Just Wrought

Leveraging Just Wrought’s Obscurity as a Feature, not a Bug

 

Okay. So yesterday’s experiment with blowing the dust off of Just Wrought’s mic went… well… not poorly—experiments can only be said to go poorly if they don’t yield data, and this one definitely did that. The data I took away from yesterday’s post “Testing… Testing… Is This Thing On?” is that not many people are going to hit my blog for information about what I’m up to during the Covid – 19 Corona Virus Crisis. Blogs are so 12 years ago. I get it.

But now that I know Just Wrought is (for now) a place where only people who really care what I’m doing go, I can shift its use from one-way information flow, to a two-way back-and-forth. For instance, I’m about to make a move in the space of virtual performance, but before I do, I’d love to sort of test drive the text of the crowd funding release to work out all the kinks, and answer all the questions that might come up.

The Pitch:

Help me pay actors to record my short stories.

The Gist:

I retired from theatre, particularly play-writing, seven years ago to pursue other sorts of writing and story-telling. In that time I have written a wild, weird quasi-memoir called The Starting Gate (published in 2016), a novel (yet-to-be-published) inspired by my time working as the only male executive assistant in the senior executive suite of Washington Mutual Bank during the run up to the Great Recession, and countless essays, poems and short stories. I. And am sad to admit that I have given those short stories (if you’ll forgive the lame proto-pun) short shrift. That I,s, I do sometimes post them on line and I do read them at my monthly literary reading Loud Mouth Lit (which I founded 3 ½ years ago), but other than that limited exposure, they sit on a virtual shelf gathering virtual dust, perhaps never to be read again.

I’d like to change that by paying professional actors, first with my own money and then with yours, to record these stories and ultimately offer them back to the public as audio book quality recordings.

Here’s how I see it working.

I open an Indiegogo campaign, with a goal of raising $7,000 dollars. This is how I raised the money to publish my book The Starting Gate, so I can vouch for it as a tried and true method. The pitch will contain an explanation of my plan essentially paraphrasing what I’ve written above. I will set contribution levels as follows:

Story Patron

Give me $10 and I’ll give you a story, recorded by professional actor local to the Pacific Northwest.

Collection Patron

Give me $25 and I’ll give you all seven of the stories I hope to record with local professional actors.

Book Patron

Give me $50 and I’ll give you all seven stories, PLUS a free copy of the paperback edition of my book THE STARTING GATE (a 15$ value.)

First Edition Patron

Give me $100 and I’ll give you all seven stories, PLUS a free copy of the limited first edition hardback version of my book THE STARTING GATE (a 25$ value and there are only 20 of them left), PLUS I will record a sonnet of your choosing by William Shakespeare, written back during a similar epidemic which closed all of the theaters in England.

Casting Patron

Give me $500, and you’ll get everything you get for $100 but also I will give you the option of nominating a professional Pacific Northwest actor whom you wish to record one of my stories.

Commissioning Patron

Give me $1,000 and you’ll get everything you get for $100 but you also get to commission a brand new, original story from me based on beginning parameters that you help provide. And I’ll let you cast the actor, too, if you want.

 

For every $1,000 I raise, I will record a story, paying a local professional actor (whom I worked with back in my theatre daze) at least $500 to do so.

Why not the whole thousand? Well, there are several expenses associated with this endeavor in addition to the actor’s fee, such as:

• The director’s fee. (This would be for the services of the incomparable book artist, Lyssa Browne, and whose studio, Cedar House Audio, the stories will be recorded.)
• Post-production costs. These range from paying a sound designer to do the final mix, to any other costs associated with bringing you a professional audio book quality offering.
• Administrative costs. Indiegogo, just like every other crowdfunding platform, charges a fee for its services. In this case, it would be ~5%, which is ~$50 off the top of every $1,000 raised. Other hidden fees around distribution will also apply.
• Promotion costs. I would only be spending money to promote this if I had a little extra left over after everything else got paid.
• Paying forward. In the unlikely event that there is money leftover out of the $1,000 per story I’ve budgeted, l will plow the surplus forward into the next story. I honestly don’t anticipate this being a problem, but I am ready and eager to deal with it if it arises.

 

So that’s my initial sketch of my plan. What do you think? I welcome any and all of your feedback in the comments.

 

Also, what should I call this project?

