You don't have to pay for it. I don't want to get a sicker. It's a real human being, a mother of two children, whose denial of tax is the money cost to the taxpayers in North Carolina. There's not a penny in this legislature. Access to health care, access to life, that's not right. It's not right.  I'm 78 years old. I've been a revolutionary most of my life. Fire up! There you go! This is the seventh day of the Jericho March. No way! That's correct. And so it's important for us to do all that we can to get as many people out to vote as we possibly can. Good morning. Would you all say with me forward together? Forward together. Not one step back. I've been to North Carolina and then gone to jail down in North Carolina. Where the folk that went to jail in Marl Monday? Where's Jay Leach? Is Jay here? Yeah. Alright, anybody else? Alright, come on up here because y'all know that in Marl Monday we never speak from a stage alone. So I need two or three of y'all. It's time. So y'all sit, grab a chair and sit right behind me because we need a new ethic. It's not never was. Have you ever watched that when Dr. King was at March on Washington all the people that were around him? There was never this one person on the stage kind of thing because it's not about one person. It's about we. What we can do. And so you just saw tidbits. Now I want to first lay out 12 steps that we've been working with for the last seven years. It takes time. Just grab a chair. One of those chairs. Yeah. Just grab a chair. They look like those cops standing behind and getting ready to rest. God, we praised this morning. And we thank you for your power and strength. We've been working on this fusion movements take time, but it's critical because I believe that we're in the embryonic stages of a third reconstruction. The first reconstruction, the 1800s reconstruction, the 1960s, both of them happened because of fusion politics. We don't have time to work through all of the components, but you should know that the very attacks that are going on today to the social justice movement is the sign not that we're losing, but we're winning. You see, sometimes your enemy is your best predictor of your power because we know from the first reconstruction and the second reconstruction what they used to stop both of those reconstructions, the tools of deconstruction always included taking over the courts, attacking voting rights, attacking fair tax policies, attacking public education, attacking labor rights, and attacking those who were believing in a progressive way. The only difference is in the first reconstruction it took them about 30 years to undo. And the second reconstruction from 54 to 68, it took 14 years, but when President Obama was elected, not him as president because we don't agree with everything, but the electorate that elected him that shifted the south, that changed the south and caused states like North Carolina, Florida, and South Carolina to vote for an African American, the former slave states. And when you saw all these people come together, black, white, different parties, different races, different creeds, different sexuality, it pointed to the possibility of breaking the southern strategy, which is the last stronghold in the American democracy. And when that happened, the people who saw it happen realized we were in the embryonic stage of a reconstruction. So they did what they claimed they don't like to do. They're trying to abort it. You see what I'm saying? So they didn't wait 30 years like it did in the 1800s or 14 years in the 1960s immediately. And what did they attack immediately? The courts, voting, tax policy, labor. Now, we've been working at this for about seven years because we believe from 2007 and 2008 is actually when we began to see this embryonic stage. And we believe in North Carolina, the Forward Together Marble Movement, there are 12 components of the movement. And I want to encourage each of you to go back home, your states, and work with Bill Lee's movements. I'm going to tell you why. And here they are. Number one, we have to engage indigenously led grassroots organizing at the state level because change does not happen from DC down. It happens from Selma up. It happens from Birmingham and Montgomery up. So what we need are indigenously led, say that with me, indigenously led, state government, state-based, deeply moral, deeply constitutional, anti-racist, anti-poverty, pro-justice, pro-labor, transformative fusion movements. Because most of the things that are happening to hold this country back now are happening in state governments. Each one of our reconstruction, the first reconstruction, the second reconstruction, happened when we changed what was going on in state legislatures because in state legislatures and with governors, remember Dr. King, governors whose lips are dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, is state governments and legislatures as where interposition happens to undermine federal protection. You see? So we have to have a free focus. Dr. King actually never told us to go back to DC.  So if you come to DC, you come with a movement not just with a march. All right. Number two, we must use moral language to frame and critique public policy, not just this left-right Democrat. It's too small. We need moral language. Number three, we must demonstrate a commitment to civil disobedience. Nobody is going to be bothered if you just go have a march. They'll sit up there, have a picnic and watch you. But we had 1,006 people arrested over two years. And we have seen the governor's number go from 50% to 35% to legislature from 40% to 19%. And we've seen in North Carolina when we started, only 40% of the people were for Medicaid expansion, but now 58% are for it because through civil disobedience and moral framing, we were able to shift the consciousness of the state. We must be at number four, build a stage to lift the voices of everyday people, not politicians. Did you see? Those were everyday people. We must put a face on the pan and force America to see the pain that it's causing. Number, the next one, build a coalition of moral and religious leaders of all faith. We learned that from Unitarian. So we have 1,000 Imams and Rabbi. Really, our movement is quite Unitarian. Next one, we must intentionally diversify the movement with the goal of winning uniclimate allies. 11% of the folk that went to jail and marched with us are Republicans because we don't even talk about Republican and Democrats. We talk about extremists versus those who believe, because there are some people that are not Tea Party intoxicated and they're not high on Coke, K-O-C-H. And you have to give them room. You have to give them some room. You have to believe in a movement and the possibility of redeeming your enemy. Anytime you get in a movement and you do not believe in the possibility of your enemy redeeming, you need to check yourself because if you stay at that too long, you will become what you hate. Next, we must build transformative long-term coalition, rooted not in an individual, but in an agenda. So you can't just curse the darkness. Our agenda is economic sustainability, addressing poverty and labor rights. Number two, educational quality for all children. Number three, healthcare for all. Number four, criminal justice reform because of the disparate impacts on black, brown and disenfranchised poor whites. And then the last one is protecting and expanding voting rights, women's rights, LGBT rights and labor rights and upholding the fundamental principle of equal protection under the law. You cannot just have a negative what you are against. Prophetic, moral, crawling demand that you have hope. A hope that touches the pain but then builds hope up out of the pain. Next, you have to make a serious commitment to academic and empirical analysis of policies. In other words, the worst thing you can do is to be loud and wrong. Next, you have to utilize social media and the cultural arts. What Sayuda did, did you feel the room shift? Nevada just can't, if I had come in here and just started talking, it'd be a very different place. But she used the cultural arts to do two things. She used music to connect you to the past, inspire you in the present and create an atmosphere for prophetic, moral teaching. Because the Bible says in the Book of Kings and before the prophet or before prophetic teaching can come forth you must call for the minstrel. It says that when the minstrel sings then the hand of the Lord comes upon those who are engaged in prophetic, moral work. Next, you must engage in voter registration and education. Next, you must pursue a strong legal strategy. A lot of these issues we also have to take in the courts. Whatever you stir up in the streets you have to litigate in the courts. And then lastly you must resist the one-moment mentality and build a movement. Now those are the 12 steps. I don't hawk a book, but I have a book entitled Forward Together, a Message for the Moral Mission and in it it lays out all of these things on Amazon. I'd like to ask you to get that. And Beacon is helping us write a piece that's coming out soon on the third reconstruction. Where are my friends from Beacon? They're here. And these are movement books. They're a movement to talk because I really believe that we are in a battle for the soul in the heart of our democracy. And we need a moral campaign going forward. Now the Bible says in Psalm 94 God put an end to evil. Judge the earth. God the wicked get away with murder. How long will you let this go on? And then it says who will stand up for me against the wicked and who took my side against the evil workers. Psalm 94 suggests that in every age you must have moral dissenters. People who will not go along just to get along. People who will challenge injustice non-violently but aggressively and who will not back up. Moral dissent is a necessity for our democracy. You remember Henry David the Roe when he wrote this little piece on civil disobedience? He was in jail one day and his friend Waldo Emerson came by to visit him and basically said Henry a man of your upstanding character and place in the world why are you in jail and to which Henry the Roe looked at Emerson and said with all this slavery and injustice why are you not in jail? That's really the issue. Moral dissent. The reality is we are in a time I believe when we need moral dissent like never before. Let me share with you why. First of all, right now as we sit here we are in the nation's poorest region, the south. The highest percentage of citizens living in poverty as high as it was in 1968 when Dr. King was shot. Our country's 12 poorest states are southern states. Though 15% of Americans live in poverty, the numbers in the south Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Louisiana, Texas are upwards of 20% and in some states in the south upwards of 40% of our children our children not black children, our children well 40% of black children but 20% 25% of children in general. There are we are at this time we're the wealthiest nation and the poorest nation in terms of the gaps at any time in our history. That's serious. We need a moral movement. At the same time we're in the south and in this country right now we've had 24 states refuse to expand Medicaid. 