10 ms·

Who the Hell Is This Joyce (1928)

163 points by samclemens 10y ago

mwfunk 10y ago
"My warmest wishes to you Joyce. I can’t follow your banner any more than you can follow mine. But the world is wide and there is room for both of us to be wrong." An admirable sentiment. I don't think the human mind (including mine) is capable of following it 100%, but I wish more people at least aspired to it, and fewer people saw it as a sign of weakness (which it is not, quite the opposite).
- CalChris 10y ago
  Aspired to it. I read The Dead and Portrait. But when it came to Ulysses it felt like I was aspiring to read it. Too much work and too little pleasure No one ever quotes Joyce. They allude to him. Maybe they're just further along that aspirational trail.
  - duaneb 10y ago
    Love loves to love love.
  - adamwk 10y ago
    Let my country die for me.
  - anonymousDan 10y ago
    I would encourage you to give Ulysses another go. I think there are a few chapters that are hard going at the start that put people off, but after about the third or fourth chapter it is a bit more digestible. Especially the one where he's getting the carriage to the graveyard. Another thing I found helpful was to read an edition with lots of footnotes explaining various obscure passages. You can even look up bits you find confusing online. It's more work than reading your average novel I'll grant you, but after finishing it every other novel I've read really made me appreciate the richness of the language in Ulysses.
    - andybak 10y ago
      I was once advised: 1. Don't be afraid to skip parts or start from the middle and jump around 2. Don't worry too much about it all fitting together - each small part is enjoyable even if you're not following that larger structure. Basically open a page at random and revel in it. It's potentially a lot of fun to read. I'll hasten to add that I personally haven't followed this advice. I gave my copy away before hearing it.
  - empath75 10y ago
    >Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo
    - zwischenzug 10y ago
      That's from portrait
  - jackfoxy 10y ago
    "Yes." (Couldn't resist that one.) Ulysses is a hard slog. That should be expected from someone who wrote one page per day. IIRC correctly Ulysses took 7 years, so Joyce apparently wasn't even writing every day. I read Sometimes a Great Notion soon after, and enjoyed Kesey's 3 months of effort more.
  - lbebber 10y ago
    Well being quotable is a thing on its own - you have to produce phrases that are witty, impactful, and, importantly, self-contained and short. That doesn't necessarily speaks to the quality of one's work.
  - thret 10y ago
    I adored Ulysses, it was Wake that drove me crazy. In the end I was forced to just speed read it and gather up whatever gems were offered on the surface (there were not many).
  - zwischenzug 10y ago
    'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' 'I fear those big words, which make us unhappy.' are two I've seen quoted.
  - rukuu001 10y ago
    Being quotable would put Wilde above Joyce, which I don't think is right.
  - mcguire 10y ago
    Judging by Wells' comments, you are in good company.
- drcross 10y ago
  I think you are selling everyone short. All accomplished people can recognise certain outstanding peers, appreciate their intelligence and yet have damning opinions on their particular set of principles. For me, it's the most refreshing thing in life; that someone can stay stedfast to their well-considered trajectory which may be perpendicular to your own.
  - hinkley 10y ago
    I think it's only healthy when you realize you work is accessible to a large but finite audience to accept that you don't speak to or on behalf of everyone. Appreciating the work of someone else with a large audience that largely does not overlap with your own is just respecting that divide all the more. Maybe you're both wrong and there's some third writer who everyone loves. But you know, being a writer with 'only' and audience numbered in the tens or hundreds of millions is a lot better than I'll ever manage. The projects I number as successes have had less than half as many users as that, and that's still an accomplishment most of us never achieve. I haven't done the things I hoped when I was 25 but I have done enough.
- duaneb 10y ago
  Isn't this just shine theory, albeit without the intent to support a minority? I don't think it is so hard for a human to recognize alternative forms of greatness.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pault 10y ago
> Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousand I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering? This is a perfect phrasing of my feelings about all postmodern literature. I tried so hard to get into Pynchon but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was the butt of an elaborate practical joke.
- lucidone 10y ago
  I had this same problem with Pynchon. Try David Foster Wallace, much more approachable.
  - officemonkey 10y ago
    Try reading "Inherent Vice." It barely reads like Pynchon. Or rather it's Pynchon writing the Big Lebowski like Raymond Chandler would, if Raymond Chandler were a hippie.
    - labster 10y ago
      I don't even know what this means but I'm upvoting it anyway!
- sverige 10y ago
