Stephen Dedalus famously says in Ulysses, ” A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.”
This post looks at a mistake I made in an online talk, and it considers what it means exactly for an error to be a “portal of discovery.”
Continue readingThe years keep rolling right along — WordPress reminded me this morning that I’ve posted something on every Bloomsday for the past three years, so I now feel like I have to keep the streak going.
On this Bloomsday, I find myself thinking about Joyce’s description of William Blake making breakfast, one that I think was the seed of Ulysses.
Continue readingThe movie Backrooms made a splash this month, turning a massive profit on a meagre budget of less than ten million dollars. The film is noteworthy because it was made by a twenty-year-old Youtuber, who was also responsible for a series of short videos about the titular extradimensional space.
This post suggests that Finnegans Wake can be read as a kind of “backrooms,” a maze that underlies reality.
Continue readingThis post considers Stephen Dedalus’s notion of “esthetic arrest” from the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joseph Campbell’s connection of this idea to the Hindu concept of “maya,” and the development of Joyce’s style in Finnegans Wake.
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The Suspended Sentence 