Windbag

Jul 07, 2010

For ten years in the 1960’s my mother worked as a proof-reader for a small town New Hampshire newspaper, The Concord Monitor. Tucked into a miniscule cubicle that was wedged between the linotype operators and the clattering print machines, she spent five mornings a week reading galley proofs of local and national news, everything from presidential primaries—it was New Hampshire, proud possessor of the first state primary in the country—to items about bass fishing, snow removal, Little League scores, bingo tournaments and Sunday church services. In elementary school and junior high at the time, I would occasionally drop by to see her. Even for a small circulation paper, the print room was a scene of chaotic activity, and the decibel level was, if my memory isn’t exaggerating, awesome. You didn’t talk to the person right next to you. You shouted.

I’m reminded of the scene at the Concord Monitor when I reread the “Aeolus” chapter in Joyce’s “Ulysses.” As anyone who’s spent any time with this magnum opus knows, each chapter of “Ulysses” is characterized by a set of seven salient characteristics: the scene (where in Dublin the action takes place); the hour (what time of day it was on June 16, 1904); the designated body part; the “art;” a color; a governing symbol; and finally something mysteriously referred to as “technic,” a zany category which can range anywhere from “narcissism” to “peristaltic.”

The “Aelous” chapter takes place in another noisy, chaotic press and print room, that of Dublin’s Freeman’s Journal and National Press. As a piece of virtuoso writing it’s both a parody and a wild, fantastically baroque toccata on the subject of verbal rhetoric. The performers are a group of middle aged Irish men who’ve gathered in the office and antechamber of the paper’s editor for no particular reason other than to shoot the breeze—most are there because they’ve just been to a funeral and don’t feel like returning to their regular jobs. They would prefer to be imbibing but fear that to indulge so soon after a funeral would be a show of disrespect. The characteristic “organ” of this chapter is the lungs, and its “art” is rhetoric. In the Homeric epic Odysseus is aided by the god of the winds, Aeolus, who tries to help him make his way back to Ithaca by putting all the “adverse winds” in a bag so they won’t blow Odysseus off course.

In the Joyce chapter the talk is largely “hot air,” with multiple opportunities for this or that character to wax flowery and bombastic about whatever springs to mind. Some of the bloviating is extremely funny as only the Irish can be.

I love this chapter because it springs out of the gloom and moody introversion of the previous “Hades” chapter like a feisty, in-your-face Charles Ives march—the middle movement of “Three Places in New England,” for example, or the scherzo to the Fourth Symphony. The chapter is full of noise, both verbal and ambient. The huge cylindrical drums that print the sheets of newsprint roll violently in three-four time: “THUMP thump thump THUMP thump thump…” Yelling, barefoot newsboys—“guttersnipes,” in the words of one of the men—make a racket in the hallway. An editor barks orders at someone. Four or five loitering Irishmen all talk at the same time, one trying to pose a lame riddle, another repeating an off-color joke while a third makes fun of a pompous piece of writing in the latest edition. It’s all a cacophonous counterpoint, deftly orchestrated.

What an ear Joyce had! During the seven years it took him to complete “Ulysses” he always kept as a vade-mecum a little notebook into which he scribbled anything that he happened upon that might be of use to him in his novel—a bar room ballad, a Norse etymology, a news item about a crime, a patriotic song, etc. etc.

Both Charles Ives and James Joyce enjoyed constructing dense polyphonies made up of often apparently unrelated elements. They shared a love for musical and verbal found objects, and their multi-layered compositions are crammed with fragments of popular melodies and lyrics, often placed side by side with a reference to a great thinker or artist from the past—Dante or Homer or Giambattista Vico in the case of Joyce; Beethoven, Emerson or Abraham Lincoln in the case of Ives.

My mother’s family was half Irish, and my memory of family gatherings is full of the same kind of gab and repartee that I find in the Aeolus chapter. The Catholic Church is never far offstage. One moment it’s the butt of scurrilous humor, and then a minute later it becomes the source of a sudden seizure of nervous piety.

Walter Pater, the aesthetic philosopher and art critic that I recently dragooned into a piece about Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary”, comes to mind again here. Pater’s most famous quote was doubtless familiar to James Joyce: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” It’s one of those memorable little apothegms that are just a tad too perfectly packaged not to be suspect. Nonetheless, the idea of a literary tour de force like the Aeolus chapter, with its loud, boisterous, scherzo-like horseplay, does in its own way aspire to the same sort of chaotic high comedy that Charles Ives, writing at nearly the same historical period, imagined.

Comments (13)

emma smore
July 7, 2010

"miniscule cubicle"...god, I love your writing, Dr. Adams...

Eamonn
July 9, 2010

Brilliant piece. Well you have to come to Ireland. Your spouse must also have Irish roots.

I'm sure you are aware that Joyce was a singer (light tenor) and there are recordings of him singing. A lot of the poems Ecce Puer ( about his father) or Sleep Now, O Sleep Now would be ideal as songs.
Also, it seems there is an obvious correlation between his work Chamber music and music. One section of Chamber Music: Golden Hair set to song by no less than Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd.
Lean Out of the Window

Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair,
I hear you singing
A merry air.

