#james joyce pub

[colonellickburger]

Evelyn Hofer. Mulligan’s, James Joyce’s Pub. Dublin 1966

[literarylondonhq]

British Spanish ‘Literature’. Oh and drinking..!

Some of the Brit Gang tonight! An all Brit’ Pub Crawl tonight! Preparing to enjoy some ‘inspiration’ at Bradley’s Spanish Bar. Join us! We’re out every Saturday – or why not book a private soiree! http://www.LondonLiteraryPubCrawl.com

[theperfectpints]

The Temple Bar, Dublin

[evermoredeluxe]

How Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Took Over the Entire World

By Chris Willman

By Alissa Gao for Variety

On the morning that Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” is about to begin a three-night stand in Dublin, the older gentleman taking charge of my passport at airport customs has clearly had his fill of Swifties, probably processing them by the hundreds already today. When I reveal myself to be one too — despite being arguably the wrong gender, inarguably old and lacking a telltale “Lover” mascara star over my right eye — his disdain is palpable. Suddenly, I’m getting way more screening questions than anyone not on a watch list should. “What do you like about her?” he sneers, peering up over specs.

This is probably the wrong time for me to point out Swift’s Irish heritage, or to assert that she is this generation’s James Joyce. (The original king of the Easter eggs, right?) I wouldn’t really go that far — I’m only on record as doing my best to certify her as this century’s Beatles. Trying to figure out how to answer him, the past 18 years of extolling Swift in print flash before my eyes. I end up murmuring the bare minimum: “Um, her songwriting.” This seems to disturb him further. He snaps back: “Aren’t they all the same song” — a slight pause, and I know what’s coming next — “about her breakups?” Then, abruptly, he stamps me through, sparing me a detour to Interpol for more grilling.

In the cab into town, the driver is blasting a local talk-radio personality sharing his dismay about the fans of an awful superstar taking over his country. The host reads an email sent in from a hater who says, “A year ago, when tickets went on sale, my partner and I made a reservation to take our kids out of the country this Friday morning. … Thank you for creating a safe space with your show.” I start to wonder if Swift might have met her match at the Cliffs of Moher.

But from my drop-off forward, the next three days are like living in a Swift-topia. The mile and a half to Aviva Stadium each night is like Disneyland when it shuts its doors early for an affinity group. Whether stopping in the pubs or walking through the charming neighborhood of Victorian brick homes adjoining the fancy new stadium, there’s that warm feeling of people who are united by one quality: They are all super in touch with their feelings — or else they wouldn’t be Swift fans. And they all are happy to stop on the street or over pints to talk about poetical expression. (Well, except for the occasional taciturn, invariably straight young male who has signified his supportive-plus-one status by wearing a jersey bearing the name of Swift’s Super Bowl beau, Travis Kelce.)

So it is that I end up chatting with a middle-aged gay man in a sequin-covered shirt whose female companion whispers to me, while he steps away to trade friendship bracelets with a 10-year-old girl and her mum, that Swift’s music just helped him through a difficult breakup. The girl then runs off to trade her homemade bracelets with a pair of high-helmeted Dublin policemen loaded up to their own elbows with friendship swag — unexpected accessories for long arms of the law.

All the stories about American Swifties swarming overseas to catch “The Eras Tour” turn out to be true: You couldn’t swing a neon golf club around here without hitting a Yank. Approximately one out of every five fans I approach is visiting from the States — and the jubilation they’re feeling about the night’s impending concert is compounded by the fact that nearly all of them financed a European vacation and a concert ticket for roughly the same amount they would have paid on a secondary ticketing site for a typical four-figure ticket to one of last year’s predatorily repriced U.S. shows.

Remember the venerable stereotype of the Ugly Americans, brusquely trampling over refined Europeans in their travels? Thanks to Taylor Swift, who has a gift for laying out global welcome mats, this is the summer of the Spangly American.

At the stadium on night one, just down the row from me are a group of millennials from New Jersey, several in glam unitards inspired by the “Lover” or “1989” portions of the career-spanning show and looking like they were costumed by Swift’s own designer, with fake jewel-encrusted microphones to match. I ask how many hours went into perfecting these nearly pro-grade outfits.

“About 80 hours for mine,” says Megan McLaughlin. “Hers probably longer,” she adds, nodding toward one of her sisters, Margo Steinberg. “She knows all the glues and the best gems.” Indeed, confirms Steinberg, “I was working on mine since January. And, yes, I did quit my job to finish it!” She adds, when I ask if she cares to share any secrets to a particularly good look, “You have to use the B-7000 glue.” (A third sister, Amelia McLaughlin, admits she resorted to buying her spangly dress off Etsy — “I was doing a PhD, but I had to match these girls’ enthusiasm” — while a fourth, Carolyn McLaughlin, skipped the glitter and went for a red dress that matches Swift’s from the “I Bet You Think About Me” video.)

