Not New news, but interesting if you read other Irish Writers besides Joyce.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1144561,00.html

Also interesting because while I can make no claims to having enjoyed the whole novel of Ulyssses I did read it twice. I did enjoy parts of the book. Finnegan's wake I have read in parts, but only enjoyed the parts I've heard read aloud.

It's almost unfair to judge "Ulysses" in such a manner. The book was more about freedom of expression than anything that was expressly written in it. It opened doors by showing a commonality of man that had been previously denied. To look at the novel this far into the future, we distance ourselves from what was really going on back then. Joyce had to fight to get the book in print, let alone distributed. With little help, and one good judge, it happened within his lifetime, but just barely. Joyce opened the door for real authors to speak their mind without fear of reprimand from some moralistic theocracy. Many authors would never have had a chance at publication if it weren't for Joyce and "Ulysses."

quote:

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Roddy Doyle, the Booker prize winner and the bard of raucous Dublin demotic, chose a Joyce birthday celebration to slam the epic story of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom as overrated, overlong and unmoving.

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Is this not the perfect description of life as a terra bound human?

Well, the whole publishing scandal goes without saying. The edition of Ulysses I own has the judges ruling printed before the first chapter.

However, I think what this relates to is the relationship of living irish writers who don't feel an obligation to say Joyce's Ulysses is the greatest book of the twentieth century, and that Joyce influenced their writing.

But if you buy into Jungian psychology or, perhaps the psychogeography of Sinclair, there's certainly no way around saying that someone like Roddy Doyle is formed out of some kind of post-Joycean structured view of Dublin in the first place. From having lived in Dublin I can say that you can ask anybody on the street about Ulysses and they'll give you an opinion whether or not they've read the damn book, and they'll call you an intellectual wanker for asking. I wonder if there is now a defacto literary psychology for a city, Dublin is pretty small and Joyce is king there whether people like it or not.

Yeah, I really don't think someone can live in Dublin without being influenced by Joyce or "Ulusses"- He really brought the aspects he most noticed or appreciated to the attention of the world. Even prior to "Ulysses" he had started this trend with "A Portrait of the Artist..." and eventually culminated with "Finnegans Wake" and with a body of work both as prolific and descriptive(almost to a fault, almost) as his, one cannot escape feeling that Dublin in particular and Ireland in general would be completley different places without his influence.

But I am a psuedo-intellectual wanker. I love the sig, btw.