James Joyce - classic or dud

I was too young for 'Ulysses' (17) so reserve comment. I think it needs to be read fast, is all.

"read an article in the sunday times abt a soon-to-be-published biog of joyce's daughter"

Yootha?

Also I picked it up and started reading it again when I was staying with Starry & Lixi last year, so I would say that it is entirely possible to enjoy reading Joyce. Er, my attempts at Ulysses weren't enjoyable though.

After that, I had no inclination to waste my life with Ulysses.

STATELY, PLUMP BUCK MULLIGAN CAME FROM THE STAIRHEAD, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

--INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

--Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

Solemnly he came forward and mounted the round gunrest. He faced about
and blessed gravely thrice the tower, the surrounding land and the
awaking mountains. Then, catching sight of Stephen Dedalus, he bent
towards him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat and shaking his head. Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms on the top of the staircase and looked coldly at the shaking gurgling face that blessed him, equine in its length, and at the light untonsured hair, grained and hued like pale oak.

Buck Mulligan peeped an instant under the mirror and then covered
the bowl smartly.

--Back to barracks! he said sternly.

He added in a preacher's tone:

--For this, O dearly beloved, is the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns. Slow music, please. Shut your eyes, gents. One moment. A little trouble about those white corpuscles. Silence, all.

First, I'm thinking he's indoors, a natural assumption when he's carrying shaving equipment. Not till I get to the gunrest bit do I realise he's outdoors, though "mild morning air" confused me. He calls for Kinch, but Dedalus comes up. And it's not clear at fiorst where Dedalus is: I thought he was down on the ground because Mulligan is standing on the gunrest blessing the countryside. The whole is written in, for me, a nerdily inflated prose, with redundant adverbs and elgant variations like "aloft", and there's a religiose feel to it that reminds me of the one part of "Portrait" I didn't like: the sermon.

Do you?

Bunged: There is an ingenious theory that ch 1 is deliberately badly written.

Zappi, your not thick for not getting FWake, so few people do.

Pete s, you can hear some of joyce reading some of FWake at www.ubu.com (the best site on the web?) When he reads it i can (just about) understand some of the gist.

http://www.ubu.com/sound/joyce.html

"There's few other books which understand and empathise with human emotion better, and with warmth and sympathy. It places these things in context, that's it's whole trick. It says awareness, of things larger than yourself and the solipsistic universe in your head, will make you laugh, will make you cry. And that's the point of being alive, isn't it?
It's one of the funniest books ever written."

I got a copy of that the other month. I liked it.

Joseph Campbell wrote a 'guide' to Finnegan's Wake called 'Skeleton Key'; I don't know if it's still in print.

Yea, pretty much. :^0

(I have a recording of john cage reading it, an extra track on 'roaratorio')

JAMES JOYCE - THE COMPLETE RECORDINGS/EUGENE JOLAS - JAMES JOYCE
[sub rosa] CD + 116 page book £19.99
On the CD, Joyce reads from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (rec. 1924 & 1929); Jolas's book is a first publication

(I am almost reminded of... myself.)

The DV knows full well that some people have got a lot out of Joyce; perhaps he is... struggling to convince himself that he wouldn't? Or is he just toying with us all?

Actually I hope that I don't manage to persuade the DV to stop protesting too much about Joyce; it is endearing.

But TS: "lame-o textual analysis" (DV, other thread) vs "careful, attentive, appreciative reading"; and who gets to draw the line between them?

Possible interpretation of my last sentence really means is: 'just reading straightforwardly for pleasure' is great, but sometimes the claim to be doing that can be a deflection from a more reflective reading that would actually be more pleasurable.

i *think* i've read "portrait...", but i'm not sure, i may be confused...

*

As to the claim that Joyce's daughter helped him write, this seems to amount to no more than the testimony of a visitor to Joyce's house, who noticed that the daughter often went to the writing room with Joyce and danced there as Joyce wrote. I think Joyce was just looking after her; she had problems.

I've never heard of her. I went to Amazon to read an extract; not possible. So, my curiosity is aroused. Anyone read her? Is she worth reading?

--INTROIBO AD ALTARE DEI.

