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As Open Culture explains, this rare 1924 recording of Joyce reading from the Aeolus episode of the novel was arranged and financed by his friend and publisher Sylvia Beach, who brought him by taxi to the HMV (His Master’s Voice) gramophone studio in the Paris suburb of Billancourt. She writes in her memoir, Shakespeare & Company:

Joyce had chosen the speech in the Aeolus episode, the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was “declamatory” and therefore suitable for recital. He had made up his mind, he told me, that this would be his only reading from Ulysses.

I have an idea that it was not for declamatory reasons alone that he chose this passage from Aeolus. I believe that it expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice. As it rings out–”he lifted his voice above it boldly”–it is more, one feels, than mere oratory.

Pair with these rare 1935 illustrations for Ulysses by none other than Henri Matisse

SoundCloud / brainpicker
Being hated by another woman: a unique pain that is only eased by the fierce love of yet ANOTHER woman.
Lena Dunham (who is necessarily followable)
Happy Father’s Day: History’s Timeless Letters of Fatherly Advice

Though these Guardian infographics on the optimal number of children for literary success are meant as lighthearted commentary on literary prizes and parenting, the two juxtaposed above bespeak a worrisome pattern: Whether or not literature may have a “women problem,” women seem to have a literature problem – successful women of letters procreate significantly less than successful men of letters, suggesting that the cost of parenting is far greater for a female literary career than a male one.

Even with society’s evolving ideas about parenthood and what defines a family, parenting in still more vocationally perilous for mothers than it is for fathers. No wonder a number of female writers choose not to have children

Any set of letters and specific categories cannot describe the fluidity of a human’s sexuality over time.

The trouble with labels like LGBT

Maya Angelou put it best in her fantastic 1973 conversation with Bill Moyers, considering the laziness of stereotypes:

All you have to do is put a label on somebody. And then you don’t have to deal with the physical fact. You don’t have to wonder if they are waiting for the Easter bunny or love Christmas, or, you know, love their parents and hate small kids and are fearful of dogs. If you say, oh, that’s a junkie, that’s a nigger, that’s a kike, that’s a Jew, that’s a honkie, that’s a — you just — that’s the end of it.

So lovely: For her daughter Emma’s fifth birthday, Canadian photographer Jaiime C. Moore styles her in the likeness of powerful female role models – Amelia Earhart, Jane Goodall, Coco Chanel, Susan B. Anthony, and Helen Keller.

Albert Einstein’s letter of advice to his 11-year-old son.

Albert Einstein’s letter of advice to his 11-year-old son.

Italo Calvino on writing

All winter, Peter Marra’s children had been pestering him to get a cat. It was ironic, he thought as he walked up the snowy path to his modern farmhouse in Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Especially now, when the country’s cat lobby had him pegged as the Josef Mengele of felines. In his years as a research scientist at the Smithsonian Zoo’s Migratory Bird Center, Marra had produced many studies on different threats to bird life, like glass buildings and wind turbines, but none received as much attention as those featuring cats. Since its publication in the January issue of the journal Nature Communications, his team’s paper, “The Impact of Free-Ranging Domestic Cats on Wildlife of the United States,” which placed the number of birds felled by felines at 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion per year, had been picked up by most major media outlets, including the New York Times. Marra was proud, although when he saw the front-page headline, “That Cuddly Kitty Is Deadlier Than You Think,” accompanied by a photo of a tabby with its jaws clenched around the neck of a rabbit, he braced himself for an onslaught.

Sure enough, the reaction from Alley Cat Allies, the country’s most powerful cat group, was swift and furious.

In which a bird researcher gets hate mail from cat advocates – like The Cat-Hater’s Handbook in reverse. 

To be sure, the severely skewed imbalance between avians and felines is reflected even in the annals of famous literary pets, where Dickens was the sole owner of a bird amidst a crowded roster of cats and dogs.

Cats, of course, are known to serve as powerful proxies for human emotional life, which might explain the friction.

A visual anthropology of the world’s last living nomads
Stirring letter tucked by a Chinese factory worker into Halloween decorations found in Kmart exposes China’s forced labor – but not without great risk.

Stirring letter tucked by a Chinese factory worker into Halloween decorations found in Kmart exposes China’s forced labor – but not without great risk.

The American Psychiatric Association recently released an updated version of its manual of mental disorders (DSM-5) and this time it includes a new addition: Caffeine withdrawal.

Caffeine withdrawal now classified as a mental disorder. Quick, Orwell to the rescue! (Also see how we came to depend on coffee so deeply.)

Not yet ready to be mentally ill, at least in that way? Might as well learn how to make the perfect cup of coffee.

I do not accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones.
Pico Iyer at TEDGlobal 2013, echoing Annie Dillard’s eloquent meditation on presence vs. productivity.

Mark and Tim met in college and have been together since. They traveled to the District of Columbia twenty years later to get legally married, but in their native state of North Carolina, which doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage, discriminatory laws prohibit them from adopting their two teenage boys as a married couple. 

If the tragic absurdity of this law isn’t yet apparent, consider that not too long ago, Tim and Mark wouldn’t have been allowed to marry by the law for a wholly different, equally historically embarrassing in retrospect “reason” — Mark is black and Tim is white.

Support the freedom to marry here, explore the psychological essentials of parenting in the context of a same-sex family, and revisit Dan Savage’s eloquent case for how marriage equality fortifies the “equality” part rather than compromising the “marriage” part.