  That feeling may come from looking for meaning or trying to make sense of it. That's the conclusion I reached, anyway, after reading V and Gravity's Rainbow, anyway. And one other -- Vineland, that was it. I love Dubliners by Joyce, but the later stuff? I'd sooner read The Sound and the Fury again, but only if published with the different color inks Faulkner wanted.
  - reltuk 10y ago
    Good news for you, if you're willing to spring for it: http://www.foliosociety.com/book/SAE/sound-fury-william-faulkner http://www.foliosociety.com/book/SAE/sound-fury-william-faul...
barrkel 10y ago
The font in this article is nigh-on unreadable on Firefox on Windows. It renders perfectly legibly in Chrome and IE11, but on Firefox it is so faint and the forms so small that they get lost in the anti-aliasing. The kerning seems quite bad too. Here's what I mean: http://imgur.com/a/ymnvH http://imgur.com/a/ymnvH Seems like a regression, as usually Chrome's font rendering is much uglier on Windows. (Sorry for off-topic post.)
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  Those two screenshots are actually using different fonts (you can tell by the shape of the bottom part of the 'g', for example: in one screenshot it's the same width as the top part, but in the other it's wider). Chances are, this is a difference in what the different browsers do with the "garamond-premier-pro" font family name and which font they actually end up using when that's specified. Any chance you could confirm that?
greydius 10y ago
This is a nice reminder that we don't have to make enemies out of those that disagree with us.
ktRolster 10y ago
"Your last two works have been more amusing and exciting to write than they will ever be to read." Ouch.
- icantdrive55 10y ago
  That's the one that caught my attention too. There have been times where I try to get into a book, and if I even get the hint the writer is filling up pages with overly complex flowery prose; I immediately put the book down. I always assumed it was just because I wasen't a natural reader. I've actually stayed away from a lot of classical literature, because I just couldn't get into the books. I have been completely wrong though. I remember reading Nabrakov's Lolita years after I suffered through those English/Lit. courses. I do wish my instructors felt it was safe reading back then, or they weren't afraid of getting fired for assigning this book. That book really changed my view on lituraure. I remember reading the book, and every sentance, paragraph just flowed. I remember being shocked at the subject matter, and wondering if that was clouding my judgement, and honestly I'm still not sure. After that book, I bought all his books, and haven't completely finished one. I think it's more due to my unnatural reading ability though. I college, I saved up most of my required English/lit. classes for my last semester year in college--out of fear. I do know I felt traumatized by my English 101 instructor. He would rip apart my writing with that red pen. He would have me read my horrid papers in front of the class, and public speaking was my worst fear. He once, in a round about way, accused me of plagiarism--because he had to ask his wife what an amygdala was, and "How did You come up with that idea for a paper?" In the end, he did give me a B, but I was really affected by that class. I used to enjoy writing before his class. It's funny how one teacher can stifle a young student's enthusiasm. I had a girlfriend in a different English class, directly across from my classroom, at the same time of day. The doors were always open. I could hear her instructor because he had a loud voice. I would write down what that teacher had to say--stuff like funneling paragraphs, and not being to wordy, etc. I learned more about writing from her teacher than mine. And as usual, I rambled on to long, but if you don't quite get what's so great about seemingly dry old books, give Lotita a shot.
  - CalChris 10y ago
briansteffens 10y ago
I agree with a lot of what he's saying, but at the same time, why does it matter? Does every book need to be easily enjoyable as light reading by anyone who is literate? Joyce was highly educated and exceedingly well-read, and he wrote (in his later works especially) for an audience similar to himself on those points. The only downside is it limits his potential audience, similar to how a writer of obscure fanfiction or someone who blogs about niche subjects limits their own potential audience. His particular niche was writing for literature nerds.
- stepvhen 10y ago
  But Finnegans Wake isnt difficult like Pynchon or Gaddis, who have tons of characters and complex plot devices and rich narrative. It is syntactically erratic and full of "puns" and "wordplay" whose existence the reader is forever aware of but cannot understand without countless hours more poured into the supporting literature. It is not an awful experience but you do not get out what you put in, unlike other difficult authors.
eliben 10y ago
> Your last two works have been more amusing and exciting to write than they will ever be to read. Oh how true for so much code, unfortunately.
- hinkley 10y ago
  Haha, I came to say exactly the same thing. I'll have to save that line for some code reviews.
Mz 10y ago
Sorry, the title missed the bigger draw for me: This was written by H.G. Wells! The title should make that clear. This was not just anyone asking "Who the hell is this Joyce...?"