Testing… Testing… Is This Thing On?

 

It has certainly been a minute or two since I last posted here at my old blog Just Wrought. (Damn! Four years ago, Father’s Day!?) But I am considering blowing the dust off of it. (Metaphorically of course. I would never do anything as rash in this current crisis as literally blowing dust.)

I need a reliable platform from which to communicate, and, alas, very recently I have been hearing about problems with Face Book deleting posts for apparently no reason, and, let’s face it, all of the major social media platforms are utterly non-transparent and frankly a bit suspect when it comes to user data. When I post something here, I can see how many people have looked at it, and therefore have a much crisper insight into how well I am reaching people.

If you’re interested in my future offerings, some of which will be old-school style, essays, and some of which will be more like opportunities for actors, writers and other arts professionals to make a little extra spending money, then by all means, click “reload” a couple times on the ol’ browser, and heck, if you’re tempted, maybe even send a link of this post to a friend or two.

If I get enough hits here at Just Wrought, I’ll know I can use this as my primary form of communication on the internet. (Though of course, I will always post pointers to it on FB, Twitter, and Instagram.)

So if you’ve made it this far, and you like what you see, and you want to see more, say hello in the comments. And watch this space. I will have news on a special project I’m developing soon. Very soon.

Love,

Paul

My Friend for a Year: A Reader’s Book of Days

 

 

 

I have been reading the same book for nearly a year. I sit and read one page, every day, and in so doing, it has become a true friend to me. I’m actually a little concerned about how much I will miss this book when my year with it is up.

This book—my friend— was given to me by another friend, the poet Kevin Craft, who presented it to me at the 2014 Annual Mullin White Trash Christmas Party. I cracked open the tome the very next day, December 14, and quickly learned that Shirley Jackson, author of The Haunting of Hill House, was born on that day in 1914. I also learned that  in 1999 Charles M. Schulz retired from penning his classic cartoon strip Peanuts. He would be dead by the following February.

A Readers’ Book of Days by Tom Nissley is an addicting almanac of literature, charmingly illustrated by Joanna Neborsky. It engagingly details not only what happened to authors on particular days, but also, and perhaps more importantly, what happened to their characters. We all know that Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March, and most of us know (or should) that Leopold Bloom began his vast single-day adventures on June 16, but how many of us know that the wedding that kicks off The Godfather occurred on the last Sunday in August 1945?

Nearly a month into my ritual of reading a single page every morning with my coffee I learned that in 1873, Herman Melville’s brother-in-law lobbied the Secretary of the Treasury to see if anything could be done to make the author’s job as a customs inspector easier. This was twenty years after “Bartleby the Scribner” was published, and twenty-two since Moby Dick first surfaced. In July I learned that on the 16th of Germinal in Year II the poet Fabre d’Églantine was executed in the revolution for which he helped invent an entirely new calendar. He handed out his poems on his way to the guillotine. 

Stories like these especially spoke to me, freshly laid off from my day job of seven years and recently retired from theatre to begin writing in new forms. 2015 loomed ahead of me with an intimidating unknowable newness. Still, if Melville could defy obscurity two decades after Moby Dick, and if d'Eglantine could still earnestly offer his poems even as he tumbriled towards death; then who was I not to soldier on in my privileged circumstances. And so, in addition to introducing me to all kinds of cool books, from Cloud Atlas to the The Time Traveler’s Wife, with his own singular book Tom Nissley helped remind me that success and failure as an artist are just painted-on illusions. All you can really hang your hat on is the work, and the earnest offering of its product.

Books are like people: it’s easy to love the general idea of them, but in reality there are just too damned many to know or care about. There are books with which you had wild youthful affairs. (Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and John Gardner’s Grendel leap to mind for me.) Ones that you treasure fond memories of, but understand you’re unlikely to revisit in middle age (Joseph Campbell’s The Hero of a Thousand Faces), and then there are the books you live with, day upon day, in something not unlike happy matrimony (Coleman Barks’ versions of Rumi for me as well as The Ancestor’s Tale, by the brilliant, but lately somewhat loathsome Twitterer, Richard Dawkins; and Jorges Luis Borges’s hat trick: The Fictions, The Non-Fictions, and The Selected Poems.)

