the cassandra pages

Brilliant Coroners, reprise

Several years ago, a group of friends put together this poetry anthology, Brilliant Coroners, published through my nascent publishing house, Phoenicia. We've never done a really effective job of promoting it, but I was looking through it again recently, and remarking to myself that it contains some truly wonderful work by many bloggers and poets you may have heard of in these pages...several of whom who've since published books of their own and are even gaining an international literary reputation.

Thanks to the excellent work of editors Rachel Rawlins and Rachel Barenblat, I think you'll find that the work inside is of consistently high quality. The cover was a collaboration between Dave Bonta, who took the original photograph, and Marja-Leena Rathje and Natalie d'Arbeloff.

The poets are:

Elizabeth Adams, Ivy Alvarez, Rachel Barenblat, Maria Benet, Dave Bonta, Teju Cole, Natalie d'Arbeloff, Dale Favier, Dick Jones, Alison Kent, Leslee Masten, Tom Montag, Jean Morris, Rachel Rawlins, Peter Stephens, Anne-Mieke Swart, and B.E. Wing

It's on sale through tomorrow, and is inexpensive anyway. To take a look inside, here's a link. It seems like a great way to celebrate National Poetry Month, and the joy of collaborating with others to keep poetry -- and our own enthusiasm for it -- alive.

Waiting to Unfold

I haven't written much about my publishing projects lately, but today is a launch day, so it's a perfect time to do that!

Rachel Barenblat, also known as The Velveteen Rabbi, has been a friend of mine for almost as long as I've both been blogging. After becoming friends through our blogs, we worked together on an anthology of poems, Brilliant Coroners, and on the online literary journal qarrtsiluni. We met several times in person, in Boston, Montreal, and New York. During the past decade, she studied to become a rabbi, was ordained, and started serving a congregation. As religious people coming from different places we both engaged with and talked about the difficult issues of the Middle East. We did a presentation together about Jewish and Christian approaches to Scripture, and contemporary life and politics. Recently she entered into the world of parenthood. All the while, she blogged, and wrote poems. Very good poems.

When I started Phoenicia Publishing, it was because I wanted to publish the work of writers like Rachel, who had the courage to look beyond borders and convention and to illuminate the liminal spaces of ethnicity, spirituality, politics, and personal identity. Works that created bridges for readers, rather than walls behind which we could fortify ourselves, or hide within our prejudices. The first book of Rachel's that I published, 70 Faces: Torah Poems, looks at the first five books of the Hebrew Bible through a feminist perspective. Other people shared my own enthusiasm: for an independently-published book of poetry, it's done amazingly well.

 

Today we're launching Rachel's second full-length collection, Waiting to Unfold. These are poems about pregnancy, birth and early parenthood, but again, she doesn't take the expected route. The poems, written as letters to her unborn son and then as a sort of poetic journal of the first year of his life, take an unflinching look at the difficulties as well as the joys of motherhood. I'm not a parent myself, but I've often observed that parents, and mothers especially, are under tremendous pressure to feel and to say that everything is rosy, even perfect, when in fact the experience is often quite mixed. A lot of women who give birth find themselves finally admitted to the secret club of motherhood, where it's almost as if they have to sign a pledge not to reveal the darker side.

Rachel had a miscarriage before she gave birth to her son; that experience and that unborn child are not forgotten, but woven into her poems about this subsequent pregnancy as he writes of her worries as well as her anticipation. And after the birth, she experiences and is treated for post-partum depression, eventually emerging from that cloud. The majority of the poems are celebratory, joyful, funny, and above all, honest. Like all of Rachel's work, I found them very accessible, and -- like the author herself -- imbued with a deep spirituality that's always present but never overbearing.

It was a real pleasure as well to work with the exuberant cover artist, Mary Bullington, a Roanoke, Virginia artist who I met through Marly Youmans. The cover art is a detail of one of Mary's collages, titled "Creation."

