James Joyce

Waving the white flag

I’m really competitive; not what you would describe as mucho, Wolf of Wall Street competitive.  I do play sport – tough, physically demanding, contact sport – and as a young man I was the guy on the court or pitch who would argue with a referee/umpire convinced that he was variously blind or biased and very often both.  It’s not something I am particularly proud of, just part of my experience growing up.  While I may never completely grow up I  am well past this stage of my life.

No, I am more the kind of person who just really hates mediocrity and mediocrity in myself is not something I am comfortable with.  And that’s a problem, as it leads to chronic procrastination, not wanting to start something until I am absolutely convinced I can be moderately successful, and certainly never last or the worst at anything. Geez, I sound like a real piece of work.

When it comes to reading, I like to think I’m pretty widely read.  I absorb anything that comes my way like a gravitational singularity inside a black hole absorbs matter.  While studying a post-graduate degree I loved reading detailed, highly technical academic journals and I’m a veracious ‘Googler”, reading up on anything that spikes my curiosity from quarks to syllogistic logic, and sometimes I even understand what they’re talking about.

That’s why it is so hard to admit I have been defeated; resoundingly, thoroughly and completely defeated.  I tried, I really tried.  My form was flawless and nothing I had faced got close to bettering me.  But in this case I wasn’t good enough.  And the protagonist of this humiliating defeat is a book.

What makes it worse is that this book is described by some critics as the most important book of the 20th Century, James Joyce’s Ulysses.

The first time I picked it up I was really looking forward to it.  Of course I had the usual trepidation I feel faced with a monster read – it is long, very long, at 933 pages (see my previous post, I’m a coward) – but I’ve read Joyce before.  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is a modernist masterpiece of creative, intellectually stimulating poetic prose.  I devoured it, enjoyed it and even understood it.  But Ulysses was too much for my feeble mind.  It is opaque and reading it is like wading through quicksand.

Since then I’ve tried twice more and each time I haven’t got past page 137 (of 933) … that’s less than 15%, not even close to a 50% pass mark.

Sure, the language is complicated.  In the process of writing Ulysses Joyce effectively invented a new dialect of English.  According to Wikipedia he used 30,030 different words out of the 265,000 words in the book.  But I’ve read complicated, modernist books before, so this can’t be it.

May be it’s because of its parallels to Homer’s poem Odyssey, which has been translated in to English dozens, if not hundreds of times, over hundreds of years.  I’ve read a little of the Illiad, but none of Odyssey and Joyce apparently once wrote to his aunt Josephine that, ‘If you want to read Ulysses you had better first get or borrow from a library a translation in prose of the Odyssey of Homer.’.

May be I just didn’t get in to the story or Leopold Bloom.  The ‘hero’ is indifferent and in the 137 pages of I have read of the novel I just haven’t warmed to him.  Or it could be that each time I have tried to read it, it has been at night, before going to bed; Ulysses could be a day time book, needing the soft warmth of the sun and higher ultraviolet or infrared light; may be the production of vitamin D helps an unmalleable mind be shaped in to a form capable of appreciating the story.  Now I’m clutching at straws.

Whatever it is, it has beaten me.

The book still sits on my book shelf, in fact right at the top of a pile of similarly silvery-spined books I have managed to consume my wife has curated on our colour-coded shelves.

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One day I may be ready to read it, but I suspect I’ll procrastinate for many years to come.  In the meantime I have waved the white flag.

I’m a coward

There are a lot of things in this world to be scared of – spiders, snakes, terrorism, Britney Spears.  Books shouldn’t be one of them.

But I have to confess I am a bit of a coward when it comes to some books.

I wrote in a previous contribution about how I often choose books because of their cover or title (You Can Judge a Book By Its Cover).  If you haven’t tried it yet, you should.  But I omitted to say that I will also judge a book by another superficial criteria – how thick it is. If it’s thicker than two of my fingers, then I balk – I’m a coward and a wimp.

I look at the book, it looks at me.  Everything else around goes out of focus; all I see is the spine of the book in wide-screen, high-definition, digital, Blu-Ray clarity.  I hear a faint buzzing sound in my ears and the thump thump of my rapidly increasing pulse.  I break out in a cold sweat and I’m almost overcome with a wave of self loathing – “you nob” I think “you’re such a hypocrite – an intellectual snob on one hand, yet you don’t have the balls to tackle a really meaty story.  What a lightweight!  Ohh poor you, your hand will get sore and it will take you a while to read it and it will be heavy in your bag … boo hoo you little baby”.  Well that last part might be an exaggeration, but you get the picture.

And even if I do close my eyes, grit my teeth and go against all instinct and buy the book, I can never quite shake the feeling.

