Joyce, de Quincey

Since my last post, I've read an issue each of OK Magazine, The New Scientist, The Globe, the Examiner, the National Enquirer, and Eclectic Reading.

I've also read a biography of Thomas de Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, which made for very sad reading, and am now reading a biography of Norah Joyce, wife of James Joyce, by Brenda Maddox. It's excellent of course. But both of these books are endless tallies of debt and despair. The Joyce story, as you might expect, is leavened with sex. Golly. James Joyce fell in love because Norah gave him a hand job on their first date: not exactly what mothers taught their daughters when I was growing up. Now, it is clear that Norah gave James much of his material -- she wrote him letters full of sexual content, she talked about sex, she enjoyed sex, she had sex with him, and her surviving letters show a great debt he owed her for her stream-of-consciousness style. I had no idea, despite reading a biography of James Joyce. Puts much of Joyce in a new light, it seems to me.