The whole process of publishing a book -- like becoming a parent, I imagine -- is exciting, demanding, and challenging; the best part of it is working with the author and artist as a team trying to do our creative best, and trying to do justice to the words themselves.

I hope some of you might decide to buy a book for yourself or to give to a mother you love; while you're over at Phoenicia please take note that all of the other full-length poetry books are on sale through the end of April, in honor of National Poetry Month. The books are all available through Amazon UK and Europe, but if you're on this side of the pond and able to order through the e-store, both the author and publisher will receive considerably more of your support. Thanks!

 

Colors of the Sun

I made myself a sketchbook to take on our trip. The original plan was to buy one of Stillman & Burns' new Gamma series landscape-format sketchbooks; they're lovely, and the paper is heavy enough to take light washes. But they aren't cheap, nor are they carried anywhere in Montreal, and as a result I left the task of ordering from Toronto undone too long. What to do? Then it occurred to me that I could make my own sketchbook and fill it with whatever combination of papers I wanted! What a revelation! I've made a lot of small notebooksbefore, but never a sketchbook. The other advantage was that I could choose a size that was light and easy to carry. The binding itself is reversible; I can take pages out or add more anytime.

It helps to have a big papercutter and a heavy-duty adjustable binding punch and comb binder; we used to use it for binding reports for our design clients.

I already had these handpainted covers, waiting for a binding, so that part was easy. The next task was to cut up a sheet of a favorite drawing/mixed-media paper, Stonehenge, and another one of Arches 140-lb watercolor paper. It was enough for two books, one slightly larger and longer than this, with plain black covers, and this one. The binding here a flat leather thong; the other book has a black plastic comb binding.

Now I just need to make the time, and pluck up my courage, to do some sketches rather than being on-the-go every minute while we're away. The work of the Urban Sketchers, a growing international movement, both inspires and daunts me, because sketching buildings and urban scenes has never been my forté. What I'm most interested in isn't accuracy, but conveying the feeling of a place or scene.

On the other hand, having this blog, and you, my kind and generous readers, is a great incentive, though I admit that every single time I put pen or brush to paper, a little voice in my head worries about making a disastrous mess! Just do it, I tell myself, as all my teachers have told me too: sketch every day. Some drawings will be a mess, and some will come out all right. No matter what, you'll learn and improve through constant practice.

Funny, isn't it -- after all this time, and all this making-of-things, we are still fragile! I think that this beautiful bright color will help.

Escaping to Istanbul

We all seem to have our "escape" genres - the books we turn to when we just want to lose ourselves in a story. For some it's sci-fi, or fantasy, or romance, or horror. For me it's thrillers - not murder mysteries so much as international espionage, set in places I either know well, or have never been, often with some sort of historical interest. (No, in case you're wondering, I've never read anything by Gérard de Villiers, perhaps I should!)

I like to listen to audio books while I'm walking, or riding the metro, or exercising on the boring elliptical in the basement. My most recent was Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon, a story of spies, counter-spies, politics and personal relationships, set in Istanbul at the end of WWII. The title refers to the passage of boatloads of Jews, released from concentration camps in Eastern Europe, through Istanbul on their way to Palestine. Both money and information change hands, in this case putting American, British, Russian, Romanian, and Turkish interests on a collision course.

Contributing to this book's appeal for me was Jeffrey Mays' mesmerizing reading performance, which brought the characters and their dialogue to life in a way I simply wouldn't have appreciated as much if reading a printed copy. I thought his subtle command of accents, and sensitive portrayal of both male and female characters, was a tour-de-force.

Joseph Kanon tells a good story, and even if some of the plot is predictable, the characters are well-written, believable, and multidimensional. One of the major highlights of the book is its setting, with the city of Istanbul and the Bosphorus evocatively described by someone who obviously knows and loves them well. (Readers of this blog already know my affection for Orhan Pamuk, who has written some pretty suspenseful novels himself, but I've always had a desire to go to Istanbul, and this book increased that yearning.)

