James Joyce and Ulysses

Coolish day... nice breeze.  Lovely weather.

Ulysses

J. D. Biersdorfer wrote about James Joyce's Ulysses in the New York Times Book Review last Sunday.  As you may know, I am a James Joyce fan, having been exposed to his work by an "English Major"

in the Air Force in Germany.  At his recommendation, I started with Portrait of an Artist... followed it with Dubliners and then tackled Ulysses. After a long time, I even tried to read Finnegan's Wake.  Tough going there!  (I have a tape of someone reading Finnegan's Wake, but I haven't had the time (courage?) to listen to it  yet.)

Joyce was a word expert.  Fluent in all kinds of languages and a master at puns, anagrams, dialects, and knotted sentences."

Most people try to read Ulysses, but give up after a short period of time.  They then feel guilty about it and decide to go back and at least read Molly Bloom's soliloquy,

because most people talking with them about the book will assume that they had read that bit of salacious wordage, and they would not want to appear as though they were not educated.  Besides, the book covers just one day in the life of one Leopold Bloom...

now what could be difficult about that?

Anyway, Mr. Biersdorfer (I love that name!).. wants to  help folks with the book's language and suggests some help: ( In case you don't have access to the NY Times article, I'll try to extract a bit here.. but of course, it would be better to see the original material.)

o  A touch-screen puzzler: He liked Thick Word Soup.. free for Android and iOS; chronotext.com/WordSoup. 

This is a game, at the end of which, the player will  have untangled "about 100 sentences and four pages from the book."

o  Audio tour via the free RE:JOYCE podcast (blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce) Frank Delaney is an author and broadcaster who recognizes that every one of Joyce's sentences  has more that one meaning and "sometimes many more meanings."

o  James Joyce's Ulysses: A Guide ($8.99 for ipad; bit.ly/28d8B5v)  This is a Naxos app, that lets you see photos of Dublin, easily accessed book annotations, and translations for foreign phrases found in the book.

o  Ulysses "seen" project by Robert Berry.  Web-based graphics relating to the text.  It's a work in progress.

o  Infinite Ulysses site...  (infinityulysses.com)  Scholars discussing  an online copy of the book's text.

o  Virtual Reality and Ulysses..  (vimeo.com/154873527)  (re: the Proteus episode.) (Eoghan Kidney's In Ulysses film.. maybe soon?

Dig into Joyce... and let your imagination fly to the sky just like Stephen Dedalus. 

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