Yes indeed! I will celebrate by fondly recalling the first 45 or so pages of Portrait of the Artist . . . OK, done recalling. Something about moocows, and then Catholic school? Oh well, someday.
Dubliners is some fine stuff, though, and also whatever portions of Chamber Music I read before stopping.
You should figure out some way to post your Molly Worth cartoon from a couple of years ago.
Jack, you should probably give Ulysses another shot - it saddens me that someone who maintains as deep a taste in music as yours would suddenly never stride out of the kiddie pool and dive into the bigger, deeper modernist Irish prose pool.
I can't give Ulysses another shot, because I haven't given it a first shot yet. Doesn't it build off of Portrait to a reasonable extent? And Portrait is, unfortunately, too dry for me to enjoy very much.
There's probably a good discussion in this, but I've decided that I don't feel too bad about not forcing myself to read books where the writing doesn't "flow" for themselves, at least to my eyes. I know that sounds wrong talking about Joyce, who's so musical. I did find Dubliners to "flow," though I read it some time ago, out of how lyrical his writing is. Portrait doesn't do the same thing for me, and frankly I can't relate to the subject matter very directly either.
I think there's also another good discussion in your "deep end of the pool" metaphor for brainy books & music, even if you don't entirely mean it. This is a dangerously wrong-headed approach to culture.
Speaking of books, lunch hour is up, so back to work for me!
Working in publishing for a few years will make you less angry about copyright law in general. I'm not sure you can reasonably ask the law to litigate around James Joyce's son being an A-hole.
I think a fun nugget in the article is this facetious-sounding quote from Joyce the elder:
"As Joyce told one of his translators, 'I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one's immortality.'"
I doubt he meant that entirely, but do keep in mind that he knew how inaccessibly he was writing . . .
All right, fine, if you're going to be all reasonable about it, then I concede both points.
I do want to read Ulysses some day. (Maybe I can borrow your Bullfinch's first.) I feel like reading excerpted chapters would be a cop-out, but maybe it wouldn't be a bad start.
Portrait I'm really going to have to give up on though, especially if you say the second half is hard to get through. I didn't even get that far.
6 Comments:
Yes indeed! I will celebrate by fondly recalling the first 45 or so pages of Portrait of the Artist . . . OK, done recalling. Something about moocows, and then Catholic school? Oh well, someday.
Dubliners is some fine stuff, though, and also whatever portions of Chamber Music I read before stopping.
You should figure out some way to post your Molly Worth cartoon from a couple of years ago.
Jack, you should probably give Ulysses another shot - it saddens me that someone who maintains as deep a taste in music as yours would suddenly never stride out of the kiddie pool and dive into the bigger, deeper modernist Irish prose pool.
I can't give Ulysses another shot, because I haven't given it a first shot yet. Doesn't it build off of Portrait to a reasonable extent? And Portrait is, unfortunately, too dry for me to enjoy very much.
There's probably a good discussion in this, but I've decided that I don't feel too bad about not forcing myself to read books where the writing doesn't "flow" for themselves, at least to my eyes. I know that sounds wrong talking about Joyce, who's so musical. I did find Dubliners to "flow," though I read it some time ago, out of how lyrical his writing is. Portrait doesn't do the same thing for me, and frankly I can't relate to the subject matter very directly either.
I think there's also another good discussion in your "deep end of the pool" metaphor for brainy books & music, even if you don't entirely mean it. This is a dangerously wrong-headed approach to culture.
Speaking of books, lunch hour is up, so back to work for me!
I'm swimming in the deep end of your bad attitude, Jack.
Working in publishing for a few years will make you less angry about copyright law in general. I'm not sure you can reasonably ask the law to litigate around James Joyce's son being an A-hole.
I think a fun nugget in the article is this facetious-sounding quote from Joyce the elder:
"As Joyce told one of his translators, 'I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one's immortality.'"
I doubt he meant that entirely, but do keep in mind that he knew how inaccessibly he was writing . . .
All right, fine, if you're going to be all reasonable about it, then I concede both points.
I do want to read Ulysses some day. (Maybe I can borrow your Bullfinch's first.) I feel like reading excerpted chapters would be a cop-out, but maybe it wouldn't be a bad start.
Portrait I'm really going to have to give up on though, especially if you say the second half is hard to get through. I didn't even get that far.
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