- dang 10y ago
  HN tries to de-emphasize authors in titles. The year should be in there, though, to cue the reader that it's probably a historically interesting author. We'll add that.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    I really wish you wouldn't, though I can see some of the merits of this. Fact is, reputation does matter. I disagree strongly with publications that do this, most especially for current works. The Economist doesn't have bylines at all (and have an explainer for this, which utterly fails to persuade -- the less charitable explanation is that many of the stories are written by young recent grads with little actual depth and who wouldn't be considered other than the publication's umbrella branding), The Register omits bylines from its overview page, though they're featured on articles themselves. Arguably the justification is the inverse of The Economist's.
    - dang 10y ago
      That analogy doesn't hold up because HN isn't a publication, it's a list of links. It's nearly always trivial to figure out who the author of a post is. The question is whether that should be emphasized in the title, and HN's traditional default is no. Putting the emphasis on content rather than personalities seems to produce better discussion.
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        As I said, I understand your reasoning (your description is as I'd thought it would be). I disagree with it. Arguing over whether or not HN is a publication is awfully semantic. At the very least, it's a publication of links and the commentary of them. So we disagree there as well, though that's not particularly material. There's a deeper issue of reputation, credibility, consequences, and more, that matter. This ties strongly into my "Big Questions" re-asking (submitted an hour or so back), and a suggestion from Ted Lemon in 2015: that a very large part of the addressible problem we're facing is the noosphere -- a superset of media, all of human thought. There's something very broken (and some terrifying consequences) to how ideas are created, propagated, (or propagandised), distorted, mistated, etc. I'm not sure how to fix this. I'm not sure that it's fixable. When I first started studying science -- in primary school -- I found the mentions of scientists names and such to be distractions. Shouldn't the ideas matter more than the person who had them? I've completely reversed my thinking, because it seems to me impossible to consider an idea without understanding the context within it, and context matters. The person themselves matters. I've been thinking a lot about reputation, identity, and community, particularly regards my recent experiences with Imzy, and constrasting that to other spaces. In particular, identity IS reputation in a whole lot of ways -- starting with the etymologies of "fame", "reputation", "fame", "honor". Fully anonymity is also full impunity, and at least my experiences elsewhere suggest that works poorly. I've contrasted that strongly to HN's practices and results. Even where I don't always agree, or find elements frustrating, one thing HN does is, generally, allow tensions to dissipate fairly quickly, through UI/UX (including some of the annoying or missing elements of it), moderation, examples set, and more. I realise that offering authors names risks a cult of personality. At the same time, some good (and bad) reputations are well deserved. Electronic communications generally strip away many of the normal social queues. Stripping away the few that are left, most especially authorship, strikes me as heading the wrong way. I'm a fan of Jakob Nielsen's microcontent guidance. I'm also increasingly convinced that not offering users tools to quantify and qualify the content they access online is a tremendous failing of present tools. I've a limited capacity to really process information and messages, various sources (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg, NY Times moderation desk) suggest ~150 - 300 emails, ~800 comment moderations, are about the upper limit of what someone can sustainably absorb or process per day, over the long term. And that is if this is their full-time job. If you're looking at assimilating quality and complex information, the count's likely far lower. As such: cues to quality, including reputation and identity, matter.
l33tbro 10y ago
Great post. In fact, this is the perfect article to counter the fist-shaking cries of "Why is this article posted on Hacker News?" The take-aways from this article are so broad that they are applicable to many disciplines, especially coding, technology, and entrepreneurship. Here we have two writers with very different ends. Joyce, the great poker of form, who must have mildly infuriated the utilitarian and reductive sensibilities of Wells. The letter makes me reflect on the tensions of my own life between engaging in more experimental flights of fancy (where I'm making something I really love) and, conversely, asking myself if other people may actually find value in what I'm doing. Either way, I find articles like this much more insightful than another Iphone headphone jack op-ed or whispers from the Elon Musk rumour mill.
- f_allwein 10y ago
