Mork & Mindy

… yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like made and yes I said yes I will Yes.

With jubilation I finished reading the tome of that most famous Irish author, James Joyce. The book of course, is none other than Ulysses. It was certainly a fascinating read, most of the time I had no idea what was going on, but just passed over the words while my mind wandered (which also happened to me while reading Dubliners).

The novel started off normally enough, not very interesting, but certainly coherent. And it finished in a style most jarring, about 30 pages with no punctuation of any kind, a complete stream of consciousness. But this was actually not that unreadable. I approached it with a clean frame of mind and let Joyce take control of the random musing and tangents my mind moves to. It was the middle section that was actually the most torturous to read. Keeping track of who is speaking to whom in the long sections of dialogue was a task I wasn’t prepared to take.

Why did I decide to read Ulysses? Well, I had a long summer and thought that it would be good to educate myself with a seminal text. This book was chosen, as it was recommended by a tutor for a subject I enrolled in last year – Modern & Contemporary Literature. But it was not on the whole a book that is a pleasure to read, nor one that I would recommend to others, unless they were particularly interested in seeing what modernist literature is about.

A far more interesting yarn can be found in the (supposed) work of Homer’s Odyssey. It is an epic poem, both in length and content. I don’t want to ruin the story for you (which will already be done if you have seen the Simpson’s take on it, or read the Wikipedia link above :P). Since it is meant to be orally recited, it reads very easily. The text has a rhythm and repetition to it that makes it come alive. As Odysseus retells of his tales, you can feel the adventure, indeed, the odyssey of it :). Would make a good series of television or movies, far too much happens to be contained in any one film. (And let us not forget the horror that was Troy, based on the far less encompassing Iliad).