I had to read some of his works in high school. It was 'stream of consciousness' DRIVEL. At best. "Horse-Piss and Rotted Straw"
The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
31–40 of 74 posts
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#32> Despite Quinn’s persuasive argument—Ulysses was so dense and convoluted that no one could possibly understand it, much less be debauched by it, he argued—a three-judge panel, using the Hicklin test, concluded that the book had the potential to corrupt youth and was therefore obscene. LOL. The kids are too dumb to be corrupted by this book! The best part is that it is true. If you have enough constitution to be able…
Keep in mind that the novel itself was originally serialized, and the chapter in question (Nausicaa) is one of the easiest in the novel - further, the “obscene” part is right at the beginning of the chapter. So this wasn’t a case of censors plumbing an 800-page novel and discovering something, or of a snippet being excerpted in newspapers - a scandalous specific issue of a literary journal started the whole controver…
Judge for yourself: Here's "Nausicaa" : http://web.uvic.ca/~mvp1922/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Episo...
I personally found that calling this indecent is really pushing it. Maybe because it presented some light erotic ideas in an unexpected medium (a young girls stream of consciousness).
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Keep in mind that the novel itself was originally serialized, and the chapter in question (Nausicaa) is one of the easiest in the novel - further, the “obscene” part is right at the beginning of the chapter. So this wasn’t a case of censors plumbing an 800-page novel and discovering something, or of a snippet being excerpted in newspapers - a scandalous specific issue of a literary journal started the whole controver…
Judge for yourself: Here's "Nausicaa" : http://web.uvic.ca/~mvp1922/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Episo... I personally found that calling this indecent is really pushing it. Maybe because it presented some light erotic ideas in an unexpected medium (a young girls stream of consciousness).
Maybe its like how people called marijuana a "gateway drug", because after all of the breathless hype about how great it is and how it will immediately ruin you life, the people who tried it were mostly disappointed. If the authorities were so wrong about marijuana then heroin can't be that bad.
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#34> Despite Quinn’s persuasive argument—Ulysses was so dense and convoluted that no one could possibly understand it, much less be debauched by it, he argued—a three-judge panel, using the Hicklin test, concluded that the book had the potential to corrupt youth and was therefore obscene. LOL. The kids are too dumb to be corrupted by this book! The best part is that it is true. If you have enough constitution to be able…
> The kids are too dumb to be corrupted by this book! Or Joyce is just that impenetrable. Have you seen Finnegans Wake?
Sometimes I have to stop myself and ask "Is this genius, or just badly written?"
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difficulty in reading this book is usually greatly exaggerated. It takes a while to come to grips with, but it is not in the least impenetrable. It’s one of my favorite novels. It’s certainly no Finnegan’s Wake , which I pick up and read a page of every few years, only to put it down, saying, “not this time”.
My favorite way to read Finnegan's Wake is to get some friends and perhaps some drinks, have everyone pick a random spot from the book and read it out loud. The book is a circle so it doesn't really have a proper beginning, and the way the narratives are intermeshed to the point that they are incomprehensible means that the narrative is secondary, so concepts such as beginning and middle don't really matter anyway. I…
Finnegan's Wake absolutely exists to be read, or even sung, out loud. If you've never gotten the appeal, just try listening to the start of an audiobook version. There's a Youtube series that covers the first few chapters that I adore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HgCjtd2iPU
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difficulty in reading this book is usually greatly exaggerated. It takes a while to come to grips with, but it is not in the least impenetrable. It’s one of my favorite novels. It’s certainly no Finnegan’s Wake , which I pick up and read a page of every few years, only to put it down, saying, “not this time”.
Similar to Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest. I recommend to people to just fight through the first 200 pages and you end up in the flow and things begin to come together. Gravity’s Rainbow in particular is confusing for a long while but when it begins to come together it’s rewarding. Agreed - Finnegan's Wake is impossible. Try the audio version and it’s somehow even more difficult. I was tempted to eat a bag of mu…
I think Gravity's Rainbow is significantly harder than Infinite Jest
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#37> Despite Quinn’s persuasive argument—Ulysses was so dense and convoluted that no one could possibly understand it, much less be debauched by it, he argued—a three-judge panel, using the Hicklin test, concluded that the book had the potential to corrupt youth and was therefore obscene. LOL. The kids are too dumb to be corrupted by this book! The best part is that it is true. If you have enough constitution to be able…
The difficulty in reading this book is usually greatly exaggerated. It takes a while to come to grips with, but it is not in the least impenetrable. It’s one of my favorite novels. It’s certainly no Finnegan’s Wake , which I pick up and read a page of every few years, only to put it down, saying, “not this time”.
I'm of average intelligence. Some sections of Ulysses are straightforward and understandable, some are strange, but others are completely impenetrable without some kind of guidebook, and intentionally so.
Example https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/u/ulysses/summary-and...
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#38My favorite part about this episode in history is the name of the supreme court case "United States v. One Book Called Ulysses". The whole of the United States going up against just one book? That's a fight I would love to see.
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#39I highly recommend the podcast Re:Joyce by Frank Delaney if you're at all interested in Ulysses. He reads Ulysses and discusses it - sometimes an episode is dedicated to just one sentence, sometimes a paragraph. Tragic that he died before completing it and that his website has gone untended. https://feeds.feedburner.com/libsyn/sQtR
> an episode is dedicated to just one sentence > he died before completing
It appears he started on Bloomsday 2010, and in episode 321, from 2016, he remarked in an introduction that he planned to finish it within ten years from then – which Wikipedia cites as evidence of it being "planned" to run to 2026, whilst completely missing the bit where he’s really talking about an there being an extra episode once a month and jocularly remarks that it is to reduce the weekly podcast from 25 remaining years to ten.
I hadn’t heard of this until today. This is amazing.
Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Similar to Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest. I recommend to people to just fight through the first 200 pages and you end up in the flow and things begin to come together. Gravity’s Rainbow in particular is confusing for a long while but when it begins to come together it’s rewarding. Agreed - Finnegan's Wake is impossible. Try the audio version and it’s somehow even more difficult. I was tempted to eat a bag of mu…
It seems like after 100-200 pages of Gravity's Rainbow one of two things can happen: 1. The reader can't figure out what the hell is going on anymore or who anybody is. They give up and stop reading. 2. The reader can't figure out what the hell is going on anymore or who anybody is. They stop trying to make sense of the book and just read the words. "Sure this guy has a toilet stuck to his foot now, and can prevent b…
The literary device in the novel is effect preceding cause. Like, very early in the book the hypersonic v2 - and how series it is for things to blow up and then you hear it - is introduced, but if you miss it then that then you miss all the other times we see the same concept.