James Joyce Tower And Museum
The James Joyce Tower and Museum is a Martello tower in Sandycove, Dublin, where James Joyce spent six nights in 1904. The tower was leased from the British War Office by Joyce's university friend Oliver St. John Gogarty, with the purpose of "Hellenising" Ireland. Joyce left after an incident in which Gogarty fired a gun in his direction.
The opening scenes of Ulysses are set the morning after this incident. Gogarty is immortalised as "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan" (the opening words of the novel).
The tower now contains a museum dedicated to Joyce and displays some of his possessions and other ephemera associated with Ulysses (e.g. an empty pot of "Plumtree's Potted Meat"). The living space is set up to resemble its 1904 appearance (with a ceramic panther to represent one seen in a dream by a resident). It is a place of pilgrimage for Joyce enthusiasts, especially on Bloomsday.
The Tower became a museum through the efforts of the Dublin artist, John Ryan. Ryan also rescued the front door to 7 Eccles Street (now at the James Joyce Centre) from demolition and organised, with Brian O'Nolan, the first Bloomsday Celebration in 1954.
Read more about James Joyce Tower And Museum: Further Reading, Opening Hours
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“The fatal futility of Fact.”
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—Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923)
“Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word “sophisticate” means, very simply, “obscene.” A sophisticated story is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a “sophisticate” means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other.”
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“I have no connections here; only gusty collisions,
rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse.
...
I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn,
a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement.
People want to push the buttons and see me glow.”
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