Brilliantine, Sir Riccardo Poltroon -- jaonickally speaking of course! The idea of playing jouay allo misto posto with some foolufools all barely in their typtap teens! Herr JJ was e'er an icy child amuser.
I think of him as the literary version of Jackson Pollock. To most of us his work looks like an incomprehensible mess, but there are those who see something in it they like.
Excellent analogy, Peter! Fortunately I have never attempted to slog through any of his work, just hearing my friends describe it in college was enough to turn me off.
I like this post, though, for showing us how a non-traditional writer depicted typewriters. Especially as I would not have come across these passages without your help, Richard!
The Wake is admittedly hard to love. Individual sentences and paragraphs can be fun exercises in decoding punsterdom, but in my experience it can get tedious. Ulysses is more accessible and human, Portrait of the Artist still more so, and everyone should be able to enjoy the well-crafted short stories in Dubliners.
For me, reading Joyce reveals the manifest mad joys of life. Consider this, from Ulysses:
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
So simple and so complex. The alternation of singulars and plurals. The profusion of g's--soft and hard--and the fizzy alliteration of f's and s's. Saying so much about Bloom & his appetites, about Irish food, about the viands that were likely, at the time, the cheapest cuts one could buy, and about the uniquely human attraction to flavor.
I prefer Ulysses to Portrait and Dubliners. I've attempted but not succeeded in making it through FW. But every book has its time.
Brilliantine, Sir Riccardo Poltroon -- jaonickally speaking of course! The idea of playing jouay allo misto posto with some foolufools all barely in their typtap teens! Herr JJ was e'er an icy child amuser.
ReplyDeleteEnglish major though I am, JJ and I just never got along. I just never saw his prose as "lyrical" or whatever the effusive adjective du jour is.
ReplyDeleteStill—for mentioning typewriters—I award him exactly One Mike Point. No cash value.
I think of him as the literary version of Jackson Pollock. To most of us his work looks like an incomprehensible mess, but there are those who see something in it they like.
ReplyDeleteExcellent analogy, Peter! Fortunately I have never attempted to slog through any of his work, just hearing my friends describe it in college was enough to turn me off.
DeleteI like this post, though, for showing us how a non-traditional writer depicted typewriters. Especially as I would not have come across these passages without your help, Richard!
That's quite an effort of transcription, such murky dreamtext! For that I salute you, Richard.
ReplyDeleteThis lack of emotional connection with Joyce make me sad. Time to grab Finnegans Wake off my overcrowded shelf and get to work.
ReplyDeleteThe Wake is admittedly hard to love. Individual sentences and paragraphs can be fun exercises in decoding punsterdom, but in my experience it can get tedious. Ulysses is more accessible and human, Portrait of the Artist still more so, and everyone should be able to enjoy the well-crafted short stories in Dubliners.
ReplyDeleteFor me, reading Joyce reveals the manifest mad joys of life. Consider this, from Ulysses:
ReplyDeleteMr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
So simple and so complex. The alternation of singulars and plurals. The profusion of g's--soft and hard--and the fizzy alliteration of f's and s's. Saying so much about Bloom & his appetites, about Irish food, about the viands that were likely, at the time, the cheapest cuts one could buy, and about the uniquely human attraction to flavor.
I prefer Ulysses to Portrait and Dubliners. I've attempted but not succeeded in making it through FW. But every book has its time.