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| 000632438X
| 9780006324386
| 000632438X
| 3.60
| 30
| Nov 25, 1970
| 1971
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it was amazing
| Here is a perfect introduction to Jimmy Joyce – very short (91 pages) and because it was written in 1971 totally free of the clogged infarcted mandari Here is a perfect introduction to Jimmy Joyce – very short (91 pages) and because it was written in 1971 totally free of the clogged infarcted mandarin language that wrecks so much writing about JJ (and everyone else) since the 1980s. Unfortunately it’s out of print. I was always amazed by JJ’s scorched-earth policy towards writing – one single short story collection; one single conventional(ish) autobiographical novel; one play; one exploded-multiverse reinvention of the novel; and one final work which leaves the English language behind completely. What JJ would have done next if he hadn’t been so remiss as to die at the age of 59 is beyond our tiny imaginations. I myself am not so much of a Joyce fan, really, I’m a Ulysses fan. I think Finnegans Wake is unreadable. JJ in his madness took 17 years to write it, that’s 17 wasted years for me, falling down a rabbithole he himself made, entranced as he fell like Alice. It was a grossly self-regarding experiment. As for the other stuff, Dubliners is excellent but oh so miserable (Gross says “the prose, for all its artfulness, tends to level off into an even drone”) and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is tiresome (except for the hellfire sermons) and pompous, or I thought so when I read it many years ago, I should give it another go. (Gross says “The portrait of the artist turns out to be the dissection of a second-rate aesthete”.) But all introductions to great authors should be like this – short, sweet, pungent. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 04, 2024
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Mar 05, 2024
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Mar 03, 2024
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Paperback
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| 131651594X
| 9781316515945
| 131651594X
| 4.75
| 64
| Jul 2022
| Jul 12, 2022
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it was amazing
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PART ONE – THIS BOOK This is an absolutely gigantic behemoth of a book. If it fell on you it would be an immediate ambulance ride to the Emergency depa PART ONE – THIS BOOK This is an absolutely gigantic behemoth of a book. If it fell on you it would be an immediate ambulance ride to the Emergency department. Here is a photo showing an ordinary copy of Ulysses next to it for comparison : [image] Now you know I always buy the cheapest possible paperbacks from Abebooks, but occasionally something pricey comes along which has Birthday Present or Christmas Present written all over it. So this was an Advanced Birthday Present from me to myself. Pure indulgence. I love it, but the question must be asked who is this great beast for? The introduction says that many people try to read Ulysses and fail, and this edition is designed to help the poor reader grapple with all the difficulties. Well, there are lots of guides around already – I just read a great one : [image] So that plus a cheapo copy of Ulysses will do for all those wannabe readers. No normal person is gonna shell out for this giant beast if they are not already a raging hardcore fan, like me. But for the Joyce obsessive in your life, who already has a yacht, this is a must. Why is it so big? Well, the original book is 730 pages long. Each of the 18 chapters is here given an explanatory ten page essay, therefore an additional 180 pages. Plus various trimmings, and it all adds up to 960 pages. Also, there is a LOT of white space on each page. I haven’t yet read all the essays. I’ll update this when I have. PART TWO Goodreads have announced a new policy: Creative writing will be removed from Goodreads on Sept. 1, 2022. Some years ago I wrote a ridiculously long review of Ulysses which some Goodreaders kindly found helpful. I split it into two parts. First part covering chapters 1-7 is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... I put the second part into a "creative writing" entry, so I need to move it, and it may as well be here. But it's too long. So this part covers only chapters 8-12. THE BIG FAT ULYSSES REVIEW PART TWO Note : Each chapter is rated out of ten for Difficulty, Obscenity, General Mindblowing Brilliance and Beauty of Language. 8. The Laestrygonians. Difficulty : 5 Obscenity: 3 General mindblowing brilliance : 2 Beauty of language : 3 Where Bloom nips in a pub for a swift half and a sarnie. Language is deliberately ugly in parts here, all about innards and guzzling and unlovely foodstuffs, oysters looking like snot, that kind of thing. Bloom suddenly recalls the first time he & Molly did it (one assumes) and there's some sloppy sensual stuff which might have raised eyebrows way back when - Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it. Joy! then five lines later ...fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her - yes, this is Ulysses and not Harold Robbins. ** 9. Scylla and Charybdis. Difficulty : 5 Obscenity: 4 (Jehovah is described as “a collector of prepuces”; Buck Mulligan invents a play called “Everyman His Own Wife or A Honeymoon in the Hand” with characters called Toby Tostoff (a ruined Pole) and Crab (a bushranger). General mindblowing brilliance : 4 Beauty of language : 6 You have to wonder who the hell Ulysses is for anymore. I worship at its shrine, slaughter the fatted literary critic in its honour and generally dance naked on remote hilltops in praise of the Joyceness of all Joyce, but even I’m not sure Ulysses is for me. This chapter is a good example of what I mean. It’s so abstruse. Here’s young Stephen jawjawing and bore-boring on and on about his theories about Hamlet & Shakespeare in general, and he wonders if he believes them, and we wonder what they are because his acres of speechifying are just a natural wonder of obfuscatory high-toned dog’s bollocks that you ever came across, so who’s fooling who? What’s it all about, Alfie? as Cilla Black plaintively asked in 1966 (although as we know, it wasn’t her who propelled Joyce into the Top Twenty). On one level JJ breaks his own rules here, since up to now all the characters have spoken very naturalistically. But now Stephen opens forth his intellectual gob and this kind of thing comes forth: Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves. The playwright who wrote the folio of this world and wrote it badly (He gave us light first and the sun two days later), the lord of things as they are whom the most Roman of catholics call dio boia, hangman god, is doubtless all in all in all of us, ostler and butcher, and would be bawd and cuckold too but that in the economy of heaven, foretold by Hamlet, there are no more marriages, glorified man, an androgynous angel, being a wife unto himself Like anyone ever came out with stuff like that casually before sliding off for a pint of plain. Or maybe I just don’t get out enough. Or didn’t in 1904. So all this gorgeousness of language and fruitiness of phrase which is the case with Ulysses from page one to page last is really eating foi gras followed by Christmas cake and a plate of chicken jalfrezi for breakfast followed by duck a l’orange and lightly flayed swan’s arse-cheeks for dinner and the same again the next day. No beans on toast for you my lad – foi gras! JJ loves his rare words to drive us all mad – on page 201 we have, for instance, mesial, brooddam, honeysauce, sack (= wine), marchpane, ringocandies, gombeen, scortatory, lakin and birdsnies. One of goodreads great reviewers, Jason Pettus, once munched his way through 100 designated “classics” and asked the question – well, are they still classics? And his crucial question in this is : how much can this work be enjoyed on its own, without having to refer to the critical and explicatory scaffolding erected round it? Ulysses has so much baggage. What is “common knowledge” anymore? Stephen’s hundreds of allusions to writers, theologians, poets and philosophers of the past, even if he’s just a prize Irish bullshitter trying to impress his elders, are in so many cases as far over our 21st century heads as the swan wished it had been just before we roasted its arse cheeks. But even when it was published Ulysses was famously difficult. Is it now almost impossible? But then, who wouldn’t love this bonkers sentence which suddenly appears at the beginning of this chapter - He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor. ** 10. The Wandering Rocks. Difficulty : 2 (mainly from a slight tedium creeping in) Obscenity: 3 (see below) General mindblowing brilliance : 5 Beauty of language : 6 This is the chapter JJ wrote with a stopwatch in his hand - dozens of characters crisscross Dublin in the early afternoon. We flit from one group to an individual who meets someone else then back to her and on to him - a version of this technique is to be seen in the movie Slacker. And just like that movie, some bits are kind of draggy. The obscenity in this chapter, I suppose, may be found in one guy describing Molly's breasts to another guy and telling how he was able to cop a surreptitious feel of her bodily parts in a cab once - he says "The lad stood to attention anyhow". This reminded me that in following Bloom in the previous chapters how often he is revealed to be leering and peering at a random female he spots, trying to get a glimpse of her petticoats and embonpoint, etc. Bloom isn't any kind of perv, he's the average guy, and we are reminded that in those old ghastly days the sight of sexy women was so rare it was prized, and naked pictures were nowhere to be found. So every man was perpertually lusting. And so it is that in this chapter average Bloom is fingering and eventually buying a porny novel "The Sweets of Sin" which sets him off thinking about sex : "melting breast ointments...armpits' oniony sweat. Fishgluey slime..." yes, I guess some would think that train of thought a little obscene. You never know when someone in Ulysses is going to start thinking about sex, often very vulgarly, and this gave I think its first readers a great feeling of anxiety, which hyped up its reputation. Also, in this chapter there is the N word used, and various characters display casual antisemitism. ** 11. The Sirens Difficulty : 10 Obscenity: 1 (see message 33 below) General mindblowing brilliance : 9 Beauty of language : 7 I had been looking forward to this chapter but have to report that it's ten times harder than I remembered. This is I think the point where people who think life is too short for Ulysses will hurl it from their bosoms with a cry familiar to fans of literature the world over : "James Joyce, you are not my favourite person any more!" Many are called, but few are chosen, and thorny is the path that leads to Molly's final universecreating "yes". This chapter is The Sirens, which refers to the two barmaids in the Ormond Hotel in which a bunch of the usual boring Dublin blokes are having - yes, of course - another skinful of drinks. Haven't they already had a load at lunchtime? Yes, but now it's 4 pm so they want yet more, preparatory to surging forth in the evening after a light tea to guzzle even yet more alcohol in the evening. Not to mention the perpetual smoking. Anyway, Joyce has several things going on at the same time. There's the feebly ironic mythology allusions, we can ignore those; there's the plot, which is entirely psychological at this point as nothing happens in this 30 pages; and there's the ruling "art" of the chapter, which is music. In the previous chapter JJ wanted to turn his book into a walking tour of Dublin. In this chapter he wants to merge the written word as much as he can into music. So we get stuff like this: Bloom looped, unlooped, noded, disnoded. Bloom. Flood of warm jimjam lickitup secretness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow, invading. Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o'er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joygush, tupthrop. Now! Language of love. Okay, Bloom, take a deep breath! It’s not all like that. But it’s often hard to tell what’s being said to who or whether we should really care. (But then, William Gaddis once wrote an entire – long – novel consisting of nothing but unattributed dialogue. Check it out! There’s no garde that some wiseguy hasn’t avanted somewhere.) Stuart Gilbert describes the music technique of this chapter as follows ; The various themes are introduced in the fugal manner: the first, the Subject, is obviously the Sirens’ song. The Answer, Mr Bloom’s entry and monologue; Boylan is the counter-subject. the Episodes or Divertamenti are the songs of Mr Dedalus and Ben Dollard. The Episodes, Subject, Answer and Counter-Subject are often bount together contrapuntally… Then he points out various effects from classical music which JJ ingeniously works into the text : trillando, appoggiatura, fermata, staccato (hey, I’d heard of that one!), martellato, and so on and on. This is where 99.99% of readers are left thinking hey, JJ, why do you do like you do? I can see why JJ made no money in his life except what he was given by a couple of strange American ladies who liked their avant served neat. This is a very tough chapter which is full of gorgeous phrases, sentences, and effects that don’t make the reader’s life any easier. Ulysses has to be more fun than this...and fortunately, it is. ** 12. Cyclops Difficulty : 2 Obscenity: 7 General mindblowing brilliance : 8 Beauty of language : 7 Suddenly without any preparation we are pitched into a first person 50 page long comedy sketch in which the unnamed "I" visits a pub to see “the citizen” (also unnamed throughout) and a bunch of other Dubliners who we’ve been bumping into here and there. It starts like this : I was just passing the time of day with old troy o the D.M.P. at the corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye. I turned around to let him have the weight of my tongue when who should I see dodging along Stony Batter only Joe Hynes. And also throughout we have another form of comedy - at the drop of a hat we get weird and wonderful parodies of all the various types of pomposity which Joyce felt like giving a good kicking to. For instance, here he has a go at Spiritualism, which was big in those days (still is too) : - Don't you know he's dead? says Joe. - Paddy Dignam dead? says Alf. - Ay, says Joe. - Sure I'm after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a pikestaff. - Who's dead? says Bob Doran. - You saw his ghost then, says Joe, God between us and harm. - Dead! says Alf. He is no more dead than you are. - Maybe so, says Joe. They took the liberty of burying him this morning anyhow. - Paddy? says Alf. - Ay, says Joe. He paid the debt of nature, God be merciful to him. - Good Christ! says Alf. Begob he was what you might call flabbergasted. In the darkness spirit hands were felt to flutter and when prayer by tantras had been directed to the proper quarter a faint but increasing luminosity of ruby light became gradually visible, the apparition of the etheric double being particularly lifelike owing to the discharge of jivic rays from the crown of the head and face. Communication was effected through the pituitary body and also by means of the orangefiery and scarlet rays emanating from the sacral region and solar plexus. Questioned by his earthname as to his whereabouts in the heaven-world he stated that he was now on the path of pralaya or return but was still submitted to trial at the hands of certain bloodthirsty entities on the lower astral levels. …. Asked if he had any message for the living he exhorted all who were still at the wrong side of Maya to acknowledge the true path for it was reported in devanic circles that Mars and Jupiter were out for mischief on the eastern angle where the ram has power. It was then queried whether there were any special desires on the part of the defunct and the reply was: We greet you, friends of earth, who are still in the body. Mind C.K. doesn't pile it on. It was ascertained that the reference was to Mr Cornelius Kelleher, manager of Messrs H.J. O'Neill's popular funeral establishment. The rambling rattling rambunctious conversation is amusing stuff but it’s full to the brim of slang expressions and it’s most of the time like overhearing a conversation which would be intelligible if you knew what they were talking about. I guess I have to give a high obscenity score to this chapter for two passages. In the first Bloom has poked his head round the door & joined in the conversation: So they started talking about capital punishment and of course Bloom comes out with the why and the wherefore and all the codology of the business and the old dog smelling him all the time I'm told those Jewies does have a sort of a queer odour coming off them for dogs about I don't know what all deterrent effect and so forth and so on. - There's one thing it hasn't a deterrent effect on, says Alf. - What's that? says Joe. - The poor bugger's tool that's being hanged, says Alf. — That so? says Joe. — God's truth, says Alf. I heard that from the head warder that was in Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible. He told me when they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like a poker. — Ruling passion strong in death, says Joe, as someone said. — That can be explained by science, says Bloom. It's only a natural phenomenon, don't you see, because on account of the... And then he starts with his jawbreakers about phenomenon and science and this phenomenon and the other phenomenon. And a little bit further, the citizen comes out with a tirade against the British royal family : And as for the Prooshians and the Hanoverians, says Joe, haven’t we had enough of those sausageeating bastards on the throne from George the Elector down to the German lad and the flatulent old bitch that’s dead? So one may not be so surprised that Ulysses had a Lot of trouble finding a publisher. The effect of reading Cyclops, indeed the cumulative effect of reading Ulysses, is the engulfing conviction that Joyce actually KNOWS EVERYTHING. He knows every book ever written, every turn of phrase, every arcane argot, every particle of science and religion, the lift of each and every eyebrow, he has every hair of your head numbered – it’s quite creepy. For the obvious crazed plenitude of his knowledge alone the guy was a stone genius. That he can then dish it out into brilliant prose stuffed with a mad Monty Python surreal wit doubles the genius and wallops a big fattest of fat cherry on the top with ice cream sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. I love this chapter also because in it we find the only quotation from Joyce ever to make the British Top Forty. I’ve mentioned this before. The phrase is “Love loves to love love” and you can find it as the title of a song Lulu got a modest hit out of in November 1967. Final part of this review is here; https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 05, 2022
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Jul 06, 2022
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Jul 05, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 0141999764
| 9780141999760
| 0141999764
| 4.37
| 139
| Jul 01, 2005
| Jan 20, 2022
|
it was amazing
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[image] [image] It will not have escaped your attention that 2022 is Ulysses’ 100th birthday! Should you be wishing to leap boldly into the unique exhaus [image] [image] It will not have escaped your attention that 2022 is Ulysses’ 100th birthday! Should you be wishing to leap boldly into the unique exhausting but hilarious reading experience that is Ulysses, here is a great guide. Terence Killeen doesn't waffle on too much in the way that professors can and often do, those naughty academics who are all in love with the sound of their own voices. No. He is succinct. But most informative. And when he wrestles with the Difficult Bits (there are a fair few, but stiffen thy sinews) he sounds like a real reader. He doesn’t assume that everyone has a class A brain with memory already fully equipped with all the Greek Classics. Some of those professors will put you off your own breakfast, so they will. So this is recommended! MY OTHER FAVOURITE BOOKS ON JOYCE Biographically I loved this old one [image] Can you imagine being Jimmy Joyce’s brother? And him forever short of a ten bob note? Here is a lovely picture book [image] and here is a really great history of what happened to Ulysses after it was published – it had many adventures! It’s a real pageturner! [image] and finally a real obscurity – if you ever wanted to read about somebody’s truly grim-but-funny obsession with one single book – [image] If you ever thought of trying FW this will cure you. Poor Roland. (But Ulysses is a whole other thing! Give it a go....) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 11, 2022
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May 27, 2022
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May 11, 2022
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Paperback
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| 1594203369
| 9781594203367
| 1594203369
| 4.33
| 1,251
| Jun 12, 2014
| Jun 12, 2014
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really liked it
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Revived review to celebrate BLOOMSDAY 2020 This book is my favourite book-about-Joyce. **************************************** TWO REVIEWS : 1. THE SHORT Revived review to celebrate BLOOMSDAY 2020 This book is my favourite book-about-Joyce. **************************************** TWO REVIEWS : 1. THE SHORT VERSION For all Joyce fans this is a MUST READ. 2. THE LONG VERSION In 1915 James Joyce was 33, unemployed, as poor as he’d ever been, with a wife and 2 young kids, living in Trieste, a few miles from where bombs were exploding and soldiers dying in thousands. His only book, Dubliners, had sold 412 copies since it was finally published in June 1914. (It had taken 10 years to get published). No one would touch his novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a twenty foot pole. So, then, the perfect time and setting to begin Ulysses! It took 8 years and became a dreadful pain in the arse for everybody. Two radical literary magazines, both run by women, one in America (The Little Review) and one in London (The Egoist) decided to try to serialise it. The chapters emerged and got ever weirder and more obscene. After receiving the “Sirens” episode, Harriet Weaver, editor of the Egoist, wrote to him : I think I can see that your writing has been affected to some extent by your worries. Ezra Pound put it another way and asked Joyce if he had “got knocked on the head or bit by a wild dog and gone dotty”. In America the government finally prosecuted when the Nausicaa chapter was published. They didn’t like Gerty MacDowell’s underthings, at all. In the courtroom : The DA launched into a red-faced invective, at which point Quinn [for the defense] broke in and pointed to the prosecutor : “This is my best exhibit! There is proof