I'll be fielding calls, downloading upon request, for friends and family abroad. Not a burden at all, at all, since I expect something in the neighborhood of few to no requests. Not big James Joyce fans, my relations and acquaintances.
While the Irish must suffer in blacked out silence, here in America we can view, online, some excerpts from James Joyce. Things that have not been published, and have been squirreled away by the estate of James Joyce are going to available online for the Joycean scholars to consume with relish, and perhaps a side of fried kidneys. It's what you've waited all your life to read, isn't it?
The release to the internet of this trove of Joycean lore is part of the settlement between Joyce's grandson Stephen, in charge of the estate, and Stanford professor Carol Loeb Shloss. Poor woman had to jump through hoops and travel through hell to get permission to cite some specific material in her book about Lucia Joyce. Following a lengthy trial, the court sided with Prof. Shloss and determined that she could put her data on line at a dedicated website, which is a companion piece to the biography Lucia Joyce: To Dance In The Wake.
In the book that was released in 2003, the Professor expounded on her theory that Lucia Joyce appeared in Finnegan's Wake, and that she was James Joyce's muse as well. Because of restrictions, she was unable to print the quotes and citations that backed up her theory, and she had to sue the estate to protect her name and reputation as a scholar. Ms. Shloss couldn't very well write something and then tell the literary world to trust her on it, and being able to provide the background material that led to her conclusions was necessary, to provide the paper trail by which she navigated.
Thanks to the wording of American copyright law, the Yanks can sit at their keyboards and read away, while the restrictive laws of England and Ireland will keep the screens blank. That's where I come in, assuming any of my family or friends abroad would give a toss about James Joyce or his mentally ill daughter. I'm handy with the copy and paste, I know how to e-mail, and you can rest assured that blocking a website is not going to prevent anyone from seeing the material that the Joyce estate wants to keep hidden.
Sort of like those who bought copies of Ulysses in Europe, when the book was banned in the US, and smuggled it across the border to share with friends. It's just that smuggling bytes is so much easier, and far less bulky.
3 comments:
I knew a kid who tried to read Ulysses for the naughty bits. I based my short story, By The Book, on him.
But we only read it for the intellectual stimulation, of course. Hope your short story was published.
Thanks, but the only place it was "published" was zinos.com, which pub'd just about anything uploaded by writers. I think zinos.com is no longer. My original story was a mere 250 words for a teeny-tiny publication that pub'd 250-words-only stories. Not 249 or 251 words, but precisely 250. Like zinos, that publication bit the dust. However, the process of editing my story into 250 words was a fabulous exercise.
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