(Untitled)

[droidlocks]

AS TYSON WAS RIDING INTO JERUSALEM
HE FELL AND HURT HIS ALEC KAFOOZELUM

Quite charmed and enchanted by the vision and craft of James Joyce lately. I have been moving through A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man at a very relaxed pace, which is a rare joy. Often I find myself madly tearing through books that really do warrant a more patient read (I

Comments

[ex_josh_han]

The infuriating thing about Portrait is how easy it is to get sucked in by the brilliant "sentence work" and frankly attractive romanticism, all of which leads one to miss the fact that the novel is at its essence self-satire.

But, once you get your head around that, it makes the plunge into Ulysses much easier to take.

[droidlocks]

I suppose I need to get deeper into the book before I can really comment (in the midst of Stephen's teenage years at the moment), but to this point I have found the book pretty sincere and insightful with regards to the development of the "artistic/aesthetic" consciousness (if you can stomach so pretentious a concept as the artistic/aesthetic consciousness, which even make me gag a little bit, and I am very pretentious). Especially with regards to this early engagement with the mysteries of being, the simultaneous fixation with the hidden mechanics and meanings of his small bleak world, coupled with the obsessive and futile drive to unravel it all. Also, the genesis of Stephen's understanding of language, which in turn chisels his reality out of the vague, senseless ether.

[ex_josh_han]

Well, in the sense that the novel is autobiographical, it's pretty "serious," but I think the book takes on a different kind of power when understood from a certain distance: the distance of age. THe novel is dedicated to POV, from the first pages, and the fact that Stephen is very serious, to a fault, is necessary to the novel's conceit. Joyce actually wrote the high-Romantic celebration of the artistic/aesthetic in Stephen Hero, which he threw away and started over as Portrait. Once you get into Ulysses you get to see Stephen kind of cut down to size and contextualized.

Like everything in Joyce, Stephen is a joke, a deadly serious joke.

[ex_josh_han]

"The distance of age" was meant to refer to Joyce's age, by the way, not some sudden wisdom I myself have stumbled into, which is, alas, still completely lacking.

[johnnyninja]

surrealist subversions annoyed me from the introduction, sadly. they start off with a glowing intro of the author repeatedly expressing his cred because he's an anarchist. or did anarchist shit. or shat with an anarchist. or etc or etc.

mother fucker! i get it!

[droidlocks]

Hey, speaking of shitty books, Jill and I want to shoot some books with guns. Namely that fuckin Twilight shit. Do you know where we can get some guns?