Ulysses does not corrupt or fill people full of lascivious thoughts. Look at him! Does a reading of that chapter want to send him into the arms of a whore? Is he filled with sexual desire? Not at all. He wants to murder somebody! He wants to send Joyce to jail. He wants to send those two women to jail. He would like to disbar me. He is full of hatred, venom, anger and uncharitableness. But lust? There is not a drop of lust or an ounce of sex passion in his whole body… He is my chief exhibit as to the effect of Ulysses.” Sylvia Beach, who ran Shakespeare and Co, a bookshop in Paris, [image] (it’s still there! I have been…) decided to bite the bullet and publish Ulysses in 1922. When she did, it turned out that everyone was gagging for a copy, but they all lived in Britain or America where it was banned. It immediately became the supreme symbol of cultural rebellion. To have a copy, or even, to know someone who had a copy! O the thrill! So they had to smuggle their copies from France, and the smuggling takes up a fair chunk of the tale. Ulysses sold 24,000 copies in the following nine years, which was pitifully small. The Great Gatsby sold the same number in its first year & this was considered a major disappointment. So for ten years they couldn’t get Ulysses published in the USA because this vice supremo John Sumner would have vamoosed them off to Sing Sing. Into the gap stepped shady guys printing up pirated copies, and obviously paying Joyce nothing (just like music bootleggers later). They had to be stopped - and the only sure way of doing that was for Mr Quinn, the defender of Ulysses, to ask Mr Sumter to prosecute the pirates for distributing obscene books! Which situation he described as “somewhat ironical”. The government didn’t want the botheration of a full trial, so what they did was confiscate every imported copy. In December 1922 they had collected nearly 500 copies at New York’s General Post Office Building on 34th Street, and : They wheeled them down the basement’s dim corridors and unloaded them in the furnace room. … The men opened the round cast-iron hatches and began tossing James Joyce’s Ulysses into the chambers. Paper burns brighter than coal. For this very delicious book Kevin Birmingham got hold of a great subject, which we might have thought we already knew about but we really didn’t , not to this degree of essential detail. And just when the reader is thinking that this quaint old cultural war, long since won hands down, (is anything now considered to be obscene?) is a type of comedy, he switches the focus to Joyce’s own life, which was painful – literally. We have pages of Joyce’s horrible eye ailments, the grotesque eye operations, lists of treatments, all of which failed – Steam baths Mud baths Sweating powders Cold compresses and hot compresses Iodine injections Stimulation of the thyroid Electrotherapy Leeches applied to eyes (many times) Dionine (eyedrops) Salicylic acid (eyedrops) Boric acid (eyedrops) Atropine (eyedrops) Scopolamine (eyedrops) And of course Iridectomies (multiple times) He had decades of on-off painful eruptions of his eye problems, which KB attributes to tertiary syphilis, contracted way back when Joyce was a student in Dublin. However, thankfully, it wasn’t all misery. After Ulysses he began the inscrutable Finnegans Wake, of which Nora Barnacle said: “I go to bed and then that man sits in the next room and continues laughing about his own writing.” She would get out of bed and pound on the door, “Now Jim, stop writing or stop laughing!” (All Joyce’s friends hated Finnegan, but he carried on with it for 17 years & finished it & died.) When the formal case against Ulysses was heard in November 1933 it was a very rum affair. The prosecutor, the defender and the judge all agreed that Ulysses was a masterpiece of the highest order. No witnesses were called. Judge John Woolsey made the decision all on his own. Time magazine, that champion of the avant-garde, apostrophized thus : Watchers of the US skies last week reported no comet or other celestial portent. In Manhattan no showers of ticker-tape blossomed from Broadway office windows, no welcoming committee packed City Hall… Yet many a wide-awake modern-minded citizen knew he had seen literary history pass another milestone. For last week a much enduring traveler, world-famed but long an outcast, landed safe and sound on US shores. His name was Ulysses. It fair brings a tear to the eye. Except that the same journal was probably calling for Joyce's head on a plate ten years before. Well, the tide had turned. Let’s finish with a remarkable fact. Can I believe it? Well, I’m going to try. On p 340 KB informs us: After ninety years in print, Ulysses sells roughly one hundred thousand copies a year. I raise a glass to all of you yearly 100,000. May every one of you make it through to Molly’s final yes. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 21, 2014
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Jul 26, 2014
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Jul 08, 2014
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0571242545
| 9780571242542
| 0571242545
| 3.84
| 281
| Sep 28, 2009
| 2010
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did not like it
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A righthearted but wrongheaded attempt to reboot Ulysses as a fount of the zen wisdom of everyday life and a book every ordinary reader should eagerly
A righthearted but wrongheaded attempt to reboot Ulysses as a fount of the zen wisdom of everyday life and a book every ordinary reader should eagerly glom onto. This is a very stupid idea. God bless Declan Kibert for having such a stupid idea, but God curse all his friends and editors for not strenuously dissuading him from writing this turgid self-defeating attempt to do the impossible. He’s an academic who rages against the elitism of academia, the abstruseness of the professors, and wants to lead a people’s revolution to take back Ulysses from their undead mottled hands and torch their fusty theses and caper up and down the quadrangle yelling “Free Joyce from the Joyceans!” . He says : It should be as accessible to ordinary readers as once were the Odyssey, the New Testament, the Divine Comedy and Hamlet. I dunno, this kind of jazz baffles me. What readers did those things have? Er, none except the teeny weeny eeny minority who were literate, so by definition, not “ordinary”. Maybe some ordinary types got to see Hamlet and hear the Odyssey being declaimed. Anyway, he says Any teacher knows that many students today sprinkle their essays with quotations from the lyrics of rock music and from popular films. This suggests that they still yearn for instruction from artists on how to live. And he proposes that Ulysses is the thing to replace the aphorisms of Eminem and Katy Perry. You know, I think somebody slipped something in Declan’s drink when he wasn’t looking. Ulysses is not for the ordinary reader, however you teach it. That’s the main problem. But the other, worse, problem is that Declan writes in the same way that all the jawbreaking Joyceans do. Let’s open this book at random. Page 176. Although Bloom can at one moment feel that all is lost, turning down the frieze on a doily in a gesture which reverses that in the morning when he straightened Molly’s bedspread, his use of water imagery suggests acceptance of what has happened between her and Boylan : “as easy stop the sea”. Hours later, Molly will use the same image of the sea to explain her adventure so this line also carries a suggestion that the Blooms are married not just in law but in the profound depths of a shared imaginative life. Just the same professorial Joycean jabber and blather you have read, or hopefully, avoided, in a jillion previous tomes. I don’t need it, neither do you. You need to read Ulysses instead because you’re not an ordinary reader. Read on and off over the the last 2 years, but today I just got f-f-f-f-f-f-fed up of it. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 20, 2013
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not set
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Mar 11, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0520067452
| 9780520067455
| 0520067452
| 4.21
| 3,071
| 1974
| Jun 26, 1989
|
it was ok
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This book is bulkier than Ulysses itself and I didn't like it one bit. I think the authors knew I wouldn't. In their preface they say The notes may app This book is bulkier than Ulysses itself and I didn't like it one bit. I think the authors knew I wouldn't. In their preface they say The notes may appear to labor an abundance of the obvious in order to render a few grains of the subtle and suggestive And This book is designed to be laid open beside the novel and to be read in tandem with it. Tandem reading, however, has its disadvantages. I'll say. Especially when the front rider on the tandem is pedalling manically into the dangerous transcendent extreme edge of language itself and the back rider is steering towards a bricabrac shop he just spotted. They suggest a plan : an "interrupted" reading of a chapter (i.e. checking every annotation) followed by an uninterrupted reading. Or even better : Skim a sequence of notes, then read the annotated sequence in the novel with interruptions for consideration of those notes that seem crucial, then follow with an uninterrupted reading. Yes, I think that's the best way. If you have no family, no pets and a private income. The annotators are crushingly aware that they are actually wrecking a major part of JJ's work, which was to show the significance of the trivial (Bloom finally meets Stephen, but they part and don't become friends, that's it, no big drama folks, nothing to see). But by hammering every triviality with a big note this book changes the trivial into the significant by the very act of annotation. But still, it's a useful book since it tries to explain everything in Ulysses which is no longer common knowledge. And what is this thing called common knowledge now, anyway? I was speaking with an elderly female relative the other day (no names please) and in the conversation it became clear that she'd never in her long life heard of the idea that there might have been a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Meanwhile I work in an office with a bunch of kids just out of university and I'd bet a crisp tenner that half of them wouldn't know who JFK was. So that means that almost everything in Ulysses isn't common knowledge anymore. But my main objection to this probably inevitable and essential book, why I don't like it at all, is that it gives you, the reader of Ulysses (at least I hope you are) the idea that you ought to understand every bit of Ulysses, every damned reference to bits of Italian opera and Irish slang and Fenian history and the Latin mass and how much a Dublin hooker paid in rent and so on and so forth and really – big breath – you don't need to, you just don't, at all. JJ shoves all that glorious detail in as the woof and weft and particoloured pantaloons of his gartersnappingly real picture of dear dirty Dublin, so, you know, just breathe it all in, and as in your own real life, accept that there are about a thousand bits and bobs of conversations and half heard remarks and things that go by too quick on the tv and all of the onrush of frantic netsplurge and soundblurt of the day-to-day day which you won't quite get. And that's how it is. But this book thinks you can get everything. It's just wrong. ...more |
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not set
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Feb 2012
