James Joyce presciently said he hoped his Ulysses would keep
picky professors
busy for centuries while arguing over what he meant. They reap
like Macki Messers
repartees, with papered comments sharper than sharks’ teeth
in tenured aisles,
creating with their published words an intellectual wreath,
uncourteous Weills.
Ulysses interpretations that are far more sensible,
Maureen Dowd
is surely making than of D.C.’s far less comprehensible
creepy crowd,
and of course a lot more tacky
than Bertolt’s Mr, Messer, Mackie.
In “A New Look for ‘Ulysses’: Eduardo Arroyo, a Spanish artist who died in 2018, provided drawings, watercolors and collages for an illustrated edition of the James Joyce novel,” NYT, 2/10/22. Raphael Minder writes:
James Joyce once said that he hoped his groundbreaking and famously challenging novel “Ulysses” would “keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.”
In “D.C. and Joyce — Both Incomprehensible,” NYT, 2/12/22, Maureen Dowd writes:
On this centenary of James Joyce’s colossus, we can borrow a thought from W.B. Yeats’s poem “The Fascination of What’s Difficult”: Is “Ulysses” hard because it’s great, or do people assume it’s great because it’s hard?
“It’s hard because Joyce put a lot in there,” Dan Mulhall, the Irish ambassador, told me. “A lot of people are drawn to the novel because of its complexity and derive a lifelong satisfaction from delving into it more deeply. It’s like Wordle for serious readers.”
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
