Monday, August 13, 2012

The Ulysses Book Club

There's a temporary book club organized by my co-worker Tom from Classics I Forgot to Read and regulars of the Modern Lit Book Club which I wanted to draw attention to.  The purpose is to read James Joyce's Ulysses over the course of three meetings, occurring on the following dates: September 20th, October 18th, and November 15th.  Meetings are held at Books Inc in the Marina, 2251 Chestnut in San Francisco at 7 PM.  The idea is to read roughly a third of the book before each meeting.  Fabulous idea.  I'm hoping to pull myself together enough to read this thing and make the meetings, but we'll see.  In any case, I think this club could possibly give Finnegan's Wake Popcorn a run for its money in SF Weekly's "Most Pretentious Book Club" category, if Modern Lit hasn't already given an adequate showing...  On top of that, both Classics I Forgot to read and the present book club will continue normally scheduled meetings on the last Wednesday and second Sunday of each month, respectively (see the post below for information about our selection for September).


One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, Ulysses has had a profound influence on modern fiction. In a series of episodes covering the course of a single day, June 16, 1904, the novel traces the movements of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through the streets of Dublin. Each chapter has its own remarkably innovative literary style, and the book is one of the great, extended tours de force of stream-of-consciousness narration. It is an essential stop in any tour of English literature.
This marvelous edition reproduces in facsimile the original 1922 text. Today critical interest centers on the authority of the text, and this edition republishes for the first time, without interference, the original 1922 text. Equally important, Jeri Johnson's editorial material is acknowledged to be by far the best there is. Her textual apparatus--notes, introduction, stemma of published versions--is unsurpassed. Johnson strikes the perfect balance between what readers need to know in her notes and introduction. Her fantastic explanatory notes begin by giving the time and location of each episode and a description of the correspondence with the episode in Homer being paralleled. In addition, the introduction is a model of scholarship and lucidity, leading the first-time reader through the intricacies of the text.
This edition also includes a full list of errata, a Composition and Publication History, an up-to-date bibliography, a chronology of Joyce's lie, a map of Dublin of the period, appendices reproducing Gilbert and Linati schema (i.e. the tables that set out the symbolic significance of each episode in the novel by title, hour of the day, place of the action), and much more. It is the perfect introduction to the crowning work of modernist literature.



Friday, August 10, 2012

André Gide - Lafcadio's Adventures

The Confidence-Man discussion will be on Sunday at 7, usual spot.  Should be a great jam.

Next month I'm predictably and regrettably going back on my promise not to pick a dead white bearded French male author for at least a few months.  André Gide Lafcadio's Adventures has simply been on my shelf for too long... it was the first thing that sprang to mind when prompted for a selection, so it must be taking up too much head space in these realms.  I'll make up for it next month....  I think Lafcadio should appeal to members of this club for its supposed mystery content, not to mention Nobel Prize-winning authorship, for what that's worth.  Discussion is at 7 PM on September 9th.


Passing with cinematographic speed across the capitals of Europe, Nobel laureate André Gide’s Lafcadio’s Adventures is a brilliantly sly satire and one of the clearest articulations of his greatest theme: the unmotivated crime.
When Lafcadio Wluiki, a street-smart nineteen-year-old in 1890s Paris, learns that he’s heir to an ailing French nobleman’s fortune, he’s seized by wanderlust. Traveling through Rome in expensive new threads, he becomes entangled in a Church extortion scandal involving an imprisoned Pope, a skittish purveyor of graveyard statuary, an atheist-turned-believer on the edge of insolvency, and all manner of wastrels, swindlers, aristocrats, adventurers, and pickpockets. With characteristic irony, Gide contrives a hilarious detective farce whereby the wrong man is apprehended, while the charmingly perverse Lafcadio—one of the most original creations in all modern fiction—goes free.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780375713385