[HN Gopher] United States vs. One Book Called "Ulysses"
___________________________________________________________________
United States vs. One Book Called "Ulysses"
Author : andyjohnson0
Score : 135 points
Date : 2022-06-16 08:29 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (law.justia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (law.justia.com)
| woodruffw wrote:
| It's good to review historical cases like these, as a reminder of
| how fleeting our contemporary view of free expression in the US
| is: restricting even the _private_ distribution of literature was
| broadly popular less than a century ago, and many of the Comstock
| laws[1] survived well into the 20th century. Distributors of Howl
| were arrested as late as 1957!
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > 1933: The words which are criticized as dirty *184 are old
| Saxon words known to almost all men and, I venture, to many women
|
| Times have changed.
| AthroughZ wrote:
| Having read this book earlier in the year, after putting it off
| for decades. The description in the text is spot on. It helps to
| know something of Shakespeare, Greek, and Latin. But even with
| only a modicum of the above it still a remarkable experience.
| kinghtown wrote:
| For anyone curious about Ulysses:
|
| It's great.
|
| Read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before
| Ulysses.
|
| If you gave up on it before: try again. I used to think it was BS
| for years but I tried again and ended up loving it.
|
| I'd advise skipping student editions or getting hung up on
| reading tons of notes and criticism while reading it. Just use
| google translate for latin and know a little bit about Homer and
| Shakespeare. It's about mainly about life, death, and
| reincarnation.
|
| Ulysses is like a slot machine in that it rarely pays out on the
| first pull. And if anyone loved a good pull it was Joyce.
| Kstarek wrote:
| I tend to love books that require a lot of effort and time on
| behalf of the reader, Infinite Jest and its never ending
| footnotes are probably my favorite book, however I really
| struggled with Ulysses and ended up putting it down as my
| inquisitive nature had me diving deep into every footnote,
| maybe I'll pick it up again and try to resist the urge to fully
| understand each reference
| bbarnett wrote:
| Even better is Ilium, especially the translated version by Dan
| Simmons.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| It has a reputation as "that book that most people don't
| finish." As someone who hasn't read it, I tried to find out
| why. Here's some reasons I've found:
|
| 1) Stream of consciousness. The reader must figure out whose
| mind they are in, if it's at all possible. Then they must deal
| with all of these tangent thoughts that would make sense to the
| character thinking them, but not to anyone else, including the
| reader, since they they don't flow from the previous context.
|
| 2) "References to various 19th century Irish intellectual
| debates that you could not reasonably be expected to understand
| unless you have a degree in the intellectual history of Ireland
| in the 19th Century or a closely related field." "Allusions it
| makes to obscure literature and Irish politics.
|
| 4) "Joyce makes reference to all kinds of works, from Dante and
| Nietzsche to Walt Whitman; obviously Homer's Odyssey is
| important to be familiar with. So be familiar with the
| important works of British, Irish, and American literature, and
| with ancient canonical works. Oh, it will also be quite
| important to be somewhat familiar with Shakespeare's Hamlet,
| and his life in general."
|
| 5) Changes writing styles throughout the book.
|
| 6) Uses words that many people don't know.
|
| Knowing this, I believe I would be one of those people who stop
| reading less than half way through. From reading about _why it
| was difficult to finish_ , I get the feeling that many people
| read it _because it 's difficult to finish!_
|
| I'm imagining reading over sentences not understanding what's
| going on or why what's being said is being said, even after
| looking up hundreds of words in the dictionary that I will
| never use again. I'm imagining spending many hours confused and
| lost, for what? To be able to say that I've read Ulysses?
|
| But I could use an annotated companion book! Then I'd be able
| to understand what's going on, even if it takes twice as long
| to read. I wouldn't really get to brag about having read it the
| same way those literature professors can.
|
| In that case, then the real reason for reading it would not be
| because it's a challenge. It would be out of appreciation for
| its modernist style and its underlying story. But I'm not
| really interested any either of those things, based on what
| I've read.
