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Last month, the newly elected poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy told an audience of schoolgirls in Manchester that the MP expenses scandal was “just too much of an open goal for me so I’ll wait for something a bit more subtle to write about.” But evidently, Duffy has decided that she won’t follow in Cristiano Ronaldo’s footsteps. This week, Duffy “leaps into [the] expenses row” with “Politics”, a poem published on the front page of the Guardian. She writes: “…How it takes the breath/away, the piss, makes of your kiss a dropped pound coin….” She could have been writing about the poet laureate post itself: predecessor Andrew Motion (that’s Sir Andrew now) said the job was “very, very damaging to my work” and left him with a five-year case of writer’s block. Does Duffy’s first foray—after her pledge to lay off the topic—suggest she’s suffering the same?

Got Milk? The term “writer’s block” was coined by the Austrian Jewish psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler, a Freud follower who fled from Hitler and set up shop in New York in the late 1930s. The condition was caused by “entrapment in rage over the milk-denying pre-Oedipal mother.” This week, the New Yorker‘s Joan Acocella traces the treatment of writer’s block through the ages. Apparently, Prozac is a mixed bag: “some report that the drugs tend to eliminate their desire to write together with their regret over not doing so.”

Following Holden’s Path. As Acocella points out, not every writer who retreats from the literary stage is a “block” victim. JD Salinger hasn’t published a piece since 1965, but he says he is prolific in private. “I love to write and I assure you I write regularly”, Salinger said in 1980. “But I write for myself and I want to be left absolutely alone to do it.”

The end of Salinger’s masterpiece Catcher in the Rye finds protagonist Holden Caulfield in a rehab facility (“a sanatorium, where he has gone because of a fear that he has t.b., not a mental hospital”, as the New Yorker noted). Now, the New York Post reveals that Salinger “is holed up in a rehab facility” as well. The tabloid reported this week that Salinger “has to communicate in longhand because he has gone totally deaf.” The information comes from his longtime literary agent, Phyllis Westberg, who has filed an affidavit in the lawsuit to block an unauthorized Catcher sequel from being published. (The affidavit is posted online at TheSmokingGun.com.) Salinger won a court case in the 1980s to keep his private letters out of print, and the Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog reports that in the current suit, “the Salinger camp might have a good leg to stand on” (as opposed to Salinger himself, who broke his hip last week).

The Talented Miss Highsmith. Speaking of reclusive American writers, crime novelist Patricia Highsmith “never became popular in the US“, Michael Dirda writes in the NYRB. At least, not until 1999, four years after her death, when Matt Damon and Jude Law starred in the film adaptation of Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. Now, a re-release of her Ripley novels—all 1,520 pages packed into one boxed set—has brought Highsmith’s reputation to a posthumous peak. Oprah Winfrey is a fan: “If you have only one summer vacation, spend it with Tom Ripley“, according to the daytime TV diva’s O magazine. The New York Times calculates that, if Tom Ripley was 25 when Highsmith wrote her first installment in 1954, then “he celebrates his 80th birthday in 2009“. Dirda credits Highsmith for writing “perhaps…the first…novel about lesbians [that] ends happily“: The Price of Salt, which was published pseudonymously in 1952 (and, as Terry Castle speculates in Slate, which perhaps inspired the cross-country car-trip in Lolita). The English critic AN Wilson is a convert as well. As he writes:

[W]hen the dust has settled and when the chronicle of twentieth-century American literature comes to be written, history will place Highsmith at the top of the pyramid.

Speaking of AN Wilson and conversion, Wilson—once an avowed atheist and the author of God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization—is featured in the Wall Street Journal‘s Houses of Worship column under the headline “Look Who’s a Believer Now“. He has recanted his recanting in a New Statesman essay.

