Latest news with #JamesJoyce
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
In what film did Jennifer Lawrence play a mop's inventor? The Saturday quiz
1 Which national flag has been modified 26 times?2 What is the first letter that doesn't name a vitamin?3 Which late pianist was the first to record all of Beethoven's piano works?4 In legend, what joined the yoke to the pole of a Phrygian wagon?5 In what film did Jennifer Lawrence play the inventor of a mop?6 What was unusual about Cpl Wojtek, who served in the war with the 2nd Polish Corps?7 Which writer last visited Dublin in 1912?8 Which Essex market town is named after a spice?What links: 9 Mark Berry; Stacia Blake; Jed Hoile; Barry Mooncult?10 William Huskisson; James A Garfield; Leo Tolstoy?11 Formerly 1/16 of a rupee; Icelandic narratives; ranging technology; relating to a city; made a god?12 Cleeks; Crushers; HyFlyers; Iron Heads; Majesticks; Torque?13 Gracious and glorious (1); long, our and the (2); save and God (3); King (4)?14 Capitol Complex, Chandigarh; Notre-Dame du Haut; Unité d'habitation; Villa Savoye?15 Catherine the Great; Éamon de Valera; Adolf Hitler; Julia Gillard; Boris Johnson? 1 US.2 F.3 Alfred Brendel.4 Gordian knot.5 Joy.6 He was a bear.7 James Joyce.8 Saffron Walden.9 Dancers who accompanied musical acts: Happy Mondays (Bez); Hawkwind; Howard Jones; Flowered Up.10 Died/fatally injured/assassinated at railway stations: Parkside; US president, Washington DC; Astapovo.11 Palindromes: anna; sagas; radar; civic; deified.12 Teams in LIV golf tour.13 Word distribution in first verse of national anthem.14 Architectural works by Le Corbusier: India; Ronchamp; Marseille and other cities; Poissy.15 Not born in the country they led: Prussia/Russia; US/Ireland; Austria/Germany; Wales/Australia; US/UK.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
In what film did Jennifer Lawrence play a mop's inventor? The Saturday quiz
1 Which national flag has been modified 26 times?2 What is the first letter that doesn't name a vitamin?3 Which late pianist was the first to record all of Beethoven's piano works?4 In legend, what joined the yoke to the pole of a Phrygian wagon?5 In what film did Jennifer Lawrence play the inventor of a mop?6 What was unusual about Cpl Wojtek, who served in the war with the 2nd Polish Corps?7 Which writer last visited Dublin in 1912?8 Which Essex market town is named after a spice?What links: 9 Mark Berry; Stacia Blake; Jed Hoile; Barry Mooncult?10 William Huskisson; James A Garfield; Leo Tolstoy?11 Formerly 1/16 of a rupee; Icelandic narratives; ranging technology; relating to a city; made a god?12 Cleeks; Crushers; HyFlyers; Iron Heads; Majesticks; Torque?13 Gracious and glorious (1); long, our and the (2); save and God (3); King (4)?14 Capitol Complex, Chandigarh; Notre-Dame du Haut; Unité d'habitation; Villa Savoye?15 Catherine the Great; Éamon de Valera; Adolf Hitler; Julia Gillard; Boris Johnson? 1 US.2 F.3 Alfred Brendel.4 Gordian knot.5 Joy.6 He was a bear.7 James Joyce.8 Saffron Walden.9 Dancers who accompanied musical acts: Happy Mondays (Bez); Hawkwind; Howard Jones; Flowered Up.10 Died/fatally injured/assassinated at railway stations: Parkside; US president, Washington DC; Astapovo.11 Palindromes: anna; sagas; radar; civic; deified.12 Teams in LIV golf tour.13 Word distribution in first verse of national anthem.14 Architectural works by Le Corbusier: India; Ronchamp; Marseille and other cities; Poissy.15 Not born in the country they led: Prussia/Russia; US/Ireland; Austria/Germany; Wales/Australia; US/UK.
