Raising the Wind As is perhaps appropriate for the holiday season, this issue of the James Joyce Quarterly has put on a bit of weight—the result, in this case, of the particularly rich fare on offer. We begin with “Who Curls up with Ulysses? A Study of Non-Conscripted Readers of Joyce,” by Francis Devlin-Glass. I first heard part of the material she presents at the Bloomsday 100 conference in Dublin and immediately sought to publish her examination of the ways in which “amateur” readers approach Joyce’s work. This kind of detailed survey offers a unique insight into the current state (in one Australian city at any rate) of what Joseph Kelly calls “our Joyce,” and reveals to us in fascinating detail the kinds of uses to which Joyce and his works are now being put. Similarly, John A. Snyder, in “Confessions of a Wakefiend: Bibliomantic Readings in Finnegans Wake," shows one “non-conscripted reader” making the rather startling discovery that the American presidential election of 2000 had, in fact, been “fixed”—not by nefarious political operatives, but by Joyce himself some seven decades before the fact. The next set of articles in this issue also engages in political readings of Joyce by focusing on the complexities of Irish identity at both the opening and the close of the twentieth century. Douglas Kanter offers a detailed historical study of Edwardian Ireland which significantly challenges aspects of Joyce’s own self-mythologized isolation by emphasizing the importance of nationalist anti-clerical discourses. The Catholic Church, Kanter contends, was far from a monolithic institutional apparatus that paralyzed Ireland’s political and social life. Instead, it was the object of a significant nationalist critique, and Kanter effectively locates both Joyce and his fictional work within what he calls this larger “Irish secular ethic, which . . . had its roots in nationalist politics.” Even as Kanter effectively embeds Joyce more firmly in Irish history and politics, however, Barry McCrea, in “Secrets of Szombathely: The H.E.L.Y.’S Sandwichmen and Irish Citizenship,” seeks to confound the very idea of Irishness. In a witty and detailed reading that links wandering sandwichmen, the ancestral home of the Blooms, and recent changes in Ireland’s constitution, McCrea contends that Joyce’s work engages in a still urgent critique of genealogical origins. “Szombathely,” he concludes, “is the real philological and ideological omphalos of the novel, to which the tired, penniless, wandering H.E.L.Y.’S sandwichmen finally come home, a hybrid crucible, birthplace of both words and people, the city from which springs modern Ireland’s national hero, and the word that provides the letters for the keywords of Ireland’s national epic.” As both Kanter and McCrea insist, Joyce was deeply entangled in Irish nationalism, yet he fearlessly interrogated both the pleasures and the limits of its identitarian discourses. The dialectic between alienation and identification emerges as well in Juliette Taylor’s “Foreign Music: Linguistic Estrangement in ‘Proteus’ and ‘Sirens,’” the first of three essays focused on individual episodes of Ulysses. Taylor, whose work first emerged at the 2002 Trieste Symposium, argues that Joyce’s multilingualism granted him a “sense of linguistic materiality and semantic ambiguity” that becomes one of the most vital structural elements of his work. Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli and others have, of course, explored such effects in the translations of Joyce's work, but Taylor contends that they are already present in Joyce’s subtle manipulation and deployment of language. Hugh Davis directs our attention away from the ear which hears Joyce’s “foreign music” to that most benighted of senses: smell. In “‘How Do You Sniff?’ Havelock Ellis and Olfactory Representation in ‘Nausicaa,’” he reminds us that the Linati schema identifies the nose and not just the eyes as the thirteenth episode’s organs. A telling response to recent critical emphasis on scopophilia, this piece instead insists that Gerty’s pleasure might be found in the “associative, intuitive, osmotic apprehension of hidden referentiality.” The article concludes with a detailed and useful appendix that demonstrates a convincing link between Joyce’s work on this episode and Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex. From such titillations (intellectual and otherwise), we turn to Michael Livingston’s “‘Dividends and Divisors Ever Diminishing’: Joyce’s Use of Mathematics in ‘Ithaca.’” This essay contributes significantly to the now expansive conversation about both the nature of the errors in “Ithaca” as well as Joyce’s own knowledge of such complex concepts as calculus, irrational numbers, and set theory. Rather than attempting to derive some definitive reading of the episode, Livingston instead contends that the language of mathematics should be treated here with the same degree of critical skepticism that we deploy in arguing about the stage directions in “Circe” or the musical structures of “Sirens.” In doing so, he concludes, we will share Joyce’s own suspicions of any “indifferent analytical, scientific, and naturalistic approaches to knowledge.” The articles in this issue conclude with two studies of authorship and its construction in an age of mass-mediated celebrity culture. Eric D. Smith, in “How a Great Daily Organ is Turned Out: ‘Aeolus,’ Techne, and the Recording of Ulysses,” develops a theoretically sophisticated concept of writing as a prosthesis. He then pairs the text of “Aeolus” with Joyce’s famous 1924 recording of the passage in which MacHugh relates John F. Taylor’s speech to the College Historical Society. This nuanced reading compellingly argues that the voice we hear hissing out of the past not only “confronts his epoch’s struggles with the prosthetic, but . . . demonstrates the folly and futility of trying to establish fundamental distinctions between the prosthetic and the natural and, I think more importantly, between writing as the extension of individual genius and as a collectively determined social production.” Megan M. Quigley too considers the complexities of authorship in “Justice for the ‘Illstarred Punster’: Samuel Beckett and Alfred Péron’s Revisions of ‘Anna Lyvia Pluratself.’” By returning to the early manuscript translations of Anna Livia Plurabelle by Beckett and Péron, Quigley reveals Joyce’s extensive dependence on a text that was once dismissed as a mere “premier essai.” In fact, she contends that in essentially appropriating this work, Joyce may have been attending as much to his own celebrity image and intellectual property rights as he was to the details of language itself. Quigley’s detailed manuscript studies are compelling, and, like Smith’s essay, they complicate considerably our conception of modern authorship and the institutions in which