My book was closed,
I read no more,
Watching the fire dance
On the floor.

I have left my book,
I have left my room,
For I heard you singing
Through the gloom.

Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair.

http://theotherpages.org/poems/joyce01.html

I love this photo of him: I was wondering if he would lend me five shillings! http://www.themodernword.com/joyce/jj_1904.html

Doug Palmer
July 10, 2010

In 1907 A guy named G. Molyneux Palmer set some of the Joyce poems, with Joyce's enthusiastic approval.
Joyce expressed the wish that they could all be set, calling them songs.

I set four a few years ago for a salon, they were received warmly.

"I hear an army charging upon the land"
Can be sung to the tune of "Lili Marlene"

Some of it anyway.

eamonn
July 10, 2010

Thanks Doug
I wasn't aware of the poems being set to music. I didn't know that about I hear and army and Lili Marlene but will give it a go tonight

Doug Palmer
July 11, 2010

Being facetious, the first line of army suggests Lili to me and I can't get it out of my head.

David
July 12, 2010

If anyone can do something playful with what is, in fact, such a funny text, Finnegans Wake, it's you. Yes? No?

Completely off topic, but since you don't mention it in your wide rangings here, did you get to see the Barbican/Stratford East production of I Was Looking...? I'd say, though I didn't see Peter Sellars's production when it came to Edinburgh, that it truly arrived here with this staging. The seven young singers are all absolutely remarkable. They'd have to be to pull it off: God, it's tough! And some of us have been earwigged by countless little themes and riffs.

Mark k
July 12, 2010

In the absence of anything perceptive to say about James Joyce, here's a link with a bygone day of yore : a man playing his wind instrument :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKX3U5Pnf5Q&feature=related

Eric Dolphy playing bass clarinet.

Doug
July 13, 2010

I tried to set the last few pages of FW, as Anna drifts out to sea, it was terrible.

Eamonn
July 18, 2010

John Cage's Roaratorio is based on Finnegan's wake. It is a great work.
http://www.moderecords.com/catalog/028_29cage.html

Finnegan's Wake is itself a famous song
http://www.thebards.net/music/lyrics/Finnegans_Wake.shtml

Songs in Finnegan's Wake.
http://www.james-joyce-music.com/finnegans_wake.html

Lynn Biederstadt
July 21, 2010

This, I truly understand. The Celt in me made me a writer; the flourishing of a gazillion tales told fireside. The tiny German part made me sullen; the bigger, better Irish part made me glad of it. Thank you again, John, for making my word-day as well as my listening day.

Eamonn
July 28, 2010

Dublin wins Unesco title as city of literature http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2010/0727/1224275545743.html

Francisco Campos-Lopez
July 28, 2010

Dear John:

My name is Francisco Campos-Lopez, I'm an award-winning Filmmaker and Music Video Director. I'm originally from the Chile-Argentina Area. Now I'm living in the US, where I'm developing my career in an exciting way with a variety of projects. I'm very young but I feel my Director's career is taking off little by little.

During the last month of February, I was spending some time with my family at my small hometown in the south of Chile and sadly the major Earthquake in February struck my area. It was devastating. It crippled our nation and for myself as well. But as an artist that experience inspired me and I organized forces with some production companies in the area. I raised a little money from donations and I shot a film, entitled "Aftershock", about the supposed big aftershock that everybody was waiting after the big earthquake. I shot it at real locations, using unknown actors to have this sense of raw reality. But at the same time, something that really inspired and moved me, was your Musical work, the piece is called "Shaker Loops". It was the perfect match for my footage and the perfect music for my editing, etc. So I've used 2 tracks of "Shaker Loops: during postproduction. The sound and image postproduction was entirely made in the USA.

Now we are about to release the film. It is ready for the worldwide release. we don't have any commercial purposes under such a delicate theme for my nation and the world. It will be for free in our website, we believe in sharing this material to spread this kind of awareness that the film is about.

I would like to release the film, having your authorization if possible. In order to be able to use your music without any commercial purposes what so ever. Of course you will receive credit and mention in any press release. I am personally a big fan of your work and I feel a great admiration and respect, you are a very cinematic and A National Treasure.

So if you could please help me to obtain your authorization and the one from his Record Label as well I would appreciate it very much.

Best Regards

Looking forward to meet you in the near future.

Francisco Campos-Lopez
Director & Screenwriter
202-569-7642
carteludo@gmail.com

Toner Quinn
August 16, 2010

Readers may be interested in this piece by Irish writer Barra Ó Séaghdha about John Adams: http://journalofmusic.com/article/1185

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Hell Mouth is a blog about music (mostly contemporary), literature (mostly good), politics (mostly pernicious) and culture (mostly American). It is written by John Adams with the help of several “friends” who live in the redwoods of coastal Northern California.