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Mar 01, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0764538144
| 9780764538148
| 0764538144
| 3.59
| 46
| Jan 06, 2003
| Jan 01, 2003
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did not like it
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I wanted to find out what the famous Cliffs Notes said about Ulysses. It turned out to be bad. Really bad. As bad as bad as bad could be. Now, students sh I wanted to find out what the famous Cliffs Notes said about Ulysses. It turned out to be bad. Really bad. As bad as bad as bad could be. Now, students should study literature, and they should be examined in their studies in a rigorous and merciless way before giving them their certificate of competence. That is all fine and dandy. If, however, I am able to infer the type of exam students will be sitting from reading the kind of guide to answers provided in Cliff Notes then – it would appear – our exam system in English literature is successfully reducing great works to vile box ticking and train-spotting exercises, plot, character, theme, technique, all boxed up with a shudder and labelled with wretchedness. Explain the significance of the Bloom’s lemon soap and why he transfers it from one pocket to another throughout the day? Discuss Bloom's penis with particular reference to masturbation. In the Circe episode why does Stephen's mother do the frug? These notes are chronically joysucking, laughterkilling loveless anticelebrations of what should be doors, bridges and windows, not to mention explosions of mindmelting brilliance, and not dungeons and shackles in the mind. For instance - and these are actual quotes, not made up by myself - Readers should understand immediately that this chapter is first of all filled with many references to long cylindrical objects similar to the red-hot stave-like weapon which Odysseus used to blind his captor. Keyes's demand for two crossed keys at the top of his ad suggests the keyless plight of Ulysses' two male protagonists, as does the allusion to "home rule". It is fashionable today to view this religious symbolism as being suggestive of a tri-union of Bloom, Stephen and Molly, in which Bloom and Stephen share elements of God the Father and God the Son, and in which Molly becomes the Mystical Bride, that is, the Bride of the Catholic Church. The rising and falling of the biscuit tin which was flung by the Citizen is reflected in the various ascents and declines in Nausicaa : for example, Gerty MacDowell's tempting leg, the roman candle's rise and climactic explosion, and the swinging censor of the church benediction – all of these risings and fallings lead up to and down from the simultaneous orgasms of Gerty and Bloom. Groan – leaving aside that I don't think Gertie had an orgasm for a second, it's just not credible -but how perfectly dreadful this is. How sorry I feel for students having to drag their sorry asses (note examples of other moribund beasts of burden in the Eumaeus episode) through Ulysses, then these damned notes, then the double-damned exam itself. Show how Cliffs Notes represent a reductive and ultimately self-defeating attitude to English literature, with particular reference to their notes on Ulysses. You have one hour. You may begin. ...more |
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Feb 19, 2012
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Feb 24, 2012
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Feb 24, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0711227454
| 9780711227453
| 0711227454
| 3.33
| 3
| Mar 28, 2008
| Mar 28, 2008
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liked it
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Comparing this handsome photo book of Dublin with a similar one by Edward Quinn published in 1973 I was struck by the apparent tragedy laid out before
Comparing this handsome photo book of Dublin with a similar one by Edward Quinn published in 1973 I was struck by the apparent tragedy laid out before us - clearly, between 1973 and now, someone had dropped a neutron bomb on Dublin. This is the type of bomb which vaporises all the human beings and leaves all the buildings intact. So here is the visual proof of the undying beauty that is Dublin. How sad that there does not appear to be one single Dubliner left, if these photos are to be believed. Not in the pubs, not in the libraries, certainly not in the streets or on the bridges. Probably Paul Barker must have got special permission to visit the place and worn a special radiation suit. Funny that I never read anything about this in the news. It just goes to show. Levity aside, this is a lovely photo book of Dublin, of course, and if you're a Joyce fan you can add it to the growing pile of Dublin/Joyce photo-celebrations - so far I have James Joyce's Odyssey by Frank Delaney The Joyce Country by William York Tindall James Joyce's Dublin by Patricia Hutchins James Joyce's Dublin by Edward Quinn Dublin by Paul Barker So all are crammed with pix of the various locations in and around dear dirty Dublin and all are taken at various times between the late 40s and 2007 so you can compare and contrast and go into a kind of Joycetrance. ...more |
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Sep 2011
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Sep 11, 2011
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Hardcover
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| 0415138582
| 9780415138581
| 0415138582
| 3.98
| 1,438
| Jan 01, 1988
| Sep 26, 1996
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really liked it
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PB’S REALLY SHORT BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO ULYSSES I know some people would like to read Ulysses but can't find the six months in their busy schedules they PB’S REALLY SHORT BLUFFER’S GUIDE TO ULYSSES I know some people would like to read Ulysses but can't find the six months in their busy schedules they think they'll need, so here's the short version. It consists of the first and last lines from each chapter. It struck me how stunningly beautiful these sentences are, so even if you never do get to read Ulysses, you can get the gist of the damn thing right here. Let's go. (I also add my own summary of the action in brackets). CHAPTER ONE Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. Usurper. (Stephen and his mate have breakfast and decide to fuck off to town.) CHAPTER TWO You, Cochrane, what city sent for him? On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins. (Stephen does a morning of teaching history and has to put up with his boss the headmaster boring him to death.) CHAPTER THREE Ineluctable modality of the visible : at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails braided up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship. (Stephen mooches to town and thinks his head off about all kinds of shit.) CHAPTER FOUR Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. Poor Dignam! (Introducing the fairly dull Leopold Bloom and his MILF wife Molly. Has anyone noticed Molly is a total Milf before? This point appears to have escaped the professors.) CHAPTER FIVE By lorries along Sir John Rogerson's quay Mr Bloom walked soberly, past Windmill Lane, Leask's, the linseed crushers, the postal telegraph office. He saw the trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed highly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh : and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower. (Bloom goes to a public bath and has a bit of a wank. No big deal.) CHAPTER SIX Martin Cunningham, first, poked his silkhatted head into the creaking carriage and, entering deftly, seated himself. How grand we are this morning. (They all go to a funeral and think morbid thoughts like you do.) CHAPTER SEVEN In the heart of the Hibernian metropolis. Tickled the old ones too, Myles Crawford said, if the God Almighty’s truth was known! (Stephen & some really boring types go to a newspaper office and jaw jaw jaw for what seem like hours.) CHAPTER EIGHT Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. Safe! (Bloom goes for a pint and a pie in some pub and gets grossed out by the eating habits of his fellow human beings. Like you do.) CHAPTER NINE Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred : Laud we the gods and let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils from our bless’d altars. (Stephen spins some really migraine inducing theories about Shakespeare to some old fuckwits in the library. Read this and hang yourself. But we’re already half way done!) CHAPTER TEN The superior, the Very reverend John Conmee S.J. reset his smooth watch in his interior pocket as he came down the presbytery steps. On Northumberland and Landsdowne roads His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849, and the salute of Almidano Artifoni’s sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door. (Lots of people meander about Dublin. Some get the bus.) CHAPTER ELEVEN Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing. Done. (Bloom visits yet another pub, bloody hell. He fancies the barmaids.) CHAPTER TWELVE I was just passing the time of day with old Troy of the D.M.P. at the corner of Arbour hill there and be damned but a bloody sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye. And they beheld Him, even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe’s in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel. (To coin a phrase, this chapter’s got more rabbit than Sainsburys. These Irish guys, man they can argue.) CHAPTER THIRTEEN The summer evening had begun to fold the world in its mysterious embrace. Cuckoo. (Bloom wandering along the seafront and eyeing up this teenage girl, she must be no more than 15, and giving himself a crafty feel, like you do. Well, you might. I would never do that.) CHAPTER FOURTEEN Deshil Holles Eamus. Just you try it on. (Stephen and his drinking pals round the maternity hospital and guess what, more drinking and jawing. Fuck me.) CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green will-o’-the-wisps and danger signals. A white lamkbin peeps out of his waistcoat pocket. (This is the Freud-on-Acid section – Bloom and some other random guys go to the red light area to continue their carousing. Not much in the way of lapdancing or actual sex, however, sorry to disappoint.) CHAPTER SIXTEEN Preparatory to anything else Mr Bloom brushed off the greater bulk of the shavings and handed Stephen the hat and ashplant and bucked him up generally in orthodox Samaritan fashion, which he very badly needed. As they walked, they at times stopped and walked again, continuing their tete-a-tete (which of course he was utterly out of), about sirens, enemies of man’s reason, mingled with a number of other topics of the same category, usurpers, historical cases of the kind while the man in the sweeper car or you might as well call it in the sleeper car who in any case couldn’t possibly hear because they were too far simply sat in his seat near the end of Lower Gardiner Street and looked after their lowbacked car. (They’re all quite drunk and rambling and shagged out, so this chapter is written in a DELIBERATELY BORING way – you can tell, can’t you – I mean, what author does that? I mean, fuck that.) CHAPTER SEVENTEEN What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning? Where? (Bloom is taking Stephen back to his house to crash because Stephen doesn’t want to go back to his own gaff because he’s hacked off with his mate. This chapter is written in question and answer fashion, and is supposed to reveal the secrets of the universe or I don’t know something along those lines. By now, who cares.) CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Yes because he never did a thing like that before as ask to get his breakfast in bed with a couple of eggs yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. (I had to cheat here as the last NINETY PAGE chapter doesn’t have any punctuation in it – way to go, JJ. Anyways, this is pure milf-of consciousness as Molly Bloom of the ample proportions takes it away. If you can groove on it it’s not too bad, but 90 pages is pushing it.) There you are. Now you can say “I haven’t read Ulysses but I have read the first and the last sentences of every chapter.” Watch how this impresses your friends! Or perhaps makes them think you’re slightly unhinged. ...more |
