Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of February 2nd.
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It is the 33rd day of the year, leaving 332 days remaining in 2022.
It is said you could rebuild Dublin from the descriptions in Joyce's books, especially Ulysses. His novels and stories showed his encyclopaedic knowledge of the city, and Ulysses gave particularly vivid and detailed accounts of a day in the life of Leopold Bloom.
Yet Joyce, while always being pegged as an Irish writer, left Dublin at a young age and lived most of his life in Paris. He is considered to be one of Ireland's finest writers, and indeed, scholars put him up there with some of the greatest writers in the English language.
His first writing assignment was for a small agricultural journal in Ireland, The Irish Homestead, which paid him £1 per story. (Several of the stories were later collected in his first book, Dubliners.)
His writing was innovation and comprehensive. His books were bawdy and sometimes sexually explicit, which often drew the attention of censors. His use of language was precise, and he often used experimental writing techniques.
For instance, he was one of the first authors to use the stream-of-consciousness approach extensively in his works. Another, similar stylistic touch was to write long, unpunctuated paragraphs.
He employed many of those techniques, including combining multi-linguistic words, and writing as if life were one universal, cyclical dream, in his novel, Finnegan's Wake. The novel nominally is about a publician working outside of Dublin. More than one critic has described the novel as "unreadable," yet, it is considered among Joyce's exemplary works.
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