Unreading the text

Declan Kiberd's introduction to Ulysses has always struck me as a necessarily lucid critical overture to reading the text itself, with its defiantly non-lucid conception of narrative form. What a coincidence it was, then, and particularly after my thoughts here about Joyce's novel, that a review of Kiberd's new critical work on Ulysses popped up in today's Observer. The reviewer informs us of the bipartite structure of Kiberd's book: the first consisting of chapters which seek to debunk Ulysses' notoriety as a book for elitists; the second a chapter-by-chapter guide. Kiberd is no doubt one of the most reliable guides to accompany readers of Ulysses on their own Odyssean journey, but I am more interested in the arguments put forth in the first section, especially as they concern the binary nature of Joyce's passionately loyal community of readers: on one side the academics, and on the other, the non-academic but nevertheless critically studious readers fascinated more by the pre-critical joy of Joyce's psychogeographic depiction of early twentieth century Dubliners. In other words, the community of readers for whom the book was written: as the reviewer terms it, for the common people; a novel thus conceived to be read in the here and now of the everyday.

Like some third way Joycean, I am somewhere in the middle of this divide. Having studied Ulysses at university three times, twice at undergraduate level and once - and in a much more prolonged and adulatory fashion - at postgraduate level, I think I am ready to unread the text in order to naively experience its linguistic vitality. Thinking about the cycles and recycles of the human mind, I think I am therefore ready to approach Ulysses a fourth time, almost as if I've never read it before, allowing the words to roll around and loll about my head in all their incandescent, discombobulating glory. Perhaps my aim is to submit to Joyce's defiance. How else to enter a world but to be enveloped and dragged through the thicket of the writer?

A Question

Why isn't Britain embracing a radical version of the Left - possibly in some revised notion of Communism - rather than FASCISM?

The argument that because of its past failures Communism has no future in our world doesn't hold any water. What about the catastrophic failures of fascism?!

Considering the success of cooperative movements in Britain (and, paradoxically, in the north of England, where fascism is at its strongest), Marxist principles can and do work. The challenge seems to be the application of principles, which is dependent on collective action based around mutual respect, trust, and strong levels of decency.

There's the rub: you will find none of these qualities in fascism. In fascism, collective action centres around an unreconstructed, animalistic, primeval notion of superiority, aided and abetted by - predominantly male - violence and aggression. Fascism channels such urges, causing a catastrophic short-circuiting of the human mind.

Hopeful

A touching story here from the Observer. A touching story full of decency.

Hope(less?)

As the United States of America embraces hope and invests wisely in its future through Barack Obama, a not insignificant number of the British electorate might (or might not; I don't know which is worse now) go to the polls this Thursday and vote for a party that is rotten at its core and will almost certainly, given any amount of power, cause British society to crash headlong into indecency.

A cross written in the unequivocally wrong box also marks that voter's descent into a life of non-conscience.

I am of course referring to the British National Party. The thought of this party gaining any more power depresses me.

I cannot emphasise this enough: IT DEPRESSES ME.

And we think MPs have gone off the rails! Let's wait until Thursday to see if the British electorate joins them.

Cycle/recycle

Do the workings of the human mind have natural cycles?

If we read Ulysses in our early twenties, are we likely to remember it later, or are we condemned to an impressionistic view of how the novel feels rather than what it actually says?

I suppose this is natural for reading memory.

Having read Ulysses in my early twenties, I have no choice but to read it again now, in my early thirties, if I am to recover my prior thoughts on the text, or if I am able to remember Ulysses at all.

Outside of the book, life sifts through the hourglass. The mind develops or evolves - depending on which model of mental progress you subscribe to - and with it your receptivity to the text. Ulysses will be different now than it was then, insofar as mental development or evolution allows. Some would say this is maturing with the text. As I walk the streets, I carry Ulysses around with me in spirit, conjuring up images of its printed pages as if evoking its iconoclastic spirit. What I am invoking here is my attachment to the written word, which has always been the dominant influence on my own self-formation. My affinity with the written word or language in general, in fact, is thickening at a rate I myself am not determining. Is this another natural cycle?

