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Bloomsday Requiem
June 17, 2016
(A day late and a dollar short)

Today I send to its final rest my ambition to read Joyce's Ulysses. It was an ambition born in the heart of a twenty two year old who fancied himself a damn clever fellow and thought, therefore, that it was essential to read what everyone told him was a damn clever book. It survived thirty long years, and more than half a dozen aborted attempts, including this final one to listen to it as audiobook.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.

After my first failed attempt, I realized that I lacked sufficient depth and breadth of reading to appreciate the scope of Joyce's creation, and set it aside, confidant that once I remedied that deficiency the book would open to me and I would join the erudite congregation that sang its praises.

That never happened.

I did broaden both my reading and education. I learned about modernism, its origins and rationale. I read cheat sheets meant to give first time readers easier access to Joyce's convoluted brilliance. All to no avail; I grew older and wiser, yet each new attempt to survive reading the length of this tome defeated me well before the hundredth page.

Along the way I learned that I fundamentally detest modernist literature; that I consider it to be intellectual masturbation and a cultural dead end. I could write an essay on that, but the details aren't important here. The point is, discovering my personal antipathy for modernism did not diminish my ambition to read Ulysses. I hated Eliot's The Waste Land, but had read its entirety, studied it, and thus had the basic capital necessary to discuss my view of it. I wanted to be able to do the same for this work considered to be the crowning achievement of modernist literature.

As previously noted, I have failed in that ambition. My final attempt was to listen as the book was read to me via the Blackstone Audio edition. It is a fitting tribute to my thirty year ordeal that I made it no further than the Calypso episode that ends with Bloom defecating.

My ambition to read this book is dead. There will be no further attempt.

I appreciate that Ulysses is a book that helps to keep professors of literature employed as a priesthood to explain the inner mysteries of great works that the hoi polloi can never comprehend. I appreciate its value as a hobby for the literate elite. But that doesn't change the fact that the book is a grim cavalcade of stupefying boredom. It is less a work of genius than a clever parlor trick played by a naughty trickster on his fellow intellectuals. I'm done playing.

Rest in peace.