This Friday at 7 p.m Tom Nissley will be celebrating the paperback editon of A Reader’s Book of Days at the warm and welcoming shops he owns, Phinney Books. (In the interest of full disclosure, I must inform you now that I have since I introduced myself to Tom as a fan. And I like to think that we have begun a tentative but promising new friendship. Indeed, I asked him to write a blurb for the back of my soon to be published book, The Starting Gate, and he surprised me when he told me it would be his first time.)

As artists, as humans, we cannot know the true measure of our gifts; that’s for others to understand. Kevin Craft couldn’t know what the book he was bringing to my raunchy Christmas party would mean to me over the following year, and Tom Nissley couldn’t know one of the people he would reach so profoundly was the guy who wrote the deeply weird play about angels and sub-atomic particles he saw at a black box in Belltown in 1992. We offer what we offer and we hope for the best. Through Kevin and Tom this best of books changed my last year for the better. And now in turn I’m offering you this piece of advice: go if you can on Friday to Phinney Books and purchase yourself a copy of A Reader’s Book of Days.

 

Who:     Tom Nissley

What:     A Reader’s Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year

When:     Friday, November 6, at 7 p.m.

Where:     Phinney Books, 7405 Greenwood Ave N, Seattle, WA 98103

Why:    Because you’ll be achieving several great things in one small, fun, and easy package: buying a great book directly from the author, and in doing so supporting local literature and local booksellers, and finally you’ll be celebrating authors throughout the ages that worked hard so you’d have something interesting with which to pass the years of days.

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Exit/Entrance/Exit/Entrance... Imagination

 

This week I started my new job working for the City of Seattle, Department of Transportation (aka SDOT). This coming Sunday evening, I’ll be reading a story I wrote called “Exit Interview” about getting laid off from my old job. At the time I conceived it, the plot was mere imagination, but I knew the ax would eventually fall. Additionally, the story morphs into being about the end of my life, and then, more eventually still, about the end of the world. And again, I used my imagination but I have a pretty good general idea of how these things will go.

So why am I reading this story on Sunday evening (with the help of the truly excellent Brandon Simmons)? And why, in support of Bernie Sanders campaign to become the next president of the United States of America?

So many think he doesn’t have a chance. Others think he’s inured to the injustice of American racism, puffed up on a cloud of clueless White progressivism.

What do you think?

Do you think he has a chance to become our next president?

Here’s my suggestion: use your imagination; because like me— like all of us— you have a pretty good idea of what will happen otherwise.

 

 

Tired of Being the Other

Well over a month ago my good friend Bob Williams posted something on Face Book that set me back on my heels and caused me to realize that back when I was doing theatre, and most specifically, when I was sitting at the casting table, I often did not pay close enough attention to the biases of the people making the decisions, myself especially.

Bob has been a dear friend and treasured collaborator since we first started hanging out and doing improv together at the University of Maryland back in the mid-1980’s. He’s been a cast member of some of my favorite productions of my plays, including Annex Theatre’s An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show and “White Boy can Take a Punch” in Brown Box Theatre’s Hoodie’s Up. Bob’s a terrific actor and a deeply generous person and not exactly known for living on a soap box (unlike some of us - *cough*). So I feel strongly that his words deserve special attention and bear repeating. To that end, I asked Bob if I could republish his Face Book post here at Just Wrought, and he kindly acceded. Part of me is sorry it took me so long to get this up on my blog, the other part isn’t sorry at all, since it’s good sometimes to reemphasize a call to action that may have been otherwise quickly forgotten.

 

 

From Face Book, posted, August 19 at 11:37pm

My main Point last night at the forum on artistic freedom and artistic responsibility at the Seattle Rep was that, 50 years after the civil rights act removed the signs that told us that Black people were Colored and White people were not, no color at all,(What if the signs said "Black" and "Bleached"?) we still have a culture that normalizes White as neutral, or of no particular ethnicity. And that informs how we cast roles in the arts community and how we see ourselves as a people.

If a White actor is seen as ethnically neutral, they can play anybody. And non Whites are only seen as their ethnicity. A White guy can play everyman and I can only play Black man, and if a writer does not specify an ethnicity for a character, the default setting is to see that character as White, straight, able bodied, Christian. Should the actor with an eye patch only show up for pirate roles?

Two guys walk into a bar...

What color are they? Did one of them use the ramp to enter?

Our default cultural setting says "White unless specified as other."