A number of years ago I read Illywhacker by Peter Carey.  When I bought it, it met all of my criteria – great title, great cover, an author I have been encouraged to read for years – everything; except it is a monster of a book.  To my eyes it’s a foot thick, weighs in at 150 kgs, is written in 4pt font single spaced and the page edges are intermittently serrated or razor-sharp.  Each day I would pull it out of my bag and I’d think I’m never going to finish it and even if I do I’ll be 87 and won’t have remembered what happened at the start of the book, so I’ll have to read it again.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it.  I read all 817 pages (I feel nauseous) and it was a great read.  Not many authors can use words the way Carey can.  It’s clever, funny, well researched etc etc.  But even today, it frightens the living hell out of me.  I’m tired even thinking about it.

Now, years later, the feeling is still there.  When considering the prospect of a long book I look like Homer Simpson faced with a day without doughnuts or Paris Hilton faced with the prospect of wearing polyester – totally and completely petrified and out of my depth.

Other books like 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (925 pages) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (933 pages) had just the same effect, worse in fact in the case of Ulysses, and if I can bring myself to, I’ll make that the subject of a future blog all it’s very own.

Now excuse me while I get back to enjoying the 201 pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister.

I’ll never need batteries for a book

I’m pretty comfortable with technology.  I wouldn’t say I am a first mover or even an early adopter, optimistically a fast follower. I’ve had a Facebook account for >10 years, a LinkedIn account since about 2005, I have an iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro, Sonos etc etc. The thing about these technologies, hardware and software, is they are genuine innovations.  They created something new; they were original; solving a problem in a better way than the past or perhaps creating a solution to a problem people weren’t aware of.

But I will never use an e-reader.

I won’t argue that the Kindle isn’t a brilliant, elegant piece of technology and ridiculously convenient. It is. The fact you have access to thousands of books anywhere in the world is truly amazing.  I even bought one for my wife.  But to me it is a backward step: it is an inferior technology replacing a superior one.

For one thing you never need a battery for a real book.  It never runs out of power literally or metaphorically.  The idea that I can’t keep reading a book, not because there isn’t enough light available to see the words, but because it won’t turn on is ridiculous.  You can’t turn on a real book, because it is never off. My wife asked me last night when we went to bed, to remind her in the morning to plug in her Kindle, I promised I would and rolled over and opened my current book, Bend Sinister (Vladimir Nabokov), which I know will always be there for me to read, no matter how long it lies waiting on my bedside table.

For me books are a whole body experience; a contact sport.  From the cover (see my earlier post ‘You can judge a book by its cover’) to the weight and the texture and smell of the pages.  Each book is different and the experience of reading it should be too.  A real book engages at least three, if not four, senses uniquely for every book.

Each book creates a different sensory experience – sight, touch, smell and even hearing.  With an e-reader the process of reading is the same whether you’re reading a complicated mountain of a novel like Ulysses (James Joyce) or a short, clever fable like Fup (Jim Dodge) – the physical experience is the same.

In a real book, the pages can be different textures and sizes – smooth, rough, tall, wide – or different shades of white, cream or  grey.  I have an edition of Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish published by Picador where the text subtly changes colour throughout the book from black to khakis to purples, greens, blues, navy and brown; it’s beautiful.  And then there’s the incredible paintings of fish, for which each chapter is named, by the real Van Diemonian (Tasmanian) convict artist William Buelow Gould.  You can’t possibly experience the whole story without appreciating what these fish look like through the eyes of a man, for who’s life the story is a fictionalised account of.

And then there’s the joy of sitting in a room and looking at a shelf full of books.  Each book brings back memories of time, place and experience that no flat, rectangular grey piece of plastic, circuitry and lithium-ion could ever do.  I love being able to browse books in my and other people’s homes.  While my wife has a Kindle, she appreciates the physical presence of real books, having one day, when I was out of the house, reorganised the books on our bookshelves by colour.  Granted this system drives me mad, as I prefer a more logical filing system using that wonderful thing called the alphabet, but I will agree it looks brilliant.

A bit sentimental? OK, so let me take a more rational approach.  While there appears to be some debate, most credible sources suggest there is less environmental impact through the production of real books than e-readers and if I ever contemplated disposing of a real book, not that I would, I could simply put it with my other paper recycling, or even bury it, knowing it’ll break down and feed the garden like it fed my mind.  An e-reader on the other hand will require me to drop it off at my council’s local waste collection facility – a sad, cold, wasteful exercise.

It’s certainly getting harder to buy real books, as physical book retailers in the Western World suffer the shifting tastes of consumers and the economics of running an increasingly low margin retail business.  I recently bought some books online for the first time ever.  It wasn’t the same as going in to a bookshop, just a necessary step, and some evidence I’m not a Luddite.  However I will always prefer the experience of buying real books in real bookshops from real people and I will only ever read real books, even if I have to end up printing them myself.

All power to the readers of e-readers out there, but ideas bound up in pages of reconstituted wood pulp and ink will always ignite my imagination and soul more powerfully than any electronic technology.