Bloomsday! Ulysses is one hundred and twenty one years muddle aged… such a gush gobbledygook, babble clamour of a book…
both an incomprehensible compendium of tedium and a work of flabberghasting genius, this restless, and relentless, churning of words and lives
I was listening to the audio book when foolish awake at 5:00 this morning… one of this, my summer of 60, regurgative projects…
the audio book really helps! brilliantly read by Bishop Len Brennan, from Father Ted… Jim Norton… his narration is marvelously nuanced…
often Joyce brain hops between 3 or 4 characters, allusively, all within the same sentence… but a subtle shift in intonation nudges you somewhere towards comprehension
also really helps with the cadence and flow. recommended
I’m up to chapter 12, about a third of the way through… no expectation of finishing… but thats not really the point… brogue, vim and fortitude!
I first read it whilst living in a squat, next to Karlov Most in Praha
endlessly roaming the streets, always with a colourful hippy bag containing Ulysses and my juggling clubs… preposterous drunkenness, surprised I never lost neglected them in a pub!
took me more than 2 years to get to the end, the gusto of youthful pretentiousness (not that much has changed)… forever bewildered, having to lurch back to the beginning, or some other random point in the tale
I remember finally finishing it in Piran, Slovenia… i’d hitched down to see Boris in Ljljljubljana… sunset, somersault into summers salt water, sitting on a rock on the beach, where i’d sleep that night, a murmuration of starlings weaving a spell around the church on the hill above… from my seat, a view across the water to Trieste, where, curiously, Joyce had been living when he began the book… pleasing linear circularity
anyway snap of me, from yesterday, with my old battered 90’s copy… and one of curati and i, spring 91, on the steps in Staroměstská (thanks RP!)
Bloom to my own Dedalus