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not set
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Jan 1986
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Sep 09, 2010
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Paperback
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| 0195016637
| 9780195016635
| 0195016637
| 3.81
| 124
| 1972
| Dec 25, 1986
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it was ok
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Got your tin of Red Bull ready? Okay - now get another. And - get some Anadin Extra too. That's for after. Because this is not skateboarding on a Sund
Got your tin of Red Bull ready? Okay - now get another. And - get some Anadin Extra too. That's for after. Because this is not skateboarding on a Sunday afternoon, this is not Strictly Come Dancing and this is definitely not that Aerosmith video with Alicia Silverstone. And - it's not even Strictly Come Dancing with mythical Greek heroes instead of grade D celebs. What this is is proper Ulysses criticism and I don't think I like it. For instance : "Joyce is so far faithful to Homer as to let the initial burden of opposing the suitors of Penelope fall principally on Telemachus. In the third triad of chapters Bloom is conspicuous only in the middle, Stephen holding the stage in Aeolus and Scylla and Charybdis with his two parables, one of nationalism, the other of art. In accordance with their hypothetical juncture in the first six episodes, the two men are now banded together without being aware of the fact. Unconsciously they are in league against the powers of this world and the next. Their first joint enterprise is in defence of language, both of English as a whole and of the integrity of each word. If the artist is to bring the word to his race, he must begin by rejecting false diction and the false gods it enshrines." Oh yes, get thee behind me false diction! I vomit thee forth. This is as I recall the kind of jiggerypokery which passed for exegesis when I was a wee bookish geek at the University of Southampton. I could make a fair fist of it but I never really believed in it when I was writing essays on Yeats' wonderful poem Vaseline in Action or Dickens' searing novel of life as an early Victorian pest controller Great Infestations . It just seemed as though no one ever thought like that except people who were given professorships on the basis of the fact that they did. And of course if you did think like that, you could just turn on a tap and out it would come: "The antithesis of cream and blood is reasserted in the fleshiness and fleshlessness of the people Bloom meets." "Father Time misbehaves, offering not decorous succession but frisky agitation, and Mother Space cannot be kept at home," "The brain's womb is also a tomb : experience dies in it to be reborn like Christ beyond space and time. The process is painful, like labour or murder." All these big words - the thatness of that, the thisness of this, and howsomever the that and the this coexitentialisagilliframuglify each other and our very selves - is this not the very pith and plinth of great literature and the point where we sit on the high diving board of human things and cannonball off into the voidoid? Well, I think it's self-evident. But I don't like it. ...more |
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Apr 18, 2010
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Paperback
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| 2.67
| 3
| Jan 01, 1950
| 1950
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liked it
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None
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Dec 05, 2007
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| 0586084509
| 9780586084502
| 0586084509
| unknown
| 4.13
| 90
| Jun 16, 2013
| Jan 01, 1982
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it was amazing
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Full of gorgeous black & white photos of Dublin and environs. Been goggling at this one again this evening, along with my own photos of Dublin taken i
Full of gorgeous black & white photos of Dublin and environs. Been goggling at this one again this evening, along with my own photos of Dublin taken in the late 80s of all the Joycean bits & pieces - these are also really good and should be published. No, I jest.
...more
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Notes are private!
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Dec 05, 2007
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||
| 0805203478
| 9780805203479
| 0805203478
| 4.00
| 12
| Jan 22, 1973
| Jan 01, 1973
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it was amazing
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These are beautiful black & white photos of all the places mentioned in Joyce's books, which are many and varied. They were taken in the late 50s most
These are beautiful black & white photos of all the places mentioned in Joyce's books, which are many and varied. They were taken in the late 50s mostly. I went to Dublin some years ago and took this book with me. I then insisted on going to every location, standing as near as I could to the place the original snapper stood, and taking my own photo, just to see how much had changed in the 35-ish years since. In some cases nothing had, in other cases it had all gone. It was one of the most fun things I ever did on holiday - call me a loony if you dare. My female companion and her Dublin-based friend were at first bemused but pretty much got into it. If you're a Joyce fan and you visit Dublin, you could take this book and do the same!
...more
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Dec 05, 2007
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Hardcover
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| 0394700139
| 9780394700137
| 0394700139
| 4.17
| 2,341
| Jan 01, 1932
| Jan 01, 1952
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liked it
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THIRD AND FINAL PART OF THE BIG FAT ULYSSES REVIEW (moved here because Goodreads is removing "creative writing" from September). (First part is here http THIRD AND FINAL PART OF THE BIG FAT ULYSSES REVIEW (moved here because Goodreads is removing "creative writing" from September). (First part is here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and second part is here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) ** Note : Each chapter is rated out of ten for Difficulty, Obscenity, General Mindblowing Brilliance and Beauty of Language. 13. Nausicaa Difficulty : 2 Obscenity: 8 (see below for details) General mindblowing brilliance : 9 Beauty of language : 7 Via another discombobulating jump-cut, we are now apparently reading some horribly sentimental magazine story: The three girl friends were seated on the rocks, enjoying the evening scene and the air which was fresh but not too chilly. Many a time and oft were they wont to come there to that favourite nook to have a cosy chat beside the sparkling waves and discuss matters feminine … None of your spoilt beauties, Flora MacFlimsy sort, was Cissy Caffrey. A truerhearted lass never drew the breath of life, always with a laugh in her gipsylike eyes and a frolicsome word on her cherryripe red lips, a girl lovable in the extreme Yes, we're still in parodyland and will be remaining here, deliriously, on and off, for more or less the rest of the book. This particular parody is utterly delicious but the way JJ uses it makes it a model of how to skewer a few chastening points brilliantly into the reader's brain. JJ intertwines three things together – the most serious and self-regarding of these three girls (who are looking after a baby and two toddlers on Sandymount strand) is Gerty McDowell, she believes everything she's read, and as we read the ridiculous uberromantic description of this banal evening her thoughts begin to emerge and blend in and out of the lush descriptions, and then, both her thoughts and the lush descriptions keep being capsized by the demands of looking after the kids The twins were now playing again right merrily for the troubles of childhood are but as fleeting summer showers. Cissy played with baby Boardman till he crowed with glee, clapping baby hands in air. Peep she cried behind the hood of the pushcar and Edy asked where was Cissy gone and then Cissy popped up her head and cried ah! and, my word, didn't the little chap enjoy that! Then gradually through Gerty's thoughts we perceive that a man is leaning against some nearby rocks watching them, but particularly looking at Gerty herself. Joyce now begins an exquisite entwining of various strands – Gerty thinks immediately he's a tall dark stranger and that he's enraptured by her beauty; the other girls collect the kids and go off to see a firework show they've just noticed is happening at a nearby bazaar; Gerty stays behind, as does the mysterious stranger. There then follows an extrordinary episode of exhibitionism in which JJ fuses the fireworks Gerty is seeing with what can only be the pocket rocket that the mysterious gentleman is playing with... how very distasteful indeed! And – oh no! the gentleman turns out to be none other than Mr Leopold Bloom! I have hardly ever come across a book which fuses such sadness and such humour together as in this chapter of Ulysses, which is nearly my favourite chapter, in which the hero of the book masturbates whilst looking at the undergarments of a disabled woman. ** 14. Oxen of the Sun Difficulty : 10 Obscenity: 0 General mindblowing brilliance : 10 Beauty of language : 1 In the Cyclops chapter Joyce is writing a chatty, funny account of encounters and arguments in a Dublin pub when suddenly the smooth flowing surface of the prose is exploded by eruptions of weird deadpan parodies of various types of writing. And they're hilarious. Much fun is had. Thighs are slapped. In Oxen of the Sun the entire thing is a series of pastiches of prose styles, and indeed, the subject matter is not that far from Cyclops – booze-fuelled jollity and debate – but this chapter is excruciatingly painful to read. Indeed, I will give a crisp ten pound note to anyone who can prove they have read all of this chapter without skipping, sighing deeply, moaning aloud and fixing to hurl Ulysses at the wall (before horrifiedly realising what you were about to do!). As you all know Oxen of the Sun is Joyce at his most rarified, pastiching the following in some mad analogy between the development of the English language and the development of the unborn child. He's playing to the gallery here – but there are only four people in the gallery, all applauding and nodding, and all professors. Everyone else has left. Then spake young Stephen orgulous of mother Church that would cast him out of her bosom, of law of canons, of Lilith, patron