Sabbatical number 1

I'm writing this post in the final stretch of my first term of sabbatical leave. I was really lucky to be able to spend the term away from Oxford -- the below is my view -- but I didn't write this post to gloat. The sabbatical leave is an odd fish. People here (in France) don't seem to understand what it is (although that might be my bad French); it is nice when they mistake me for a student on her gap year, though. I looked it up (does Google translate count?), and the word for sabbatical is more or less the same... 'Sabbatique': that's what I thought! Although perhaps it has a different meaning?!

Before I began my sabbatical, my brother (who's an historian) sent me a link to a blog article, 'Seeking Sabbatical Advice', written by someone about to go on her first term of sabbatical leave. As far as I can tell, she wasn't offered much in the way of advice. This is telling. I'm not sure that there is much of a template for these things. For me, it was a great excuse to catch up on writing deadlines, to work on my new book, and to clear my inbox. I finally cleared my inbox today – for about 2 hours – but there is something oddly frightening about a screen that declares 'Inbox: 0 items'. It immediately, perversely, makes me want to run back to civilization. At the same time, I'm enormously admiring of a colleague (and friend of mine) who told me he keeps to a '<5' email inbox. That will definitely be my mantra going forward. Of course, a sabbatical is surely, mostly, about making resolutions you will never keep. Plus ça change...

That picture of Marilyn Monroe reading 'Ulysses'

It's been a while since I posted -- blame the man I met, and subsequently married, since my last post -- so there's lots to catch up on from the past couple of years...

Let's begin with Marilyn. Over the last two years I've been working on an edited collection entitled Navigating the Transnational in Modern American Literature and Culture, and in addition to co-editing and co-writing the introduction, I wrote a chapter for it entitled 'Man and the Echo: W. B. Yeats in Contemporary American Poetry and Song'. During the same period, I had been discussing (with a variety of people) the ways in which apparently 'high' culture becomes assimilated into apparently 'low' cultural forms–and the attendant presumptions (and snobberies) that come with this. I was also reading my colleague (and friend) Edward Clarke's book The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry, which brilliantly connects pop culture with poetic culture in a challenging and provocative way.

Inevitably, as might be the case with all academics working in Irish studies and/or Modernism, my thoughts turned to Joyce's Ulysses, a book that seems to be the most cited in discussions of 'high' and 'low' art; only relatively recently, Declan Kiberd argued (in Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living) that the novel had been misappropriated by the academy and was meant to be read and discussed by the 'everyday' person walking around Dublin. This, perhaps inevitably, led me onto Marilyn Monroe, and that famous picture of her reading Ulysses (not upside down, as some cruel commentators have often claimed).

What I am interested in, is what this photograph does to our expectations (and presumptions) as readers. In one sense, the photograph, taken by Eve Arnold in 1955, is one of the most persistent and iconic images of American artists interacting with Irish culture. It's a surprisingly touching, innocent pose which (perhaps inevitably, but certainly frustratingly) has now become more famous for its discussion of whether Monroe actually read Ulysses than for the beautiful composition of the photograph. Arnold, however, insisted that Monroe was reading the novel, and that she was travelling around with it in her car for some time. What is perhaps surprising, though, is not that Monroe was reading Ulysses, but that there was so much disbelief surrounding whether the 'dumb blonde' American actress could read it. But perhaps the more pertinent question is: why not?

It's always a challenge, when confronting images that subvert our expectations concerning 'high' and 'low' culture, to know how to respond to them. We're nervous lest we should be condescending or patronising, or (perhaps worse still) cheerleading: there's a kind of gun-ho, 'you go, girl!' mentality to the declaration 'Why wouldn't she have read it?'. Yet at the same time, we know that Ulysses has beaten many a reader. A colleague of mine once said in a lecture that only around 1 in 8 of the people who claimed they had read the novel actually had. Are you part of this secret majority? Your secret's safe with me.

           

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Lee Miller/ James Joyce

In Dublin for a conference a couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate to be surrounded by 'Bloomsday' excitement -- and felt drawn particularly to a new event at the James Joyce centre, 'Lee Miller in James Joyce's Dublin'. I've followed Miller's work in different ways over the years -- saw portraits of her by Man Ray at the National Portrait Gallery in London, visited Farley Farm House (the home she shared with Roland Penrose and a focal point for British surrealism), marvelled at those famous photographs of Miller in Hitler's bath -- but these small, quiet snapshots of life in Dublin in 1946 were somehow just as, if not more, affecting. In the photographs Miller traces the journeys of Ulysses and Dubliners but also encounters the people and places that shaped Joyce's life and work (he had died in 1941, previous to her photographic Odyssey), and she does so with stillness and grace. There is very little of the tourist gaze in these photographs, which makes the American photographer's work all the more valuable I think.

Advertising poster for 2014's Bloomsday Festival, James Joyce Centre, Dublin

Faith, doubt, and the Passion: 'Calvary' and 'Rev.'

In the last month I've seen two extraordinary pieces of writing on faith, doubt and humanity focusing in on a protagonist who is a priest: Irish film-maker John Michael MacDonagh's wonderful, bleak and shockingly moving Calvary, and the (increasingly challenging) third series of the BBC 'black comedy' Rev. Both, I think, are brilliant for the ways in which the central characters, who themselves are flawed humans, try to believe in the good in people in ways that are sometimes uplifting, sometimes demotivating and other times completely heartbreaking. 

Both stories use the Easter narrative to brilliant effect too, allowing the trials of their protagonists to follow a recognisable journey: but it would be giving it away to say too much. The question central to both seems to be whether faith has consonance in the modern world. And just as they appear to answer that question, to get close to an ultimate response, they step back again: infuriatingly, perhaps, but brilliantly, of course. It helps, also, that Brendan Gleeson and Tom Hollander are both wonderful actors of 'face', for want of a better expression. Oh, and look out for Chris O'Dowd in Calvary as a butcher who's handy with a cleaver -- and Liam Neeson as a shell-suit wearing 'God' in Rev. (yes, really).