Irish Times
4 days ago
- General
- Irish Times
Jung at Heart – Frank McNally on the Irish legacies of a Swiss psychologist
The psychologist Carl Jung, who was born 150 years ago this weekend, seems never to have visited Ireland. But he loomed large in the lives of two of our greatest writers, for very different reasons. He and James Joyce shared a city – Zurich – for a period during and after the first world war. Unfortunately, they also shared a deep, mutual scepticism, exacerbated by the attempts of third parties to bring them together. Here's Joyce, writing to his patron Harriet Weaver in 1921: 'A bunch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr Freud) amuses himself at the expense…of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnets.' One of that bunch was Elizabeth McCormack Rockefeller, a Jungian disciple and philanthropist who subsidised Joyce for a time, but wanted him to undergo analysis and suspended funding when he wouldn't. READ MORE Jung, for his part, believed Ulysses was evidence of the author's latent schizophrenia, which he also thought explained Joyce's heavy drinking. Asked to write the preface for a German edition, he suggested among other insults that the book could be as easily read backwards as forwards. When the publishers showed that to Joyce, according to biographer Richard Ellmann, he telegraphed back a terse response in German, 'Niedrigerhangen', meaning: 'Ridicule it by making it public' (yes, they have a word for that too). Jung later repented by publishing a more respectful version and, in a letter to Joyce, admitting that difficult as he found Ulysses to read, 'I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it.' As for the author, family tragedy eventually forced him to relent in his scepticism enough to allow Jung treat his daughter Lucia for the actual schizophrenia with which she was diagnosed in her mid-20s. 'I wouldn't go to him, but maybe he can help her,' he wrote. Jung thought Lucia had the same madness as her father, without the genius to channel it, and famously likened them to two people going to the bottom of a river: one diving and the other drowning. Ellmann thought Jung was fundamentally wrong about Joyce's supposed self-medication against mental illness, in part because of his unfamiliarity with Irish drinking habits. 'It was not easy for Jung, who had been brought up in a 'fanatical anti-alcoholic tradition', to understand Joyce, whose rearing was diametrically opposite,' he wrote. The writer drank at night only, Ellmann pointed out, and with a combination of 'purpose and relaxation'. He enjoyed company but also used it to study human behaviour and to unburden himself of anxieties. In summary: 'He engaged in excess with considerable prudence.' By contrast with Joyce, Samuel Beckett had only one encounter with Jung, but it brought a shattering insight that changed his life. When he attended a lecture by Jung in 1934, it was at the suggestion of his psychiatrist Wilfred Rupert Bion, who had been treating Beckett for depression. Some of that related to an intense relationship with his mother, an austere woman from whom he inherited his tall, thin frame and hawk-like features, but not her narrow worldview. Relations between them were exacerbated by Beckett's apparent prenatal memories of a claustrophobic life in the womb. In the lecture, Jung recalled the sad case of a pre-teenage girl he had treated years before. She was troubled by recurrent dreams, which the psychologist thought (but didn't say) were premonitions of imminent death. And she did indeed die soon afterwards. But the bit that astounded Beckett was Jung's one-line summary, added as an afterthought. For Beckett, that explained a lot about his own life. Bion thought so too and went on to develop theories involving 'psychological birth' in the womb, a result of which was that 'biological birth did not necessarily bring mental separation from the mother'. Beckett gave up therapy the same year. But he often referred to Jung's story in conversation. And a 20 years later, he put it in the mouth of Maddy Rooney, the main character in his radio play All That Fall (which I had the strange experience a while back of hearing at Tullow Church, Foxrock, in the Beckett family pew, among a blindfolded audience). All That Fall is the most localised of his works, set along Brighton Road on a race day in nearby Leopardstown. Mrs Rooney goes to meet her blind husband off the train, which we later learn has been the scene of a tragedy involving a child, never explained. On the way home, she remembers something she heard in a talk once, from 'one of those new mind doctors', that had 'haunted' her ever since. She goes on to retell the story Beckett had heard, about the 'strange and unhappy little girl' and recalls the doctor's conclusion, which he had found so mind-blowing: 'The trouble with her was that she had never been really born'.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘City of singles': cosmopolitan prewar Paris's ‘crazy years' brought to life
