my odyssey
Well yesterday I finished reading Ulysses. I’ve started it many times, and read extracts many times. This time I followed through, buying a new very handsome Bodley Head hardback last June, on the centennial Bloomsday in fact. So it’s taken me near a year.
Impressions? It’s been a long time since, as a vaguely ambitious twenty-year-old, I read Dubliners and thought, no doubt pretentiously, of Elizabeth as my version of Dublin, a place where as a teenager I’d tried desperately to fit in, perpetrating my share of petty crime, fringing youth gangs, wondering if they were sniggering at me, knowing sometimes that they were.
I’d get my revenge through writing, I hoped, but was I up to it? Apparently not. A portrait of the artist as a young man was inspiring too [I recall reading out the hell and brimstone speech from it to my housemate, an art student, at a table dramatically lit by tapers, our electricity having been cut off], if not so obviously usable to me. Being bespectacled and skinny in those days, I suffered Joycean delusions, strolling down the then deserted Norwood Parade of a Sunday, ashplant in hand, until some hairy lout backed me into a laneway and ruffled my feathers for offering a passing glance to his none-too-attractive girlfriend. I began to wonder if it was really Elizabeth that had been my problem.
Where was I? Ulysses, yes would’ve made a start on it in them days, and on days in afteryears, but I was having my doubts, and anyway life’s the thing, places faces and finding my own way, artist as someyoungthingelse, and I read philosophy because of a friend, to keep up the end of conversation, and halfarsed obsessionalism took over, but kept on trying to make stories of my adventures, adventures of my story…
So over the year I’ve read the whole thing, though mostly absently, after a keen commencement, a busy performance of noting and researching. Lost interest, lost faith. The only things that kept my dander up towards the end (plenty in Molly’s monologue of course) were the sexual moments and innuendos. I found myself watching for them like the leery patron who paid for Anaïs Nin’s erotica. I couldn’t keep track of the cast of minor Dubliners, couldn’t be bothered trying to figure out the Latin phrases, the Spanish, the Italian, the musical allusions, the streetscape, the dream from the reality. In the Molly monologue, all unpunctuated, I couldn’t even be bothered most of the time working out where one thought or memory ended and the next supervened. Still I read the book, 1078 pages in the Bodley Head edition, and when I announced the fact at last night’s reading group meeting, I was applauded roundly. Hollow man, head-piece full of straw.
Impressions? It’s been a long time since, as a vaguely ambitious twenty-year-old, I read Dubliners and thought, no doubt pretentiously, of Elizabeth as my version of Dublin, a place where as a teenager I’d tried desperately to fit in, perpetrating my share of petty crime, fringing youth gangs, wondering if they were sniggering at me, knowing sometimes that they were.
I’d get my revenge through writing, I hoped, but was I up to it? Apparently not. A portrait of the artist as a young man was inspiring too [I recall reading out the hell and brimstone speech from it to my housemate, an art student, at a table dramatically lit by tapers, our electricity having been cut off], if not so obviously usable to me. Being bespectacled and skinny in those days, I suffered Joycean delusions, strolling down the then deserted Norwood Parade of a Sunday, ashplant in hand, until some hairy lout backed me into a laneway and ruffled my feathers for offering a passing glance to his none-too-attractive girlfriend. I began to wonder if it was really Elizabeth that had been my problem.
Where was I? Ulysses, yes would’ve made a start on it in them days, and on days in afteryears, but I was having my doubts, and anyway life’s the thing, places faces and finding my own way, artist as someyoungthingelse, and I read philosophy because of a friend, to keep up the end of conversation, and halfarsed obsessionalism took over, but kept on trying to make stories of my adventures, adventures of my story…
So over the year I’ve read the whole thing, though mostly absently, after a keen commencement, a busy performance of noting and researching. Lost interest, lost faith. The only things that kept my dander up towards the end (plenty in Molly’s monologue of course) were the sexual moments and innuendos. I found myself watching for them like the leery patron who paid for Anaïs Nin’s erotica. I couldn’t keep track of the cast of minor Dubliners, couldn’t be bothered trying to figure out the Latin phrases, the Spanish, the Italian, the musical allusions, the streetscape, the dream from the reality. In the Molly monologue, all unpunctuated, I couldn’t even be bothered most of the time working out where one thought or memory ended and the next supervened. Still I read the book, 1078 pages in the Bodley Head edition, and when I announced the fact at last night’s reading group meeting, I was applauded roundly. Hollow man, head-piece full of straw.
posted by Stewart at 10:33 pm
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