Yes, Ulysses: Yes yr favourite chapter I said yes

I think this is rilly hard, akshully. I'm very fond of "Nausicäa", but "Cyclops" hits heavy with the lulz and "Oxen of the Sun" is the 20 minute guitar solo. If I had to point at a weak link I might think "Lestrygonians" is a little undistinguished but that's crazy talk really. The last page of "Ithaca" is straight dreamy, tho.

either Nestor or Sirens for me... but Aeolus and Ithaca too. Cyclops is the one i dislike for the most part, that hyperbolic/ surreal style just doesn't sit well with me. i think i read Oxen of the Sun straight through and caught less that 1/10th of what was going on but i'm ok with that.

i can't believe it's been 10 years since I last read this...and some of these are getting a bit fuzzy now. I'm inclined to say Proteus

I adore "Hades" – a great mix of the old and new Joyce. Martin Cunningham quietly coming to Bloom's rescue always touched me.

anyone who votes for "Ithaca" or "Oxen of the Sun" should have Finnegans Wake flung at their heads.

why the hate for ithaca, al? i <3 it

my favorite bit:

What rendered problematic for Bloom the realisation of these mutually selfexcluding propositions?

The irreparability of the past: once at a performance of Albert Hengler’s circus in the Rotunda, Rutland square, Dublin, an intuitive particoloured clown in quest of paternity had penetrated from the ring to a place in the auditorium where Bloom, solitary, was seated and had publicly declared to an exhilarated audience that he (Bloom) was his (the clown’s) papa. The imprevidibility of the future: once in the summer of 1898 he (Bloom) had marked a florin (2/-) with three notches on the milled edge and tendered it in payment of an account due to and received by J. and T. Davy, family grocers, 1 Charlemont Mall, Grand Canal, for circulation on the waters of civic finance, for possible, circuitous or direct, return.

Was the clown Bloom’s son?

No.

Had Bloom’s coin returned?

Never.

love/hate relationship with Nausicaa. it's a good stand-in for my relationship with this book, actually.

this is harder than i thought it would be! i may vote telemachus, actually. cyclops is terrific, too.

how so hs

It's the love that hates the love that loves to hate the love of lovely love.

oh i just love it because it's pretty, even though Joyce is clearly uncomfortable with pretty and feels the need to mock + assert his superiority over it. gender stuff, whatevs.

i really love Cyclops and Wandering Rocks. i think it would be inaccurate to say i love Ulysses, though, and I'm almost certainly never going to read it again, so i should stop being a bitch in this thread.

xpost ha exactly, Noodle Vague!

need to rescreen this

ya gender stuff i feel u.

I think JJ's relation to romance/romantic fiction is more complicated than straight mockery. After all, in lots of ways the whole book is a paean to sentimental pop culture: the guys singing in the bar in "Sirens" are kind of ennobled by the music, Bloom's internal monologue is as poetic as Stephen's in his own way. I think "Nausicäa" is about dreaming and dreaming of escape and the sense that big R Romance is not a tenable way of living but just sometimes you can almost touch it, much more than it is "lol girls"

but just sometimes you can almost touch it

theres definitely some touching going on in this chapter amirite

And altho the purple prose feels like it's in Gertie's head it's just as much in Leopold's too I think.

xpost Yeah also can't imagine JJ knocking wanking, he seems to've been pretty fond of it.

i agree that his attitude is complicated, but i can't help...i don't know, by the time i read ulysses (i read joyce roughly in chronological order), i was just tired of the my brain is so capacious and various i contain multitudes thing. i do think the book constitutes a kind of overwriting of a feminized sentimental tradition, and the Joyce is more comfortable with the masculinized version. maybe there's nothing wrong with that, but grrrrr.

a fairer version of this might be, modernism isn't quite my bag. it's not really his fault, but Joyce just kind of represents something. i know there's a lot of pleasure in this book, and i don't want to be a naysayer in a thread of fans!

yeah the Naussicaa section made me feel very alive; it was quite touching

horseshow i know what you mean--I thought Ulysses was the bee's knees until i read Moby Dick

yeah, Melville is a-okay by me for some reason. maybe because his novels are so gay? ulysses is kind of gay, though. i don't know.

I see where you're coming from, and I have to admit I'm a blind Joyce fanboy. But I do think he uses his capaciousness in the service of something much more human and humanistic than his Modernist compadres.

i am sorry i called you horseshow

proteus is astounding

Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man's shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.

Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping, soused their bags, and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf's tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf's gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody. Here lies poor dogsbody's body.

-- Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel.

The cry brought him skulking back to his master and a blunt bootless kick sent him unscathed across a spit of sand, crouched in flight. He slunk back in a curve. Doesn't see me. Along by the edge of the mole he lolloped, dawdled, smelt a rock and from under a cocked hindleg pissed against it. He trotted forward and, lifting his hindleg, pissed quick short at an unsmelt rock. The simple pleasures of the poor. His hindpaws then scattered sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved. Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand, dabbling delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spouse-breach, vulturing the dead.

ulysses is super gay

god stop making me kind of want to reread this guys.

another good poll wld be best first line of each chapter

that section vahid posted is completely boss

also max that would be a long entry for the last chapter right? first line, amirite???

wokka wokka wokka,

Mr. Q.

dog / hare / buck / horse (stiff forehoofs) / serpent / bear (bearish fawning) / wolf ('s tongue) / calf ('s gallop) / "like a dog" (!) / (leo)pard / panther / vulture (vulturing)

wrote huge essay on this in college

STATELY, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

YOU, Cochrane, what city sent for him?

INELUCTABLE MODALITY of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes.

MR LEOPOLD BLOOM ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.

BY LORRIES along sir John Rogerson’s quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past Windmill lane, Leask’s the linseed crusher, the postal telegraph office.

MARTIN CUNNINGHAM, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself.

IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS: BEFORE Nelson’s pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold’s Cross.

PINEAPPLE ROCK, lemon platt, butter scotch.

URBANE, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred: —And we have, have we not, those priceless pages of Wilhelm Meister.

THE SUPERIOR, the very reverend John Conmee S.J. reset his smooth watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps.

BRONZE by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing Imperthnthn thnthnthn.

I WAS just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D. M. P. at the corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye.

THE SUMMER evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace.

DESHIL HOLLES EAMUS.

THE MABBOT STREET entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o’-the-wisps and danger signals.

PREPARATORY to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion which he very badly needed.

WHAT parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?

YES because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs since the City Arms hotel when he used to be pretending to be laid up with a sick voice doing his highness to make himself interesting for that old faggot Mrs Riordan that he thought he had a great leg of and she never left us a farthing all for masses for herself ...

MR LEOPOLD BLOOM ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.

^^ my favorite opening line, maybe my favorite in the whole book

haha vahid the section i quoted was the section i wrote a paper abt for my ulysses class two years ago

my college Ulysses class was so, so awful. also not Joyce's fault.

my college ulysses class was fucking killer because i took it w/ prof. john bishop (check the research interests) ... also took a class on conrad w/ him that pwned and a more general one on brit modernism that was all woolf and lawrence and so on

more "proteus" fun facts: IIRC you can take a map of the strand (was it sandymount strand?) and diagram stephen's walk and it makes a rough approximation of a golden spiral, turning inward

"based on my thirty-eight-year engagement with the novel."

wow

problem w/ classes like that is that it basically ruined literature for me forever. after reading joyce w/ a living master of joyce interpretation / explication i just basically decided to only read pulp & new wave sci-fi for the rest of my life.

my love for this book stems from a ridiculously good class i took w/ a classics prof where we read the odyssey and then ulysses

i loved the professor of my Ulysses class, but she was no match for the other students, who were a bunch of theater kids. we ended up talking about mime a lot.

:( hate classes with great professors and awful students

word

those classes w/ prof bishop were what i (wrongly) assumed college would have been all about: hungover unmarried people in their 50s w/ haunted expressions solemnly explaining the dialectic of all culture to 18 year olds at 11 am, followed by unhurried lunch & many cigarettes.

should've majored in english

=(

ms f0zi assures me this gets old after 8 years or so but i don't know if i believe that, maybe dr3w or someone else can weigh in on that.

sorry to distract from ulysses but for better or worse it's one of those things that you really can't untangle from the context in which you encounter it (cf shakespeare comedies and horrible horrible high school drama clubs)

it gets old after 8 years or so.

vahid did you get married or is that the future ms f0zi

soon-to-be-ms-f0zi

Quitney's fave dude Terry Eagleton came to our uni and delivered a brilliant lecture on Ulysses. I was two sentences behind him trying to parse what he was saying for most of it but he was funny and on the money. Gist of it not dissimilar to something Pinefox said round these parts: that Joyce's politics are sharper and more particular than some of his belle lettrist fans give him credit for.

Agree that the first line of "Calypso" is a stunner, btw. That chapter unfailingly makes me hungry. Akshully quite a bit of the book does.