  exactly. It also reminded me of Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts - if nothing else, Joyce definitely represented a new paradigm, so representatives of the old would have scorned/ not understood him. Does not make his work better or worse, but explains why radically new approaches often meet with scepticism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
- dev1n 10y ago
  There was a time where HN front page was 50% philosophical literature and 50% tech news. I miss articles like this.
- andybak 10y ago
  > who must have mildly infuriated the utilitarian and reductive sensibilities of Wells. I get the feeling you came away siding with Joyce. I came away with hugely increased respect for Wells (who I didn't know a huge amount about going into this). Maybe I'm reading too much into your comment but 'utilitarian and reductive' seemed faintly damning whereas I was surprised how deeply he was considering the role of his work in relation to society and how nuanced his challenge to Joyce was. Especially for a 'mere' science fiction writer...
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blazespin 10y ago
I would never ever read finnegan's wake. Honestly, I can't imagine why anyone in their right mind would except perhaps literary scientists. But to put finnegan's wake on the stereo or headphones while working out or doing a fanstatic hike or sailing or whatever is an incredible experience that I have always been grateful for. I encourage everyone to do it. HG wells, however, on the other hand is something you'd want to sit down and read because he kills his darlings with the idea that his readers will sit down and read it. Not just let it waft over them and permeate their subconscious. Finnegan's wake is wonderful mental music. BTW, Joyce wrote portrait of an artist as a young man, which is a really great read and a must for anyone with a literary / artistic bent.
- johnloeber 10y ago
  Listening to FW is a superb idea, especially because the text takes onomatopoeia to its limits and contains a plethora of multilingual puns. It's meant to be read aloud. I'm guessing that the stream-of-consciousness style lends itself especially well to audio that you can lose yourself in, which is great for running etc.
  - twoodfin 10y ago
    Can anyone recommend a good unabridged reading of the Wake? By the way, the Irish RTE radio (unabridged!) production of Ulysses is wonderful. https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook
    - reltuk 10y ago
      When I saw this question, I went to find a link so that I could recommend Patrick Healy's reading. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it now available for free on the internet. It's quite rushed and somewhat flat at parts. Some of the abridged recordings I've listened to do more justice to the excerpts they've chosen. But it's a heroic effort none the less. For me, it made the full Wake accessible and alive in a way that made me really enjoy spending time with it.
awclives 10y ago
Any Joyce or Wells lovers here may like Jupiter, an app my team built. We are clearly biased, but we think that Jupiter is the best way to read the classics. It allows you to highlight your favorite parts, and share magic links like this one to a great line from Dubliners: https://jupiter.ai/books/Q9bx/?hl=Oze https://jupiter.ai/books/Q9bx/?hl=Oze As expected, the reading experience is great in the iPhone app and necessarily not great in the browser. Here's the app store link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jupiter-read-highlight-classic/id1121414981?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jupiter-read-highlight-class...
Hondor 10y ago
A great example of the complaint writing process of beginning and ending with a compliment and sandwiching the criticism in the middle. Allowing him to get away with "Your mental existence is obsessed by a monstrous system of contradictions." and still not being too personally offensive.
pmoriarty 10y ago
Virginia Woolf called Joyce's Ulysses the work of "a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples."
Tycho 10y ago
What makes this so great is that it's private correspondence, unburdened by any audience except the recipient. It's hard to imagine such frankness in a contemporary NY Times column, with the usual liberal/progressive/SJW sycophancy at work. You wouldn't get lines like You began Catholic, that is to say you began with a system of values in stark opposition to reality.
smcnally 10y ago
"Your last two works have been more amusing and exciting to write than they will ever be to read." is a good zinger, and likely true in mnay cases
ap22213 10y ago
It's revealing that Wells made this letter to Joyce and not the other way around. To the artist, the audience only becomes important when they're either a patron or a subject. And, even then, they often don't matter much. But, to Wells, the audience is the purpose - and his work, a product. To consume art is to allow oneself to momentarily seep into the mind of another. And, if done with 'soul' unshielded and open, it's one of the most intimate actions possible for a sentient being like a Human who is eternally imprisoned within a vessel of imperfect sensors. Joyce is an artist. And, to read him - well, the experience may not be enjoyable - it may actually be uncomfortable, painful or even bizarre or alien. But, it's what he is.

