isn't it about time you changed the record, OJ?this one's getting a bit tired...

i doubt anyone can be bothered to reopen this old wound.

Brit:

How old are you?

i'm as old as my nose and a little bit older than my front teeth

Well, when your nose is a little older you'll start to question some of the things your professors told you--about Darwinism, James Joyce, etc. You'll find you don't have to accept things as true just because they're politically correct.

my professors?

i'm almost flattered. i'd love to say i was still a fresh-faced young whippersnapper, but regrettably i'm not.

you patronising buffoon.

Sorry, just assumed no one over twenty-five could still hold so many unexamined opinions.

you may not like them, but they're my opinions, old boy.

when i first read ulysses i did try to call some of my old professors to ask them whether i ought to like it or not, but they couldn't remember me and told me to bugger off.

What's not to like? They're quaint.

they were probably too busy donning their skirts for the village field hockey competition.

its a quaint tradition we have here in little ol' england. after the game we all go off to our castles and ruined churches (entrance is £2.50) and examine our opinions.

Don't be so hard on Ulysses, Orrin. It's kept a lot of English profs busy on footnotes, instead of even more foolish things. Plus, it's good for the Dublin tourist trade.

And it looks downright readable compared to Finnegan's Wake. Of course, the product of those monkeys typing on those typewriters looks downright readable compared to Finnegan's Wake.

You keep banging on Ulysses, OJ. Perhaps someone will catch on and future generations will not have James Joyce inflicted upon them.

Don't forget to whack Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man too.

Casey:

In fairness to Brit, your favorite--though comprehensible--is no great improvement.

If you haven't seen the movie "The Commitments" do yourselves a favor and rent it. Hilarious!

I liked "The Commitments" but am puzzled about its relationship to Joyce.

When I was an Eng. Lit. major at Cow College, I drove a friend over to the big state liberal arts school ("What's the difference between culture and agriculture?" Answer: 22 miles.) to buy a guide to reading of "Ulysses."

The guide was 800 pages long, or about as long as the novel. This led me to observe that the author of a book that required a guide of equal length to understand had some communication problems.

My friend said I was a redneck and a Philistine.

Too true.

Harry:

Roddy Doyle wrote the novel, The Commitments.

Joyce said of Finnegan that it was a novel the reader could devote his whole life to reading and understanding. Arrogant ass.

I'm a readaholic, so much so that I even wade through OJ's and Stove's splenetic ravings about evolution.

But even that pales in comparison to Ulysses' stygian dreck.

Orrin, you gave a favorable review to The Turn of the Screw. I have it on tape, along with Kerry boffing the AP babe.

There's a real bad pun in that previous post, and I plead guilty.

It's been a long time since I've read Ulysses, but I still remember (as faintness spirals through me) that ghastly experience. Never have I picked a book with such high hopes and so much subsequent disappointment. It had been so highly praised that I thought it had to be wonderful, and so I slogged on, waiting for the good part to begin. It never did.

In particular, I remember my outrage with regard to one chapter that described a childbirth. The first paragraph was in Anglo-Saxon, the next in a slightly newer style, progressing to Middle English, to Elizabethan, and so on (the birth of the language -- get it?). But none of this wordplay touched upon the emotions of the people involved, or even on the physical details. It had all the depth and empathy of a crossword puzzle (though I admit that I know some New Yorkers for whom filling out the Sunday Times crossword is the emotional highpoint of their lives).

Compare this with a childbirth in, say, Zola's novels. The descriptions may be over-clinical for some tastes, but Zola does at least concern himself with what might be called "the basics": the birthpangs, the joyous relief when the delivery occurs, the anxious nail-biting relatives, the worries of the attendant physician or midwife, the clean-up. Joyce can't be bothered such mundane details. He's too busy inventing gimmicks. The man missed his calling; he should have taken up advertising.

I use the childbirth scene as an example, but all of the chapters are about the same in this respect. There is no clear picture of what Leopold Bloom or Stephen Dedalus are like. They are wraiths, walking plot devices -- without any plot to carry. Leopold Bloom, for instance, is Jewish; but since Joyce knows nothing about Judaism and cares less, Bloom's religion has no bearing on his character, particularly as he has no character to be influenced. Stephen Dedalus is a poet, but he doesn't seem to spend much time writing and in any case it doesn't sound as if he's capable of writing anything good. Occasionally there are some flashes of humor or genuine emotion -- such as Stephen accidently discovering his little sister's pathetic attempt to teach herself French -- but they are too scattered and too infrequent to support a work of this gargantuan length.

Joyce wielded enormous influence, and the influence was a bad one. Essentially he traded substance for style. It's not even a particularly engrossing style, but it's "modern". That word strikes the keynote of the critics when Joyce's novel first came out; it's so different, it's so unlike what other authors had done before! And plenty of other authors followed suit, hoping to catch the readers' attention by the originality of their technique, frequently concealing a similar paucity of humanity or ideas.

How many people have been genuinely moved by Ulysses? About as many people who have actually read Finnegan's Wake from end to end in it's entirety -- but let's not get started on that one.

I remember one line from "Portrait," which is one more than I remember from most novels: "Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow."

A guy who could write a line like that could have gone places.

Josh.

You must be lying. OJ's already proved that nobody's ever read Ulysses.

Brit -- I wish you were right, but I'm sorry to say it's true. We all have our youthful indiscretions. I was very naive at the time, which must be my excuse, and I honestly believed that a book had to be terrific if a lot of people said so. I kept wondering what on earth I was missing as I doggedly went through that morass.

As you can tell, it made a strong impression -- strong, but unpleasant. It's hard to describe how deeply I felt that I had been cheated after reading it. The entire experience was like sitting down to an immense but inedible banquet; prettily served up and showily displayed, but with plaster meats and wax fruit.

Josh:

Now that was well written.

I think what Joyce has in common with much of the modern art & literature project is that he taps that niche of vanity in the modern psyche that says the inaccessible equates to the enlightened. If we can only crack the code, we'll achieve that higher level of cultural status that will set us apart from the masses.

I've taken about 3 stabs at getting through Ulysses, but like trying to get up a long, steep driveway covered with snow, my mental momentum was never enough to get me over the top.

I read for pleasure now.

OJ: I do not disagree with you concerning the literary merit (or lack thereof) of Mr. Joyce's book. However, claiming that the professoriat promotes him as an icon of modernism shows a shocking discontect with contemporary academia. Contemporary humanities faculties are post-modernists, do not "read" the works of DWEM, but deconstruct important culturanl works such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead.

At this point, we shall have to wait until the whole MLA sleeps with the fishes until anybody teaches any litererature again. By that time Joyce won't even be forgoten.