This Post Hopes to be Diaphanous

March 11, 2008

Psst. I’m not supposed to be posting now. I’m trying to discipline myself not to post until I’m done reading Ulysses, also known as the book the meek fears to tread. So there, my reason of not updating. I’m 60 something pages in (out of 900, sweet mother-of-pearls!) and I’ve never felt fervid resentment of reading a book. Just read chapter 3. See if you could, without slamming your head on your desk.

Ok, did you do that - I mean, read it? I hope not, or at least I hope you didn’t think it was a good idea to jump to that chapter immediately. But yeah, I understood what it was about. First, Stephen Dedalus tore the letter he received from the previous chapter. Second, he was still mourning about his deceased mother. Third, he attempted to confront a dog that supposedly alludes to Proteus. Fourth, he wrote some poetry. Lastly, he masturbated. Somehow James Joyce felt compelled to have us read about masturbation most abstrusely, and I can’t say that felt rewarding. In fact, I felt pissy about it. Pun intended? Whatever. Seriously, James Joyce hates me. I understand why this chapter read like that - it was supposed to imitate the random and the sudden nature of our thoughts - but geez I really don’t see its point other than a show of verbal flair, what with the insertion of many different languages. Fine, as a speaker of multiple languages my train of thoughts may be like Stephen Dedalus’s, but since when did I start assuming that people would want to read the goings-on of my mind? I mean, besides the obvious reason of my being ever-so-slightly twisted?

Anyway, I can’t wait to finish this book and read something lighter. Those I read before Ulysses - those are Odyssey and A Scanner Darkly - have all been heavy and I’m starting to desire reading Archie’s. Well, after not reading a single one since I graduated from high school. Are they even sold on Natio anymore?

Apart from reading, there are many things happening to my life, most of which I can comfortably disseminate and will disseminate after dealing with Ulysses. Apparently the lure of updating my blog just to take me away from that monster was too irresistible, but today I did have a case of monitor-odium. For the past few days I’ve been staring at the monitor so much I got sick of it. Have you ever felt that way? Well, I am feeling that way, and if there’s anything I could do to skip work just so I can spend a day NOT staring at a monitor I would! Even as I’m writing this I want to rip my eyeballs out of my skull. All these flickering screens are making me sick! I dunno if this is creepy, but have you noticed that much of the modern lives revolve on a screen? There’s the TV. There’s the monitor. There’s the iPod and there’s the PSP for people who think it makes sense to watch movies on such small screen. There’s also the mobile phone. At this rate we might see a future when everyone’s t-shirt has a built-in TV. Darth Vader’s pointless chest radio and buttons will start looking normal.

Anyway, if you’ve noticed, despite my hatred for staring at another monitor I am still at this blog posting the most inane stuff yet. There’s always the choice of this and Ulysses, and sheesh if this goes on I’m never gonna finish that book. So with that said, I’m going to, drum rolls, sleep instead. But really, I need to finish that book so I can start speaking and thinking in normal tongue again. It’s perniciously scrambling my methods of communication. The last 100 pages had zero punctuation. I’m friggin not lying about that!

I stately hate Ulysses Yes.

Posted by nightdreamer at 1:06 am | permalink

Previous Comments

I read the first sentence of that chapter and I gave up. But I did try to look for the passages on masturbation, though. Heh.

Posted by Ade at March 11, 2008, 1:44 pm

Hello Ade. :-)

Chapter 4 wasn’t so bad as in it wasn’t totally incomprehensible. But yeah, Ulysses is raw mutilation of anything you’ve learned on your writing class, exactly why it’s controversial.

The masturbation happens somewhere between lines 453-498. Some notes or texts interpret that as pissing while others interpret that as masturbation.

And given my frame of mind, well…

Posted by nightdreamer at March 11, 2008, 1:51 pm

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