163 points by samclemens 10y ago

"My warmest wishes to you Joyce. I can’t follow your banner any more than you can follow mine. But the world is wide and there is room for both of us to be wrong." An admirable sentiment. I don't think the human mind (including mine) is capable of following it 100%, but I wish more people at least aspired to it, and fewer people saw it as a sign of weakness (which it is not, quite the opposite).

CalChris 10y ago
Aspired to it. I read The Dead and Portrait. But when it came to Ulysses it felt like I was aspiring to read it. Too much work and too little pleasure No one ever quotes Joyce. They allude to him. Maybe they're just further along that aspirational trail.
- duaneb 10y ago
  Love loves to love love.
- adamwk 10y ago
  Let my country die for me.
- anonymousDan 10y ago
  I would encourage you to give Ulysses another go. I think there are a few chapters that are hard going at the start that put people off, but after about the third or fourth chapter it is a bit more digestible. Especially the one where he's getting the carriage to the graveyard. Another thing I found helpful was to read an edition with lots of footnotes explaining various obscure passages. You can even look up bits you find confusing online. It's more work than reading your average novel I'll grant you, but after finishing it every other novel I've read really made me appreciate the richness of the language in Ulysses.
  - andybak 10y ago
    I was once advised: 1. Don't be afraid to skip parts or start from the middle and jump around 2. Don't worry too much about it all fitting together - each small part is enjoyable even if you're not following that larger structure. Basically open a page at random and revel in it. It's potentially a lot of fun to read. I'll hasten to add that I personally haven't followed this advice. I gave my copy away before hearing it.
- empath75 10y ago
  >Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo
  - zwischenzug 10y ago
    That's from portrait
- jackfoxy 10y ago
  "Yes." (Couldn't resist that one.) Ulysses is a hard slog. That should be expected from someone who wrote one page per day. IIRC correctly Ulysses took 7 years, so Joyce apparently wasn't even writing every day. I read Sometimes a Great Notion soon after, and enjoyed Kesey's 3 months of effort more.
- lbebber 10y ago
  Well being quotable is a thing on its own - you have to produce phrases that are witty, impactful, and, importantly, self-contained and short. That doesn't necessarily speaks to the quality of one's work.
- thret 10y ago
  I adored Ulysses, it was Wake that drove me crazy. In the end I was forced to just speed read it and gather up whatever gems were offered on the surface (there were not many).
- zwischenzug 10y ago
  'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' 'I fear those big words, which make us unhappy.' are two I've seen quoted.
- rukuu001 10y ago
  Being quotable would put Wilde above Joyce, which I don't think is right.
- mcguire 10y ago
  Judging by Wells' comments, you are in good company.
drcross 10y ago
I think you are selling everyone short. All accomplished people can recognise certain outstanding peers, appreciate their intelligence and yet have damning opinions on their particular set of principles. For me, it's the most refreshing thing in life; that someone can stay stedfast to their well-considered trajectory which may be perpendicular to your own.
- hinkley 10y ago
  I think it's only healthy when you realize you work is accessible to a large but finite audience to accept that you don't speak to or on behalf of everyone. Appreciating the work of someone else with a large audience that largely does not overlap with your own is just respecting that divide all the more. Maybe you're both wrong and there's some third writer who everyone loves. But you know, being a writer with 'only' and audience numbered in the tens or hundreds of millions is a lot better than I'll ever manage. The projects I number as successes have had less than half as many users as that, and that's still an accomplishment most of us never achieve. I haven't done the things I hoped when I was 25 but I have done enough.
duaneb 10y ago
Isn't this just shine theory, albeit without the intent to support a minority? I don't think it is so hard for a human to recognize alternative forms of greatness.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

pault 10y ago

> Who the hell is this Joyce who demands so many waking hours of the few thousand I have still to live for a proper appreciation of his quirks and fancies and flashes of rendering? This is a perfect phrasing of my feelings about all postmodern literature. I tried so hard to get into Pynchon but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was the butt of an elaborate practical joke.

