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James Joyce was a complicated man
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Re: James Joyce was a complicated man
#42This is actually one of the best summaries of Ulysses I've ever seen, and I took an extension course at Stanford on the book. We also had an approved commentary book. I don't remember most of these themes being raised. I remember the teacher saying with awe, "He can do whatever he wants with the English language!" and me thinking, "Who cares?" He also went on and on about Joyce's stream-of-consciousness writing, and…
>I remember the teacher saying with awe, "He can do whatever he wants with the English language!" and me thinking, "Who cares?
I would normally think that saying someone can do anything they want with (X) would be an assertion of absolute mastery, and one should care if someone is an absolute master in something.
This candidate can do whatever he wants with our main programming language, yeah but I'm still going to hire this one guy who said graduating code camp last week was super cool!
The chef at this restaurant can achieve whatever effect they want with food, sure, but me and the band are going to eat these delicious street dogs!
it would be easy to make more absurd examples..
Re: James Joyce was a complicated man
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not this Irishman…
Nor I.
TL;DR accepting intellectually that we are technically Europeans has very little to do with feeling like European-ness is a part of one's identity.
I thought it'd be obvious that I didn't mean every Irish person would be bemused, but I should have been more explicit.
There's a difference between accepting Ireland as legally and bureaucratically part of Europe, or thinking it's politically or culturally useful to be in the E.U., and feeling that European-ness - however you choose to define it - is a part of our identity as a people.
My anecdotal experience (have lived in two European countries and one non-European country, learning the local languages and diving deep) is that European countries are about as "foreign" to Irish people as any other countries. There are exceptions, and it depends on the country, e.g., we're closer to the Poles now, and have a few fun stories about crates of Prazsky at the wedding in Gdansk.
Try out the experiment - ask an Irish friend or relation of yours if they feel like them and a Finnish / Belgian / Romanian person have something in common, or what they know about that country. My experience is that a lot of people (not everyone, and again, anecdotally) are very uncomfortable even with the idea of imagining that other places really exist.
Re: James Joyce was a complicated man
#44Excellent essay! Really loved it. For Finnegan's Wake - I find it's best to open it up at random and shout it out as you pace around. Maybe peer at yourself now and again in a mirror. If you can work it up to a roar, then you'll really be flying, but it'd depend on what you had for breakfast.
All joking aside, there is a lot of literature that really needs to be spoken to be grasped. I learned this in college taking a middle English literature course. The Canterbury tales really need to be read out loud. They have a cadence that needs to be spoken. I would actually argue that Joyce is in the same category. His work isn't meant to be internal. It's storytelling in a group and meant to be spoken. It helps u…
This is also true of Homer, whose stories were meant to be shouted out to a large crowd.
A much later and much more obscure American writer, R. A. Lafferty, was deeply influenced by ancient Greek poetry and philosophy, and his prose is better understood if you think of it as being read loud to a large crowd.
Re: James Joyce was a complicated man
#45Excellent essay! Really loved it. For Finnegan's Wake - I find it's best to open it up at random and shout it out as you pace around. Maybe peer at yourself now and again in a mirror. If you can work it up to a roar, then you'll really be flying, but it'd depend on what you had for breakfast.
Right when you're starting to think it's just nonsense, you catch some hint that there might be some sense behind it
And it sucks because sometimes I really just want to write it up as nonsense and put it down, but is seems like there is some kind of system there
Re: James Joyce was a complicated man
#46I am currently reading Ulysses, so this was a nice surprise on hn. Great historical context. Thank you! After many years of false starts, I stopped trying to understand everything and just let the prose wash over me. And now I’m enjoying it. “ I feel I need not worry so much about “misreading” Joyce. Every reading of Ulysses is a misreading, a faulty but revealing translation, a way of drawing the novel into new and…
Keep pushing, it really starts to pick up after oxen in the sun
Circe definitely makes it worth it. Even though that chapter is huge, it feels very short
Re: James Joyce was a complicated man
#47For anyone who want get into James Joyce, but finds reading him intimidating, I highly recommend the RTE (Irish national radio) recording of Ulysses: https://www.rte.ie/radio/podcasts/series/32198-ulysses/ Not only do they have a fantastic full cast reading of the book, but for each chapter they have a companion episode where they talk to a Joyce scholar about the chapter. I went through it by alternating listening t…
Portrait of the Artist is also a good starting point
It's way more approachable than Ulysses, the hard parts of it are more self-contained, and if the reader decides to go on to Ulysses they'll have a good understanding of Stephen as a character
Really in hindsight I think I liked Portrait more just because you don't have to do as much homework to understand it. It's somewhere in between the general appeal of Dubliners and the masturbatory, literary stuff in Ulysses
Re: James Joyce was a complicated man
#48I really like Joyce but the one complaint I do have is his harder works require a bunch of homework
Like if you're going to read Ulysses, there are a bunch of companion books that are entirely footnotes for the thousands of unexplained references. Ofc you don't have to read every footnote, but there's considerable overhead involved in reading him
Ditto for the Wake, most people just give up and assume it's nonsense. But there is some general story behind it and it too has a bunch of homework
Portrait is more approachable and I got more out of it per ounce of labor involved
It's nice to be able to just pick up a book and read it, no? Like if you know basic Russian history you can pick up a Dostoevsky and read through it without too much hassle
I'm not sure what changed in the literary world that made authors prioritize showing off over being understood by anyone
Re: James Joyce was a complicated man
#49Excellent essay! Really loved it. For Finnegan's Wake - I find it's best to open it up at random and shout it out as you pace around. Maybe peer at yourself now and again in a mirror. If you can work it up to a roar, then you'll really be flying, but it'd depend on what you had for breakfast.
All joking aside, there is a lot of literature that really needs to be spoken to be grasped. I learned this in college taking a middle English literature course. The Canterbury tales really need to be read out loud. They have a cadence that needs to be spoken. I would actually argue that Joyce is in the same category. His work isn't meant to be internal. It's storytelling in a group and meant to be spoken. It helps u…
I wasn't joking at all (but if I had been I'd nonetheless be very tempted now to refuse to put it aside).
Re: James Joyce was a complicated man
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
All joking aside, there is a lot of literature that really needs to be spoken to be grasped. I learned this in college taking a middle English literature course. The Canterbury tales really need to be read out loud. They have a cadence that needs to be spoken. I would actually argue that Joyce is in the same category. His work isn't meant to be internal. It's storytelling in a group and meant to be spoken. It helps u…
So many (snooty) people treat audiobooks like a cheap substitute for reading, when in reality, reading is the cheap substitute for oral storytelling. Sure, you've got Infinite Jest where page structure and end notes are part of the aesthetic design, but I think more people would consume more literature if audiobooks were more normalized.
Audiobooks are a cheap excuse for oral storytelling. People listen to audiobooks as they sculpt their muscles in the gym, as they walk to the shop to get groceries averting the eyes of all strangers who pass by, as they fold laundry, alone.
Oral storytelling used to happen in small intimate groups around fires with a couple of lamps lit, total silence, wind howling, drinks and sometimes other delights, with no conceivable distractions. Even saying "no distractions" isn't accurate, as it was moreso the case that they'd a completely different conception of time. The stories would be told live by another human, with their voice and body and eyes looking at you.
Reading is different than oral storytelling - it doesn't pretend to be the same thing, at least not anymore. Creating a hierarchy between the three is, I find, a bit odd, in general.