I had such a great time reading this the summer I graduated high school (with help from Stuart Gilbert's pedantic but useful guide) that I was invariably disappointed when a grad school course turned the novel into soup. The professor - a former Cornell guy who's one of the world's foremost Yeats scholars – was so hung up on the novel's purported difficulties, and the class' need to understand the novel's metaphysical/mythological armature, that most of my mates said to hell with it.

Understanding that a lot of that stuff is only scaffolding is key to really digging the book, I think.

FW is better than any of this, of course.

But "IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS" is probably even better, at this late date, than the endlessly familiar relish pun.

FW is better than any of this, of course.

^what horseshit

hoseshit

omg so sorry i like the endlessly familiar relish pun pls kill me now

relish in a bun: just like that kid Obama was talking bout this week

I've never even thunk of it as a pun. I like "nutty gizzards" and the faint tang of urine.

isn't FW about pissing in a young girl's mouth?

Why not?

1) proteus
2) nausicäa
3) ithaca

no lie,

since i first read the book, i have had the phrase 'ineluctable modality of the visible - at least that if not more' pass through my head at least twice every day

i love that phrase i think partly because when i was a little kid i asked my mom about the book, and she pulled it out and told me it was really amazing but really hard and i think she read me that line, or maybe the whole first paragraph of proteus, as a way of showing me. i remember going over the sentence over and over and trying to parse it and being sort of amazed that something could sound the cool.

*that cool

that's beautiful, max.

if you want to get really treacly (sort of oppressively so)... my parents are close friends with, and still live in the same town as, most of their good college friends. one of their close friends, a housepainter and artist whose favorite book was ulysses, died of leukemia in 2003, and every year since then they get together on bloomsday and read one chapter aloud in a circle. it sort of smacks of intellectual pretension but, i dunno, i hope when i die the memorials my friends build for me will have the same kind of personal resonance.

so yeah, given these kinds of memories i guess my love for this book doesn't stem entirely from that class i took, although i love that class for opening up a host of new readings.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

hoseshit

problem w/ classes like that is that it basically ruined literature for me forever. after reading joyce w/ a living master of joyce interpretation / explication i just basically decided to only read pulp & new wave sci-fi for the rest of my life.

-- moonship journey to baja, Friday, 21 March 2008 16:57 (1 week ago) Link

weird, reading ulysses had a similar effect on me. it's been 10 years since and I have a completely different relationship to novels now. can hardly bring myself to read them, and for a former english major / longtime lit nerd it was a very strange thing. I'll read poetry, philosophy, film criticism, tech stuff, but I can count on one hand the number of novels I've read since finishing ulysses. it broek my brane.

Sirens, Circe, Eumaeus, not nec. in that order.

Hearing again about Bishop depresses me because I took a Joyce seminar and not his.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

i'm surprised!

I always want to read excerpts of Ulysses after I go to Irish music night at the bar.

pervs

the joyce seminar with john was the best thing I ever did in my entire academic life

So much otm stuff in this thread and I missed it somehow. Yes, it did stop me reading novels for a while too (and stopped me trying to write a novel which was a good thing) because, well, what's the point? But then I got into Pynchon and Gaddis blahblahblah, novel not dead shocka, etc.

Also 'ineluctable modality of the visible'! I think this sticks in peoples minds because up to that point it's pretty straightforward prose but at that moment you either go with the flow or get a dictionary or give up.

Also, doing Joyce at school, esp. our schgool which was very straight, conservative, traditional. Suddenly after Shakespeare, Austen, The Brontes...(all good stuff of course but...) suddenly there's this thing which takes time and effort and then rewards you with jokes and sex and more stuff than you can think about.

I'm rambling now, time to stop.

That last sentence of NedTrifle's is the least likely James Joyce sentence ever!

RFI: Why Does Ulysses Get All Yessed Out In The Last Chapter?

The Very Reverend John Conmee's smug stately saunter through the streets of Dub is the most evocative piece of summer i ever read

Eumaeus 	1

Proteus, for the first few paragraphs alone, even

I realize not too many folks voted in this, but I'm kinda bummed no one repped for Wandering Rocks

i repped for wandering rocks in the thread, even though i didn't vote for it! i love that one.

it's been more than a decade since i read this book though o_O

haven't read this since 1996 myself. surprised no penelope votes.

I've only read the book in its entirety once, in 1998. I like to go back and revisit various chapters and passages fairly often, though. Ulysses is really good for that sort of thing!

My senior thesis was on Wandering Rocks.