24 states, think about that now that's a new civil war and most of the reason to expand Medicaid is because they don't like a black man in the White House let's just be real about that because it can't be because it's anti-Republican because the idea came from a Republican named Teddy Roosevelt 100 years ago 8 million people are right now without health insurance according to the New York Times simply because governors and legislatures are once again engaging in the interposition and nullification just like Wallace and others stood in the doorways to block people from going to colleges now we have governors and legislatures in the south blocking people from going to hospitals. Think about it. That's right Florida I can name them all if I named all 24 I'd get mad so that's why I say 24. We are and what's sad about it is that it's actually hurting more whites than blacks but as Tim Wise said these arguments about poverty and social programs are racialized that started in 1968 with the White Southern strategy of Kevin Phillips to racialize these issues. Now in the states that are being denied Medicaid 6 out of 10 black people live in those states but in my state for instance there are 344,000 of people being denied a white only 142,000 of black and yet there are people thinking that if they expand Medicaid they're going to primarily help black because the White Southern strategy is a mythology that has power it's the only way we've been able to hold back the South and that is to cause poor whites to vote against their own self-interest and you can't break through that a white black I mean a democrat versus republican argument you have to have a moral argument for instance I was in a little town where they fly three confederate flags I had lost a little weight and there's a guy by the name of Sugar, Joe Sugar has a good clothing place so I wanted me some clothes I said I'm going despite the confederate flag he's a good friend of mine when I got out of the car there were three white guys in this particular place St. Paul they were standing on the corner I got out they pointed at me that's him oh my goodness but I wanted those pants so it was on because every now and then I get vain and think I look good at least my wife tells me that and so they started walking in the fact they said are you that NAACP guy I said yes I am they said we heard you having a march I said yes I am they said well now we don't know about this NAACP but we heard that you were fighting for Medicaid expansion and unemployment because our governor I said yes they said well can we come I said they said well we heard that you were talking we heard you on TV talking about right and wrong you weren't talking about Republican because we're Republican but we didn't vote for this mess I got a cousin that needs Medicaid expansion and I got a brother that keep borrowing money from me because he lost his unemployment can we come up I said come right on come right on because there is we have to begin to get people to see the myth of extremism and when we deny Medicaid expansion we're talking about cash years and cooks and nurses aids and waiters and veterans and construction workers and people who actually clean our back sides but then can't afford health care and the sad thing about that the poorest states with the highest level of poverty and the highest denial of health care are red states that have the most politicians that are against the very policies that would help the people who elected them and how immoral is it to get elected to Congress and simply because you were voted in you get free health care but then you don't want the people that elected you to have the same thing I'm telling you we need a moral movement Otto Swarma at MIT sounded like a prophet I didn't even know people at MIT believed in God I was up there I was studying and I met Otto Swarma and he was talking one day and he says he was in the class he said Reverend Barbara he was stuck in the class and he said we need to imagine again a different future I said that sound like Isaiah 58 where it says cry loud and spare not show Israel my sin is this the fast that I require no the fast that I require is that you care for the poor that you lose the man and then he said because you know when we do not care for the poor and the hurting it's a form of attention violence I said that sound like Ezekiel when Ezekiel said your leaders are like rabies infected wolves who eat the flesh of the poor and the hurting I said so we so he calls it attention violence he said it's and what we got going on in America is almost a willingness to disregard the poor and the hurting and it affects the best of us I mean even sometimes as much as I love president Obama you know sometimes he'll say what we're working for is a society where those people aspiring to be in the middle class can come up some people are not aspiring to be in the middle class I want to say which I was his name was with his you know counselor sometimes you got to say the word pope some folk are not aspiring to get in the middle class some people are trying to simply protect what Jesus wrote into Jerusalem on those y'all don't read your Bible you'll get that it's three letters when we see that in education resegregation is happening now faster than it was in the 1970s and when we see that the one institute say that high poverty resegregated schools 61 years after brown is still the major problem with education in America now remember Dr. King 20 days before he was killed March 14th, 2006 1968 talked about the other America and he said one America is beautiful but there's another America that has a deadly ugliness about it thousands of people can't work thousands don't have healthcare thousands live in vermin infested homes and thousands and thousands of young people are deprived the opportunity of education they are not dumb they are not without because they don't have native intelligence but because the schools are so inadequate and so overcrowded and so segregated that they are devoid of quality and in 2015 we can still talk about the two Americas and then on top of all of this we need a moral movement because now we're almost having to rename America we almost need to stop saying democracy and call it what John Nichols calls it dollarocracy $10 billion spending in the last election the Koch brothers talking about spending a billion dollars of their own money because of the way the supreme court you know and I tell folks we need to talk about sex but not the private stuff personal sexuality abortion what we need to talk about is the relationship in the back seat of our democracy between big business and politicians that keeps having this sex and producing the malformed children of injustice that's the sex we need to talk about we need to talk about we need to talk about the sex the sex that Hosea talked about you know it's some good stuff in the Bible but she's not going to read it Hosea said that the leaders have gone ahorring after other gods and when Hosea said that he was talking about when the leaders used their power to get in bed with the power for rather than to do what is right for the people now we got the VIA the Supreme Court gutted it Justice Roberts said the nation is no longer divided and then the Holy Ghost got a hold of Justice Ruth Ginsburg She forgot that she was a justice and became a preacher. And in her dissent, she called what they were doing hubris, pride. You know, pride is the first sin. Pride comes before the fall. And then she said, throwing out pre-clearance when it has worked is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet. And then she looked up from her paper and said to the court, no matter what you have done here today, you remember Bloody Sunday. And then she quoted a Unitarian. She said, and this court needs to remember that the moral art of the university is long. But it will then toward justice. But Justice Ginsburg was right because two hours after the ruling, Texas announced that they would be enforcing a strict photo identification. And 45 days afterwards, North Carolina passed the worst voter suppression law since 1965 that would not have met the test of pre-clearance. One of our senators said, the day that Shelby came down, June 25th, a day that will live in infamy, he said, now that the headache has been removed. He described the Voting Rights Act that cost the lives of four girls in a church here in Birmingham, the lives of James Reeve and Viola Woosa and Jimmy Lee Jackson and Martin King and Mega. He described what their blood purchased as a headache. Another official up in the mountains said on camera, if what we are doing will hurt students that are lazy, so be it if it will hurt Democrats, so be it. And if it hurts a bunch of blacks that just want free stuff from the government, so be it. And when people are that sick, you cannot cut through that with the simple conservative versus liberal. You need a moral, a powerful deep penetrating moral argument. And now some people are getting weary, even our friends. The Tea Party has said, the best we're gonna give you, if we fix the Voting Rights Act, this is what they're saying, and the bill has been filed, the best we're gonna give you is a fix to what the Supreme Court did that leaves Alabama, where you are today, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia and Tennessee uncovered. Oh yeah, that's being proposed in Congress right now. And voter ID would not be covered under pre-clearance. Now, and some of our friends are saying, you know, we're tired, it's the best we can do. You never negotiate till you fight. In a moral movement, you always change the atmosphere before you change the attitude. I said, how can you accept that we haven't sat in the Capitol yet? We haven't had civil disobedience yet. We haven't marched yet. You know, if the people, it has no way in the world, we can accept a Voting Rights Act fix that gives us less protection than what they want marching across the Edmunds Pettus Bridge. And we have to say to some people, if we are more scared of people drunk on tea and people that are intoxicated with this coke mentality, if we are more afraid of them than our foremothers were of billet clubs and guns and death, then shame on us.  