James Joyce as fireworks porn pioneer

I finally finished reading James Joyce's novel Ulysses today. By the evidence of my own blog, I started this thing on May 30, which means I knocked out the giant in a month in a half. Not bad.

I can't say I understood all of it, and I certainly didn't enjoy all of it, but I can now say I have read all of what is often described as the greatest novel in the English language.

On the Poetry Scores blog, I have been jotting down passages of the novel that will work nicely as song lyrics. I will continue to do so and one day, I hope, make a record of these songs. It is fabulously rich stuff. Had Joyce wanted to make the most beautiful novel in the language, as opposed to the most frustrating and innovative one, he could have done that instead.

I plan to use this space to puzzle out some of my own complex, contradictory responses to a novel that I have thrown so hard against a wall that it had to be repaired with duct tape in order to make it to the finish line in one piece. Today I'll record some oddities and perversities that I jotted on the flyleaf, along the way. Plenty more where this came from ...

Banker hating. As I was reading this novel, the free world was convulsed in a welcome fit of suspicion and resentment of the masters of high finance. Joyce presaged this sentiment by including the following italicized phrase in one of his phantasmagoric parades of monstrous beings: "the chapter of saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence".

Pornographic fireworks. I'm not aware that Joyce has received his just due as the pioneer of firworks porn, yet we find this italicized sentence in the novel: "Mirus bazaar fireworks go up from all sides with symbolic phallopyrotechnic designs."

Suicide by stout: In a catalogue of suicidal options for women, Joyce includes (again, italicized): "casting themselves under steamrollers, from the top of Nelso's pillar, into the great vat of Guiness's brewery".

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Phallic fireworks image from someone's MySpace page. You know I looked for a picture of someone drowning in Guinness ...