>...and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.everyone is just pretending to like this book, right?
that was ok but 800 pages i'd prefer not
>Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!>omg this is literally the best book ever, an absolute masterpiece
>>25299012>omg this is literally the best book ever, an absolute masterpiecethis but unironically and said by a white person instead of a malding jeet
>>25299019i'm sure Ulysses sits next to Infinite Jest on your shelf, both gathering dust and unread.
>>25299023just applied new tape to keep it held together for my current reread. just finished hades. nigger.
>>25299026I concede defeat. So, what's so great about it? Or rather, what do (You) like about it? It looks like a bunch of nonsensical blabber to me
>>25299028For me the plot takes a backseat to Joyce's ability to play with the language in such original and beautiful ways. My favorite parts are the depictions of internal monologue, never seen anyone do it as well as he did. For ex Bloom contemplating the dead bodies in the ground while he's at the cemetery>I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpsemanure, bones, flesh, nails. Charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink decomposing. Rot quick in damp earth. The lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy kind of a cheesy. Then begin to get black, treacle oozing out of them. Then dried up. Deathmoths. Of course the cells or whatever they are go on living. Changing about. Live for ever practically. Nothing to feed on feed on themselves. I definitely liked my first reading of it the least, but wouldn't try to convince anyone to read it multiple times just to "get" it. Plus a lot of it is just pleasant to read aloud like>Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince's stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince's stores.
>>25299047Thanks for providing some examples, I can see how some would find the prose enjoyable. Something else I contend with is that I've seen people say the chapters can be read in any order the reader pleases, and readers can even skip entire chapters without missing anything! I'm still grappling with this prejudice against it, but it makes me think that if one can pick and choose parts of it and not miss anything, that there's not really anything to miss in the first place.
>>25299054>chapters can be read in any order the reader pleases, and readers can even skip entire chapters without missing anythingI don't know who said this but I don't think any serious Ulysses enjoyer would agree at all with this.If you do ever consider giving it a shot I'd recommend reading it while having joyceproject.com open on your phone, it's the entire text with hyperlink explanations for every slightly confusing bit. I'd never click every single one, I don't give a shit if Buck Mulligan's razor and bowl is a reference to some Catholic bullshit, but if I read a line like >Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.and have no idea what the fuck is going on it quickly explains it, and you can not only understand what was once "nonsensical blabber" but appreciate what he's saying and how he chose to say it.
>>25299047>>I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpsemanure, bones, flesh, nails. Charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink decomposing. Rot quick in damp earth. The lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy kind of a cheesy. Then begin to get black, treacle oozing out of them. Then dried up. Deathmoths. Of course the cells or whatever they are go on living. Changing about. Live for ever practically. Nothing to feed on feed on themselves.Shit, I like it. Gonna read it. Thanks for selling me on Ulysses, anon.
>anything im too retarded to understand is LE PRETENCE
I've read it in Italian, now think I'm ready for the Eng. I still want some notes but not overkill. This looks like a good edition.
>>25299582That's the edition I own, it's good. The introduction is actually very edifying and all the notes at the back are useful for references/allusions, Homer parallels, chapter summaries, etc. And the text size is a tad bigger than average which I like, it makes the em dashes pop out.
>>25299598You ever felt the need to go beyond it in terms of explanations and notes? I mean one obviously can, but in terms of reading pleasure/understanding.
>>25299061Ok, I started this thread to be a hater but you've actually convinced me to give it a fair shake
>>25299012And immediately after this (IIRC) is one of the most confounding sentences I have ever read (but I figured that that was what he was going for, to confuse and bewilder around that point). Then they start talking about a bunch of babies and pregnant ladies in a castle or something.
midwits will never understand genius
>>25299644I love Ulysses so I always feel the impulse to learn more about it. For a casual reader, this edition will suffice.
midwits will never communicate genius
>>25299047>>25299061>>25299094Frankly, I don't get it. It seems to me like Ulysses is the literary equivalent of the start of Dadaism.
>>25300284I don't get it either but I appreciate good prose that can vividly conjure a mental image for me. Some of the example sentences posted in this thread do that. However, I'm still not fully convinced that it's not 800 pages of annoying stream of consciousness narration without a coherent plot. I might give it a chance one day, but there are so many other books I'm sure I'd find pleasant to read, whereas reading Ulysses seems like work. I'm also still not fully convinced that the main reason people claim to like Ulysses is precisely because of how incomprehensible it is, and saying one likes it makes them feel like part of a secret club
I shall take the occasion of this little thread to note something very amusing and Joyce-related which I just read, just now. I am reading a series of essays about Sade. As we know, Sade's an asshole, raging against god, the universe and so on. One of these, by Klossowski, focuses on nature, and now nature (if one takes the physicalist view of things and goes no further) is constantly transforming this-or-that thing or object into another. Thus Klossowski (emphasis mine, of course):"But though Nature, as it is said elsewhere in the System of Pope Pius VI, uses this means [destruction] to recover her powers, her work in making populations perish from time to time from illness, cataclysms, wars, and discord, or from crimes of scoundrels, actually works only to the profit of that secondary nature of the three kingdoms [animal, vegetable, mineral] which are ruled by the laws of a perpetual METEMPSYCHOSIS."
The problem with this book is Ireland and Irish people are lame.
>>25300326I read Ulysses as a senior in high school and, assuming you've got a working memory of the Odyssey and some basic Shakespeare like Hamlet, it's not incomprehensible on a macro level. There are absolutely lines and moments that are like "what the fuck?" but the point of the book is to capture the interior's of a person's mind and no person's mind is fully knowable to anyone but themselves. The part of the book where it becomes a play and they're in a whorehouse drunk is a wild ride, and the Oxen of the Sun chapter which journeys through the entire history of the English language as it progresses is something else, but really the main point of the book is that each chapter is a chapter of the Odyssey redone in Dublin and Odysseus is a converted Jew whose Penelope is fucking her manager to get ahead in her career.Also each chapter has a special quirk, like the ones I mentioned, but also like the finale taking over in the brain of this book's Penelope, or the Sirens chapter which is intentionally super romantic and flowery until Bloom busts a nut and then it gets super terse and realistic with post cum clarity.Opening three chapters centered on "Telemachus" (aka Stephen) were my least favorite, but when it gets going, it goes.
>>25300338> until Bloom busts a nut and then it gets super terse and realistic with post cum clarityKek Joyce literally does that in one of his dirty letters to Nora…and all the time pissing her drawers with pleasure and letting off soft warm quiet little farts behind until her own girlish cockey is as stiff as his and suddenly sticking him up in her and riding him.Basta! Basta per Dio!I have come now and the foolery is over. Now for your questions!We are not open yet. I send you some posters. We hope to open on the 20th or 21st. Count 14 days from that and 3 1/2 days for the voyage and I am in Trieste.
>>25299002Anon couldn't handle the jocoserious
>>25300284dada had some great literature attached to it
>>25300284deeply retarded comparison but i hope you felt smart saying it, i guess
>>25299047Maybe I'm a retard but this feels like it leans into just being poetry at that point.
>>25300478>Maybe
Finally reading Ulysses after spending a year reading through Dubliners and Portrait was pure ecstacy.
>>25299002I think the thing i would say is that ulysses is a town; in contradiction to portrait which is a bildungsroman and contrast to the wake which is partly the of the unconscious mind dreaming dreams during a night’s sleep
>>25300478you dont read poetry so how would you know
>>25301540>a year for two weekend books