Certainly, there is an element of cosplay to many of the fans’ outfits. Some have seen footage of the new segment Swift added to the tour beginning in April 2024 — devoted to her most recent album, the 31-song “Tortured Poets Department” — and have managed to manufacture gowns that look like they’re made of paper and feature lyric excerpts printed on them in script, à la Swift’s custom-made Vivienne Westwood dress. I meet a group of American women who became friends as literature majors in college who have “Tortured Poets”-themed outfits, one duplicating the Westwood dress and the other with handmade printouts of the latest album’s lyrics pinned all over her black dress, as if she were literally pulling pages out of Swift’s playbook.

It’s the devotion to lyrics, even more than glitter, that is most impressive about the bespoke outfits fans have concocted for the occasion. There are scores and scores of Swifties wearing homemade T-shirts — sometimes singular, sometimes matching with a friend, like walking Burma-Shave signs. Some of the messages are obvious, like the dozens of laddies wearing “It’s me, hi, I’m the husband/boyfriend/father, it’s me” shirts. (Bet that seemed really original at one time.) But a lot of them refer to more obscure songs or stanzas, as if every nearby street or stadium loge section is full of human Easter eggs, begging to be unpacked. It’s hard to think of any other superstar in the history of stadium tours who could have inspired as much fan-crafted clothing rooted in the power of words.

Combos of middle-aged mothers and their teen or 20-something daughters abound; some of them have seized on Swift’s mentions of her own mother, Andrea, to come up with their T-shirt ideas. On Lansdowne Road, I talk to a mum whose red-on-black shirt says, “Had to listen to all this drama,” accompanied by a daughter bearing the legend, “And here’s to my mama.” (This is a reference to Swift’s song “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things.”)

Later, in a stadium Guinness line, I chat up a pair of thirsty locals, the daughter’s shirt reading “I call my mom, she said …,” with the mom’s shirt completing the thought: “It was for the best.” (Damn it, I had to Google to recall that’s from a “1989” Vault track that came out last year.) I ask the daughter if she had to explain to her mom what she was wearing. “She’s 52,” she replies. “I don’t think she knows.”

Age is really no guarantor of not getting it — the popular #SwiftieOver50 hashtag on X proves that. Although outnumbered, plenty of older people are unaccompanied by a minor, or by anyone who has been a minor in the past 20 years. I approach a middle-aged couple, Jean Sebastian Conley and Natasha Gagne, again bidden by their matching shirts — “Who’s Taylor Swift?” and “Who’s Travis Kelce?” They turn out to be French Canadians who found their 206-euro SRO tickets to be a steal compared with the extravagant resale prices they briefly considered back home after being shut out of the initial on-sale. I ask what attracted them to Swift since, unlike so many others here, they didn’t grow up with her.

“I really fell in love with her with the ‘Folklore’ album,” Conley says, referring to her low-key Grammy-winning album recorded during the early months of the pandemic. “I think different audiences and older audiences found her through that and ‘Evermore’ because they were more singer-songwriter, a little bit rougher indie music, and that’s what we like most. So that’s how I got hooked.” For her part, Gagne says, “I like everything she represents. And when she redid all her masters, that’s where I thought she was a lady boss.”

It’s a reminder that, for however many mini-narratives Swift packs into the three hours and 20 minutes of an “Eras” show, there are really four or five years of backstory that feed into the audience’s shared awareness. When she sings the ominous ballad “My Tears Ricochet,” accompanied by a coven of stone-faced dancers, at least some fans will understand it as a distant reflection of her very public feelings about the men she considers her business bêtes noires, Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta, who bought and sold (respectively) the rights to her first six albums, spawning much vitriol as well as four “Taylor’s Version” rerecorded albums to date.

When the dancers put their grins back on, Swift plays an ebullient excerpt of a very recent “Poets” bonus track, “So High School,” which every person in the crowd will know is inspired by Kelce. There are some breakup songs of recent vintage too — yes, Mr. Customs Man! — like “The Smallest Man in the World,” which may or may not have cost Matty Healy, the 1975 frontman and former Swift paramour, a night of sleep.

The whole tour is themed around not just the newer records but the rerecordings that have made every older album in her catalog feel improbably fresh. It was, quite possibly, the single most baller move in the history of the record industry … and led to the career-retrospective concept for what is already unquestionably the biggest tour in the history of popular music.

Any discussion of the charms of fandom isn’t meant to forestall discussion of “The Eras Tour” as big business. The numbers are fuzzy because Swift’s camp does not release grosses from her shows, unlike nearly every other artist at the stadium or arena level. Even when the tour wraps after 20 months on Dec. 8 in Vancouver, it seems likely those numbers will continue to be guarded with a zeal on par with the government of North Korea’s. Many industry experts believe the gross will approach or even surpass $2 billion.

What is known for certain — even without a confirmation from Swift World — is that she broke the all-time tour-gross figure when she hit the $1 billion mark, whenever exactly that might have been. The two trade publications that specialize in the touring industry have slightly differing estimates: Billboard calculated a cumulative gross of approximately $900 million when she took a break at the end of 2023, figuring that she would crack $1 billion shortly into the tour’s resumption in April, while Pollstar estimated that she had passed $1 billion by the conclusion of last year. Any way you guesstimate it, Swift took less than a year to break the previous record of $939.1 million, which Elton John grossed with his “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” tour across nearly three years of shows.