In 1926, James Joyce was working on his novel Finnegans Wake while living in a spacious apartment in the 7th arrondissement of Paris with his partner, Nora Barnacle, and their two adult children, Giorgio and Lucia. Joyce's neighbours in the elegant stone building at 2 Square de Robiac included a Syrian family whose three children had an English nanny called Jessie, Russian émigrés, an Egyptian industrialist, and the US writers William and Elizabeth Placida Mahl. The details are part of a new exhibition that paints a portrait of the French capital a century ago when it was a hub for artists, intellectuals and young unattached men and women during the decade that became known as les années folles (the crazy years or roaring 20s). Curators at the Musée Carnavalet have drawn on work by researchers from France's National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS) using artificial intelligence to create a database of the 8m individual handwritten entries from the censuses of 1926, 1931 and 1936. The result is an almost comprehensive list of those recorded as living in the 80 districts of Paris's 20 arrondissements at a time when the population of the city reached 2.9 million people. Only the details of those in prisons, hospitals or religious institutions have not been released. 'It's absolutely fascinating. For the first time we can name almost every person who was registered as living in Paris during this period,' said Valérie Guillaume, the director of the Musée Carnavalet. 'From the information, we see Paris was a city of single, young adults and that there were many different nationalities. There were very few children in the city at that time.' As France recovered from the first world war, Paris attracted a cosmopolitan crowd of writers, artists, and musicians who mingled with people fleeing revolution, genocide and persecution, workers from France's colonies as well as young people from the countryside seeking jobs. While Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani were busy reshaping the art world, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald were living it up in the French capital and George Orwell was down and out. Before 1926, population counts had been carried out in Paris, but the census that year was the first to give precise details of city inhabitants including date and place of birth, dependents and profession. Until now, the public has been able to consult the censuses in the Paris archives, but this has required a manual search. 'The artificial intelligence was trained to recognise letters and numbers in the handwritten entries in the census to create a database that can be searched and consulted. Entries that were ambiguous were checked by a human,' Guillaume said. 'It's never been done before because it's an enormous job; too big to manage without digital help.' Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion The Musée Carnavalet, which is dedicated to the history of Paris, said the censuses threw up a 'mosaic of diverse life stories in a whirlwind of memories and emotions'. Aside from the famous, including the US actor and entertainer Josephine Baker, the singers Édith Piaf (born Gassion) and Charles Aznavour (born Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian), and the celebrated model Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), the exhibition focuses on ordinary Parisians. The data also reveals interesting comparisons between the 1920s, when the average lifespan of a Paris resident was 50-60 years, and now, when inhabitants live to aabout 80. As well as documents and photographs from the era, many of which have never been previously seen publicly, visitors to the exhibition will be able to consult the census database. 'People will be able to look for details of relatives who were living in Paris at the time or the names of people living in their building a century ago,' Guillaume said of the exhibition, which opens in October. The People of Paris 1926-1936 exhibition will also include newsreels and broadcasts from the era as well as recordings of Parisians recalling life in the city in the 1920s and 1930s made as part of a City Hall project in the 1990s. Joyce lived in Paris for 19 years, frequently moving address until the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, when the family moved to Zurich, where he died the following year. Finnegans Wake was finally published in 1939. As a matter of record, the 1926 census entry for the Joyce family is not entirely correct: the children are wrongly recorded as having been born in Ireland instead of Trieste, Italy, and Giorgio is recorded as Georges. 'This whole project is fascinating and a living thing. For the first time we can put a name to those registered as living in Paris during that decade,' Guillaume said. 'On one hand it is a very large mass of information and on the other it's personal because we are looking at individual people and their stories.'
