Wandering Whiner

I am trudging onward in the same direction I was trudging before, light or no light, hope or no hope. I don't want to be doing this, and I don't think I'm getting anywhere, but I promised to do as I am now, so I have to at least try. If I stop trying, then what will I be?

A failure.

An oath-breaker.

Free. 

And, while I mean every word of this blog post, I would like you to know that it also allows me to dub myself a pathetic peripatetic, what with the trudging and the angsting. And BECAUSE I just dubbed myself a pathetic peripatetic, I can share with you a little Calvin and Hobbes:

What do you know? Now I feel better.

Hope you do, too. :)

Peripatetic Pathetic Pretension: Why I Must Understand James Joyce

I hate James Joyce.

I tried to think of a better way to start this post. I could talk about flowers, or my ceiling fan, or paintbrushes, or books. I could talk about many, many unrelated things - just like Joyce does. But I think I would have to work to create a piece of literature as abominable as Ulysses.

I hate the pretentious quote on the back of my copy of The Portable James Joyce: "A volume that makes Joyce easily available, in compact form, to peripatetic Joyceans." (Peripatetic means wandering. The Portable James Joyce has just been praised for being...well...portable.)

I hate the pretentious writing style, stream of consciousness, a style that meanders from thought to thought without bothering with the need for a plot. (Actual quote from my professor: "Did you find this book a pageturner? No, quite the opposite. Because this is an art that has proceeded far beyond - far beyond - those concerns." I laughed because I thought he was kidding. Then I realized he wasn't.)


I thought that everyone must hate James Joyce. But there's an entire day devoted to his work: Bloomsday, June 16. There are websites and websites extolling his praises, and - more convicting for me - there are pages and pages of comments saying how much the readers of that article love James Joyce. 

I'm outnumbered.

So, yes, I hate James Joyce. But if I can't understand why other people love him, if I can't see a single good thing about James Joyce, then the problem's not the book. The deficiency is in me.

I must understand this strange, strange man, who writes sentences like this:

"Yet may we not see still the brontoichthyan form outlined aslumbered, even in our own nighttime by the sedge of the troutling stream that Bronto loved and Brunto has a lean on."

Even James Joyce is confused by James Joyce.

What does it mean? I don't know! Tons of people on the Internet know, and they say that the book with this sentence in this is clever and hilarious and has layers and layers of hidden meaning about people and life's situations. Maybe they're a little pretentious - any group of people who describe themselves as "peripatetic" instead of "on the move" probably are - but that's okay. Soon, I will know why.

Okay.

Cue maniacal laughter.

Now, how does this relate to anything?

It relates to anything because of a quote on the end of an article entitled Why Read James Joyce?:

"So is Joyce difficult? Yes, but so is life."

Life is difficult right now. James Joyce is difficult right now. It's good to be faced with difficult things.

This is, once again, my refusal to give up. I will corner my professor (I thought he was joking about Joyce being funny - now I must ask him why he wasn't). I will ask the questions I need to ask. I will do the tasks I need to do. I will bury my doubts and my whining and I will find the beauty in this impossible, terrible task.

Then I will hate it.

But not until then.

Tell me. What's your James Joyce?