You begin by reading Ulysses. No, you begin by trying to read Ulysses. You start on the first page, and right away–bam–appears Stephen Dedalus. You’ve read Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and finished it so sick of Dedalus that seeing the name once more on the first page–promising to appear on many more–you throw the book against the wall, remembering the quip about a book not being one to set aside lightly but to be hurled with great force–supposedly from Dorothy Parker, but probably not.
Years later you try again, your pique blunted, and you plow through. You trod through. No, you plod. Not really plod through, just along. You plod along reading four pages a day for 170.5 days. You learned that trick when surviving Remembrance of Things Past. Started as insomnia books, then you get far enough into it to put yourself on a schedule to make sure you can finish as quickly as bearable and get the pages back on the bookshelf where they belong.
You scan all the words, stubbornly; you’re gonna read every last word. But whatever is to be deciphered as a novel escapes you. It’s just a flurry of words, whizzing by like the crystals of a North Dakota ground blizzard blowing across the freeway at midnight on the solstice with miles to go before you do what you do when you’ve gone those many miles–whether to keep a promise or not. Although maybe only to yourself.
Eventually you reach page 682 and find: “THE END”, because time passes whether you try to keep up with it or not. At first you think you’re walking away with nothing more than being able to check that beast off the list. But one day you think, man, I missed the forest, but there were a lot of trees. Different trees. How did one man so long before the days of the internet know so many things–so many trivial things, so many profound things, so many things in between–and be able to string them together into one thread–however coherent or muddled it might have been? For the first time I understood the pejorative nuance in the term tour de force. Generally meaning an impressive performance, but pejoratively meaning the performance is all there is to speak of.
Although your taste in literature is solidly in the spare, minimalist tradition of Hemingway, curiosity keeps you now and then sticking a toe in the world of Joyce and stream of consciousness writing. You read both The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying long ago. Virginia Wolfe, yes. Beckett, yes. The aforementioned Proust, YES! four pages at a time! You read the supposed first SoC novel, We’ll to the Woods No More by Eduard Dujardin. But the enduring fascination our culture has for this school of lit remains incomprehensible.
You read Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses, and you find in it all the narrative you missed on your own. Stuart Gilbert was largely known as a translator. His translation of The Stranger by Camus remains your favorite. When you find other translations in a used bookstore, you look at how they handle the sentence that Gilbert rendered as “He opened himself to the benign indifference of the universe.” You’ve found none other as poetic. It reminds you how modern translations of the Bible can’t touch the poetry of the King James version. In any case, it’s not a big surprise that it took someone with the skill of Stuart Gilbert to translate Ulysses for the English speaking world. Or at least for you. And Dante whispers as though from a dream that of course you need a Virgil to guide you on such a hell of an odyssey.
Gilbert reveals the structure of Ulysses, which helps, but the general style–and the literary world’s enamor with it–is still befuddling. Is this a joke? It’s certainly a reminder that you are in this world but not of it.
But of what world are you? And how do you write about that world?
Your own writing offers no clues for you, because it has its own kind of muddle. Competent but a hodgepodge; nothing that inspires you to pour yourself in one direction. Nothing that resonates with the world around you and returns that resonance as a directive: spend your time doing this! What were the clues that kept Joyce working? The years of commitment at the exclusion of so much else. The opportunity costs that come with singular sacrifice in dedicating your life to create one thing without promise of anything in return that will say this effort was worthwhile, to say nothing about the possibility, as with Joyce, that the response may very well come largely as censure and hostility.
Life has more to offer the starving artist than a bare garret on the left bank of Paris. You find that having something to write about is far more important than whether you can write. As Leonard Cohen said, “For me, poetry is the evidence of a life and not life itself. It’s the ashes of something that’s burning well. And sometimes you confuse yourself and try to create ashes instead of fire.” There is no writer’s life. There is only a human life, of which writing is a part.
Dedicating years to a single created thing is not for you! But you still want to participate. You still want to taste as much of the banquet as you can without having to do the dishes.
You decide to take small bites, create something you can complete in one sitting. Dabble, but take the dabble to completion and offer it to the world come what may. No expectation but some satisfaction in doing, finishing, creating a complete thing. At the very least you’ll get practice finishing things! Isn’t that the hardest thing to learn? Then don’t (yet) work on big projects that take forever to finish. Where’s the practice in that?
