Brevity by Dan Thompson for May 02, 2013

Anybody have a clue about this one?

Don’t worry, sweetie…no one else can understand him either….

One of the books at the top of the list after I’ve read every other book that I want to read.

Not a very good portrait of the young man.

AS for why he’s saying “Idjit….”

Not sure, other than calling her one…

BUT… and this is obscure…..

I remember that spelling from a fragment of an old Irish rhyme about Jews, which would now be considered anti-Semitic….

Which may have been something I read in “Ullyses…”

(a book I’ve been intending to finish for…oh…. well… since I was 16-ish.)

The main character is a Jew in Dublin, so it would make sense… sort of…

But if by any chance that’s the connection, Dan wins this week’s Obscurity Prize.

Exactly, Otto.

Good one, Otto….Ha!

A paragraph from a randomly selected page:

“Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain. Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring tothe sun.”

This is what passes for great literature in an age that lauds frauds who splatter paint on a canvas and call it art.

I had to read Finnegan, Portrait, and Ulysses, and the only thing I remember is “there was a little moo cow”

I got through Ulysses, but not Finnigan’s Wake, which this seems to reference. I have seen idiot spelled and pronounced as idjit when quoting the uneducated.

I read ULYSSES every few years. It’s a great book, rather assembled than written, as the music of Stravinsky is said to be. It’s a tour de force, and certainly not an easy book to comprehend. I think you have to have lots of quiet time and a literary background to really appreciate it because it draws from so many different sources. . It all takes place on June 16, 1904, and the different chapters relate to the 12 books of Homer’s ODYSSEY. It was banned in the U.S. for many years (for language and sexual situations), and American tourists used to bring back copies from overseas (THE NEW YORKER had a few cartoons about this at the time)..“Idjit” is probably a background character’s patois pronunciation directed toward character Leo Bloom somewhere in the book. Other unusual terms used are “agenbite of inwit” and “ineluctable modality of the visible.” .One of these years I’m going to plow completely through FINNEGANS WAKE (note there is no apostrophe for the possessive) a much more difficult book. You really have to read books to read these books. .I’m glad that somewhere among everything written, there are books such as these still published.

IDJIT?

do tell

Obviously it hinges on having actually read “Ulysses”, which I have not. From wikipedia:

“…the first edition of Ulysses contained over two thousand errors but was still the most accurate edition published. As each subsequent edition attempted to correct these mistakes, it incorporated more of its own. "

If this is what Thompson is going for, it makes sense why it is the actual book in counseling as opposed to a character from the book.

Who knew this would be so educational. Thanks. I’ve learned a lot.

Back in my schooldays, the writers of “the lost generation” were taught and appreciated (though not completely understood), even won Nobel prizes. Apparently they aren’t valued or even admired as much, anymore, merely tolerated. Is this happening in European and Asian countries, too? Has Henry Ford’s snort, “History is bunk, by and large…” also being applied to Literature?.If you don’t like what you read from ULYSSES, then don’t read anything by Faulkner, for god’s sake. The following is written of Faulkner, but could also apply somewhat to Joyce: He has,. “… the unerring ability to create scenes which could well be realistic, on one plane, but on another heighten and condense experience in terms of an oblique language based on a theory of the simultaneity or circularity of time, according to context.”.I gather even Lewis, Saul Bellow, Nabokov, and Updike are falling out of favor. And that’s a shame, because like all great writers they portray the milieu of their times but also transcend it and connect to the past. .I’m bemused when I hear people say they dislike this art or that literature and dismiss it out of hand. As if they disapproved of Chartres or Pieta or the Matterhorn and those should then be warehoused. Artistic works are not there to be tested and judged by people; people are themselves being tested. People are relative ephemera. Mona Lisa will smile enigmatically long after they’re gone.. A good short story from the period above discussed: THE DEAD, by Joyce; a good novel, THE HAMLET, by Faulkner. If just one person read those that might not otherwise, I would be gratified.

Must be greek

Incidentally, I’ve heard the best way to read “Ulysses” is to try and read it in an Irish accent. I’m now trying to imagine Liam Neeson reading it out loud.

Joyce’s experimental writing wasn’t meant to be easily read.

People pretend “Ulysses” is a great book for the same reason they pretend the emperor isn’t naked.