luka

Well-known member
If someone points out and explains an idea to me I csn go oh right, that's clever isn't it, but left to my own devices I'll do my best to ignore them
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
As far as I'm aware, all you'll really get from the Odyssey is that Stephen is Telemachus, living in a "palace" occupied by "usurpers". (Haines represents England, the great usurper of Irish rule.) His unforeseen mission in Ulysses will be to find a surrogate father (Bloom), as Telemachus's mission will be to find Odysseus and bring him home to destroy the suitors to his wife. (Bloom's wife is adulterous.)

There are some references to Homer in that chapter (the winedark sea).

There are differing views on how important the Homeric parallel is to Ulysses. Nabokov said that Joyce told him he wished the Homeric index had never been released, because it wasn't really all that important. OTOH, of course, it is CALLED "Ulysses"!
 

luka

Well-known member
Well there's as many ideas in uyleses as there are in gravitys rainbow if you want to look for them. Its your kinda book. Robert Anton Wilson is a good guide if you want to foreground that stuff and ignore the merely literary
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
My method for reading it, (or so I hope), will be to read it through, resigned to not understanding a lot of it, hopefully to enjoy it in spite of this ignorance, and to then revisit each section with some annotations to help me...

But let's say you take the Proteus section - which is Stephen's inner monologue. If you were to be able to read another person's thoughts, you'd not understand much of what they were thinking about. Especially if they were the sort of muddleheaded intellectual/aesthete that Stephen is supposed to be. In other words, while you can find out what is going on by consulting academic notes, you're not really necessarily SUPPOSED to understand it.
 

luka

Well-known member
Why didnt pynchon explain in the text that Tyrone Slothrop is an anagram of sloth and entropy or whatever you said it was? Cos he was being a smartarse and didn't want to spell it out. It spoils the game
 

jenks

thread death
On a Ulysses related note, i just read this
https://www.henninghamfamilypress.co.uk/books/dedalus-by-chris-mccabe/

you need to know your Joyce, but if you do it's very enjoyable.

Anybody read any Murnane? i have just started to get into him - I would have thought he might appeal to a few on here. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...ald-murnane-lost-genius-of-australian-letters

Also reading Murmur by Will Eaves - a fictionalised account of Turing's life which i'm really enjoying http://www.cbeditions.com/eaves3.html

Been reading lots of short story collections - Wendy Erskine, Samanta Schweblin, Grace Paley.
 

droid

Well-known member
Turns out, as part of my new job Im going to be attending all of the Joyce summer school events this year. Just met with the country's leading Joycean academic.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Reading "Hades" today (the funeral attended by Bloom and Stephen's father). Bloom's thoughts in the graveyard - ' Who passed away. Who departed this life. As if they did it of their own accord. Got the shove, all of them'. These are soliloquies, spoken by the characters to themselves, as in Shakespeare. (Bloom the materialist reminds me of Falstaff, without the cravenness. Stephen obviously like Hamlet, the self-torturing intellectual.)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Course it's just occurred that Bloom is also the gravedigger in 'Hamlet' in this scene.

As a matter of fact this has reminded me that Hades is a good bit in The Odyssey.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm sad because these stream of consciousness bits are so fantastic and I know pretty soon the books going to be swamped in parody. I say pretty soon, it might be a few hundred pages yet. It's one of those obvious things about Ulysses that I've always read but it is amazing how he made an epic out of one day in the life of two men and a woman. (And a city, and a universe.)
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
I finished Fanon's Black Skin White Masks this month. It's something I've been chipping away at and turned out to be v. stimulating and appreciable.

I'm now gonna piss that all away with reading a self-help book from a pro-wrestler. Because I'm all about balance.
 
Top