READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

  The grey-eyed goddess is the grey-eyed goddess We meet at daybreak like it’s a new day. Rate this day against the usual array! Weight of desire, the wait of transgress, Everything shaping for a brand new spoil The reason trivial, typical, near: Land claim, male pride, beauty skin deep, feud fear. Hidden from sight she lets events uncoil. The wine dark sea is the wine dark sea We stare into drunk, stare into sober, The swell describing how warfare can be The turmoil that thrills, alienates and shifts; The race homeward ours too, over and over. The still, where ships wait for the wind to lift.

This year’s online Bloomsday seminar via Facebook was a global conversation in the privacy of our own screens. Each of the eighteen short films, released online by Bloomsday in Melbourne at the hour set for each episode, were treated as the ‘papers’ to prompt online discussion. Episode 9 included contributions by Steve Carey, Sian Cartwright, Sue Collins, Frances Devlin Glass, Ben Frayle, Sabia Mac Aodha, and Margaret Newman, whose initials appear where their thoughts are represented in these analecta. We have plenty of Homer all day, but here is where Shakespeare gets the treatment. The contrast is apt, between an artist who was a community engaged in inventive transmission over generations (Homer) and an artist who emblematises the great solitary genius, reliant on his singular talents (Shakespeare). Our society upholds both these ideals as models of the storyteller-poet, yet they are not mutually exclusive. For example, Joyce is the first progenitor (Shakespeare) of Ulysse...