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"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 wron
by 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 agoAspired 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 agoLove loves to love love.
- adamwk 10y agoLet my country die for me.
- anonymousDan 10y agoI 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 agoI 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 agoThat'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 agoWell 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 agoI 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 agoBeing quotable would put Wilde above Joyce, which I don't think is right.
- mcguire 10y agoJudging by Wells' comments, you are in good company.
- drcross 10y agoI 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 agoI 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 agoIsn'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.