The Art Of Life
Only Margaret Anderson could succeed where Ezra Pound failed.
Ezra tried for a while to get James Joyce’s Ulysses published in the US and persuaded the publisher from Indiana to print the novel in her Chicago-based magazine The Little Review.
She serialised the book over three years, starting in 1918. The US Post Office burned four complete editions of the magazine during the run and she was convicted on obscenity charges.
She once said: “I believe in the unsubmissive, the unfaltering, the unassailable, the irresistible, the unbelievable. In other words the art of life.”
These words stand up to the toughest criticism of blogs today so I take my hat off to the woman.
December 21st, 2007 at 3:30 pm
THis entry creates quite a contrast from the previous entry’s comments, wouldn’t you say?
December 21st, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Give it time, Ed.
December 21st, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Sticky hamster penis!!!
December 21st, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Sorry.
I preferred Dubliners to Ulysses. I like my streams of consciousness in small, manageable chunks and I don’t care if that’s a contradiction in terms. But it is bizarre, now, to think of Ulysses being considered obscene. Although, I suppose, no more bizarre than to think, now, of prosecuting counsel in an obscenity trial saying to the jury with no irony whatsoever, “Would you allow your wife or your servants to read this book?”
December 21st, 2007 at 5:25 pm
(That was the Lady Chatterley trial, that was. Not Ulysses.)
(I am going to leave your comments box alone now.)
December 21st, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Sticky hamster penises definitely fit the theme of Lady Chatterly’s lover better than they do Ulysses.
I think.
Sorry, Cliff.
December 22nd, 2007 at 7:00 am
TO me the art of life isn’t ‘the unsubmissive, the unfaltering, the unassailable, the irresistible, the unbelievable’. TO me, the art of life is how we as individuals deal with the unsubmissive, the unfaltering, the unassailable, the irresistible, the unbelievable.