So now and then you put together a short story and post it on your blog. This becomes the Being with Georgette story series. And it serves its purpose until Georgette goes absent–as is her wont–and time passes, and you get involved in other aspects of life.
Then one day your daughter shows you her TikTok channel, and you wonder what kind of TikToks would you make if you were to try your hand. You think, wouldn’t it be funny to read Ulysses to the world in ten-second clips! Funny for you anyway. And you could take videos of the landscape where you live and write your own little snippets of music. In a relatively short time you could create something small but complete and exercise your creativity.
So you create Reading Ulysses in Montana #1. Reading out loud the first line of the Wordsworth Classics edition of Ulysses, you find it doesn’t read well to your ear, so you fiddle with some of the words to make it sound better. And you wonder if anyone will notice the improvement–if anyone will care. But here it is.
Your plan was to create one short video from each page, but a page drawn at random. This would honor your appreciation of Joyce’s variety of content in Ulysses without getting bogged down in trying to fit it to the overall narrative.
Then each day for fifty days, you create another. The second is a passage from the middle of that day’s page. Same with the third. But soon you start to assemble the day’s reading from different sentences across the page. Then different words across the page. And finally you start interjecting words and images and ideas that help the short story stand apart from the page in Ulysses.
Like this one. You’ll find some of these words on page nine, but not the passage itself.
But again, time passes, and life intervenes. And fifty seems like a nice round stopping place. You find creating these a pleasure, but pleasures run their course. So you move on to other things.
A year passes and now and then you think about returning to this series. But you have to make the videos. You have to make the music. You have to put it all together. And you end up not doing it.
But you’re now even more intrigued by using Ulysses as a source of writing exercises. Maybe just writing short stories based on a page, and not worry about creating the video and music.
In the mean time, generative AI has taken over the world. You begin to think maybe you could use DALL-E to create an image for each story. In fact, as bad as generative AI can be, it’s very flaws fit perfectly with the surreal jumble of the text.
So you compose your own text inspired in some way by a page of Ulysses, and then ask DALL-E to generate an image based on keywords in that text. Then you post it on your blog. Click the following image for the first blog post, or here: https://wordpress.com/post/rickmallery.wordpress.com/2326.
You find this fits the scale of how you want to participate in the world creatively. What is it? Is it a joke? Only to the extent that life is a joke. Sometimes beautiful, poetic, and wise, then suddenly ugly, doggerel, and foolish. Befuddling. Enigmatic. And as life can be all these things–even all at once–you find that this is the forum where you can share, employ, (exploit!), and relieve the varieties of experiences from your own life; for as coherent or awkward those experiences might be, they always have one organizing principle that ties them together, and that is you. You and your life. Your real life, not labored and contrived according to devices like the three act narrative structure. You are weaving a tapestry of life.
Looking back, maybe that’s another lesson you can take from Joyce. From Ulysses. That stream of consciousness writing is not about Joyce or Faulkner or Woolf or Dujardin showing off what tour de force they can produce with this style–as a vehicle for their genius–but rather it is about you getting in that same vehicle and taking it for a spin to see how far it takes you.
If it’s a spoof, it’s a spoof on all life. On all earnestness and on all those hours burning the midnight oil and sniffing overwrought candle smoke. Do it. Finish it. Leave it for those who may take from it what they please. For after all, tomorrow is another day, but so is the next and the next, and then you die. So say hello to the elephant before the candle smoke gets too strong. It’s time to stop for today.
I haven’t listened to the excerpts yet, it’s taken me all this time to absorb and understand (did I?) what you had written. Anyway, I enjoyed it. I’ve spent years coming to terms with Joyce whose words haunt me, (Dubliners is one of my all time favourite reads) and I visited Trieste two years ago to wander in the area he wandered so see if it helped. It didn’t. We’re so lucky though, to be able to read him without being censored and I am happy to be haunted by his words, his books and his photograph, that one with the hat and the suit.
Yes, and thanks to Sylvia Beach for publishing when no one else would/could. 🙂 Thanks for the comment!
My copy sits on the shelf waiting, along with Remembrance of Things Past. One day….
Wait until they grab you by the collar, throw you in the chair, and cast a spell of casual attention. “For a long time, I went to bed early,” said stately, plump Buck Mulligan.