Where is Mr. President at? Where's Mr. President? Mr. President, we need the Unitarian Church to stand up in this moment. We need white people to talk about racism. Yeah, and we need, if the NAACP, and my president is talking about a journey for Americans, a journey for justice in America and possibly marching, not from Selma to Montgomery, but from Selma to Washington, D.C. We need the Unitarian to be a part of that. We need, we need a moment. I'm willing to help you, Mr. President, but aside from all the civil rights organizations, we need a group of clergy to put on our stoves and our robes and go sit down in Boehner's office and refuse to move until we are not, we are not going to change what's going on with just texts and tweets and emails. We must put our bodies on the line in this moment. If we have politicians that have decided to crucify voting rights and crucify the poor and crucify the sick, my Bible teaches me that every crucifixion needs a witness, needs a witness. Think about what they're trying to sell us and you'll understand why we must have a moral movement. This crowd is saying to us that the way to a better America is these are the things you must do. You want a better America? Cut money to public education and hurt teacher. This is what they say. This is their whole agenda. Let me break it down on the street level. If you want a better America, take healthcare and let people die and be sick. If you want a better America, cut people's unemployment. Take away their earned income tax credit. If you want a better America, then give more tax breaks to the wealthy and raise taxes on the working poor and the poor. If you want a better America, take women's rights. If you want a better America, then take away the rights of the LGBT community. If you want a better America, then push aside the push aside voting rights. If you want a better America, criticize the president on everything, even when he's right. Talk about his wife's arms. Talk about when she wants to give people the children their vegetables. Even talk about his daughters. Rather than that crazy festival of pardon in a turkey anyway. You remember when they talked about his daughter? What, the dress she wore at the pardoning of the turkey? This is what they're saying. If you want a better America, divide people and split them up. And then if you really want a better America, after you've done all of this division, make sure people can get a gun quicker than they can raise to the vote. That's their whole agenda. And we must stand up to that agenda because if we can't make a moral claim and a moral case against that kind of agenda, then what kind of faith do we have? Isaiah, are the people of faith now? The Bible is asking, who will stand up for me now? That's what God wants to know. Let me close here.  Matthew 25 says, when I was hungry, and that's not a question about personal charity, that's a question about systemic justice and how we use government. When I was, he said, the Bible says, he will say to the nations, not to the individuals, but to the nations, to the government. When I was hungry, did you feed me? When I was naked, did you clothe me? When I was in prison, did you visit me? When I was sick, did you care about me? James Reeve, I read about him so much and I'm glad to be here among his friends, his legacy. All souls church, July 1964, a year before he was killed, almost. He says, look, if we're gonna be able to meet their need, we're gonna really have to take upon ourselves a continued and this disciplined effort with no real hope that in our lifetime, we're gonna be able to take a vacation from the struggle for justice. Let all who live in freedom, won by the sacrifice of others, be uniting and the task begun.  And I'm here to tell you, that time is now. We need a moral movement, a moral dissent. Somebody must stand and say, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who's in power, Republican or Democrat. There's some things greater than Republican Democrat. And left versus right, I don't even like that language. There's some things greater than the narrow categories of liberal versus conservative. There's some things that are just wrong, extreme and immoral. It's constitutionally inconsistent, morally indefensible and economically insane. We need a movement that destroys the myth of extremism. We need a movement that says it's extreme and it's immoral to hurt millions of people, just because you can. It's extreme and immoral to sing America, America God shared his grace on thee. But then you refuse and deny grace to women and grace to the immigrant community and grace to the LGBT community and grace to those who are poor and grace to those who are sick. Something wrong with that.  I'm glad to be among those. We couldn't have done moral movement in North Carolina and in 12 other states without the Unitarian Church. I'm glad because it's our turn now. Martin ain't coming back, y'all. James Reed cannot come back. Mega can't come back. Elizabeth Canton's state can come back. Harriet Tubman can't come back. But we are their children. And it's our time to focus on the weightier matters of justice and compassion and faith. It's our time to take on the regressive public policies and the nightmares of extremism. And I often say if Harriet Tubman could get 500 people out of slavery, she didn't have tech, she didn't have email, she didn't have a car, she didn't have a plane, she didn't have a train. All she had was moss on the north side of the tree, a north star in the heavens, a made-up mind, and every now and then a 38 in her pocket full. I'm not suggesting that part, but I am suggesting. It's time for us to restore hope of a better way. Walter Bruegelman says prophetic movements do not start with implementation. Don't ask how we're gonna fix it all. The first role of a moral movement is to restore imagination. It's to conjure up a new hope. It's to help people be released from all of the things we have given our allegiance to that has caused us to be cynical and despairing. And the prophet comes to say, but wait a minute, justice can still roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. The prophet comes along and says, wait a minute, there is still higher ground. There's still hope. There can still be community. The prophet comes along and the prophetic movement comes along and says, no, if we do these things, we can be repairers of the breach. And so is our time to speak truth to power, to protest, to go to court, to stand up, to vote like never before, to march for justice, to do the work of God. Doesn't matter who's in the governor's office, doesn't matter what the Congress does, doesn't matter what the Tea Party says we can't be, who somebody needs to stand up in this moment and say you don't have enough political power to vote us away. You don't have enough insults to talk us away and you don't have enough money to buy us away. We need the heart. I'm on my way back to Montgomery, but the heart of our nation needs reviving. The heart is in trouble. Not just the politics, but the heart of our nation, our democracy is in trouble. And they tell me that whenever you have heart trouble, whenever there's an heart attack, somebody has to call code blue. And when code blue is called, everybody comes. Everybody drops what they do. And they tell me that when the heart has stopped or is having problems and having a rhythm, you don't give up on it.  And that defibrillator has electric shock. And you don't just shock the person one time. It's been said that you might work on a heart 30 minutes or 45 minutes and people have come back because it is always possible to shock the heart. Well, I want you to know that the word heart comes from the Latin word core. It means the core, the center place where you are. But the word heart also comes from the word or the same Latin word core is the key to the word courage. And so to have heart is to have courage. And somebody's got to have the heart to start, to revive the heart. What you talking about? My wife is a nurse. And she told me that she's seen people go into cardiac arrest. And she says if you don't have courage, it'll unnerve you. If you don't have courage, it'll freak you out. And you won't be able to help the person whose heart is dying on them. But if you have courage and if you have something inside of you, you can run over there and get the defibrillator. And while they're jumping and while they seem like they're dying, you can help them and you can put what's necessary on the defibrillator and you can stick it on their chest. And over and over again, you can shock them. And she's been there where she has shocked people and they have come back to life. I'm wondering in America. I'm wondering in the Unitarian Church. Are there any people who have some heart? Is there a heart in this nation today? Are there some people that have some courage and you don't mind shocking this nation?   Today is time to shock this nation and revive our heart again. If I was in church, I would sing revive us again. Fill each heart with thy love. Let each soul be rekindled with fire from above. Hallelujah. Find the glory. Hallelujah. Find the glory. Hallelujah. Find the glory. Revive us.


Astroglia are neural cells that contribute to the pathophysiology of various neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders through complex changes in their structure, molecular expression, and function, which can be either beneficial or detrimental to disorder outcome. Astroglial pathophysiology includes reactive astrogliosis, astroglial atrophy with loss of function, astroglial degeneration, and death, and astrocytopathies characterized by aberrant forms that drive disease. Understanding the cellular and molecular mechanisms of astroglial pathophysiology can lead to new therapeutic strategies for various CNS diseases and disorders. This article was authored by Alexei Vokratzky, Arthur Butt, Bauman Lee, and others.


The National Chairman of the People's Democratic Party, Senator Iocha Aiu, and Vice-Presidential Candidate of the PDP, Governor Ifani Okowa, have charged the Benwear Community in Kaduna to unite and promote peaceful coexistence in the state. PDP National Chairman, Senator Aiu, who was accompanied by Governor Ifani Okowa of Delta State, the PDP Gober Flagbearer of Kaduna 2023, Hon. Ashiru Kadun, and Senator Leah Limoke says he is grateful with a large turnout of members. Also speaking, Vice-Presidential Candidate of the PDP and Governor of Delta State, Dr. Ifani Okowa, held the Benwear Community for the Reception, stressing that the achievements of the People's Party since 1999 are great. I want to urge you to please reach out to all other people from Benwear State residing here and all other persons outside Benwear State whom you know, reach out to them so that they understand that in Nigeria of our dream can only be created by the PDP government. I don't precise other people, I don't precise other parties but when you look through you will know that it's a difference, a constant difference with the PDP government. However, the President of Benwear Community in Kaduna Chief Paul Wachihi expressed optimism in the leadership style of their son, Senator Dr. Aiu, saying Benwear Community in Kaduna is solidly backing the PDP under his leadership to deliver Nigeria from the hardship experienced across the country. The Governor's Chief Candidate promised, say within this week he's going to see us and we'll get back to them and we'll make sure that it won't be in the hall, that it's ready to be in an open field where he will see all the Benwear sons and daughters in the cabinet.