One source close to the production said early in the “Eras Tour” era that her average gross each night is $14 million. Others believe that is a highly conservative estimate, with a possible total that on at least some nights edges closer to $17 million. One remarkable aspect is that this does not include the revenue from any inflated resale tickets — which, as anyone who has tried to get tickets through Vivid Seats or StubHub knows, mostly have gone for several times their face value. It was little publicized, but Swift had “dynamic pricing” turned off for her ticket sales, possibly to avoid the controversies Bruce Springsteen encountered when the face value on some of his tickets leaped to the four-figure range upon their first sale. Swift left money on the table by not participating in the scalping of her own tickets, which had an average price of around $230 and topped out at $499, excepting VIP packages, which zenithed at $899 — all well short of what some other superstars ask nowadays. Of course, neither Argentina nor anyone at Wembley Stadium ahead of Swift’s opening night performance in June will be crying for her when she’s in reach of $2 billion without the resale inflation … not to mention the hundreds of millions of dollars in merch.

(This is extraordinary also because Swift hasn’t done any press to promote the tour, except for when she was selected as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in December. But she doesn’t need to — the tour is constantly being celebrated on social media with every outfit change. And it’s also become so huge, it’s featured more A-list sightings than the Oscars, from Julia Roberts to Tom Cruise to Stevie Nicks, who had the surprise song “You’re on Your Own, Kid” dedicated to her in Dublin.)

Benson Boone, whose “Beautiful Things” is the most-streamed song of 2024 in the U.S. and the world, says he felt dwarfed when performing as the opening act at one of Swift’s seven shows at London’s Wembley Stadium. He has forever committed to memory the exact attendance figure he was given for the night: “89,497,” he says. “Just her stage alone is bigger than anything I’ve ever seen — 300 feet of it!” he says. “I took in every moment. It was cool for me to experience another artist’s world and learn from it. I want to work that hard and be the captain of my ship.”

Although it’s maddening to a media that likes official box office reports and can’t get them, it’s easy to see the wisdom in not flaunting those figures if you’re a superstar artist who counts on being seen as relatable. Swift certainly is proud of breaking records — she posted a tweet when “The Tortured Poets Department” spent its first 12 weeks at No. 1 on the album chart, one of only three albums in history to do so. But she’d rather count fan impressions than dollars. By the same token, she doesn’t publicize or confirm acts of generosity that leak out, like the sizable food-bank donations she makes in every city she tours, or the $100,000 bonuses that the tour’s 50 truck drivers reportedly got for Christmas.

An addendum to all this is how the “Eras Tour” film — released last fall, less than halfway through the actual tour — grossed just over $180 million domestically and $261 million globally, beating the records set by Justin Bieber’s concert film in the U.S. and Michael Jackson’s globally. Massive big-screen spoilers only heightened, rather than diminished, resale demand for the shows yet to come on the 152-date tour and helped precipitate the movement among Americans to head overseas, to make up for the supply found sorely lacking at home.

“She is the torchbearer for the live industry,” says Andy Gensler, editor of Pollstar. “It’s nothing we’ve ever seen before, and it’ll be a long time before we see it again. Her timing was exquisite: The pandemic created this yearning and hunger for live entertainment like nothing else in our history, so she couldn’t have picked a better time to go out.” Pollstar called last year a “historic golden age” for touring, as the top 100 global tours collectively surpassed $9 billion — up 46% from 2022 — with Swift obviously contributing a significant chunk of that total. (This year, the trade reports that overall tour attendance is down, with flat grosses, representing a slight reckoning for the live industry that, obviously, isn’t impacting “Eras.”)

“What my partners and I talk a lot about is how it’s one thing to have a big tour in North America. It’s another thing to have an equally big tour wherever you are in the world and to do doubles and triples in these markets,” says Bernie Cahill, an Activist founding partner and manager of acts including the Grateful Dead and the Lumineers. “It’s an anomaly. It’s not normal. And don’t forget, you’re going into what I call asymmetric venues, which are venues that are not really built for music; these are venues that are built for football games or soccer games and can be very challenging to do music. And they get it right every time — Louis Messina [Swift’s tour promoter since her earliest days] and his team are world-class.” But for all that globe-trotting, he notes, “there are some artists that you see do a show and you know they don’t even know what city they’re in. I always feel like Taylor knows exactly where she is. She has a relationship with that city or that market and those fans and she’s connected to them in ways that are very authentic, that you can’t fake.”

The one big snafu in the rollout of “The Eras Tour” occurred in November 2022 when the Ticketmaster system melted down after too many North American dates went on sale at once, causing thousands of fans to experience long delays. The on-sale broke the all-time record for tickets sold in a single day at 2 million, but it also nearly broke the world’s largest ticketing platform. Swift herself was Teflon in this situation, as the blame fell on a ticketing system not capable of handling so much of the Swift-loving world at once. And although most of the problems people have with Ticketmaster are different from what fans faced in the “Eras Tour” debacle — mainly, hidden fees and monopolistic practices — it could have big legislative consequences anyway. Dean Budnick, co-author of “Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry and How the Public Got Scalped,” believes that the Swift hullabaloo was the main catalyst for Congress enacting reform. “There’s no question that perhaps there’s gonna be some meaningful change in ticketing as a result of what people experienced with that on-sale.”

