How often have you heard the above in life?   Very often, James Joyce is not associated with the world of immediacy.  in fact, Boring, thick, drawn out, painful and dense are all words that your average Joyce reader will stumble across first.  It's not like anyone is  entering into any Joyce Summery Competitions any time soon...

Yet, this evening, this is exactly what i found myself doing.  Desperate for a fix for Chapter 11 of Joyce's epic work, I was phoning all my literary friends and begging to borrow a copy of one of the most started, least read, books in the history of the world.  Frankly, I thought it was a gimme.  I assumed that my poor friends, daunted by the opening salvo in this crazy tome, would have put it down and would be begging for a chance to unload the cumbersome object.  But alas, it turns out that either many already HAD unloaded it, or hadn't even wanted to pick it up in the first place.

But really, who would want to be in the head of this man? 

The sad answer is: me.   I am disheartened to learn that Emergency reading materials actually would involve me shipping out to the local B&N and purchasing another copy of the book.

Let me just say that, as an academic experience, I have found few things in life as rewarding as unpacking that book.  But let me also say that I would have been completely powerless to get anywhere in it at all if not for the assistance of Cliff Notes, Class Mates, and the Genius of my professor.  And even then, it was a struggle.  Why then, do I list this book as one of my favorite novels?  Is it a sense of trying to create a false academic superiority?  Is it a desire to show off that I conquered what felt like an overwhelming edifice of dense language? 

Maybe.  But once the door is opened to the intricacies of this novel, its impossible to overlook that ever single word is intentionally placed exactly where it should be.  Even the words he made up.  To read 300 hundred pages without a single extraneous word or a single concept out of place is the complete opposite of everything i hear today.  Look at a political speech these days, and you see layers of pointless words obscuring meaning, obfuscating point, and blunting any sharp rhetoric in the interest of political feasibility.  With Joyce, you can re-engage with a man who uses words with both an utmost respect and a cheeky inventiveness, challenging our sense of the way sentences work while painting pictures more vividly then traditional wordplay has ever allowed.  Sure, you have to work for it, but after yet another vague talking points answer that wilts under any sort of direct thought into a puddle of pathetic blah, isn't that a good thing?

One more interesting video, in relation to the previous clip:  I always thought the golf line sounded strangled!

WNYC!