Ulysses

Ulysses ... Joyce is fascinated by the way in which English as a language evolves ...

you could do it... compare a chapter from Lord of the Rings with a chapter from Ulysses.

you have the publication of Ulysses, which is James Joyce's novel. Yeah, it's on the second day of the second month of 1922. So it's 2222, which is Joyce's 40th birthday.

the whole novel is an attempt to bring to life fictionally the Dublin that Joyce was living in on that day. Yeah. And it's a stupefying achievement.

Ulysses, the funny thing about Ulysses is that the point that it's published, it's describing a world that no longer exists because at that point, you know, Ireland and Britain have been embroiled in the Irish War of Independence.

Ulysses got a series of absolutely terrible and hilarious reviews. The Daily Herald set to nearly six years of Joyce's life to write, and it will take nearly six years of hours to read.

Virginia Woolf described Ulysses as an illiterate, underbred book, the book of a selftaught working man.

Ulysses was published.

He spent like 20 years of his life, a third of his life on Finnegan's wake and no one can, it just, he just makes up words. It's nonsense. ... He wrote Ulysses and everyone's like, okay, we're fucking with you. This is kind of a hard read.

James Joyce guy that wrote Finnegan's Waken Ulysses masterful author but also posthumously a bunch of fart fetish love letters that he wrote to his wife got released.

It took him a lot longer.

You know, actually, when you read Ulysses, because one of the most famous scenes in that book that got it attacked by a lot of anti-obscenity laws is, uh, is one of the characters, uh, walking along the strand basically and masturbating through a hole in his pocket while his wife fucks some other guy.

And when you are reading a story about a man masturbating through a hole in his pocket, again, all fiction is a dialogue between reader and author.

When I went overseas myself for my semester abroad, I took Ulysses at an Irish university. So it was probably the ideal circumstances. It's an incredible novel. It's a lot of parallels. Both stories are on June 16th. Both involve a journey taking place around a single city.

It's never too late to crack open Ulysses, Bill. It is for me, because my brain is leaking out of my ears.

Actually, I don't know that that happened with James Joyce and Ulysses and all these other great novels that are so celebrated of his from the 20th century, where did that shift the center of mass?

Ulysses was one of the most born books ever James Joyce's won back in the days

I appreciate all that shout out, I think, to our ridiculous history James Joyce episode, which is on the way. The publication of Ulysses prompted so many, so many discussions about the nature of pornography or the nature of that which is considered unclean.

you couldn't publish...James Joyce's Ulysses...before about 1960 without worrying about being dragged into court. We got rid of all of that and then we created the internet...