lucidone 10y ago
I had this same problem with Pynchon. Try David Foster Wallace, much more approachable.
- officemonkey 10y ago
  Try reading "Inherent Vice." It barely reads like Pynchon. Or rather it's Pynchon writing the Big Lebowski like Raymond Chandler would, if Raymond Chandler were a hippie.
  - labster 10y ago
    I don't even know what this means but I'm upvoting it anyway!
sverige 10y ago
That feeling may come from looking for meaning or trying to make sense of it. That's the conclusion I reached, anyway, after reading V and Gravity's Rainbow, anyway. And one other -- Vineland, that was it. I love Dubliners by Joyce, but the later stuff? I'd sooner read The Sound and the Fury again, but only if published with the different color inks Faulkner wanted.
- reltuk 10y ago
  Good news for you, if you're willing to spring for it: http://www.foliosociety.com/book/SAE/sound-fury-william-faulkner http://www.foliosociety.com/book/SAE/sound-fury-william-faul...

barrkel 10y ago

The font in this article is nigh-on unreadable on Firefox on Windows. It renders perfectly legibly in Chrome and IE11, but on Firefox it is so faint and the forms so small that they get lost in the anti-aliasing. The kerning seems quite bad too. Here's what I mean: http://imgur.com/a/ymnvH http://imgur.com/a/ymnvH Seems like a regression, as usually Chrome's font rendering is much uglier on Windows. (Sorry for off-topic post.)

bzbarsky 10y ago
Those two screenshots are actually using different fonts (you can tell by the shape of the bottom part of the 'g', for example: in one screenshot it's the same width as the top part, but in the other it's wider). Chances are, this is a difference in what the different browsers do with the "garamond-premier-pro" font family name and which font they actually end up using when that's specified. Any chance you could confirm that?

greydius 10y ago

This is a nice reminder that we don't have to make enemies out of those that disagree with us.

ktRolster 10y ago

"Your last two works have been more amusing and exciting to write than they will ever be to read." Ouch.

icantdrive55 10y ago
That's the one that caught my attention too. There have been times where I try to get into a book, and if I even get the hint the writer is filling up pages with overly complex flowery prose; I immediately put the book down. I always assumed it was just because I wasen't a natural reader. I've actually stayed away from a lot of classical literature, because I just couldn't get into the books. I have been completely wrong though. I remember reading Nabrakov's Lolita years after I suffered through those English/Lit. courses. I do wish my instructors felt it was safe reading back then, or they weren't afraid of getting fired for assigning this book. That book really changed my view on lituraure. I remember reading the book, and every sentance, paragraph just flowed. I remember being shocked at the subject matter, and wondering if that was clouding my judgement, and honestly I'm still not sure. After that book, I bought all his books, and haven't completely finished one. I think it's more due to my unnatural reading ability though. I college, I saved up most of my required English/lit. classes for my last semester year in college--out of fear. I do know I felt traumatized by my English 101 instructor. He would rip apart my writing with that red pen. He would have me read my horrid papers in front of the class, and public speaking was my worst fear. He once, in a round about way, accused me of plagiarism--because he had to ask his wife what an amygdala was, and "How did You come up with that idea for a paper?" In the end, he did give me a B, but I was really affected by that class. I used to enjoy writing before his class. It's funny how one teacher can stifle a young student's enthusiasm. I had a girlfriend in a different English class, directly across from my classroom, at the same time of day. The doors were always open. I could hear her instructor because he had a loud voice. I would write down what that teacher had to say--stuff like funneling paragraphs, and not being to wordy, etc. I learned more about writing from her teacher than mine. And as usual, I rambled on to long, but if you don't quite get what's so great about seemingly dry old books, give Lotita a shot.
- CalChris 10y ago

briansteffens 10y ago

I agree with a lot of what he's saying, but at the same time, why does it matter? Does every book need to be easily enjoyable as light reading by anyone who is literate? Joyce was highly educated and exceedingly well-read, and he wrote (in his later works especially) for an audience similar to himself on those points. The only downside is it limits his potential audience, similar to how a writer of obscure fanfiction or someone who blogs about niche subjects limits their own potential audience. His particular niche was writing for literature nerds.

stepvhen 10y ago
But Finnegans Wake isnt difficult like Pynchon or Gaddis, who have tons of characters and complex plot devices and rich narrative. It is syntactically erratic and full of "puns" and "wordplay" whose existence the reader is forever aware of but cannot understand without countless hours more poured into the supporting literature. It is not an awful experience but you do not get out what you put in, unlike other difficult authors.

eliben 10y ago

> Your last two works have been more amusing and exciting to write than they will ever be to read. Oh how true for so much code, unfortunately.

hinkley 10y ago
Haha, I came to say exactly the same thing. I'll have to save that line for some code reviews.

