Wednesday, March 09, 2005
youlisten
I give up. Though dude is one my favorite writers, I can't read him right now. Ulysses is a seemingly great work (all 200 pages I sank my teeth into) but it requires all 1440 minutes of a day to dig out a few ounces of meaning. The book itself is not that complicated structurally (though it does rank with The Sound and the Fury and this book). Language, for Joyce, is more than functional in telling a broader story here, its about the post-rational moments of immediacy involved in reading a sentence. It fragments the reading process and what is normally elemental in constructing a broader textscape is a paragraph-in-itself: five words long and meaty. Not to step on any toes, but the brilliance of this book needs to be taken in doses all at once. Unfortunately time won't allow that for me right now. Moreover, I don't have that kind of discipline, yet. I've grown accustomed to reading multiple books at once and you can't really appreciate this book if you do that. Its easier to digest four novels that are equally challenging but on a collective level.
sorry, James. You may have had an operatic voice, stopped cursing when you were older, a good tipper and wore four watches at once, but I'm going to have to pick up your novel later this year. Finnegan's Wake is still on my personal bestseller list (how did he write a book in that form for that long!).
on a different note, I'm working on a new story that takes place solely in a hallway. It involves a fourtyfour year old history professor, a letter he wrote twenty-two years ago detailing how he was going to leave his wife and a cup of coffee. his name is Gustavo. and he smokes too much.
and "neuro" is finally working properly. It is being hosted on a website by a benevolent friend.
meepmeep.
