LOL. The kids are too dumb to be corrupted by this book!
The best part is that it is true. If you have enough constitution to be able to get through the prose you aren't going to be turned into a sex maniac by it.
I did appreciate the explanation of how the novel became so infamous so quickly, with lurid portions of the book apparently being excerpted in newsmagazines of the time. It always seemed strange to me that such a dense and nigh-unreadable novel would attract the ire of censors. How would they have even gotten to the objectionable material?
So this wasn’t a case of censors plumbing an 800-page novel and discovering something, or of a snippet being excerpted in newspapers - a scandalous specific issue of a literary journal started the whole controversy.
I personally found that calling this indecent is really pushing it. Maybe because it presented some light erotic ideas in an unexpected medium (a young girls stream of consciousness).
The book is a circle so it doesn't really have a proper beginning, and the way the narratives are intermeshed to the point that they are incomprehensible means that the narrative is secondary, so concepts such as beginning and middle don't really matter anyway.
It is the language and wordplay of the book that is the enjoyable part. If you sit there by yourself and read it silently, it's mostly a boring academic exercise. When you read it out loud the playfulness and humor of the book comes through. There is one part that is written such that if you read it aloud you sound like a drunken irishman, and one part which is simultaneously a description of a pantry (or perhaps a grocery) and an erotic scene. The main thing I think people miss about the book is how funny it is!
Arguably the most challenging element for readers is not Joyce’s heavy erudition in drawing on the classical canon. Rather, it is some of the Irish politics in the early 20th century that will baffle most readers outside Ireland (and probably most readers inside Ireland, the colonial era being so far away now).
Gravity’s Rainbow in particular is confusing for a long while but when it begins to come together it’s rewarding.
Agreed - Finnegan's Wake is impossible. Try the audio version and it’s somehow even more difficult. I was tempted to eat a bag of mushrooms and listen to it but alas, perhaps one day far in the future.
Example https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/u/ulysses/summary-and...
Or Joyce is just that impenetrable. Have you seen Finnegans Wake?
Hormones do that all on their own.
And if that happens is it because dang hate's your freedom or you've pushed the limits of tolerable behavior?
He reads Ulysses and discusses it - sometimes an episode is dedicated to just one sentence, sometimes a paragraph.
Tragic that he died before completing it and that his website has gone untended.
I had not appreciated the scale of this. There are 368 episodes, spread over almost seven years.
> he died before completing
I hadn’t heard of this until today. This is amazing.
I'm struggling to understand that particular statement. Can anyone explain?
EDIT: "Copyright exists automatically in an original work of authorship once it is fixed in a tangible medium"[0]
If you write out your original thoughts on a piece of paper, that's fixing them in a tangible medium, right?
A few days later the book showed up at Random House—it had passed through customs. Furious, Ernst personally marched the package over to the customs office and demanded that it be searched. When the inspector opened it and found Ulysses, he muttered, “Oh, for God’s sake, everybody brings that in. We don’t pay attention to it.” Ernst insisted that he seize it.
https://www.amazon.com/Most-Dangerous-Book-Battle-Ulysses/dp...
