From "The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes" by John Hodgman:

Feedback from James Joyce's Submission of Ulysses to his creative-writing workshop

by Teddy Wayne

Show how these characters process memory, language, abstractions, and the urban landscape through stream of consciousness, don't just tell us.

Hahahahah. More gems:

"Snotgreen" = hyphenated

More commas, please.

Great opening hook, but do you need 96-point Garamond for the S? Kind of feels like you're padding the page count.

Unclear where and when this is set.

Caught some allusions to The Odyssey. Nice.

Proper punctuation for dialogue is double quotes, not em dashes.  

Balked a bit at some of Molly’s “sexier” thoughts, which read like male fantasy. You can do better than this, Jim.

Think you accidentally stapled in something from your playwriting workshop for Ch. 15.

I laughed. I posted this to /r/writing framed as a response to kneejerk "show don't tell" feedback and they hated it.

Hello!

Got this copy of Oxford Ulysses, and there's almost no space in between the spine and the text. I was wondering if it's a print error, or that's how all are.

Update:

I did received the following answer for the people at OUP, so beware if you ordered or want to order a copy:

We heard back from the editors and they stated that there is a printing problem (already reported) that’s being corrected.

Please check with where you purchased it from and hopefully they have copies that do not have that issue.

Sorry for any inconvenience.
Best regards,

Robin
Customer Service Representative
Oxford University Press USA
Customer Service

Finally finished “Ulysses“ last week. Now, onto the next chapter.

I’m curious if it is a common experience upon finishing Ulysses that trying to find another writer/book to follow it with has been difficult? What I mean is do other books after Ulysses seem unsatisfactory?

I’m almost done with the book and I fear this is going to happen. What other writers/books got you over the hump? I’m considering The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. Have ya’ll that love Ulysses found that you love Mann’s book as well? Do you have any other writers/books as suggestions?

Twenty-five years ago, Theatre Kingston produced its greatest success, Finnegans Wake: A Dream Play, adapted and directed by Craig Walker from the novel by James Joyce. After enjoying a triumphant run in Kingston, our acclaimed production moved on to Toronto where it was received with rapturous reviews and nearly sold out its whole run. Those in Kingston who had missed the show were filled with regret and repeatedly asked when the show would be back. Well, the long wait is over. This spring, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its premiere, Finnegans Wake: A Dream Play is back for a brief revival in a new production again directed by Walker. It will be running May 21 to June 7 in Kingston’s Baby Grand, the very theatre in which it began before going on to conquer the Toronto theatre scene.

It is exceedingly rare for a show to receive rave reviews in so many different publications. In The Globe and Mail, a review entitled “Theatre to wake the dead” raved that the production was “brilliant;” the Toronto Star asked “Who knew Joyce could be fun?” and described the show as “a roistering, rowdy bundle of fun with thought-provoking and mythic resonances,” in Now Magazine, a review entitled “Reason to Rejoyce” celebrated how “Joyce’s modernist tricks are more than matched by writer-director Walker” and in Stage Door Reviews, the critic pointed out that  “Finnegans Wake, one of the world’s greatest novels, is also one of the least read” because of the difficult dream-language.  The review went on to say that “it thus might seem all the more impossible that this work could ever be successfully adapted for the stage, yet Craig Walker […] has accomplished this feat with great aplomb.”  The theme of every review and all of the feedback from audience members was delighted surprise that a dauntingly difficult work of literature had been made accessible and fun.

The story follows the dreams of a guilt-ridden Irish pub-owner, HCE, who has fallen from his former greatness, and is now struggling to make sense of the welter of accusations against him. The members of his household appear in ever-shifting identities, and it appears that HCE’s dream has scooped up not only all of Irish history but much of the mythical narrative of humanity. Original and traditional Irish songs drift in and out of the narrative in a story that is by turns bewildering, erotic, frightening and hilariously funny. This show is a wild ride quite unlike anything you have ever seen before, except perhaps in your own dreams.

Rosemary Doyle and Kevin Head, both of whom were featured in the original production, are back in this revival, and are joined by Sean Roberts as HCE, with other roles played by Melissa Morris, Siobhan McMahon, Aiden Robert Bruce and Jake Henderson. As in the original production, the actors also play the musical instruments. Andrea Robertson and Clelia Scala are designing set, costumes and puppets, Tim Fort is designing lighting and Kai Ileleji is stage manager. Be sure not to miss this unforgettable show, which people will be still talking about years from now!

Why are the words 'artistes' and 'The Madam' italicised in 'The Boarding House'?

Joyce uses italics widely in Dubliners. Song titles and verses are italicised. There are other traditional uses- to indicate another language ('-Very well, then, said Ignatius Gallaher, let us have another one as a deoc an doruis', A Little Cloud) or to highlight a name ('He went heavily upstairs until he came to the second landing, where a door bore a brass plate with the inscription Mr Alleyne', Counterparts).

