JJQ

Sharon Fogerty has written and directed a play about Lucia Joyce entitled “Lucia’s Chapters of Coming Forth by Day” which will be staged September 23th, 24^th, and 25^th Off Broadway at Performance Space 122 (more ticket and location information can be accessed here).  Lucia will be played by Ruth Maleczch and Joyce is played by Paul Kandel.  The production is part of the 1^st Irish Theater Festival, and a review for the New York Times by Rachel Saltz can be read here.

The Dublin City Public Libraries has selected Joyce’s Dubliners at its 2012 Dublin: One City, One Book program.  Each year, this initiative encourages everyone to read a book having to do with Dublin during the month of April.  The reading of Dubliners will be accompanied by related events throughout the city.  Past Once City, One Book selections include, Flann O’Briens’s At Swim Two Birds, Sebastian Barry’s A Long, Long Way, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Ghost Light by Joseph O’Connor.   Further details can be accessed here.

In a brief message to JJQ, Andres Weigel has uncovered a useful bit of information about an encounter with Joyce that apparently did not take place.  In 1977, the Austrian writer Max Riccabona published an article describing his meeting with the Irish author in Feldkirsch in the summer of 1932.  At the time, the young man was only seventeen and he went on to describe this brief encounter with a literary icon and its importance to his work.

Mr. Weigel has discovered, however, that Riccabona was actually in Davos seeking medical treatment for a lung condition during the three weeks that Joyce was in Feldkirch.  No word on whether the Joyce he allegedly met could “shoot two eggs off two bottles at fifty yards over this shoulder.”

The Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro will be presenting the exhibition, “Fritz Janschka: My Choice: Joyce” through November 20^th.  Janschka was born in Vienna in 1919 and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts beginning in 1943.  He has long held a fascination for Joyce’s work and cites the author’s influence in his paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures.  The Weatherspoon exhibition will feature works inspired by Finnegans Wake and Chamber Music.  Details can be accessed here: http://artdesignfest.com/2011/09/13/the-weatherspoon-art-museum-presents-fritz-janschkas-works-inspired-by-james-joyce/

Spotify’s bid to conquer the online music market has made its way into the high modernist consciousness.  Featuring music both from and inspired by Joyce’s work, the James Joyce Spotify Playlist is a collection of 38 songs accessible through the music service.  Selections include Irish standards such as Declan Hunts’ “The Croppy Boy,” the aleatoric experimentation of John Cage’s “Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake—Part Four—To End,”  Kate Bush’s recent rendition of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, and even a remix of Joyce’s reading of the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of The Wake courtesy of DJ Spooky.  The Playlist can be accessed here.