After all I didn't say two Asian guys walked into a bar.

So many people in the Bagley Wright Theater last night are tired of being the other. And we are getting tired of explaining how it is still employed, or having to explain that it still exists.

This is how you get Jake Gyllenhal as the Prince of Persia and the Last Samurai starring Tom Cruise.

Or the film honoring Navajo code talkers "Windtalkers" starring Nick Cage.

Or the film about Indian ballplayers coming to America "Million Dollar Arm" featuring mostly Jon Hamm.

Or Cotton Club starring Richard Gere.

Or Mississippi Burning with very few Black characters.

Or Ghosts of Mississippi with barely a line spoken by a Black actor.

Or Matthew Broderick as the main character in "Glory"

Or Matthew Broderick as Simba, King of the plains of Africa, and Jeremy Irons as his uncle.

It's this rich history that in no small part brought us to The Mikado controversy, and brought all of us to the forum last night.

White people can be anything (even Japanese), our shared culture tells us that.

Edgar Rice Burroughs gave us a template:

Abandon a White baby in the jungles of Africa. Now come back 20 years later and where's that baby? Anywhere he pleases. He's Tarzan, King of the whole damn place.

And the IMDB page for this second animated feature Disney chose to set in Africa,(Disney's Tarzan) Has a sea of White headshots on the cast listing. (Seriously, go look.)

If you are producing this "2 Guys in a Bar" play are you open to guys of different ethnicities? Do either of them have to be a guy? Can two PEOPLE walk into a bar? Do they both have to walk?

Mostly I wanted to show the room these two photos, taken Saturday at the lower Queen Anne Bartell's drugstore, a couple hundred yards from where we had gathered. Aisle 12: Ethnic care.

And the products on Aisle 12 in the other shot. How many ethnicities are represented in the ethnic care aisle? Where should I look for soap, Ethnic cleansing? (Seriously, go look. Take your time, it will still be there. Aisle 12.)

White/Colored, Ethnic/ non ethnic, how far have we really come?

Thanks Kathy Hsieh for calling on me and facilitating a discussion. Thanks Annie Lareau for showing us how it can be done right. Thanks Andy Jensen for reminding us all that not every family looks the same and thanks Pamala Mijatov for making Annex one of the places where these issues don't flare up, and for reminding us what a local treasure Courtney Meaker is.

I'm getting older, and I'm getting tired of walking some of my White brothers and sisters through the baby steps of "Your people aren't the only people that are people."

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“Johnny Got his Gun”: Chapter 8 of THE STARTING GATE at St. Andrews

 

Next Monday I’ll be reading the eighth chapter of my book The Starting Gate at St. Andrews Bar And Grill in Green Lake. This chapter is titled “Johnny Got his Gun”, and tells the story of what happened when some hillbilly hold-up artists tried to rob the pharmacy across the street from the bar I worked in as a teenager.

Over the years, my views of the role of the gun in civilized society have evolved to a position practically diametric in opposition to the one inculcated in me as kid; but nothing in life is truly clear and simple, and if you think the myth of “The Good Guy with A Gun” is nothing but that, a harmful myth, then you might want come consider this story.

Here’s a quickie excerpt:

 

“See what happened was there was a guy at the door that was holding the girl and this other fellah with the screwdriver on the little girl’s throat.”

“Who does that?” my brother interjected at the table.

“Right?” said John. “One guy’s got this cannon of a .357. The other’s got nothing but a screw driver.” All three of us shook our heads and grimaced at the occasional idiocy of rednecks. Then John continued, “So I said ‘Frosty, are you carrying.’ Or I might’ve said, ‘Are you packin’?’”

“And he said, ‘Yeah.’”

 

And here are the details:

When: Monday, September 29 at 8pm

Where: The St. Andrews Bar, 7406 Aurora Ave. North, Seattle, WA 98103

Who: Me, and you, and probably a few others you know

How: Quick, dirty and FREE! PLUS the readings rarely last longer than 25 minutes.

Why: Why not?

 

 

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I recently mentioned this play in my last essay “The Misuses of Art” and then realized I had not posted it anywhere for those who might want to read it.

I had great fun watching my son open and close this piece at last year’s SOAPFest, as well as witness the exquisite work of his fellow cast members Tracy Hyland, Michael Patten and Heather Hawkins, so masterfully directed by Annie Lareau.  Such a great staging. I’ll never forget it.