Things are falling into place. At last! I think I understand what is meant by the materiality of the word! I'm still not sure whether I ultimately understand what is meant by this, other than some nebulous sense of the word as a shape-shifting, vocalisable element in the toolbox of the intellect. In any case, for me the materiality of the word has something to do with that feeling of individual words forming in my head, revolving in order to reveal meaning on the other side. And all further revolutions of this word will uncover other meanings. No two sides are the same, or so the mind thinks.

Perhaps I'm not making myself clear. Such is language.

So: three years? Five years? Ten?

Duration is subjective. It can be the mother of all invention, allowing for the entrance of the Muse. The flip side is an ineluctable erosion of the mind. Perhaps the two are neutralising; the Muse comes forth because mental erosion clears memory space. Or stuff gets buried in the ever deepening pile of the palimpsest.

You Did Cause Offense

Jonathan Ross has no control over the many thousands of instances of homophobia that go on every day, day in day out, across our green and frequently unpleasant land.

This is why his recent comments against gays are offensive and irresponsible. He may not be homophobic, but a large percentage of the millions of viewers whose unreconstructed homophobia he reinforces with such words, ARE. And they are the people who make my life a misery.

The BBC needs to get its act into gear. They repeatedly refuse to accept that those under their patrician wings are causing offense to a minority community they have the responsibility to represent. Yes, you're right: gay people are not exempt from the licence fee. To look at the BBC these days, you'd think we were.

Three Books

The first two are striking as examples of beautiful book production, but of course primarily for their content. The third book struck me in a different way: it seems timely, and appears to detail a phenomenon which to my knowledge has received scant attention from historigraphical quarters.

Homage

In light of her death, some questions have been put to Judith Butler and Didier Eribon about Kosofsky Sedgwick's legacy.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009)

The eminent queer theorist, Distinguished Professor at CUNY, and author of such pathbreaking works as Epistemology of the Closet and Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, has died at the age of 58. The obituary in the Guardian can be read here.

Mahler in New York

Professional pains were tempered by personal pleasures, especially for Alma, whose “circle had become so large that [her] day was filled up and organized.” Over the years she and Mahler grew increasingly comfortable in New York. The couple traveled the Long Island Railroad to Oyster Bay, where they visited with Laura Roosevelt, cousin of Teddy Roosevelt. Back in Manhattan, the Mahlers explored the city in all its splendors, dining at the home of Louis Comfort Tiffany on Madison Avenue, visiting an opium den in Chinatown, and touring the tenements on the Lower East Side. They even sampled the latest fad, participating in a séance with one Madame Palladino.

What a flim this would make!

Mahler's symphonies are currently being performed in sequence in New York by the Staatskapelle Berlin and two conductors: Daniel Barenboim and Pierre Boulez.

What we're up against

A couple of years ago I walked past James Street station in Liverpool with a few friends. Liverpool was at its sunniest best; hundreds of people were milling around the Albert Docks, the restaurants were full to capacity, and all was just calmly and nicely going on. Outside James Street station an instance of the uncanny, as if I was suddenly in a flashback to the 1970s: a youth clad in neo-Nazi/neo-National Front gear, gyrating for some unknown reason on the pavement, supercharging the always manic atmosphere of James Street. Where did he come from? Aside from a toned-down, gentler version, as if aping an eighties pop group, I'd never in my lifetime seen fashion like that on an actual person. My suspicion in this instance was that this person was not engaged in some retro-aping of his favourite group; it felt very much like he was the real thing: a neo-National Frontist, a member of the rejuvenated far-right youth, intent on ignoring the BNP's new code of conduct. A tremor of fear went through me. Was this the cycle of history returning to smack us in the face?

Fast forward to this weekend. In the space between that time and now Liverpool had been given half of its city back by a global corporation who had spent over a billion pounds sprucing it up and rebuilding like there's no tomorrow. The city had expanded, and so had the horizons of its citizens. Alfresco dining was put at the very centre of things; elegant criss-crossing walkways to elevated street levels towered above new and happy Scouse shoppers. Liverpool felt and still feels as if it's been given a second chance after the calamitous era of Thatcherism, dockers' disputes, and the Hillsborough tragedy, to mention a few of the epochal events with which the city has had to contend. London-centric journalists will continue to sneer at us, Liverpool's people say, but we love our revitalised, beautiful city. We're even bucking the recessionist trend, they say.