Your Georgette inspired me to take my little weekly challenges and meld them into a story. I’m beginning. I have been immersed in writing and reading since retirement and actually having time to savor life. I can, ponder, reflect or just be. I got your first book on Kindle. I can’t hold books any longer. I miss it terribly. I use my eyes to gaze my Surface Pro. I almost generated images for the new short story but had a twang of guilt. I think writing in short bursts is like eating an elephant one bite at a time. Is that why you use the elephant at the bottom of the page? Happy Writing! Sal
I used an elephant because I couldn’t find a good silhouette of a hippo. But glad you recognized it for something. 🙂 Thanks for the comment. Good luck!
So if I may clarify, are the current posts also ai-generated content, or are you composing them yourself?
I compose the text myself, but the images are ai-generated. Thanks for asking! 🙂
You had me at “No, you begin by trying to read Ulysses.” Precisely my experience, but imagine the horror of being afflicted with dyslexia. Oh! I tried again and again. I tried my old standby: Jump ahead and look for something friendlier. I tried: Jump to the end. I tried read the paragraphs backward. I plodded for years and I never finished it. But it had its moments. Oh yes! I had unforgettable moments.
I’m not sure even Joyce ever really read it. It’s more about sharing an attitude than sharing a narrative. Good to hear from you; thanks for the comment.
Yes, I’ve wondered about that also But, oh my: “Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount Strand”
https://yordiesands.com/2014/06/03/its-like-this/
Nice post. I do find his little poetic nuggets worth the trip, although they are far and few between at times. I’m as much fascinated with our culture’s fascination with the book as I am the book itself. I still try to keep both at arm’s length.
Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and
shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a
time. A very short space of time through very short times of space.
Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable
modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a
cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the nebeneinander
ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at
my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends
of his legs, nebeneinander. Sounds solid: made by the mallet of Los
Demiurgos. Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand? Crush,
crack, crick, crick. Wild sea money. Dominie Deasy kens them a’.
Yes, yes, and yes. I did like the notion of pure streams of consciousness, but it left we adrift again and again. Maybe it is time to return to Ulysses. After all these years, after years of past struggles, just step back in, one small step at a time. That actually sounds great to this dyslexic. But first, I’ll try out the path you’ve laid out with “Montana”.
I’ll be glad to hear how it goes!
Did I just step off the internet into…into the hellhole of the internet? My stream of consciousness feigns. You are nuggets for a bored mind. You’re not about this demon ate Jimmy Wagner. Goddamn the cuff, and I can’t get into the inevitability of the next line to save my life, or impress you neither. Thank you Jimmy says. I thought I was being ignored. Can I really say it? Thank you for creating our world, but I can’t see the consciousness behind it seeing behind it. A deepness lies in the frog, but I’ve stepped into meaning, and where is it about being ignored?
Thank Elvis we always have the back door!
“You find that having something to write about is far more important than whether you can write.” Astoundingly true. I’m so angry that you’ve said this and not me!
II only read Portrait in high school, and only by assignment; I had never understood why Joyce gets Irish pubs themed after him, or why a pub themed after an author has so many beers and so few lumens of lightbulbs with which to read your pristine and unbent copy of Joyce in while also happily setting your beer on top of it.
But writing as Joyce? That sounds delicious fun.
Yes! It is. 🙂 It’s the best thing I got out of it.
was it Jung that said ulysses was like a tapeworm and he couldn’t get into it till he realised that? just the same backwards, or in bits, or however you read it. I can’t remember if I’ve read it – as in finished it. What a thing to spend years writing! But what the hell, what an inspiration!
I’ve found it’s more about an attitude than a narrative. An attitude you can apply beyond lit. Thanks for the comment!
Well, cock-a-doodle-doo, and let the heart-cockles be set afire. Refreshing this is, and I kid you not.
Thank you for subscribing to Trivial Music Silliness, Rick. I will return the favor with unadulterated gusto.
I came over here to see what Delving Yardbarker was about, and as soon as I read the latest post, I was hooked.
May all your troubadour consciousnesses continue to stream with steaming, reckless monumentationism.
Thanks for the visit and the well wishes. This silliness is a lot of fun. 🙂
“Your real life, not labored and contrived according to devices like the three act narrative structure. You are weaving a tapestry of life.” I love this! I recently found myself in my writers’ critique group saying something like, “Well, yes, it does go back and forth like that for awhile. Because it’s about LIFE, and that’s not always (or often) the great march through neatly canned conflict to the pinnacle of victory. It’s not always the Hero bringing home the Elixir. It’s abstract. It’s messy.” Thank you for saying this publicly!
It’s liberating, really. And more fun!
Excellent series. I’m thinking about trying it again.
