James Joyce fans around the world celebrate Bloomsday—June 16, the date on which his novel Ulysses takes place—any number of ways. There are marathon readings and brilliant stage performances. There are solemn rituals (eating a Gorgonzola sandwich), whimsical gestures (carrying a potato in your pocket), and more canonical Joycean exploits (late-night brothel hijinks). Given all the ways Joyce’s novel tends to seep into everyday life, on Bloomsday and year-round, it’s remarkable that Ulysses was illegal to publish, sell, import, or advertise in the United States for over a decade. The novel was banned as obscene until 1933, when Judge John Woolsey of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York allowed it to roam free on U.S. soil.
As he grew into a toddler, my son decided to play instead of read books with his sister at night or at the kitchen table during breakfast. He preferred running wild until he passed out. He’s me as a small child—the energy and the desire to explore and push boundaries. He wants to climb up my back and jump on me.
Finally, I found another book that caught his attention: Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. I’d read the book to him before, but one evening, when he was two, he saw what I saw as a child.
When it came to agreeing on an idea for the show, the Brothers and I knew that most everybody loved bars, especially sports bars. The Brothers had grown up in Las Vegas, and one of our earliest ideas was to set the bar in Barstow, California, because we thought about its proximity to Las Vegas and how the guests on the show would stop over in Barstow en route to or from Vegas. The main action would take place in the hotel bar. The structure was similar to that of Fawlty Towers in that the stories would walk into the bar.
Once we settled on a sports bar, we ruled out New York City as a setting, not only because it had been overdone but, more important, because it had multiple teams for the same sport. We considered Boston, Philadelphia, and Detroit, where local fans really love their sports and everyone roots for the same team. We decided on Boston because there was an accent and because it was such a distinctive town—working-class and cosmopolitan at the same time.
Einstein’s theory of relativity shattered the master clock into many clocks – one for each person and object in motion. In Einstein’s picture of the universe, everyone carries their own clock with them.
One consequence of this is there is no guarantee the clocks will tick at the same rate. In fact, many clocks will tick at different rates.
Even worse, the faster you travel relative to someone else, the slower your clock will tick compared to theirs.
Arguments had previously been made for stretches of countryside in the Marche region and between Milan and Genoa. During a presentation in Vinci, near Florence, Mr Cotte contended that the artist was more plausibly depicting a part of his native Tuscany—one that keenly interested him at the time. According to this theory, da Vinci represented the area not as it was, but as, in an unrealised scheme, he intended it to be.
The streaming of music offers us a two-dimensional view of pop. Stars that peaked decades apart seem close to one another, like the constellations in the night sky. A young fan of guitar rock, coming across “My Generation” and “Pretty Vacant” for the first time on a playlist, might imagine they came from the same period. That could never have happened during the vinyl age, when one look at the haircuts on the record sleeve would immediately tell you that the Who and the Sex Pistols came from different eras of pop. With nothing but the capacious but disordered resource of the internet to help us make sense of the vast array of music at our fingertips, what we need is a comprehensive handbook, a text that provides contextual depth to 120 years of recorded sound.