Woolf and Joyce (and Dolly Parton)

Virginia Woolf’s New Year resolutions for 1931 as noted in her diary:

Friday 2 January 1931:
Here are my resolutions for the next three months…
First to have none. Not to be tied. Second to be free and kindly with myself, not goading it to parties: to sit rather privately reading in the studio…
To care nothing for making money. As for Nelly, to stop irritation by the assurance that nothing is worth irritation: if it comes back, she must go. Then not to slip this time into the emptiness of letting her stay.
[Nelly was the Woolfs' cook and the bane of Virginia Woolf''s existence. It was as if the power relationship had been reversed. Woolf felt herself terrorised by Nelly.]

Despairingly on 17th February 1931 Woolf writes in her diary:
Nelly comfortable installed for life.

Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses (as I was last year) I began to make a list of words unfamiliar to me.

Resile, to return to a former position
Dundrearies, long flowing sideburns
Catamenic, monthly

Then followed:

Baisemoin
Agendath
Inwit
Kalipedia

but I quickly ran out of patience. I can’t be opening the dictionary every two lines: so these words remain as mysteries.

Virginia Woolf in a letter to Roger Fry, on reading Proust and then Joyce:

‘One has to put the book down with a gasp. The pleasure becomes physical – like sun and wine and grapes and perfect serenity and intense vitality combined. Far otherwise is it with Ulysses: to which I bind myself like a martyr to a stake, and have thank God, now finished – My martyrdom is over. I hope to sell it for 4 pounds 10 shillings.’

Quite.

I downloaded all 26 CDs of the uncut spoken books edition of Ulysses. What could I have been thinking? Will I ever listen to it? Actually did listen to a couple of minutes the other day and wonder if this might be the only way to approach this monster (monstrosity?)

A few things I enjoyed in Ulysses (and yes, yes there are many wonderful scenes, but the totality…It’s like higher Irish blarney. A lot of drunk Irish men going on and on. Incomprehensibly. Oh, if only there had been more of the Blooms):

Joyce invents the World’s worst twelve books including: Let’s all chortle (hilaric) and Who’s who in space (astric)

‘It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.’

‘Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.’

‘Ineluctable modality of the visible.’ [Sounds great but what does it mean?]

‘Beaglebaying’

The American country singer Dolly Parton (b1946) may be historically unique for having lent both parts of her name to science. A parton is what Richard Feyman named  a mysterious particle out of which protons and neutrons are made. Murray-Gellmann named the same particle the quark, the name that stuck, a word found in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake that describes the sound a seagull makes. The first cloned mammal was a sheep named Dolly (because cloned out of a breast cell). She was born on July 5th 1996 and died February 14th 2003. Sheep can live 20 years. The average life expectancy is 10 to 12 years.