Book Review:
Ulysses Audiobook
I got this audiobook (Ulysses by James Joyce, read by Donal Donnelly) from the library on interlibrary loan probably 20 years ago, it was 40 CDs. Ripped it to my computer and saved it as 1.3gb of mp3s. I don't know if some of the CDs were scuffed or if I was trying to do something while ripping the mp3s, or if the files somehow got corrupted over the years as I dragged them from one hard drive to another, but there's weird audio glitches in a few parts. That'd be irritating/infuriating in a regular novel but for one that's an avant garde classic it's kind of funny-- it's like an accidental Kurt Schwitters effect, stuttering and hiccupping the words backwards into phonemes without context or referent, skipping across the text like a well-thrown rock on a lake. I told myself I'd never use this word but it's like a modern palimpsest-- not a wearing away that reveals new layers but a strange fracture that heals creatively.
Once I realized that my files were corrupted I tried to find other versions to listen to, but of the small number of readers that have attempted this over the years, I like Donnelly the best, so this is what I have for now. Donnelly really throws his ass into it and he has a good concept of the different accents that various characters require. Also notable is Miriam Healy-Louie, who does Molly's chapter, she's dynamite. The skips and blips are frustrating but there are some parts of the book I like more than others for simple matters of personal taste, so it doesn't feel so bad to add a few more small parts that I can't like, for mechanical reasons. And it's not like this all the time, only for like, 5 or 6 minutes here and there over the 42 hour runtime.
As for the book, I like it a lot. There's a lot of walking around thinking about things and running into people in the street, which is really one of my favorite things to do. Plus it all occurs in a single day, just like me. Well, I occur over more than one day obviously, but I try to limit myself to only occurring one day at a time, no more. If you're hung up on getting every inference in the book than you're probably not going to have a lot of fun, but if you decide to use what you have to enjoy the moment as much as you can, that's a perfectly viable strategy and it's working for me.
I think I first tried to read Ulysses in 2002, when I was working at a local community college, a job that involved mostly sitting around in an old chapel that had been converted into a computer lab, with sunlight streaming in through stained glass windows, while people said "the internet's down" and then I'd find out that the problem was that they had simply typed "how to find cheap airline tickets" into Microsoft Word and pressed enter, and nothing happened. It was a great job that I eventually quit because it felt like I could've been there forever, and I didn't want that. I was hung up on getting every inference of the book-- I was playing an "all items" style of reading, trying to pick up every coin and power-up. First I would read the relevant chapter of the Odyssey, then the chapter of Ulysses that was modelled on that chapter, then I would consult a website that sussed out more references. Guess how far I got with his rigorous approach? WRONG!!! I got more than just one chapter! But yeah I bailed well before they even got to lunch.
To be honest I probably wouldn't have picked it up again if I didn't see this very rich picture of Marilyn Monroe reading on an unspinning merry-go-round:
When I first saw this I thought it must be a gag or a set-up, that someone handed her this arty smarty book to be funny, because my mind has been warped by growing up in a patriarchal society. But after seeing it over and over (on Tumblr) I did some research. Here's the photographer of this picture, Eve Arnold, quoted in Richard Brown's essay "Marilyn Monroe Reading Ulysses: Goddess or Post-Cultural Cyborg?", in "Joyce and Popular Culture", University Press of Florida (Gainesville) 1996:
We worked on a beach on Long Island. She was visiting Norman Rosten the poet.... I asked her what she was reading when I went to pick her up (I was trying to get an idea of how she spent her time). She said she kept Ulysses in her car and had been reading it for a long time. She said she loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it-- but she found it hard going. She couldn’t read it consecutively. When we stopped at a local playground to photograph she got out the book and started to read while I loaded the film. So, of course, I photographed her. It was always a collaborative effort of photographer and subject where she was concerned-- but almost more her input."She loved the sound of it and would read it aloud to herself to try to make sense of it", that's beautiful. Remember loving the sound? Remember trying to make sense out of something? Nowadays people immediately jump to "I don't understand" to mean "this sucks" when something is the least bit abstract or unexpected, but there's a positive side of "I don't understand" that's there for anyone with a comely ounce of joie de vivre. You can try to understand, as it turns out I love doing that, even if I don't get where I thought I'd go. Or you can proceed without complete understanding and see what that's like. Try doing it with an open heart if possible, I find that helpful. Shout out to Marilyn! Also great call on keeping a book in the car!