That sense Cahill spoke about of the singer making it clear to an audience she knows exactly where she’s at is in full force in Dublin. Swift introduces the “Folklore”/”Evermore” segment by suggesting that she had a spiritual locale in mind when she started writing that more intimate material, locked in during the first part of the pandemic. “It keeps me up at night all year long: Which era is the most Irish?” she half-jokes to the crowd. “I’m gonna make a case for it being ‘Folklore’ … This album’s imaginary world had a whole aesthetic — like I lived in this cabin in a really green, nature-y, moss-covered landscape. You see where I’m going?… Another thing that I think makes it more Irish than the other eras is, ‘Folklore’ was all about storytelling. And I know you hear this a lot, but you guys are naturally gifted storytellers, right?”

Later on, Swift will cement the local connection by playing, as a “secret” surprise acoustic song, “Sweet Nothing.” She doesn’t have to give the crowd any explanation for that: From the first notes, Irish Swifties will immediately recall that the lyrics reference to the coastal town of Wicklow. The real cherry on top of the show for locals at any international Eras Tour stop, though, comes with a customized moment each night during “We Are Never Getting Back Together” when the spotlight is put on backing dancer Kameron Saunders for a couple of seconds, as he blurts out something locally appropriate, and cheeky. One night in Dublin, it’s the Irish catchphrase “the neck of ye!”; on another, he yells out “pog mo thoin,” meaning “kiss my ass!”; the massive, knowing laugh that inside joke gets makes it clear this isn’t entirely an audience of American tourists after all.

But the basic theatrics and emotional currents remain consistent from show to show. If Swift is surprisingly reticent to make her “Eras Tour” numbers public, that may be, in part, her desire to keep the focus primarily on a personal fan connection. Music industry veterans are taken aback by Swift’s ability to be giant and intimate onstage. “She’s a master marketer of herself — and she is not afraid to be vulnerable to her fans,” says Michele Bernstein, who runs a consultancy that works with stars like Drake. Bernstein could almost be quoting the lyrics of “Mastermind,” where Swift describes herself in almost comically omniscient terms, then dives into a bridge about how no one would play with her as a little girl.

People like my guardian of the customs gate may complain about Swift’s songs centering on her romantic splits, but that subject matter magnifies her own insecurities and weaknesses, expressed in genuinely eccentric wordplay, in ways that keep the audience in thrall to someone they perceive as a humble underdog as well as a veritable cage fighter. She could do a $10 billion tour someday and still keep the crowd enraptured by how she measures up to, or rallies to exceed, the smallest man — or men, or Kardashians — in the world.

This plays out in the “Eras” show in all sorts of symbolic ways, like the new segment in the “Tortured Poets” section where she seems to have fainted from the vapors of failed romance. Dancers in tuxedos try to revive her while a swing version of “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” plays over the PA. A pair of women dressed as nurses fit her with what looks like a majorette’s uniform — or, with all its off-white stripes, is it really meant to resemble a straitjacket? The resemblance is probably not coincidental. Swift fans know there’s nothing like a mad woman.

The most exhilarating moment that has been added to the show this year has her gliding down the ramp on a platform, appearing to anyone at floor level like she is levitating like the witch she makes herself out to be in “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?” Taylor Swift: She was Agatha all along!

Yes, there is much to unpack. But in Dublin and in every other city where “Eras” has alighted, there is also pure inspiration for those who maybe haven’t always felt like they’ve had a voice, whether it’s her LGBTQ+ fan base or, well, women. It’s a modern transmutation of Beatlemania in which Swift manages to be all four Fabs, and a mirror, as well as object, of that gaze. You don’t have to be a woman to experience the explosion of pure female joy that takes place on a mass scale at an “Eras” gig, but for men, it doesn’t hurt to have a healthy sense of where you might sit on the female spectrum.

Outside Aviva Stadium, two young Londoners have formed their own two-woman straight-gay alliance: One is wearing a shirt with the hand- drawn words “You’re obsessive and crazy,” and the other’s shirt has the phrase “You’re gay,” each with an arrow pointing to the other. This echoes the original lyrics to Swift’s 2006 oldie “Picture to Burn,” which was rerecorded after some were offended by “gay” as a possible teen epithet. “I am obsessive and crazy, and she is gay,” laughs Zoe Gibson, pointing to her friend, India Day. “We want to bring back the original lyrics. We never found them homophobic — we want to reclaim it.” Day adds, “We’ve listened to her since we were 4 years old, so obviously there’s the nostalgia factor. But for me, she speaks on quite a lot of issues like gay rights and feminism, and all of her songs perfectly sum up the experience of being a woman.”

