Starting Off Sunday

 Up at 7, down to McClure's around 7:30, on the computer at 8. I got a shock, my ride was coming to take me to church. I had to call and beg off.

What follows constitutes most of the past two hours. I also tidied up and started up on my lunch, and got two posts ready for later in the week.

Last night's weather alert:

 Special Weather Statement issued October 7 at 9:​32​PM EDT by NWS Indianapolis IN
Partly cloudy skies and light winds will allow temperatures to fall into the middle and upper 30s tonight. These conditions may allow some patchy frost to form in sheltered and favored cold areas overnight. 

I looked over Unleash Lit, Exsolutas Press, LongDayPress.com, Hobby Horse Press, and Narrative as a place to send “Road Tripping.”

I am sending “Between The Dead and the Dying” to Exsolutas Press.

I mentioned Penelope Unbound by Mary Morrissy in my post Loafing, and Just Poking Around - Reading, Listening, and The Last Two Days, The Guardian has its review under Penelope Unbound by Mary Morrissy review – masterly alternative life of Nora Barnacle:

Famous, and extremely unlikely. Joyce was highly educated, perhaps too much so, knew a number of languages including Danish, wrote verse and prose of exquisite sensitivity, and had no doubts as to his own genius. Nora – the “h” was the least of the things Joyce took from her – had left school at 12, was not much interested in books, was strong-minded, ever on for a bit of fun, and sceptical of Joyce’s hifalutin ways.

However, as the world knows, this seemingly mismatched couple were to remain together until the writer’s death in 1941, despite Joyce’s fecklessness, excessive drinking, and obsession with himself and his work. They left Dublin in 1904, stayed briefly in Paris and Zurich, and settled, albeit precariously, in Trieste. On their first night in that city, Joyce left Nora outside the railway station with their baggage while he went off to check on a promised job as a teacher at the international Berlitz school. He became involved, not uncharacteristically, in an altercation with some sailors and ended up spending the night in jail.

Starting from this incident, Irish novelist and short story author Mary Morrissy has written an alternative history of Joyce’s and Nora’s lives together, or, rather, not together. The result is a novel of great brilliance and inventiveness, a remarkably – and mysteriously – moving story of what might have been.

***

The bulk of the narrative follows Nora’s increasingly complicated but wholly credible adventures, which end up with her back in Dublin as the owner of – you guessed it – Finn’s hotel. And it is to Finn’s there comes calling one day a gentleman identified by his card as “Signor Giacomo Joyce, Irish-Italian Tenor, Music Professor, Via Alice 16, Trieste”. Morrissy’s Joyce has given up all that “oul” writing business and become instead the professional musician Nora always thought he should be. And along with him is his wife, Amalia, née Popper, who in real life was the inspiration for Joyce’s short, ecstatic prose piece Giacomo Joyce. Amalia, pat as you please, embarks on a little Dublin odyssey, visiting the places mentioned in Joyce’s first book, Dubliners.

Penelope Unbound is a masterwork, and is most masterly in its concluding sections, when “Giacomo” Joyce and Norah – with the aitch restored – meet up again at last. These pages, so convincing and so affecting, demonstrate how a vastly gifted novelist, by applying her artistic imagination to the mere facts of lived lives, can persuade the reader of a transformed reality that is at once mundane and magical. Ariel could not have contrived it better.

Sounds like a wonder and wonderful.

I have not been keeping up with Mary Bear – my loss and should not be yours – and The Guardian reviewed her Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard review – imperial exploits.

By the end of this thrilling book we are no nearer to looking the emperor in the eye. But we are much closer to understanding what he was for. Leaning into all the wild stories rather than disregarding them as so much distasteful waste, Beard does a wonderful job of taking us into the maelstrom of fantasy, desire and projection that swirled around the rulers of ancient Rome.

 One more book review from The Guardian: Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford review – fabulously rich noir.

Astorony still interests me, if you feel the same then check out: Why the earliest galaxies are sparking drama and controversy among astronomers.

Sunny and chilly here.

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