I've listened to the audiobook version on a long plane ride when I was stressed out, a bus ride when I was miserable, and at work (neutral), but the most frequent way I'm interacting with it now is very similar to the Marilyn method-- I listen when a selection from it comes up on shuffle, when I'm listening to mp3s in my room. Out loud and out of order. The only difference between me and Marilyn Monroe is that I'm not even in control of when I open the book so to speak, it just opens itself and starts reading in between Motown acapellas and Sugar Oi (for instance). It's a little bit disruptive to the vibe but each chapter is broken up into chunks roughly 4 minutes long, which isn't bad, and I only ever get one chunk at a time, followed by more music. That's a wild way to approach a piece of literature, in random order at undermined times. But as with the occassional skip, it feels appropriate to this particular piece of literature, for modernity reasons. Joyce might've blanched at these involuntary stochastic updates but I'm sure a lot of aggressively forward-thinking authors of the 20th C would've given their eyeteeth to get their novel to deploy at mathematically random moments in an unpredetermined order between unrelated works.
There's also a magical component to this approach that can't be overlooked. Students of the shuffle know that if your library is big enough and varied enough, you frequently get served a track that seems like it's about your current life situation somehow, as either a joke or a taunt or a piece of sage advice, or sometimes all three. Ulysses has a famous structure, based on the Odyssey, and also tying in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the indefatigable rainbow. Well I'm happy to now report that Ulysses is also based on my life and things I'm thinking about, when it comes up on shuffle as I putter around my room. Your mileage may vary.
Ulysses by James Joyce is available in several different editions, including a few different cheapo paperback editions, all of which are fine (I assume). If it feels somehow embarassing to read this in the café you can put tape on the cover and spine, that's what I did. To be absolutely clear I enjoy reading this book as a book, in order, at a time decided by me, starting at the beginning like a totally regular person. I don't want that to get lost. Anyway regarding the audiobook (which is the focus of this essay) I got the one read by Donal Donnelly, it's still readily available. If you get the book and the audiobook and do them both at the same time it's like reading a book in a movie. Recommended.
Links
- If you're not at all interested in monsters of literature that's totally valid, but if you want a boost towards liking Ulysses, someone to walk you through the brambles of "it's a serious and difficult work" towards the spendid rolling ocean of "it's fun", I recommend Frank Delaney's podcast "Re:Joyce". I think this would be lovely even if you haven't read any of the book, or even if you have no intention of doing so, initially. But I recommend reading at least the first couple pages before settling in.
Each ep is ~5min long and takes you through 1 or 2 sentences, breaking down every allusion our beloved Delaney can suss out, and a few he's almost certainly inventing. His glee is infectious, and you can almost hear his eyes twinkle as he ruminates and divulges. He has a special episode where he raps and it isn't even cringe, which is astounding. I mean he's no Rakim but he gets by in his own way. Delaney passed away in 2017 but 7 years of the podcast is still available via his website: [https://rejoyce.libsyn.com/]
The site seems to be slowly crumbling at the moment, so if you're reading this in the future and this link finally completely doesn't work please let me know-- I downloaded all the episodes for safekeeping and I will happily upload them somewhere. RIP to a much beloved scholar, teacher, and friendly experiencer.
- Thinking about the word "palimpsest", which I've looked up in the dictionary probably fifty times in my life, and usually for poetry reasons, got me thinking about my dictionary practice-- I am constantly looking up words in an online dictionary, and I take a screengrab each time. Those screengrabs get added to a special page in the library here in the castle, and that's like my own personal dictionary. Or, it displays only the edges of my personal dictionary-- the places where I know the word but I'm not 100% on the definition or spelling, or I just want to check something. Because it's screengrabs (pictures of text, not text itself) it's pretty much unsearchable. Which suits me fine. Organized by time, with recent searches first. Why I am doing this at all I do not know but I just updated it yesterday. [dictionary]
thank you to Arthur for sending me this pic with the note "this is you". This is me! I'm the vocabulary vampire!
- I'm sad to say that this "some things I like" mug that I made a few years ago got copyright policied by the Blade Runner estate--
luckily there are hundreds more mugs available on my emotional homegoods design company storefront [TigerUnlimited.com]. - I'm on a few different enjoyable email lists now from different authors but I want to single out Bela of "Bela's MTV" for inspiring me to return to writing with her most recent forays. [Bela's MTV]. Thinking especially of "fuck marry kill the men i am dating this week (don't read this if you're one of them)"
- I thought about saving this post for Bloomsday, the day that all the events of Ulysses take place (June 16), but I decided instead to post it now, which is 8 months before then, so the idea can really gestate and you have time to get into it (if you want). And then on Bloomsday we can like, party.
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