READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

Turning Over Idly Signatures of All Things I am Here to Read : How Ulysses Teaches us How to Read Ulysses Paper on how to read Ulysses given by Philip Harvey at Bayside Arts and Cultural Centre in Brighton on the 16 th of June 2014 as part of Bloomsday in Melbourne. I Nobody wished to claim my first copy of Ulysses. It was on a shelf in the lost-and-found at my school, incongruous amidst misplaced football jumpers and unnamed biology textbooks. It was a worn-out Penguin edition. No-one explained how it got there. Maybe it was a teacher’s guilty secret. Maybe someone left it in a classroom when they couldn’t find the dirty bits. I knew about James Joyce from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but everything about Ulysses was different from any book I had ever seen. Like many a novice, I gave up trying to understand the Latin on page one and flipped to the back . I hate having a long wrangle in bed or else if its not that its some little bitch or other he got in with ...

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/04/children-galway-mass-graves-ireland-catholic-church As usual around June, I take down Ulysses for some more good-humoured updates on what happens on Bloomsday. This year my reading coincides with news of the latest church scandal from Ireland, the gruesome revelations about the remains of nearly 800 children found in a disused sewage tank in Tuam, County Galway. The children died between 1925 and 1961 while under the care of the Bon Secours nuns. Other graves are also being uncovered. One is forced to make connections of meaning between what James Joyce is saying in Ulysses and the stories coming out about Magdalen laundries, child sexual abuse, and now these mass graves. The iron power of the Catholic Church in Ireland is object of his continuous satire in Ulysses, a power that only became entrenched after the Civil War. At times the satire goes on too long, Joyce seems unable to restrain himself from questioning the Chu...

George Barker George Barker writes at length On sperm and roses and death. What I am really trying to say is George Barker writes at length On sperm and roses and death. Once or twice he offers the world To his four-year-old daughter in verse Or addresses a well-suited art critic In whimsical words that stand unsanded And heavy-handed, but most times George Barker writes at length On sperm and roses and death. His wives and mistresses And fifteen children are, I imagine, His most insightful critics As he writes at length about loneliness And the appreciable pains of hell.

  Here are my contributions to a seminar on Dante’s Divina Commedia conducted with Dr William Johnston on Thursday the 27 th of March 2014 at the Institute for Spiritual Studies, St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne. Will’s papers and other material from the seminar are available on the parish website. I. HOW POETS TODAY REWORK DANTE Peter Steele, of blessed memory, Melbourne poet and Jesuit, cites the American Ralph Waldo Emerson: the Commedia is “autobiography in colossal cipher”. By which he means, Dante’s life is written large through the code of his poem. Steele embellishes on that idea by adding that the Commedia “might also be called metaphor in colossal suspense.” Which I take to mean, Dante’s poem keeps us hanging on even as it goes on talking about ultimate questions. In literary terms generally today, this is a central issue because while some writers strive to find through their words ways of describing and explaining everything knowable in human ter...