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 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.
Continue readingI’ve recently returned to my re-reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I’m finding the final chapter more interesting than ever before — and funnier! I’ve laughed out loud several times reading it, including one scene that I’ll discuss here in this post, a scene in which a strange character repeats himself. I compare it below to a recurring gag on my favorite television show, The Sopranos, and I reflect on the significance of Joyce repeating a moment from his own life, enshrining it in art in a way reminiscent of what William Wordsworth called a “Spot of Time.”
Close readings of Joyce, reflections on life, and fragments of pop culture — all this and more on today’s post!
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The Suspended Sentence 