Ulysses and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

Are you who you appear to be? If so, I bought a book that you blurbed that I liked but I never got around to finishing.

um, you should be aware that the rest of the book isn't much like the first two pages.

also, Ulysses really is not a book that "spoilers" applies to

Also, is there any difference between the Penguin and Vintage international versions? Sorry if all of these are stupid or redundant questions...I'm still rather young so I haven't heard the heaps of praise for Ulysses for years and years like I'm sure many of you have.

there's a couple texts: reprints of the 1922 text are annoying bcz they reprint lots of misprints; then there's i think the 1939 bodley head text? which is sort of "standard" only bcz later attempts at "corrected" texts have been the sites of bitter, bitter academic battles. this is a specialist subject i've not really cared to get into. really anything but the '22 text is ideal AS LONG AS IT HAS NOTES.

ulysses is a very funny book, also as affecting as anything i've read, also formalistically pretty breathtaking. HOWEVER this is true of the first hundred pages in a far more rarefied and academic way than it is of the more playful/out-there later parts. remember, get an edition with notes. notes notes notes.

I spent the summer before my junior year trying to 'read' Ulysses so I'd be, like, better prepared for class or whatever. Aside from the geekiness of that whole idea, I remember that I gave up after repetitive bouts of frustration and agony. So not quite geek enough. But I also remember that it really didn't seem that hard when I ended up reading it for class. I think it was partly a frame-of-mind thing, and sometimes I just had to let go & stop trying to understand every little bit. I don't know that I would call it 'pleasure reading.' That said, I think it's wonderful.

I don't think Portrait is a great book, but knowing Steven's history and character make his interior monologues seem less arbitrary.

I'd strongly recommend reading the 80's Gabler edition of Ulysses in which thousands of mistakes were corrected. Many of the obscurities in the 1961 edition are unintentional. The original was printed in France by printers who couldn't read english (printers in england would have been arrested for obscenity) and Joyce's corrections were handwritten onto two different sets of galleys and many of them missed the boat. He was obsessed about having the book come out on his birthday and it was a rushed and sloppy job. The 61 edition incorporated some corrections, but it wasn't until the 80's, with the advent of word processing, that the job of comparing the published text with the sets of galleys and other notes became practicable.

I'm looking forward to reading it again, perhaps with notes this time, but perhaps not. RJM, after hammering on me for years about Joyce being a master, is happy that I've finally conceded.

And yes, read it aloud when you can.

There's time for the annotations and the interpretations later, if you think the book's worth it. (Of course I think it is.) But there's a lot of stuff about Ulysses out there, and your first reading is the only chance you're going to get to read it without that stuff sloshing around your brain, which is why I say go for it without a net. (Or a 'Net.)

And to answer your original question, I'd read Dubliners, then Portrait, then Ulysses. That's another kind of learning curve, and the earlier books offer an easier (in some ways) in to Joyce's Dublin and its people. Have fun!

I enjoyed the experience of not understanding a lot of what was going on, it was more like listening to music (Bartok or Cecil Taylor) than any reading experience I'd had up till then. Not everybody likes that and for some the notes give the reassurance they need to get through it.

"But even when you're a kid you learn to infer meaning from context . . . " etc. Yeah! One of my favorite things about Ulysses (still true after several readings) is the childlike wonder (unique to me in literature) one experiences in relation to it. Proust (my next best reading experience) describes that kind of wonder, but Joyce puts you inside of it.

Bit of deja vu all of this. I recommend the other thread -Reading Ulysses- too.

The other option is to just read the annotations, of course. Which is somewhat more like what I've done.

That same year, a boy I was in love with read me the last chapter of Ulysses—the soliloquey—through a locked door. How can I improve upon that?

At this point we've probably absorbed all the Ulysses footnotes by cultural osmosis—we've been around so many people who took courses in it, seen and read references, etc. So I imagine we'd all breeze right through.

Let's do it someday. One thread, one book.

nb sp: 'Dedalus'

I don't find Ulysses very difficult, save a few sections of density.

I tend to share some of Cauistry's view of the Portrait: it is surprisingly dull, considering who wrote it.

My copy of Portrait (Penguin Classics) comes with footnotes in the back of the book explaining all of the obscure references (much like Dostoevsky books, etc.). I ordered Ulysses and it came in today and it doesn't have any footnotes or explanations whatsoever. Just the text, and that's it. Are there any editions that come with these (the Penguin Classics version, perhaps)? I don't want to get a separate book of annotations because I'd like to try it without that first, but I definitely wouldn't mind the inclusion of them in the back of the book if available.

Just started Portrait and am really enjoying it. It reminds me (and maybe it preceded this) quite a bit of The Confusions Of Young Torless by Robert Musil.

Interesting for me also in that I am quite familiar with the schools and stuff, he also went to the school I went to, I think prior to Clongowes though so it may not feature.

Some of the footnotes are funny to an Irish person, like "cod - a joke or a ruse" etc. It feels a bit over the top, and I find myself checking footnotes when I know what the thing is, just in case I'm wrong. Like if the word "wrong" in that context had a footnote, I'd check it and then it'd say "incorrect", and I think "why did I check that?"

i used to tease an earnest young law student i roomed with for raving about ulysses, which i had written off as nonsense (in my 17 yr old wisdom).

Now it broods on the shelf above my head as i sleep, as if in judgement.

He probably earns multiples of what i do by now.

That's me shown.

Ulysses is funny! I'll often reread the first three chapters or "Hades" for the exchanges: Dedalus and Buck, Bloom and Martin Cunningham and Power and Simon Dedalus, Dedalus and the pedantic teacher.

There's also a few chapters which should only be read once.

Oxen of the Sun is a slog of the first order, but much-maligned Ithaca is my very favorite. One of my favorite parts of the whole novel is found during SD/LB's drunken amble home; the elevation of the scientific to the poetic, and the mathematical to the sacred.

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipent lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

Ithaca has some beautiful prose.

idk if there is a causal relationship between yr old friend liking ulysses and earning cash money, deems

I have a weird theory that Ithaca/Proteus are twinned chapters, bookending Stephen's day, and that the recurrence of public urination (first alone, then with LB) is, among other things, symbolic of communion. I think of them as Matins and Vespers.

benefit of hindsight, nakh, benefit of hindsight. i feel it's indicative.

i'd guess liking ulysses and earning cash money are inversely related, actually, so there's time for you yet

(to like ulysses)

yeah my ulysses is fairly pristine too. portrait first then i'll see how i'm fixed.

"You behold in me," Stephen said with grim displeasure, "a horrible example of free thought."

'portrait' is great until the last chapter, which really is an unreadable slog.