Reading Ulysses

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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.)

i don't think that's a fair meaning of "engage with" and it's a stupid generalization. i've thought about picking up Ulysses a bunch of times during the last 2 months, i've never thought that about Friends in my life. i haven't thought about rereading Ulysses as a challenge but because it's a comfort and a pleasure in a way that Ronay is suggesting only Friends can "truly" be

(a stupid generalization by Ronay, sorry Sund4r :D )

glancing at its pages is likely to produce feelings similar to being stabbed through the eye with a knitting needle dipped in industrial glue.

Very strange.

For one thing, what is industrial glue? Has BR seen it? Why would it make a knitting needle worse?

For another, being stabbed in the eye with a knitting needle would (supposing you lost your sight) be so bad that comparing anything to it is tasteless.

For another, Ulysses has nothing do with any such feelings. I am going to be participating in a 2-hour close reading of it later today, as I do frequently. It will be quite nice to read as it always is. It can raise ambiguities, but it's mostly not very difficult.

The quotation gives a general impression that BR knows nothing - either about reading or about industrial glue.

I should probably read his actual article to check, though.

I feel that way about Pierrot Lunaire but I'd still say it's more difficult to engage with than "Wonderwall" for a new listener (in the sense that I described, not in the sense that it would make someone collapse on the couch and crave "All Star" by Smash Mouth). That said, the excerpt is totally idiotic otherwise so yeah. I was just thinking about the obstacles and ways into Ulysses more than about a stupid sports column, I guess.xp

I was actually just thinking that as my concentration is coming back I might have another go at Ulysses this year. I am not up on Joyce at all really, only read DUBLINERS for the first time pretty recently. I dip into Finnegans wake pretty often tho as it’s very easy to engage with in quite a superficial way, its pleasures are obvious and immediate. Actually reading it all the way through and making meaning from it would be trickier for me.

I always loved the line from Harold Nicolson’s diary about when he met JJ: “he has the loveliest voice I know — liquid and soft with undercurrents of gurgle” this quote has always been in my mind when I’ve read any Joyce

xp

ulysses is demanding but it is beautiful and humane and anyone who thinks it is an example of a "punishing" kind of modernism doesn't know what they are talking about

there is art that is meant to shock or provoke discomfort. ulysses isn't an example of that.

being stabbed in the eye with a knitting needle
Somewhere in this video which I can't watch I believe there is an impression of this sensation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCenwG3iUVU