I know I go on and on about whatever is my favourite @ the time, and often I'm a bit pompous about it. Here's some more.
There is no question that my favourite piece of fiction is Ulysses. First time I read it was pretemps of 1994. It took 4.5 m to work it through, and I'll admit that oftentimes it was next to indecipherable. Don't get me wrong- I understood enough to declare it my favefiction, but it wasn't until I read the scholars takes and then the rereads. Again, simply put, its an amazing journey and one that I wish to take again many times before I die.
The book is written about a single day in Dublin, 1904. It's almost 800p long, and it's written in a dizzying array of styles. There are 18 different 'sections' - not proper chapters I don't think, but differing sections nonetheless. It was the strand section- not know the proper name rite now- where Bloom and Gerty have their......thoughts.......was the first section where I finally felt "OK, I know what's happening..."
However, for me (and Joyce!), it's the Ithica section that I love. Yes, it's inspired my own art, (and this post is a fucking) nudge to meself to finally get rid of it. Maybe next summer.
The Ithica section of Ulysses is written in a style that I was very very comfortable and familiar with: it's written in the question and answer style of a Catholic Catechism. These were books we studied with in grammar school. It was entirely made up a of questions like this made up one by me:
What are the two types of sin?
The two types of sin are Mortal and Venial.
How are the two types of sin different?
Mortal sins are sins of great magnitude....etc etc etc...........
The whole section is a series of questions and answers. Fex, here is one of my favourites in Ulysses, rite near the beginning of the chapter. The two main characters, Bloom (basically Joyce as the old man) and Stephen (Joyce as a young man) finally meet after coming close to each others paths for hundreds of pages. And shit, this really is what we've been waiting for- Stephen leaves the newspaper office as Bloom enters (or other way around?), they drink @ different bars, etc...... but finally, FINALLY they meet. continue their walking in Dublin, but this time home (well, after a drink @ that sailors stop- "I'm crossing yr bows, matey").
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Of what did the duumvirate deliberate during their itinerary?
Music, literature, Ireland, Dublin, Paris, friendship, woman, prostitution, diet, the influence of gaslight or the light of arc and glow lamps on the growth of adjoining paraheliotropic trees, exposed corporation emergency dustbuckets, the Roman catholic church, ecclesiastical celibacy, the Irish nation, jesuit education, careers, the study of medicine, the past day, the maleficent influence of the presabbath, Stephen's collapse.
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I just love the sequence of thought- from a general talking up of music to music on paper= literature. Then onto what they both were obsessed- Ireland. Then onto where Stephen had come back from- Paris, also a capitol city. Then the sequence I love= friendship (yes, and in those listing of lines you know it- Stephen and Bloom are now frenz), then naturally to woman- yes, they are our frenz, but what else did they represent to these two? Prostitutes!! And then these fucked up types discuss diet next.
I love it.
The summer of 1994 was a very powerful one. My Dad had died the previous year, I'd just finished student teaching, we were playing soccer in the park all the time, and I read two of the most influential books I've ever read; Ulysses and Face of Battle. The fiction of the pair taught me (again) about how far art can be out there yet still pack a stunningly deadly punch. The Non fiction of the two taught me that the subject of war was as valid a topic of scholarly interst as = well, Ulysses. From that summer on, it didn't have to floow the rules of grammer, it didn't have to just be about Midway batlle of, it didn't have to not be about the smell of shit rising to the nostrils...........all is all is all is art, and all of it is totally legimate to be studied. My 'self hating' graduate self could now glory in the difference between Line and Column, really really think about what soldiers did in combat- meaning, how did they sleep? How did they feel in combat? And the most mundane things about life-- that sitting on the toilet bit I like so much-- is all high art. The elevation of Bloom- as everyhuman, and as all of us-- to a god state now to me so obvious. It's obvious in one line from The Strand section. Sometime in a few months, @ my pace.
Well, Jesus jumped down from heavan 'cause he wanted to be a man, rite? We are the gods. See- commies like Rosen and anticatholics like Joyce have made me try to be a better Catholic. And not be afraid to talk of bodily functions.
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That's my favourite picture of Joyce. When I saw it in '94, I immediatley got thrift store white pants and began dressing like him in this picture, sans eye patch. And it wasn't for not trying to get a patch that I never got one.
to-morrow, something on the Ithica section of James Joyces Ulysses - that's Joyces "Ithica", jus' warnin', not Hilts Ithica, which of course is a pale comparison, but still............I bet some of you will really like to read it.........