Look Who’s Got “Major Backing” Now. We don’t mean to revive the debate over in-house favouritism in the nonfiction section of the New York Times Book Review. (Times in-house watchdog Byron Calame pointed out in 2005 that one-tenth of the nonfiction titles in the paper’s “100 Notable Books of the Year” were written by Times employees.) But we would like to shift the debate over to the fiction side. This past week, The Times published two positive reviews of Commencement—the fictional debut by NYT researcher J. Courtney Sullivan—within the span of two days! On 11 June, Janet Maslin called Commencement “one of the year’s most inviting summer novels“. On 12 June, Maria Russo joined the chorus: “Sullivan’s gifts are substantial“. (Russo, to her credit, did note that at times the novel is a tad “too earnest”.) And if that wasn’t enough, NYTimes.com featured a fawning Q&A with Sullivan last week. (The questions—”what are you working on?”; “what is a typical day in your writing life?”—aren’t exactly hard-hitting.) This is on top of Nicholas Kristof’s proclamation on The Times website in March that Commencement is a “terrific” book that marks “the launch of a literary career“. Sullivan once wrote a piece for The Times on Cara Birnbaum’s Universal Beauty, which she described as “a book…with major backing“. She might as well have been describing her own.

Kristof Strikes Back. Speaking of Nicholas Kristof, the Magdalen College alumnus might have thought that Commencement was “terrific”, but he doesn’t have kind words to say about Mahmood Mamdani’s Survivors and Strangers, which was reviewed by Marc Gustafson in the 11 May edition of ORB. (Incidentally, Mamdani doesn’t have kind words to say about Kristof either. Two years ago, Mamdani wrote in the London Review of Books that “Kristof’s columns…mirror the ideology of Arab supremacism in Sudan by demonising entire communities”.) This week, Kristof takes to the pages of the New York Review of Books and blasts “Mamdani’s error-filled polemic“. Kristof questions whether Mamdani even bothered to fact-check the book. For instance, where did Mamdani get the idea that Darfur was a member of the League of Nations? (It was not.) Mamdani acknowledges on the Social Science Research Council blog that he “reproduced [it] from a Communist Party publication“. Talk about being “caught red-handed“!

James Joyce, IRA? John Walsh (not anti-crime activist John Walsh of “America’s Most Wanted” fame but anti-Derek Walcott activist John Walsh of Padel-gate fame) reviews Ulysses and Us (see Scarlett Baron’s take-down in last week’s Oxonian Review) and concludes that author Declan Kiberd spends too much time trying to “infer [Irish] Republican sympathies” in Joyce’s masterpiece. The Irish Times (famous for its lack of Irish Republican sympathies—it called for the execution of the Easter Rising rebels in 1916) reviews Ulysses and Us and concludes that it is a “beautiful, joyful book about a beautiful, joyful book“. The Seattle-based Stranger reviews Ulysses (yes, it’s 87 years late—but the alternative weekly paper wasn’t around in 1922) and concludes that the book is “an act of terrorism against the English“. Meanwhile, Dedalus devotees from Hungary to Buffalo celebrate Bloomsday this Tuesday, 16 June, the 105th anniversary of the (fictional) events of Ulysses. (US troops stationed in Kyrgystan jumped the gun and kicked off their Bloomsday celebration last month.)

A Day in the Life of James Joyce. Dedalus’s creator would say that he had a “good day at the desk” if he had managed to eek out “three sentences”. (Of course, if Joyce maintained his rate of 12,931 words in a sentence, that might be a good day indeed.) Alexander Raban Waugh, the brother of Evelyn, could churn out 24,000 words a week if he was “popping some benzedrine“. And Joyce Carol Oates could write 40 pages a day at her peak, according to the New Yorker‘s Louis Menand. In a survey of academic creative writing programmes, Menand classifies Oates as a “program product“—which is not quite accurate: she teaches in the creative writing faculty at Princeton but her own MA from the University of Wisconsin was in English. Menand explains that American universities began to grant degrees in creative writing after World War II to tap the flood of tuition assistance funds pouring out of Washington under the GI Bill. Even so, creative writing programs cost a pretty penny: the flagship Iowa Writers’ Workshop is $21,467 (£13,088) per year for out-of-state students. That’s nearly double the rate that non-EU students pay at Oxford, although it’s all for naught if the programmes are, as novelist Nelson Algren claimed, “worthless“.

