December Daily: Ulysses

teigh_corvus asked, "Your thoughts on James Joyce and Ulysses."

Haha. Well. I reported this to the spouse, and he said, "I think we don't like it."

We read one chapter, and then we went and looked at the SparkNotes (which are brilliant, by the way) about that chapter, and then we looked at each other and said, "What?"

Ulysses:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

—Introibo ad altare Dei.

Halted, he peered down the dark winding stairs and called out coarsely:

—Come up, Kinch! Come up, you fearful jesuit!

SparkNotes:

It is around 8:00 in the morning, and Buck Mulligan, performing a mock mass with his shaving bowl, calls Stephen Dedalus up to the roof of the Martello tower overlooking Dublin bay.

Res and Spouse: "What?"

We do a lot of reading out loud, and generally my opinion is that it improves the experience of the book. A Christmas Carol is an annual tradition, to the point that the three of us can recite paragraphs of it from memory, which is appropriate for Christmas. Maurice has this marvelous moment when the text makes you say "fuck" and suddenly you're in the 20th Century. Moby Dick read out loud is glorious -- it falls into iambic pentameter sometimes, just for the sheer joy of it.

I'm thinking, though, that Ulysses is not improved by being read out loud. I actually had an easier time making out those lines above when I read them than when I listened to them. So possibly this was a bad choice? Possibly we should read the SparkNotes aloud and then read the text itself silently?

In fairness, another difficulty has been that with illness, travel, and other barriers, we haven't gone back to it, and now the spouse has lost his Kindle.




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