Here's an interesting curio:
Pitch 'n' Putt with Joyce 'n' Beckett, Donald Clarke's two-minute short imagining the two Irish writers stuck on a golf course awaiting W.B. Yeats. It's a funny concept, and there's one funny gag in it, but it suffers from the ailment common to such ironic-fandom works: thinking references to some factoid about the figure (e.g., that Joyce had poor eyesight and that Beckett wrote a play about waiting for somebody) are comedy gold. Mr. Clarke also deserves to be flogged for writing such witless dialogue for Joyce. If you want a better comedy experiment about Beckett, try to find a copy of A.S. Hamrah's "The Beckett-Bushmiller Letters" in
Hermenaut #15; for more entertaining Joyce-related video, check out
Joyce DeWitt's recent appearance on Sally Jesse Raphael.
A komedy kwicky like this isn't really much to hang a discussion on, but since I've
been over this before, I'm still puzzling over why the topic of Joyce and his work appears to be such a Bermuda Triangle of film adaptations. By my estimate, Joseph Strick's
Ulysses is a weak C, Sean Walsh's
Bloom is a D-minus, Strick's
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man pulls down a B-minus. John Huston's
The Dead is a long-time favorite thanks to its status as a
DVD-orphan, but I'd have to cap it at B-plus. Dennis Courtney's
21-minute adaptation of "Araby" is promisingly described as both "award-winning" and "currently used in over 100 colleges and universities," but I haven't been able to find a copy. The prospect of Ewan McGregor playing a person with a high IQ is enough to keep me away from a movie called
Nora, and anyway, if we're already into the field of Joyce-biographical skylarking, the point would seem to be established: Joyce and film are irreconcilable—oil-and-water, dog-and-fire-hydrant, Palestinians-and-Israelis irreconcilable. This is strange, but it certainly seems to be true. Anybody have
other opinions?
![[the simpleton]](img/thesimp.gif)