of abortions, of bigness wrought by wind of seeds of brightness or by potency of vampires mouth to mouth or, as Virgilius saith, by the influence of the occident or by the reek of moonflower or an she lie with a woman which her man has but lain with, _effectu secuto_, or peradventure in her bath according to the opinions of Averroes and Moses Maimonides. Well, I have got an English degree and I have read Mort D'Arthur and Bunyan and so on, but I wasn't in the gallery Joyce is playing to in this chapter. It's kind of fun but also it kind of isn't. ** 15. Circe Difficulty : 9 Obscenity: 7 General mindblowing brilliance : 8 Beauty of language : 5 According to Ulysses Annotated, there are direct sources for the amazing phantasmagoria we now confront in this chapter : The Temptations of Saint Anthony by Flaubert Faust by Goethe (especially the Walpurgisnacht section) The Assumption of Hannele by Hauptmann The plays of Ibsen and Strindberg Venus in Furs by von Sacher-Masoch Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing So Bloom, Stephen and the medical students betake themselves to the red light area of Dublin, Nighttown. But forget any notion of "story". This is a 150-page (by far the longest chapter) psycho-skelter through everybody's subconscious mind, Bloom's, Stephen's, yours, mine (well, yours anyway, I never think like this!). The whole thing is in the form of a surreal play, and everything speaks, and everything turns into everything else. Like an acid trip. Yeah, like that. This can be bewildering and, frankly, tiresome, but there are many Joycean bursts of ridiculous humour – crazy elephantine lists sprout up at the drop of a hat. It's fun, bring your own bottle of psychology. ** 16 Eumaeus. Difficulty : 9 Obscenity: 0 General mindblowing brilliance : 3 Beauty of language : 0 Strange scores for this chapter but it is one of the strangest. In the beginning novels were written in the first person (Robinson Crusoe, 1719) or a number of first persons, as in the epistolatory novels like Clarissa, 1748, or in the omniscient third person narrator manner which became the default in fiction. In Tom Jones (1749) Fielding, (we should probably say "Fielding") the author, breaks into his own narrative and talks directly to the reader, musing on what has happened to his characters and tweaking the reader's expectations about what should happen next, and what would be the most entertaining sort of thing to read about. When novelists did the same thing two hundred years later, such as in the French Lieutenant's Woman or The Crimson Petal and the White, or in B S Johnson's novels, modern readers got a post-modern jolt this fourth wall breakage because novelists had been striving to make their narrative seamless and believable, all that baked in goodness. Just like in the movies, where you just don't want to see the actors suddenly start bitching about the poor script, you don't want to see the mike boom, they cut all that stuff out. The audience's willingness – need – to suspend disbelief is however nearly limitless – QUINCE Then, there is another thing: we must have a wall in the great chamber; for Pyramus and Thisby says the story, did talk through the chink of a wall. SNOUT You can never bring in a wall. What say you, Bottom? BOTTOM Some man or other must present Wall: and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some rough-cast about him, to signify wall; and let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisby whisper. Novels are just pretend for grownups. But in Ulysses you get massive disruption, Joyce throws hand grenades all over the place, there is nothing seamless about it, it's the opposite, it's a hectic babble of voices of all kinds, there is no overall narrative authority. In Cyclops the chapter is narrated by an unnamed character in the pub, you never find out who he is. Circe as we know is laid out like a play with insane stage directions. And so on. The story, such as it is, has to be glimpsed between these clashing registers. But at the same time, Joyce crams in a dozen bits of Dublin verisimilitude in every line, and he's writing with maps and stopwatches, so at the same time as making this novel the least realistic, he's also making it the most realistic. In Eumaeus we have a new narrator, and it's the worst of the lot. This new voice comes across like a character itself, but it isn't, it's a version of the omniscient narrator, or should I say it's a sub-version, because the voice is wind-baggy, bumbling, rambling, incoherent, irrelevant, trails away into vagueness, is awkwardness personified. E,g. Mr Bloom, without evincing surprise, unostentatiously turned over the card to peruse the partially obliterated address and postmark. It ran as follows: Tarjeta Postal. Señor A. Boudin, Galeria Becche, Santiago, Chile. There was no message evidently, as he took particular notice. Though not an implicit believer in the lurid story narrated (or the eggsniping transaction for that matter despite William Tell and the Lazarillo-Don Cesar de Bazan incident depicted in Maritana on which occasion the former's ball passed through the latter's hat), having detected a discrepancy between his name (assuming he was the person he represented himself to be and not sailing under false colours after having boxed the compass on the strict q.t. somewhere) and the fictitious addressee of the missive which made him nourish some suspicions of our friend's bona fides, nevertheless it reminded him in a way of a longcherished plan he meant to one day realise some Wednesday or Saturday of travelling to London via long sea not to say that he had ever travelled extensively to any great extent but he was at heart a born adventurer though by a trick of fate he had consistently remained a landlubber except you call going to Holyhead which was his longest. Forty pages of this stuff and you are like to hang yourself. This is the omniscient narrator as the garrulous bore you got stuck next to on a long flight once going on about stuff you have zero interest in - for hours. The memory of it still can make you shudder. Suddenly, Ulysses, a book many people don't read because they think it will be longwinded and tiresome, is longwinded and tiresome. Of course it's appropriate, it's one in the morning and Poldy and Stephen are fagged out after their Nighttown exertions, no one is on tip-top form. Including the novel. In the words of Blur, this is a low. ** 17 Ithaca. Difficulty : 8 Obscenity: 3 (some quasi-scientific talk of ejaculating semen in the natural female organ, and also note Bloom kisses Molly's bottom, see below) General mindblowing brilliance : 9 Beauty of language : 6 The previous chapter's voice was exhausted; this chapter's voice is exhaustive. By the time you've finished you'll be wrung out and gasping and Bloom will be filleted, cross-indexed, financially, erotically and intestinally investigated, we will have crawled all over Bloom, peered in every orifice, itemised every cupboard and drawer in 7 Eccles Street, we will have autopsied his dreams and schemes and calculated to the nth degree every tear he has shed and for what reason and on what day, Bloom will be smashed, pulverised, atomised, his dust weighed, sent off for analysis, and results shown in the table below; and all of this will be done by some giant Joycean impersonal completely insane multivac computer voice. All the commentaries will tell you that the technique in this chapter is "impersonal catechism" which mirrors the "personal catechism" in the 2nd chapter, Nestor. But there are many passages which resist this simple explanation and which I find incomprehensible as if Joyce is smuggling in a lot of gibberish behind his sleight-of-hand scientific method-acting. And there are many quite insane riffs which suddenly boil up and make the slog through this chapter suddenly delightful : What relation existed between their ages? 16 years before in 1888 when Bloom was of Stephen's present age Stephen was 6.16 years after in 1920 when Stephen would be of Bloom's present age Bloom would be 54. In 1936 when Bloom would be 70 and Stephen 54 their ages initially in the ratio of 16 to 0 would be as 17 1/2 to 13 1/2, the proportion increasing and the disparity diminishing according as arbitrary future years were added, for if the proportion existing in 1883 had continued immutable, conceiving that to be possible, till then 1904 when Stephen was 22 Bloom would be 374 and in 1920 when Stephen would be 38, as Bloom then was, Bloom would be 646 while in 1952 when Stephen would have attained the maximum postdiluvian age of 70 Bloom, being 1190 years alive having been born in the year 714, would have have surpassed by 221 years the maximum antediluvian age, that of Methusalah, 969 years, while, if Stephen would continue to live until he would attain that age in the year 3072 A.D., Bloom would have been obliged to have been alive 83,300 years, having been obliged to have been born in the year 81,396 B.C. ** 18. Penelope Difficulty : 7 (it really is completely unpunctuated) Obscenity: 10 (in the context of the times – lots of penis talk, "that trememdous big red brute of a thing", ejaculation into handkerchiefs, contemplating a different use for a banana, etc etc) General mindblowing brilliance : 7 Beauty of language : 7 Joyce : the final amplitudinously curvilinear episode... The last word (human, all too human) is left to Penelope. This is the indispensible countersign to Bloom's passport to eternity.... Though probably more obscene than any preceding episode it seems to me perfectly sane full amoral fertilisable untrustworthy engaging shrewd limited prudent indifferent. The men go out into the world (Bloom, Stephen) and do their stuff (mainly, it seems, drinking and yammering). They finally return home (or try to). The women stay at home – Molly does, in Ulysses, and enjoys the company of a man who has left his home and visited hers. Joyce's novel is very male in its peregrinations & so ends with 70 pages inside the head of Mrs Bloom. The male chapters have been increasingly rigidly structured, ending in the pan-galactic encyclopedia of Ithaca with its facts and figures and firm absolute knowledge of all things & so now we get this unpunctuated flow splurge torrent cataract of thought feeling emotion observation sex memory argument churning on & on to the final yes. Critic PJ Smith describes Molly as garrulous, ignorant and damnably annoying. The only thing in her favor is that she is never for a moment dull and she is a huge feat of ventroloquism, Joyce's presuming that he can speak – think – for a woman on such intimate levels as this and I'm not sure I can say if it works or not. What I take to be its verisimilitude pretty much convinces me, I can say that. And it's a great sad compassionate way to end the day. And that's it. ...more |
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| 0520042980
| 9780520042988
| 0520042980
| 3.74
| 27
| 1981
| Jan 01, 1981
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really liked it
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Finnegans Wake is very famous for being unreadable, and all the stories are completely true. This is not so much a book about Finnegans Wake as a book
