A Joycean "I Do"

As James Joyce would say, "spring has sprung in spickness" (Finnegans Wake) here in Vancouver and I am already dreaming of lounging on the beach reading books, despite the fact that's it's (unsurprisingly) going to start raining again tomorrow. Yet while I might be prepping for sangria on patios, the blog/fashion/magazine world is starting in on wedding season. 

This wedding-mania is fairly awkward for me on a number of levels, including the pervasiveness of heterosexual stereotypes, abundant consumerism, holding on to tradition to the point of incredible boredom from guests... And I'm not the only one who worries about the warm weather setting off an onslaught of wedding articles in my Google Reader feed: "Wait till spring has sprung in spickness and prigs beg in to pry they'll be plentyprime of housepets to pimp and pamper my. Impending marriage."

What was that, Joyce? Did you say "Impending marriage" or "Impending doom"? 

Of course, the secret is that I'm totally stoked about actual weddings. My oldest friend is getting married this summer and I can't wait. I think it's the best that when you have a wedding you can add all kinds of great personal touches on what results in a fantastic party with everyone and everything you like best! If Joyce was alive today, even he could marry Nora Barnacle at a wedding infused with his absolute favourite thing in the whole world - his own works of literature. The Los Angeles Wedding Officiant provides a fairly expansive list of readings to choose from and nestled in there right in between "Love is courteous/Love is kind" and Barrett Browning's "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" is a Ulysses reading! I have to say, I was pretty nervous that it was going to be Molly's soliloquy ("yes I said yes") or the Gerty McDowell and Bloom fireworks encounter ("and everyone cried O! O! in raptures") and I'm not sure if I'm relieved to say that the reading is actually from "Cyclops":

Love loves to love love.  Nurse loves the new chemist.  Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly.  Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle.  M.B. loves a fair gentleman.  Li Chi Han loves up kissy Cha Pu Chow.  Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant.  Old Mr. Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs. Verschoyle with the turnedin eye.  The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead.  His Majesty the King Loves Her Majesty the Queen.  Mrs. Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor.  You love a certain person.  And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.

I mean, I guess. But I think there's some subtext in "Love loves to love love" that's being overlooked here and "The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead" doesn't exactly invite enthusiasm for tying the knot. I actually find myself wishing for a little "flower of the mountain" here! 

What do you guys think? Is there a hidden 'sexy Joyce' that isn't laced with religious cynicism, general romantic malaise, or fart jokes?

Don't Read Ulysses?

One of my good friends has started Ulysses four times and has always stopped at page 30, meaning to go on, but realizing a year or two down the road that she never quite got back to it. She told me just this weekend, that for her, reaching "Usurper." at the end of Episode 1 is such a satisfying experience that she feels like her reading experience is complete and she doesn't have to go on. Though she says she enjoys the first episode, I can't help but wonder if there's some voice inside of her whispering "Don't read Ulysses! One chapter is really enough."

The Hullabaloo has put this feeling into words for us, giving four reasons we shouldn't read this book:

1. “Ulysses” is really, really long. The audiobook lasts 32 hours. The text clocks in at an absurd 260,000 words. Think of how many things you could say in 260,000 words and carefully consider whether you want to invest that much time into reading Joyce.
2. Joyce made this book as complicated as possible, on purpose. He once said that he “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant” in order to make the novel “immortal.”  The stream-of-consciousness narrative is full of auditory puns, onomatopoeia and alliteration. The book begins in modern English (from 1914, when Joyce wrote it) and slowly degrades to Middle and Old English as the book progresses. Joyce wrote Episode 15 as a script interrupted with the main characters’ hallucinations. It ends with a 24,000-word stream-of-consciousness soliloquy featuring only eight sentences.
3. After slogging through this difficult and long-winded prose, one would think the story would reward you with an interesting and clever insight into human experience with some climactic tale of love, death, and adventure. Nope! The story follows a day in the life of Leopold Bloom as he wakes up, eats breakfast, walks to the butcher’s, talks to his friends, reads the mail, goes to church and buys soap. The most exciting thing Leopold Bloom does is attend a funeral. Later, he adventurously consumes a gorgonzola cheese sandwich.
4. There is no definitive edition of this work. Some people think William Shakespeare, with his folio and quarto versions, presents a peculiar problem in discerning what is actually the text. There are 18 different editions of “Ulysses.” The first revision, published in Joyce’s lifetime, should be the most accurate, but it still has more than 2,000 significant errors — if you can find them in the sea of confusing prose. Even trying to pick out which version to read leads to mountains of scholarly articles about the editing process, differences between French and Anglo-American scholarly editing and whether some sections even belong to Joyce at all. Do yourself a favor, and don’t bother.

First of all, point two isn't true at all. The book doesn't begin in modern English then 'degrade' as the book continues. Episode 17 is full of Bloom's current scientific inquiry into the cosmos, Episode 18 is slangy and modern in its discussion of female sexuality, and throughout, we meet a cast of characters from Mulligan to the barmaids in "Sirens" who certainly wouldn't be considered antiquated. Perhaps this author is referencing Episode 14: contrary to the devolution suggested here, "Oxen of the Sun" gives us the birth and development of language, tracing its history from Old English through Middle English to almost undecipherable modern slang.

Aside from that, points 2-4 are exactly why I love Ulysses! Though it really is long, and as much as I want to congratulate my friend for making it through Episode 1, I know that sadly, she's barely made a dent.