catalog

Well-known member
It's actually been surprisingly easy and enjoyable. 2 weeks or so. Tough bit is early on, but there's a good beginning so it's OK, you just gotta slog through a bit from page 200-400. I can't really remember that bit. However, I now feel I could go back and re read it. Ending 200 or so pages have been fantastic. It's better than gravity's rainbow.
 

catalog

Well-known member
good line from last chapter:

"he must have come 3 or 4 times with that tremendous big red brute of a thing he has i thought the vein or whatever the dickens they call it was going to burst through his nose"

so much of it is like that, even weirder actually, she starts going on about his bum fetish at times. in previous chapter there was a whole half page about him cutting off his toenail and giving it a sniff. facking bonkers.
 

version

Well-known member
... following Molly's memory of today's events and her indiscretion back through the channels of her recall to her days in Gibraltar and "down" into the "ashpit" (Gabler, 18.747)...now, you are ready to (in Dante and Virgil fashion) climb from those days back "up" to her destiny of joining Poldy as his "mountain flower" (Gabler, 18.1576). Consider that if the book (in the broadest terms) concerns whether or not Poldy will get his eggs in the morning (meaning that his love has survived the Bloomsday test), then the answer (not given in this book) depends on the reader's view of Molly's "sin" (blah-blah, "O, felix culpa" theme, etc.). If (in terms of the "syllogistic structure"--evidenced by the "Q.E.D." at Gabler, 17.2332), the first seventeen episodes made the case logically, then Episode Eighteen must be making the case emotionally. So, if after seventeen episodes of Stephen and Bloom musing on love from sex to agape as a form of creative act, the reader is left at the end of "Ithaca" with as ambiguous a sense as Bloom's "Sinbad-Tinbad" reverie (not taken up until the next book), then--really--the deciding case is going to be made by Molly herself....

...and, when the reader reads Episode Eighteen (whether you noticed it or not) there is no longer any narrator...no James-Joyce's-voice lurking behind the scenery directing the thoughts of the reader...there's no scenery at all...just Molly's thoughts...that least common denominator for a reader and a writer. So (again), as Stephen said in Portrait, the artist has (almost) "vanished behind his work like the god of creation, pairing his fingernails," and...the final case in the book is made entirely in the voice of the defendant...as read entirely in the voice--the inner-voice--of the reader. In short, if this is a case of law (as suggested by Aristotle's take on the particular logical structure Joyce uses, the enthymeme), then Joyce leaves the last word of the case in Molly's mouth and YOU, the reader's mouth. He makes you read her defense back into life as you read his words and images back into life.
 

version

Well-known member
Throughout the novel until this episode, Molly has been explicitly objectified--to the extent of being an arm seen tossing a few coins out a window...but also as the object of everybody else's imagination. We have only come to know Molly as others have objectified her; now we get the chance to be her...in the sense of her subjective inner monologue.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Just read this comic, dotter of her fathers eyes, by mary and bryan talbot, on the lucia story. Its not very good, cos she (mary) tries to mirror her own life with lucias (her dad was a joycean scholar, who was nasty as a dad). Both joyce and nora come off as complete cunts to lucia, effectively stopping her from pursuing her dreams and then the son giorgio gets her committed which brings on the descent to hell. The war and joyces death doesn’t help. Beckett has a bit part as a brief rmance for lucia, but then dumps her. Sounds like a pretty shitty life. Nora comes off worse than joyce, he just seems like a self obsessed artist, whilst she is just generally frustrated. 1920s paris is painted well.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Heres a screenshot from it, her dancing teacher doling out advice. Another was pretty nasty to her. Sounds like a tough thing to get into, ballet. But i like the sentiment expressed by this teacher

Qpn24an.png
 

catalog

Well-known member
Joyce on water

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?


Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I couldn't really get a sense of any of the characters apart from Leo and Stephen, and only really later on, 2nd half, for those 2
 

version

Well-known member
It reminds me of something I recently read about Gravity's Rainbow,
Finally, the novel must be difficult because, as every guidebook and critical study notes, its governing rhetorical trope is the hysteron proteron, or the reversal of cause and effect. Just as you hear the “screaming…across the sky” of the V-2 rocket only after it has landed, so is all understanding subsequent, after the fact, which means that you cannot understand anything you are actually experiencing. Pynchon’s professor at Cornell, Vladimir Nabokov, once remarked that you cannot read a novel but only reread one: this is doubly and triply true of Gravity’s Rainbow. Every section begins in medias res with backstory only coming gradually or implicitly, until by the section’s end you actually have enough information to read what you have in fact just read. A simple example: the novel casually deploys the symbolism and technical vocabulary of the Kabbalah throughout its whole length, yet the Kabbalist system is only clearly explained for the reader on page 768. It is a frustrating effect, but an eerie one. It leads the novel to read, in Harold Bloom’s words, like the work of one “who always seems not so much to be telling his bewildering, labyrinthine story as writing a wistful commentary upon it as a story already twice-told, though it hasn’t been, and truly can’t be told at all.”
 
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version

Well-known member
I flipped to the notes at the back of my edition earlier and realised just how much I'd been missing. There are so many details which mean nothing to me then turn out to be him parodying some Irish politician from 150 years ago or a pope I've never heard of. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to hinder enjoyment at all. I just go "ah, that's cool" then carry on reading.
 

catalog

Well-known member
My friend re-read it fairly recently after previously reading it 10 years or so ago. He used one of the guidebooks with it this time around, said it was well worth it, made it a lot easier, wished he'd done the same the first time around.

I had a pdf of one of the annotated notes books, but didn't use it all that much, cos it seemed to get in the way, and like you say, most of the notes seem fairly inconsequential and are about various famous people, or give you a bit more detail, but don't substantially alter what he's on about. I tried it most on the hamlet section (dunno if you've reached that yet?) cos I don't know much about that play at all (seen it performed once, never read it) but it was making it harder so I gave up.
 

version

Well-known member
I haven't reached the Hamlet section yet, although Hamlet's been mentioned a couple of times and I caught a reference to Elsinore.
 

version

Well-known member
... most of the notes seem fairly inconsequential and are about various famous people, or give you a bit more detail, but don't substantially alter what he's on about.

Yeah, like the section on history (Nestor) where Stephen's discussing whether the infinite possibilities were possibilities at all if they didn't happen. I got the argument itself, but I didn't know it was from Aristotle until I had a look at the notes.
 
I was doing quite well with this last year, was being propelled along by the audio book—but I checked today and I had done 7 hours out of 27 hours. While I was reading it I was overjoyed by how great it was, it was living up to all the hope I had invested in it over the years. But, while I'd managed to get through the Proteus bit I hadn't got to the really hard, boring bits yet.

you still on the audiobooks corpsey? Tell me about it. I’m just trying one for the first time ever
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Personally I can't really make them work for me unless I'm reading along. I find that a good combo though cos the audiobook forces me to keep going and reading keeps my attention on the audiobook. Otherwise my attention tends to drift.

I've got a friend who doesn't really read anymore he mainly listens to audiobooks. I know him to have much greater powers of concentration than me.
 

version

Well-known member
There's something very definite about this book. What he's saying doesn't seem too open to interpretation. The references and allusions are all very specific. They definitely mean certain things that he's trying to communicate to you. I'm starting to get the distinction between modernism and postmodernism on a bit more of a gut level now.
 
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