Tag Archives: ulysses

Some slang, like skeezing, goes way back — an example from Ulysses

December 15, 2010 By in Books, Fiction Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

In her soliloquy, Molly Bloom thinks: “hes mad on the subject of drawers thats plain to be seen always skeezing at those brazenfaced things on the bicycles with their skirts blowing up to their navels” (emphasis added, as they say in the trade). Don Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated helpfully tells us that skeezing is “Slang for staring at covertly.” Urban Dictionary, meanwhile, tells us that “skeezing” may have definitionally drifted somewhat, with the top rated definition being “doing the nasty,” and definitions of “skeezer” that impinge female sexuality like about 10,000 other words.

The modern term “creeping,” in the meantime, appears to have taken some of the voyeuristic connotations that Gifford assigns to “skeezing,” albeit in a way that is digitally enabled: “Following what is going on in someone’s life by watching their status messages on Instant Messengers such as MSN. . .”, whereas in the old days you had to do such things in the flesh. Other commentators, however, have such disparate definitions that “creeping” might not actually mean much of anything, other than being a catch-all words of opprobrium.

The Oxford American Dictionary included with OS X doesn’t include an entry for skeezing, and its entry for creeping says “move slowly and carefully, esp. in order to avoid being heard or noticed,” while the noun form does list “a person who behaves in an obsequious way in the hope of advancement,” which seems rather far from what Urban Dictionary thinks.

Reading James Joyce’s Ulysses for plunder

November 30, 2010 By in Fiction, Writing Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

There’s a wonderful Paris Review interview with Robertson Davies, and the Interviewer says:

Bruce Chatwin once remarked that there were two ways of reading, reading for love and reading for plunder, in other words, reading to learn how writers accomplished certain effects, solved certain technical problems, or just in general went about doing their work. That’s a legitimate means of being influenced.

I’m precisely reading Ulysses (as previously discussed) for plunder. I find it hard to believe I will ever love Ulysses, but the number of technical effects (and the emotions they create) are astonishingly large and varied. More so perhaps than any other novel I’ve ever read. The amount of stuff worth plundering in Ulysses is tremendous, and its ability to convey a great deal in a small number of words through incomplete thoughts is showing me how to loosen up some in my own writing. At a few moments in the novel I’m working on now, I’ve come across sentences that make me say, “Yeah, that’s Ulysses‘ influence.”

Many of the novels I’ve read for grad school—The Crying of Lot 49, for instance—merely feel tedious. Ulysses, although I resisted it at first, feels like a trove of novelistic effects.

Note, however, that I’m not saying Ulysses is only good for those effects, as the kinds of emotional powers those effects create are equally impressive. But I’m reading much more for plunder.

Reading James Joyce's Ulysses for plunder

November 30, 2010 By in Fiction, Writing Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments

There’s a wonderful Paris Review interview with Robertson Davies, and the Interviewer says:

Bruce Chatwin once remarked that there were two ways of reading, reading for love and reading for plunder, in other words, reading to learn how writers accomplished certain effects, solved certain technical problems, or just in general went about doing their work. That’s a legitimate means of being influenced.

I’m precisely reading Ulysses (as previously discussed) for plunder. I find it hard to believe I will ever love Ulysses, but the number of technical effects (and the emotions they create) are astonishingly large and varied. More so perhaps than any other novel I’ve ever read. The amount of stuff worth plundering in Ulysses is tremendous, and its ability to convey a great deal in a small number of words through incomplete thoughts is showing me how to loosen up some in my own writing. At a few moments in the novel I’m working on now, I’ve come across sentences that make me say, “Yeah, that’s Ulysses‘ influence.”

Many of the novels I’ve read for grad school—The Crying of Lot 49, for instance—merely feel tedious. Ulysses, although I resisted it at first, feels like a trove of novelistic effects.

Note, however, that I’m not saying Ulysses is only good for those effects, as the kinds of emotional powers those effects create are equally impressive. But I’m reading much more for plunder.

The dangers of romanticizing poverty and James Joyce’s Ulysses

November 2, 2010 By in Life Tags: , , , 1 Comment

“Stephen [Dedalus] is entirely without means. He stands in boots and clothes that were given to him by Mulligan. He has a job as a teacher at Mr. Deasy’s school but his salary is barely sufficient for drinks. He owes bits of money all round the town. Let an individualist artist deny religion as vehemently as he will, economics is something he cannot deny. [. . .] Some misguided people have at times affirmed that the stimulus of poverty is useful to the artist and it may be darkly hinted that one day one of these misguided individuals will come to any untimely end. Poverty was never any good to anybody.”

—Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’.

(And, perhaps weirdly, Tucker Max says something very similar of poverty in Assholes Finish First:

When I first moved to Chicago, it was to be a writer, so I refused to use my law degree to get a ‘real’ job. I knew it would pay so much that it’d make me complacent and drain my creative energy. If I was going to become a writer, I was going to do it full-time. Anything else was a distraction from my goal, and a compromise I was unwilling to make.

That’s great in theory, but in practice, not making any money means that at some point you can’t afford to buy food. That’s pretty bad. Then you don’t have enough to buy alcohol. That’s really bad. But when you don’t have enough money to even go to $1 beer night, it’s an emergency.

I think there’s an element of violating a sacred taboo to acknowledge that money and material conditions affect the artist and what the artist can or will do.)

The dangers of romanticizing poverty and James Joyce's Ulysses

November 2, 2010 By in Life Tags: , , , 1 Comment

“Stephen [Dedalus] is entirely without means. He stands in boots and clothes that were given to him by Mulligan. He has a job as a teacher at Mr. Deasy’s school but his salary is barely sufficient for drinks. He owes bits of money all round the town. Let an individualist artist deny religion as vehemently as he will, economics is something he cannot deny. [. . .] Some misguided people have at times affirmed that the stimulus of poverty is useful to the artist and it may be darkly hinted that one day one of these misguided individuals will come to any untimely end. Poverty was never any good to anybody.”

—Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’.

(And, perhaps weirdly, Tucker Max says something very similar of poverty in Assholes Finish First:

When I first moved to Chicago, it was to be a writer, so I refused to use my law degree to get a ‘real’ job. I knew it would pay so much that it’d make me complacent and drain my creative energy. If I was going to become a writer, I was going to do it full-time. Anything else was a distraction from my goal, and a compromise I was unwilling to make.

That’s great in theory, but in practice, not making any money means that at some point you can’t afford to buy food. That’s pretty bad. Then you don’t have enough to buy alcohol. That’s really bad. But when you don’t have enough money to even go to $1 beer night, it’s an emergency.

I think there’s an element of violating a sacred taboo to acknowledge that money and material conditions affect the artist and what the artist can or will do.)

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