Giacomo Joyce

[aycheb]

Call this a coda or a very late placed intermission for the ‘Ulysses’ melee. I still haven’t finished it due to feeling that the last two chapters should be properly savoured and snatching odd paragraphs by omnibus isn’t the way to do it. But I have found time to revisit a much shorter work that Joyce wrote while finishing ‘A Portrait of the

Comments

[atpotch]

That's all extremely interesting. I'm sort of semi-tempted to bumble to the library tomorrow and see if I can find a copy, though I also have this feeling of completion still in my head, and I think I'm maybe a tad Joyced out, despite my love of the melee.

I saw that piece in The Guardian, which was especially resonant to me because my name is Toby, and everyone always identified me with the Tram Engine whose line was about to be closed down. I have to say that the West Indian immigrant metaphor never occurred to me even though I still have a mug with Toby on its side next to my bed, and I still occasionally wonder about the stories when drifting off to sleep.

TCH

[aycheb]

One of the pleasures of parenthood is revisiting the old favourites. Not that they're interested in the original books, but anything that's not Barney has to be good. I never had an eponymous engine although I do have this transsexual thing going with the hero of Watership Down.

[ladyhelix]

Thank you!! If you're up to the last 2 chapters in Ulysses, you got Much farther than I did!! And I've been mourning the fact that I didn't keep up, even thought I simply didn't have the time to dedicate to it (my pace was plodding - at best!).

I'll pick this up, and enjoy a "brief Joyce"! I am encouraged - so thank You!

[aycheb]

Oh do, it's a beautiful little book and the introduction is probably longer than the text and quite a good read too.

[ladyhelix]

" the introduction is probably longer than the text "

This sounds right up my alley!! Who did the intro in the text you read?

[aycheb]

Richard Ellman who wrote one of the main biographies. The paperback I have came out in 1983 in the UK. I don't know if it's still in print.

[ann1962]

Just ran to our playroom to look at our giant fabric poster (for lack of a better word, fabric length) of all of the Thomas the Tank Engine trains. Sure enough there is a Toby. Annie is brown and Mavis is black. Several are green and red. Hmm, I say now. Never occurred to me to look at them through that lens. Sean hasn't been into that for years but maybe we will have to dig out the books and videos. Very amusing indeed.

Haven't gotten to anything about Giacomo in Burgess' book yet. Will keep an eye out. Thanks for the rec.

[aycheb]

I think the author of the books was more interested in different classes of engine than races of people. Toby's brown because those sort of trains were back in the day. Plus I suspect if he had have made the connection the character would have been rather less sympathetic. One with the trucks. The books always remind me of my grandfather who worked on the railways. That and being taken to watch what must have been some of the last steam trains coming in to Dorchester station as a weekend treat.

[londonkds]

I know there was a row in the 1970s about one of the early Awdry books referring to somebody covered with soot as "black as a n*gg*r" or some such simile use of the word. Cut now, of course.

[aycheb]

Oh interesting. And it figures.