Some of the shirts are apropos for Pride Month. Seeing a boy of no older than 15 or 16 wearing a homemade “But Daddy I Love Him” shirt (the title of a “Tortured Poets” fan favorite), it’s easy to imagine some courage was required to don that apparel. Along the same lines, I spot any number of women making their own statement in shirts with the modified exclamation “But Daddy I Love Her.”

Gay or straight, 6 years old or 60-something, female or just female-allied, the crowd inside gets its sway on early in the show, with the arrival of the gentle, waltz-time “Lover.” It’s not one of the big set-pieces of this nonstop Broadway-style production — the spotlight is just on Swift and her acoustic guitar — but it might be the one where the entire audience feels like it’s at a four-minute campfire. No wicked witchiness here, just winsomeness.

Down on the floor, I’m seeing what amounts to a Taylor Swift mosh pit: gangs of two or three or five young women, ignoring the fact that Swift herself is just yards away from them on the ramp. They’re singing and acting out every last line to each other, as if the superstar isn’t even towering right over them. A waste of their euros? Hardly. Swift will capture their full attention again as the show proceeds, but in the moment, she isn’t just a superstar — she might be the world’s greatest community organizer.

[fanfican]

An Important Lesson from the Authors Who Came Before Us

We all know the story of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Childhood friends, high school sweethearts, and university rivals.

They showed up at Cambridge with trunks full of typewritten stories featuring talking lions, magical rings, a demon named Screwtape, and a dragon named Smog.

Their Creative Writing professor, James Joyce, famously suffered a fit of apoplexy when he first read their writing. He was so furious over their whimsical stories that he banished them from his classroom and forced them to work as unpaid innkeepers at his pub. He told them they could only come back once they proved they'd learned enough about the "real world" to write stories about "real things, like eagles and children."

Professor Joyce was forced to admit them back into his classroom when Tolkien wrote his eagles into Middle Earth and Lewis created the Pevensie children to visit Narnia. Their contemporary, Bede Griffiths, alleges that Joyce could be heard raging and screeching about how the clever young authors had willfully misinterpreted his assignment as far away as Gertrude Stein's Edinburgh apartment!

I remember this moment in history every time my professors tell me that I need to change my writing--when they try to get me to conform to a dying format. When they tell me that my Land Before Time fanfiction isn't appropriate for a class on Immigration Stories and Travel Narratives. When they tell me that my Babe fics "can't" be considered an essay on Orwell's Animal Farm.

Won't they feel silly in a few decades, when there will be sold-out university courses focused on studying work like mine.

There's a reason James Joyce's work has never been turned into movies. There's a reason his fandom is practically nonexistent.

The only reason we know his name is because he was a footnote in the intertwined heroes' journeys of authors who weren't afraid to try something new.

[ernmark]

I just stumbled across somebody saying how editing their own novel was too exhausting, and next time they'll run it through Grammerly instead.

For the love of writing, please do not trust AI to edit your work.

Listen. I get it. I am a writer, and I have worked as a professional editor. Writing is hard and editing is harder. There's a reason I did it for pay. Consequently, I also get that professional editors can be dearly expensive, and things like dyslexia can make it difficult to edit your own stuff.

Algorithms are not the solution to that.

Pay a newbie human editor. Trade favors with a friend. Beg an early birthday present from a sibling. I cannot stress enough how important it is that one of the editors be yourself, and at least one be somebody else.

Yourself, because you know what you intended to put on the page, and what is obviously counter to your intention.

The other person, because they're going to see the things that you can't notice. When you're reading your own writing, it's colored by what you expect to be on the page, and so your brain will frequently fill in missing words or make sense of things that don't actually parse well. They're also more likely to point out things that are outside your scope of knowledge.

Trust me, human editors are absolutely necessary for publishing.

If you convince yourself that you positively must run your work through an algorithm before submitting to an agent/publisher/self-pub site, do yourself and your readers a massive favor: get at least two sets of human eyeballs on your writing after the algorithm has done its work.

Because here's the thing:

AI draws from whatever data sets it's trained on, and those data sets famously aren't curated.

You cannot trust it to know whether that's an actual word or just a really common misspelling.

People break conventions of grammar to create a certain effect in the reader all the time. AI cannot be relied upon to know the difference between James Joyce and a bredlik and an actual coherent sentence, or which one is appropriate at any given part of the book.

AI picks up on patterns in its training data sets and imitates and magnifies those patterns-- especially bigotry, and particularly racism.

AI has also been known to lift entire passages wholesale. Listen to me: Plagiarism will end your career. And here's the awful thing-- if it's plagiarizing a source you aren't familiar with, there's a very good chance you wouldn't even know it's been done. This is another reason for other humans than yourself-- more people means a broader pool of knowledge and experience to draw from.

I know a writer who used this kind of software to help them find spelling mistakes, didn't realize that a setting had been turned on during an update, and had their entire work be turned into word salad-- and only found out when the editor at their publishing house called them on the phone and asked what the hell had happened to their latest book. And when I say 'their entire work', I'm not talking about their novel-- I'm talking about every single draft and document that the software had access to.

