"Alex [Itin] has been painting on books for years, exploring a kind of palimpsest style — old, yellowed texts or roadmaps like the walls of a decaying city, against which sinewy, calligraphic figures move." You're looking here at his surreal, stream-of-conscious animation of James Joyce's Ulysses... the animation cast by the flickering of stray, slightly monstrous images across crackling yellowed page as they are flipped. The narration is provided by Mr. Joyce himself.
From a personal perspective, I find this video fascinating. For one thing, I'm an American living in Dublin, and I actually live right next door to James Joyce's childhood home. According to the plaque from the Irish Historical Society hanging on the front stoop, it's even where he wrote his first words. Ulysses, as a work of literature, is particularly near (if not dear) to my heart, as every Bloom's Day I end up spending the vast majority of the day directing stray Ulysseans off my lawn.
But here's another thing: Joyce was a Dubliner. Yet the type of accent in which he spoke has completely died out, not just in Dublin, but in Ireland as a whole. He sonorously sing-songs and trills his r's: Joyce sounds far more Scotch than what we would now equate with Irish. I don't know why that is, necessarily: perhaps the accent relates the occupation of the British, or perhaps the Irish accent has become homogenized by constant exposure to American media. But it's like listening to a man speak in a dead tongue — that he was born just down the street from me is mysterious and wonderful.
incredible ulysses animation [if:book]
