why let schratz have all the fun

well to be honest i am posting in order to receive a free book (why has no one else yet taken advantage?), but since i devote such a great portion of my brain to constant literary rumination, i may very well end up saying something relevant by the end. i spent winter study in china after convincing peter murphy and chris pye (piece of cake) that either a) i would work on my thesis every day or b) i didn't really need to work on my thesis at all. whichever story i told them, it worked, and i bet you can all figure out how much work i got done. but thats ok. i did get some reading done- most of "the birth of tragedy", henry james' "the altar of the dead", some murakami of course. as for the latter, i think he's pretty good. not much to say else. i don't have any gripes with him yet, and that says alot. oh and a few stories from a book called "dangerous laughter", i forget who it's by, far inferior to murakami.

what i have been thinking about these days is james joyce. i have a carrel on the 2nd floor of sawyer, tucked away in the northeast corner, facing the bold front of stetson and otherwise promoting scholasticism by the extent of its detachment. yet every time i walk around the corner to go to the bathroom i have to first walk directly towards joyce's claim in the stacks, and the spines of dozens of books with "ulysses this" or "ulysses that" or some stupidly clever thing like "a portrait of the artist in exile". A portrait of the exiled chamber music of ulysses finnegan as a young dubliner. so its virtually impossible that i go very long without being prompted to think about joyce, excepting rare cases of sustained dehydration. and now i am taking a break from reading some essay on JSTOR about the aeneid and the waste land. it's kind of convincing -- all i've read so far is a list of reasonably direct allusions -- but it's still equally plausible to me that Dante stands as an un-ignorable (help, schratz, i am always looking for a real word to say "un-ignorable" that is more accurate than undeniable or incontestible) middle man between the two. that is to say, i am not so far convinced that one is in error who continues to categorize bleeding trees in the waste land as a dantean, and not a virgilian, homage. but then again i still have to finish the essay.

what a strange relationship i have, and have had, with these two modernist poster children. i suppose i grew disillusioned with eliot at least a year or two ago, though i fear his personal influence will never truly leave my brain, eager though i am to move beyond his clutches. regardless, i don't think i have anything really new to say about him, other than i refuse to hold in too high esteem any critic who so vehemently attempts to disguise himself as a poet. and no, it is not the other way around. yet my thoughts on joyce i feel still need development. by the end of taking the ulysses class with tifft i thought i had made a huge breakthrough by recognizing that stephen is the true odyssean figure of the novel, lest we concede to acknowledging that all bloom had to do to consummate the odyssey's vastly important homecoming is, well, come home. so stephen's leaving the bloom house (and it is his heroic capacity to leave just as much as his mere presence which finally re-qualifies molly's sexuality) is some greater and more symbolic kind of homecoming. for example joyce's leaving ireland as the step by which he "returns" to some kind of real, pure, or worthwhile literature. which is really anti-modern, in contrast to the pride with which eliot seems to want to portray boring people and consider those portrayals as successful literary endeavors.

i mean, i guess i still agree with myself that all those things are interesting and perhaps true as long as one feels tied down to homer, but i am starting to feel, and gladly so, less and less of a real desire to think of homer at all. after all, it's not like i will ever really be able to absolve myself of a homeric consciousness, no more than literature itself will. but i feel its the mature thing to do at this point. but damn! it's still so hard to commit to any of these postures with someone you know is trying to trick you all the time. once you realize that joyce is so mischevious, it's like you say, "oh! i get it! he was just fucking with us the whole time" and you feel like you've got him figured out. but then after such a fleeting moment of self-satisfaction you begin to wonder, "but wait- what exactly is the trick he's playing on us?" there is a large pool to choose from there. i guess that's why it's such a good book. or why it's such a bad book. and in what senses do i mean "good" and "bad" here? i guess "good" if you like thinking alot. or if you just think he puts words together favorably. "bad" if you have some devoted concern with the sanctity of literature- which, if it is in fact threatened, i still feel we must attribute less to joyce himself than to the door he helped open.