Mz 10y ago

Sorry, the title missed the bigger draw for me: This was written by H.G. Wells! The title should make that clear. This was not just anyone asking "Who the hell is this Joyce...?"

dang 10y ago
HN tries to de-emphasize authors in titles. The year should be in there, though, to cue the reader that it's probably a historically interesting author. We'll add that.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  I really wish you wouldn't, though I can see some of the merits of this. Fact is, reputation does matter. I disagree strongly with publications that do this, most especially for current works. The Economist doesn't have bylines at all (and have an explainer for this, which utterly fails to persuade -- the less charitable explanation is that many of the stories are written by young recent grads with little actual depth and who wouldn't be considered other than the publication's umbrella branding), The Register omits bylines from its overview page, though they're featured on articles themselves. Arguably the justification is the inverse of The Economist's.
  - dang 10y ago
    That analogy doesn't hold up because HN isn't a publication, it's a list of links. It's nearly always trivial to figure out who the author of a post is. The question is whether that should be emphasized in the title, and HN's traditional default is no. Putting the emphasis on content rather than personalities seems to produce better discussion.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      As I said, I understand your reasoning (your description is as I'd thought it would be). I disagree with it. Arguing over whether or not HN is a publication is awfully semantic. At the very least, it's a publication of links and the commentary of them. So we disagree there as well, though that's not particularly material. There's a deeper issue of reputation, credibility, consequences, and more, that matter. This ties strongly into my "Big Questions" re-asking (submitted an hour or so back), and a suggestion from Ted Lemon in 2015: that a very large part of the addressible problem we're facing is the noosphere -- a superset of media, all of human thought. There's something very broken (and some terrifying consequences) to how ideas are created, propagated, (or propagandised), distorted, mistated, etc. I'm not sure how to fix this. I'm not sure that it's fixable. When I first started studying science -- in primary school -- I found the mentions of scientists names and such to be distractions. Shouldn't the ideas matter more than the person who had them? I've completely reversed my thinking, because it seems to me impossible to consider an idea without understanding the context within it, and context matters. The person themselves matters. I've been thinking a lot about reputation, identity, and community, particularly regards my recent experiences with Imzy, and constrasting that to other spaces. In particular, identity IS reputation in a whole lot of ways -- starting with the etymologies of "fame", "reputation", "fame", "honor". Fully anonymity is also full impunity, and at least my experiences elsewhere suggest that works poorly. I've contrasted that strongly to HN's practices and results. Even where I don't always agree, or find elements frustrating, one thing HN does is, generally, allow tensions to dissipate fairly quickly, through UI/UX (including some of the annoying or missing elements of it), moderation, examples set, and more. I realise that offering authors names risks a cult of personality. At the same time, some good (and bad) reputations are well deserved. Electronic communications generally strip away many of the normal social queues. Stripping away the few that are left, most especially authorship, strikes me as heading the wrong way. I'm a fan of Jakob Nielsen's microcontent guidance. I'm also increasingly convinced that not offering users tools to quantify and qualify the content they access online is a tremendous failing of present tools. I've a limited capacity to really process information and messages, various sources (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg, NY Times moderation desk) suggest ~150 - 300 emails, ~800 comment moderations, are about the upper limit of what someone can sustainably absorb or process per day, over the long term. And that is if this is their full-time job. If you're looking at assimilating quality and complex information, the count's likely far lower. As such: cues to quality, including reputation and identity, matter.

l33tbro 10y ago

Great post. In fact, this is the perfect article to counter the fist-shaking cries of "Why is this article posted on Hacker News?" The take-aways from this article are so broad that they are applicable to many disciplines, especially coding, technology, and entrepreneurship. Here we have two writers with very different ends. Joyce, the great poker of form, who must have mildly infuriated the utilitarian and reductive sensibilities of Wells. The letter makes me reflect on the tensions of my own life between engaging in more experimental flights of fancy (where I'm making something I really love) and, conversely, asking myself if other people may actually find value in what I'm doing. Either way, I find articles like this much more insightful than another Iphone headphone jack op-ed or whispers from the Elon Musk rumour mill.

