8 ms·
Infinite Ulysses
- n0nick 12y agoWoah. When I last (tried to) start reading Ulysees, almost a year ago, I thought about this: An online "book club", allowing users to join in reading classics and participate in discussions on top of the text. That would have certainly helped me continue reading the book. Eventually I put the book back on the shelf, and wrote down the idea in my ~/ideas.md. Your 'read' page [1] is exactly as I pictured it. Looks like an interesting, important effort. Kudos! [1] http://www.infiniteulysses.com/ulysses/3 http://www.infiniteulysses.com/ulysses/3
- kenbellows 12y agoYou should ask for your royalties https://xkcd.com/827/ https://xkcd.com/827/
- rmc 12y agoOne tidbit of Ulysses is a character wonders if it's possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub. Using OpenStreetMap I figured out that it was http://www.kindle-maps.com/blog/how-to-walk-across-dublin-without-passing-a-pub-full-publess-route-here.html http://www.kindle-maps.com/blog/how-to-walk-across-dublin-wi...
- plug 12y agoHa, I love this so much. You'd be quite thirsty after a walk like that - good thing there are plenty of pubs on Baggot Street :)
- chippy 12y agoGreat piece of work. Four years later and many pubs must have closed...in the UK at least it has been that around 30-50 pubs closing every week. Perhaps there would be more alternative routes across Dublin today?
- rmc 12y agoProbably not. In Ireland pub licences are very restricted, and there are only so many. When a pub closes, a new one will buy the licence and move it elsewhere. Rural pubs do close in Ireland, but this route goes through central Dublin. If anything there aren't enough pubs there for the demand.
- ganeumann 12y agoSo you're saying the only way to walk across Dublin without passing a pub is to walk past the Guinness brewery? :)
- rmc 12y agoYou can't walk in there and have a pint! So it's OK IMO :)
- jamesdelaneyie 12y agoYou can at the Gravity Bar [0] but with this route you don't pass the entrance so it's all good :) [0] http://www.guinness-storehouse.com/en/Index.aspx http://www.guinness-storehouse.com/en/Index.aspx
- wjnc 12y agoLove the idea, and hope that it grows into something bigger. For any book of historic, literary or intellectual interest you often need notes, perspectives and connotations. Especially the older a work gets, for even things as the meaning or use of English words can change. For the best books you can sometimes buy annotated versions, but the Genius-approach of annotate anything lends itself particulary well to books. For now I fear only free books (like Ulysses) can be handled site that crowdsources annotations. But crowdsourced annotations on all books, provided you own a license to the work of some sort... wow.
- anonymousDan 12y agoWith regard to your point about the meaning or use of English words changing, after trying but failing to read Ulysses a few years ago I asked my Grandfather whether he had ever read it (he was born in 1914 and grew up in Dublin). He said he had read it a few times and didn't find it difficult to understand at all since most of the phrases and slang were things people said when he was growing up.
- wjnc 12y agoI have the same experience in trying to read the classic English philosophers. The language feels the same, but isn't. Funny thing is that you can find 'the Greeks / Germans / ..' in a side by side translation to modern English with notes, but that it doesn't exist for many of the classics. It's easier to get to understand Biggie than Thomas More (which I own in an ancient English translation of the Latin original, kind of my point...).
- cafard 12y ago"Sure I am that the signification of words in all languages, depending very much on the thoughts, notions, and ideas of him that uses them, must unavoidably be of great uncertainty to men of the same language and country. This is so evident in the Greek authors, that he that shall peruse their writings will find in almost every one of them, a distinct language, though the same words." John Locke, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Book II (On Words), Ch. IX, section 22
- dtf 12y agoFor anyone interested, this is a great, deep site with hyperlinked annotations. (Not crowdsourced in anyway, though) http://joyceproject.com/ http://joyceproject.com/ There's also a comic version: http://www.ulyssesseen.com/ http://www.ulyssesseen.com/
- pvitz 12y agoA comic version for the impatient: http://thattherepaul.com/features/uford.html http://thattherepaul.com/features/uford.html
- andybak 12y agoUlysses - the 'Trout Mask Replica' of the literary world
- griffinmahon 12y agoI like this a lot -- I love the idea of poring over Ulysses -- but the clicking on the reading page doesn't feel responsive enough for me and I wish annotations were displayed better (I'm used to Genius..)
