Anna Burns, Milkman
Milkman by Anna Burns My rating: 5 of 5 stars “I did not like twentieth century books because I did not like the twentieth century,” says the narrator of Anna … Continue reading
Against Celebration: Bloomsday vs. Dallowayday
Two years ago, Elaine Showalter suggested that we balance Bloomsday (June 16, the day whereon Joyce’s Ulysses is set) with Dallowayday: Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is set … Continue reading
Bloomsday Notes: Jung on Joyce
The emergence of a literature which is predominantly concerned with the exploration of both a social reality and individual consciousness is a relatively recent phenomenon. Its first clear manifestations date … Continue reading
William Butler Yeats, The Tower
The Tower by W.B. Yeats My rating: 5 of 5 stars In my review of Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist, I casually referred to “Yeatsian idealism,” to contrast the … Continue reading
Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist
Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney My rating: 5 of 5 stars Thinking, for what should be obvious reasons, about previous Anglophone poets who won the Nobel Prize, I … Continue reading
Bloomsday Thoughts: Blasphemies, Monuments, Traditions
The nightingales are singing near The Convent of the Sacred Heart… —T. S. Eliot, “Sweeney among the Nightingales” Joyce was an apostate, renegade, heathen, exile, dissident, blasphemer—and so perhaps the … Continue reading
Samuel Beckett, Happy Days
Happy Days by Samuel Beckett My rating: 3 of 5 stars Fascinating but not my favorite. Evidently Beckett regarded Winnie as a kind of earth mother spirit, indomitable, and I … Continue reading