Thank you for liking my poem!
just dropped in to see if you are real,
And I’m pleased to see you are!
Please to meet you.
s.
Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy!
like everyone, surely, I tried, and failed with Ulyses many years ago. Glad I did.
s.
😀
I love this. I guess it is almost as hard as reading Joyce, I wouldn’t know. I’ve never read Joyce. I felt dumber as I read this and now smarter for having read this. I should go figure out what Joyce is.
Glad you stopped by. Thanks for the message. 😀 Enjoy the ride.
As with Joyce, we are left to our devices regarding discernment. Is it subjugating content with contrivance? Or is contrivance the point? We paint our own pictures. Eberhard Weber, “No Motion Picture,” rivulets of sound, Joyce, rivulets of words. And beyond the horizon no mention of David Foster Wallace, below the belt no Brautigan. A professor’s opinion, lonely, “Joyce was a fart in a whirlwind of his own design. A grand compendium of graffiti.” I believed him a taken in scenes I saw it on crumbling brick walls. Give a baby a crayon, enough paper you get Picasso ringing in your ear Four years to paint like Raphael, a lifetime to paint like a child. Nonsense, irrelevant, postured, phony, lacking spontaneity – or free jazz genius? Turn the record over, let the needle carve a word cutlet in fat free mayonnaise.
Exactly
Hahahah 😃🤣 I love it. Thanks so much for sharing. I also enjoyed reading the other commenters.
I’m not sure I understand — or I just want to make sure I understand — you take words from parts of Ulysses pages and then make a short story out of it? Do you also use stream of consciousness to generate these stories?
Anyways I like it. A real poetic treat of imagery. Really took me on a ride like inside the shell of a snail (in a good way). I use stream of consciousness on my blog for all my posts. I’m not sure if it’s the same as the technical definition though. What I mean is I write at breakneck speed, as fast as I can, without thinking… and do minimal editing. I’m doing it right now.
I’m bipolar. I learned how to do it when I was manic. It’s fun!! ❤️❤️
Thanks again 😊🦌 Red Deer
Yes, you’ve understood the process. Although lately I don’t start with Ulysses. Just start writing into the blank page and see what pops up. Thanks for the comment. 🙂
Cool 😊 go for it. You’re welcome. I’ve found from my experience that pulling something out of nothing/a blank page is dangerous. But that’s probably because I have a sick heart. If you’re a normal person I’m sure you will work wonders with it.
For a moment, you nearly had me sold on the idea of reading a book. Then you reminded me about the stream of consciousness where I ought to be getting my foots wet at the moment. Perhaps I’ll be back to take a look at what you’ve done here. No guarantees. But, possibly. Until then – Monopreme.
We’ll leave the light on for you.
I didn’t fall in love with “Ulysses” until I listened to the Donal Donnelly 40-cd set. I’m so stupid, when reading it, I didn’t get the joke, “AE, (the Irish poet) IOU. Listening to it is so much more rewarding. You don’t have to wonder about pronunciation, etc.
There are many paths to Ulysses, but the most difficult seems to be the direct one. 🙂
What was that bit about the benign indifference of the universe? I like that. I don’t know what it means, but that may be a factor in why I like it. 😀
It’s near the end of The Stranger by Albert Camus. Yeah, has a nice ring to it.
Albert Camus. Hmm, wasn’t he one of those depressed French philosophers? I try to stay away from them because I probably have a tendency to go there, if you know what I mean.
Hope you’re having a great morning/afternoon/evening/night (tick any that apply), Rick. 🙂
Thank you, Robert. 🙂
Strange but this makes much more sense the second time. Maybe I’m maturing as a reader.
Faulkner once said something like “When people ask me what they should do when they don’t understand one of my books after reading it two or three times, I say, read it a fourth!”
I have been wandering around in this interesting world for days. It has been many years without tearing apart Ulysses. I filled the book with notes and sketches, and was going back on every page. Then somewhere in time, either it left me or I threw it away, I don’t remember, but I must have given it to someone, since it didn’t come back. But since I don’t want him to return it… no, it wouldn’t be fair to Joyce. My book had to come back, I would like to see the notes I wrote and the passages I underlined. Now you have started the sparks of my relationship, my memories, with this incredible book. What you’ve done is both crazy and even more wonderful… Sometimes I keep asking which one I like the most, Joyce or what you’ve done here… Every line that confuses me feels like a retroactive medicine, in the end, being here is the result of what you’ve shared and what you have built. I think it will add another layer and a spirit of depth to our personal reading adventure… I want to write a lot, read a lot and talk a lot. Thank you. Love, nia
Retroactive medicine applies to the writing of it too, in its craziness and wonder, and I wonder where it goes or if it ends, but not yet. Not now. All that matters is that it continues.
