Comments on: Introibo ad altare Dei

By: derrida derider

derrida derider — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Ouch – that last para is truly vicious. Well done.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Brian Keenan’s “An Evil Cradling” is a particularly bad example of what Kieran is talking about and is my vote for “Worst Book Ever”.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Cearly stung into action by derrida derider, dsquared here shows what “truly vicious” really means. No sympathy votes for you, Brian.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Oh come on it was a terrible book. Thinking about it, John McCarthy and Jill Morell’s book was also pretty bad, though in a more prosaic way.

I always dreamed of the day that Terry Waite landed the Glow-worm central heating endorsement …

“Hullo. I’m Terry Waite. After five years chained up in a basement in Beirut, there’s not much that I don’t know about radiators …”

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve never read it. Sounds like a good counterexample to the ‘great art comes from suffering’ school of thought, though.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Oh God I feel all guilty now. It’s absolutely loathsome of me to make fun of someone else’s unimaginably horrible experience, of course. But I remain firmly of the opinion, in the face of uniformly good reviews, that it was not a good book.

By: Invisible Adjunct

Invisible Adjunct — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

The poster’s only for starters. I’ve got a set of 6 “Famous Irish Writers” coasters that my mother brought me back from Ireland (or at least from Shannon Airport). Irish writers’ mugs for your mugs.

By: B

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

I’m on the list of people that never read Joyce, and frankly did an excellent job of avoiding anything of supposed literary significance.
I am now faced, in my partially framed young adulthood, with whether I should try reading Joyce. Is it too late to go back now, is it something that should seriously be thought of as over many people’s heads (including mine)? I’m a little cautious of anything that requires an entirely separate book (notes to…) for understanding the first book. What’s the best reason for dedicating serious time and energy to Joyce now?

By: st

st — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Oirish Joyceans:

About ten years ago, I was in school at UCD and took a seminar on Ulysses from one Declan Kiberd, who is a prominent Irish Joycean (wrote the intro to the European Penguin Classics edition, for whatever that’s worth). I don’t know if he is one of the Oirish Joyceans of which you speak, but I gotta say, Kiberd’s deep knowledge of every aspect of that book was a revelation, and the experience of reading that book under his guidance was one I’ll not soon forget. I feel extremely fortunate to have approached the book for the first time with such a guide (and living in Dublin didn’t hurt.)

Your post got me thinking about rereading it, now…

By: brendan

brendan — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Ditto McAnaspey.

Here in Galway they just had a little shindig reading bits from Ulysses in front of the house where Nora Barnacle was born in Bowling Green. Unfortunately it started to rain.

Thanks for a great post about a great book. Roll on Bloomsday 2004.