Ychydig am gweithio i chi'n dweud, a rwy'n gofio gyda'n strannu yng Nghymru, oedd a'r Ynchblad, oedd yng Nghymru yn gwybodaeth angylcheddau. Felly, rydych chi'n gweithio i chi i chi. Mae Byryddydd fel y dyfodd oedd yn fwybodaeth, o fe allan yn gweithio 100 yng nghymru ofeth o Laylau choice Ceylon. there's no better way to do with the Tour of Ireland's finest contemporary writers and end writers and Emma McBride. We're also delighted to welcome Dr Claire Hutton who will be hosting them this evening. The British Library has a small but very wonderful collection of Joyce materials. We're particularly indebted to Harriet Shaw Weaver, the patron of James Joyce who gave her archive, or possibly sold it, I'm not totally sure, to the British Library. a ddiddordebeth. Mae'r materioli a gweithio yn y gallu gwath y gallu gwlad y Llywodraeth Bryddiad o'r amddangos, ddim yn ymgyrchol o'r twfnod ar y gaelch yma, i'r pethau yma, i'r pethau'r adroddau i'r cyfrifiadau. O'r adroddau'n ei wneud o'r pethau, mae nhw'n gael i'r llawd o'r modd. Dr Clare Hutton gave a wonderful talk on Harry Shawweaver for us not so long ago and she delved into the collections and that will be available on the British Library player shortly. Clare is a reader in digital humanities and English at the University of Loughborough. She has recently curated the exhibition Women and the Making of Ulysses at the Harry Ransom Centre University of Texas and she's the author of Serial Encounters, Ulysses and the Little Review, an editor of the Irish book in English. We do have books by Anne and Eamor and of course James himself outside and the edition of Ulysses you find out there has got a fantastic new introduction by Anne. Later on you'll be able to buy books in fact, you'll have a copy of one of each of Anne and Eamors too. Those of you who are watching online can go to the books tab at the top of the screen and you can also purchase if you wish. Later on we'll be having questions in the normal way for you here, put your hand up and wait for the mic. Those of you who are watching online you are able to post questions in the form below your video window and we'll get to as many questions as we can later on. Finally I just wanted to mention that we are hosting a number of events related to Ireland. We're trying to reinvigorate the British Library's relationship with Ireland and institutions during the course of this year. In the autumn we are hosting a fantastic Irish Writers Weekend so please look out for that amongst other things. I'd like to now hand you over to Claire, to Eamor and to Anne and please enjoy the evening. Thank you very much indeed and I'd like to say welcome to the library. What an unusual event this actually is. Unusual to be live after two very long years. Unusual to actually have two major novelists here to talk about another novel 100 years on. There aren't many novels that we would talk about 100 years on if we think about it. It's a very sort of interesting thing that Ulysses is still casting this spell 100 years later. So let me introduce our novelists Anne Enright born in Dublin where she now lives and works. The author of seven novels including The Gathering which won the Booker Prize in 2007. And most recently Actress which came out just before lockdown February 2020. I remember seeing it on the best selling shelves just there. That was the last time I was in Dublin. And has also this year for the Centenary of Ulysses edited the vintage Ulysses which you're holding in your hand I can see. And also it's a lovely addition actually I've just had a look and my inner joy. I think it was Hans Walter Gabbler who edited it actually. Yes well I mean introduced here. I just gave it a little freshener at the top. No I did immediately see it was Gabbler's text. I didn't notice that. I'm not here as an academic but I did see that. And also Eamor. So astonishing book A Girl Is A Half Form Thing came out in 2013 with its own unique publishing history. Took nine years to get to publication. And won so many awards that year. The Goldsmith's Prize and also the Women's Prize for Fiction and also the Irish novel of the year. And since then we've had the lesser Bohemians and most recently Strange Hotel which also came out in February 2020. Also seems like a very long time ago now. So what are we going to talk about? The Legacy of Ulysses. Where do we begin? I thought a good place to begin would be to talk about first experiences of reading. When, where, why, how did you first encounter this book which continues to cast this spell? Over to you Anne. As I've been writing over and over in the last six months I bought my first copy of Ulysses when I was 14 in a bookshop in Kinsale when I was on a hosteling holiday. And so I read it in the hostel in Kinsale on the table. And then again in Cork after we cycled to Cork. And I still have that volume at home actually. So it was 1977 and it caused 470. You can still see the sticker at the back. I have no real idea of what I was doing when I bought Ulysses. It's a heavy book if you're cycling. Except I think I thought it would make me look interesting of course. I was out in the world and I thought it would be a great draw. But I read maybe the first three episodes before I got back home. And they were all kind of conniptions and lots of squawking from my mother who didn't want me to be reading Ulysses. Thought I should be reading Dubliners. My sister was dispatched to talk to my English teacher who said that no, it was too early, too early. But you know real teenage ding dong because it was my money. So it was agreed that it would be put up in the attic until I was 18. And so there was string and newspaper involved and it went up into the attic and I climbed up there when I was 18. And I read it while I was at college from all of it at that stage. But I didn't study it until last year, put it that way. I didn't study it at college. So many people encountered at university and it really... I just looked at it and thought that was enough for the time being. And I didn't want to go into all the stuff I didn't know. I wanted to experience it as directly as I could. And it was sort of my eyes on the page where all that interested me in those early encounters. Which is completely arrogant and very a lot of fun. I have to say I think resisting the temptation to study the book is quite sensible actually. Just looking at it. That strikes me as quite a... Yes, I mean you see some young people, it's a great book to read when you're young. But you want to grab the guide out of their hands and say just throw them in at the deep end and see if they can swim. Yeah, I think so. What about you, Emer? You had an intense encounter on this book with the train. Yeah, this is like my foundational writing story which is... I'm sure he'd be very pleased with that. But you know I was older, I was 25. Was that right? Yeah, so I was about 25 when I read it. And I was working as a temp. And I got this new temp job doing data entry at Deutsche Bank down on London Wall. And I needed the job because I had to pay the rent. But also it was going to kill me a bit to have to go and do data entry at Deutsche Bank. So I thought well what can I do to make it better? I'll read Ulysses. And I had it, I bought it when I was about 18, 19. And I had maybe started it but I hadn't really read it. And I bought it, this copy in fact. And I still have the original bookmark which is from a bookshop in Westport. And so I thought right, this is what I'll do. I'll read Ulysses that will make it all better, make Deutsche Bank recede. And so at the time I was living in Tottenham and I had to get the train in from Bruce Grove to Liverpool Street every day. And which is about 20 minutes. And so I got on and I started to read it. And it was a complete joy scene epiphany. And by the time I got off I just thought oh right. Everything that I have written up until this point is rubbish. And it's time to start again. If this can be done then this is the direction that I have to go in. Train underground or overground? It was overground. I don't want it to be emerging then. No, it's sadly not quite as cinematic as that. It's just more kind of stumbling through the crowds. That was my kind of beginning of Joyce. And then it was just reading it over that period where I would go and sit in Finsbury Circus which is now all built over and just kind of eat my curly cheese sandwich and read Ulyssys or read it on my lap while I was doing my data entry. And yeah, it did help actually.  It was just after a breakup I was so sad I sat on I read Ulyssys. People tell me some origin story about the book which is about growing up or enlargement. But it's quite poignant sometimes. It's interesting that, you know, they set it as a thing that will shift something in their lives that they're going to do this now. And the moment of choice can be kind of slightly melancholic, which I like. Well, it's that thing. I think it connects that thing where people are so often just saying, oh, I've never read it. Oh, I couldn't read it. And so when people do read it, they're never sorry that they read it because they have to suffer through it. And so by the time they get to the end, the beginning of that journey is kind of a thing. Because it's just, I mean, it's so often me people just go, oh, I've never read it. I couldn't read it. I started it. It was terrible. Yeah, a lot of that. Yeah, I started it. But they did a survey on some Irish website and there were, you know, 5,000 people said, responded to it and 2 out of, maybe 1 out of, sorry, 3,000 said they'd read it and 2,000 said they hadn't finished it. So tick for not finishing it. It's quite good, you know. I mean, I strongly have the opinion that whether you've finished it or not is a matter of your own self-importance, really. It doesn't really matter if you've finished the book. Just read it.  And that even when you've finished it, it won't remain. It won't stop just because you've stopped. It will keep going behind your back. And then you go back to it. You'll find that you have to start it all over again somehow. Actually, that's not, I mean, yeah, I'm just making that up. But the idea of finishing it or not finishing it of it as something possessed and done and completed is not something that I value. Put it that way. I'm very happy for people to read in it or read it one way or the other. I like the modesty of these responses. I like the idea that you can read it for 20 minutes on the train. You know, I like that. That's an interesting one. I mean, just to kind of settle in for 20 minutes and give it a go. But I mean, if people say, how did you read Ulysses at 14? The other way to read Ulysses is one word at a time.  I like it. Kenner saying that the sentence is not the privileged sort of unit in choice. That a lot of the excitement is one word at a time. The sentences tend to fall apart under you. So that's not a bad way to proceed. One word at a time and sometimes one paragraph with one word. I mean, he's the genius of the one word paragraph. That's one of his kind of tricks. Which is an amazing thing to be able to have that confidence to write a one word. There's lots of tricks and confidence. You've got a big choice. Everyone also goes behind the book to think about what Joyce is trying to do to their head. I mean, there's a lot of sort of biological interest that he's slide through the text and say, this is very tricksy now.  