Archive for James Joyce
portrait of the author as a young man [X rated]
Posted in Kids, pictures with tags Christopher Columbus, James Joyce, Mark Twain, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, sinus, sinusite, trigonometry, X-ray on April 4, 2023 by xi'an
the best books of the NYT readers
Posted in Books, Kids, Travel with tags 1984, book list, book reviews, Catch, censorship, Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, George Orwell, Harper Lee, Harry Potter, J.K. Rowlings, J.R. Tolkien, James Joyce, John Steinbeck, Le Monde, list, Margaret Atwood, Nabokov, novel, The Lord of the Rings, The New York Times, To Kill a Mockingbird, Toni Morisson on February 9, 2022 by xi'an
Two years after Le Monde reported on the list of the 101 favourite novels of [some of] its readers, which I found most fascinating as a sociological entry on said readers, rather than a meaningful ordering of literary monuments (!), even though it led me to read Damasio’s La Horde du Contrevent, as well as Jean-Philippe Jaworski’s Gagner la Guerre [To the victors go the spoils], The New York Times did something similar to celebrate the Book Review’s 125th anniversary. If on a lesser scale, as it only produces
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- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
- 1984 by George Orwell
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
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as the top five books of the last 125th years, Lee’s, Tolkien’s, and Garcia Márquez’s appearing in both lists, if with a different ranking. (The nomination rules were not exactly the same, though, with only novels for Le Monde and only “recent” books and only one per author for the New York Times.) Here is a longer list of the 25 top contenders, from which NYT readers voted [an opportunity I missed!]:
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (1932-2018)
Posted in Books, pictures, Travel with tags A House for Mister Biswas, Amadeus, Dubliners, English literature, James Joyce, John Huston, José de Sam Lazaro, Man Booker Prize, Nobel Prize, The Dead, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul on August 13, 2018 by xi'an
I heard of the death of the writer V.S. Naipal late today, after arriving on the North coast of Vancouver Island. While not familiar with many of his books, I remember reading a House for Mr. Biswas and A Bend in the River in the mid 80’s, following a suggestion by my late friend José de Sam Lazaro, who was a professor in Rouen when I was doing my PhD there and with whom I would travel from Paris to Rouen by the first morning train… As most suggestions from José, it was an eye-opener on different views and different stories, as well as a pleasure to read the crisp style of Naipaul. Who thus remains inextricably linked with my memories of José. I also remember later discussing with, by postal letters, while in Purdue, on the strength of Huston’s The Dead, the last and possibly best novel of Joyce’s Dubliners, which stroke me as expressing so clearly and deeply the final feelings of utter failure of Conroy, Gretta’s husband. As well as his defense of Forman’s Amadeus!
Le Monde puzzle [#845]
Posted in Books, Kids, Statistics with tags Académie des Sciences, Escher, France Culture, James Joyce, Katrin, Le Monde, Lewis Carroll, mathematical puzzle, neurosciences, neutrino, quark on December 21, 2013 by xi'anYet another one of those Le Monde mathematical puzzles which wording is confusing to me:
Take the set of integers between 1 and 1000. endow all of them randomly with red or blue tags. group them by subsets of three or more (grapes). and also group them by pairs so that a switch can change the colour of both integers. Is it always possible to activate the switches so that one ends up with all grapes being multicoloured? Unicoloured?
I find it (again!) ultimately puzzling since there are configurations where it cannot work. In the first case, take a grape made of four integers of the same colour, reunited two by two by a switch: activating the switch simply invert the colours but the grape remains uni-coloured. Conversely, take two integers with opposite colours within the same grape. No mater how long one operates the switch, they will remain of an opposite colour, won’t they?!
This issue of Le Monde Science&Médecine leaflet actually had several interesting entries, from one on “the thirst of the sociologist for statistical irregularities“—meaning that regression should account for confounding factors like social class versus school performances—to the above picture about weighting the mass of a neutrino—mostly because it strongly reminds of Escher, as I cannot understand the 3D structure of the picture—, to another tribune of Marco Zito informing me that “quark” is a word invented by James Joyce—and not by Carroll as I believed—, to an interview of Stanislas Dehaene, a neuroscientist professor at Collège de France and a (fairly young) member of the Académie des Sciences—where he mentions statistical learning patterns that reminded me of the Bayesian constructs Pierre Bessière discussed on France Culture—.
The Dead
Posted in Books with tags Dubliners, James Joyce, John Huston, Jonathan Coe, Maltese Falcon, Subway, The Dead on April 10, 2011 by xi'an“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” James Joyce, The Dead, Dubliners
In The Guardian of last Saturday, Jonathan Coe wrote a piece about film adaptations of great books, mostly siding with Hitchcock’s views that masterpieces were bound to produce terrible films. (Thus connecting with my post of yesterday. And a much earlier post about subways and books…) However, he manages to find exceptions, such as Huston’s The Dead, which is perfectly translating Joyces’ sublime short story into a film, concluding with
The last few minutes of the film follow Joyce’s final pages closely but not exactly. Fragments of dialogue are transposed, a funny story Gabriel tells at the party being cleverly turned into a ruefully futile attempt to stir his wife out of her melancholy silence during their cab journey home. The painful conversation between husband and wife in the hotel room is just as Joyce wrote it, and flawlessly played by Donal McCann and Anjelica Huston. Then comes the celebrated final monologue, for which the film slips into voiceover for the first time. The script truncates and rearranges it, but holds to its tenor and spirit. As McCann’s voice unfolds, the screen offers us simple shots of wintry landscapes at dusk, the folk tune recurs, distantly, on a solo clarinet, and we are treated, for a few overwhelmingly moving moments, to what film can and should but rarely does become: a perfect counterpoint of word, music and image.
I cannot but agree as I do remember watching this film in Chicago, more than twenty years ago, during a December snowstorm, and emerging speechless from the movie theater, stunned by the masterly way Huston had translated my own apprehension of the story on the screen. (Actually, Huston managed a similar feat, earlier, with the Maltese Falcon.)