Declan Kiberd
Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life
Faber and Faber, 2009
400 Pages
£17.99
ISBN 978-0571242542

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If Marilyn Monroe can read Ulysses, so can you. The 20th century’s archetypal blonde sits on the cover of Ulysses and Us, gracefully curled on a playground bench, attired in colourful stripy beachwear. Her eyes focus intently on the heavy tome balanced upon her knees; her mouth hangs slightly open; she is engrossed.

The connection between the cover photograph and the content of Declan Kiberd’s book is never spelt out. Although this is not ideal, it is probably for the best: to explain the link would be to risk implying that a blonde bombshell provides the best possible example of the ordinary reader. For Kiberd’s book is all about the common or average reader—that is, the reader who approaches Ulysses without academic incentive or guidance. Kiberd’s view, repeated with mantra-like regularity throughout this episode-by-episode guide to James Joyce’s masterpiece, is that Ulysses was written for precisely this kind of reader.

Ulysses and Us has two principle aims: to explain why Ulysses has missed its target audience, and to give that audience the means to enjoy and reclaim it. Kiberd argues that Ulysses is for ordinary readers because it is primarily about ordinary people. The novel’s minimalist plot revolves around a single day in the lives of three Dubliners: Stephen Dedalus—erudite young man and aspiring writer; Leopold Bloom—middle-aged Jewish man, advertisement canvasser; and Molly Bloom—Leopold’s wife, a concert singer.

While Molly waits for her lover to arrive, Leopold ambles about the streets of Dublin, trying in vain to keep his wife’s dalliance out of mind. Meanwhile, Stephen follows his own meandering trajectory through the city, thinking abstruse thoughts about life and literature. While Stephen is haunted by memories of his mother’s recent death, Bloom’s thoughts often return to his son Rudy, who died in infancy ten years earlier. The two men’s paths eventually cross as Bloom follows Stephen and his riotous drinking companions to Dublin’s red-light district. In the early hours of the morning, the two men amble back to Bloom’s kitchen for a cup of cocoa.

There may not seem much to this storyline, but Joyce’s masterful and revolutionary use of interior monologue infuses his protagonists’ experiences with emotional resonance and psychological complexity. The book derives additional meaning and structure from an external source: the title is a reference to Homer’s Odyssey, with which it entertains countless correspondences—Stephen is a modern-day Telemachus, Bloom a contemporary Odysseus, Molly an updated Penelope.

Ulysses and Us convincingly portrays Bloom as a representative of civic bourgeois virtue. Kiberd aptly and engagingly captures the tenderness and tolerance with which Joyce endows his everyman: it is in Bloom’s well-intentioned concern for others and kindness in action that Ulysses’s everyday wisdom resides. However, Kiberd’s contention that Bloom’s values are Joyce’s own—that Bloom is in some way privileged over other protagonists as a mouthpiece for Joyce’s opinions—is more controversial. It is on this premise, however, that Kiberd’s overall interpretation of Ulysses hinges.

Literary critics tend to think of Ulysses as a modernist triumph (the book was first published in 1922) that can surely delight any reader who attends to its demanding prose, but only yields true intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction—as arguably do all works of art—when submitted to close scrutiny. Kiberd maintains that Joyce wrote with everyday readers in mind. Accordingly, he laments the fact that “a book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman endured the sad fate of never being read by most of them.”

A university professor himself, Kiberd thinks Ulysses has been “wrenched out of the hands of the common reader” by the ivory-towered academy: the canonical status bestowed upon Ulysses from within these intellectual enclaves cements the book’s reputation as an abstruse and indecipherable work of genius. Ulysses and Us is an impassioned clarion call to allow the book to “reconnect” with “the everyday lives of real people.”

Its author, however, does not help Kiberd’s case. Joyce famously stated that “I have put in [Ulysses] so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.” Of his ideal audience, he quipped that “the demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.” Such comments need not discourage the average reader from picking up the book, but they help explain why generations of critics have emphasised Ulysses’s apparent opacity.

Indeed, not all share Kiberd’s sense that Joyce needs to be returned to a mass ordinary audience-in-waiting. In 2004, prize-winning Irish novelist Roddy Doyle railed against Ulysses’s monumental standing, deploring its inflated length (the book, he said, “could have done with a good editor”) and its failure to engage with real human concerns: “People are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books”, he said, “but I doubt any of those people were really moved by it.”

