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April 15, 2015 4:03 PM

Come read Ulysses with us!
posted by the man of twists and turns (18 comments total)

No i said no i will no
posted by chavenet at 4:16 PM on April 15, 2015 [9 favorites]

Infinite Ulysses? Isn't that Finnegans Wake?

Seriously though, great site.
posted by gwint at 4:25 PM on April 15, 2015 [3 favorites]

posted by the man of twists and turns

Now that's a good eponysterical!
posted by howfar at 4:26 PM on April 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

This narrates Bloom farting just a little bit ("Pprrp. Fff. Oo."), making sure the lady behind him didn't hear, and deciding to hold it in
posted by Potomac Avenue at 4:45 PM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

It's not as appealing as my own dogeared copy, thrice read and annotated heavily in my own scrib, but it's a fine idea.
Gravity's Rainbow next? or Infinite Infinite Jest?
posted by OHenryPacey at 4:55 PM on April 15, 2015

It's like the Pynchon Wikis, but with more polish.

Anything that gets people to read the great text is excellent.
posted by OmieWise at 4:58 PM on April 15, 2015

Gravity's Rainbow next? or Infinite Infinite Jest?

I think the name (and thrust) of this project is inspired by a similar long-running one for IJ. I vaguely recall there being an Infinite Spring (?) aimed at Gravity's Rainbow, but I can't find any trace of it on the internet.
posted by kagredon at 6:48 PM on April 15, 2015

Though I'm a diehard Joycean, this particular presentation of the text is not quite reading the book. It's a too much broken up click fest leading to what appears to be pretty obvious annotations. No real insight. I made it through three pages and gave up. The truth, at least for me, is you just have to start reading and let the details wait. It's ok that a thing here and there is a little obscure. You know, reality is kind of like that. And no, I don't like augmented reality either.
posted by njohnson23 at 7:08 PM on April 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

That's what a philosophy teacher told us in college about trying to read long hard books by people like Kant or Hegel or Heidegger - just keep going, don't worry that you have no idea what you are reading, have faith that you will understand it later. But that was for the first reading - he also said to read them three times.
posted by thelonius at 7:14 PM on April 15, 2015 [4 favorites]

But first you must answer questions three! "Who is your favorite author?" "Joyce, no Pynchon-aaaauuugghhh!"
posted by Oyéah at 8:45 PM on April 15, 2015

Timely! I just today read this article at the New York Review of Books, It's Still a Scandal! One of those good NYRB book reviews that makes a nice standalone essay, in this case on Ulysses. It made me think I should read it at last.
posted by not that girl at 9:25 PM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm on my third or fourth reading right now (just started Sirens), and it's this time through that it's striking me as a really, really dirty book.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:11 PM on April 15, 2015 [2 favorites]

Great stuff. I would pay good money for an epub/mobi version of this (not to mention other classics) that are annotated in such a way so I can read it on my Kindle.
posted by zardoz at 10:40 PM on April 15, 2015 [1 favorite]

Pound called it a “super-novel,” and even Joyce had problems of definition. In a letter to another of his supervised interpreters, Carlo Linati, he called it an “epic,” an “encyclopedia,” and most charmingly a “maledettissimo romanzaccione” (fucking novelosaurus)

I did not think it possible that anything could replace "moist novelette" in my heart, but this may be The One.
posted by thelonius at 2:00 AM on April 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

I like to approach Ulysses is a sort of multimedia project. Wikis and annotations give you insight into the puns, allusions, references, and stylistic innovations. I highly recommend the audible book version read by Donal Donnelly to get a flavor of the rhythms and sounds of the words.

Also, the 1967 movie by Joseph Strick gives you a good visual as to what actual events are going on, which is hard to determine from just reading the book.

My favorite way to think about the book is as a demonstration that any given day in your life can be the source of an epic on the scale of Homer.
posted by zymoglyphic at 7:28 AM on April 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

Stainislaw Lem wrote a book called "A Perfect Vaccum", which is a collection of reviews of nonexistent books. One of the books was called "Gigamesh", by an Irish author determined to outdo Joyce in number of puns and obscure references per page. However, he was worried that readers wouldn't get all the jokes, so he included his own commentary which was twice as long as the actual book.
posted by zymoglyphic at 8:17 AM on April 17, 2015

However, he was worried that readers wouldn't get all the jokes, so he included his own commentary which was twice as long as the actual book.

This joke would be funnier were it not for the fact that it was the actual case for the first edition of The Waste Land.
posted by mr_roboto at 10:07 PM on April 17, 2015

It's still a scandal!
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:32 PM on April 29, 2015