2.04.2008

This Week In History

1922 drawing of Joyce by Djuna Barnes, via wikimedia commons.

  • Feb. 2, 1848: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is signed
In consideration of the extension acquired by the boundaries of the United States, as defined in the fifth article of the present treaty, the Government of the United States engages to pay to that of the Mexican Republic the sum of fifteen millions of dollars.
  • Feb. 3, 1820: U.S. population announced at 9,638,453 - representing a 33% increase from the previous decade.
  • Feb. 2, 1882: James Joyce is born. Often considered the greatest novelist of the 20th century, Joyce both inspires and confounds. Years ago I undertook Ulysses only to find myself wading through a mysterious kingdom of foreign words and obscure references. I gave up, I was defeated. The following is a verse from his poem Chamber Music, a bit more appealing to the commoner mind. Also, you can find his Dirty Letters To Nora at the link. A recording made in London, 1929, preserves for history the rhythm of his poetic style, and the cadence in his voice.
I hear an army charging upon the land,
And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:
Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,
Disdaining the reins, with fluttering ships, the charioteers.
They cry unto the night their battle-name:
I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.
They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,
Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.
They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:
They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.
My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?
  • Feb. 7, 1964: The Beatles arrived in the NY for their first US tour. By the look on their faces, they weren't expecting so many screaming banshees.
  • Feb. 8, 1600: Giordano Bruno declared a heretic by the Catholic Church. 9 days later he was burned at the stake. Bruno, like Spinoza and many other proto-scientists of his day, was a pantheist. They looked at nature, at the stars, and deduced that everything was and is part of a whole, that God is in all things, and all things are within God. Today that sounds perfectly appropriate, but in Bruno's day, such things once said were automatically attributed as a challenge to authority, to the church. It may be said that he is sciences first martyr. From The Harbinger.
    As a mystic, Bruno grasped the essential unity of this infinite universe and severely criticized the religious belief-system for its dualistic metaphysics. He experienced God as the world itself, an idea that transcends the empirical sciences and traditional theology. Therefore, it is not surprising that Brunian mysticism seriously threatened the rigid and closed politico-religious establishment of his time (this same dogmatic outlook by the Church would later force Galileo to recant all his discoveries in descriptive astronomy).
  • Feb. 9, 1895: Volleyball invented. Uhhh, yea.
  • Feb. 9, 1943: Joe Pesci is born. Later becomes George Carlin's god.
-Reese

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow the recording of Joyce is great, thanks for the link. His lilt is so different than what I supposed. I bought Ulysses on a whim a while ago and a guide to it, but I fear I'll never even crack either of them.