JJQ

Thomas F. Staley, the founding editor of the James Joyce Quarterly, will retire from his position as the Director of the dazzling Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at the end of August.  The HRC just announced that his successor will be Stephen Enniss, the current Head Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library.  Dr. Enniss holds advanced degrees in both English and Library Science and has served in the past as a curator and then Director of Emory’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library.  He seems to be an outstanding choice for this new position and it’s particularly encouraging to see someone committed to single-author scholarship assume this important role.

And of course we wish Dr. Staley the very best as he leaves the HRC and resumes his teaching career.  He helped build Joyce studies into a global phenomenon and has played an equally important role in assembling perhaps the finest collection of modernist materials in the world.  All of us who work in the field owe him our thanks while here at the journal we continue to safeguard an intellectual and institutional legacy he gave us that is extending this summer into its fiftieth year.

It seems we might have some competition here at the journal.  I just discovered that there is now a J.J.Q. Billiards Lounge in Missisauga, Ontario, which clearly hopes to cash in on our fame.  As Austin Briggs points out, their homepage even features an image of two women (one with dark hair, the other light): dead ringers for the Bronze and Gold of the Ormand bar.  Needless to say, an extensive research trip appears to be in order.

The Irish Independent‘s Orlaith O’Neill has written a short report on the set of CDs just released by the British Library entitled The Spoken Word: Irish Poets and Writers–I Will Arise.  It’s a gangly title but the collection includes radio broadcasts, recordings, and interviews with W.B. Yeats, Sean O’Casey, Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O’Connor, and many others.

According to O’Neill, the latter reflects briefly on a meeting with Joyce in Paris when the pair discussed some shared memories of Cork and the uncertain status of Ulysses in Ireland.  O’Connor reminds us that the Joyce’s household language was Italian and he came away from the encounter at the Rue de Grenelle clearly finding the family and author both a bit disconcerting.  Among other things, O’Connor claims that Joyce suffered a kind of “associative mania”–a not unsurprising diagnosis of the mind then at work on Finnegans Wake.

We’re planning to review The Spoken Word CDs ourselves in a forthcoming issue of JJQ.

Joyce’s former home has become the subject of some archaeological attention.  A team of archaeologists from the National Museum of Ireland have just concluded a full-scale excavation of the ash pit from the house Joyce and his family lived in from 1900-1901.  The archaeologists have already found quite a bit of material, mostly consisting of glass slides of the kind used in magic lantern shows, depicting religious scenes.  They are still performing tests to determine at what period of the home’s history the items were interred in the ash pit, but results are forthcoming.  The home has some significance for Joyce’s work.  It is where the fifth chapter of A Portait begins.  The house is currently owned by Stephen D’Arcy, who has restored it.  Thanks to Terrence Killeen’s article in The Irish Times for the coverage of the story.

I’m happy to announce that the JJQ is now able to accept submissions electronically through our new submission portal (reached by clicking on the Submissions links on our homepage).  My hope is that this change will have several important benefits including easing the burden on writers working outside the United States, lowing our postal costs, and reducing the journal’s carbon footprint.  We also believe it will help speed our review process.

We do expect a few glitches to develop as we make this transition and so ask you to bear with us through any difficulties.  We will continue to accept paper submissions as we always have, though we do plan to move away from this procedure in the next few years as the journal undergoes a complete redesign for its coming 50th anniversary.

If you have any difficulties with the new system or need help with a submission, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

In a small item we missed over the holiday break, The Irish Times revealed that the state reception hosted at Dublin Castle to mark Joyce’s centenary in 1982 cost “£8,000– or about €37,000 in today’s terms.”  About half of that cost went to the bar bill, a figure not at all surprising to anyone who has helped organize a Joyce conference.  The article includes some interesting details about the event, noting for example that the Department of Foreign Affairs believed only one reception was necessary.  Let’s just hope our upcoming hosts in Charleston and then in Utrecht will be as generous!

In a recent letter to the Irish Times, Conor Leahy proposes that the 75th anniversary of Joyce’s death in 2016 might present an opportunity to bring Joyce’s remains to Ireland for reburial in the land of his birth.  As he notes, Giorgio Joyce championed such a plan near the end of the life and I was surprised to learn that the event would have included a naval escort and state burial.  Alas, there is no mention of adding a gramophone to the proposed gravesite.

Good news for those visiting Dublin: the Martello Tower, which closed for the summer earlier this year, will reopen. Though open on the weekend of Bloomsday in June, the Tower has been closed the entire season because of funding shortages.  Now, thanks to generous volunteer efforts, organized as a group called Friends of the Joyce Tower Society, the Tower will be open for visits seven days a week from 10am until 6pm through the end of September.  Fáilte Ireland, the organization currently operating the Tower, is in discussion with Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council about permanently handing over operation and promotional duties.  Here is a link with more information. 

The BBC’s Radio 4 will put on a 24 hour tribute to Ulysses on June 16^th, commonly known as Bloomsday, to correspond with the events as depicted in Joyce’s text, which is set on June 16^th, 1904.  The characters, themes, and events that take place in Ulysses will be the running theme throughout the day’s broadcast schedule.   Among these broadcast events, will be a new dramatization of the novel that will be read in installments throughout the day, with Henry Goodman starring as Leopold Bloom and Andrew Scott as Stephen Dedalus.  These broadcast events are scheduled to begin at 9 am and conclude just before the midnight news.   Here is a link to the BBC’s page with more information about the Bloomsday programming.