 

Sexy New Acting Edition of THE SEQUENCE

Original Works Publishing has just released a sweet, sexy and sleek new edition trade acting edition of my play The Sequence, about the real-life race to decode the human genome. The new edition features a flat binding, super-gloss cover, larger print, ample margins for blocking, and extra pages for notes.

 

 

Original Works is a great outfit, with plenty of new titles from some of the hottest American playwrights including Elizabeth Heffron, Jeff Goode, Gwydion Suilebhan, Adam Szymkowicz and on and on. If The Sequence ain’t your cup of tea, you’ll still likely find something at OWP that is. Head on over and check out their deeply impressive catalog of hard copy and electronic titles.

 

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Finally Face to Face with the Other Racer

Finally Face to Face with the Other Racer

Last night I got to meet a man I’ve known for 10 years, albeit only in the very arcane and narrow way that a playwright can know one of his living subjects. In addition to being an actual living person, J. Craig Venter is a character in my play The Sequence, which dramatizes the real-life race to decode the human genome.  Venter drove the private side of the race, while Francis Collins, now head of the NIH, drove the public side as then head of the Human Genome Project. Some years ago, I had the honor of meeting Dr. Collins at an early public reading of the play at George Mason University. He came late, sat in the last available seat, in the front row about eight feet from the actor playing him. It was the most nerve-wracking night of my life. But when the reading was over and the bows were taken, Collins graciously, spontaneously joined the post-play discussion. And at the reception after, Collins happily chatted with my all my friends, as well as my mom, brother and niece who had driven down from Maryland to attend.  He later emailed me asking for a signed copy of the play to give his mother. Collins impressed me as a deeply affable and approachable person.  Dr. Venter, however, proved more elusive—that is, until last night when I attended his lecture at Town Hall Seattle, at which he introduced his new book, Life at the Speed of Light, which details his recent efforts to “boot up” an artificial organism from DNA code “written” by his team.

I learned a lot of things last night.  Here’s a sampling, in order of increasing “inside baseball” genome geekery:

 

“That dust in your house?  That’s you!”

This direct quote from Venter came as he described how life is a constant process of renewing worn out proteins. If the trash doesn't get removed, you wind up with some particularly nasty afflictions like Alzheimer’s and Mad Cow Disease

 

Life happens because of Brownian Motion.

Brownian Motion, the constant random motion of water molecules, theoretically confirmed by Albert Einstein, creates a turbulence within living cells with a force comparable to a Richter 9 earthquake.  This constant agitation drives the enzymatic processes that allow life to exist and do all the cool things that life does. Brownian Motion is temperature and phase state-dependent, which is a fancy way of saying life requires water in a liquid state.

 

Biological teleportation is coming.

Instead of transporting organisms, we will beam their digital genomic code to far flung places, like disease control centers around the globe during a pandemic, or even farther, to places, like Mars.  And conversely,when we do find life on Mars (for Venter it’s a “when” not an “if”) we will sequence it's DNA in situ there, then beam back the digital code to earth so that the Martian life-form can be “printed” into terrestrial existence, for… ya know… further investigation.

 

Artificial life gets watermarked.

“We think it’s very important, when making a synthetic species, to mark the species as synthetic.”  Gee, Craig. Ya think?! So Venter’s team inserted “watermarks” into the DNA of their artificial organism: widely recognizable English phrases consisting of quotes from James Joyce, Robert Oppenheimer and Richard Feynman.  Shortly after Venter’s team first published their results, they got a call from the Joyce estate demanding to know why permission hadn’t been sought.* My friend attending with me last night, who had also seen a reading of The Sequence at Seattle Public Theatre a few weeks ago, remarked how ironic it is that Venter should be so irked, when back in the 1990’s he was an outspoken advocate of gene patenting. As my buddy put it, “Intellectual property law can be a bitch.”

 

Artificial life needs kill-switches. 

If (more likely when) we introduce human-designed organisms into the wide world beyond the laboratory, which we might do for any number of legitimate purposes — health care, food production, energy production, environmental clean-up, reversal of global warming, etc.— we are going to want to the means to – ahem—un-introduce them.

 

Venter became an amateur science historian. 