| dundarious wrote:
| Having a "completionist" mindset (wanting to understand every
| reference and insight, and spending hundreds of hours to
| achieve it) is not the only way to read it, and draw meaning
| and enjoyment from it. I think a lot of people do "finish"
| it, but have barely scratched the surface -- nevertheless,
| they enjoy it.
|
| No harm in not enjoying it, or recognizing you'd be unlikely
| to, either.
|
| However, there is a tendency among people using your logic
| (but coming to different conclusions so I'm not lumping you
| in with them) to end up disparaging almost anyone for reading
| Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow or even Infinite Jest.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| > No harm in not enjoying it,
|
| In a way, I do assign a kind of "harm" to books that I
| don't enjoy. You must invest time into a book and give it a
| fair chance before you can write it off. What's at risk is
| potentially hours of wasted leisure time.
|
| > Having a "completionist" mindset (wanting to understand
| every reference and insight, and spending hundreds of hours
| to achieve it) is not the only way to read it, and draw
| meaning and enjoyment from it.
|
| I've actually read more than one account of people saying
| they just sort of accepted that they don't understand
| what's going on and just power through it. Personally, that
| doesn't seem like something I'd enjoy, but apparently some
| people do, so I won't debate that.
|
| I do think there's something to be said for readability in
| general. Whenever the reader has to stop because something
| is confusing (and not because it's thought-provoking or
| important), this interruption tends to jolt the reader back
| out of the story and into "ok now I gotta look up this
| word" or "ok let me re-read this last paragraph because
| that sentence was very long and full of ambiguous
| pronouns." To me, this sort of thing is not enjoyable in
| any book.
| dundarious wrote:
| I think it's a bit funny to judge it so forcefully along
| the axis of "readability", especially with a huge bias
| towards "readability for a 2022 non-Irish audience
| outside the art scene" -- you're assigning "harm" to the
| book itself, so I no longer think you're just giving your
| 2c about your experience. It's famously and I'd say even
| canonically one of the most dense and quasi-academic
| pieces of literary fiction of its era -- it's not for
| everyone (I haven't attempted it).
|
| Even then, there are novels for all permutations of
| "readable (to me)" and not, and "good (to me)" and not.
| Fair enough though in the sense that I wouldn't take a
| "barely readable (to me) but very good (to me)" novel to
| the beach.
| bitshiftfaced wrote:
| > you're assigning "harm" to the book itself, so I no
| longer think you're just giving your 2c about your
| experience.
|
| Only to the extent in which I've defined "harm" (in
| quotations), which was to say that I don't like to invest
| free time into books that I probably won't finish.
|
| In any case, while I do care about readability, it does
| look like I've stepped a bit too far over the line.
| Believe me, I have no desire in forming any sort of
| literary criticism against a book that many famous
| writers have said is great, especially having not read
| it.
| versk wrote:
| Its funny because once you read enough of it to properly grok
| the working of the stream of consciousness style it becomes a
| joy to read, as easy to comprehend as your own internal
| monologue. Reading ulysses once you crack it is like trying
| on someone elses consciousness. Blooms is a nice
| consciousness to inhabit, Stephens less so, but both almost
| unbearably rewarding. Don't get too caught up in
| understanding every weird association that pops into and out
| of either characters head, although there is certainly
| pleasure to be had in doing a close reading with research,
| where by you get to fill out a characters own mental map. A
| book of untouchable genius
| angst_ridden wrote:
| Agreed. And it's side-splittingly _funny_ too.
| m-watson wrote:
| I could not agree with you more, this book was when I
| learned how to let things slide some times and just push
| forward. I would just keep reading without conscious
| interpretation. Once I got into the general feel of the
| book, the story started falling into line with out me
| really trying.
