Today is Bloomsday, an annual event in which people celebrate a writer that few people have read and even fewer people have understood by gathering in a bar, and reading the most unreadable passages to one another, and pretending to understand the reason why. Beer, which is a drink that is easier to understand than read - except in the latter stages of beer consumption, at which point it becomes easier to read and somewhat less easy to understand - facilitates this process. This is known as being 'cultured' and 'sophisticated', which is perhaps one reason why, when they are told what it means to be cultured, most people simply turn on the telly and watch the latest episode of Home and Away in preference.
Anyway, to celebrate these celebrations, let's partake in a little James Joyce reading ourselves:
There ensued a somewhat lengthy pause. (World Classics - p. 584)
Wowzers! He couldn't have made this more difficult if he tried! But such culture, such artistic sophisticiation, such complexity buried into every word! Clearly, the only such person who could even begin to unpick such a fine filigree of a sentence would have about as many degrees as the temperature is in Melbourne today, and half the alphabet (half the Russian alphabet), after their name. I'll leave it up to you to interpret as you see fit, but as for me, I've had enough.
Oh, and keep your hands off the beer. I've only got one left.
UPDATE! - Bloomsday, bah! How about we hold another event in which we read the most depressingly boring passages from the pages of accountacy textbooks, and the like? We can call it 'Gloomsday'.
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13 comments:
Sometimes your humour seems so pointed I can't tell if you mean it to be that way.
Thank you for pointing out the pointedness of this post. I'm still not sure what the point was my self, but I'm glad you weren't disappointed by my appointed point.
In fact, and indeed, all I did was log on to blogger with the first sentence of this post in my head, and started typing away, and before I knew it, I had several more sentences that followed.
This pleases me, as I like saying meaningless things.
I often think that the meaningless things are the things we mean most, but sometimes a stream of consciousness is really just a stream of consciousness.
Have I been reading this website wrong for years now? I assumed that the pointlessness was the point. Oh no. Please say that you haven't been saying anything. Or are the the next messiah and I've smiled and nodded and mindlessly agreed to 10% tithe all because I wasn't paying enough attention?
Obviously folks can take away from this blog any point, or lack thereof, that they like.
And there's certainly no point in fighting over that point.
We could have Broomsday, when we all read Harry Potter. Or Doomsday, when we all play Doom. Either one would be more crowd-pleasing.
James Joyce really should have considered these things.
'msday, devoted to readings of ambiguous contractions from all walks of life.
TimT, I don't think you need to go to accounting textbooks for exceedingly depressingly boring passages. There are plenty in the so-called classics unfortunately ...
How about Enid-day. I'm thinking passages of Blyton's Famous Four series being read in the pub to an audience of big burly blokes.
Plus, we could go around asking attendees at Enid Blyton day, 'And what's your personal Blight for the day?'
For another anti-Bloomsday rant, try this:
http://tinyurl.com/mc82cz
Personally I would like to see a Biggles Day - where we all gather round in pubs to read the spiffing adventures of Biggles, Algy and the rest of the gang.
Oh well - back to Bloomsday - I wonder Mr Train whether you had seen this http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/16/rare-recording-of-ja.html
(Word Verification: Micks! Only thing better would have been Paddy)
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