September 27, 2017 Our Correspondents Joyce’s Unpunctuated Rigmarole of Numerical Spangablasm By Anthony Madrid An seventeenth-century shilling. Joyce was good. He was a good writer. He makes me grumpy a lot, especially Ulysses, but he was good. There are at least twenty irresistible qualities to Ulysses. At or near the top of the stack, at least for me, is the way he traffics in what I call “hyperrealistic unnecessaries.” Shakespeare was like that, too. Sprinkled all through his plays are these exchanges that are not at all essential to the plot but that “ring true” in some surprising way, causing one to turn ’em over and over in one’s mind, pleasurably. FIRST PLAYER But who, O who, had seen the mobled queen? HAMLET The “mobled” queen? POLONIUS That’s good. “Mobled queen” is good. The above is especially ticklish because Hamlet, a moment before, had sputtered in indignation at Polonius’s having interrupted the player’s speech. Suddenly, surprisingly, and delightfully, Hamlet himself interrupts—and deflates the very speech he was just defending. And then Polonius reverses himself as well! Moreover, the fact that the whole thing turns on the word “mobled” raises the pitch well into the “exquisite” range. (The best Simpsons episodes are full of this kind of thing, as well.) But to return to Joyce: the unnecessary bits that are just so perfect are everywhere in Ulysses. I want to unpack one of them from my favorite chapter (chapter 1), for the benefit of American readers who have absolutely no idea how traditional British money works. Here is the passage: Read More
September 20, 2017 Our Correspondents The Little Shoppe of Negativity By Jane Stern Chalk it up to synchronicity, but within an hour I opened a package in my mailbox and found a patch I ordered for my baseball cap that says, BECAUSE FUCK YOU, THAT’S WHY. Then I drove half a mile into town and saw a new store about to open. It was called the Little Shoppe of Positivity. I wanted to throw a brick through the window. I have no idea what kind of merchandise they will carry in the Little Shoppe of Positivity, so I asked some friends having coffee at that café next door what a positivity shoppe would sell. “All kinds of angel paraphernalia I would imagine,” one said. “Needlepoint pillows with positive thoughts,” said another. “I don’t know, but every time I drive by it I feel happy,” said a third. Now I needed a second brick. Read More