This is such a great image, Marilyn Monroe reading ULYSSES, that I knew we’d be using it somewhere on the site. But where? Fortunately, critic Declan Kiberd has made that decision, my job, and the jobs of a lot of Joyce fans a bit easier.

Kiberd’s book “Ulysses and Us; the art of everyday living” smartly puts Marilyn right up in front on your on your bookstore shelves (I just thought you’d want to see the full shot of her here).

The book is getting great reviews and I’m embarrassed to say of not had time to pick up a copy yet as I’ve been so busy with this blog!  Sure to be my next read, but I don’t think it would spoil the ending if any of you decide to tell me what you think of Kiberd’s take on the work.

-Rob

There are many different ways to enter the labyrinth of Joyce’s text and, challenging bastard that he was, Joyce often left many well-intended but ultimately false breadcrumb trails for us to foolishly follow while he sat safely in the the shade of a forest elm  laughing at our academic and misguided assurances of correct navigation. He was, at the end of the day, a genius-prankster, a terribly devious minister of his own sense of modernism, who never missed out on the opportunity to lead pilgrims astray. Hell, he longed for that opportunity and set about finding more and more ways to reach it in the new and uncharted waters of “a fully modern novel.”

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The unfortunate but now-consequently-famous friend of James Joyce who stood as the model for Buck Mulligan is Irish physician and bawdry-poet Oliver St John Gogarty.

Gogarty was much respected by Dublin literary society in later years and the rift between him and Joyce is a fairly unsolvable knot of which man might, in the final analysis, prove to be the greater ego. Particularly interesting in this judgement is Joyce biographer Richard Ellman’s assertion that Gogarty was the man who got Joyce drinking and, as Simon Dedalus might say, “tickled his catastrophe.”

I’m not so sure about how I feel about this growing phenomenon, but I’d be ridiculously short-sighted to not have thought about it.

Twitter is, to my mind, a really perfectly balanced tool for many aspects of new media at the moment but, like facebook before it, twitter may easily take on a Walmart approach to buying and selling in high volume; to my mind that’s  the hell that any good new media application eventually starts building the low-cost paving stones for.

Twitter is no way to read a novel, but an undeniably fresh and arguably useful way to market one. Will this new approach to web 3.0 (god, I hate that term) mean that book groups can exist and thrive in an on-line environment better than they can from localized chapters of O Magazine subscribers? Will tweet-talk replace Thursday night at the local coffeeshop? And would that really be so bad if it did?

-Rob

Yeah, I never heard of this before either, but I’m loving what it can do and where it can go.

A social networking site called Book Glutton is making internet bookclub reading, and public domain sharing, viable and down right attractive.

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