Whether Kiberd or Doyle are right about Ulysses’s ability to touch the hearts of its readers, and surely the heart of the individual reader should be the judge of that, the book has undeniably made it out of the library and into the limelight. On 16 June every year, Dublin and many other cities around the world celebrate Bloomsday, commemorating the day on which Ulysses is set and on which the Blooms face their marital crisis (always one to mark anniversaries in style, Joyce sets his opus on the date he and his lifelong partner, Nora Barnacle, had their first tryst). In 2004, Bloomsday’s centenary year, over 10,000 people took to the streets of the Irish capital to take part in the day’s festivities. Yet such high levels of public visibility are not—as Kiberd acknowledges—a measure of Ulysses’s true readership so much as a reflection of the current trend for the government-funded fetishisation of Joyce’s works: the prime beneficiary of this enthusiasm is arguably the Irish tourist industry rather than Ulysses itself.

Although it is no state-sponsored Bloomsday, Kiberd’s enterprise is at heart a popularizing one. Between introductory and concluding sections devoted to the book’s mission statement (these come under such titles as “How Ulysses Didn’t Change Our Lives” and “How It Might Still Do”), 18 numbered chapters give an episode-by-episode account of Ulysses. The titles chosen for these summarizing sketches epitomise the dangers inherent in Kiberd’s project. Instead of referring to the episodes by the Homeric names that signal their connection to the Odyssey (these are used by academics, as they were privately by Joyce himself), Kiberd resorts to platitudinous gerunds, such as Waking, Thinking, Ogling, Parenting, Loving. To be sure, the basic activities singled out here do feature in Joyce’s encyclopaedic book. But to suggest that any one episode is predominantly about a particular kind of action is to do Ulysses an injustice, for each of Joyce’s episodes muses on all—and a great many more—of the aspects of everyday life that appear on Kiberd’s list.

Kiberd’s overly personal tone is another cause for discomfort. His musings can be unabashedly grandiose (Joyce “excavated the very depths of the self and the world”), embarrassingly corny (“it is the reader who can decide whether to change, the reader who has been made heroic by the act of working through the challenges posed by the book”), and nostalgically moralizing (“If today a twenty-two-year-old graduate would feel quite unsafe in taking up the invitation of an unfamiliar man to come home with him for cocoa and a chat, that may be our loss.”).

Kiberd’s strong point, on the other hand, is contextualisation, both literary and historical. He does an excellent job of resituating Joyce’s works in relation to the Irish Literary Revival, arguing, in a refreshing turn against the status quo, that the author’s aims were not so fundamentally different from those of his more openly political Irish contemporaries. Joyce’s epic of modern life is read side by side with the Bible and the works of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Whitman. Kiberd also illuminates connections between Ulysses and World War I: in the light of that conflict, he suggests that Joyce’s redefinition of the notion of heroics—largely by way of his endearing, civic-minded bourgeois modern hero, Leopold Bloom—takes on a more prescriptive edge than is usually recognised.

Kiberd’s take on Bloom is key to his thesis: again and again, he praises Bloom as a paragon of the empathetic everyman. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this view, but Kiberd is rather too forceful in his assumption that Bloom functions merely as a vehicle for Joyce’s message. Joyce’s use of interior monologue for all three of his protagonists makes his novel resistant to such a reductionist reading.

While he falls short here, Kiberd acquits himself well on many counts. Popularization is always a tricky business. Indeed, there is an inbuilt paradox in Kiberd’s self-appointed task: if Ulysses was written for the average reader, why does that reader need a guide to enjoy it? The reviewer of Kiberd’s book faces a related double-bind: while the novice reader of Ulysses cannot be expected to evaluate the guidebook’s accuracy, an academic reader is hardly in an ideal position to appreciate how useful Kiberd’s book may be to its intended audience. The best advice to the potential first-time reader of Ulysses may simply be to cut out the primers and take a tip from Marilyn Monroe: get started on the real thing.

Scarlett Baron received her DPhil from Christ Church, Oxford. She is currently a Prize Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford.

