Cervantes - in context

I say, too, that when a painter desires to become famous in his art he endeavours to copy the originals of the rarest painters that he knows - and the same rule holds good for all the most important crafts and callings that serve to adorn a state. Thus must he who would be esteemed prudent and patient imitate Ulysses...

A Nightmare on Melville House Street

Ulysses is a copy-editor’s nightmare and a printer’s incepted Freddy Kruger in a copy-editor’s nightmare.

- Josh Cook, in an column about the correction (or otherwise) of Joyce's 'typos'

Books I've actually finished lately: 93

Ellmann's biography of Wilde was one of the first big books I read (/finished), aged about 16.

From which event extends a trail of more-or-less predictable consequences...

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 92

Knocked on the head in four days flat, whilst decorating.

(Tip: entirely comprehensible when read a) this well, b) at pace, and/or c) by an Irishman.)

Bloody Nora

Sure, why would I bother?

- Mrs Joyce, on being asked whether she'd read Ulysses

'If transgender fisting occurs earlier in the history of the novel...

I would be surprised.'

And other musings upon Ulysses, by Adam Thirwell.

James Joyce - in context

I think I would know Nora's fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of socially better-adjusted women.

Thing there should be on the internet:

James Joyce-type random obscenity generator.*

--
* Idea going for 15% cut of all profits.

James Joyce-type minced oath

Be'Chandos, Petunia and Cyrusvance!

Joyce: yes and no (but not necessarily in that order)

A lot of spurious guff has sprung up around Ulysses, about it being easy to read, and how it was intended to be spoken aloud by the poor and the uneducated - Joyce himself started this clunker by claiming that it was a book for servants, maids and porters. And yet, elsewhere, he also confessed that it was a highly sophisticated novel designed to "keep professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant".

- Kevin Maher, The Times

Ulysses

I spent three years reading Ulysses incessantly at university, and then applied to do a five-year PhD on Joyce at the State University of New York... but dropped out in panic at the eleventh hour when I realised that it was just a book...

- Kevin Maher, The Times

Ulysses, reviewed (or, Squaddie banter III)

I heard Germaine Greer say it was the greatest book ever written and vowed then never to find out.

- Charles 'Chucky' Stephenson, illiterate

Classical

My mother writes to inform me that the enigma of Joyce's Oirish masterpiece Ulysses is to be celebrated in a series of 'massups'.

Chuckle.

The problem with the life of the mind

Ulysses takes about a week to read, if you do nothing else.

- Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché: essays and reviews 1971-2000 (italics* mine)

For why would you want to do nothing else?! Larkin tried it, and look what happened to him.

* the ones in the quotation, obviously; not the title.

The smaller picture

Every life is many days, day after day...

- Joyce, Ulysses

This is a day - same as any other

- Smyth

Not seen on a T-shirt

Finnegans Wake!

(Because Ulysses is for girls.)