That who has the confidence to do that? I suppose he was supremely confident. I think it's also important to remember he wasn't writing in the light of James Joyce. He wasn't writing with the weight of, oh, this is what I have to do. This takes confidence in this, here I am. I think for everyone going after, there's the weight of, oh, but he had the confidence to write a one word paragraph. But for himself, it was all virgin. It was all his own. Yeah, it was whether it worked or not, I suppose. And he didn't know for a long time.  Interesting. I think Joyce was very knowing about his own. I think he knew. No, I think there's a lot of bluster, and I think there's a lot of confidence. But I think there's also, there's so much writing that he's hiding all his fear inside. There's a lot of hiding, all right, to come and get me. Which is the other kind of, the reverse of what you're saying, that he's saying, I mean here, he's somewhere. So, yeah, putting it up to you. But I like that Nora's saying he's up all night writing, laughing to myself. Because that kind of, that pleasure is that, you know, the sense that he's having a good time is enough for me sometimes. Well, now, what about some readings to reflect on this, otherwise we might go around in circles here. Well, we will go around in circles, but why don't we just open the book and have a sense of, you know, you as readers. That would be nice. Who's going to go first? I think mine is at the earlier part of the book.  Yeah, I'm a chapter one. So this is at the top of the Joyce Tower and the Martello Tower in San Degro, and it's Buck Mulligan. Shaving, looking out over the sea. He said quietly. Isn't the sea what algae calls it, a great, sweet mother? The snot green sea, the scrotum tightening sea, epi aneu pa, pontone, ah, deadless the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalata, thalata, she is our great, sweet mother. Come and look. Stephen stood up and went over to the parapet, leaning on it. He looked down on the water and on the mail boat, clearing the harbour mouth of Kingstown. Our mighty mother, Buck Mulligan said. He turned abruptly, his grey, searching eyes from the sea to Stephen's face. The aunt thinks you killed your mother, he said. That's why she won't let me have anything to do with you. Someone killed her, Stephen said, gloomily.   And you refused. There's something sinister in you. He broke off and lathed again lightly. His father cheek a tolerant smile curled his lips. But a lovely mummer, he murmured to himself, kinch, the loveliest mummer of them all. He shaved evenly and with care in silence, seriously. Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, ffretted his heart. Silently in a dream, she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown grave cloths, giving off an odour of wax and rosewood wood. Her breath that had bent upon him mute reproachful a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuff edge, he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the well-fed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed, holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting. Buck Mulligan wiped again his razor blade. Ah, poor dog's body, he said in a kind voice. I must give you a shirt and a few nose rags. How are the second-hand breeks? They fit well enough, Stephen answered. The well-fed voice. Yeah, so it's too famous to read. The wetted ashes and the rosewood and all the whole tank, it's too famous to read. It's not really, I mean, the well-fed voice and the poor dog's body. It's amazing the way he squashes those words together. Yes, that's not Gris, Crotum, Tytnang, all the rest of it. Yeah, that's great. But he makes Buck Mulligan, I love Joyce writing this extremely offensive book, makes Buck Mulligan the most offensive character in it. And Stephen is kind of pious and Jesuitical. You're fearful Jesuit, he's called, and disapproving and takes offence. Buck Mulligan sails around the place, you know, saying dreadful things. And it was just another Joyce's tricks. I'm not saying it. Even when they accuse each other of pissing on Singh's door, that was his contribution to the cause of literature, I think. Me, says Stephen, that was his contribution. Buck Mulligan takes the slack. It takes the blame. We can come back to the doorway, where? You know, the steps up to that door. You don't just idly come back from the pub and relieve yourself over the wall and hit the door. You have to go up a big set of granite steps where J.M. Singh was living with his elderly mother. And you have to do it. It's really like some doing it. This is obviously gating. This door is when you've visited. We'll come back to that.  And so he takes this really abject and horrible episode of his own life and turns it into Buck Mulligan on that. Amazing. Sorry, it's very hard to stick to the one subject here. We'll come back to glastool and doorways and the intimacy of living in Dublin with these kind of monumental textual presences. But maybe we can move to you for a reading. Would you like to? Yeah, I'm reading for a bit later on. I'm trying to remember why I chose this bit. I think it was kind of nosiness, the nosiness that he has about women that made me take it. But anyway, I'll read it and we'll see. Ah, devils they are when that's coming on them. Dark devilish appearance. Molly often told me, feel things a ton weight. Scratch the sole of my foot. Oh, that way. Oh, that's exquisite. I feel it myself too. Good to rest once and away. Wonder if it's bad to go with them then. Safe in one way. Turns milk, makes fiddle strings, snap. Something about withering plants I read in a garden. Besides, they say it the flower withers she wears. She's a flirt. All are, daresay, she felt I. When you feel like that, you often meet what you feel. Like me or what. Dress, they look at. Always know a fellow courting colours Well, cocks and lions do the same in stags. Same time, my prefer a tie undone or something trousers. Suppose I, when I was, no, gently does it. Dislike rough and tumble. Kits in the dark and never tell. Saw something in me. Wonder what. Sooner have me as I am than some poet chap with bare grease, plastery hair, lovelock over his dexter optic. To aid gentlemen in literary. Ought to attend to my appearance, my age. Didn't let her see me in profile. Still, you never know.  Besides, I can't be so if Molly took off her hat to show her hair. Wide brim, both to hide her face, meeting someone might know her.  Hair strong and wrth. Ten bob I got from Molly's comings when we were on the rocks in Hollow Street. Why not? Suppose he gave her money. Why not? All a prejudice. She's worth 10, 15 more. A pound. What? I think so. All that for nothing. Bold hand, Mrs Marion. Did I forget to write an address on that letter like the postcard I sent to Flynn? And the day I went to Drimmies without a necktie, wrangled with Molly it was, put me off. No, I remember Richie Goulding. He's another. Wades on his mind. Funny, my watch stopped a half past four. Dust. Shark, liver oil I used to clean. Could do it myself. Save. Was that just when he, she... Oh, he did. Into her. She did. Done. Ah. Follow that. Inside the head of Leopold Bloom. I think that's the only reference of sex in the book, entire. I'm not going to challenge you on that. Sorry. Sorry, no. Piste offline, everybody. Stop, stop. There is. There is. I didn't mean it. So, I mean, it's just... We're into the question of, you know, Bloom and interior monologue and the stream of consciousness and the very distinctive styles of... I mean, what's interesting about Bloom and stream of consciousness is how it changes as the moods of the day progress, you know, the moods and moments so that you don't just get one type of narrative. It's many types. So, I suppose the question really would be, you know, the correlation between coming to terms with the book as a reader and committing to your own novel writing. That's quite a big question, isn't it? So, in other words, what has Ulysses enabled? Oh, well, for me. I mean, pretty much everything, I would say. I think... I think because I came to it with such ignorance that any reverence or understanding with no kind of university education or sense of approach... I'm really pulling the air rather than pointing, but... I think it gave me freedom that... I don't know, I suppose for a long time it was felt that he ruined it for everyone. But for me, because I came to it with ignorance, it was a release from all the kind of 19th-century stuff that I had been wading through before that. And I think to be allowed to give free reign to whatever came to your mind to follow in a way... Although it's such a constructed novel, there's also a sense constantly of instinct, of the brain darting here and there and following and finding images, finding words, finding styles and forms, which interested me less that. I don't know, I've gone off. But yeah, it was that boundlessness, I think, of possibility for the novel. That was something I had not encountered before. It's always stayed with me whenever I get stuck. So it's a sort of liberating force for your own aesthetic growth? Yeah, I think so of just being kind of unconcerned with anything other than your own whim. And I think that's a very important thing to not feel constrained by rules or forms or ways of doing or writing or behaving. For me that was Joyce allowed that. Maybe because I had come from this very particular kind of reading that was very sort of 19th-century and to just suddenly feel on the outside of that to be kind of pushed towards writing for the body that language had to be changed in order to capture, to be free to find a new language to describe the kind of experiences we have that grammatical language isn't quite so adequate to describe, to just find the gaps between words and try and create something that you can push into that that pulls the sense of that experience out. And that's a hard thing to do because the experiences are so subjective but when you see Joyce do it and even if you don't always agree, it gives you, I think, a bit of courage to have a go. It did for me. I suppose one of the things you're talking about is memory and the way that Joyce's prose remembers so many things and how he's so confident. Well, I love his kind of shameless obsessiveness. The endless hilarious lists of people's names and places or types of food that he twists and plays with and that kind of thing, which is you know that he's pulling all of these things into a place where he wants to keep them safe in the world and he's taking them out of the realm of memory where once he's gone, they will be gone. My feeling is that he puts them all in here so that he himself is preserved. And that's, you know, it's kind of shamelessly arrogant to think that I wouldn't be interested but also it's an obsessive thing to do which exists outside audience. And I quite like that, being to sort of give in to your own obsessions and then just let them go free in the world and see what comes back from them. Yeah, that's one of the phrases in the criticism. Is it young where someone says about Joyce, he has no concern with audiences? I think. Yeah, which is interesting. I think it's cold. Young also thought he was cold. Yeah. But I don't know. Joyce was very offended by young, wasn't he?  Yeah, he's not the only one who thought it was cold. But the temperature never bothered me. No, I don't think it's cold either. I don't agree. It's sort of body heat. It's like 30 years old. There are too many functions, there are too, you know, it's, there is no distance with Joyce. Yeah. Blood temperature, yeah. So can I just return back to this question to you? I mean, what about that correlation between reading and writing for you? To do you feel as though technique, style, theme? I don't think, I wasn't Joyce, I didn't suffer anxiety about Joyce's influence because I never claimed it as an influence.  