Replica of James Joyce's desk

Today’s Photo Friday theme is Blur, which provides an apt excuse for posting this fuzzy shot of a replica of James Joyce’s lapdesk, which is among the memorabilia and manuscripts on display at the National Library of Ireland’s current exhibit on James Joyce and Ulysses. After getting very little sleep the night before–and even less sleep during–my red-eye flight from Boston, yesterday I found Dublin itself to be a blur, a perpetually unwinding scroll of strange sights, sounds and sensations.

Touring the Joyce exhibit with that girl helped to ground me a bit: looking at Joyce’s heavily edited pen-, pencil-, and crayon-scribbled manuscript pages along with the literal scraps he used to record notes during his composition of Ulysses reminded me that art is a pastiche of ephemera: a sight here, a sound there. Now that I’ve gotten a full night’s sleep after my first day’s blur, I’m hoping today these sensations will start making sense, the jots and tittles of imagery and scribbled impression pulling together to make a semi-coherent whole called Here.