One of the better things about working in the internet is the surprising number of like-minded folks you can meet purely by chance. Not on myspace or in chatrooms (what you do with your own internet time is entirely your own business) but through similar tastes in politics, movies or, in our case, difficult books.
Ulysses “Seen” has inspired me to write something about my first ever encounter with “The Book.” For me, it was the right book at the right time. I can’t put it any more perfectly than that. I was finally starting to feel at home in college, and when I ran into my professor on the ferry, he told me he was teaching a class the next semester that would read it. “I only do this once in a decade, so it’s like Haley’s Comet: if you want to see it in your lifetime, it’s gotta be now.” I’m paraphrasing. Anyway, I not only took the course, I forced all my friends to take it. I lost a lot of friends that semester!
I remember there being a lot of freaky-seeming coincidences over the course of our reading it. The one that sticks with me is when we had a long, deep discussion of the significance of keys sparked by the Alexander Keyes ad Bloom is designing, and a student from an earlier class entered the room looking for his lost keys. We all laughed and freaked out; some of us actually screamed. Someone accused our prof of setting it up. The student was stunned. Then there was the time we were approximating how much money Stephen spent over the course of the day & someone out in the quad started playing Pink Floyd’s “Money” loud enough for us to hear. I know there were more, but I can’t remember them (jeez, it’s 22 years ago now!).
A huge percentage of the book flew over my head, and a lot of it still does, all these years and 6 full reads later. I really felt the characters though, and the verbal pyrotechnics are completely amazing. Not until my fourth read through it did I begin to comprehend the book as a unified whole, rather than a series of episodes. There are more priceless moments in it than I can count.
Two years ago I assembled a group of high school students to read the book aloud every week. I’ve kept my notes on those crazy meetings – a gazillion in-jokes resulted – & someday I’ll write something about that. Maybe next year 
You can read Stevie D’Arbanville’s blog here.
“Stately, plump”: the first line of Ulysses
by M. Thomas Gammarino
(author of the novel BIG IN JAPAN: A GHOST STORY)
First a caveat:
Ulysses is my favorite novel. I’d just as soon it be something else—I dislike bandwagons as much as the next serious reader—but Ulysses, which routinely tops the best-novel-ever lists, happens to be the one book which has most provoked and inspired me, and it’s one of very few novels I intend to reread regularly until I die. By way of evidence, I’ll cite the pilgrimage I made a few years back to the Martello Tower so that I could better feel the first chapter. And I might mention also that my own first novel, Big in Japan, pays homage to Ulysses throughout.
Another chapter read this very morning in two sittings separated by trip to the local store for bread and a newspaper! I find Ulysses less a pea-souper fog to find my way through and more an actual pea-soup to eat – tasty! I’m not sure where we are in Sirens or what time it is either – however, eventually I do fathom the position of the characters. Initially I mistakenly thought we were in a tea room with all the talk of tea, but it appears we are in a bar and the ladies I thought were taking tea are … what? Barmaids. The bronze and the gold are later joined by several of the men we have met previously and both Simon and then Ben sing a song. The blind guy who has been wandering about turns out to be a piano tuner who has mislaid his tuning fork and is on his to retrieve it. (more…)
In a list of “most difficult chapters to read” this one would rank thankfully low – so low that it was even enjoyable. I certainly appreciated the break. This chapter consists of many smaller episodes all interlinked with each other and with the other events in the book, but most easy enough to understand the basics of what and where. That’s not to say the meaning is easy to get at but still the relief from all that stream of consciousness from one point of view is genuine.
Oddly, even though this seems once more all about structure, here I got a real sense of what Joyce’s writing may be like if he did just write straight-forward prose. Y’know, like anyone else! Without the constant drone of allusion and the layers of puzzle it might at least have been a quarter of the length. I know though, that that is not the point. I just couldn’t help saying it anyway. (more…)