Kanon is sometimes compared to Graham Greene, and I can see why; this book is not merely a thriller, but an exploration of complicated moral issues in a way that Greene, I think, would have appreciated. The relationship between a man and three women - the protagonist's wife, confined to a mental institution; the prostitute he visits on Thursday afternoons; and the wife of a high-level American consul -- is set inside the larger story of espionage, itself complicated by personal relationships between various characters who have to balance their allegiance to particular causes with actual friendships. Nothing is black-and-white in this place where the fall of the Ottoman empire is a recent, stinging memory, but international politics and power still collide.

Some days after finishing the book, I found myself troubled by the fact that books like this hinge on the consequences of atrocities, especially, here, a particularly horrible massacre that occured in a Romanian concentration camp. There's a learning aspect, for sure; I've always felt that novels and films had tremendous power to educate and to influence, as well as to misinform and manipulate our emotions and opinions. And yet, I didn't think about that very much as I was listening to the story; I was detached from the actual events. It's another moral issue, isn't it - the use of war, genocide, and violence, as well as more individual and personal crimes, to entertain, and to profit? I find this the most problematic in movies, but I never really thought about it in terms of fiction, especially literary fiction. But as in Graham Greene, the subtlety of Kanon's presentation of moral questions and gray areas suggests to me that he may have thought about it himself. I think it would be a mistake to read Istanbul Passage as a story only, without considering the questions it raises: how people use each other; the limits of friendship; the cost of betrayal; the way ordinary people become pawns of those with greater power, forced to make decisions they never would have made; and the stories we tell ourselves afterward, to make it all go down more easily.

 

 

Annals of Bookmaking II

Before we leave the subject, here are a couple of other books, one recent and one (above) that I made quite a while ago but have never photographed. This one has a Japanese stab binding in heavy natural linen. It's a scrapbook, about 8 inches wide: each sheet has a folded edge that's unseen but held by the binding; this extra thickness allows the user to add pasted material to the sheets in the scrapbook without causing the book to bulge. Very retro, those colors!

The book below is another small notebook that I made last week. This one has an ultrasuede binding - a material that I find works remarkably well, and comes in great colors.

Annals of Bookmaking

Last week my studio was taken over by grey Davey board, linen threads, linen tapes and beeswax; paper, paint and relief-blocks; glue and glue-brushes and leather and many sheets of waxed paper; my Chinese chop and its porcelain pot of ink. The big bookpress was pressed repeatedly into service. I finished one small book that I'd already sewn but not covered, and made another one from scratch - a late Christmas gift for a close friend. Now that I've given it to her, I can share some of the process here with you. (It also gave me a chance to try out the close-up features of my new camera.)

The signatures, sewn on linen tapes, covered by a coarse linen mull, set between the cover boards.

The mull is glued to the inside of the cover boards, and then the tapes glued over the mull. The first page of the first and last signatures will be pasted over the tapes and mull, forming a strong hinge.

At this stage it starts to look like a book!

Printing the cover papers on a hand-painted base. I made four different sheets, different designs in the same basic colorway, and chose this one for this particular book. Unfortunately I didn't take any other photos of the process, but here are some pictures of the finished book, which is about 5 inches long by 4 1/2 inches high.

I love the fussiness of bookmaking -- it's probably perfect for a Virgo perfectionist like me. The binding process is very exacting, but there are a lot of creative decisions to be made along the way, and I especially enjoy making the cover papers. Parts of the process are meditative -- the sewing of the signatures, and sanding the edges of the cover boards, for instance -- and require a lot of patience. Other steps have to be carefully prepared and planned, and then executed very quickly. It's only through practice that you learn how to do that, and believe me, I've irreparably screwed up hours and hours of work at the very last minute! This one worked out pretty well, and I was grateful for that. Sometimes I realize I've been holding my breath for a long time, when doing the final gluing, for instance! That part can be pretty tense.