So it's somehow part, so not quite of my DNA, but it's part of my epigenetics, I suppose. So it's somehow visceral, or it's in the way I am as an Irish writer. So I'm not going to kind of, and I, you know, I'm developing a theory that some writers are not as good as the Joyce of Dubliners, and then some writers are not as good as the Joyce of Portrait of the Artist, and some writers are not as, not in Eamor's case, not take Ulysses as their cue. And I think that I've found the stuff in Portrait in retrospect, the way the text kind of organised itself into different styles, in the Hellfire Sermon or in the stuff about romance and romantic fiction. And he does the same on a larger scale in Ulysses, so it allows you episode to episode for the language to become the style that it needs to be for that length of time. Until it almost becomes redundantly stylish, if you know what I mean, or redundant in its own. So that's pre-post, well, I don't know, I don't know enough about modernism to say that that's what modernism gives to you, is the ability to kind of find different idioms within a single story, which I like to do. I like my characters to think differently, but I like sometimes for them to think like different books, like they're in a different book already, which I did a bit in the green road and I'm doing it again now. And so, yeah, but that's not a very good answer. A lot of writers say, how can you write in the shadow of Joyce? And like Eamor, I say, he shone a great light. He made all things possible, so it's whatever you're having yourself. There it is. It's all there, so you can, you know, it's available. It made many things available. I think also it's an easier question for a novelist than it is for academics, because I think often academics, when they talk about influence, they want to see something very directly, a very direct link inside work. Whereas I think for novelists, an idea of influence is not a recreation or repetition.  And so I think there's two kind of conversations about influence. But also if you've read Ulysses and people sometimes say to me, you write a lot about the body, and you say, well, what else are you living in, right? If you're not living in a body, you write about, you know, garden sheds or something, but we're not all walking around as garden sheds, you know. And there are things that he does that when people don't do it, he says, well, how can you abandon that whole sort of part of the writing life? How can you not write about the body? How can you not allow language to do its thing? How can you keep it closed down like that, or one way or the other? I was really struck. I was looking at your introduction. I know you've written several pieces. This one where you talk about the freedom joist brought to the Irish tradition has been more useful to female writers than to male. I was welcomed as a gift by writers like Emer, like Edwin and Brian. And then the killer line in the essay when you just say, his innovative genius is more often declared a burden by men. That's sort of straight into this period. Yeah, well, it's all old father, old artificer stuff. And I'm really intrigued about how people go through the text and see the person behind the text and take the person behind the text on as if there was some mano a mano going on.  But what he's doing on the page is he's very energetically, he's messing with language. It's not about him, fun. Or it can't be about him because Emer says he hides, but he disappears behind it all. Or he becomes redundant and the book becomes its own thing. Yes, we shouldn't be so interested in the kind of self-projected by the writing. We should be just interested in the writing. But we should also not necessarily assume that the writer is projecting. I mean, that's kind of one of the problems with a lot of modern readings, that everything, and obviously love women get this more than male writers, that if you're writing a character who is a woman and you are a woman, then this character is somehow a projection of use. And then it's applying that logic to Joyce as well. But it rather wonderfully can't be not you. Yeah, but not necessarily the way people think. No, not the way people think. And the incredible richness that he could then, all the not-joices in the book, I mean Stephen and Bloom. It's so enlargent. I just wonder if we should get on to some more readings and maybe think about this sort of business of luxuriating in the language of the novel. I know you've got the dog, Tater's. And Tater's, will I? You mongrel. It's good reading. It's a good dog. He can do anything. He just shown off, he just does descriptive, he just does it. So this is Stephen on Sandy Manstrand, which is this amazing shallow beach in Dublin that goes on to the horizon when the tide is out. And then the sea comes right up to the wall as it chases Stephen off in the middle of this chapter towards the end of it. Cockle pickers. They waded a little way in the water and stooping, sized their bags and lifted them again, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelled running to them, reared up and poured them, dropped on all fours again, reared up with them at mute bearish fawning. Unheeded, he kept by them as they came towards the dryer sand, a rag of wolf's tongue red panting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf's gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked around it.  Dog skull, dog sniff. Eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dog's body. Here lies poor dog's body's body. Tatters out of that, your mongrel.  He slunk back in a curve. Doesn't see me. Along by the edge of the mole he lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hind leg pissed against it. He trotted forward and lifting again his hind leg pissed quick short at an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His hind paws then scattered the sand, four paws, dabbled and delved. Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand, dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing. A pard, a panther, got in the spouse's breach, vulturing the dead. It's fantastic. It's one out of many metamorphoses apparently in that chapter. The mole becomes another thing, another thing, another thing. And the language does what Emer's language does. It sort of nouns its verbs, its nouns and gerundifus everything. The bit that strikes me is the absolute kind of Dublinese of the way the dog is called. Tatters out of that your mongrel. It's a shock. Get out of that. I think Simon Daedalus doesn't get out of that later on in one go. Get out of that now. You can hear those voices. They talk about the streets and the places and the times and everything, but the absolute accuracy to the Dublin idiom, much of which remains the same, is astonishing. And it's so amazing that Joyce wrote that detail with such an absolute ear so precisely never having gone back after 1912. This 260,000 word novel is written in these circumstances of kind of chaotic upheaval. It shades into the parodic very quickly, which may have helped if you know what I mean. He's doing the voices. And then the voices themselves are quite parodic. There's quite a playfulness about the kind of speech that particularly the men in the book use. They're always largeing it. And they're always having the bounce. They're bantering. And so there's quite a performative thing to it, which you can see.  You can see that somebody would hold on to that kind of dramatic potential of that and have it in their head as a kind of constant thing. Don't you think it's also about his being away that allowed him to sink so far down into the memory of the Dublin that he has left behind? That in a way, had he been there, that kind of concentration would have been dispersed by everyday life, by actual interactions with people in the city on the current basis. And that actually having that space away, in that place. And the kind of the endless letters of, what is that chapter there and where we're in, was kind of, it's the memorial again. I think it's kind of the obsessive memorial, but it's the kind of luxury, he allows himself to luxuriate in a Dublin that he's already gone. Because he is, and he can do it because he's not being interfered with by contemporary Dublin. And it actually doesn't also quite exist. I mean he, even at the time, he got lots of little things wrong, even in his absolute need for accuracy. Some of the sources were quite corrupt and botched. So he gets things slightly wrong. So it's half made up at the same time. When you mentioned big male voices, but I think you've got a big female voice to read. Mrs Yelverton Barry. Oh, so yeah, I'm going to read a bit from Cersei. So God help us all, I don't know. But yeah, it's kind of a long bit, so. Good luck. From, yeah. So Mrs Yelverton Barry. In low corsaged opal boldress and elbow length ivory gloves, wearing a sable-trimmed brick-quilted dolman, a comb of brilliance, and Panachef Osprey in her hair. Arrest him, Constable! He wrote me an anonymous letter in Prentis backhand when my husband was in the north riding of Tipperary on the Munster circuit, signed James Love Birch. He said he had seen from the gods my peerless globes as I sat in a box of the theatre royal at a command performance of Latsigal. I deeply inflamed him, he said. He made him proper overtures to me to misconduct myself at half past four on the following Thursday, done sync time. He offered to send me through the post a work of fiction by Monsieur Paul de Coq, entitled The Girl with the Three Pairs of Stays. Mrs Bellingham. In cap and seal Coney Mantle. Wrapped up in the... wrapped up to the nose, steps out of her broom and scans through the tortoise shell and breaks from inside her huge opossum muff. Also to me, yes. I believe it is the same objectionable person because he closed my carriage door outside thornly stoker's one sleety day during the cold snap of February 193 when even the grid of the waste pipe and ball stop in my bath's cistern were frozen. Subsequently, he enclosed a bloom of Edelweiss culled on the heights, as he said, in my honour. I had it examined by a botanical expert and elicited the information that it was a blossom of the homegrown potato plant herloined from a forcing case of the model farm. Mrs Ylverton Barry, shame on him. A crowd of sluts and ragamuffins surges forward. The sluts and ragamuffins screaming. Stop thief, hurrah there, bluebeard. Three cheers for Ikeymo. Second watch produces handcuffs. Here are the darvies, Mrs Bellingham.  