More on A Portrait
There’s been a lot about Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man going up lately, and that’s because I am in the midst of writing a longer critical analysis of the book as it pertains to the same quotation that I begin with here. This paper actually is sort of a short precursor to the longer paper; although, this is rather rough, and hopefully the finished product will be more insightful and fully developed. Regardless, consider this a teaser.
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TBD — The Primer Pt. II
—–14
“The Primer Pt. II,
or Pt. II of its other title”
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A Briefcase Full of Blues
To kick off my analysis of websites, I am beginning with the links on my own blog. A Briefcase Full of Blues is actually a blog that a friend of mine maintains that he posts reviews and the like on. It’s something like a more professional livejournal.
His blog statement:
Welcome back to the Stage of History
What follows is an amalgamation of thoughts about stuff that you may or may not care about. I post movie reviews, though I have no real credentials to be a film critic, save a couple of film courses in college. I also follow the Cubs with a border-lined unhealthy devotion, though I have little to no actual ability to play baseball. From time to time I may blog about other random thoughts as well. Just as my header image might suggest, there is no real rhyme or reason as to what I post here.Many Bothan spies died to bring us this information…
I’m not a Cubs fan (I’m not against them; I’m just not for them). However, if I want to know if a new movie is good, he’s usually the guy I ask. Newspaper reviews, even reviews from popular critics, always seem to have a lingering bias that I cannot appreciate. A Briefcase Full of Blues, on the other hand, provides me with sensible reviews; reviews that are not trying to make a point, but are willing to assess both the good and the bad and provide some background, which is what I really want in a review. He’s offering an educated opinion, but not a formal opinion. He’s smart–he’s a programmer by trade–but he’s a smart guy giving his opinion on things that he is willing to admit he only has a limited background in. Nonetheless, that’s pretty much all of us. And his honest, clever reviews are worth your time if you’re trying to decide to go see something or rent something. He also posts some reviews of comics, and whatever other interests of his take hold at the keyboard. His link is in the Links section of this blog on the right, and here: A Briefcase Full of Blues. I recommend it highly.
Shared Words–Realizing Joycean Epiphanies
There are two ways that Joyce and his epiphanies are discussed in critical analysis. I first came across this notion in an article from PMLA, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Mar., 1967) pp. 152-154, entitled The Epiphanies of Joyce by Robert Scholes and Florence L. Walzl, which is written mainly as a comment on another article by Walzl called The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of Joyce. Each of them has somewhat of a beef with how often the term epiphany gets tossed around these days, and they do some work to try and better define it, so that it can be applied in a way that is clarifying through specificity, rather than obscuring by becoming a vague umbrella term for any occurrence of a realization in literature (I agree with this idea; largely because I’ve seen too many situations where catharsis and epiphany are used interchangeably).
Here are a few important things from that article:
“1. For Joyce the word “Epiphany” designated a prose genre in which he worked.
2. From 1900 to 1904 he wrote over seventy Epiphanies and put them together in a fixed sequence beginning with the famous “Pull out his eyes” Epiphany which appears early in A Portrait” (152)
What is important to recognize is that there is something more to the term, and there is this background that the term evolved out of. And “none [Joyce's epiphanies] were invented. In fact, by his own definition, they could not be invented but had to be recorded” (152).
The second sense of an epiphany is as a thing’s “whatness.” The moment that a thing (basically a noun: person, place, thing, idea) is recognized for what it truly is, is the epiphany. Also the means by which it is brought to light can be considered part of the epiphany. One way to think of it is as the final piece of the puzzle that reveals what the whole picture is, or some hidden detail about said picture. This idea of recognizing essential qualities comes from the epiphany term’s origin in Catholic religious practice: “As to the religious signification of epiphany: the epiphany is universally defined as a visible manifestation of deity, and the liturgical epiphany is such a manifestation in the life of Christ, the account of which is incorporated in the liturgy of the Mass or Divine Office” (153).
I play pick-up games of soccer twice a week with a group that is largely composed of international students (because typically they grew up with soccer and are vastly better at it). We were all taking a drink break (normally we play for 2 hours), and a conversation about marrying into wealth sparked up. The crowd present was all male (although it usually isn’t), and we carried on a bit, had some laughs, and the following bit of conversation came up at the tail end. David isn’t the actual guy’s name; although, we do have a David, and he isn’t “American” in the stricter sense used here, either. With the idea that epiphanies cannot be invented, and instead must be recorded, I have taken this one down here:
“So what about you, David?”
“What?”
“Would you take an average girl if she had all the money in the world, or a pretty girl if she was poor?”
“I’d take the poor girl, and I’d make her rich.”
“Make her rich? You are in America, man. You’re not American.”
The implication seemed to be that someone coming into the country couldn’t make it the way an American born in the country could. I’m not sure if that’s what was meant or not. Regardless, it was something I hadn’t expected, and in spite of it, we were all still laughing.
If you’re looking for a little more on the notion of an epiphany, here are a few links:
Wikipedia’s entry for “Epiphany (feeling)”
New Section & New Ideas — Oh, WWW!
Again, I’ve added a new section to the blog–this time with an eye on the World Wide Web. There is a wealth of literature on the web, as well as blogs about it, and a slew of other types of websites that revolve around the literary world. I encounter a good number of these sites, as one might imagine an aspiring writer would, and I am taking the opportunity to share some of them. I hope to give brief reviews, and while most sites I visit don’t really need traffic from me, I hope that I can collect a nice little database in the new World Wide Web section of the blog. I suppose if I were clever I’d make a Joyce reference and make it the Word Wide Web section, and while I cannot say how long I can resist that temptation, I’m at least holding off on committing such punnery.
TBD #3 — Next in succession
—–10
“The Primer to an Iron Age Daydream,
or perhaps another, shorter title”
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More TBD — Debris
—–6
“Debris
(to be retitled as something more
conventional)”
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Fighting Trim — The start of a new series
I’ve started a new series of poems that are being called “To be Determined,” and can be found in the scrolldown box on the right under “TBD Series.” This is the first piece–expect more to follow!
—–1
“Fighting Trim, or
Some Other Title as has yet to be Determined”
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Derivatives of Happiness
“Mot Juste”
She’s sitting in the backyard,
scribbling down
good reasons to die from radiation poisoning
in her spiral notebook.
She’s a Utilitarian she says,
interested in the best interests
of the rest of us, or all of us,
or something like that.
But I know she’s doing it for me,
even though I never asked her to.
The delicate balance has shifted.
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
To the Lighthouse: The Illusion of Control amidst Chaos
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