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Orange’s Thick Skin. AS Byatt has called it “sexist“. Tim Lott adds that it is “perverse“. But the Orange Prize—awarded each year to the best English-language novel by a writer with two X chromosomes—remains impervious to attacks. (The chair of last year’s jury has suggested that men should be able to judge—if not compete for—the award, though organisers chose to maintain a male-less panel nonetheless.) American author Marilynne Robinson accepted the £30,000 prize (and the accompanying bronze “Bessie” figurine) last week for her 2008 novel Home and shot back at critics who say a women’s-only award is discriminatory. “I do think it’s a necessary corrective“, Robinson told Reuters. (In contrast to Home, which was “unnecessary and contrived“, according to the New York Times‘ chief book reviewer, Michiko Kakutani.)

The “biggest winner” at the Orange awards was the Oxford-based Francesca Kay, says The Economist. Robinson “hardly needs introductions” (Barack Obama lists Robinson’s Gilead as one of his favourite books on his Facebook page), but Kay—who won the prize for best first-time novelist—could use a name-recognition boost. The Guardian dismissed her debut An Equal Stillness as “heavy-handed” earlier this year (though The Independent was more impressed).

The All-Knowing Noodle. Two weeks ago, the New York Times ran a restaurant review titled “Worshipping at the Alter of Ramen“. Food critic Frank Bruni visited a Greenwich Village noodle shop and concluded that the cuisine was—metaphorically—mesmerizing. But Andy Raskin has taken his love of ramen to another level. A therapist advised the 44-year-old Raskin to “surrender to a higher power“. So Raskin, unattached to any organised religion, adopted instant noodle inventor Momofuku Ando as his deity. His memoirs, reviewed in the Washington Post, also tell the tale of the twice-jailed, thrice-married Ando and his quest for the perfect packaged meal. Apparently, one’s love of instant noodles does not diminish after the university years (as MP Marc Francois’s expense reports also reveal).

The Balance of Gastronomic Power. One’s love of French cuisine does diminish over the years, according to Slate wine columnist Michael Steinberger. And that’s because French cuisine is on a downward trend. The Observer reviews Steinberger’s new book Au Revoir To All That and agrees that the small-town bistro is “withering” while upmarket restaurants are suffering a “crisis of creativity”. The Sunday Times, which reviewed the book last month, agrees that the balance of power in the culinary world is tilting westward: “[I]t is Americans who now uphold the classic French techniques, obsessing over the best raw-milk cheeses made to the old formulas, while the French themselves scoff Big Macs in Le McDo.” (Steinberger, for his part, worried recently in a Slate column that the White House was not upholding its commitment to classy wines: Thomas Jefferson amassed a 20,000-bottle collection, but the cellar’s inventory has fallen under a thousand. The situation is so bad that Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were served a 2004 Newton unfiltered chardonay, a wine that is “cloying”, “buttery”, and “overwrought”).

The Jungle Book, Chapter 11. With two of Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers now bankrupt, the Daily Telegraph says that “Motown is now more like an echoey ghost town“. Not to be confused with the actual Amazon ghost town where “Fordlandia” was once found. The Wall Street Journal reviews a new book on Henry Ford’s ill-fated attempt to build a rubber plantation in the Brazilian rainforest. (His dream was dashed by labour unrest and “very hungry caterpillars“.)

Meanwhile, the London Review of Books looks at the lessons that an army ant trail in Panama may hold for highway traffic management. According to Oxford zoologist Iain Couzin, ants have developed a three-lane system—with the outbound ants taking the outer lanes and the inbound ants coming down the centre. But apparently, not everyone follows the rules of the road:

A constant game of chicken ensues, with the outbound ants holding their ground against the returning ants until the last possible moment, then swiftly turning away from the oncoming traffic. There is the occasional collision, but Couzin says the three-lane structure helps minimise the subsequent delay.

Perhaps not the best model for managing the M40 at rush hour.