He urged me, stating that he felt at his mission in life to urge me to defile the marriage bed to commit adultery at the earliest possible opportunity. The Honourable Mrs Mervyn Tullboys. In Amazon costume, hard hat, jack boots, coxbird, vermillion waistcoat, fawn musketeer, gontluts with braided drums, long train held up and hunting crop with which she strikes her welt constantly. Also me, because he saw me on the polo grounds at the Phoenix Park, at the match all Ireland versus the rest of Ireland. My eyes, I know, Sean, divinelys, I watched Captain Slugger Denahy of the Innisfilings win the final chukor on his Darling Cobb Centaur. This plebean Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes and obscene photographs such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards insulting to any lady, I have it still. It represents a partially nude seniorita, frail and lovely, his wife, as he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature. Practising illicit intercourse with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me to do likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the garrison. He implored me to soil his letter in an unspeakable manner, to chastise him as he richly deserves, to bestride him and write him, to give him a most vicious horse whipping. Mrs Bellingham, me too, Mrs Ylverton Barry, me too. Several highly respectable Dublin ladies hold up in proper letters received from Bloom. The Honourable Mrs Mervyn Tolbetts stamps her jingling spurs in sudden paroxysm of sudden fury. I will by God above me. I'll skirt that pigeon-livered curr as long as I can stand over him. I'll flay him alive. What is not love? I'll flay him alive. Oh, yeah. That's great. Well, no. Where do we go? I was going to say, all in all, a very male book, which is one of the things that you have written, but moving from that towards the idea of maybe female characters and female characterisation, of which we've just heard. There were very much in Bloom's head, we have to say, those ladies. Yes, they were. They're Phantas Magoria, of some description. But it's all in Joyce's head, you know. So, when people want to talk about female characters, I sometimes push back and say, well, what about the men in this book? They're kind of weird, actually. You know, that's, you know, could Joyce write women? I mean, could he write men? Which you call Leopold Bloom. He's supposed to be a kind of every-man figure, but not every-man does what Bloom does. Every-man might think about doing what Bloom thinks about doing, but you know, there is a distance between fantasies, particularly in the Cersei, you know, urge and engagement, one might say, decorously. So, not all men are... Perhaps all men are potentially Bloom-like, or all men are potentially dead. I don't know, that's a large statement. It's a large statement about masculinity, and I'm not going to make it. But in the way that people endlessly used to... Well, not endlessly, but you'd be asked about Molly a lot, in a kind of knowing way. People might stand back a bit and see what you had to say. And what these are are kind of refracted images from Joyce's marvellous mind. They're not real. Although the amount of real people in it, we were just discussing this in the green room. The National Librarian, Lister, was rung up by the BBC late in his life. I believe you're a character in Ulysses, and he wrote back and said, Actually, I am not a character in Ulysses. I am myself. Surprise, surprise. That was a very good answer. But I'm just saying, there's nothing sort of standard about the book that you could say this tells us about... Apart from the idea that it opens possibilities for how we see either men or women. I suppose I think what's interesting about the women is that he's interested, at least, in the women that he writes about. But you don't get a lot in male writers now or then. No, it's an amazing generosity of interest. It's not just like they're not there to fulfil various roles. He's searching through them. Well, they're also there. Well, and that's the trouble of Joyce. It is all the things. But you feel like he's searching those characters all the time. They do not exist, pre-exist, and they're laid out. He goes through them, the lines he's trying to find them, find the things about them to understand what. And the questions that they're always asking themselves, you know that he's asking about them. And I think there's something very different about that feel. He doesn't. I don't think he particularly writes women well and whatever that is supposed to mean. I don't know, but I think he is really interested in the inner lives of women, and that is interesting. Well, he allows them to be desirous, which wasn't really common at the time. So, I know I have a special request, which is my favourite female character in this novel. I'm kind of out on my own at this. Well, maybe I'm not on my own in this. Maybe it's all about culture. Oh, I love her too. So, my favourite female character is Mrs Breen, who just, she's my grandmother really. So, I've asked... Where did your granny grow up? Oh, Clam Brassel Street. Oh, I'll bring down the accent a little bit. Did she? Yes. Did she? Yes. It's all gone now, Clam Brassel Street, really. Leopold Bloom is born on Clam Brassel Street, and he isn't real either, but I'm sure your granny was real. She was. Oh, Mr Bloom, how do you do? Oh, how do you do, Mrs Breen? No use complaining. How is Molly those times? Haven't seen her for ages. In the pink, Mr Bloom said gaily, meily has a position, a position down in Mullingar, you know. Go away, isn't that ground for her? Yes, in a photographer's there, getting on like a house on fire. How are all your charges? All on the baker's list, Mrs Breen said. How many has she? No other in sight. You're in black, I see. You have no... No, Mr Bloom said. I've just come from a funeral. Going to crop up all day. Going to crop up all day, I foresee. Who's dead when and what did he die of? Turn up like a bad penny. Oh, dear me, Mrs Breen said. I hope it wasn't any near relation. May as well got her sympathy. Dignum, Mr Bloom said. An old friend of mine. He died quite suddenly, poor fellow. Heart trouble, I believe. Funeral was this morning. You're funerals tomorrow while you're coming through the ride. Sad Lucy, old friends. Mrs Breen's woman's eyes said melancholy. Now, that's quite enough about that. Just quietly. Husband. And your Lord and Master.  Hasn't lost them any hand. Oh, don't be talking, she said. He's a caution to rattlesnakes. He's in there now at his law books. Finding out the law of libel. He has me heart scalded. Wait till I show you. Hot muck, turtled vapour, and steam of new baked jam puffs. Roly-poly. Poured out from Harrison's. The heavy noon reek tickled the top of Mr Bloom's gullet. Want to make a good pastry? Butter, best flour, Demerara sugar. They taste it with a hot tea. Or is it from her? I'll put Arabs stood over the grating. Breathing in the fumes. Dead in the gnaw of hunger that way. Pleasure or pain is a penny dinner. Knife and fork, chain to the table. Opening her handbag, chipped leather. Hot pin, ought to have a guard on those things. Stick it in a chap's eye and a tram. Rummaging, open, money. Please take one, devils if they lose the sixmans. Raised cane, husband barging. Where's the 10 shillings I gave you on Monday? Are you feeding your little brother's family? Soiled hanker chief, medicine bottle pastile. That was well. What is she? There must be a new moon out, she said. He's always bad then. Do you know what he did last night? Her hand ceased to rummage. Her eyes fixed themselves on him. Wide in alarm, yet smiling. What, Mr Bloom asked? Let her speak.  I believe you. Trust me. Woke me in the night. She said, dream he had a nightmare. Indigis. Said the ace of spades was walking up the stairs. Hormys is green. She's great. But it's a moment of great sympathy in the book. It is just lovely. It's such a nice encounter and not a harp on about Dublin, but it really is very Dublin. Yeah, yeah. It's just some amazing stand-out lines, aren't they?  I mean, that just bounces off the page, doesn't it? He has me heart scalded. He has me heart scalded. And he said the ace of spades is walking up the stairs. That's a great... Well, on that high note, I think we should open up to some questions. Not about the ace of spades perhaps, but have we got any questions? I'm roving Mike's wandering round. Oh, there we are. Yes. Gosh, I can see the audience now. Who's going to be brave? And ask questions. That's the one over here. Where is the Mike? Here it is. It's just coming behind you. I just wanted to pick up something that you said earlier on about Joyce not writing for himself, not following anyone. And it just made me think... He was trying to write the ultimate realist novel, wasn't he? And people were trying to do that before. I mean, Duda Rowan, mid 1700s, wrote something I think called... This is not a story. So the subject of trying to write realist literature was there. And I just wondered if you think... Joyce was obviously aware of the topic and people striving to try and write this and then running with it himself, or maybe it was just his idea. I mean, do you think that he was... He did quote an antecedent in a French novel whose name escapes me that there was a streaming consciousness novel in French that he had... Dujardin. But Claire is probably best fixed to answer that. I don't know. Dorothy Richardson was supposed to be the first person who wrote stream consciousness, wasn't he? I don't know. She's around the same time, and it's not as convincing. Dujardin is the one who, I think, does some stream of consciousness in French, and it's a little bit earlier. It's kind of a strange thing to want to do, put everything in a book. Yeah. This question about realism... I mean, realism is this huge 19th century genre, isn't it? In a sense, Joyce wants to write the realistic novel, but he also wants to take issue with the form of realism. That's part of what the second half of the novel. I'm not supposed to answer the question. Supposed to be you. I don't know. Have we got a question from our online audience? There's a question here about Dublin, and whether you see Dublin differently because of reading Ulysses. Does it play on your mind? Has it ever played on your mind when you experience the city? Yeah. I walk along by the joist terror quite often with my dog. And I pass Sandy Main Strand on my way here today to the airport, and whether the tide is in or the tide is out. I want to have a Bloomsday celebration where everyone closes their eyes and walks out on the strand, because that's what happens in the first bit of that chapter, in an octable modality of the visibility. Stephen closes his eyes and sees how far he can go. We used to do that drunk on bicycles when we were students. Close your eyes and see how far. So that would be my Bloomsday celebration. I'm going to walk out there. But there are standard landmarks, Finns Hotel, where Norbarlacle worked. The paintwork is still on there on Nassau Street. I don't think of it as often as I think of Oscar Wilde, who's around the corner. I mean, if you're asking. But yeah, quite a lot. But I lived in one of the houses that's mentioned in Ulysses in 13th St Kevin's Parade, which is mentioned in Calypso. It was a guy to whom money was owed for tea called Moses Herzog. In Tom's Gazette, it's actually an Isaac Herzog, if I have it all right. So there was a population in those streets. I lived there in 1985-86. I didn't know anything about it. I think I heard it later and it was kind of boring. I lived in the house in Ulysses. Who cares? But recently it struck me like with a jolt. I was living at a fictional house in an area of Dublin that has completely changed from your granny in Clam Brassel Street. There was a population of Lithuanian, a Jewish Lithuanian population that shifted to America and elsewhere when Ireland got too Catholic for them, among other reasons. I never knew that was there. There it is in Ulysses. It's there because Joyce is in Trieste. He wanted to open up the nationalist conversation. He wanted to make it less Catholic and homogenous. It's there because he went away and he researched it back in. I find