Happy Bloomsday, Everyone

Posted: Tue 16 Jun 2009 5 13 pm

To all lovers of literature:

Today, the 16th of June, is "Bloomsday," the day when most of the events in James Joyce's 1922 novel ULYSSES take place.

Most of the novel takes place exactly 105 years ago, in 1904.

So, a Happy Bloomsday to everyone who loves literature!

Very Happy

Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: North of Watford

And a happy Bloomsday to you too, JP.

I was just thinking that it was time I had a re-read.

Spartacus

Posted: Tue 16 Jun 2009 9 38 pm

Happy Bloomsday JP.

Do they do Bloomsday cards yet?

Posted: Wed 17 Jun 2009 8 20 pm

I'm sure they do, somewhere!

Posted: Fri 19 Jun 2009 8 25 pm

JP, you have aroused my (easily aroused!) feelings of inadequacy. But, confession is good for the soul, they say!

(whispers) I have never read Ulysses. Embarassed

BUT ... today I downloaded the work onto my e-reader and (once I have finished my mindless Sci-Fi trilogy) I shall read it forthwith.

Anyone else want to own up?

Posted: Fri 19 Jun 2009 8 48 pm

Bestbear wrote:

Anyone else want to own up?

Yep.

Joined: 03 Jan 2006 Posts: 593

I've never read it either.

Can't say I'm embarrassed by the fact though. To each his own.

Posted: Sat 20 Jun 2009 4 39 pm

I started it today, and so far I am not enjoying it at all. Crying or Very sad

Joined: 13 Aug 2005 Posts: 2902

Bestbear wrote:

Anyone else want to own up?

It's not a book I've particularly been inclined to read, I have to say.

Posted: Sat 20 Jun 2009 5 03 pm

tjwmason wrote:

Bestbear wrote:

Anyone else want to own up?

It's not a book I've particularly been inclined to read, I have to say.

Now I AM surprised! Without a shred of irony, and meaning nothing but genuine respect, I thought TJ was one of those here I expected to have covered all the "must read" classics.

So far, I have to admit, I am far from gripped. What is the attraction, JP? Wink

Joined: 13 Aug 2005 Posts: 2902

Bestbear wrote:

tjwmason wrote:

Bestbear wrote:

Anyone else want to own up?

It's not a book I've particularly been inclined to read, I have to say.

Now I AM surprised! Without a shred of irony, and meaning nothing but genuine respect, I thought TJ was one of those here I expected to have covered all the "must read" classics.

You forget Besty, I'm too arrogant to let the '60s pseudo-establishment tell me what is "must read" and not.

Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: North of Watford

tjwmason wrote:

Bestbear wrote:

tjwmason wrote:

Bestbear wrote:

Anyone else want to own up?

It's not a book I've particularly been inclined to read, I have to say.

Now I AM surprised! Without a shred of irony, and meaning nothing but genuine respect, I thought TJ was one of those here I expected to have covered all the "must read" classics.

You forget Besty, I'm too arrogant to let the '60s pseudo-establishment tell me what is "must read" and not.

Not quite sure how that applies, tjw. In my case, the writer who encouraged me to read Joyce was Anthony Burgess, by no means an "establishment" anything.

I think that both he and Joyce would have been most insulted by the idea! Wink

My recollection is that, like Eliot, Hesse and Larkin, the three other great favourites of my university days. Joyce was regarded with great suspicion -if not derision - by the campus Marxists whose philosophy (though some would find it hard to believe) I never shared... Wink

Spartacus

Joined: 18 Sep 2007 Posts: 1801

I read it in a lit course in college.

It is all about queers. Don't waste your time on it.

Joined: 18 Sep 2007 Posts: 1801

Bestbear wrote:

BUT ... today I downloaded the work onto my e-reader and (once I have finished my mindless Sci-Fi trilogy) I shall read it forthwith.

I am reading a Sci Fi trilogy myself.

It is the "Island in the Sea of Time" series by SM Stirling.

The island and population of Nantucket is swept back into time in the year 1250 BC.

It is all about them surviving and exploring the world of 3,000 years ago.

Posted: Mon 22 Jun 2009 9 23 am

I soon realised the book is about gentlemen who prefer gentlemen, Gator ... but do they ever do anything interesting? Does anything interesting ever happen to them? I shall waste a bit more time, probably finding out that the answer is "no!". Wink

I am re-reading the Harry Turtledove "World War" series. I read it a few years ago, but it was included in a bundle of e-books I downloaded from ebay, and as I remembered it fondly I am reading it again. Love those lizards!

