"i am part of all that i have met"

Today's soundtrack:
Politick SkipMix

I finished Ulysses yesterday. I can't say that it was enjoyable. Well, in parts. Bloom's wanderings and inner dialogue was rich. The characters were incredible. But Joyce made me work. During my summer. When I'm supposed to be working on my thesis. Well, if he's going to be like that, I'll just leave Finnegans Wake off for another year.

The last section gave me the most trouble. No punctuation. Nothing. Just Molly's stream of consciousness. There were some brilliant moments, such as "why cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first you sometimes love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all over you you cant help yourself I wish some man or other would take me sometime when hes there and kiss me in his arms theres nothing like a kiss long and hot down to your soul that almost paralyses you...". But, as the notes point out in the back, "Molly's monologue is a compendium of old-fashioned sexist clichés about the incurable self-contradictions of womanhood" (1184). While Joyce maybe have been bang-on about the inner monologue of Bloom, he was way off on Molly.

This disappointed me. Slightly. After all, how disappointed can someone be after reading Ulysses? I had already planned to follow Joyce with Atwood's The Penelopiad. In hindsight, I probably should have started this summer with Homer's Odyssey. Regardless, I managed to read it in a day. After the fragmentation and the jarring of Joyce, I felt as though I was one of those insubstantial shades milling about Hades, listening to Penelope. Just wafting back and forth. And my soul felt better after reading it. The life of Penelope, from Penelope's point of view, allowed me to superimpose Atwood's brillance on Joyce's less-than-perfect rendering of Molly, making the final chapter of Ulysses easier to bear. At least someone gets it, I thought to myself.

If you've not read it, read it. If only for Atwood's ability to rip the academic community a new one. I fear accidentally meeting this woman. She's not a gorgon or anything of that sort, but that biting wit and sarcasm would leave me like the twelve maidens - my feet twitching in the air.

But now, it's onto Mrs. Dalloway, who has been oh so patient with me as she waits on that London street.