Finnegans Wake is very famous for being unreadable, and all the stories are completely true. This is not so much a book about Finnegans Wake as a book about extreme fanboy behaviour. Therefore file next to Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer's comedy masterpiece about not writing a book about D H Lawrence, and U & I, Nicholson Baker's delightful essay about his inability to read much more than a paragraph by John Updike without howling in pain; and Razor's Edge, Andrew Muir's rueful mea culpa about the further reaches of Bob Dylan worship. Roland McHugh powered through Ulysses, then flirted with Finnegans wake, then decided no one had previously read the Wake correctly, & so decided to do it - PROPERLY. By yourself, with only your native wit and a good pre-google encyclopedia to guide you. The literary equivalent of walking naked through the kalahari Desert and drinking your own urine and sleeping in the bowels of slaughtered goats to survive. (I know that's how you do it. I can't tell you how I know.) So, Roland McHugh's book is the funniest book of literary criticism i have ever read. Not for everyone, but for Joyce fans, it's as good as a new series of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Can there be higher praise? ...more |
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| 1973
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it was amazing
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Absolutely beautiful black & white photos of Joyce's Dublin which I confess are even better than my own. (Did I already mention those? I did? Oh.) Thi
Absolutely beautiful black & white photos of Joyce's Dublin which I confess are even better than my own. (Did I already mention those? I did? Oh.) This Dublin has gone now, but in this book you can walk those streets again.
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| 030681210X
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| 3.80
| 140
| 1957
| May 01, 2003
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really liked it
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| 0195033817
| 9780195033816
| 0195033817
| 4.35
| 2,780
| 1959
| Oct 20, 1983
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really liked it
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James Joyce was the poster boy for the avant-garde no-compromise artist who never had a day job (a little bit of teaching once, couple of months in a
James Joyce was the poster boy for the avant-garde no-compromise artist who never had a day job (a little bit of teaching once, couple of months in a bank once) and lived his whole life on handouts from his brother and a few rich American women. At the same time he lived a life of utter bourgeois conformity – no drugs, no affairs, no bizarre sex life. Oh, well, okay, he did have a very scatological, voyeuristic, underwear-fetishistic, masochistic fantasy life – good thing the internet wasn’t around in 1904, he’d never have got anything done at all. Because of the permanent lack of ready cash he dragged his family from one cheap flat to another and from one European town to the next, all the while completely confident he was one of the great geniuses of literature, which he was. No one ever doubted it. He took his own sweet time producing his works and apart from a few poems and a play, there are only four: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. He had a slash and burn attitude to literature – after Dubliners, no more short stories; after Portrait, no more conventional narrative; after Ulysses, no more English language. He ended up too radical even for the serious people from whose hands he fed. After the first couple of parts of FW were issued in pamphlets, they were walking around in a daze, they were on their knees – no more of this please Mr Joyce! His brother wrote : I don’t know whether the drivelling rigmarole…is written with the deliberate intention of pulling the reader’s leg or not…Or perhaps – a sadder supposition – it is the beginning of softening of the brain. but Joyce took no notice and carried on his by now completely incomprehensible way for another 16 years and though nobody understood a word of what he was writing they continued to pay him, that’s how much they knew he was a genius. I’m not so much a Joyce fan as a Ulysses fan. Dubliners is okay but painful and imbued with a sense that you’re meant to assume or know more than what’s on the page. John Gross precisely describes its language as mimicking “the moral conditions which it describes by means of strategically-placed cliches, shabby-genteel euphemisms, jog-trot repetitions”. Not hard to believe then that the stories are as jolly as the onset of toothache. Portrait is also painful but the language is intense, as is the boring hero Stephen Dedalus. It’s an autobiographical novel all about religious oppression and artistic hubris and it’s been a while since those particular themes made my heart sing. But Ulysses is the most outrageous most beautiful and funniest novel ever, so Joyce is forgiven for his portrait of himself as a young arse. That said, you can’t read Ulysses without some kind of guide. Joyce bragged that his book would keep the professors busy for a hundred years and he wasn’t wrong. He stuffed it full of everything and recast the everything into such sentences as Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the cross-trees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship. or Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. or In Rodot's Yvonne and Madeleine newmake their tumbled beauties, shattering with gold teeth chaussons of pastry, their mouths yellowed with the pus of flan breton. or Time they were stopping up in the City Arms Pisser Burke told me there was an old one there with a cracked loodheramaun of a nephew and Bloom trying to get the soft side of her doing the mollycoddle playing bézique to come in for a bit of the wampum in her will and not eating meat of a Friday because the old one was always thumping her craw and taking the lout out for a walk. How radical is Ulysses? Very. Usually brilliant innovators get their ideas stolen and watered down and recycled, like Impressionist paintings appearing on chocolate boxes, but 80 years have not diminished the strangeness and monumental technical daring of Ulysses. It changes style usually every chapter but sometimes twenty times within a single chapter. It has pages of stream of consciousness. It tries to be honest about the way people actually think and what they do – Bloom in his toilet, Bloom masturbating, but Joyce is presenting him as just an ordinary guy doing ordinary things. And this offended many people and got Ulysses banned for years. Joyce said : “If Ulysses isn’t fit to read, life isn’t fit to live” . Also, I should point out, it has no story (for 750 pages). Well, the story is Bloom and Stephen have slightly trying days and meet by chance in a pub late at night and Bloom, seeing the young man is somewhat drunk, offers to put him up for the night. End. Nobody gets married, nobody dies, nothing to see here, go on home. The whole 750 pages take place over about 18 hours and within that short span it tries to cram everything in. It is written with the most extraordinary language about the most ordinary things. It has the nerve to celebrate the mundane. It’s a paradox – the most artificial book but practically everything in it is real – the characters were based on Joyce’s acquaintance, all the events happened, the dialogue is as Joyce remembered it. And yet the book has many secret patterns and schemes hidden inside it, invisible to the naked eye, counterpointing the diurnal and the eternal, pedestrians and gods. It’s an encyclopedia of the ways language can be used, it’s exhausting and thrilling and if I was an author I’d never ever go anywhere near it, it would depress me too much. A final word about Finnegans wake, the one nobody reads. (Note: Here’s a painless way to get a flavour of it – Joyce himself reading a section: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtOQi7...) There are a three great books on literary obsession I’ve come across - Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dwyer, about D H Lawrence, U and I by Nicholson Baker, about John Updike, and The Finnegans Wake Experience by Roland McHugh is the third, in which McHugh details his lunatic quest to read FW “properly”. This begins with him devoting “almost three years” to reading Finnegans Wake and nothing but Finnegans Wake. “Having initially read through any chapter I would spend a week or two repeating the process and then make a frontal assault with dictionaries”… I began to annotate my copy of Finnegans Wake. I transferred information to it in very small writing, using a mapping pen. I could actually get two lines of writing between every two Finnegans Wake lines and I used twelve colours of ink to specify different languages.” The message is clear – if you meet a Joyce fan even remotely like Roland, back slowly away. Richard Ellman's biography of JJ is great, up there with Leon Edel's Henry James and Michael Holroyd's Lytton Strachey. If you like large, long, leisurely lives those are the tp three I've come across. JJ appears in Ellman's book as an odd bird, obsessed and unflinching, more well-read than Borges, a bit of a perv, as uxorious as John was with Yoko, a charming friend-maker and altogether one of the nicer geniuses we've had. Friend of JJ : Hello Joyce, what have you been doing all day? JJ: I've been working on a sentence. Friend: One sentence? Well, I suppose sometimes it can be awfully hard to pick the right words. JJ: Oh no, I've already got the right words. I've been working on which order they should go in. ...more |
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Paperback
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| 0192839993
| 9780192839992
| 0192839993
| 3.84
| 158,971
| Jun 15, 1914
| Jan 04, 2001
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really liked it
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For anyone thinking of putting James Joyce on your “must read this year” list for 2019 here are my suggestions. BY 1. Dubliners Brilliantly atmospheric s For anyone thinking of putting James Joyce on your “must read this year” list for 2019 here are my suggestions. BY 1. Dubliners Brilliantly atmospheric scraps of Irish miserablism – must read to get where JJ is coming from. 2. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Strangely – tiresome and inessential. Bangs on about religion and more Irish miserablism and a bit too much like a portrait of the author as an insufferable young genius. 3. Ulysses The essential book out of all of these. Difficult but also very funny and not impossible. FWIW my short bluffer’s guide to this truly astonishing book is here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and my long review of it (chapter by chapter) is here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and here https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/... (it’s very long) 4. Finnegans Wake This is really not recommended. But this is – a 10 minute excerpt (“Anna Livia Plurabelle”) read by JJ himself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grJC1... I had thought, this small part being so beautiful, that FW would be another masterpiece, but the rest of it isn’t one tenth as fascinating or linguistically lovely, and it will do your brain in. The only thing I’ve been able to do with FW is parody it, rather lamely https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... which was unnervingly easy to do once you get into the swing of it. The reader who can gain enjoyment on any level from the great mapless madhouse that is FW has my undying respect. ABOUT 1. The Most Dangerous Book : The Battle For James Joyce’s Ulysses By Kevin Birmingham By far the best book on JJ and Ulysses I ever read – you almost don’t need a real biography after this. It’s a total page turner. It’s not an analysis, it’s the story of how it was written and how it was published – long, painful and thrilling. 