/lit/ - Literature

Are there any reading exercises that'll help with my comprehension? I tried picking up The Portrait of a Young Man to read sort of a long time back, a couple months ago honestly, and I could hardly understand what the fuck was going on. I consider myself to have a fairly strong grasp of grammar and vocabulary, but just how the sentences were structured made it difficult to pay attention. Am I just stupid?

>Post some of your favourite prose passages. Seriously, why don't we do this more often?

A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.

She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.

>inb4 farts

what about Ulysses

*taps head*
In here is where I must kill the king and the priest.

ITT: High-brown puns.

hey /lit/,

so I've read all of Joyce's stuff (except Finnegans Wake obv), and I was just wondering is there any other author that comes close to describing the "artistic sublime" as well as he does? My favorite parts are when Bloom is tranfixed by the music in the pub in Ulysses, and the whole snow falling quietly as Conroy has his epiphany about his wife and her dead lover in the Dead, and when Stephen Dedalus wades into the water while seeing the spectral beauty of the girl.

Idk, its just I get this feeling when Joyce describes stuff like this...its like nothing else. Its pure platonic beauty and I was wondering, does any other author come close to him in this regard? I'm kind of depressed I'll never read these parts for this first time again...

>is written using real words

What do you guys think about James Joyce making that obstruction call? This Series might end up in St. Louis.

>>4007773
he really fucking does

that's my last.fm picture at the moment.

>>3959831

Yeah, you should. I took a seminar on Joyce so that kinda streamlined the process.

My teacher would get so mad if I brought up Pynchon. For the final class we went to her house and read our Joyce parodies (for one of our final assignments we were to write a parody of one of the chapter/episodes) and she had promised us Guinness and other Irish shit, so everyone got drunk and read their parodies. Toward the end we got in an argument about who was better and she eventually started yelling that I 'get this postmodern shit out of her house,' which was pretty funny.

I have mixed feelings on Joyce, as a person. I, in a way, both despise and admire him.

I'll start:

And here slip I
Dragging one foot in the gutter
In the midnight echo of the shop that sells cheap radios.
And there sits she
No bed, no bread, no butter
On a double yellow line
Where she can park anytime.
Old Lady Grey; crash-barrier waltzer
Some only son's mother. Baker Street casualty.
Oh, Mr. Policeman
Blue shirt ballet master.
Feet in sticking plaster
Move the old lady on.
Strange pas-de-deux
His Romeo to her Juliet.
Her sleeping draught, his poisoned regret.
No drunken bums allowed to sleep here in the crowded emptiness.
Oh officer, let me send her to a cheap hotel
I'll pay the bill and make her well - like hell you bloody will!
No do-good over kill. We must teach them to be still more independent.

Live online global reading of Joyce's Ulysses:
http://globalbloomsday.com/

Starts 21:00 UTC.

>>3741679
Get a clue, loser. He's only one of the most important writers of the last 400 years.

I am gonna go to Dublin soon, could you give me some /lit/-related advice? Are there any good bookstores? Is the Writers Museum any good? What are some places related to Joyce, Beckett or Wilde I should visit?
>How do I literary life in Dublin?

Does anyone still have that flowchart which explains in what order you should read the books of James Joyce?

I bought Dubliners today but I wasn't sure anymore if it was entry level stuff.

>tfw a cute girl next to me couldn't reach Ulysses in the upper shelf but I was too busy thinking about this shit

Wwwwelp....

Rate my poem /lit/

It's a mystery to me - the game commences
For the usual fee - plus expenses
Confidential information - is a diary
This is my investigation - it's not a public inquiry
I go checking out the reports - digging up the dirt
You get to meet all sorts in this line of work
Treachery and treason - there's always an excuse for it
And when I find the reason I still can't get used to it
And what have you got at the end of the day?
What have you got to take away?
A bottle of whisky and a new set of lies
Blinds on the windows and a pain behind the eyes
Scarred for life - no compensation
Private investigations.

>yfw the ghost of Joyce is already responsible for half the posts on /d/

>>3340090
>>3341854
I think he intentionally wrote a bland and ordinary opening line, just because it doesn't always have to 'immediately pull you into the novel' or 'make the reader wonder and ask questions'. It's rather nice he did, since it was becoming sort of a chore for writers to think of a witty opening line or else not write a good novel. Only few others actually did it well, Kafka was one of them.

Why was he great?

>>3235939
This. Everyone knows that Joyce, the patron saint of /lit/ is the only person who can write proper erotica. If there are no "farts" involved, it is shit.

>>3220852
You forgot that he is also a pirate.

>>3156551

>>3045458
don't mind me just farting on this Fitzgerald Wank