Ulysses. My big book of the New Year. Actually started reading it in December along with several members of my book reading group (affectionately known as the Bitch Goddess reading group - still haven't convinced the local bookstore to feature us on their special, local book group shelves). The thing about reading Ulysses is that it makes me want to read Infinite Jest and Hamlet and The Odyssey. I also have this groovy Ulysses annotation that kind of consumes me with its sort of knit picky detail and description. Its reading this that makes me most miss reading IJ and appreciate DFW's great, good sense and humor to do the annotating "himself."
Over Christmas my uncle told me that the local graveyard is now full (my cousin who died the week before Christmas is one of the last to get in and ho ho ho Merry Christmas.) I read Bloom going on for pages and pages and pages about how terrible it is to be buried or maybe it's a relief or...part of life none of us escape - birth astride the grave and all that (so his secretary wrote). Hades - an unrelenting chapter it is, which is the point I guess. You feel like you'll never emerge.
I daresay the soil would be quite fat with corpse manure, bones, flesh, nails, charnelhouses. Dreadful. Turning green and pink, decomposing. Rot quick in damp earth lean. The lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy kind of a cheesy. Then begin to get black, treacle oozing out of them. Then dried up. Deathmoths. Of course the cells or whatever they are go on living. ChangingOh it's not without it's humor.
about. Live for ever practically. Nothing to feed on feed on themselves.
And then you do emerge and its into the world of Headlines and Advertising. It's so lovely and random.
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