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘City of singles': cosmopolitan prewar Paris's ‘crazy years' brought to life
In 1926, James Joyce was working on his novel Finnegans Wake while living in a spacious apartment in the 7th arrondissement of Paris with his partner, Nora Barnacle, and their two adult children, Giorgio and Lucia. Joyce's neighbours in the elegant stone building at 2 Square de Robiac included a Syrian family whose three children had an English nanny called Jessie, Russian émigrés, an Egyptian industrialist, and the US writers William and Elizabeth Placida Mahl. The details are part of a new exhibition that paints a portrait of the French capital a century ago when it was a hub for artists, intellectuals and young unattached men and women during the decade that became known as les années folles (the crazy years or roaring 20s). Curators at the Musée Carnavalet have drawn on work by researchers from France's National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS) using artificial intelligence to create a database of the 8m individual handwritten entries from the censuses of 1926, 1931 and 1936. The result is an almost comprehensive list of those recorded as living in the 80 districts of Paris's 20 arrondissements at a time when the population of the city reached 2.9 million people. Only the details of those in prisons, hospitals or religious institutions have not been released. 'It's absolutely fascinating. For the first time we can name almost every person who was registered as living in Paris during this period,' said Valérie Guillaume, the director of the Musée Carnavalet. 'From the information, we see Paris was a city of single, young adults and that there were many different nationalities. There were very few children in the city at that time.' As France recovered from the first world war, Paris attracted a cosmopolitan and global crowd of writers, artists, and musicians who mingled with people fleeing revolution, genocide and persecution, workers from France's colonies as well as young people from the countryside seeking jobs. While Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Amedeo Modigliani were busy reshaping the art world, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F Scott Fitzgerald were living it up in the French capital and George Orwell was down and out. Before 1926, population counts had been carried out in Paris, but the census that year was the first to give precise details of city inhabitants including date and place of birth, dependents and profession. Until now, the public has been able to consult the censuses in the Paris archives, but this has required a manual search. 'The artificial intelligence was trained to recognise letters and numbers in the handwritten entries in the census to create a database that can be searched and consulted. Entries that were ambiguous were checked by a human,' Guillaume said. 'It's never been done before because it's an enormous job; too big to manage without digital help.' Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion The Musée Carnavalet, which is dedicated to the history of Paris, said the censuses threw up a 'mosaic of diverse life stories in a whirlwind of memories and emotions'. Aside from the famous, including the US actor and entertainer Josephine Baker, the singers Édith Piaf (born Gassion) and Charles Aznavour (born Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian), and the celebrated model Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), the exhibition focuses on ordinary Parisians. The data also reveals interesting comparisons between the 1920s, when the average lifespan of a Paris resident was 50-60 years, and now, when inhabitants live to aabout 80. As well as documents and photographs from the era, many of which have never been previously seen publicly, visitors to the exhibition will be able to consult the census database. 'People will be able to look for details of relatives who were living in Paris at the time or the names of people living in their building a century ago,' Guillaume said of the exhibition, which opens in October. The People of Paris 1926-1936 exhibition will also include newsreels and broadcasts from the era as well as recordings of Parisians recalling life in the city in the 1920s and 1930s made as part of a City Hall project in the 1990s. Joyce lived in Paris for 19 years, frequently moving address until the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, when the family moved to Zurich, where he died the following year. Finnegans Wake was finally published in 1939. As a matter of record, the 1926 census entry for the Joyce family is not entirely correct: the children are wrongly recorded as having been born in Ireland instead of Trieste, Italy, and Giorgio is recorded as Georges. 'This whole project is fascinating and a living thing. For the first time we can put a name to those registered as living in Paris during that decade,' Guillaume said. 'On one hand it is a very large mass of information and on the other it's personal because we are looking at individual people and their stories.'