All the materials involved are tactile, special, and many have been used for centuries; for the same reasons that I like calligraphy, I enjoy this process and the feeling of being connected to so many anonymous, careful scribes and binders who have gone before. The Chinese signature chop was a gift from my pen-pal friend in Beijing; it's carved out of alabaster. She told me that the characters are a phoenetic representation of my name. I only seem to use it for bookmaking, where it feels appropriate, and it seems like it adds a special finishing touch.

I told the recipient of this book that she had to use it, it was meant to be written in! And today I was very happy to get a note from her saying she had written a short poem and some reflections in it this morning. Books should live.

Book List 2012

First of all, a look at the statistics:

2012 showed a drop in the number of titles read. There are two reasons for that. First, this year my husband and I bought a large screen for our bedroom and have been watching movies and (mostly) BBC TV shows and documentaries, and that's definitely cut into my reading time. Having said for years how much I hate TV (and this isn't a TV, but still!) I've enjoyed what we've been watching tremendously. A lot of it is pretty damned literary, too, plus it's made me think a lot about screenplays, and the art of writing and adapting for the screen, as well as the incredible talent of certain actors and directors. (But I defensively digress!)

Reason two is that many of the books I read this year were mammoth ones. There are only so many pages that anyone can get through in a year!

Of these 30 titles, 14 were by women, 16 by men. Eight of them are by people I consider to be friends. Slightly less than half were in digital form: 9 were e-books and 2 audio books. I don't have a dedicated e-reader - I use my Android smartphone, and while the screen is small, I really like the portability -- as well as the ability to download free copies of many classics. I can't quite believe I read Ulysses on my phone, but I did!

Finally, I've been more active on Goodreads, and have posted some reviews over there that haven't appeared here. All the links shown in the list below go to my reviews.

David Copperfield and his friend Mr. Micawber

The year was definitely dominated by those "big books:" Ulysses, David Copperfield, Emily Carr's journals, the Icelandic sagas. I've written about them both here and at Goodreads, so follow the links for more details.

Particular standouts written by friends included Marly Youmans' evocative and poignant novel of an orphan boy-turned-hobo in the depression-era South, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage; Dorothee Lang and Smitha Murthy's Worlds Apart, a book of letters between two women, one in China, and one in Germany, who've never met but begin a correspondence about travel that deepens into true friendship; and Khadija Anderson's first full-length poem collection, History of Butoh, which taught me about this astonishing artform and gave me more of Khadija's strong, uncompromising, and beautiful writing that I had first come to appreciate on qarrtsiluni.

The novel that I may have simply enjoyed the most, as a page-turner, was Tèa Obreht's The Tiger's Wife: highly recommended, extremely enjoyable.

I was disappointed with Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke, underwhelmed by Cees Nooteboom's Roads to Santiago, and with many of the essays in Derek Wolcott's What the Twilight Says, though I did like his essays about certain poets. That latter volume was completely eclipsed, for me, by the studies of writers, known and less-known, in Virginia Woolf's The Common Reader, First Series, which I found captivating and brilliantly written. Ghosh's second volume in his ambitious, long trilogy contains page after page of descriptive prose that simply failed to capture me.

When I turned to Charles Dickens I immediately saw why: Dickens loved his characters, and makes us love them too, not through techniques or exotic locations or extensive research, but by observing the small human details that make each of us unique. His books may be long, but in many ways they are simple, moving and memorable. Like A.S. Byatt, I feel that Ghosh tends to over-write, and that the books end up being more about the author than about the creation of a world that the reader inhabits, populated by literary friends that will remain for a lifetime. I don't know about either of the other authors I just mentioned, but I do know that Dickens himself was humble, and it comes through in the books.

