Yes, interesting and highly intelligent although his speech gives the impression of being an alcoholic.🤔

Do you write that badly on purpose?

@@jonharrison9222 Yes, bit of a cliffhanger.

Gross.

What a mind fuck.

Cop-out!

Hope not.

Sounds pretty gay.

Absolutely decimating

Nabokov also hated Dostoevsky and Freud, but their ideas directly inspired stream of consciousness. It was an interesting literary fad - but it was undoubtedly elitist and smug and there is no way Joyce would have indulged in it had he not made his name first as a writer who made sense (Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist). Having attained fame, he was free to show off - which is what Ulysses was. An epic that proclaims loud and clear, "Look at me! I know stuff!" Joyce was a nervous, fidgety man with little self-esteem who did whatever he could to stand out and reveal himself as a special boy. He predictably let it all go to his head and hence produced that excessive monstrosity "Finnegan's Wake". Stream of consciousness was a phase of the post-WW1 disillusioned age that also dabbled in Dada and surrealism. Woolf softened it in her understated way, Faulkner made it pulse with Michelangelo-like energy, and they were fine writers like Joyce - but I do not think stream of consciousness a fine style in which to write. Sort of how Hitler was an excellent speaker, but what he was saying was...not excellent. Mass disdain of the stream of consciousness should not be shrugged off. Blaise Pascal notes that the opinions of the ignorant masses are very important as ignorance is the natural state of humanity, thus there is a deep root of truth in it. It takes years of "education" to make someone believe a red dot on a canvas is brilliant, but modern art galleries are usually empty. Everyone wants to visit the Sistine Chapel, however. This should tell us something.

Overpraise for it is common among pseuds.

Woolf disdained Joyce's emergence in the genre, saying an upstart autodidact wasn't fit for such elevated form of artistic expression!

@@tommygunhunter Joyce had an excellent education at one of Ireland's best schools, Clongowes, University College Dublin and the Sorbonne in Paris. Virginia Woolf...didn't. She was madly jealous of Ulysses as her diaries show.

@@douglasmilton2805 yea but it was his own voluminous reading that really enabled him to push the limits. It was a remarkable effort considering his circumstances with his eyesight and offspring issues although mitigated by his American benefactress!

I believe Kingsley Amis would regard Donald Trump as uncivilized.

@@sheiladineen9483 Brash and uncouth, too, perhaps...? I doubt it...There are far more pressing matters. Mrs Roosevelt considered Churchill the same (for stubbing out a morning cigar - smoked at the Whitehouse breakfast table into the yoke of an uneaten egg). I don't think uncivilized would count for much when the enemy of ALL western civilization stands opposed the man.

This is the most ridiculous comment I’ve read on KZfaq in quite some time. Congratulations.

dave erwin ...?

Losing relevance like rotting fangs...

Yeah, but Joyce will have the last laugh.

Odd, given he praised Updike for how well he handled it in the Rabbit books.

Got it. American medicine.

You would sound less unhinged if you actually had read Amis in his entirety.

@@jonharrison9222 I guarantee I have read far more Martin Amis than you, also like his dear friend Christopher Hitchens, he despised the Islamic fascists and the little yap dogs of the censorial left that accompany them.

Hence why you don’t vote for people who want to scrap the NHS.

yeah well...check out a dopey socialist like corbyn...he's a useful idiot

string22 the best kind of socialism.

"AT THAT DAY YE SHALL KNOW THAT I AM IN MY FATHER, AND YE IN ME, AND I IN YOU" (John 14:20)

Think it was Amis himself who asked why rich people should drink all the champagne.

string22 I'll take a champagne socialist over a root beer capitalist any day.

You seem to suck at it. Too bad the accent telling you so makes you feel so inferior but that can’t be helped.

It is perfectly fine to dislike something dear fellow, but you would do well to learn that ignorance and a lack of understanding of something isn't any basis to criticize it.

@@Arareemote There was no ignorance there. I've read enough of his work and heard enough of his stupid, ill-informed opinions to make such a verdict. That you blankly assume I don't know anything about him betrays your own ignorance, old bean. The best thing Martin Amis ever did was to be Kingsley's son.

​@@CriticalDispatches ​ I refer of course to your evaluation of his novels. While you can certainly find flaws within them and even dislike them. (As I do for a few of them too) it takes a certain level of literary ignorance to dismiss them as being entirely awful. Especially Money and Experience which are exceptionally well written. That's what I refer to when I say ignorance. Not your personal judgments of him. To those comments, though it should be noted funnily enough that he would agree with you, he can even be quoted sincerely calling himself "stupid and ignorant." In fact, the whole reason he avoided essays, was for the reason you had to research and know things. And I do agree he was very out of touch despite being an excellent and very astute critic of literature.

@@Arareemote It's not ignorance though. You are describing it as such because you seem to have an emotional investment in it. The sad fact is that British literature has been almost uniformly godawful since at least the 1950s. The Americans have utterly blown the Brits out of the water in that regard. Writers from that Oxbridge set are painfully dull - snobbish, establishment left-wing conformists masquerading as rebels. What follows after them, the Zadie Smiths and the rest, are even worse Their subject matter is unimaginative and self important, their metaphors tired and superficial, their prose mundane. They can't even do self-indulgence correctly because they're all so utterly dead inside. Boring, upper middle class time wasters. I will agree, however, that Money is not entirely terrible, but is very juvenile and empty - which emphasises the message of the book, but only coincidentally. I'm reminded of a passage from Dubliners when thinking about them: "...phrasemongers, incapable of thinking consecutively for sixty seconds," appealing to "an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impresarios." But, of course, this is all purely subjective.

Your stupidity is already showing; no need to run about screaming and waving it in the street.