In his lecture he frequently referenced the fairly obscure work of 18th and 19th Century scientists and thinkers, the ideas of whom he seems to have used for inspiration and guidance when sailing the uncharted seas of artificial life creation. As an amateur science historian myself, this charms me.

 

Venter and I share a fascination with a brilliant little book by the guy who gave us the “neither-dead-nor-alive” cat.

What is Life?, was published in 1944 by quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger. In it, nearly a decade before Watson and Crick’s discovery of DNA’s structure and mechanisms, Schrodinger posited that the information processing required for the propagation of life might in fact be the result of a simple digital code.  Some day I need to write an essay about “What is Life?” It’s an eminently accessible book for the lay reader, and in it Schrodinger goes on to posit theories much more outlandish than digital life.  Indeed the entire book seems to point at a potentially universe-reversing conclusion that life might provide a powerful negating counter-punch to the seemingly unbreakable 2nd Law of Thermo-dynamics, such that entropy may not, in fact, have the final word that we have all been taught it must.

 

Not even scientists get to fudge history.

Both Venter, and the comparable genius who introduced him, the University of Washington’s own Leroy Hood, worked hard at times last night to needlessly and speciously burnish Venter’s legacy. For instance, Hood asserted in his introduction that Venter made his company Celera’s work product freely available during the  genome race  as a reference for competitors, like Collins’ team at HGP, who were also attempting to  read every one of the 3 billion letters of the genome. In fact the opposite was true. The public side HGP data was used by Celera to double-check its enormously long, but doubtfully accurate sequences. (The “Shotgun" sequencing technique which Venter developed was fast, but sloppy.) Celera  held their sequences under wraps as private and proprietary information which they hoped to sell in a paid subscription model like Bloomberg Professional Services.  That plan never came to fruition.

 

Venter’s DNA was not God’s gift to humanity.

After getting fired from Celera, the company he founded, Venter publically released the bombshell news that the genome sample the company sequenced was not, as it should have been, from a randomly selected anonymous donor but rather from Venter himself. He had snuck his own DNA into the lab at the very beginning of the process. Last night Lee Hood maintained that Venter’s bizarre action has been widely praised in the scientific community and beyond, when in fact, it is almost universally viewed as an ethically questionable stunt of astounding hubris.

 

Venter was against junk DNA before he was for it.

Junk DNA is one of the great mysteries of biology. Over 98% of the human genome is noncoding DNA, meaning it doesn’t get translated into proteins. It just sits there, doing what? Maybe nothing. When asked a question about junk DNA last night, Venter said he had always argued against a commonly held notion that junk DNA has little value; but actually back at his first company TIGR, he was indeed dismissive of junk DNA. Here’s a snippet from early in The Sequence, before Craig decides to join the genome race:

KELLIE:  So tell me.  Why is it so important to sequence the human genome?

CRAIG:  It’s not.

KELLIE:  It’s not?

CRAIG:  No.  95 percent of it is junk.  I’m only interested in the five percent that does something.  The sequences that make up genes.  I don’t care if we ever sequence the other stuff.

Nitpicking aside, I had a delightful evening. If nothing else, seeing Venter up close and personal helped reassure me that I had gotten him right in The Sequence, capturing his brash confidence and brilliance, his impatient pursuit of achievement.

 

My play is at least a blip on Venter’s radar. 

Upon the lecture’s conclusion, I bought Life at the Speed of Light and stood in line to have Venter sign it. I had also brought along a copy of The Sequence which I personalized to him during the lecture. “For J. Craig Venter. Thank you for driving this amazing story, and this astounding achievement in human history. ” When it was my turn to get my book signed I said, “Dr. Venter, my name is Paul Mullin and I wrote this play about you.”  I handed him the script along with his book to sign.

“Oh, so you’re the guy,” he said.

“Yes. I am the guy.”

We smiled at each other and shook hands.

“Can I make changes to this?” he jokingly asked.

“Sure,” I countered “Mark it up and sent it back to me.” I wasn’t really joking.

Then he signed my book and we wished each other well.  Alas, I didn’t get a picture.  Maybe next time.

 

 

 

*The quote was from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.” I could’ve have told them that Joyce’s people are notoriously stingy with permissions.  The issue is now moot, however, since most of Joyce’s major works fell into public domain on January 1, 2012.  Thank goodness!

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