Of course, it is not the sort of stuff pseuds would give a prize to! Laughing

Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: North of Watford

Gator wrote:

I read it in a lit course in college.

It is all about queers. Don't waste your time on it.

There's not a gay character in it, as I recollect, Gator. Joyce himself was pretty aggressively heterosexual - quite the ladies' man - and there's a fair bit of straight sex in it!!!

A less tactful man than I might ask if there was something in the eye of the beholder, there .... Wink

Spartacus

Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: North of Watford

Bestbear wrote:

I soon realised the book is about gentlemen who prefer gentlemen, Gator ... but do they ever do anything interesting? Does anything interesting ever happen to them? I shall waste a bit more time, probably finding out that the answer is "no!". Wink

I think you're a little mistaken there, BB. Wink

Gay, Joyce was not!!!

Seriously, "Ulysses" isn't everybody's cup of tea - some might say Joyce was a "Writers' Writer" in the same way that Bach or some modern jazz instrumentalists are "musician's musicians. You have to "get" what they're trying to do ....

To dismiss him as a "pseud" because you don't personally like what he does is a little ungenerous of you.

Can I suggest that you check out if Joyce's "Dubliners" is in your box of tricks? In particular, try the last story, "The Dead" which, IMHO, proves that he was a fine writer even if everyone doesn't "get" his later, more esoteric, work.

Spartacus

Joined: 13 Aug 2005 Posts: 2902

Spartacus wrote:

Seriously, "Ulysses" isn't everybody's cup of tea - some might say Joyce was a "Writers' Writer" in the same way that Bach or some modern jazz instrumentalists are "musician's musicians. You have to "get" what they're trying to do ....

That certainly puts it into a context which makes sense to me, given that I can have a tendancy towards violence when people don't acknowledge Bach to be the greatest composer ever or where they dismiss certain more advanced forms of jazz...just don't get me onto the subject of Olivier Messiaen, or I'll be here for months.

Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: North of Watford

tjwmason wrote:

Spartacus wrote:

Seriously, "Ulysses" isn't everybody's cup of tea - some might say Joyce was a "Writers' Writer" in the same way that Bach or some modern jazz instrumentalists are "musician's musicians. You have to "get" what they're trying to do ....

That certainly puts it into a context which makes sense to me, given that I can have a tendancy towards violence when people don't acknowledge Bach to be the greatest composer ever or where they dismiss certain more advanced forms of jazz...just don't get me onto the subject of Olivier Messiaen, or I'll be here for months.

I know what you mean, tjw. An American schoolteacher I know - a fine musician herself - shares your love of Bach and literally cannot do anything else when listening to him: she has to cherish every note and every chord.

Personally I - a non-musician - find that I "appreciate" Bach's work (especially the St. Matthew Passion) more than I love it, and it's taken me a lifetime to begin to appreciate the intracacies of modern jazz (though it was worth it).

But Messiaen, like many twentieth century composers, I still find hard work, I'm afraid. Crying or Very sad

Spartacus

Joined: 18 Sep 2007 Posts: 1801

Bestbear wrote:

I soon realised the book is about gentlemen who prefer gentlemen, Gator ... but do they ever do anything interesting? Does anything interesting ever happen to them? I shall waste a bit more time, probably finding out that the answer is "no!". Wink

I am re-reading the Harry Turtledove "World War" series. I read it a few years ago, but it was included in a bundle of e-books I downloaded from ebay, and as I remembered it fondly I am reading it again. Love those lizards!

Of course, it is not the sort of stuff pseuds would give a prize to! Laughing

Boring book but who am I to be critical of a book that somebody else likes? To each its own.

The World War series by Turtledove is great. I have read all the books of the series including the last one; Homeward Bound. The only thing I didn't like was the story was that it was never wrapped up nicely with an ass kicking of the Lizards.

Turtledove wrote a great book about the South winning the Civil War. It is called "Guns of the South". In the book a man shows up and offers General Robert E. Lee 100,000 AK-47s. The rest of the book is some serious yankee ass kicking. I loved the book.

Turtledove also wrote a multi book series about the South winning the Civil War. It had no connection to â€œGuns of the Southâ€. It was entirely different story line. In this series WWI was fought in North America. I didnâ€™t like it all that much because the South was aligned with the Germans and the Yankees aligned with Brits. It should have been the other way around.

As far as the prize for Lit I am pass the point in my life where I am bothered about what other people say about my choices for literature. I read what I want. I love and appreciate the Classics but I also read for entertainment.

