The snot-green sea. The sctrotumtightning sea.
What? Ulysses is a lot of fun. The clever turns of phrase. The stupid ones. The jokes. The really bad jokes. Ulysses is a barrel of fun.
There was another thread on here that posed the same question about Gravity’s Rainbow". (I belive they also made the emperor has no clothes allusion). That another one that is also dense, profound, beautiful, stupid, (sometimes, almost) unreadable…and also lots of fun and really fucking funny.
Yikes! Malaka didn’t take anything any way! I simply posted a link. I’ve never read JJ. <shrug> Mebbe I will…mebbe I won’t. But, it won’t be due to or because of this thread.
I thought the “Mad Magazine” comment and smiley made it clear.
Gotcha.
Hmmm.
Yes and no.
I agree with the majority of what you are saying, but I want to augment it a bit.
What I meant by the grandness of his gesture is this: Joyce employs a different type of narrative technique for each chapter, and each chapter, as you know, has its own color, art, symbol and assorted whatnots. Some chapters and instances do approximate the mind’s meanderings, but not all. The chapters that deal with the various organs replicate, in words, the functions of those organs. Obviously, there is more to organs than the brain and thinking.
I think of that as grand, because with all its’ themes and sub-themes, there’s a lot of information to tease out and pore over.
Yes, true. But of course the “systems” he built within Ulysses are metaphors for the references and allusions and associations through which our thoughts meander from point A to point Z, and beyond. In Ulysses these systems are more abstract (being more concrete, if you get my meaning), but he achieved a purer state of non-abstraction in Finnegans Wake.
It stands for Vico, of course; as a Roman numeral, it refers to the Law of Fives and the Five Ages of Man; it was obviously swiped from Pynchon…
Anyone who claims that Shakespeare is the happy hunting grounds of unbalanced minds has met any Joyce scholars.
(I mean that in a good way, of course)
My theory is that U is Modernism, FW is postmodernism.
There is a great paper on FW and the net, published by an undergrad at Trinity, IIRC. I will post it here shortly.
[sub]lissener: nice to see you fixed your sig[/sub]
Yes, do, but you still haven’t noticed the other FW reference in my above post.
Comodius? (It is meet and right to be here; let us construct a water closet.)
“This paper, a dissertation in philosophy from Trinity, uses the triple lenses of Douglas Hofstadter, Umberto Eco and Marshall McLuhan to focus on the Wake as a network. In its rambling and humorous approach to the text, it absorbs everything from Buddhism to quantum physics, and contains some wonderfully insightful passages – highly recommended.”
Actually, I have one quibble with it - it should have been htmled. Other than that, it’s the best Joyce paper since, well, me 
http://www.themodernword.com/joyce/joyce_paper_netwake1.html
Almost.
How commodius, eh?
I started reading it, but there are two grammatical errors in the very short preface (one of which he commits twice), so it’ll be difficult to stay with it.
hasn’t met any (or many)Joyce scholars, I mean.
commodius
Riiight. I can only correctly spell words over twenty three letters in length. (This would go a long way to explaining my dismal Scrabble scores, too.)
Honey swarns where mellisponds
Here comes everybody.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by lissener *
**
Ooh, let me try to find them! Maybe I can redeem my inability to spell by being able to proof!
Dr.Pinky, have you still not noticed the reference?
How Commodius, Eh?
How Could (an alleged Joyce scholar) miss a clue so Egregious?
(and the answer is: Incorrect comma usage!)
No. Although I might have comma’ed the thing differently, comma usage is so uncodified that I wouldn’t count it real offense.
The mistake he makes once is an unnecessary hyphen: “I hope that most people will choose something in-between.”
The mistake he makes twice is to write “i.e.” when he means “e.g.”
Though these mistakes are unforgivable–I would have returned the ms. without marking them and not accepted it again till he’d found them and fixed them–to be fair he’s made no real mistakes in the several subsequent pages, which is as far as I’ve read.
Yesterday I decided to get a head start on my new years resolutions for the next year. One of them was to start reading all those book you’re supposed to have read, so I went to the bookstore today and picked up a pile of paperback classics.
One of them is Dubliners. Certainly not one of his heavier books but I thought I’d start light.
Dubliners is about the right one to start with.
Joyce should really be read chronoligically: his themes and techniques develop along a pretty discernible arc. Dubliners should ideally lead you to Portrait, which really must come before Ulysses. And you can’t expect to pull too many plums out of Finnegans Wake if you stick in an inexperienced thumb.
Ha! chronoligically. I like that!
Well, the professional literati have the Apology for J.J. pretty well in hand by this point. But the OP did ask whether anyone reads Joyce for pleasure; so long as you earn your bread in academia, you can’t genuinely be said to be reading anything for pleasure; you never know when you’ll come across some trope in the romance novel you pick up at WalMart that ties in neatly with your particular area of interest and might be just the thing for a quick and publishable little screed that could also attract the right sort of interest at the next SAMLA conference).
Despite being a former English lit academic manqué, I’ve never read Joyce other than for pleasure (actually, I think we did read Dubliners in one of my undergraduate classes, but that’s a minor exception). I read Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses in high school, Ulysses as part of an after-school reading group organized by one of my teachers, led by a University of Arkansas lit prof, but strictly on a voluntary, extracurricular basis. I read it again before I finished high school, once in college, and have re-read most of it twice over since then. I enjoy it more every time. I’m not going to say I think it’s everyone’s cup of tea, but it suits me. I find Ulysses making up a surprising amount of my mental furniture. Phrases (“When I makes tea I makes tea and when I makes water I makes water,” “Who’s he when he’s at home? . . . O rocks, tell us in plain words,” “Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowl,” etc.) from it pop into my head unbidden every day.
That being said, I have never been able to convince myself that Finnegans Wake is anywhere near as much fun. I even have something approaching the affinity for languages and broad exposure to them that FW requires (Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, German, and Old English studied formally, and Italian and several older Germanic dialects and languages picked up along the way). I have (IMHO) an outstanding ear for the sound of language and can appreciate puns that span three or more languages and hundreds of years but that are only apparent if you focus on how the words sound. I understand Joyce’s sensibility fairly deeply from prolonged exposure to it in Ulysses and the shorter works. I have (largely from the same source) a pretty fair knowledge of the social and political history of Ireland, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, am conversant with the history of Western civilization, philosophy, and religion. In short, I am the very model of a modern reader of James Joyce. Still can’t make myself slog through FW.
I don’t think it’s for slogging through. That would be like trying to read the Internet, front to back. FW is a circle, and, as Charles Fort said, one measures a circle beginning anywhere.
I’m of the random access school of FW enjoyment. Sure, get a guide, get a feel for the lay of the land, but ye gods and wee fishes, reading it straight through seems onerous to me.
“Professional literati” … nobody’s ever call me that before. (I like it!) Would you be referring to the $900 I made in poetry over the last twenty years, or the cool $250/year I make as theater critic for my beloved hometown paper?
I’m just a guy that enjoys codes.