[artmialma]

James Joyce’s Pub Ireland 1966

[imaginefinneganswake]

... and during mighty odd years this man of hod, cement and edifaces in Toper's Thorp piled building supra building pon the banks of the livers by the Soangso.

Finnegan’s Wake - James Joyce

ChatGPT4o critical interpretations (Created ChatGPT):

This passage from Finnegans Wake is dense with Joyce's characteristic wordplay and allusion, and it invites several layers of interpretation. Let's break it down in parts and explore possible critical interpretations.

1. "mighty odd years"

Joyce often plays with time in the Wake, and here the phrase "mighty odd years" evokes a long, indeterminate stretch of time. The word "odd" here might suggest something unusual or out of the ordinary, hinting at the peculiarity of history and memory in the Wakean universe. It could also play on the idea of "odd numbers," furthering the sense of uncertainty or irregularity. Time in Finnegans Wake is not linear but cyclical, echoing Vico’s theory of recurring ages of civilization, and thus "mighty odd years" could gesture toward the mythic timescales involved in human history and development.

2. "this man of hod, cement and edifaces"

This phrase clearly suggests an archetypal builder, perhaps even alluding to the Masonic tradition, where the "hod" (a tool for carrying bricks or mortar) signifies manual labor, building, and craftsmanship. The mention of "cement and edifaces" ties this figure to construction, both literally and symbolically. The man may be a representative of human civilization's striving for permanence and structure through architecture, which in Joyce’s world, is often a metaphor for language itself—building blocks of culture, tradition, and meaning.

This could be a veiled reference to HCE (Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker), the main protagonist who is often portrayed as a "builder" of sorts, both in the material and social sense. As the patriarchal figure of the Wake, HCE is frequently associated with civilization-building efforts, from constructing cities to founding societies. Joyce intertwines the literal and metaphorical "builder" with the act of storytelling itself—each layer of meaning is a brick in the edifice of Finnegans Wake.

3. "in Toper's Thorp"

"Toper's Thorp" seems to be a blend of two concepts: "toper" (a heavy drinker) and "thorp" (an Old English term for a village or hamlet). This could be read as a winking reference to the recurrent motif of alcohol in Finnegans Wake (think of the pub as a site of storytelling, myth-making, and the cycles of human fallibility). The blending of these two words suggests a place where drink and community converge—possibly referring to the fallible, human aspect of society. The "thorp" could also evoke ancient or medieval communities, underscoring the cyclical passage of time from early human settlements to the modern city.

4. "piled building supra building"

This line vividly evokes a sense of architectural layering, which could symbolize the way civilizations build upon the ruins or foundations of their predecessors. The word "supra" also suggests a hierarchical or metaphysical layering, alluding to the construction not only of material structures but of ideas, languages, and histories. Joyce’s technique often involves palimpsestic layering—stories within stories, histories buried under layers of time, and meanings that stack upon one another like bricks.

The idea of one building being "piled" upon another could reference the recursive, self-referential structure of the Wake itself, where texts and traditions accumulate meaning over time. Each "building" could be a nod to previous narratives, histories, or even earlier parts of Joyce’s own work, all constructing the edifice of the novel.

5. "pon the banks of the livers"

The "livers" here is likely a playful fusion of "livers" (the organ, which filters and sustains life) and "rivers" (the flowing, life-giving water often symbolizing time and memory in Joyce’s work). This blending evokes the River Liffey, which plays a central role in Finnegans Wake as both a geographical feature and a symbol of life’s continuous flow. Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is closely associated with the river, embodies the cyclical nature of time and feminine creativity in the novel.

The "banks of the livers" could also be understood as a metaphor for the thresholds or boundaries of life and history, where human efforts to build civilizations are constantly influenced by the natural, organic flow of time (the rivers/livers). The pun on "liver" as a bodily organ adds a biological layer to this interpretation, emphasizing the body’s integral role in the cycles of life and death, further complicating the line between organic and inorganic structures (bodies vs. buildings).

6. "by the Soangso"

"Soangso" is a playful reduction of "so-and-so," which in English idiom implies something indefinite or deliberately vague. This obfuscation of the specific place name fits with Joyce's technique of rendering places mythic or universally applicable through partial erasure of their specificity. It’s also a characteristic Wake joke, pointing to the arbitrariness of place names and the fluidity of identity. Joyce might be suggesting that these grand human efforts—building civilization—occur everywhere and nowhere, always unfolding at the same time, in the same indeterminate "Soangso" location.

Additionally, "Soangso" could hint at the substitution of one place or civilization for another, implying the ephemeral nature of human achievements. If read as a commentary on historical recurrence, this construction on the "banks of the livers" (the constantly changing flow of time) takes place "by the Soangso," an anonymous site where all human civilizations meet the same inevitable fate.

Synthesis: Symbolic and Mythic Layers

In totality, this passage from Finnegans Wake functions on both a literal and a symbolic level. The literal image of a man piling buildings on a riverbank recalls the story of human civilization’s attempts to assert dominance over nature and time through construction. Yet, as Joyce often implies, these efforts are fragile and temporary, always washed away by the flow of time (the river).