If finishing Ulysses, on my third attempt, was my biggest reading accomplishment of 2012, my biggest surprise was rediscovering Charles Dickens, 45 years after being forced to read Great Expectations and hating every minute of it.

For art reading, I learned a lot from the essays in the excellent, exensive catalog for the Van Gogh Up Close exhibition in Ottawa.

I always read a few spiritual books, and this year was no exception. However, the books I read by Thich Naht Hahn and Adyashanti didn't affect or inspire me nearly as much as The Journals of Emily Carr, the Canadian artist, who might be appalled to hear her writing described as "spiritual," since that was certainly not her expressed intent even though she often wrote about her sense of the holy as she found it in nature. Her journals, which an astute friend gave to me early in the year, are mainly about the creative process, and moved me deeply. They were a companion as I myself wrote, throughout the year, about Iceland and Montreal, and my own re-emerging sense of myself as a visual artist through the drawings I was doing, and I think her largely solitary journey, so plainly and directly described, gave me a great deal of encouragement and support. What more can we possibly ask of a book than to have it become a friend and companion on our own journey?

So, without further ado, here's the list. Previous years' book lists can be found here (scroll down.) Happy New Year, and happy reading in 2013. I've already got my first few months lined up!

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2012 READING LIST  (links go to my reviews or commentaries)

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson (in progress)

Bleak House, Charles Dickens (in progress)*

Out of Africa, Isak Dinesen (in progress, audiobook)

Richard II, William Shakespeare (reread)

David Copperfield, Charles Dickens*

The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places, Bernie Krause

Chorister at the Abbey, Lis Howell (audiobook)

River of Smoke, Amitav Ghosh

Aim High, Achieve More: How to Transform Urban Schools through Fearless Leadership, Yvette Jackson and Veronica McDermott

Van Gogh Up Close, Cornelia Homburg, editor

Ulysses, James Joyce*

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce*

History of Butoh, Khadija Anderson (full-length poetry collection)

Worlds Apart, Dorothee Lang and Smith Murthy

I Stand Here Shredding Documents, Kristin Berkey Abbott (poetry chapbook)

Balance, Robbi Nestor (poetry chapbook)

Saga of the People of Laxardal (from Sagas of Icelanders)

What the Twilight Says (essays), Derek Walcott

A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage, Marly Youmans *

Living Buddha, Living Christ, Thich Naht Hahn

Emptiness Dancing, Adyashanti *

Sacre Blues: An Unsentimental journey Through Quebec, Taras Grescoe

Roads to Santiago, Cees Nooteboom

The Common Reader, First Series, Virginia Woolf *

The Most Beautiful Thing, Fiona Robyn *

The Tiger's Wife, Tea Obreht *

Nobility of Spirit: A Forgotten Ideal,  Rob Rieman

That Woman, Tom Montag (poetry chapbook)

Hundreds and Thousands, The Journals of Emily Carr

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, Tamim Ansary

The NYT favorite book cover designs of 2012

I'm preparing by own book list post for the year, but in the meantime, here is a slideshow of some terrific cover designs. My own favorite is the one shown here - and yes, as the Times caption-writer wrote, I do wish I'd thought of it myself!

Thaliad, last two days for pre-order!

I'll be making a formal announcement on Friday about Phoenicia's publication of Thaliad, by Marly Youmans -- with cover and illustrations by Clive Hicks-Jenkins -- but wanted to let Cassandra's blog readers know that there are just two more days to pre-order the hardcover edition at a special price of $23.00.

I can't even begin to tell you how lovely this book is when you hold it in your hands, or how proud I am to have been part of the collaboration that made it. After November 30, it will be offered in both paperback ($13.95) and hardcover editions ($26.00.) The first fifty orders (of either edition) will also receive something very special, to be announced soon!

