come down to a convention that is going to decide this thing.”

From yesterday's NYT.

Liberal Media

From Democracy Now!

Study: Of Over 2,000 Sunday Talk Show Questions to Candidates, Only Three On Global Warming

A new study by the League of Conservation Voters found that the five major Sunday morning political shows asked the presidental candidates well over 2,000 two thousand seventy questions in 2007. Just three of the questions mentioned global warming.

... According to the League of Conservation Voters, Tim Russert of NBC’s Meet the Press asked 755 questions to the candidates without mentioning global warming.

George Stephanopoulos of ABC’s This Week didn’t mention those two words in any of his 726 questions to the candidates. Neither did Bob Schieffer of CBS’s Face the Nation

According to the League of Conservation Voters, Wolf Blitzer of CNN and Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday were alone in mentioning global warming. Blitzer mentioned it once; Wallace, twice.

And here's a video from the group that produced the report: