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The composer Otto Luenig recounts a meeting with the writer where he talked about remembering Dublin: "As Joyce described a street, he began with the kinds of cobblestones ... He made vivid the sounds of horses' hooves, and the sound of footsteps on the cobblestones, and their different echoes; and then the smells -- musty sometimes, sometimes of dirt and sometimes of the fresh, or dried, horse-manure that he called 'horseapples.' He illuminated this street of the mind by describing how it looked at different times of the day, in different kinds of light. He talked about the shops with their particular stoops, entrances, and colours, and why some looked like poor, and some like rich, shops." [cite]
"Snow: frost, moon, pictures, holly and ivy, currant-cake, lemonade, Emily Lyons, piano, window sill.Tears: ship, sunshine, garden, sadness, pianoforte, buttoned boots, bread and butter, a big fire."
These he fleshed out into simple vignettes:
"In the first the flow of ideas is tardy. It is Christmas, in Galway, a moonlit Christmas Eve with snow. She is carrying picture almanacs to her grandmother's house to be ornamented with holly and ivy. The evenings are spent in the house of a friend where they give her lemonade. Lemonade and currant-cake are also her grandmother's fare for her. She thumps the piano and sits with her dark-complexioned gipsy-looking friend Emily Lyons on the window sill.In the second the ideas are more rapid. It is the quay of Galway Harbour on a bright morning. The emigrant ship is going away and Emily, her dark friend, stands on the deck going out to America. They kiss and cry bitterly. But she believes that some day her dark friend will come back as she promises. She cries for the pain of separation and for the dangers of the sea that threaten the girl who is going away. The girl is older than she and has no lover. She too has no lover. Her sadness is brief. She is alone, friendless in her grandmother's garden and can see the garden, lonely now, in which the day before she played with her friend. Her grandmother consoles her, gives her a new clean pinafore to wear and buttoned boots, a present from her uncle, and nice bread and butter to eat and a big fire to sit down to."
I enquired about Ulysses. Was it progressing?"I have been working hard on it all day," said Joyce.
"Does that mean that you have written a great deal?" I said.
"Two sentences," said Joyce.
I looked sideways but Joyce was not smiling. I thought of Flaubert. "You have been seeking the mot juste?" I said.
"No," said Joyce. "I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of words in the sentence. There is an order in every way appropriate. I think I have it."
"What are the words?" I asked.
"I believe I told you," said Joyce, "that my book is a modern Odyssey. Every episode in it corresponds to an adventure of Ulysses. I am now writing the Lestrygonians episode, which corresponds to the adventure of Ulysses with the cannibals. My hero is going to lunch. But there is a seduction motive in the Odyssey, the cannibal king's daughter. Seduction appears in my book as women's silk petticoats hanging in a shop window. The words through which I express the effect of it on my hungry hero are: 'Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.' [U8.638] You can see for yourself in how many different ways they might be arranged."
--Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses," pp19-20
"For certainty the motive of an artist -- of all artists, whether they are conscious of it or not -- is to give pleasure to others.' JAJ to Max Eastman (E598)A writer's purpose is to describe the life of his day, he [Joyce] said, and I chose Dublin because it is the focal point of the Ireland of today, its heart-beat you may say, and to ignore that would be affectation. (Power, 97)
"I want the reader to understand always through suggestion rather than direct statement." (JAJ to Budgen, 21)
Budgen: "Some of your contemporaries," I said, "think two books a year an average output." "Yes," said Joyce. "But how do they do it? They talk them into a typewriter. I feel quite capable of doing that if I wanted to do it. But what's the use? It isn't worth doing." (Budgen, 22)
At intervals, alone or in conversation, seated or walking, one of these tablets was produced, and a word or two scribbled on it at lightning speed as ear or memory served his turn. (Budgen, 176-77)
I wondered when Joyce found time to write. At night, he said after the lessons were over. (Beach, 38)
With this eye trouble, wasn't it difficult for him to write? Did he sometimes dictate? "Never!" he exclaimed. He always wrote by hand. He liked to be held back, would otherwise go to fast. He had to see his work as he shaped it word by word. (Beach, 39)
"If there is any difficulty in reading what I write it is because of the material I use. In my case the thought is always simple." (Budgen, 291) [more]
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Ulysses:
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4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12a
12b
13
14a
14b
15a
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15c
15d
16a
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18a
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Tower :
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[B-L Odyssey] :
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Circe :
1904 :
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Finnegans Wake:
txt:
[I.1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
II.1
2
3
4
III.1
2
3
4
IV] :
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