Ulysses -- and the Trojan Horse Within

The Trojan Horse

Last night I finished my major summer reading: on my third attempt in as many decades, I finally finished Ulysses. How do I feel? Well, I keep asking myself that question. I guess I feel relieved to be done and proud of myself for actually finishing it, bu mostly I feel rather exhausted, somewhat annoyed, somewhat amused. In some ways I still don't know what to make of it. Perhaps that's what Joyce intended, and perhaps that's part of what makes it a great book: the fact that you are never really done with it, and it's never really done with you.

My longtime blog friend Loren (In a Dark Time the Eye Begins to See) also finished the book last night, and he's written some initial thoughts here. Lorianne (Hoarded Ordinaries) is in the middle of it, and she made some good points in the comments over there. Earlier this summer several online friends and I decided to tackle the book; we figured that, as with exercise, we'd be more likely to stick to it if we had company, and that proved to be true.

Odysseus escapes from the Cyclops cave by hiding under a ram

Like Loren, I also read Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man; I should have started with it but actually read it as a kind of detour when I found myself in danger of completely losing both my way and my desire to finish Ulysses itself. That was a good idea; Portrait really helped to contextualize Ulysses, and to place Joyce (through his character Stephen Daedalus) in his own narrative. It was also interesting to enter the Catholic-steeped, "priest-ridden" (to use Joyce's own words) Irish culture not long after the death of Parnall, and compare it with what I have learned about Quebec, where I now live, another formerly-priest-ridden culture filled with nationalist sentiment and many problems that are circularly debated to this day, trapping the society in a provincial, insecure mindset that still keeps it from truly looking outward.

In the famous Christmas dinner scene in Portrait, Joyce describes a family fight over Catholicism and Nationalism, about loyalty to the Church vs loyalty to the nationist cause, that degenerates into hopelessness about the future. Daedalus/Joyce observes this as a boy; it is the first Christmas where he has been allowed to eat dinner with the adults, only to see the eagerly-anticipated event devolve into a complete disaster, with the family members at each other's throats. Later on in the book, people speak of their hopes for Daedalus, a young man of bright intelligence; he flirts with religious devotion, and is even vetted for the priesthood. But no, he says to a friend eventually, I hope to fly by all those nets. He want to escape becoming ensnared in Catholicism, in politics, even in academia. At the end of Portrait, we still don't see how. Ulysses is Joyce's answer.

 

Odysseus kills the suitors who want his wife and kingdom.

--

As an intellectual and literary monument Ulysses is fraught with “oughts”: I ought to read it, I ought to understand it, I ought to like it, I ought to say it is great. Frankly I think a lot of literary intellectuals lie about Ulysses: very few have actually read it all the way through. I did my own informal poll, and even people I was certain would have read it  -- Oxford-educated literary clergy among them -- admitted they had not. And there are good reasons for that. After adeceptive start, the prose becomes as dense as a rain forest and you, the already-soaked and miserable reader, have neither machete nor macintosh; what you do have is the path behind you, you can turn around and go home, and most of us do. I certainly did, twice before. The verbal pyrotechnics can be extremely annoying; I don't want to have to read a book with a concordance in order to "get" everything, and I don't want to sit and listen to sophomoric male sparring: I had enough of that in college to last me a lifetime.

 

As for the structure of the book, I'm quite familiar with the Odyssey, but my copy of Ulysses didn't include the later notes and chapter headings, written by scholars arguing for the book's acceptance and legal publication, explaining the parallel scenes in Joyce's book and Homer's epic. I struggled to try orient myself in the two narratives, only getting the big picture after finishing, when I read the Wikipedia notes. As I quipped to a friend, part way through, "I think I prefer the original."

 

But actually none of this intellectual density ended up mattering to me. Once I had read Portrait, I was able to cut Stephen Daedalus a break because now I knew where he was coming from and what he was reacting against. I read several essays about the reaction to the book, when it was written, which helped me to understand the larger cultural context into which Ulysses exploded, and why what Joyce was doing was so revolutionary and shocking at the time. I read a good deal about Virginia Woolf's struggles with the book, and her friend T.S. Eliot's unmitigated praise for it.

