"One Thousand and One Nights in a Bar-Room"

"One Thousand and One Nights in a Bar-Room:  Or The Irish Odysseus" is an article/review by Matthew Josephson on/of the book Ulysses by James Joyce.

It begins on page 146 of the journal Broom (from September 1922) which you can read for free here:  http://books.google.com/books?id=sEwHAQAAIAAJ&dq

It is interesting to me for its title only, the review speaks at great length as to how Joyce's Ulysses is nothing more than 700+ pages of drunk people in a bar talking.

It has nothing to do with the Nights apart from its title, however, just another interesting mention.

Broom was a journal of the arts in the US, published in the early 20th century - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broom:_An_International_Magazine_of_the_Arts

Josephson was a writer from New York. 

James Joyce's copy of Burton's Nights

Here's something you don't see everyday, and something I was particularly excited to get to look at, the volumes of Richard F. Burton's Nights that were a part of the library of James Joyce.  I don't know much about the particularities of the volumes, where Joyce bought them, etc., but do know he got them and read them (via a couple of articles by Aida Yared) after writing, or shortly before finishing, Ulysses.

They are housed as a part of the Poetry Collection of the University of Buffalo (NY) Libraries, along with a ton of Joyce related writings and other incredible things, like the original of Yeats' order form for Ulysses, and etc. etc.

Many thanks to the staff at the Library, very cool people, always be nice to your librarians, they run the world.

I took these pictures, but they are owned by The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, so don't use them elsewhere!  Thank you!

As an aside, it is known that there are no markings in the books, and that most of the pages are cut (they used to have every page sealed, and you had to cut them to read them), but what has never (as far as I've read) been remarked on is that Volume 10 ("Terminal Essay," etc.) has a particularly well creased spine, the pages laid flat, unlike all of the other volumes (yes, I asked to look through all of them...), and, most interestingly, the pages of Volume 10 smelled of smoke, other volumes didn't.  Immortality indeed.  Yes.

From JJ Nights

From JJ Nights

From JJ Nights

From JJ Nights

From JJ Nights

From JJ Nights

From JJ Nights

ulysses and the 1001 nights

I'm presenting a sort of preliminary paper at the upcoming Joyce Conference at UC Irvine and the topic is the relationship between James Joyce's Ulysses and the 1001 Nights.

I say preliminary because thankfully that is the format of the conference as everyone will be presenting a 5 page argument abbreviated paper instead of a fully developed one and thankfully because my argument isn't as developed as I intend it to be.

What I'm suggesting in this paper is that previous scholarship on both the Nights side and the Joyce side fail to fully develop which specific version of the Nights Joyce used for inclusion in Ulysses. Aida Yared has an article which convincingly argues that Joyce had not read any version in particular before Finnegans Wake and that Joyce uses extensively from Burton's specific version in the Wake.

The primary function of the Nights in Ulysses seems to be as part of the English/Irish pantomime and not of any textual version.

Once you begin looking at the specific version of the Nights Joyce uses you can begin to uncover the ways in which he uses the Nights in Ulysses.

In any case, I think most scholarship on Joyce and the Nights apart from Yared's article just mentions the 1001 Nights in a general sense and that they influenced Joyce but not to what extent nor which specific versions of the Nights and in what ways.

For whatever that's worth it's sort of the direction this paper is heading. It'll be my first conference paper too.

- M