Long year.
Slow week.
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Long year.
Mitch at Anteroom raised a good point: December is a stupid time to try to read something as dense and as demanding-of-your-undivided-attention as Ulysses is. (Mitch was kind enough to put that all in much more diplomatic terms.)
Of course, nobody's ever accused me of being wildly intelligent.
Well, okay. I have been accused of being wildly intelligent. See, sometimes I hide my stupidity pretty well, well enough that people might mistake me for someone with some smarts in my head. Why, then, instead of rolling with that, would I let my innate dumbness all hang out, by trying to do something as silly as read Ulysses during a single December?
Mostly it was just a thing to do. Ulysses always seemed like one of those books that everybody talks about but nobody actually ever reads. It didn't seem like a book you were actually supposed to read. Like, reading Ulysses, that's just not something that's meant to happen. Except, it does happen, and I wanted to have some reason, some excuse to get over that hump, to get to the place where it does happen, for whatever profit or loss that might bring. Let the pages fall where they may.
So, why December, then? Fine to read it in a month--a first reading, you're barely hoping to survey the book at best, get a feel for the landscape, you're not actually going to understand any of it--but why the big end of the year month, when you're all run down and jacked up, when there's more distractions than there are at any other time of the year? Why, God, why indeed?
For me, this year, this blog, it's been largely about rediscovering literature. Way back at the beginning of the year I signed up for one of those fifty book plans--read fifty books, blog a lot, make some noise, pat self on back for being an awesome middle class literate guy with spare cash and leisure time, say wahoo and go nuts. Because, it's not that I ever forgot how awesome books are, but along the line, I got distracted, by everything else in life. There was that year I spent addicted to Netflix, those hours spent playing video games, the countless times I chose to try to write my own stories, the forever and ever and amen. I wouldn't go back and trade any of that in. (I mean, watching all those seasons of Buffy in half a year? Yeah, that was some pretty sweet action right there. God bless catching the ep where SMG's mom died, while I was stoned on Vicodin. That was rad.) But, see, somewhere, somehow, my knowledge that I still loved books and reading and literature and the struggle to create meaning out of chaos, the life-long knowledge that something I'm here to do is take part in the good fight, that was all still there, but. Something fell off track. It seems I forgot to actually read books. And that wasn't cool. So it was time to get back to my roots. Time to keep it real. Time to remember how this gangsta rolls. So, Netflix got cancelled, the Playstation started to collect dust, and the laptop found itself with long stretches of time off. But damn it, a lot of books got read. And it was dubbed totally sweet.
Which was fine and all until somewhere along the line I decided it would be good motivation to make Ulysses the fiftieth book, to do it all in one month--to be forced to read the book in this given time frame or else fail in the year's quest, whatever. Combine this with the desire mentioned above, about making Ulysses less an insurmountable abstraction and more a real thing, and you've got whatever you've got, with all of this: you've got a random Internet guy reading a really hard book in one hard month, and making some noise about it.
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Slow week.
It's funny. This year, it's been about reconnecting, and all that. That was the theory at least. And it's worked out that way, a lot. But then in reality it's also been about opening my arms wide and taking in as much of the noise out there as I could stand. It's been about reading, and reading, and reading, and then reading all this stuff people post on the internet about reading, and reading about reading about reading, and then everything else out there with the blogs and the bloggers and the media and the noise and the stuff. It's an awful lot to be interested in.
I guess maybe eventually it had to get a little tiring, a little bit like a little too much. I kind of stopped reading Ulysses this week, which really has been the perfect book to be reading this month, in some ways, in the way the book just embraces noise, and goes about making some noise of its own. Maybe Joyce did it better in that other book, the one I'm pretty damned sure nobody, nobody reads, and so I feel no pressure to tackle, but still, with Ulysses, Joyce still steps up to the mic and rocks it, world-ending last-shot style.
Noise. Noise noise noise. In other ways it's been the wrong book to read this month, because, y'know. It's one thing to know there's culture jamming going on out there in society somewhere that isn't where you are. It's another thing to invite the culture jammers into your house, set them up with their own coffee table and couch, so they can throw spitballs at your brain. Sometimes, like life, it's just too much to take in.
But either way, it's right, isn't it? Ulysses, that is: this life, it's complicated. There's more noise in heaven and earth than in your philosophy, eh?
Anyways, yeah, I got a little tired, and it was a slow week. Didn't get much reading done. Insert a dash of boring trite cliche twenty-something white guy identity crisis in there, resulting in a slow blogging week (not that I have nothing to say but that I've got too bloody damned much to say), and you get the picture. That's okay. There's still time to finish reading Ulysses by six the evening of December 31st, which is when I begin drinking copiously, and the blog's not going anywhere and I guess there's still room on the internet for boring trite cliche twenty-something white guy identity crisis blog posts, so I guess it's all cool. For a while I thought I'd be done with Ulysses way early, but I think I knew going into it there'd be some time off thrown in there. It's cool. Fuck knows what I'd do for an encore if I finished early, after all. Finnegans Wake in three days, like what.
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Also! I'd just like to say: I've really enjoyed the comments and such that have filtered my way, regarding this little project, and/or regarding Ulysses in general. I'd love to hear more reactions to the book. More stances, if you will. Love it? Hate it? Never heard of it? Keep 'em comin'.
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