Joined: 18 Sep 2007 Posts: 1801

Spartacus wrote:

Bestbear wrote:

I soon realised the book is about gentlemen who prefer gentlemen, Gator ... but do they ever do anything interesting? Does anything interesting ever happen to them? I shall waste a bit more time, probably finding out that the answer is "no!". Wink

I think you're a little mistaken there, BB. Wink

Gay, Joyce was not!!!

Seriously, "Ulysses" isn't everybody's cup of tea - some might say Joyce was a "Writers' Writer" in the same way that Bach or some modern jazz instrumentalists are "musician's musicians. You have to "get" what they're trying to do ....

To dismiss him as a "pseud" because you don't personally like what he does is a little ungenerous of you.

Can I suggest that you check out if Joyce's "Dubliners" is in your box of tricks? In particular, try the last story, "The Dead" which, IMHO, proves that he was a fine writer even if everyone doesn't "get" his later, more esoteric, work.

Spartacus

Check this out:

Joyce shared the opinion of the French concerning the erotic predilections of the English and was equally as ready as they were to displace perverse desires onto foreigners. In the "Scylla and Charybdis" episode of Ulysses, Joyce alludes to the English vice and its relation to another prominently unmentionable erotic practice--homosexuality, At an especially charged moment in the National Library during the discussion of Shakespeare when the question of the poet's lovers is raised, Eglinton intervenes to assert that Shakespeare's passion for the fair youth of the sonnets was nothing more than that which all Englishmen feel toward aristocrats. "As an Englishman, you mean, John sturdy Eglinton put in, he loved a lord" (Ulysses 9: 660-61). In so doing, he reiterates Joyce's own opinion that "even the best Englishmen seem to love a lord" (qtd. in Budgen 75). Eglinton's--and Joyce's--commonplace regarding the English character carries the implication of the typical Englishman's erotic submission to authority, an implication confirmed by Stephen Dedalus's sotto voce reference to Oscar Wilde's love for his young lord, Sir Alfred Douglas, and suggesting another English sexual practice referred to by the French slang term anglaiser, meaning to sodomize someone (Caradec).

The unspecified, underground continuity between sodomy and sadomasochism anxiously energizes this passage. Stephen's unspoken recollection of Wilde's "Love that dare not speak its name" (Ulysses 9: 659) in connection with Shakespeare's "dearmylove" (Ulysses 9: 658) disturbs his discourse concerning aesthetic theory. Moreover, the dangerous association between homosexuality and sadomasochism is evident when, in response to Eglinton's comment, Stephen mutely recalls, "Old wall where sudden lizards flash. At Charenton I watched them" (Ulysses 9: 662). His memory of this scene of which he cannot speak except by a reference to lizards situates this putatively "English" act in the town in France where the Marquis de Sade, that famous flagellator and sodomite, was incarcerated for his vices. In short, sadomasochism and sodomy always seem to take place somewhere else.

Although Stephen's oblique recollection of an apparently homosexual act locates it distantly in France, Joyce believed and repeatedly implied that homosexuality was a peculiarly English sexual perversion born of the same-sex environment and disciplinary practices of British public schools and universities. In his 1909 essay, "Oscar Wilde: The Poet of "Salome," Joyce defends Wilde by blaming what he calls his "unhappy mania" on his education:

The truth is that Wilde, far from being a perverted monster who sprang in some inexplicable way from the civilization of modern England, is the logical and inescapable product of the Anglo-Saxon college and university system, with its secrecy and restrictions. (Critical 204)

Just as Stephen thinks to himself, "Manner of Oxenford" (ULysses 9: 1212) when Buck Mulligan warns him against Bloom's allegedly lustful gaze, Joyce readily attributed homosexuality to "those people" (Critical 204)--the English--and their disciplinary methods. Yet the "secrecy and restrictions" as well as the flagellant practices at Clongowes, as represented in Portrait, bring the "English vice" home to Ireland and confirm the link, indissoluble yet veiled in Joyce's texts, between sodomy and whipping. Moreover, they point to the intimate yet disavowed collusion between punishment and the excitation of male same-sex desire. Specifically, Joyce's works participate in the radical division of a yet subterranean confluence between pedagogical and erotic flagellation, a contradiction rooted in the twisted logic of homophobia.

Posted: Mon 22 Jun 2009 12 37 pm

Sparty read the book a long time ago, Gator, in the innocence of his youth, under the tutelage of the homosexual traitor Burgess, wasn't it? Perhaps he didn't notice.

I am still not very far into Ulysses (like the first six pages!), but I shall report again!

Yes, I do have "Dubliners", Sparty ... and I quite enjoyed it. Joyce is certainly a good writer. Look at the menace in this excerpt from "Encounter".

