READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

Day 3 I have accepted the challenge to post the cover of seven books that I love: no explanation, no review, just the cover. Each time I post a cover, I’ll ask a friend to take up the challenge. Meanwhile, here are 100 words on a word in the title: Certain (June) It must have been about June 1975 that I was quoted to by a friend from W.H. Auden’s ‘A Certain World’. Quotes were doing the rounds of the university college where the literature students, a minority in that setting, temporarily led a life they once imagined. The real world might be Law and Medicine, it was also Reading and Writing. The pun speaks of a circumscribed world and a definite world, a known world and a particular world, a reliable world and an assured world.  We undergraduates found the title corny, but the pun speaks of each person’s individual condition.      

Day 2 I have accepted the challenge to post the cover of seven books that I love: no explanation, no review, just the cover. Each time I post a cover, I’ll ask a friend to take up the challenge. Meanwhile, here are 100 words on a word in the title: Map (June)  This map of myriad marks, unfolding pages over a lifetime, when spread out, how to read it? Will it get to the heart of it, flesh out the life that gave it shape? A sentence hangs over me daily, fully formed, or invisible until prompted. I set it out, then another, into contours I can scarcely explain myself, sometimes. These maps of words record features navigators alter with time. Promontory of Youth is renamed Narcissus Point. Desert of Emptiness is recharted Godzone. Seas of Adventure appear the same as Eros Ocean. Strange Shore becomes Friendly Islands; Guilt Trip, Strait Gate.

Day 1 I have accepted the challenge to post the cover of seven books that I love: no explanation, no review, just the cover. Each time I post a cover, I’ll ask a friend to take up the challenge.Meanwhile, here are 100 words on a word in the title: Dumps (June)  In the dumps, an idiom for the blues, extends to collective sense of despondency, unhappiness tending towards despair. It’s not despair, only a group sense of loss dictated by mood and circumstance. Dumps is a plural noun for rundown dwellings, neglected premises. For those on the street, this may be a packing case under the Brooklyn Bridge. In June it is shade, in January you could die in the snow. The verb explains this state of affairs. People dump on other people. People dump other people. They send them to a dump site, believing they’ve solved things. People dump responsibility.

A paper given by Philip Harvey at the Bloomsday in Melbourne annual seminar, held upstairs in the Imperial Hotel, Melbourne, on the morning of the 16 th of June 2018. I. “Introibo ad altare Dei” We are alerted to parody from the very start in Ulysses. When stately, plump Buck Mulligan intones the introit words of the Latin Mass while shaving in the open air, high above Dublin Bay, we are reminded instantly of how words can have a straight meaning or a not-straight meaning, depending on the context. Mulligan’s delivery is word perfect, only this is happening in a bohemian Martello Tower, not in the Catholic church down the road, where the words would be delivered with a different kind of reverence. Is Mulligan being blasphemous? Or is Joyce simply indicating to his readers that this character is irreverent and to expect more? It sets the scene for a novel alive with parodic playfulness, a novel reliant on the assumption that very little is just as it seems.