f_allwein 10y ago
exactly. It also reminded me of Thomas Kuhn's idea of paradigm shifts - if nothing else, Joyce definitely represented a new paradigm, so representatives of the old would have scorned/ not understood him. Does not make his work better or worse, but explains why radically new approaches often meet with scepticism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
dev1n 10y ago
There was a time where HN front page was 50% philosophical literature and 50% tech news. I miss articles like this.
andybak 10y ago
> who must have mildly infuriated the utilitarian and reductive sensibilities of Wells. I get the feeling you came away siding with Joyce. I came away with hugely increased respect for Wells (who I didn't know a huge amount about going into this). Maybe I'm reading too much into your comment but 'utilitarian and reductive' seemed faintly damning whereas I was surprised how deeply he was considering the role of his work in relation to society and how nuanced his challenge to Joyce was. Especially for a 'mere' science fiction writer...
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blazespin 10y ago

I would never ever read finnegan's wake. Honestly, I can't imagine why anyone in their right mind would except perhaps literary scientists. But to put finnegan's wake on the stereo or headphones while working out or doing a fanstatic hike or sailing or whatever is an incredible experience that I have always been grateful for. I encourage everyone to do it. HG wells, however, on the other hand is something you'd want to sit down and read because he kills his darlings with the idea that his readers will sit down and read it. Not just let it waft over them and permeate their subconscious. Finnegan's wake is wonderful mental music. BTW, Joyce wrote portrait of an artist as a young man, which is a really great read and a must for anyone with a literary / artistic bent.

johnloeber 10y ago
Listening to FW is a superb idea, especially because the text takes onomatopoeia to its limits and contains a plethora of multilingual puns. It's meant to be read aloud. I'm guessing that the stream-of-consciousness style lends itself especially well to audio that you can lose yourself in, which is great for running etc.
- twoodfin 10y ago
  Can anyone recommend a good unabridged reading of the Wake? By the way, the Irish RTE radio (unabridged!) production of Ulysses is wonderful. https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook
  - reltuk 10y ago
    When I saw this question, I went to find a link so that I could recommend Patrick Healy's reading. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it now available for free on the internet. It's quite rushed and somewhat flat at parts. Some of the abridged recordings I've listened to do more justice to the excerpts they've chosen. But it's a heroic effort none the less. For me, it made the full Wake accessible and alive in a way that made me really enjoy spending time with it.

awclives 10y ago

Any Joyce or Wells lovers here may like Jupiter, an app my team built. We are clearly biased, but we think that Jupiter is the best way to read the classics. It allows you to highlight your favorite parts, and share magic links like this one to a great line from Dubliners: https://jupiter.ai/books/Q9bx/?hl=Oze https://jupiter.ai/books/Q9bx/?hl=Oze As expected, the reading experience is great in the iPhone app and necessarily not great in the browser. Here's the app store link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jupiter-read-highlight-classic/id1121414981?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/jupiter-read-highlight-class...

Hondor 10y ago

A great example of the complaint writing process of beginning and ending with a compliment and sandwiching the criticism in the middle. Allowing him to get away with "Your mental existence is obsessed by a monstrous system of contradictions." and still not being too personally offensive.

pmoriarty 10y ago

Virginia Woolf called Joyce's Ulysses the work of "a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples."

Tycho 10y ago

What makes this so great is that it's private correspondence, unburdened by any audience except the recipient. It's hard to imagine such frankness in a contemporary NY Times column, with the usual liberal/progressive/SJW sycophancy at work. You wouldn't get lines like You began Catholic, that is to say you began with a system of values in stark opposition to reality.

smcnally 10y ago

"Your last two works have been more amusing and exciting to write than they will ever be to read." is a good zinger, and likely true in mnay cases

ap22213 10y ago

It's revealing that Wells made this letter to Joyce and not the other way around. To the artist, the audience only becomes important when they're either a patron or a subject. And, even then, they often don't matter much. But, to Wells, the audience is the purpose - and his work, a product. To consume art is to allow oneself to momentarily seep into the mind of another. And, if done with 'soul' unshielded and open, it's one of the most intimate actions possible for a sentient being like a Human who is eternally imprisoned within a vessel of imperfect sensors. Joyce is an artist. And, to read him - well, the experience may not be enjoyable - it may actually be uncomfortable, painful or even bizarre or alien. But, it's what he is.