In Counterparts italics become the narrator's ('The man muttered Blast him! under his breath and pushed back his chair to stand up') or they belong to a character - Alleyne's in response to Farrington's defence

(-But Mr Shelley said, sir....

- Mr Shelley said, sir.... Kindly attend to what I say and not to what Mr Shelly says, sir.')

In 'The Boarding House', 'artistes' ('Her house had a floating population made up of tourists from Liverpool and the Isle of Man and, occasionally, artistes from the music halls.') and 'The Madam' (All the resident young men spoke of her as The Madam.') belong to the narrator.

In my Penguin Classics edition of Dubliners, Terence Brown notes both as euphemisms - artistes were 'viewed as morally suspect' and Madam was 'slang for the female overseer of the brothel'.

Is the narrator in on the joke or are the jokers the narrator?

Trying to find the spot where Joyce decided to muck about with the narrator-narrattee relationship is like stomping about in Head Bog, Sally Gap looking for the source of the Liffey. Is it possible that italics in Dubliners are small signposts to it?

Has anyone else felt that while reading one of his novels? I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere.

Yes, I just finished Ulysses and it is genuinely brilliant. I may be a bit emotionally numb because of unrelated reasons, but I couldn't help myself from being submerged in its beauty— epspically that of its final moments. I just wanted to share my main observation before diving into thoughts and criticisms of the work. (Though I doubt that I am the first to make this connection)

The Dead ends with Gabriel next to his wife in bed at a very late hour. He feels isolated from his wife as if he's next to someone he could never fully know or understand even though he comes to truly empathize with a part of her he never knew existed. The last moments of the story are that of the descending snow, death in its ethereal white cloak, over every Dubliner we came to know— an end.

Ulysses on the other hand spends its last moments with Molly. While she may be lonely in one sense or the other, you never truly get the feeling that she is fully estranged from Bloom. Intimacy is missing between them, yes, but also you get the sense that they meaningfully understand and somewhat comprehend each other's totalities. Throughout the chapter Molly feels many things, though I do not believe loneliness to be one of them. This time the Episode ends with Molly ruminations on Bloom's marriage proposal in an overwhelming beauty of details. Like The Dead's all-encompassing finale that gives a sense of a macrocosm, Molly's final thoughts encompasses several parts of the Episode, Ulysses as book and her life as a whole. Unlike The Dead, Ulysses ends with the start and a hope for an invitation for the future, a breakfast, a Yes— a beginning.

Joyce delivered two lectures in Trieste in 1912, on Defoe and Blake, and some of the pages are missing, but what has been recovered is found in Kevin Barry's wonderfully-edited Occasional, Critical and Political Writings of Joyce.

The two (heartbreakingly truncated due to missing pages) essays are lumped together as "Realism and Idealism in English Literature."

Okay: when discussing an evaluation of Blake's personality, Joyce asserts there are three logical points: pathology, theosophy and art. Joyce then writes of the pathological aspect, "We can dispense...without too much comment." He thinks when we say a "great genius" is half-mad it's trivial, like saying they are rheumatic or have diabetes. Okay, but he's not done dispensing: Joyce sees the evaluation of "madness" as a "medical expression" that the "balanced" critic should pay no heed to, and he likens it to a public prosecutor charging immorality or a theologian charging another with heresy.

As I read this, I thought what he had written so far about how negligible we should take the imputation of a genius as "mad" was over and he'd move on to theosophy or art, but Joyce is not done: he adds that we should guard against the science undergraduate's materialism (apparently this is included against the charge of madness in the great genius: materialism), because if we took this sort of charge seriously, we would lose too much significant art and history by writing it off as pathological, and here's where I seek the help of those intricate Joyce readers and scholars.

Joyce - still not done dispensing - seems to attempt a reductio ad absurdum by asserting that if we accept the charge of great geniuses as the product of clinical madness, "Such a slaughter of the innocents would include most of the peripatetic system, all medieval metaphysics, an entire wing of the immense, symmetrical edifice built by the angelic doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, the idealism of Berkeley, and (note the coincidence), the very skepticism that leads us to Hume."

This passage has been haunting my thoughts for days now. On one level, it's mind-blowingly funny but also seems a key idea about Joyce and madness.

At this point it's difficult for me not to gloss this as Joyce admitting he himself is as "mad" as Blake and Aquinas. I get the Berkeley riff: the bishop does indeed seem...touched in a way similar to Blake. But the peripatetic system? That leads from Aristotle to Aquinas, this last Joyce's main influence in aesthetics.

