I don’t like to eat kidneys for breakfast. I don’t like the way James Joyce makes it hard to read what he’s written. I don’t feel much empathy with Leo Bloom; he’s just not a character in whom I can take much interest.
Call me a Philistine, but I do not celebrate Bloomsday.
However, I am disappointed that the North American Barbara Pym Society is not holding a conference this year.
Well, I’m no big Bloomsday fan either, but I do think that Joyce doesn’t “make it hard to read what he’s written” just for that effect — he’s trying to replicate the fragile and fleeting and strange way that people think. The language that flows through our heads. It’s so remarkable, and to attempt to capture that on the page, which I think Joyce does do, is stunningly beautiful.
But what do I know. I’m just an overwrought English professor.
Jean — You write: “he’s trying to replicate the fragile and fleeting and strange way that people think.” OK, I can accept that. As a philosophy/theology guy, I picked up the same kind of thing from reading Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, and from that learning how to do phenomenological investigation inside my own head. Though it seems to me there is also the matter of personal taste — if I’m going to read literature on the fragile and fleeting impressions etc., I’d rather read Proust.
But what do I know. I’m just an overwrought Unitarian Universalist minister.
why isn’t the Barbara Pym Society not holding a conference this year?
Dale — I think they only hold a conference every few years. They had one in 2003, then in 2007….