that extremely valuable and affecting. To make Dublin more plural. To make it multiple. To light and variety. Yes, less homogenous. It's more like when I'm reading the book to this online person. It's always popping up like the Ovalists until recently. We're still populated by journalists in Aeolists. A lot of it is just right. It gets it right. Wow. Have we got any other questions from the audience? Gone quiet. There's one here and one up there. Sorry, just if we were stuck. I'm doing an abridgement very cautiously and nervously doing an abridgement of Ulysses which is a rather daring thing to do. Something that interests me is the difference between Joyce and Beckett in terms of the Catholic, which is my background, and the Protestant and Anglo-Irish background of Beckett. I'm wondering if you had any thoughts on that, on the different sensibilities in terms of... Yes, sorry. Do you want to answer? I mean, I don't know. I suppose the two of them are yoked together by history, but I see them living in completely different houses all the time. I think that I find Beckett is just so scourged, despite not being Catholic, and everything is so mean and wonderful in its own way, but what I love is the total kind of sensual abandon and self-indulgence of Joyce. I suppose I always find it interesting to read about all the time they spent together drinking and being pissed and Beckett transcribing for Joyce and what could have possibly been going on in his head when he was having those experiences and what it was like for him later to share off that influence, having kind of wandered around under the weight of it and found his own kind of meaner, tighter, leaner self. Yeah, I don't know. I was going to say, I saw a Beckett, saw Happy Days in Irish on the Iron Islands a while ago, and I was listening to the Irish as well. I read afterwards there was a few other Irish translations of Beckett. I wondered what was lost or gained by a translation into the language that came before prefigured Beckett's use of English. Actually, I didn't want to say it, but the colonial experience was lost in that translation into Irish. Winnie in Happy Days was not part of an embattled and decaying ascendancy class. She was something much more pious and less affected. So all that kind of pretension was gone. All that sense of brittleness and loss was gone from the character. It was really interesting to see. So I think Beckett's Protestantism was key to his characterisations. I don't know. The rejection of English for writing in, I think is you just could never see Joyce ever being willing to do that. Yes, I don't know enough about them to be honest with you. No, I don't know that much either, but I'm here and someone's asked. No, but I think you do. I think you do know more than I. I think Joyce is so wedded to the richness of language, whereas Beckett and to the Irishness of his language, of his English, whereas Beckett goes to such lengths to get rid of the Irishness, to get free of hiberno kind of the pressure of that language, which has surrounded him, and you see it in the early, not very good writing. You can see why it's an aesthetic choice to set himself out in an empty space, whereas Joyce is always, like his feet are always on the ground, digging into the ground, growing into the ground and coming out of the ground, whereas Beckett tries to create a vacuum around himself and around his language. I can't even imagine Joyce attempting that. All the things that he attempts, he never does that. I was on the brink of a theory there, that Joyce is polyphonic and Beckett was a single note, but actually there's a lot of polyphony in Beckett as well. Yeah, there is, but there is the willful disjoint between what he comes out of and what he becomes, whereas Joyce drags Ireland with him everywhere he goes. It does actually come down to that thing to tell writing students that either you're going to write more, more, more, or less, less and less. There's only two kinds of writers. There's only two kinds, maximalists and minimalists, that if you sit at the desk long enough, you'll either have 500 pages or five. You start at the same 20. So they had perhaps a different kind of circumference. These are large questions. Yeah, they certainly are. Apparently verbatim, I think. Yeah, I think he upped it a bit. Yeah, I think he made them prettier. But he couldn't see them, of course, at the fall. Yeah, the Beckett text we kind of need, which I haven't read for about 30 years, is all that fall. That's got a fantastic joke about the Irish language, hasn't it? Beckett couldn't speak Irish. I know, but doesn't he say something? Nothing Joyce could either. No, no.  Who were they at all?  There was another question in the middle here. Yeah, I'm sorry to point. I got the feeling that for the part of Ireland I'm from, which is not Dublin, that he'd be considered a bit of an Egypt. And that may reflect on why many people don't find it easy to keep going. And the reason for that is if you look at the collateral damage from, for example, I don't think he ever bought a drink with his own money. The Nora, the Lucia, the daughter, the son, all seem to suffer significant damage from being related to him. Even his grandson, I think, was a bit of an Egypt when it came to copyright and so on. So I wonder what either people think, would be like to be related to him? To be related to him. Wow. What would it be like to be related to James Joyce? Welty, these days. Yeah, that's not an easy one, is it? I don't think he was personally cruel. No, I mean, I think he was a very doting, loving father. I think he lived a very chaotic life because of his financial circumstances and because of his marital situation. And there were lots of reasons that his children had very chaotic upbringings and moving around. But by all accounts, he was very doting and particularly of his daughter and went to tremendous lengths to take care of her when she started to descend into very serious mental illness and was very broken by that experience of what happened to her and did everything that he could, including in list young who had insulted him to help her, which, as any writer will tell you, if someone insults your writing, that is a very hard thing to overcome to ask that person for help, and he did. So I think whatever went on with the grandson, there's plenty of people who live very happily off the labors of forebears and that is a whole other Egypt problem. Just his father wasn't any good either. So it started before Joyce's time. But I remember meeting one of the nephews and saying, oh, my granny worked with your auntie. And he said, oh, that was so-and-so. The look on his face was one of great difficulty. And he could manage the whole James Joyce's famous writer thing, but that whole family went through so much in terms of... And it's actually in Ulysses in terms of Simon Teddellus not feeding his children, basically. Leopold Bloom seized them on the street and Stephen is absolutely so angry with his father because of all of that. So I don't think Joyce was the monster. I think Simon was the monster. It was the creative monster. Except he wasn't really all that creative. He came out of a very chaotic life where they were constantly one step away from getting put out of space. Everybody was right around it the whole time. And all the mad stuff. So at least Joyce wrote a good book. At least he made something out of it because that's a story that a million people can tell in a million countries around the world for generations is the story of chaotic family life. But he made something. And those that came after him profited, although they didn't make anything. So, you know, I... And then, you know, the whole monster reputation of him personally, but the book had a monstrous reputation after it. That was also very difficult for everyone. That perhaps into the next generation that it brought in a lot of money, but it was the dirtiest book in the world, you know, blah, blah, blah. And Ireland only pretended to like it. Or only pretended. Nobody read it or talked about the... When nobody ever talks about the contents of your book in Ireland, do they? They just talk about how, you know, that it was in the shop. Or... It was well reviewed. Or, you know what I mean? They wouldn't say, fuck, page 63. What were you thinking? What were you thinking? There is a kind of a privacy about between the covers. And I think that Joyce started that, actually. That she wouldn't open the page. You'd get into it. Conversationally. Well, I think we've kept our audience some time. Are there any pressing questions coming in online that you've... Well, just one more, which was Joyce convinced of his own greatness. I mean, did he have assumed that we would have been talking about it 100 years later? Would that have been his natural assumption? There are so many writers who presume on their greatness. But he was the only one who was right. Just intersected, you know, with the thousand writers at the time who thought we'd be talking about it. He was right. The rest of them were wrong. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think they all probably thought they would be. But he was, yeah. He got it right. I hope yours are. I've talked about it 100 years as well. Wow. He too. Well, I'm going to wrap this up. And I want to go back, not to Ulysses, but to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and to some of those amazing statements at the end of that novel where Stephen talks about, in a kind of pretentious and fairly various way about being a writer. A few phrases that come back. This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall try to express myself as I am. And that is such a kind of, however you see it, it's such an interesting and resonant idea. And then in conversation with the Dean of Studies, they have this very vexed conversation about the English Dean of Studies, about language and cultural nationalism and what it means to be a male writer. And he says, you know, the language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words, home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine, and so on. And then he says, my soul frets in the shadow of his language. And we've had the word frets. You know, pain that was not yet the pain of love fret at his human heart. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. Well, I'm delighted that neither of you are fretting in the shadow of Joyce's language, but actually luxuriating. And on that note, I want to thank both of you for being so generous and for reading. And I'm going to ask Eamor to read us out. I've just got a section from a girl that's a half-worn thing here. I'm just going to read from the very end. I'm the sea, the sea crimson sometimes like fire, and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees at the Alameda Gardens. Yes. And all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and the jesamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltas a girl where I was a flower of the mountain. Yes. When I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used, or shall I wear a red? Yes. And how he kissed me under the Moorish wall. And I thought, well, as well, him as another. And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again, yes. And then he asked me, would I, yes, to say yes, my mountain flower. And first I put my arms around him, yes, and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume, yes. And his heart was going like mad, and yes, I said, yes, I will, yes.