2. James Joyce : Richard Ellman But if you do want a big biography, this is the one. 3. My Brother’s Keeper : Stanislaus Joyce Or you could stick to this memoir by JJ’s faithful brother. It will make you love JJ (and Stanny) a lot more than most books will. 4. The New Bloomsday Book : Harry Blamires I liked this not-too-scholarly voyage round & through & about Ulysses better than any other analysis/interpretation 5. The Finnegans Wake Experience : Roland McHugh I only read one book about FW. It was this. It’s hilarious. Mr McHugh is a total obsessive with a screw loose & dedicated his whole waking being to reading FW correctly and then explaining how to read FW correctly. Elastic bands are an important part of the process as I recall. I think it was self published so might be hard to track down. 6. James Joyce’s Odyssey : Frank Delaney 7. James Joyce’s Dublin : Edward Quinn These two are luxury items - gorgeous photo books full of black & white pix of dear dirty Dublin as it was and I don’t think is anymore. Not essential but just a delight. AVOID 1. Ulysses and Us : Declan Kiberd 2. Ulysses on the Liffey : Richard Ellman These two do exactly the same thing – with their jawbreakin pontificatin somnambulatin ramblin they like to make you want to find the English Literature department in your nearest university and burn it down. 3. Ulysses Annotated : Don Gifford Proving that the more you know the less you understand. *** Cocklepickers. They waded a little way in the water and, stooping, soused their bags and, lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf’s gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody! Here lies poor dogsbody’s body. —Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel! [image] "How many roads must a man walk down...." Sorry JJ, couldn't resist. ...more |
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Sep 26, 2007
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Paperback
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| 0142437344
| 9780142437346
| 0142437344
| 3.64
| 153,856
| Dec 16, 1916
| Mar 25, 2003
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liked it
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CELEBRITY DEATH MATCH : STEPHEN DEDALUS VS. HOLDEN CAULFIELD (Note : this is not part of the current ongoing Celebrity Death Match series organised by CELEBRITY DEATH MATCH : STEPHEN DEDALUS VS. HOLDEN CAULFIELD (Note : this is not part of the current ongoing Celebrity Death Match series organised by Manny but I thought I would revive it as a companion piece) **************** BUCK MULLIGAN : Come on, kinch, you fearful jesuit. I’ve got a tenner on this so I have so get in that square ring and batter this lollybogger senseless. STEPHEN : Pro quibus tibi offérimus, vel qui tibi ófferunt hoc sacrifícium laudis. BUCK MULLIGAN : Give us a rest of your gobshite and pannel the wee dodger. STEPHEN : Not so wee, he’s six foot if he’s an inch. BUCK shoves him in the ring. HOLDEN CAULFIELD eyes STEPHEN miserably. His psychiatrist has explained that contests of physical strength and agility will raise his spirits and shake him out of his depressive spiral. He can’t say that he gives a rat’s ass about the whole thing. In fact he’d rather be pretty much anywhere but here. THE REF pockets a tenner secreted insouciantly to him by stately, plump BUCK MULLIGAN. BUCK : And another where that came from. REF : Seconds away, Round One. STEPHEN closes his eyes and walks vaguely about the ring, ashplant dangling from limp left hand. 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. WHAM ! HOLDEN has been thinking he may as well get this feeble thing over and done with as quickly as possible and he has strode up and flailed – there is really no other word - a long thin arm vaguely in STEPHEN’S direction. More by luck than judgement he connects with STEPHEN’s bullockbefriending ear which then commences issuing gouts of redblooded blood. STEPHEN (Throws up his hands.) O, this is too monotonous! His lips lipped and mouthed fleshless lips of air: mouth to her womb. Oomb, allwombing tomb. His mouth moulded issuing breath, unspeeched: ooeeehah: roar of cataractic planets, globed, blazing, roaring wayawayawayawayawayaway. REF issues a standing count : A one. A two. A three. HOLDEN sits down, scratches his private parts and produces a cigarette. lights it and sneers at the crowd. REF : A four. A five. HOLDEN : What a bunch of phonies. CISSEY CAFFREY : Who are you callin a phoney and what kind of accent do you call that anyway? Is he an American? O Lor, he is as well. And aren’t they all rich? So they are. Here what’s your name darlin? You look awfy young to me. HOLDEN : Well I act quite young for my age sometimes. It's really ironical, because I'm six foot two and a half and I have gray hair. I really do. The one side of my head--the right side--is full of millions of gray hairs. I've had them ever since I was a kid. And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father. It's partly true, too, but it isn't all true. People always think something's all true. I don't give a damn, except that I get bored sometimes when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am--I really do--but people never notice it. People never notice WHAMBLAM! Ooof! Shit! STEPHEN has roused himself from his solipsistic torpor and delivered a mighty blow to HOLDEN’S temple with the ash plant. ASHPLANT : Jaysus, I felt that! REF : Hey, back in your corner you holy terror, this is Marquis of Queensbury rules! No ashplants! I’m going to have to disqualify you forthwith! So I am! BUCK MULLIGAN waves another tenner in his purview. REF : If you do it again! STEPHEN, disgusted with his actions, throws his ashplant out of the ring. It is deftly caught by LEOPOLD BLOOM , an all round decent fellow with a really plumpacious sexy milf of a wife with tremendous bazooms. Let me tell you. In fact did I ever mention that one time me and her were DING DING! End of round one. STEPHEN limps over to the prone form of his lanky young opponent. He rouses him, pats him down, hauls him to his feel, and apologises. By the time HOLDEN's vision clears he finds he's been propped in his seat and a beer is in his hand, proffered by the gay crowd whose relish of the contest appears to know no bounds. LEOPOLD BLOOM pokes his head into the proceedings. BLOOM : You know, lads, this isn't the way. life doesn't have to be all about biff bang pow and the best man wins and all. let's go down the pub. Exeunt BLOOM, HOLDEN AND STEPHEN in the direction of the Butcher's Arms Public House. BUCK MULLIGAN : Dedalus wins on a TKO! CROWD : Did he bollocks! General melee ensues. ...more |
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| 3.60
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it was amazing
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Mar 05, 2024
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Mar 03, 2024
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| 4.75
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it was amazing
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Jul 06, 2022
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Jul 05, 2022
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| 4.37
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it was amazing
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May 27, 2022
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May 11, 2022
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| 4.33
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really liked it
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Jul 26, 2014
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Jul 08, 2014
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| 3.84
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did not like it
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not set
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Mar 11, 2012
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| 4.21
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it was ok
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Feb 2012
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Mar 01, 2012
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| 3.59
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did not like it
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Feb 24, 2012
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Feb 24, 2012
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| 3.33
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liked it
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Sep 2011
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Sep 11, 2011
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| 3.98
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really liked it
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Jan 1986
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Sep 09, 2010
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| 3.81
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it was ok
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not set
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Apr 18, 2010
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| 2.67
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liked it
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not set
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Dec 05, 2007
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| 4.13
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it was amazing
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Dec 05, 2007
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| 4.00
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it was amazing
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not set
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Dec 05, 2007
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| 4.17
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liked it
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Jul 06, 2020
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Oct 31, 2007
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| 3.74
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really liked it
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not set
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Oct 31, 2007
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| 4.20
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it was amazing
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not set
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Oct 26, 2007
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| 3.80
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really liked it
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not set
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Oct 26, 2007
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| 4.35
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really liked it
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not set
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Sep 28, 2007
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| 3.84
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really liked it
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not set
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Sep 26, 2007
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| 3.64
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liked it
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not set
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Sep 25, 2007
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