On Saturday afternoon a young Muslim student decides to pray in a corner of the new landscaped Chavasse Park. For reasons of personal privacy, he chooses a discrete area behind the facade and on the decking of an as-yet unoccupied building on the corner of the park. As my friend and I walk past, we are struck by an incongruous gathering: the Muslim gentleman, his wife, and a gaggle of young men dressed in the neo-Nazi gear of supposedly yesteryear. We walk a little further, past the building, but slow enough to act upon this curious discussion taking place. As we walk in line with the opposite end where there is another opening, we see the young Muslim brushing himself down, flabbergasted. The gaggle of neo-Nazis had vacated the scene. My friend and I go over, realising that something bad has happened. The young man explains as he brushes himself down with a hygiene wipe given to him by his wife, that the youths had questioned his right to pray, to be there, in that spot and in England, as a Muslim and as a Saudi Arabian. (The neo-Nazis wouldn't have got so far as to discover where this young Muslim was from, or whether he was in fact from anywhere but England, Scotland, or Wales.) My friend and I were shocked, sick to the stomach, for two reasons: clearly for the incident, but also the quickening realisation that what we had witnessed was a targeted act of fascism. The neo-Nazis had thrown a can of Stella Artois at the Muslim gentleman and his wife, and it sprayed the decking on which he had been praying. Offensive in more ways than one, then: as an act of aggression, but more specifically as an act calculated to cause offense against this young gentleman's faith; of offending what had been temporarily claimed as a space for Muslim prayer: alcohol consumption not one of the rituals of Islam, of course.

Chavasse Park is owned privately as part of Liverpool One, so security staff are on hand to assist in situations like this. The staff concerned assisted with sympathy and direct action. The young gentleman returned to prayer after we bid our good wishes and farewells, and my friend and I walked off to our bus home, shaken, perturbed, and fearful of and for the future.

It is our belief that more of these incidents will occur. Not that we wish to augur them into existence. The time travelled between the moment on James Street and the incident on Saturday has clearly seen a vile progression in fascist behaviour amongst some youths. They are now prowling our sun-soaked cities on Saturday afternoons, infiltrating the Goth crowd, skulking in corners, but also proudly displaying their fascist credentials amongst the picnicking masses in Liverpool and elsewhere. To reiterate: the time elapsed between northern English cities' depression and rejuvenation has been so long as to allow for a vile historical return in the form of neo-fascist youth.

Much of what my friend and I have been thinking and discussing coalesced in some articles, opinion pieces, and an editorial in last Sunday's Observer. Their measured and eloquent editorial highlights the contemporary BNP strategy of distancing the party from aggression and violence:

The BNP works hard to shed its skinhead image. Rule No 1 of its "language and concepts discipline manual" tells activists not to identify the party as "racist". Rule No 4 instructs them to obey the law. What kind of organisation needs to remind its members not to be thugs?

Then there is the following letter from a Liverpool resident:

Shame on the streets of Liverpool

It was with great sadness that I saw the BNP canvassing in Liverpool city centre on St George's Day (23 April), two days after the death of a true patriot and Liverpudlian, Jack Jones.
Maura Kennedy
Liverpool

One would have to be naive and in total denial to suggest that the incident on Chavasse Park and the BNP's canvassing of Liverpool were unrelated. The rise in support for the BNP runs parallel with the return of neo-fascism in public life. On Saturday I witnessed this in the form of direct action taken against an individual who for the neo-fascists concerned poses a threat to racial, cultural, and social purity precisely because he holds up a different faith and cultural tradition to their white-supremacist mentality. One need only to scratch the surface of BNP statements and policy to discover that their brethren are without doubt the same aggressive, violent, and racist thugs.

For those who would like to know more about Jack Jones, read here. A true patriot, a true Liverpudlian, a hero, Jack Jones' life was given over to social justice for his neighbours and distant 'brothers and sisters' elsewhere in the world. A truly exemplary man.