This is an exciting and interesting one and to be honest, I don’t want it to finish… I hope it goes on,… Thank you again, have a nice day, Love, nia
I wonder if any author has considered pushing the travelogue further westward with “Skipping Over Idaho Through ‘Infinite Jest'” or “Stopping in Donner Pass for ‘Finnegan’s Wake’?”
Or “Stopping in Donner Pass” for “A Moveable Feast”?
eyes too strained to read now, but really enjoyed the excerpt from needles and pins. To be continued…
Firstly, thankyou for taking the time to read and respond to my last post. I found your pages intriguing and I know I’ll need some time to digest the writing which fits well with the original text. My mind is now filled with surrealist juxtapositions from your words as I think in pictures. Reading it is like the the flick, flick, flick of one of those little paper booklets that make a ‘movie’. I’ll be back.
Thanks for the comment! This project is a lot of fun!
I’m at the point of my life that I no longer read books to struggle through them for the sake of art or status. I read for my own enjoyment. If I’m not enjoying a book I get out the DNF Stamp and kick it to the curb. Callous? Yes. And I don’t care. I also no longer pretend to like wines that are terrible. It’s glorious being free!
Here here!
You combine the surreality and fun of Carroll’s Alice with Ulysses… bravo!!!
It’s lots of fun!
This had me smiling the whole way through, thank you!
It’s fun, isn’t it? 😀
“Alexa, play Jacques Brel. ” And just like that, down a wondrous memory rabbit hole. That elegant old hotel, forty years ago. To the sheet music stacks next, aha, found the book of Brel songs. A Southern woman who doesn’t speak French drinks black high-test coffee and sings French songs early on a Tuesday morning while she plays the Yamaha beast. Her husband is deaf without his hearing aids, so he sleeps while she plays. Thank goodness, we have love, and don’t ever have to wonder.
Thank you.
What a nice scene. Tableau. Still life. Pleasant mornings and memories of many mornings past. 😀
I have written it here before, and I will write it again: brilliant! Simply brilliant! This is a unique oasis of literary creativity.
And so much fun! Thanks for your attention. 🙂
i do not know what Joyce would have wanted, but he would have wanted his words read to these hills, what a song
Thank you, and welcome!
I think the whole challenge of finishing well, anything you choose to begin, is what is so muddled and mugsy that making something completely, beginning to end, is a trip and a half. I love how you make me smile through all this. There’s a surreal quality about writing snippets from different sources and the intrigue of your brain that makes this a joy to read.
Thank you for the comment. It’s a lot of fun to write, too! 😀
Maybe some day when my son is in school and my mind can handle more things that don’t make sense, I’ll pick Ulysses up again and finish it.
I always thought that in retirement, I would read “Ulysses”. But yet, here I am 2 years into my ‘great intermission’ (my term for retirement), and I haven’t gotten more than half dozen pages into it. Even visiting Dublin on Bloomsday in 2023 didn’t force me to give it another try. Maybe I’ll try the four pages a day method. Until then, it sits on the shelf next to War and Peace.
I haven’t understood or really tried to understand the Ulysses posts until now. I see that I need to do some investigating of my own. I like the idea of the translated Ulysses and I think I’ll do some delving into the videos as well. I’m glad I spotted the link to this post.
What a fascinating testimony and approach to the work. I’m glad I found this.
I am so happy to read this today. I especially loved this here:
“Life has more to offer the starving artist than a bare garret on the left bank of Paris. You find that having something to write about is far more important than whether you can write. As Leonard Cohen said, “For me, poetry is the evidence of a life and not life itself. It’s the ashes of something that’s burning well. And sometimes you confuse yourself and try to create ashes instead of fire.” There is no writer’s life. There is only a human life, of which writing is a part.”
I am lucky to have explored your blog further!
Thank you. Welcome! 😀
Thanks for liking my book review post and I return the favour because your site is fabulous, fun and inspirational in a slightly non conventional way which makes it more appealing. I might try writing like this too.
Thanks @Rick
The way a complicated work remains, even after the reader has thrown in the towel.
This inspires me to try to read this–thank you.