Authors Electric

Trieste, in search of epiphany        I have spent the past week in Trieste with my wife in search of something, I don’t quite know what - perhaps I imagined that the ghost of James Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Daedalus, would reach me there? In my very battered copy of  Stephen Hero , repaired with ageing Sellotape - a book which was not published in Joyce’s lifetime - there is a definition of what I was looking for. The artist, Stephen, walking on a Dublin street and feeling restless, pauses as he passes a set of area railings to listen to the fragment of a conversation between a young lady and a gentleman. Stephen’s mind turns to the idea of gathering such moments together in a book of epiphanies: “By an epiphany he (Stephen) meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they t...

"Jonesie" decked out for the holidays 'Tis the season to be jolly whether your preference is secular or sacred, for one religion or another, one culture or a blend. 'Tis also the season to reflect on Christmases past, not all nog and figgy pudding. 'Tis the season of myths and symbols as well as good cheer, of endings and beginnings. Like the Christmas stories I love best, their layered meanings emerge silently from cold winter's darkness like the Bethlehem star. Consider that the Nativity story - apocryphal or not - with its manger and Magi, ends darkly. Fade to The Flight into Egypt and The Massacre of the Innocents . From the Gospel of Matthew's perspective, Baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were refugees from unimaginable violence, the same as those families fleeing atrocities in Syria and Honduras. What distinguishes the modern era's genocides from the paranoid tyrant King Herrod's mass murder of Bethelem's infants? "The past ...