READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

  An anthology of 100 poems written in the past 100 years, with readerly responses on each from Rowan Williams, is a kind of autobiography of the archbishop’s roving mind. Titled ‘A Century of Poetry’, the book’s subtitle gets to the point with the claim that we are “searching the heart.” This is not a best-of or my-favourites collection, but one where poems “open the door to some fresh, searching, and challenging insights about the life of faith.”   The English poet Michael Symmons Roberts opens ‘A New Song’: Sing a new song to the Lord, sing through the skin of your teeth, sing in the code of your blood, sing with a throat full of earth To which Rowan asks, why do we praise? Then answers, “praise is as inescapable as lament in the human world. The singing evoked here is not a full-throated self-indulgent performance; it is what manages to escape from choked and knotted insides because it can’t be contained; and it names or at least points towards what can’t be ...

  [L]   L was a light which burned all the night and lighted the gloom of a very dark room.   L was Lear who wrote without fear inventing new words strictly for the birds.   L was for London all of a sudden that in a fit said it’s best to flit.   L was landscapes, large romantic shapes sympathetic, with parrots alphabetic.   L was laureate, to whit counter-laureate his In Memoriam a pea-green gloriam.   L was for limerick, simple trick that in a stroke makes a million jokes.   L was Liguria, curious curiouser departed alone but by all, well-known.       The image is Edward Lear’s watercolour of the red-sided parrot ( Eclectus Roratus Polychloros) made circa 1830-32. More history about this painting is here: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/363843      

  One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June.   Like Martin Johnston, the Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas is concerned as much with the Bloomsday going on in his main character’s head, as in any objective account of the day’s actual activities. We reach page 214 of ‘Dublinesque’ before finding a description of a public reading of Ulysses happening in Meeting House Square in Temple Bar, Dublin. The novel is being read in sequence by a succession of politicians, celebrities, authors, academics, punters, and chancers, in much the same fashion as readings were made at Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne, going back at least to the 1980s. The main character, Samuel Riba, is a jaded publisher of ex...

One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June. Email correspondence with Frances Devlin Glass (FDG) informed some of the discussion here. Some of her remarks are included in the paper.   The story of ‘South of Broad’ by Pat Conroy opens on 16 th of June 1969 in Charleston, South Carolina. It is the day the narrator, Leopold Bloom King, learns that his brother, Stephen Dedalus King, has inexplicably committed suicide. The reasons for this act are one of the dramatic threads that keep a tight hold on the reader for the next 20 years and 600 plus pages. Here is Leo, Leopold Bloom King’s apologia for his childhood:   Of all the elements of my childhood that rang a false note, I was the only kid in the ...

One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June.   The opening line of ‘The Bloomsday Dead’, by Adrian McKinty is a coded message about a secret hotel location that reads “‘State LY Plum P. Buck Mulligan” and the last word of the novel is “Yes”, but everything in between bears no resemblance to ‘Ulysses’. The book is a “tangled and bloody odyssey through Dublin and Belfast … [a] well-paced edgy thriller” (McKinty Back cover) about a hitman called “the fucking unkillable Michael Forsythe”; it’s the finale of a series called The Dead Trilogy. In essence, Forsythe has come back to Ireland to help mobster boss Bridget Callaghan find her kidnapped daughter Siobhan, his modus operandi being to kill virtually everyon...

One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June.   The theme of the death of the author is transfigured in Gill’s Peter McGarr detective mystery. The scholar, who is found dead from a knife wound in a laneway at the back of the Glasnevin Cemetery soon after June 16, is described as having an uncanny resemblance to the author himself, as though the best way to get over the anxiety of influence generated by Joyce is to kill off a lookalike of him. This scholar is about to launch a new Joyce study with the pretentious title ‘Phon/Antiphon’ (the slash denotes its academic provenance) and though a professor at TCD, he lives (or rather, lived) in a reconverted warehouse with his wife and nine children in the Liberti...

One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June.   Martin Johnston’s novel ‘Cicada Gambit’ is probably the earliest work of fiction to use Bloomsday itself as an essential element of the story. Set in Sydney, it is an integral part of the history of Bloomsday celebration in Australia.   In brief, an academic Dr Skogg prepares for his annual solo Bloomsday. Skogg’s Dublin is Sydney and his literary celebration of the day is all in his head. He plays all the characters, something different from the social event as it has come to be known worldwide, where group sharing is a primary motive of the day’s festivities. He re-enacts a literary ritual of one. Possibly Skogg is friendless, with no one to share h...

  One of the novels written about by Philip Harvey for his paper (‘A Hundred Bloomsdays Flower : How Writers Have Remade Joyce’s Feast Day’) on Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June.   The Prologue to Amanda Cross’s ‘The James Joyce murder’ opens thus:   James Joyce’s Ulysses, as almost everybody knows by now, is a long book recounting life in Dublin on a single day: June 16, 1904. It was on June 16, 1966, exactly sixty-two years later, that Kate Fansler set out for a meeting of the James Joyce Society, which annually held a “Bloomsday” celebration.  (Cross 9)   Fansler is a literature professor at a New York university, and also a detective, all fourteen books in the Kate Fansler series (1964-2002) having connections with academe and publishing. This is the third in the series.   Adopting what she hoped wa...

  A paper written by Philip Harvey for Bloomsday in Melbourne, 16 th of June 2023 and read at the annual seminar upstairs at the Imperial Hotel, corner Bourke and Spring Streets in Melbourne, on Sunday the 18 th of June.   Foreword   Who killed James Joyce? I, said the commentator, I killed James Joyce For my graduation. What weapon was used To slay mighty Ulysses? The weapon that was used Was a Harvard thesis. How did you bury Joyce? In a broadcast Symposium. That's how we buried Joyce To a tuneful encomium. Who carried the coffin out? Six Dublin codgers Led into Langham Place By W.R. Rodgers. Who said the burial prayers? — Please do not hurt me — Joyce was no Protestant, Surely not Bertie? Who killed Finnegan? I, said a Yale-man, I was the man who made The corpse for the wake man. And did you get high marks, The Ph.D.? I got the B.Litt. And my master's degree. Did you get money For your Joycean knowledge? I got a scholarship ...