[pause]
Hahahahaha.
No, but for ser. This year, give or a take weeks or even months, OM and I will be reading what is commonly described as the most impenetrable novel ever written - at a pace of 12 pages/week. And we will be documenting that endeavor here.
OM gave a sketch of his experience with Joyce. I'll give mine.
I studied Political Science in college, and went to law school. In those seven years, I didn't read much fiction. After that, I went to graduate law school (there is such a thing, fyi), and studied Constitutional Law and Linguistic Anthropology. In that year, I still didn't read much fiction. And then I did.
I read (past tense) alot. The simplest explanation is that I missed school, and wanted to keep learning. So I decided to fill a gap in my education by teaching myself how to read fiction. Not just fiction, but literature - the stuff that I sort of intentionally skipped for 25 years. I started with a real page-turner, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. That took a while. Was it pleasant? Sometimes. Was it practice? Sure. Over the course of five years or so, I plowed through as many "great books" as I could. And always looming in the distance was Joyce's Ulysses. For that, I needed to build some stamina.
First, I read A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. It was ok. I didn't understand most of it, but I liked what he did with words, and it was tackleably short Then I read Dubliners, all short stories, which I loved. Then Homer's The Illiad and The Odyssey to get some background on Odyssyeus/Ulysses. Then I was ready.
Actually, I wasn't. Nothing could have prepared me for the mind melt of that book. It's so long and so difficult, and so easy to give up on, just in the Telemachus stuff. Then comes Bloomsday. Wow. Anyway, I finished it. (I must not have hated it because I named my second son Ulysses - after the hero, the book, and a little boy in William Saroyan's The Human Comedy.) I'm not sure how, in retrospect. A reader's guide helped, but not enough. I guess it was down to determination.
And so it will be for the Wake.
What have I done to build stamina? Eh, not much, mostly slummed through weekly New Yorkers and superhero comics. True story. I don't read now like I used to. I'm bogged down in DFW's Infinite Jest (only 200 pages left!), I'm loping through Dylan's autobiography, and I'm not enjoying Kim Gordon's memoir. And I gave up on the new Thomas Pynchon, when the female protagonist gave some guy a footjob. Oh, and I pretend to reread Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, trying to recontextualize it for a personal project and to scour it for lessons on how to be a better dad - or at least come to some understanding of bigger stuff, like parenthood and the weirdness of generational memory.
What have I done to build stamina? Eh, not much, mostly slummed through weekly New Yorkers and superhero comics. True story. I don't read now like I used to. I'm bogged down in DFW's Infinite Jest (only 200 pages left!), I'm loping through Dylan's autobiography, and I'm not enjoying Kim Gordon's memoir. And I gave up on the new Thomas Pynchon, when the female protagonist gave some guy a footjob. Oh, and I pretend to reread Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, trying to recontextualize it for a personal project and to scour it for lessons on how to be a better dad - or at least come to some understanding of bigger stuff, like parenthood and the weirdness of generational memory.
OM and I are both parents. And a part of our friendship lately has been based on trading kid stories. But another part, a foundational part, has always been based on books and shared appreciation for certain authors that nobody really likes - Pynchon, DFW, and Joyce. This project is dedicated to my far-away friend, who's about to be a dad (again). And to my dad, who was a voracious reader, and who isn't anymore.
Godspeed, O. Let's do this.
Godspeed, O. Let's do this.
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