read Ulysses

-I’m on page 40 – never made it this far before.

I’ve started it 3-4 times and want to read it right through for once

i need to read the odyssey. im sure there are some free ebooks floating around so ill get onw of those.

is it english? i can’t tell my eyes are bleeding

It was a very, very cute chapter. Sexy even! I guess that’s the chapter the censor committees have trouble with. It was the most readable passage in the book so far. If Joyce had been his normal obtuse self, he might have kept out of court.

A few general observations about Ulysses, now that I’m 1/2 way through pagewise:

• My feelings are decidedly mixed. At one point, I thought the novel potentially had great merits, but merits that would best appeal to writers rather than readers. Joyce is playing around with a number of interesting writing techniques, and even if the text itself is not compelling, the style might be. But so far, I’ve seen only one truly original technique that has potential applications—that of the bloom inner monologue (the steven monologue is not practical at all!). The other techniques are theoretically interesting, and might have been interesting to see in action in smaller (much smaller) doses.

• In Episode 13, Bloom casually mentions a few events that happened “earlier this morning”. Earlier this morning was like a year ago for me!!!!

• Ulysses isn’t a timeless classic. With each passing day, the cultural literacy required to understand this book fades a little more into the horizon. It’s kind of sad to see that so much effort, a work that would light up the brain of someone with all the prerequisite knowledge (ie, James Joyce), is bound to fade into incomprehensibility much faster than more conventional fare.

Long-winded. In theory, at least, there are some interesting things going on. There’s the retelling of events through (mostly fantastical) artifacts and mundane documents, through which are recorded exhaustive lists of unimportant details and thoroughly obscuring (but colorful) technical language. And there’s the narrator with a point of view and language quite different from what has preceded. I read some of it to my girlfriend and she thought it sounded just like hanging out at a bar, and I guess to some degree I must agree—the sense that everyone is talking and a conversation manages to plow ahead, even if no one person can follow everything. The theory is better than the practice in this case. I stopped looking up things I didn’t understand, because it seemed so pointless for this episode.

Well….compared to Episode 9 at least, it was a piece of cake. I didn’t have to pick up as much “Irish Pop Music Of The 1900s” as I thought I might need to when I started; finding the lyrics to a handful of songs seems to have sufficed.

The narration is turning a little bit wacky. So it may turn out that the silly epitaphs/punning in Episode 9 have a long-run purpose after all…? Things are becoming disjointed and blended at the same time.

Reading Ulysses still feels like doing crossword puzzles. I’m mentally stimulated, but emotion is lacking. Aesthetically, he’s going for something that isn’t quite persuasive. I’m particularly bugged by the “overture” at the beginning; it serves absolutely no purpose, other than filling up a couple of pages and confounding the reader. Even having read the whole episode and understanding what it’s supposed to mean doesn’t make it any more than a cacophony of syllables. It’s “musical” only in the sense that, oh John Cage is musical. I’m sure that appeals to some, but definitely it doesn’t to me! (Actually, the better analogy is this nonsensical Strong Bad e-mail, which is composed of one single word from each of the previous 124 e-mails.)

Still, there is something nice about bronzelid, minagold, bloom crying into bluehued flowers. When it works, it really works.

This seems like it could be quite a challenge. I read some basic chapter synopsizes which I think will help me follow along a little better.

When I was 20 and taking a college English Lit class, the Professor called me into his office to pick my brain. I mentioned that I just finished James Joyce’s “Portrait of an Artist…” and my next novel was Ulysses. At the time I was more of a book nerd then now. My Professor laughed, asked my age, and told me that a novel like Ulysses is something a well read person does not touch until they are at least 30 years old. Well I’ll be 30 at the end of this year. Then I’ll pick up the novel.

Episode 10 was a much welcomed respite, being (relatively) conventional in style and content. The care with which Joyce has drawn Dublin is proved here. Instead of being stuck intimately in Steven or Bloom’s head, I feel whisked to a much wider view of the proceedings, and now have a better feel of the society in which the action takes place. It reminded me of that Simpson’s episode “22 Short Films about Springfield”. That was a good episode!

Started a few pages of #11. It looks….interesting…?