Otherwise, I’ve got no complaint. Get it?

“egotistic, insistent, raw, striking; and ultimately nauseating.”

Going to adopt this as my Credo. Set the bar high!

Woolf’s take on “Ulysses” was scathing, though she only read 200 pages of a 600+ page book, depending on the edition:
__________________________________________

An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self- taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking; and ultimately nauseating.

–Virginia Woolf diary entry on Joyce and “Ulysses”
__________________________________________

My take was that she was intimidated by Joyce, and rightly so. Calling Joyce illiterate is like calling Einstein algebraically-challenged. She didn’t get Joyce and she was afraid to try.

Some years ago I read Theodore Dalrymple’s deconstruction of Woolf:

–“The Rage of Virginia Woolf”
https://www.city-journal.org/html/rage-virginia-woolf-12371.html

He discusses her story, “Three Guineas,” about Woolf’s utopian vision in which the teaching of Western Civ is razed, men appreciate women and there is, therefore, no more war.

Woolf has her virtues, but I don’t take her very seriously.

But Lady Luck returns us again by meandering ways to the underlying unmentionable broad bubbling stream of (no not that, you sickos!) this here Thread:

Ladies and Gentlemen, Allow me to present today’s Psycho Bitch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9CEjBH0ASM

Amalia Freud.

Jingle.

VW loathed Joyce and called him a pimply pervert or something similar. Then again she was a Lesbian Lizard Person.

Oh… here we are:

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/25/books/how-mrs-woolf-felt-about-mr-joyce.html

Mrs Dalloway is Brilliant.

It’s been a while since I read Ellman or other secondary sources on Joyce. I never quite got what Nora had on Joyce either, but she did have a hold on him. Maybe “as well her as another.” She did have a frank nature about sexuality as well as general commonsense. Maybe that was enough. Try to imagine Joyce with Virginia Woolf!

I don’t think Nora was Molly Bloom. Nora was supposed to have been indignant when asked if she was Molly. “I’m not fat,” she countered.

http://m.joyceproject.com/notes/040061agendath.html

Joyce fascinates me. The older and more curmudgeonly I get, the more I disapprove of the man. But the level of insight into human and female nature at such an early age was genius precocity.

I’ve always wondered about the Why of Nora. Possibly fun-house mirroring of Molly Bloom’s reason for picking Poldy: ‘and I thought well as well him as another’ (since dey all hos anyways). Or did she really truly have some special muse-like hold over him? We’ve already established that she had a hold.

Then again, the Irish are a benighted matriarchal race in thrall to their womenfolk. Not the only one as both subject of this thread and Joyce and Ulysses itself suggest.

Zaphod:

The world, especially Ireland, celebrates Bloomsday — June 16, 1904, the day in which the events of Joyce’s novel “Ulysses” takes place.

What was special about that day to Joyce? He went for a walk with his future wife, Nora, and she gave him a handjob.

Joyce has tricked the world into celebrating a handjob!