A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

"'Hello!  It's young Dedalus!  What's up?' 'The sky is up,' Brother Michael said"--A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Monday I picked up James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at the Lillian Smith library, which I'm reading for my book club. (Never read it before.) I'm really getting into it:  twice already I've been reading it on the bus or subway and ended up missing my stop!  This Oxford World's Classics edition is helped immensely by the annotations, like when a family friend tells Stephen that he got his stiff knuckles "making Queen Victoria a birthday present" and a note explains that means he was an Irish rebel in a British prison picking oakum from old ropes!

The book really grabbed me in an early scene where a Christmas dinner is ruined by an argument about Parnell!  I don't care for the sort of novel that says at the start, "It was 1892." I prefer it when you read about something like Parnell, and figure out the time from that.  People at the time mostly weren't thinking, "We're living in 1892"--that's a hindsight construct--but they were thinking about Parnell!

At the same library I was looking for a copy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' novel 100 Years of Solitude. (Why? That's another story for the next post...) That book's in big demand:  Lillian Smith had three copies and they were all out!  The next day I was going out to Ali Baba's to buy some falafel wraps and went to the Gladstone library to find the copy there, but the libraries had closed early because of the ice storm.  I went again on Thursday but it turned out to be out there too.  Then today I went to the Northern District branch and that copy was also out--some book club must be reading it!  So I went to Indigo Books and bought a copy.

I'm still not quite over my cold.  Last night I went to opera rehearsal but had to leave early because of a headache. (It didn't help that I'd eaten too much spaghetti.)

I've been answering a lot of questions at quora.com . (Two or three times I've reached my daily limit!) I can't resist giving some smartass answers, like when someone asked "Why do people end sentences with '...or whatever'?" and I answered "Because they're airheads!"

The other night I was watching a PBS documentary on Youtube about Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian revolution.  There's another subject to discuss in my History Meetup!