Tom Keegan
Feb 28, 2008
Citations
0
Influential Citations
0
Citations
Journal
James Joyce Quarterly
Abstract
I do not know if the 2007 International James Joyce Conference held in Austin, Texas, from 13-17 June, was conceived as an entangl ing event, but it proved to be. For a city that on the surface boasts little connection to Joyce (other than the jaw-dropping Harry Ransom Center's collection of Joyce papers), it made itself serendipitously relevant at each turn, and for this first-time Joyce conference-goer, that was a welcome surprise, as was the conference's theme: "Bring a stranger within thy tower" (LT 14.365). For the uninitiated, the conference appeared to be a massive fam ily reunion. The litany of familiar first names rose up in conversation like a wall. To their credit, conference organizers Alan Friedman and Chuck Rossman did all they could to dismantle that potential stranger-maker one handshake at a time. I simply could not man the periphery on their watch. Add to this Weldon Thornton's dubbing me one of his "grandstudents," and I felt (at least socially) like part of the family. The list of topics seemed as daunting as the list of names. Joyce and: science, tourism, Chaplin, animals, empathy, politics, suffering, space, others, other arts, Zizek, Latinos, translation, oddities, the body, psychoanalysis, and the all-too-apt names and naming among many, many others. On the first full day of the conference, I ventured into these panels and felt a touch of Farrington in "Counterparts," where a "good night's drinking" weighs heavily on his mind. I felt glutted and in need of digestion over a pint, but the omnipresent humor and curiosity about the panels kept my attention. I particularly appreci ated the reminder that the alternating sexual and mundane registers of Joyce's love letters to Nora illustrate the waxing and waning of his masturbation while writing them. This reunion, it seemed, came with its own dirty jokes. It also came with a boat ride on Town Lake that brought together two of my worst fears: American-performed Irish-themed song and bats, though neither turned out to be particularly scary. The musi cal entertainment was lively and finely tuned, and the bats .. .well, there is something to be said about facing down the world's largest urban bat population. Disgusting is the word most readily at hand,