"Thought Through My Eyes": Epilogue, Part 3 (Expansive Bibliography)

To finally close out this treatise, I would like to share thoughts on some of the books used in the research process.

The Secret Life of Salvador Dali by Salvador Dali

Published in 1942, this is really the definitive text to read for those interested in Dali. His writing style is superb though often flashy and exuberant as he tells the story of his life starting with intrauterine memories (seriously). The intrauterine stuff was actually very interesting, especially as compared to Stanislav Grof's research on the subject (which came decades later). As often seems to be the case, Dali's artistic intuition is so precise that it matches perfectly with later scientific findings.

Next to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, this was one of the main texts for my paper and (as the point is belabored in the paper) its style of "autobiographical mythology" certainly makes for an interesting comparison with Joyce's autobiographical novel. One of the differences between them though is that Dali's book is filled with beautiful hand-drawn illustrations depicting symbols, scenes, characters, etc drawn from the story.

Diary of a Genius by Salvador Dali
Although the opening pages, detailing his disputes with the Surrealists and André Breton, make for interesting reading, I didn't find this book to be all that good. Sure, Dali's writing style is always entertaining but this book is literally a diary, a daily account of a few years in Dali's life and we get to read how many times he crapped that day, what he ate, etc. It's not all boring, but I wouldn't read it again.





The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dali (as told to André Parinaud)

This book is a written account of Dali dictating his life, his work, and his theories to Parinaud and it makes for a great read. It was composed in the 1970s when Dali had been a famous artist for about five decades so there's plenty to talk about and in the 300 pages there's tons of great material. There are illustrations (and photos) in here as well, hand-drawn in an interesting charcoal style. Plenty of great material on the paranoiac method in here, it's also got the only mention of Joyce by Dali that I've been able to track down. Very briefly, he shares Helena Rubinstein's account of the great writer: "nearsighted and smelling bad."


Salvador Dali by Robert Descharnes
Descharnes is Dali's main biographer and this big coffee table art book has an engaging account of the artist's life and career while also displaying big, beautiful color images of many of his paintings. This is the first Dali book I read and it remains a great one.


Dali: The Impresario of Surrealism by Jean‐Louis Gaillemin
When I visited London back on Thanksgiving 2008, there was an art museum right on the Thames River that had a big Dali exhibit. Of course I checked it out and it was great (they had some of his illustrations of The Divine Comedy which I loved). Afterwards I was in the gift shop trying to avoid getting anything (so as to conserve my meager funds), but this little book caught my attention and I couldn't resist picking it up. I devoured it on the return flight and still pick it up every now and then. It's another book about his life and career but it goes a little bit deeper into certain things like frequent motifs or his interactions with people like Jacques Lacan. In fact, it was reading this book that first put me on to the role Lacan plays in this whole thing. This is a great introductory primer to Dali and his work, I highly recommend it. It's also a very tiny book that could fit in your back pocket.


James Joyce: Portraits of the Artist in Exile edited by Willard Potts
When I was at the Joyce conference last month I often brought this book up in conversation and it seemed nobody had heard of it. I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's a collection of recollections of Joyce by a number of writers, artists, scholars, etc. that encountered him at various points in his life all throughout Europe. It's a highly entertaining book of anecdotes and there's tons of material in it that I've never read anyplace else. This might be meaningless to most people, but it reminds me of the great baseball book The Glory of Their Times.  

James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism by Jean-Michele Rabaté
I've always thought this title sounds boring and overly academic but it's a great read. Rabaté is one of the best of the current Joyce scholars and he writes very well.

A Reader's Guide to James Joyce by William York Tindall
This book really came in handy when I first read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Tindall writes in a very clear and engaging style and he weaves through the mass of Joycean symbols and motifs very smoothly. My understanding of the symbols in Portrait really owes a lot to Tindall. (This is also a good book to have when reading Ulysses as he gives clear and brief breakdowns of each chapter.)

Coincidance by Robert Anton Wilson

I picked up this book very late in the research process and so I didn't include it in the actual bibliography but it certainly helped me put everything together. I've been admiring RAW for a while but this is the first book of his that I actually read and it was spectacular. It is a collection of essays dealing for the most part with instances of synchronicity all over the place in art, science, and history (there are also many essays about things that have nothing to do with synchronicity at all). He has three pieces on Finnegans Wake that are as interesting as anything I've come across yet on the Wake and which might convince you that Joyce was really working on some sort of unknown cosmic level. In one essay he details how the characters (and sigla) of the Wake coincide perfectly with the trigrams of the I-Ching and effectively ties both of those in with the composition of DNA. Really, really delicious food-for-thought. (There is also a footnote in which he claims certain parts of the Wake are influenced by Dali but I didn't find his argument convincing at all.)

Jacques Lacan by Elizabeth Roudinesco
For someone who lived such a wild, "rock-and-roll" lifestyle, I thought Roudinesco's account of Lacan was pretty boring. Her writing style was very dry and bland. Somebody at the conference asked me what's the best book on Lacan's life and, as far as I know, this is the only one and I wasn't too impressed with it.


