I am loathe to admit it, but some other people have written books that are as good as mine, if not better. Actually, history says a lot better. I try to read them--crib ideas, mostly, or sometimes just go 'Oh, wow!' at the author's way with language.
In preparation for Bloomsday, which is coming up on June 16, I am re-reading James Joyce's Ulysses. I read it right after college, with a guidebook on my knee. This time I'm plunging through unaided. I will miss the parallels to Homer's The Odyssey because I have never read it. And so what if I don't catch every reference to real people who lived in Dublin in 1904! However, it is frustrating to encounter slang or obsolete words at whose meaning I can only guess. But so far the stories are a lot of fun.
I remember nothing from my first read, back when Taft or McKinley was President (note: hyperbole). Therefore, everything is new: Stephen Dedalus as an impoverished student, and his pretentious friend Buck Mulligan, a medical student; Dedalus at the beach, pissing behind a rock; Leopold Bloom, frying up a kidney for breakfast, clearly in love with wife Molly, using the outhouse, out to a church where the Jewish Bloom looks to see if his fling, Martha, who thinks his name is Henry Flower, happens to be there.
Joyce's stream-of-consciousness writing was a breakthrough in literature. I enjoy it. It doesn't bother me that sometimes the stream isn't linear or doesn't make sense, because my own internal mental stream is all the time going off on tangents and then stopping a word or two short of making sense. Why should his (or Dedalus' or Bloom's) be any different?
It is my observation that William Faulkner was greatly influenced by Joyce's technique, which he uses to great effect in As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. I will never attempt the style in my own writing because it must be excruciatingly difficult to do--and besides, I write formula mysteries, not LITERATURE. But the people who can do it well, good on 'em. Faulkner is one of my favorite authors, in no small part because of the way lhe uses the technique in telling a story.
I expect I'll be busy with Ulysses for a couple of months, considering my vintage Modern Library edition is 783 pages long. After that I'll probably need something mindless and funny from Terry Pratchett or Christopher Moore. The human mind can only take so much seriousness!
In preparation for Bloomsday, which is coming up on June 16, I am re-reading James Joyce's Ulysses. I read it right after college, with a guidebook on my knee. This time I'm plunging through unaided. I will miss the parallels to Homer's The Odyssey because I have never read it. And so what if I don't catch every reference to real people who lived in Dublin in 1904! However, it is frustrating to encounter slang or obsolete words at whose meaning I can only guess. But so far the stories are a lot of fun.
I remember nothing from my first read, back when Taft or McKinley was President (note: hyperbole). Therefore, everything is new: Stephen Dedalus as an impoverished student, and his pretentious friend Buck Mulligan, a medical student; Dedalus at the beach, pissing behind a rock; Leopold Bloom, frying up a kidney for breakfast, clearly in love with wife Molly, using the outhouse, out to a church where the Jewish Bloom looks to see if his fling, Martha, who thinks his name is Henry Flower, happens to be there.
Joyce's stream-of-consciousness writing was a breakthrough in literature. I enjoy it. It doesn't bother me that sometimes the stream isn't linear or doesn't make sense, because my own internal mental stream is all the time going off on tangents and then stopping a word or two short of making sense. Why should his (or Dedalus' or Bloom's) be any different?
It is my observation that William Faulkner was greatly influenced by Joyce's technique, which he uses to great effect in As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. I will never attempt the style in my own writing because it must be excruciatingly difficult to do--and besides, I write formula mysteries, not LITERATURE. But the people who can do it well, good on 'em. Faulkner is one of my favorite authors, in no small part because of the way lhe uses the technique in telling a story.
I expect I'll be busy with Ulysses for a couple of months, considering my vintage Modern Library edition is 783 pages long. After that I'll probably need something mindless and funny from Terry Pratchett or Christopher Moore. The human mind can only take so much seriousness!