Max "Bunny" Sparber

I'VE DEVELOPED A HABIT, in the past decade, of doing all sorts of introductory or peripheral reading when I am interested in something. I may not be a very careful reader, as I said in my last post, by I am a very wide reader -- I sometimes compare my understanding of the world to the Platte River in Nebraska, which is, in some places and at some times, supposed to be a mile wide and an inch deep. So I'm starting this project, not by reading James Joyce, but by reading about James Joyce. Specifically, I have started with a book called Introducing Joyce by David Norris and Carl Flint. There were a whole lot of these "introducing" books that came out in the late 90s, introducing everything from mathematics to Wittgenstein to ethics, and all used roughly the same format: A cleanly written essay on the subject embedded in a series of witty illustrations, almost like a long cartoon about deep subjects. Carl Flint was responsible for the illustrations in this one, and he tends to draw Joyce as something that looks like an anvil with a long, pointed noise, elephantine ears, smallish eyes with little round glasses, and a perpetually thoughtful expression.

The results are quite cursory, of course, but that's fine, as I always like to start with the barest of bones and then move on to something more complicated. So we get a bit of Joyce's biography, a bit about his love of Dublin, and a smattering of literary criticism, as well as brief illustrative selections from his writing and encouraging words to tell us that, even though we may find Joyce very, very difficult, we should persevere anyway, and we shall be rewarded, which is exactly the sort of encouragement that would make any reasonable drop the book and flee the room, sobbing the whole way. I am not reasonable, however, and much of what I read sounded quite fascinating, even though, as the book moved toward discussing Finnegan's Wake, it became increasingly hard to comprehend, and then exploded into a sort of a dazzling vision of literary madness, with Dublin taking on the form of a sleeping giant with an enormous obelisk erection, and the Liffey river suddenly becoming a woman, and the language suddenly becoming this: "slipping sly by Sallynoggi ... giddy gaddy, grannyman, gossipaceous Anna Livia."

I think a few others just fled the room, streaming tears behind them.

This won't be the last book I read about Joyce, but it's enough to get me started, and I plan to start with Chamber Music, a very early collection of his poems that is considered a very minor example of his writing, but occasionally springs into the public view thanks to the fact that: a) it is in the public domain; and, b) that the poems are intended to seem like song lyrics, and so, every so often, somebody sets them to music. I shall be setting some of them to music too, because if I am to do this reading project, which demands active engagement with the text, I might as well engage it as actively as I can. Writing a song based on something somebody else has written is about as active an act of engagement as I know, and its one of the approaches I will be using to address Joyce. Others will include reading the text aloud, memorizing it, and, possibly, burying it in the earth at a crassroads with a garland of garlic about it.

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