- versk 12y agoTwo men stood at the verge of the cliff, watching: businessman, boatman. — She's making for Bullock harbour. The boatman nodded towards the north of the bay with some disdain. — There's five fathoms out there, he said. It'll be swept up that way when the tide comes in about one. It's nine days today The man that was drowned. A sail veering about the blank bay waiting for a swollen bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy face, salt white. Here I am. Nice website, if a little unresponsive. If it gets just one more person to crack Ulysses and discover the immense beauty of this extraordinary work than it has to have been worth it.
- leephillips 12y agoThis looks like a fun project about one of my half-dozen favorite novels of all time. Unfortunately, there is probably more garbage (explication, criticism) written about this book than any other, outside of Shakespeare. If you're hesitant to just dive in, I recommend Nabokov's Lectures on Literature (all the lectures are great; the one on Ulysses shows you the hidden machinery turning under the surface of the novel).
- cafard 12y agoWhen I first read it, years ago, I noticed Haynes's dictum that "Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of minds that have lost their balance.", and thought that perhaps it was Joyce's ambition to supplant Shakespeare in that role.
- cobralibre 12y agoSo I'll be the one to trot out the infamous quote: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant..." I'm personally distrustful of people who are temperamentally hostile to criticism, and I would think that self-described hackers would want to celebrate practices that seek to explain art rather than to shroud it in mystery. And Joyce's Ulysses has inspired some criticism that is literature in its own right, some obvious examples being Richard Ellmann's biography and at least half of Hugh Kenner's books.
- cafard 12y agoI am not at all hostile to criticism--I have, at a guess, seven of Kenner's books at home (and now that I think of it, wouldn't mind picking up Gnomon).
- ohjesusthatguy 12y agoKinda like (rap)genius, except with more overlapping "clever" people and a worse interface. EDIT: People beat me to the genius analogy. By hours.
- slashnull 12y agoI initially thought the "infinite" in the title referred to Infinite Jest. That would have been really wild...
- dannnn 12y agoIt may be a reference to Infinite Summer, which was a (more traditional) online book club a few years back reading Infinite Jest.
- calebm 12y agoI highly recommend the audiobook narrated by Jim Norton. Ulysses has a lot of difficult-to-parse writing (such as the last chapter having no punctuation); the audiobook removes that parsing difficulty. It's also a great performance!
- hackcasual 12y agoWow, apparently there are 2 Jim Norton's in the world. Would pay good money to listen to this one narrate Ulysses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ5DI0nD24U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ5DI0nD24U
- twoodfin 12y agoI'd recommend Frank Delaney's charming, paragraph-by-paragraph, bite-sized Re: Joyce podcast[1] and the excellent 1982 RTE dramatic radio broadcast[2] (also essentially unabridged). Many of the more difficult fragments of Ulysses are made much more lucid when read aloud, and it's a good trick to use while reading the book as well. [1] http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/ http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/ [2] https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook
- psychometry 12y agoFrom the title "Infinite Ulysses" I imagined an unending extension of the text of Ulysses using a Markov text generator. Perhaps that would be better suited for Finnegans Wake.
- cobralibre 12y agoBut since Finnegans Wake is structured as a loop, you wouldn't want to extend it from the end.
- kjs3 12y agoI'm pretty sure Joyce was a Markov bot.
- _abattoir 12y agoI was expecting some kind of mash-up or remix with David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.
- alphonse23 12y agoThis is obviously a home built website. Interesting to see their design choices...
- mark_l_watson 12y agoNeat idea. When I read Ulysses two years ago, I didn't really follow the whole plot but I did enjoy Joyce's writing a lot. BTW, I bought the audible version of Ulysses this year and I am slowing listening to it. Hearing a good narrator read the book is a very different experience than reading it.