seeoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos

To earn the title
of "Literary Snob," I
tackle Ulysses.


* * *

A friend and I are reading Ulysses together. For fun. Because we're smart like that.

Confession: after finishing the first section (a mere 43 pages out of 510), I visited Wikipedia to see if I knew what was going on.

Confession 2: I really need to refresh my memory about major plot points and characters in The Odyssey.

But: I am delighted to be swimming in this language. Air "harping in wild nerves, wind of wild air of seeds of brightness." Who has not felt the harping of nerves in a windstorm?

And: "Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seeoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos. Vehement breath of of waters amid seasnakes, rearing horses, rocks. In cups of rocks it slops: flop, slop, slap: bounded in barrels. And, spent, its speech ceases. It flows purling, widely flowing, floating foampool, flower unfurling."

Read it out loud! Have you ever heard such a perfect set of sounds and words to describes the sounds and words of water at the shore?

Hoping these pleasures will outweigh the seemingly endless series of allusions sailing over my little head.