The Reader’s Catalog, a New York Review of Books enterprise, is offering James Joyce holiday cards, six for $29.95. The card has an illustration of a man in suspenders looking dreamily at the night sky. Next to the picture, a partial sentence from “The Dead,” source unidentified:
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe.So cozy. But look at the entire (final) sentence of “The Dead”:
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.Not cozy. Not cozy at all!
Random House’s Proust gift tags and note cards (no longer available) also took statements out of context and wildly distorted their meanings.
comments: 3
LOL! that's one of my favorite bits of lit, the ending of "The Dead"-- its misuse is kind of hilariously wonderful!
I like to buy clothes from a company called The Territory Ahead. The name suggests adventure, and is taken from the ending of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: "But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before." I'm not sure that the full quote doesn't lead in another direction. (Huckleberry and Jim are on a raft, going down the Mississippi River, heading to Cairo, the southernmost point of Illinois, which is a free state. Unfortunately,they miss the cut off for the Ohio River and continue south. On Saturday, we drove to Cairo, which seems to be a town in distress.)
@Fresca: Now I’m afraid I’m going to get one of those cards in the mail. But I don’t know anyone who would spend $29.95 for six cards.
@Geo-B: Yep — the novel has already shown that there’s no escape, no place that is not “sivilized.”
I’ve looked at Cairo on Google Maps — it’s beyond sad.
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