James Joyce’s Ulysses first published in its entirety on this day 100 years ago, on Joyce’s 40th birthday. Happy birthday to Ulysses and Joyce, lads!

13 comments

  1. > “You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I f*cked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole.”

    ❤️

  5. ►https://Youtu.be/Ob3NWUtCCJI?t=1144

    A great documentary that explains what it was all about.

    There was English literature before February 1922 and then, there was English literature after February 1922 with the complete publication of Ulysses.

  7. Large parts of the book are, sadly, godawful. Look at this stuff:

    >Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer’s ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi sétier! A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me at his beck. Il est Irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux Irlandais, nous, Irlande, vous savez? Ah oui! She thought you wanted a cheese hollandais. Your postprandial, do you know that word? Postprandial. There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call it his postprandial. Well : slainte! Around the slabbed tables the tangle of wined breaths and grumbling gorges. His breath hangs over our saucestained plates, the green fairy’s fang thrusting between his lips. Of Ireland, the Dalcassians, of hopes, conspiracies, of Arthur Griffith now. To yoke me as his yokefellow, our crimes our common cause. You’re your father’s son. I know the voice. His fustian shirt, sanguineflowered, trembles its Spanish tassels at his secrets. M. Drumont, famous journalist, Drumont, know what he called queen Victoria? Old hag with the yellow teeth. Vieille ogresse with the dents jaunes. Maud Gonne, beautiful woman, La Patrie, M. Millevoye, Félix Faure, know how he died? Licentious men. The froeken, bonne à tout faire, who rubs male nakedness in the bath at Upsala. Moi faire, she said. Tous les messieurs not this Monsieur, I said. Most licentious custom. Bath a most private thing. I wouldn’t let my brother, not even my own brother, most lascivious thing. Green eyes, I see you. Fang, I feel. Lascivious people.

    ‘Look how smart I am!’ he says.

  9. I went to the Irish literary museum last year. Very good.

    Anyway, it was there that I learned Bloomsday was the day in real life where his future wife wanked him off for the first time down by Sandymount.

  10. Finished reading Ulysses last month, hated it which is a shame as it has kind of put me off of reading the rest of Joyce’s books especially Finnegan’s Wake as I heard it is a much more difficult read than Ulysses.

  13. Lovely coverage in The Economist this morning:

    Yes because a hundred years ago Sylvia Beach displayed in her Paris bookshop the first copy of a new novel she was publishing yes she was publishing “Ulysses” which is now recognised as one of the twentieth century’s greatest works of art and yes signed first edition copies can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars in auction it was written by Irishman James Joyce with its peculiar use of punctuation and yes its stream of consciousness James marked that occasion on 2 February 1922 with a muted celebration and laid out what was then the only other copy with its white letters on a blue background a nod to the colours of the Greek flag and thus to the novel’s chief inspiration Homer’s Odyssey and yes for Beach it was a risk of course supporting this experimental novel which was looked at unkindly by some like playwright George Bernard Shaw who said it was revolting and that if you imagine that any Irishman would pay 150 francs for a book you little know my countrymen

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