Imagine this:
It is the late sixties and your in New York. The world around you is a changing, the chimes of freedom are a ringing. Peace, Love and lots of mind altering chemicals are in the air. You head over to Broadway to catch a show. You choose the wildly popular musical Fantasticks.
As the official website for the production states “Before the mud of Woodstock there were the love songs of the Fantasticks”. You find your seat start reading the program and then you see this!
“Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed”
What? The opening lines to Jame Joyce’s Ulysses! Yep, that’s right.
Gardner Botsford, an editor at the New Yorker, who also wrote the capsule reviews that appeared in various theater programs got bored with the monotony of it all and to mix things up a bit he began serializing the first chapter of Joyce’s masterpiece.
Almost three years later, with additional appearances in programs for other plays like Hello Dolly and Fiddler on the Roof, the serialization was complete!
In a 1970 interview in Time Botsford talked about his private experiment and how the public responded by saying “Many are delighted they can identify the excerpts, but others think we are trying to communicate with the Russian herring fleet in code.”
Talk about a freedom that is long gone. Can you imagine something like this happening today? I am not sure that level of creative freedom still exists.
But if did….
Thanks to the Ask The Librarian section of Emdashes the blog of the New Yorker magazine