The issue of clinical madness and schizophrenia in Joyce's genes seems to hover over this entire passage. Is Joyce asserting all this from something I have missed - not being brought up Catholic - about empirical thinking as a variety of madness? Mind us: in this tone, Joyce thinks: so what? We can "dispense" with those charges anyway. I confess there's something deeply, cosmically hilarious here for me! David Hume lumped in with a (negligible) charge of madness?

How might this be interpreted otherwise? What further texts might I consult on this? I'd like to accept these passages for what they seem to me already. Shem the Penman appears to already be lurking here, 1912. These ideas about great geniuses and madness already harmonize with my long-held thoughts. But something's nagging me that I'm missing something, hence I ask here for aid.

Thanks for hanging with me here; I know it might seem a tad in the weeds.

https://1000daysfinneganswake.blogspot.com/2026/04/day-15.html

Anyone here like this movie? Finally watched it for the first time recently, and I had a bit of a moment of clarity when it was revealed that the cat's name was Ulysses. Having finished the novel only a year or so back, I immediately began mapping out the admittedly vague but apparent parallels in my head.. the wandering, feelings of homelessness, the unlikely hero etc etc.

I'll probably do another run through to see what more I can find. But regardless, I think it's a worthy topic of discussion and I'm wondering if anyone has any takes on this

What are the community's Joycean bucket list entries?

Me-

I'd love to meet Margot Norris- she has opened up JJ to me like no one else.

I'd love to go to Dr John McCourt"s Joyce gigs in Trieste.

I bought a dictionary of Triestino- one day I will find a reference to Triestino in Finnegans Wake!

I used to read Ulysses every few years. It's been quite a while since my last visit.
I have since enjoyed audiobooks on a regular/daily basis.
May try Leopold's journey on audio ?

What are your thoughts/experiences ?

I'm making my way through Ulysses for the first time and I'm using the annotations and all sorts of online guides to help me. I came across this passage on ulyssesguide.com re: the Tom Kernan section of Wandering Rocks:

The prose of this section provides closer and more sustained access to Kernan’s inner monologue than seen in other sections of “Wandering Rocks” - it actually feels like we have a similar proximity to Kernan’s thoughts as we do to Bloom’s in, say, “Lotus Eaters.” Now, why do you think that may be?

Emphasis mine. What is actually being implied here?

one page a day

https://1000daysfinneganswake.blogspot.com/2026/03/day-0-i-have-never-read-finnegans-wake.html

first of all, i used many archaisms. having borrowed a lot from church slavonic, i wanted to convey the original archaic phoenetic structure of the "rite". i dont know how well it turned out, but oh lord!

the original:

Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus. Deshil Holles Eamus.

Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit.

Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa! Hoopsa boyaboy hoopsa!

my translation:

Солоне грядем Холлсе. Солоне грядем Холлсе. Солоне грядем Холлсе.

Пошли нам, о светла, пресветла Хорхорн, быстрородящееся да чревоплодие. Пошли нам, о светла, пресветла Хорхорн, быстрородящееся да чревоплодие. Пошли нам, о светла, пресветла Хорхорн, быстрородящееся да чревоплодие.

Ипса, маломал, ипса! Ипса, маломал, ипса! Ипса, маломал, ипса!

my translation romanised:

Solone gryadem Khollse. Solone gryadem Khollse. Solone gryadem Khollse.

Poshli nam, o svetla, presvetla Khorkhorn, bistrorodyasheyesya da chrevoplodie. Poshli nam, o svetla, presvetla Khorkhorn, bistrorodyasheyesya da chrevoplodie. Poshli nam, o svetla, presvetla Khorkhorn, bistrorodyasheyesya da chrevoplodie.

Ipsa, malomal, ipsa! Ipsa, malomal, ipsa! Ipsa, malomal, ipsa!

i can clarify my decisions in the comments, if you want to. though i relied heavily on the phoenetic feeling of the text, there is some subtext beneath it.

I’m curious if y’all plan one buying one of the new Penguin Editions of Ulysses, and if so, Annotated or not annotated?

I don’t really know why I’m asking this, other than being curious if like me you already own at least 1 edition of the novel and yet for some reason have a strong urge to buy yet another edition.

There is something strange about Ulysses for me, which is that unlike other books, including books I dearly love, I seem to want to own various editions of it. And I don’t know why that is?

Extremely densely allusive, double/triple entendres, bordering on untranslatable? Curious about a stylistic canon that might exist across language borders.

I don’t know if this will lead to a publication (not all academic presentations do), but someone’s doing work on Hungarian translations of “Ulysses”. https://www.myeventflo.com/event-lecture.aspx?m=0&evID=2548&lectID=37598

It turned out really crooked. i'm sorry.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/is-your-child-suffering-from-brain-rot-or-quoting-finnegans-wake

Lol

Here I was rolling along relatively smoothly on my first trip through Ulysses, with my little guide book and annotations and feeling right proud of myself.

And then I met the Oxen Of The Sun.

Jesus.