it is embedded. In addition to these substantive contributions of Joyce scholarship, this issue of JJQ also includes a new collection of annotations for Ulysses compiled by Ian MacArthur which use various translations in order to shed new light on the original text. There is also a series of reports from this past summer’s events, describing the 2005 North American Joyce Conference in Ithaca, New York, as well as the Ninth Annual Trieste Joyce Summer School. We include as well some fourteen book reviews in our never-ending struggle to keep pace with the prolific energies of Joyce scholarship. It is, in short, a thick and dense issue which I choose to see as a sign of our “industry’s” continuing good health. News and Notes At last, plans for the twentieth International James Joyce Symposium have been announced. The conference will be held at two venues— Budapest and Szombathely— from 11-17 June 2005. Brandon Kershner is in charge of the academic program while Tekla Mecsnober chairs the local host committee. The organizers have sent the following description of the event and call for papers: The first large-scale international James Joyce symposium ever organised in what used to be the Eastern bloc and is now an exciting new part of the European Union, the XXth International James Joyce Symposium proposes to concentrate on Joyce’s involvement with the varied historical, cultural and linguistic heritage of Central Eastern Europe as a Bloomian “Union of all, jew, moslem and gentile” (U 15:1686), an idea also common to the newly extended European Union, the United States and indeed the increasingly multicultural world. Brotherly “Bruda Pszths” (FW 424.1) and Jewish “Judapest” (FW 150.27-8) at the same time, host city Budapest is ideally suited to stimulate and embrace the symposium participants’ explorations of various aspects of the sometimes traumatic but always fascinating history of the Central Eastern European peoples as manifested in the varied architectural, gastronomic, anthropological, linguistic and intellectual inheritance with which the Celtic, Roman, Slav, Hungarian, Turkish, German and Jewish populations have enriched the region, Europe and the world. Participants will have ample opportunity to explore the varied historic and lively cultural scene and possibly even take “a szumbath for his weekend and a wassarnap for his refreskment” (FW 28-29) in one of the exquisite Turkish baths of the Hungarian capital. The academic objectives of the 2006 symposium have been inspired by the location which also symbolises a political, cultural and academic “opening” towards Eastern and Central Eastern Europe. The Host Committee is devoted to making this event a real as well as symbolic part of the academic extension of the European Union, providing a (financially also viable) chance for large numbers of experts from both sides of the former “iron curtain” to meet and exchange ideas, while also assisting Eastern European research in gaining serious and concentrated academic recognition. In view of this goal, a number of scholarships are planned to be offered for students as well as Eastern European participants. Papers and panels are invited on a range of topics including all sorts of unions, from political through matrimonial to the dynamic newold cultural union of the extended Europe, as well as various united states and united nations. Special but not exclusive emphasis will be placed on the Jewish tradition in the culture of the Eastern European region; the Irish-Hungarian historical parallel and its political and literary reverberations; and the influence of Eastern Europe on Joyce and Joyce on Eastern Europe. 2006 being Samuel Beckett’s centennial year, papers on the Joyce/Beckett “union” are also welcome. The deadline for registration, titles and abstracts (of approximately 200 words) and panel proposals is 2 February 2006. Please write to Brandon Kershner (<kershner@ufl.edu>) or Dr. Tekla Mecsnober (<Tekla29@yahoo.com>). For further information please visit the symposium website at <http://seas3.elte.hu/joyce2006>. Also rapidly coming into sight over the horizon is the next meeting of the Modernist Studies Association, which will be held here at the University of Tulsa from 19-22 October 2006. Founded in 1999, the MSA is devoted to the study of the arts in their social, political, cultural, and intellectual contexts from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. Work on Joyce regularly plays some role at this conference, though panels organized around individual authors are generally discouraged. The conference will draw in excess of five hundred scholars, and McFarlin Library will mount an exhibition of its rich holdings similar to the one organized for the 2003 Tulsa Joyce conference. The conference itself will be sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as by JJQ and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. I certainly urge all of you who are interested not only in Joyce but in his larger cultural and aesthetic context to consider joining us. A call for papers and seminars as well as other information can be found online at <http://www.utulsa.edu/jjq/ msa8/index.htm>. Even as we begin to plot and plan for these upcoming conferences, we must nevertheless pause to remember that at least one of our most faithful and engaging members will be absent. On 7 September 2005, Myra Russel died at the age of 84. She has been a fixture at Joyce conferences, a regular member of the New York James Joyce Society, and an expert on Joyce and music. Her diminutive frame belied her sharp wit and energetic conversation. She will be missed. Finally, as many of you may know, the JJQ and our sister publication—Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature—moved house last year and have now settled comfortably into more modern if somewhat less distinctive digs in the English department. Shortly after the move, Holly Laird also announced her decision to resign from the editorship of TSWL after more than seventeen years in that position. During that time, she served a term as President of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals as well as Chair of the Faculty of English here at Tulsa. Holly, in fact, was chair when I was hired some five years ago and has been both a friend and a mentor in that time. I am certain that she will appreciate the sudden free time that will almost certainly become available to her, but I also know that her steady and reassuring presence at Academic Publications will be missed. Her departure, of course, betokens a new arrival, and I thus also want to welcome Laura Stevens, another close friend and colleague, over the proverbial transom. An accomplished and interdisciplinary scholar of eighteenth-century studies, she will make a wonderful editor, and we wish her the very best. Sean Latham University of Tulsa