Okay. You're not wrong about the "religious" bit: What's going on here is that Buck Mulligan (Stephen's roommate) is pretending to celebrate a Black Mass to piss off/amuse Stephen, who has turned his back on Catholicism but still can't quite shake the habits of his Jesuit education. It's early morning, Mulligan has got his shaving equipment out, and he's making like it's the chalice for a Mass. Instead of a priest's robes, he's got his dressing gown on, and it's "ungirdled," i.e. he's naked and it's flying out behind him in the wind. (Also note how the first sentence goes from "stately" to "crossed": church and state!) He's standing at the top of a set of stairs, and calling down to Stephen, who's within the tower where they live. "Kinch," or "Kinch the Knifeblade," is Mulligan's personal nickname for Stephen, as we'll find out shortly--he's the sort of person who makes up nicknames for everybody, tells the same jokes again and again, etc.

"Introibo ad altare dei" is from the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar. As Hugh Kenner points out:

"Mulligan... is tastelessly pretending to be a Black Mass celebrant, who is going through the motions of an Irish priest, who is reciting from the Ordo, which quotes from St. Jerome's Latin version of Hebrew words ascribed to a Psalmist in exile... So we might see the first words spoken in Ulysses inside six sets of quotation marks - ' " ' " ' "Introibo ad altare Dei," ' " ' " ' - a multiple integument of contexts to contain this Hebrew cry for help amid persecution. (It is spoken by the least persecuted man in the book.)"

Irvine Welsh does it as well. And the French.

I don't really see the difficulty with 'Telemachus'. This really is a storm in a shaving bowl.

i like that faux but i can't help but read it (also) as an external realization of the "impalpable and vindictive" force felt and foreshadowed previously, as well as the last layer of dust over the open coffin that is ireland. the image is too transcendent, majestically formidable, all-embracing to represent merely the fragmentation of one poor sap's soul.

i agree w/ you mir, i just took it far ther

hope you're happy

Fully braced for the first wave of Ulysses Centenary Appreciations this week, before an altogether more deadly wave arrives in June. If the eggheads pull together and really set about killing the book, we can get to #ZeroJoyce before winter.

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) January 29, 2022

oh good, the hundredth anniversary of opinions

friendship ended with DUBLINERS now FART LETTER is my new friend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLvWdrLAkc0

lol mark s

Lol at article linked in OP.

And maybe the OP as well.

Classic.

I've never read anything by Joyce, and I've never really got the impression that he is the kind of writer people actually enjoy reading. Am I wrong?

early ilx in a nutshell, right here

Joyce is someone who has done a terrific job and is being recognized more and more.

I prefer his pal Beckett.

If your Twitter handle is something like “Elvis Buñuelo” I know I can safely just skip past whatever you’re tweeting and save myself the trouble of being annoyed as fuck.

You sound annoyed already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPd_awQuH4o

Good post

the more i read about James joyce, the more i respect him for writing finnegans wake even though almost everybody he spoke to (with the exception at first of eugene jolas) told him he should give it a rest and stop wasting his talents

— andrew key (@rolandbarfs) February 22, 2022

Here comes almost everybody.

On my fourth read through of Ulysses (the first since 1995 though), should be wrapping up just before Bloomsday this year, which I am planning on spending in Dublin for the first time ever.

Thanks for the Heads U.P.!

The full 1967 film version is available on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7xAM_eXuuk

This is the most insane printing of Dubliners I've ever seen pic.twitter.com/Ce4TqcmVB8

— frank o'hara's MoMA gig (@angrydichter21) June 12, 2022

Gene Hackman looks vicious on that sleeve.

it blankets without prejudice -- the living who walk the streets are equal to the dead who lie in the cemetary

I've always read it as a conscious echo of Matthew 5:44-45: "But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."

Instead of all the novel's events happening on the same day, they all occur simulaneously outside of time. Every day is Proustday.

— Steve Mitchelmore (@Twitchelmore) June 16, 2022

This is a coastal town

Happy Bloompsday

Re: those Pulp the Classics covers - I feel like they'd be fun enough if they were just photoshop lols on the internet, but actually getting together the money to print and sell them? Fuck that, jesus.

important material for ilxors to argue abt, unpaywalled for #bloomsday2022: william empson in the lrb on ulysses (part two here)

I bought a new toilet handle today, which seems apropos.

https://theviewfromsarisworld.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/james-joyce.jpg

I like the part where he's frying the sheep's kidney, and it smells faintly of urine when he pokes it with a fork

happens to me when I have sex iirc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1WwK92kT3c

Re: those Pulp the Classics covers - I feel like they'd be fun enough if they were just photoshop lols on the internet, but actually getting together the money to print and sell them? Fuck that, jesus.

that empson piece is good

https://x.com/johnstonglenn/status/1792150960690581507

twitter links don't embed anymore?

anyway

https://i.ibb.co/tXrZP7s/Screenshot-20240520-155449.png