On a mythic level, the passage taps into Joyce’s cyclical vision of history, where all acts of creation (be they physical buildings or the creation of art and culture) are part of a larger, eternal recurrence. The builder could be read as HCE, the archetypal figure of the Everyman, who rises and falls throughout history. The banks of the river represent both the boundary of human existence and the eternal, flowing stream of consciousness and history that underpins Joyce’s novel.

Critical Perspectives:

Post-structuralist readings might focus on how this passage destabilizes the binary between construction (stability, permanence) and deconstruction (the flowing, ephemeral river), showing how meaning itself is always fluid in Joyce’s text.

Psychoanalytic interpretations could link the builder figure to Freud’s theories of civilization, repression, and the return of the repressed—especially considering the "liver" as a body organ processing emotional life.

Viconian readings would emphasize the cyclical view of history, with civilizations rising, building, and ultimately crumbling, only to be reborn in new forms.

Linguistic and Derridean analysis could delve into Joyce's use of puns and portmanteau words, which break down and reconstitute meaning in layers, much like the buildings piled upon each other.

This short passage, rich in metaphor, encapsulates many of the broader concerns of Finnegans Wake: history, memory, language, and the eternal cycle of construction and destruction.

[lakecountylibrary]

Read -> Reading -> To-Read

Here's what's been in Beth's TBR pile lately!

✅ Just Finished:

The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods

This magical novel is a love letter to books, readers, authors, libraries and bookshops. Traveling between 1922 and a modern timeline, Woods captivates the reader by weaving magic with reality. She builds extremely strong, passionate and complex women in Opaline, Martha and Madame Bowden while keeping in line with the events evolving around them. Small but special appearances by James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway will delight readers, as will locations in France, England and Ireland.

Last Call at the Local by Sarah Grunder Ruiz

A charming rom-com, especially perfect for March (set in Cobh)! Raine and Jack's charisma and connection will have readers chuckling and cheering. Jack has OCD and runs the LOCAL pub. Raine has recently dropped out of medical school, copes with ADHD and travels the world playing music. Full of lovable characters, readers will breeze through this novel and feel full-hearted after.

♾️ Currently Listening: Factory Girls by Michelle Gallen

Perfect match for viewers of series Derry Girls. Maeve Murray and her friends work in the local factory as they await the results of their exams and what they hope will be the start of their new lives—away from their small town and The Troubles.

🔮 To Read: We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland by Fintan O'Toole

I'm looking forward to reading this author's viewpoints on growing up in a changing Ireland. The prelude indicates a promising journey through his experiences.

See more of Beth's recs

[thequietabsolute]

— People do not know how dangerous lovesongs can be

James Joyce — Ulysses, from episode 9. Scylla and Charybdis

[pub., Shakespeare & Co., Paris, 1922.]

[bandiera--rossa]

At Mulligan’s' James Joyce’s Pub, on Poolbeg Street.

Dublin 1966

Evelyn Hofer

[minipliny]

The James Joyce "Live, Laugh, Love" Irish pub

[yr-bed]

I know when to go out; I know when to stay in

From "How Colm Tóibín Burrowed Inside Thomas Mann's Head":

"Tóibín’s appetite for social life is reminiscent of one of his idols, Henry James, who accepted a hundred and seven invitations to dinner in London during the winter season of 1878-79. Tóibín thinks that his own record occurred in 1981, during his years as a journalist in Dublin: almost every night, he said, he was “out drinking with friends and hanging out in every pub, going to every art thing.” In part, Tóibín is searching, like James, for an anecdote that will grow into a story. The germ can lie fallow in his mind for a long time. His best-known novel, 'Brooklyn'—which was published in 2009, and later was adapted into a film starring Saoirse Ronan—took its inspiration from a chance comment made by a visitor paying a condolence call after the death of his father, more than forty years earlier, when Tóibín was twelve and growing up near the Irish coast, south of Dublin. 'One evening, a woman came and said her daughter had gone to Brooklyn and showed us all these letters,'”' he recalled. 'When she was gone, I heard people saying that the daughter had come back from America and not told anyone she’d married there.' "I asked Tóibín several times why he enjoyed being so busy—was it a way to escape 'the dark side of his soul,' as his Mann character muses in the new novel? Tóibín resists analysis in general. Once, when I inquired if he was happy, he answered, 'I don’t know what you mean by "happy."' This time, he initially quoted the musical 'Oklahoma!': '"I’m just a girl who can’t say no."' But I pressed him, and eventually he said, 'I think I’m sort of sad, and I’m not sad when I’m out with people—the sadness just sort of goes, departs, leaves me.' I wasn’t sure if I’d achieved a breakthrough or been rewarded for my persistence. Tóibín tries to please, if he can."

