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The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

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Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

#41

Post by asimpletune »

voldacar wrote: post #36
nemo44x wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

I think Gravity's Rainbow is significantly harder than Infinite Jest

Yeah I never understood the association with infinite jest and being hard other than it’s long. The book is super funny and enjoyable to read.

Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

#42

Post by dpwm »

damontal wrote: post #25

I 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

Thank you for posting this.

I had not appreciated the scale of this. There are 368 episodes, spread over almost seven years.

Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

#43

Post by leephillips »

fogof wrote: post #38

My 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.

And the book won! The pen was literally mightier than the sword.

Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

#44

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

leephillips wrote: post #43
fogof wrote: post #38

My 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.

And the book won! The pen was literally mightier than the sword.

Lol, I don't think U.S. Supreme Court justices use swords. I'd love to be proven wrong, though =)

Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

#45

Post by syrrim »

I was interested in what made the book obscene. This article discusses it: https://somanybooksblog.com/2011/10/03/ulysses-update-episod... In short, it contains a description of a man masturbating in public, though heavily clouded by innuendo. By the logic of an obscenity law, and assuming one could actually understand what was going on, I can see how it would be banned.

Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

#46

Post by dools »

leephillips wrote: post #43
fogof wrote: post #38

My 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.

And the book won! The pen was literally mightier than the sword.

The Supreme Court have swords?

Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

#47

Post by nemo44x »

voldacar wrote: post #36
nemo44x wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

I think Gravity's Rainbow is significantly harder than Infinite Jest

I disagree. I felt like Wallace used many more $10 words and the annotations were often long enough I would lose track.

Gravity’s Rainbow had easier text to read but I’d agree the narrative is probably more difficult to follow. I also think Gravity’s Rainbow is the better book in many ways especially as it rebates to “them” co-opting everything useful.

The chapter detailing Pokler’s history is probably the finest literature I’ve read.

Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

#48

Post by nemo44x »

asimpletune wrote: post #41
voldacar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Gravity's Rainbow is significantly harder than Infinite Jest

Yeah I never understood the association with infinite jest and being hard other than it’s long. The book is super funny and enjoyable to read.

I think it’s because Infinite Jest is clearly influenced by Gravity’s Rainbow.

misread your comment.

I think it’s because yes it’s long but it uses a complex narrative structure and has a lot of uncommon words. The annotations add a bit to it.

I agree it’s very enjoyable literature.

Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

#49

Post by krapp »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #44
leephillips wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the book won! The pen was literally mightier than the sword.

Lol, I don't think U.S. Supreme Court justices use swords. I'd love to be proven wrong, though =)

Not literal swords but... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice

Re: The Banning of Joyce's Ulysses

#50

Post by nicklecompte »

Jun8 wrote: post #32
nicklecompte wrote: post #13

Earlier 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).

I am certainly not saying it’s actually obscene or indecent! My point was that the scandalous bit was really quite prominent at the time of publication and not buried in an 800-page novel.
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