Reading Ulysses

i never noticed anything being wrong with him, except his being an ad salesman

also on a whim, on a few train rides this weekend i re-read the telemachiad. the stuff with mr deasy is wrenching. i love how stephen is already not impressed with his own pseudo-profundity but can't bear to view himself on an equal level with the people around him. also what other author can just make up words and make it seem like the most natural thing? is there a better novel?

Try 2666 sometime, that's better.

oof no

Coincidentally two weeks ago I was telling a friend (who has tried to read this five times now, and has not finished) to start with the last chapter (which is what the 'reading difficult novels' link above tells you to do). I did the 'sequential, only got 10% thing' about 5+ years ago, but looking back the important thing was getting to Molly.

Although I nearly also said that Thomas Bernhard has taken the one para thing on and improved on it and you should read Old Masters instead but actually hearing about her struggles and work (she is reading bits of the Odyssey plus a guide too) I found myself quite interested in re-reading Ulysses. Might do it over the World Cup acually, starting with the last chapter.

Of course Old Masters' content is a whole different thing to Molly. Nastier, misanthropic, more my thing.

Treeship, I am sure you are correct - Mr Bloom is good, unusually for a complex fictional character. Collins was basically wrong. Your thought that reviewers avoided stating the goodness because they were scared of the kinks is a nice one. Though I feel that the truth was, they just couldn't yet see the goodness. And even today, in a way, there is a 'banality of goodness' that can make one swerve away from it.

never had any interest in reading this

kudos

keep us updated

Still don't care

He had no use for ulysses, but posted here anyway.

Hey I just checked--still don't care about this

I read it once front-to-back with very minimal support about 15 years ago and tackled it again last year in conjunction with a (somewhat corny and condescending) guide and honestly I still got a lot more out of the second experience. The guide was useful for keeping track of the mythical and theological elements but even without it I appreciated the human (and comic) dimension so much more the second time round. It's the difference between reading it as an adult and reading it as a gauche and overconfident student I suppose. It's still possible to get a lot out of Ulysses even if you're only following two-thirds of it.

I still dislike the underworld section though.

I like that one but dislike Oxen of the Sun

it's funny that someone isolated the history of english prose he was using for oxen

man ilb is ~controversial~ today

waterface, why don't you care about this

It just seems not my thing. I respect what he did--he tore the novel wide open with this. But it's not my thing. Too wordy. Too complicated?

Matt DC otm

I'm definitely one of those proponents of "read it the first time unaided and drunk and let it flow", but obviously people read in different ways. I refuse to read introductions before I've finished a novel, for instance - it's important for me to have my own thoughts before comparing notes with others.

I like Treeship's comments.

Heh, I read it unaided and didn't even realize out that it was about adultery.

*realize out

Read it twenty-two years ago w/the help of Cliff Notes. Have reread chunks and chapters since. My favorite is still Hades.

Just finished reading this for the first time a few weeks ago. On-and-off project over the past several months. I used The Bloomsday Book as a guide and I'm thankful I did. Kept me well grounded.

I think the hallucinatory brothel visit (Circe?) was my favorite chapter. Was surprised at how much I enjoyed Oxen of the Sun, considering its reputation. My opinions would probably be significantly different if I attacked this unaided though.

Second time through is way easier. You need to know what's happening in advance to really enjoy all of the other stuff, which idk, I could see how someone could think that's a flaw in the writing or just something they don't want to deal with.

Still don't care about this book

16 iBooks pages in and it's weirdly enticing. I'm assuming that people who say this is not that difficult mean it in the same way that Webern is "not that difficult"?

its difficulties don't necessarily stop your progress, i would say. it's not overly disorienting. there's a lot of relatively straightforward prose inbetween the firework sections. at the beginning what might be as difficult as anything is recognizing the very specific period Dublin words/references

The early narrative chapters are pretty seductive, it's the abrupt shifts into e.g. pseudo-Middle-English which aid the reader in much the same way as shifting from 4th gear into reverse aids highway driving.

Ha, well, it already doesn't really seem like an easy ride.

It just manages to be, as you say, seductive despite this.

Read it in high school as part of a report on Joyce for my English class, which first reading was a tough slog. Read it again many years later out loud as part of a book group and needless to say got a lot more out of it.

"Let my country die for me."

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Back in the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown there was a tendency to talk, hopefully, about the many opportunities for self-improvement confinement would provide. One suggestion was that people would start reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, the most brilliant, and brilliantly difficult, novel of the 20th century.

So how did that work out? Anyone get past “fluttering his winglike hands, leaping nimbly, Mercury’s hat quivering in the fresh wind that bore back to them his brief birdsweet cries” before collapsing into the sofa cushions, overcome by the urge to read Tintin in America?

The big thing about Ulysses – other than being more difficult to engage with than, say, Friends – is that it’s about everything. Joyce presents the entire human condition in a stream of consciousness, the streets of Dublin as a microcosm of the universe.

Which is all very well, but after six weeks of brain freeze even glancing at its pages is likely to produce feelings similar to being stabbed through the eye with a knitting needle dipped in industrial glue.

It's from this bit of the brain damage

https://amp.theguardian.com/football/2020/may/25/world-cup-questions-why-did-england-not-beat-argentina-1998

different people's brains work very differently, but never let that stop us writing a quick thinkpiece

Um, who wrote that?

i was gonna say "do we have a thread for people boasting about the limits of their interests?" but lol do we have *one thread* what was i thinking?

My post was xpost, in case you are wondering

I read (or actually mostly listened to) Ulysses during lockdown, and loved it.

wrote a few thoughts about it here - https://centuriesofsound.com/2020/04/13/james-joyce-ulysses/

I'm reading a good ton of stuff over the last couple of months. Imagine just putting on old football matches where your side lost on penalties and boasting about it.

The irony is that Ronay overwrites like mad and he could do with reading Ulysses.

i find it hard listening to other people read for some reason but thanks for that link to the RTE broadcast, accents definitely add important layers to Joyce

I like Barney on the football weekly podcast, but that article is a classic example of "here are 500 words as requested"

i don't even hate Ronay but the tone of those opening paragraphs, the shit-eating faux norminess, the unchallengeable assumption that everybody would find Friends "easier to engage with" than Ulysses

it's just lazy bullshit wordcount stuff but the fact that there's no need really grinds my gears

Has he weighed in on seeing the Picassos at the modern art museum yet?

the unchallengeable assumption that everybody would find Friends "easier to engage with" than Ulysses

my last stab at the cantos was prompted by an episode of x files so bad it made me dissociate. i still didn’t get past about the fifth or sixth but it felt better on some level or other

Was that when we had a book club thread for them?

I mean, isn't that true about Friends vs Ulysses, at least for people who have reference points for 90s American culture? It's easy to dislike Friends (which is still engagement) but surely it asks less of you in terms of being able to watch and understand?

(Full disclosure: I'm pretty sure the reason I have this thread bookmarked is bc I found Ulysses hard to engage with last time I tried.)