Meanwhile, Joshua Blu Buhs, whose previous book was about a fire-ant infestation in the US, turns his attention to a larger creature in Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, reviewed in this week’s New York Times. In 1968, a pair of amateur filmmakers in Northern California claimed they had captured footage of a large, ape-like creature on the prowl; hundreds of people across North America asserted that they had seen Bigfoot as well. Buhs argues that “white, rural men” in 1960s America who felt “threatened by women’s rights [and] civil rights” chose to believe in Bigfoot as “a way to snub effete, skeptical scientists”. Meanwhile, Bigfoot hunters in Oklahoma said last month that they had found a 15-inch-long footprint, and a new book by a California police officer claims to show compelling evidence of Bigfoot’s existence.

The Novelist and His Labyrinth. For the second time in as many weeks, the New York Times reviews Gerald Martin’s biography of Gabriel García Márquez. This week, Paul Berman weighs in on Maria Vargas Llosa’s allegation that García Márquez is a Castro “lackey”. Berman takes Vargas Llosa’s side of the dispute: “The world’s most popular serious novelist does seem to be a flunky of the world’s longest-lasting monomaniacal dictator.” But the Seattle Times says that Martin offers no new insights on the bizarre feud between the Vargas Llosa and the García Márquez, which began when the Peruvian Thatcherite threw a punch at the Colombian Nobelist, leaving García Márquez with a black eye.

Tonto Fistfight at 30,000 Feet? Whereas Vargas Llosa actually did sock García Márquez, Sherman Alexie only thought about thumping his fellow passenger on a recent flight to New York. Alexie, whose new collection of poems was reviewed in ORB, drew the ire of Amazon.com when he told the New York Times last week that he “wanted to hit” a woman who was reading on her Kindle in-flight. Alexie later elaborated on his remarks in an interview with bloger Edward Champion:

“If eBooks do take over the market, then dozens more independent bookstores will close, and all sorts of communities will lose a vital social force. Does Amazon have any plans to fill the social gaps left by those closed stores?”

Alexie may move closer to answering that question when he meets with Amazon representatives to “listen to their arguments for the machines“. The author says he has reconsidered his ire toward e-readers after receiving notes from Kindle users who, “because of various physical issues”, can only read with electronic assistance. And on his website, Alexie now avows that he “will not beat up anybody at Amazon or Kindle“.

The Bodleian in a Bottle? Amazon’s Jeff Bezos acknowledged last month that “Kindle is never going to have the same smell as a book“. But the world’s 68th richest man now stands corrected. A company called DuroSport has launched a new product line called Smell of Books, a “revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer” that will leave your Kindle with the odour of an old library. Alas, it’s a spoof, but the Guardian‘s Alison Flood is intrigued: “I think the idea could really catch on.”

Speaking of online books and old libraries, Cambridge University has announced that it will digitise its collection of pre-1501 incunabula, including a 1455 Gutenberg Bible. The BBC carries an almost certainly apocryphal account of the Bible’s acquisition:

Legend has it the book was handed to the then librarian Alwyn Schofield out of the blue when an old man turned up at the library door saying he had an old bible to donate to the library. The man turned out to be Arthur Young, retired lawyer and member of Trinity College.

Cambridge’s own website reveals that Young’s gifts to the university (340 volumes in total) came in two installments in 1933 and 1934 and a third batch after his death in 1936. If—as the BBC suggests—Young hand-delivered the donation, the octagenarian would have needed to possess superhuman strength.

Body-Building With Books? The San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News carries an op-ed arguing that schoolchildren should not be “forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks”. The op-ed writer who wants to lighten the load on California schoolchildren is none other than the state’s weightlifter-in-chief, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The “Governator” thinks that the plan could cut costs from the cash-strapped state’s budget, but the state superintendant of public instruction says that the plan is a “pipe dream“.

A £275,000 Mistake. Speaking of Cambridge and first editions, a Sunday Times review of Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (also reviewed by ORB this week) reveals that Clare College fellow Mansfield Forbes acquired the Joyce novel shortly after its 1922 publication but “was so panicked at the thought of being caught with it that he bundled up his illegal copy and threw it in the Cam“. Treasure-seeking Cantabrigians might take that as a cue to dress up in scuba gear and scour the river bottom for the remains. A first edition of Ulysses sold for £275,000 last week. The vast majority of the pages appear to be untouched; the original owner only read “the racy bits at the end“.