How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan by Roberto Harrari

Out of all the books I read for my study, this was the most difficult. The "final Lacan" is Lacan's 1975-76 seminar on le sinthome or "the symptom" and it's the one where he focuses entirely on Joyce who, he was convinced, was schizophrenic but was able to channel his madness through his art and thus remain on the safe side of sanity (although his daughter inherited the sickness and perished). That sounds easy enough to understand but Lacan illustrated his theories using the Borromean knot and twisted and tied everything in all different ways because he was at that time hanging out with a lot of mathematicians. In this book, Harrari tries to explain all of Lacan's darting thoughts but I found it impossible to follow. If you flip around the book using the index, though, it's easier to glean what info you need.

A New Chapter

As the sun goes down on the final day of the year 2010, I'm researching and preparing for a new chapter in my Roam. Early next year, my lady and I will be moving to Austin, Texas. The Texas part does not sound appealing at all. Though I've never been in the state, its reputation doesn't make it a sought-after destination for me, especially not one I'd like to leave California for. But, the more I read about the city of Austin, the more eager I am to get over there.

The main reason for the move is my girlfriend's desire to attend a culinary school situated over there but it seems my own situation has had its walls cave in to the point where I've been desiring to get up and escape to somewhere else for months now. There's no doubt that I absolutely LOVE California. There is also no doubt that I cannot afford to live here right now, especially at a point where I'm ready to dive fully into my writing and see what comes of it. I also do not want to stay in one spot right now, I'm 25 and I want to see the world, experience different places, learn how to support myself as an adult in different environments, before settling down in one city, however beautiful that city may be.

I plan on writing a big post devoted to all the things I'm going to miss in San Diego. I feel like I haven't even scratched the surface of this city's treasures since I've been here and so, as a goodbye campaign, we're planning on taking a couple weeks to just see and do everything that we can here before heading eastward.

That fact, that I'm going a couple time zones eastward now bothers me a bit. After living in the Eastern time zone my whole life, California felt like Never, Never Land. I was always able to comfortably watch the entirety of any live sports game without having to stay up past 10 PM and, more generally, it always felt special being among the last people in the contiguous United States who get to see the sun before it sets each day. Right now, as I type this it's 4:30 and still light out. My livingroom window, which faces directly south, shows the bright glimmers of the sun's rays breathing their last breath of 2010 all over the small courtyard of my apartment complex.

At first, the prospect of heading back eastward felt like going backwards. In 2008, I escaped Staten Island and traversed westward across the whole country to settle in the most southwestern corner of the map and I had fantasies of moving further out to Japan after that. Instead, I'm going back eastward to be immersed in the middle of the mix again. Reading about things like the "Keep Austin Weird" campaign, the city's proud status as the Live Music Capital of the World, and some other cool facts on Wikipedia (voted as the city with best people in Travel & Leisure magazine), I'm able to be much more accepting and even excited about trying out the new city.

Apparently, Austin is also the most active metropolitan area in the US when it comes to reading and writing blogs and, as I plan to take this blog (and my writing overall) to the next level in 2011, what better location could I choose as the center of my activities?

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Plenty of great happenings happened in 2010, not least of which is that this blog grew greatly in readership and content. I started it in late 2009 but barely wrote in it. It was 2010 when things really took off and I was mentioned on ESPN.com and the James Joyce Quarterly website. The posting content has slowed down a bit since then as I've devoted more of my free time to studying Joyce and watching too much basketball while my un-free time was spent at an increasingly stressful and low-paying job. Well, I'm quitting that job next week and will be devoting much work and attention to this site next year, especially once we get settled in Austin.

Here are the main writing projects on the agenda (what you might call "The 2011 Writing Projects on Which I Plan to Labor Resolutely"):

1 - The completion and presentation of my essay concerning James Joyce-Salvador Dali-Jacques Lacan. I am in the final stages of studying for this and will then bring it all together and submit it for presentation at the 2011 North American James Joyce Conference (for which, hopefully, I'll get to come back to SoCal). You can check out the early epiphanic realization that led to this essay if you read this post and scroll down a bit.

2 - My in-depth, chapter-by-chapter breakdown and study of Ulysses. I've been talking about this ever since I finished the book exactly 364 days ago. I've got plenty of notes already put together for it but still have a lot more work to do on it and this will be what I imagine I'll be working on most of the time in Austin. No matter how huge or awesome (or lame) it is, I will be posting the entire thing on this blog. People have told me that I shouldn't, that I should try to protect such work and copyright it, but I consider it to be a warm-up to the rest of my writing career. Same thing with the Portrait essay that's on here (and which is the prelude to the Ulysses project). I want to provide a full, in-depth, free online source to help people read and understand Joyce's amazing book. You can bet that I'll also be drawing in much of my other interests (like hip hop music) for the study and so it'll be a unique and entertaining experience.

3 - A possible book project with two of hip hop's best current lyricists. I won't delve into it though until it's official. But it's up there on the immediate agenda.

4 - When those things are done, the composition of my novel A Building Roam will then begin. The book documents my journey from growth in New York, migration to California, flutterings and sputterings in California, and eventual rise to artistic glory in....wherever the hell I end up.

5 - Of course, while all that is going on I will also stay active on here writing about sports, music, literature and a bunch of other stuff. With the addition of my iPad, I will try to document the move to Austin as much as I can because I imagine it'll be pretty exciting.

Happy New Year!