"He said that my friend
was a very rough boy and asked did he get whipped often at school.
I was going to reply indignantly that we were not National School
boys to be whipped, as he called it; but I remained silent. He
began to speak on the subject of chastising boys. His mind, as if
magnetised again by his speech, seemed to circle slowly round and
round its new centre. He said that when boys were that kind they
ought to be whipped and well whipped. When a boy was rough and
unruly there was nothing would do him any good but a good sound
whipping. A slap on the hand or a box on the ear was no good: what
he wanted was to get a nice warm whipping. I was surprised at this
sentiment and involuntarily glanced up at his face. As I did so I
met the gaze of a pair of bottle-green eyes peering at me from
under a twitching forehead. I turned my eyes away again.
The man continued his monologue. He seemed to have forgotten his
recent liberalism. He said that if ever he found a boy talking to
girls or having a girl for a sweetheart he would whip him and whip
him; and that would teach him not to be talking to girls. And if a
boy had a girl for a sweetheart and told lies about it then he
would give him such a whipping as no boy ever got in this world. He
said that there was nothing in this world he would like so well as
that. He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were
unfolding some elaborate mystery. He would love that, he said,
better than anything in this world; and his voice, as he led me
monotonously through the mystery, grew almost affectionate and
seemed to plead with me that I should understand him.
I waited till his monologue paused again. Then I stood up
abruptly. Lest I should betray my agitation I delayed a few moments
pretending to fix my shoe properly and then, saying that I was
obliged to go, I bade him good-day. I went up the slope calmly but
my heart was beating quickly with fear that he would seize me by
the ankles.

Not just homosexuality, but paedophilia and sado-masochism .....

Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: North of Watford

Gator wrote:

Check this out:

I'd love to. Could I have a link to it, please?

Spartacus

Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: North of Watford

Bestbear wrote:

Sparty read the book a long time ago, Gator, in the innocence of his youth, under the tutelage of the homosexual traitor Burgess, wasn't it? Perhaps he didn't notice..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Burgess

By gum, you lads ARE obsessed with homosexuality, aren't you? Wink

Spartacus

Posted: Mon 22 Jun 2009 1 17 pm

Not just homosexuality, but paedophilia and sado-masochism ..... Wink

Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: North of Watford

Bestbear wrote:

Not just homosexuality, but paedophilia and sado-masochism ..... Wink

Spartacus

Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: North of Watford

Gator wrote:

Check this out:

As you didn't come back with a url, Gator, I did a little gumshoeing on it myself.

Apparently, your quote is from a somewhat obscure professor who runs a Gay and Lesbian Studies course at Rice University in Texas.

Surprised to see you quoting from such a source: hope that wasn't where you did your Literature course (or that your buddies never find out if it was) Wink

Needless to say, she would probably be able to find a gay sub-text in the Polk County Phone Book. Can I suggest that, for a more balanced overview, you check out Richard Ellman's excellent biography of Joyce or Stuart Gilbert's Introduction to Ulysses.

Spartacus

Joined: 18 Sep 2007 Posts: 1801

Spartacus wrote:

Gator wrote:

Check this out:

As you didn't come back with a url, Gator, I did a little gumshoeing on it myself.

Apparently, your quote is from a somewhat obscure professor who runs a Gay and Lesbian Studies course at Rice University in Texas.

Surprised to see you quoting from such a source: hope that wasn't where you did your Literature course (or that your buddies never find out if it was) Wink

Needless to say, she would probably be able to find a gay sub-text in the Polk County Phone Book. Can I suggest that, for a more balanced overview, you check out Richard Ellman's excellent biography of Joyce or Stuart Gilbert's Introduction to Ulysses.

Spartacus

I am sorry but I just did a quick Google search and I didn't bookmark the source.

I studied James Joyce a little in college and I remember the instructor telling us Joyce had homosexual leanings and Ulysses was a prime example. Quite honestly I don't really even care if he was a queer or not.

I am not an expert and I am too lazy to go and find the url. I apologize for my inadequacies. If it is important to you I will go and find the reference url but you could probably do it yourself with Google.

Joined: 05 Nov 2005 Posts: 2977 Location: North of Watford

Unfortunately, your instructor was wrong. Joyce didn't have homosexual leanings and "Ulysses" isn't about "queers". Indeed, it was banned on first publication for its explicit (for the time) treatment of heterosexual sex.

Just wanted to put the record straight.

Spartacus

Posted: Tue 23 Jun 2009 5 01 pm

Well ... I haven't got to the juicy bits yet ...

And I am not sure anyone here was suggesting that JOYCE was queer, and I certainly was not.

You don't have to be "gay" to put someone of that persuasion into a novel, now do you?