From "Joyce Carol Oates’s Relentless, Prolific Search for a Self"

In the midst of writing a novel, Oates sometimes felt so powerful—as if singled out—that she was startled when she passed store windows and saw her small, ordinary reflection. She made use of any stretch of free time, plotting the end of a novel while she was getting a cavity filled, or writing in the car on the way to book events. If her writing was going well, she didn’t want to stop ('one image, pursued, exhausted, then begets another'), and if it was going badly she also didn’t want to stop, because she needed to “get through the blockade, or around it, over it under it, any direction!—any direction, in order to live.' (After a few hours away from her desk, revising felt 'as if one is coming home.') Her friend Emily Mann told me, 'I’ve seen her, in the middle of a party, check out, and I think, She’s just written a chapter.' To waste time made her feel 'slithering, centerless,' she wrote in her journal, 'a 500-pound jellyfish unable to get to this desk.' Oates was friends with Susan Sontag, who had a busy social life, and after the two spent time together in New York City Oates told her, 'In some respects, I am appalled by the way you seem to be squandering your energy.' She reminded Sontag that 'the pages you perfect, day after day,' will be the 'means by which you define your deeper and more permanent self.'"

[theperfectpints]

La centralissima Duke Street, nel cuore di Dublino, non poteva che ospitare un pub con una storia così importante. Dal 1822, 'The Duke', concede ai propri clienti un ambiente tradizionale da fare invidia. La sua atmosfera così straordinariamente intima è stata capace di sedurre alcuni degli esponenti più rilevanti della moderna letteratura irlandese. James Joyce, Oliver Gogarty, Arturh Griffith. E poi Brendan Behan, Flann O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh. Insomma, una compagnia di tutto rispetto. La facciata del pub, ristrutturata nel 1890, non ha subito ulteriori modifiche, riuscendo a conservare inalterati i propri tratti distintivi, in primis semplicità ed eleganza. Il classico interno tutto legno e pochi fronzoli lo rendono decisamente accogliente: l'indiscutibile sobrietà è un facile incentivo per bere pinte, sorseggiare un whiskey e gustare qualche piatto 'made in Ireland'. Magari godendo della buona musica tradizionale irlandese. In sostanza, un pub autentico. A due passi da Grafton Street, Temple Bar e St Stephen's Green. 🇮🇪🍻🥃🎻

© Irish tales from Rome

[breitzbachbea]

tell me what have you seen in ireland? uwu

Oh my god. Oh myyy god. I'LL GLADLY TELL.

So, I did just stay in Dublin bc I like to really get to know one place on my own terms instead of hopping from place to place and only see a bit. I did spend one day in Derry, though.

In Dublin, I went to:

- Dublinia, a museum about medieval and viking Dublin. One of the students working there talked his whole shift away with me and became a friend.

- Christchurch Cathedral, where Strongbow is buried

- St. Patrick's Cathedral (even found two of the mismatched tiles, bc 'only God is perfect'!)

- Dublin Castle (Saw the River Puddle! Or is it Poddle? I'm so bad with Irish river names)

- Strolled through St. Stephen's once, but didn't explore much.

- Went to the see the Book of Kells and the Long Hall in Trinity College (their Cicero bust is so funny)

- Went to the Cobblestones pub with a tumblr mutual and it was a lovely evening

- Visited Henrietta Street 14, one of the old Georgian townhouses that tells the stories from the British High Life to Irish squalor in Dublin

- Just walked around in Grangegorman and Phibsboro, bc that is where Harry, Soph and Paddy live (DESPAIR. still have no clue where I want Charlie to reside.)

- Went to the 'Dead Zoo', the national natural science museum.

- Went to the national archaeological museum and saw a cool sword. And got more extra viking info, bc it was with my Dublinia friend.

- Went to the museum of Modern Irish Literature, which was 80% James Joyce. (One room encourages you to write down the beginning of a book and I just left the beginning of a Harry and Charlie One-Shot at the wall).

- Went to the National Gallery and saw some John Keats and Renaissance Era stuff

- Went to the General Post Office Museum with their great contextualization of the Easter Rising with what came before and after. (Love the poster walls that really embed you in the Zeitgeist).

- Went to EPIC The Museum of Irish Emigration. That one was fun, I think.

- What's it called, Merrion Square? Wherever the Oscar Wilde statue is. I went there.

- In Derry, I went to the Guildhall to see their exhibition on the Ulster Plantation. That was cool!

- I also went to the Free Derry Museum, which does such a good job of contextualizing the beginning of the Troubles.

- And I walked the entirety of Derry's walls once!!! And bc the busride didn't go through Belfast, I saw a lot of the countryside in Derry, Tyrone and Armagh.

- Went to St. Michan's to see the Crypt YEHAAAAW. (The bodies are mummified bc of the temperature staying the same, the limestone walls and the methane gas that comes up through the ground).

I honestly may have forgotten something, I'm not sure. It was all in all a great trip and I already ache to return, the same way I ache to return to Sicily. I know it's Scottish and there is no Ocean in sight but ... my bonnie lies over the ocean ...

[colourme-feral]

Encore Martha locations IRL

Encore Martha: The pub that Martha sings at

IRL: James Joyce Irish Bar 愛爾蘭酒吧- 安和, 106, Taiwan, Taipei City, Da’an District, 和平東路三段70號

Credit: https://www.facebook.com/anhebar/photos