James Joyce symposium opens doors to casual readers
If you happen to see a trolley packed with 200 tweedy James Joyce scholars making its way up Main Street next Tuesday night, do not be alarmed.
The academics from universities around the world will be in Buffalo beginning Friday for “Eire on the Erie,” the 2009 North American James Joyce Symposium, a biennial conference focused on the life and work of the 20th century’s most dissertation-worthy writer.
But unlike most of the previous incarnations of the event, Buffalo’s version of the Joyceian meeting of the minds is far from strictly academic. Organizers have conceived of a series of public events—of which the vaunted professorial trolley ride is but one—aimed at merging ivory tower academics with casual fans of literature in what they hope will be a kind of popular-academic creative fusion.
For Mark Shechner, a University at Buffalo professor who served as one of five organizers for the conference and citywide event, the events provide a rare opportunity for academics to mingle with lay fans of the great Irish writer’s work.
Most James Joyce conferences in the United States, Shechner said, “are campus-oriented and campus-bound. People rarely get off campus. What we decided to do for this one is to take it out into Buffalo, to make it an urban experience, as ‘Ulysses’ itself is an urban book.” The auspicious series of events gets under way Friday at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, where local organizations Riverrun and Cinegael will welcome the renowned Irish-born novelist Colum McCann. At 8:30 p. m. Friday, McCann will read from his forthcoming book “Let the Great World Spin,” which has already received the sort of gleaming advance word that threatens to put it on a parallel with “Ulysses.”
In addition to the reading, the gallery will host a screenings of Irish writer Martin McDonagh’s film “In Bruges” (introduced by The News’ Jeff Simon) and McCann and Gary McKendry’s 2005 film “Everything in this Country Must.” McCann will also give a reading from his new novel, followed by an interview with Shechner, in the Hyatt Regency Hotel (2 Fountain Plaza) at 3 p. m. Saturday.
The evening at the Albright- Knox will also feature a film by locals Patrick Martin and Stacey Herbert, “Following James Joyce: Dublin to Buffalo,” which gives a sense of how the University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection came to inherit “the largest and most prestigious Joyce collection in the world.” That’s what Poetry Collection Curator Michael Basinski called the university’s trove of original manuscripts, artwork, photographs and assorted “Joyciana.” And Joyce scholars the world over tend to agree.
“Right at this time sitting in our room, we have local Buffalo Joyce scholars and Joyce scholars from Ireland, Spain and Oregon,” Basinski said on a recent Friday afternoon. “If you are a Joyce scholar, this is definitely one of the capitals of the world which you must at some point visit.”
Perhaps the most impressive public segment of the Joyce-fest is an exhibition at UB’s Anderson Gallery (1 Martha Jackson Place), which showcases the Poetry Collection’s stunning collection of Joyce material, from the original first drafts of “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and the original notebooks of “Finnegans Wake” to Joyce-based artwork by Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse and Robert Motherwell. The exhibition opens Sunday and runs through Sept. 13.
“We designed this exhibition for the curious as well as the scholarly. So if you are a reader of books, I think you will find this exhibition attractive,” Basinski said. “If you are at all curious about creativity, poetry, 20th century lit, Irish lit, Irish culture, I think you will be more than pleased to see what we offer.”
Another major feature of the Joyce-fest is the annual Bloomsday celebration, organized by local Joyce devotee and former UB English graduate student Laurence Shine. The event, held every year in cities around the world June 16, the day on which Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which chronicles the travails of its antihero Leopold Bloom, is set. This year, the event is slated to kick off at 5 p. m. Tuesday in Shea’s Smith Theatre (660 Main St.), and will feature a variety of readings from “Ulysses,” along with the generous pouring of Guiness and other such Irish libations.
For organizers, the upshot of the citywide festivities celebrating their beloved author is that members of the public at large — even those with only a casual association with Joyce, or those who’ve never read a sentence of his work — now have a chance to see what all the hubbub’s about.
“I think for a lot of people, this serves as a perfect introduction. Bloomsday is a day when people get together and just read from ‘Ulysses.’ What they’ll learn is that it’s a popular, accessible, funny, musical book,” Shechner said. “And for all of its difficulties, when people get up and read it aloud it becomes a kind of community activity, a community comedy.”
Shechner said he’s hoping for 1,000 people from the community to attend the Bloomsday event and join with the conference attendees, who hail from as far away as Korea, Serbia, Iran and Ireland. The trolly ride, which is slated to transport lecturers from a dinner at the Pearl Street Grill to the Smith Theatre during the Bloomsday event, will produce what Shechner called “converging streams of Buffalonians and Joyceians,” who will undoubtedly get into all manner of Gui-ness- fueled conversations about “Ulysses,” their fascination with its author and Buffalo’s place in the Joyce universe.
For the uninitiated who just might use this as an entree into Joyce’s work, Shechner down-played the imposing reputation of Joyce’s masterwork, preferring to think of “Ulysses” as the story of a man whose fears and troubles can easily resonate with the literate masses.
“It’s bout how middle-aged people deal with their desires, and once people get into the book they realize it’s about adultery, it’s about cuckoldry, it’s about sexual desire,” Shechner said. “The book is modeled after a Homeric epic, but it’s about a horny, Irish, middle-class man whose wife is cuckolding him during the day so he can’t go home. He wanders around Dublin because his wife’s lover is over. I think a lot of people would find that interesting.”
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