It’s common for descriptions of James Joyce’s Dubliners to label its stories portraits of Irish life. If you’d like to look at actual portraits of Irish life in 1904, however, you could do a lot worse than this series of old photos of Dublin, available online courtesy of the Google Cultural Institute.
Dublinalia
Heated Opinions
Some people scribble in books. Some don’t. Some people (like former Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas) chuck books with marginalia out the window.
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Egan On E-Readers
Jonathan Franzen isn’t the only writer opposing technology and digitization. Jennifer Egan, in a panel discussion last week, compared Facebook to a “huge Soviet apartment block.”
Oh Doctor
Recommended Reading: Frances Stonor Saunders on Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago.
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Flowers of Evil
“Life is worth less than a line of Baudelaire’s poetry.” These two lyric essays by Chen Li over at Asymptote Journal are economical and well-worth the read. Though Chen Li is from Taiwan, he writes in Chinese; this syllabus of Chinese writing and the “New China” from Casey Walker at The Millions pairs quite nicely.
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The Social Function of the Novel
Recommended reading: Tim Parks asks “what is the social function of the novel?“
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