(no subject)

Been stalled just shy of the end of Ulysses for weeks now, but I'm working on a paper on it anyway. I've come to admire the book more and more, and that's not entirely Stockholm Syndrome talking. Though: reading his letters and rereading his critical prose confirms my impression that I am James Joyce. I don't mean I have any of his genius, but we seem to have lived the same life. Literary opinions overlap alarmingly, too; about these I'm comfortable giving details. Ibsen was his man, first to last, Tolstoy the one novelist he heaped praise on. The third member of my personal triumvirate, Shelley, he mentions in a letter (age 22 or so) as making a third with Shakespeare and Wordsworth on the top shelf of English literature. There's a lot to this judgment--I'd demur only at the absence of Milton and Spenser. The former comes up in Wake a lot, I'd imagine, what with the shared topic and disability/method, and many have noted the odd affinities between FW and The Faerie Queene. He quotes from Faust in German a lot, and models "Circe" after it in some ways, though usually via the prism of Peer Gynt. Moby-Dick he'd likely never heard of; curious resemblances there too, no? Proust's book-in-progress he barely glanced at. Understandable. Never read Temps perdu when writing Ulysses, as I think Aesop said.

Re. Wordsworth, the novel's plot arc does have its Resolution & Independence aspect, doesn't it? And maybe can be meditated on in light of the Ode, though what can't.

(no subject)

Semi-deserved parody of The English Patient, Ondaatje

The character who would never be named looked at the character whose name the author had forgotten for four hours. She caught and crushed several spiders, dropping them neatly down the blouse she had made from a discarded Lithuanian flag. She sighed as hurricane waters soaked her back in that humid chamber without walls. Individual stings of starlight piercing her through the absent ceiling gave the character a confused impression of sad dogs forming a cheerleader pyramid. The mysterious pair who might or might not have sex at any time adjusted themselves on their bed and settee as these spun and tilted in the quaint freefall of that shadowy floorless room.

Ecuador. 1922. He was hissing. His tongue had been cut out during the second peace of the fourth war on the eighth continent but a length of belt he had partially swallowed assumed its role in loquation with moderate success. His teeth were also gone, replaced by hard candies. He had bitten his next-to-last lover's forehead in ecstasy, ignorant of its having been restructured over metal. This lover, who was not a character and therefore did not have the absence of a name, had freed her own brain to the elements so as to rub condiments against it directly, tragically assuming this would sharpen the sensation. I was twenty-five and she was twenty-seven. The Apache had placed a soul jar between us. We took turns standing and spitting into it. The floor grew sadder and sadder. It was grained in kind of a speckles-over-zigzag way. I clutched the telephone so hard it grew into my hand and could not be hung up. I had an okay local plan but the charges were still exorbitant. The dial tone drove her to her mad act of juggling hoses. She eroded before my eyes. When she died she was twenty-four and I was forty-seven.

Two other characters, a nudist epileptic bishop from four obscure European countries and the somber teenaged architect and murderer from Guava, handglode in reminiscing about the battle of the previous day at the carnival in the Himalayas. Lightning struck the toaster, doing something cool to light that reminded all five of them of Ribera. She leaned over him and "got" his nose. Slowly, with implausible simultaneity, they licked one another's scalps. None of the characters, who suddenly had names again, realized they all shared a single birthday.