Note: While this entry is not music-related, the news was just too exciting not to share, so I am including it in my journal out of pure joy.
Words cannot express my excitement at what has come to pass. As all my friends know, I adore James Joyce and particularly
Finnegans Wake and have been collecting Joyce rarities for some time.
Last summer my journey brought me to the Second Reader Bookshop, owned and operated by a local Joycean scholar and a fellow of the Poetry Collection at The University at Buffalo, home to some of the rarest and most exquisite Joyce manuscripts. In his shop, I beheld a framed print of a Joyce-themed play by the local Irish Classical Theatre called
Nightmaze. I loved it and asked if I could have it at any price but the owner smiled and said it was a treasure with which he’d never part.
But I didn’t let that stop me. I looked up the Audience Services Manager at the Theatre and inquired about the artwork, and she provided me with the contact info of the original graphic designer who conceived all of the Theatre’s promotional materials over the years. I reached out to him and was surprised to receive an immediate response.
The artist, Michael Gelen of Inkwell Studios shared that he actually favored another portrait of Joyce he’d designed for the award-winning one-man play celebrating the life of Joyce titled,
Joyicity. Excitingly, it was the first show ever produced by the Irish Classical Theatre Company in 1990 at the former Pfeiffer Theatre on Main Street so there is some real history here!
“Joyicity,” the word, is taken from Joyce’s final novel,
Finnegans Wake, and is laden with puns and multiple meanings –Joyce: joyousness; city: Joyceness, Joyce’s city etc.--and comes from his version of “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” expressing the extraordinary joyfulness of the little singing insect, just as the creation of art is joyful for Joyce, and Joyicity is a celebration of that joy, and its creator Joyce, and his city, Dublin.
Gelen generously offered to reprint the artwork without the advertising text so as to just depict Joyce in portrait, at any size I wished, complete with matting, at an incredibly reasonable price. He even signed the print for me! I was overjoyed at the opportunity to display such a wonderful piece of Joyce and Buffalo history in my own home!
Here it is - framed handsomely in my living room beside the fireplace. JOYICITY! <3
