Comments on: Living in my imagination

By: Donn

Donn — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 20:28:37 +0000

Something that I think the Narnia books did very well was to make the fantasy world feel just adjacent to our own, waiting for you if only you knew where (or when) to look.

And Ulysses, yes! Portrait of the City as an Author’s Canvas. It’s the opposite of most books that explicitly leave certain details to the reader’s imagination, but at the same time (in a funny way) it requires even more imagination to picture than any of them. Not just because even though you may know what, say, O’Connell bridge looks like but the fact that you’re sitting at home means you have to conjure it all up from nothing, but also because it’s set in the past, in a city that never quite corresponded to what existed to its readers.

By: Kristin Laughtin

Kristin Laughtin — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 21:48:14 +0000

ISLAND OF THE BLUE DOLPHINS was my favorite book as a kid, and I always dearly wished to see a replica of Karana’s hut, with its fence made of whale ribs and meat hung up to dry, and at least a map of the island if some of the other locations couldn’t be created (the spring, cave, etc.).

By: Josin

Josin — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 16:07:44 +0000

Yes, it’s in Scotland. Hogwarts was supposed based on Fettes College, a private school in Edinburgh, and a gorgeous bit of architecture if you’ve never seen it.

By: Patrick DiOrio

Patrick DiOrio — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:48:12 +0000

I got hold of four of Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan books when I was a youngster, maybe twelve or so. They belonged to a friend’s grandfather. The books had long been out of print and this was before they were reissued in paperback in the sixties. Until then I was only familiar with the movies and comics and newspaper comic strip. I had no idea the original stories were actually books. I read the first three in the series: Tarzan of the Apes, The Return of Tarzan, The Beasts of Tarzan and then one out of sequence, Tarzan Untamed. More than anything I fantasized some day going to Africa and living as the Apeman beneath the green jungle canopy, swinging from limb to limb and oh the adventures I would have! That was then, of course. But what those books did for me other than sparking my fantasies: it made me want to write my own. And for that, I will forever cherish those books.

By: Rachel

Rachel — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:17:31 +0000

This comment made me more excited than it probably should have. I LOVE Ulysses, and for a project in college, I took photographs of dozens of places mentioned in Bloom’s journey and corresponded them with passages/interpretations from the book.

This is the neatest thing, thanks!

By: Steve Masover

Steve Masover — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:10:21 +0000

Speaking of Scotland … obsessive academics (I am not one of them, not an academic anyway) imagine their way into fiction physically too. Here’s a paper from the journal Hypermedia Joyce Studies that describes physical models of the Dublin of Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, which came to my attention via a colleague of one of the paper’s U. Edinburgh co-authors:

http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v7/main/essays.php?essay=gunn

In the paper there are videos that give views on how three characters move through the ‘Wandering Rocks’ chapter of that novel in an ‘aquarium model'; and how characters travel across the city modeled on an animated map. Pretty cool, esp. for 2005.

And, yes, I did visit the Martello tower in Sandycove myself when I was in Dublin years ago.