I made a decision that it was OK not to read every word; and when pages became, for instance, simply a long list of names, I treated it the same way I once treated Deuteronomy; I got the gist of it and skimmed until I could find a footing again. Reading Ulysses became a lot like being immersed in a swiftly-moving streams: smooth, slower stretches alternated with rapids, where sometimes there was a footing, and sometimes one needed to just let go and be carried along by the sheer volume of words, feeling underneath with one's bare feet for a rock, trusting that there would eventually be a secure place to rest, get one's breath, look around, and start up again.

 

That stream could also be a description of the inside of our heads, and certainly this is one of the book's main points. As a longtime meditator, I'm aware of watching the stream of thoughts, experiencing the calmer places where one can rest, as well as the disorienting babble of the uncontrolled, unleashed, drifting mind. One of Modernism's goals was to explore the emerging awareness of human psychology in literature, and so we got various versions of this stream-of-consciousness writing: Joyce's, Faulkner's, Woolf's, Beckett's.

By her loom, Penelope and her son Telemachus await Odysseus's return

But there is also a meta aspect to Ulysses, I think. With words, Joyce is describing the minds of his characters as they go through their day in Dublin. But as the reader, you are also invited not only to examine your own thoughts, your own consciousness (both self- and sub-) in general, ("yes, I'm like Bloom, or Stephen, or Molly, I've thought like that too"), but to look back on the reading experience itself and say, wait a minute, this is what I've been doing as I read. I've had moments of clarity, periods of inattention and boredom, moments when I "got" the world depicted and moments when I was totally lost, periods when all I wanted to do was eat, or think about clothes, get up and go to the bathroom, make love.

 

Joyce knew what he was doing: he said that he'd given the professors enough material that they'd be occupied for the next hundred years trying to figure out what it all meant. On the surface that sounds like more of Stephen Daedalus's arrogance, but I wonder if Joyce -- entirely familiar with academia and literary critics -- wasn't simply pointing a wry finger at his own well-constructed smokescreen, knowing most of them wouldn't, and couldn't, see past it. The real brilliance of the book, I suspect, is not its erudition, verbal alacrity, or monumental pile of obscure references, but what it tells us about simple humanity; what it says about who we all are underneath our chosen veneers: human minds in physical bodies, and beautiful for it -- in spite of all our sins, excesses, failings, weaknesses and posturings.

After all, Ulysses - Odysseus in the Greek original - was a trickster. Known for his intelligence but most of all for his guile and cunning, he was relied upon by Agamemnon and all the Greeks. A major aspect of the Iliad is the way in which Achilles' physical prowess as a warrior, fired by anger, jealousy, and self-righteousness, is pitted against Odysseus' cooly rational intelligence and cunning. In the end, the Greek victory after nine years of fighting is not due to Achilles, for the Trojans had their extraordinary warriors too, but because of Odysseus, who devised the most famous battle strategem of all time, the Trojan Horse. The enemy, concealed and unsuspected, was lauded and wheeled right into the heart of the city.

Odysseus and Nausicaa; her father wanted him to remain and marry her, but Odysseus chose to return to his family.

Joyce's Ulysses is definitely a journey of homecoming, but I think the author has embedded his own brilliant ruse within it. You think it is this, he says to the academics and critics, and gives them, as Homer did, an adventure filled with monsters and seductresses, dangers and surprises, and enough complications, details and symbols to keep them busy forever. Wheeled into the heart of academic and literary tradition, the Trojan Horse opens, and shatters what had existed.

Meanwhile, like Odysseus, who alone of the Greeks came safely home, Joyce himself "flies by all those nets." He show us a possibility of finding our true home, beyond any concept of institution, nation, or family expectation. It's no mere coincidence that Homer titled the penultimate chapter of the Odyssey, "The Great Rooted Bed," and its final chapter, "Peace."