{"id":248,"date":"2025-07-24T22:34:47","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T22:34:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/?p=248"},"modified":"2025-07-24T22:34:47","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T22:34:47","slug":"just-finished-ulysses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/2025\/07\/24\/just-finished-ulysses\/","title":{"rendered":"Just Finished Ulysses!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cover<\/a>This was my third attempt to get through this book. In the past, I liked what I had read, I appreciated the language, the philosophical, literary, mythological, and religious allusions, but I seemed to get lost – a lot. I think it was the multiple voices all going in the same paragraphs and chapters. I know that it is like the Everest of fiction and very important, but after a first couple of early attempts, I decided I am not a mountain climber either.<\/p>\n

One of my motivations for getting through it was that I visited Dublin a couple times over the last year – once on business, the other for vacation. I met the docent, PJ Murphy, in Sweny’s – the pharmacy in the book that is an actual place. He is said to have read it 70 times and holds readings there of Ulysses and other Joyce works there weekly. I had a great time there and meeting PJ was amazing: he is a great story teller, sings songs in English and Irish, plays the guitar, and genuinely loves this work. I had given up on the book years ago and now I had new motivation. If you are ever in Dublin, you have to go to Sweny’s for a bar of lemon soap!<\/p>\n

There was some ironically different things that I did this time around. Ironic because I work in a teaching and learning center and we have been passing around an article<\/a> that says that there is no cognitive difference between reading a book and hearing it on tape. I have a physical, annotated edition of this book, but I didn’t use it. I used a version on my Kindle. I would open that up and set it on the coffee table and read it while playing the RTE Ulysses:\u00a0https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list…<\/a>\u00a0Listening to that play list while reading along helped me focus (I am getting older) and to sort out the voices and people in the narrative. It was a huge help. I really enjoyed it and got so much more out of it. Also, it really helped me think about how Joyce was editing the work (and how others edited it) because of the differences between the different editions. Eventually I am going to go back with the annotated edition and learn more about it, but there is a lot to be said to just letting the text and the language work its magic on its own. It was like a sprint through a beautiful country side and now I want to go back and meander.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This was my third attempt to get through this book. In the past, I liked what I had read, I appreciated the language, the philosophical, literary, mythological, and religious allusions, but I seemed to get lost – a lot. I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[61,63,62,64],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","tag-fiction","tag-joyce","tag-reading","tag-ulysses"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":250,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions\/250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/geoffcain.com\/blog\/fluxus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}