Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I got halfway through Ulysses when I was in my twenties and possibly more intelligent than I am now. Tried again with it last year and got about 10 pages in. Dubliners and some bits of Portrait I like, but I don't think Joyce is for me really.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
He's probably more interesting to read about than actually read.

Nicked a pdf of the pound era off the internet earlier, might give that a go when I get through with this canto
 

luka

Well-known member
"It is therefore completely logical that the stream of consciousness is eminently paratactic: the absence of internal order and of hierarchies indicates it's reproduction of a form of consciousness which is subjugated to the principle of the equivalence of commodities." etc etc etc
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
There was no way I could summon that level of commitment to read all those notes about Ulysses cos I find him really irritating a lot of the time, especially the dialogue between the characters. But the Cantos are really pulling me in.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Just read through the whole canto in one go one last time, this time without stopping to read notes. The last passage in particular is stunning:

Serenely in the crystal jet

as the bright ball that the fountain tosses

(Verlaine) as diamond clearness

How soft the wind under Taishan

where the sea is remembered

out of hell, the pit

out of the dust and glare evil

Zephyrus / Apeliota

This liquid is certainly a

property of the mind

nec accidens est but an element

in the mind's make-up

est agens and functions dust to a fountain pan otherwise

Hast 'ou seen the rose in the steel dust

(or swansdown ever?)

so light is the urging, so ordered the dark petals of iron we who have passed over Lethe.
 

jenks

thread death
I loved the way he turns the effect of a magnet on iron filings into the rose in the steel dust. He uses it a few more times later on, along with the crystal and the fountain.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I loved the way he turns the effect of a magnet on iron filings into the rose in the steel dust. He uses it a few more times later on, along with the crystal and the fountain.

Was just reading a bit in the Pound Era about that - patterned energies, the vortex, the winds so stable they are given names, the fountain sculpting the water's flow etc.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Going through that looooong 1st Pisan canto in excruciating detail with the notes was hard work but definitely a good idea, cos it looks like the other Pisan ones repeat a lot of the same imagery and references and are a bit shorter (I'm up to LXXIX now).

Having said that, seeing as the cantos project site doesn't cover everything, I probably will end up shelling out for a guide book at some point.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
The one I'm on now, LXXIX , is known as the 'lynx' canto - the feline companion of Dionysus. Love it when he gets into the Greek mythology.

tumblr_m3sj95NnI91rui49ao1_1280.jpg

Aphrodite, the "goddess born of sea-foam" shows up at the end of this again too.
 
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