READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

  Reading Christina Rossetti widely for next month’s Poets and the Faith paper at St. Peter’s, I rediscover her ‘reading diary’ of 365 daily reflections, published in 1885 in London under the title ‘Time Flies’. Wondering what she has to say in this daily devotional about the coming week, I turn to her entry for July 22, Feast of St. Mary Magdalene, of whom she notes in her terse manner: “The date of her death is unknown.”   Rossetti writes: “A record of this Saint is a record of love. She ministered to the Lord of her substance, she stood by the Cross, she sat over against the Sepulchre, she sought Christ in the empty grave, and found Him and was found of Him in the contiguous garden.”   Contiguous here means the touching or adjoining garden, but also especially surely a place of meeting, where one meets another without touching. This is a place where death meets life. The relationship, listed by the poet with such rhythm and concision, is brought into stronger focus in the next s

  The 31 st annual Bloomsday in Melbourne staged a play at St Martin’s Theatre in South Yarra exploring the encounter between Samuel Beckett and the Joyce family in 1920s Paris. Review by Philip Harvey The symbiotic relationship between an artist and their work is notorious in the case of James Joyce. Himself, his family and friends make major character appearances in his great fictions, albeit oblique, typified, parodied, and exaggerated to serve the author’s purposes. Similarly, his family and acquaintances are caught up in the creative act itself, for good or ill. This relationship, and its real-life consequences, are the driver of this year’s Bloomsday in Melbourne play, an informed drama about Joyce’s daughter Lucia (Mary Agnes O’Loughlin) and the unknown young turk fresh from Dublin, Samuel Beckett (Jeremy Harland). Steve Carey’s play employs varied modes to dramatize the conjunction between the everyday and high art. A comic café dialogue between litterateurs using a cornuc

Modernised transport and increased access to Jerusalem in the mid-19 th century gave rise to what this excellent history (‘Under Jerusalem : the Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City’ by Andrew Lawler. Doubleday, 2023) depicts as an imperial ‘race’ for the secrets in stone and artifacts either submerged or in plain sight of the Holy City. France, then Britain, Germany and Russia are amongst the nations that expend money, material, and personnel in their different bids to lay claim to the truth about the religious past. The truth itself proves elusive over many decades, as excavators offer up contradictory theories about the exact site of the Prophet’s Dream, the Passion narratives, Solomon’s and then Herod’s Temple, and other major facts of shared interest. Results are mixed. General Gordon, for example, he of Khartoum fame, engages in his own military-style survey, with definitively expressed ideas that a French scholar of the time described as “wonderfully weird.” The ca

  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 named.” H

  [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 experimenta