Reading Ulysses

Heh

A couple of them are students there iirc

yes, and on shift, and the others are paying them a visit. it's not wildly implausible, but still odd. it honestly was a factor in me giving up on my first attempt many years ago, without any online guides. sure the language was the main thing but i just didn't have a handle on the big picture. they're having a big piss up? but they're in a hospital?

I imagine the standards of the day were somewhat different

Lol

Boys but don’t think I don’t know what you are about in that hospital of yours!

I read it at 16 without any guides too and yeah, they are necessary for any number of reasons. But I still enjoyed the headiness of it all.
On my recent reread I availed myself of Harry Blamires, Jeri Johnson etc. Cleared up loads of mysteries.

Re the hospital, I don't know, my assumption is that as it's a teaching hospital there are facilities/spaces for the students to eat and drink (and even board as well?), and as NV indicates, the kind of status that male students had in those days, and the leeway they were given, is rather different from today; so the place feels halfway between a college and a hospital, essentially. I could look up what took place at Holles Street Hospital, but this is what i take from it, and I trust Joyce is not inventing it.

To me Scylla and Charybdis feels more incongruous, the other fellas are clearly not all that interested in what Stephen has to say, they have stuff to do, and yet they indulge him in his monologue. I very much doubt Stephen cannot see their bored or unamused expressions, but he ploughs on, probably trying to impress AE. I feel Joyce's desire to express his Shakespeare theory trumped his sense of the veridical, and he knows someone would likely have told Stephen to pipe down.

“After 10 attempts at reading and completing James Joyce’s magnificent ‘Ulysses’ and only making it to page 10 each time, on attempt number 11, I finally did it! Hallelujah! ‘Ulysses’ should be a real inspiration to anyone interested in breaking the rules in any art form.” -Ron📚 pic.twitter.com/m0Hhdavi6y

— S P A R K S (@sparksofficial) April 26, 2024

He finally made it to page 11. Now for the rest of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOO5S4vxi0o

well that may inspire me to pick it up again

"The Lady is Lingering" on Indiscreet borrows some lines from a Henry Miller book, Ron can make something out of literary inspiration.

Nearly done with Circe. Honestly a bit underwhelmed this time around. The connections to the Odyssey don't really add that much, without that the structure falls a bit apart. And without the structure, it seems like a bunch of experiments brought together, and some of them work a lot better than others. Those that work, though, are obviously incredible, I''m not hating. But reading Finnegans Wake two years ago was a bigger experience.

I've never managed to make it very far in the Wake.

tbf neither does the Wake

I keep finwake as an open window on my phone and re-read bits of it when I have time. The annotations are great. I like to read it aloud to myself, half the enjoyment is in the mouthfeel of it

what annotated version are you reading on your phone?

I told a Joyce professor I met that I was afraid of the Wake, he laughed and said "be afraid. I've spent 50 years programming myself to read this book." So that was encouraging.

Two things I took away from the Wake:

1) Even though all the words stayed mostly incomprehensible throughout, it's often easy to grasp the tone/discourse of the text. If it's a lesson, a flirty conversation, if it's satire, elegy, mystery, etc. So in some way you can just float along, and get an emotional experience out of it. And enough things recur to get a sort of grip on a sort of plot.

2) Nobody understands Finnegans Wake anyway, so you're free to just make up your own interpretation. While Ulysses seems a lot more settled, the meaning of Finnegan's Wake is still up for debate. To me, it seemed to be about the Irish Civil War in a lot of ways. Or something like that. About trauma, the way so much modernism is about trauma, but a very different trauma than WWI.

finwake [dot] com!

The book comes alive when you read it aloud to yourself, it’s as much music as it is text