| lupire wrote:
| Ulysses was a challenge project. Joyce tried to make the
| hardest to understand, most reference-packed book he good. It's
| the Final Boss of English Literature. I don't see the point of
| reading it before reading most/all the classic works Joyce
| built upon.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| Sheehs, if it's true that it was deliberately written to be
| hard to understand then I'm glad I never got past 10th page.
| Eff that.
|
| Tho I did finish and enjoy Infinite Jest which is also
| considered a difficult book to get through.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I think you're forgetting about Finnegan's Wake.
| versk wrote:
| Secret unbeatable boss. Michael Chabon wrote an excellent
| essay about his efforts to read Finnegans wake in the
| NYbook review
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Oooo! Would love to read that. Do you have a link?
|
| BELAY THAT: I can google. Found it. Thanks!
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| I read it and didn't particularly enjoy it, and this is a
| perfectly legitimate opinion to have about any book.
| loudmax wrote:
| Dubliners is absolutely beautiful. It's a collection of short
| stories, which helps to make it accessible to casual readers.
| There's a feeling of real depth and empathy in some of the
| stories.
|
| A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is also relatively
| accessible, though I didn't enjoy it as much as Dubliners.
|
| I read Ulysses when I was in my 20s. Parts of it are fantastic,
| but for significant portions of the book I barely understood
| what was going on. Maybe I should revisit it.
|
| I found Finnegans Wake utterly baffling. Some people love the
| humor they find in it, but it requires effort to understand the
| basic language the Joyce is inventing.
| abruzzi wrote:
| > I found Finnegans Wake utterly baffling. Some people love
| the humor they find in it, but it requires effort to
| understand the basic language the Joyce is inventing.
|
| Most people do. I have an english prof who did his
| dissertation on it because, as he told me, he was pretty sure
| no one on his committee would be able to challenge anything
| because no one had actually read it.
|
| the first "chapter" in Finnagan's Wake is the densest,
| hardest to read part of the book (not that the rest is
| easy..) so it stops most people in their tracks. One think I
| discovered is it makes a little more sense when you hear it
| spoken, because (as was somewhat common at the time) much of
| the book is phonetic so what is incomprehensible on the page
| sounds almost like real speach when you hear it.
|
| Its also fun to read the commented version (there is a work
| for that type of edition that escapes me at themoment.)
| Basically a version where the text of the book only occupies
| the center of the page, then outside the text is all sorts of
| references and footnotes with lines pointing to blocks of
| text in the body. 90% of all the references go over my head.
| I remember seeing a phrase highlighted and note pointed out
| that the same phrase was a play on words (or pun, I forget)
| in two different languages at the same time.
|
| Not really a book to read, but a fascinating thing to study.
| chucksmash wrote:
| > there is a work for that type of edition that escapes me
| at themoment.
|
| Annotated? Companion?
| [deleted]
| d4rkp4ttern wrote:
| There is a nice looking annotated version from Cambridge by
| Catherine Flynn, to be released in July:
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/literature/ir...
|
| Wonder if it's worth getting, for all of the context. Are there
| other annotated versions that are recommended?
| dmurray wrote:
| There's a companion book I enjoyed called _Ulysses Unbound_
| by Terence Killeen. It 's quite terse: For each of the 18
| episodes of _Ulysses_ it gives a few pages of stylistic
| notes, a few on the Homeric parallels, a dramatis personae of
| the real people and events alluded to, and a translation of
| foreign terms.
|
| I liked this style better than inline or footnoted
| annotations (except, perhaps, for the languages I can't read)
| as it encourages you to read and digest first, then get a
| second opinion from the annotator about what's going on.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1065953.Ulysses_Unbound
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I never tried _Ulysses_ because I couldn 't stand _A Portrait
| of the Artist as a Young Man_. It was, hands down, the least
| enjoyable book I have ever read.
| isaacfrond wrote:
| From the verdict:
|
| Joyce has attempted it seems to me, with astonishing success to
| show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting
| kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic
| palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man's
| observation of the actual things about him, but also in a
| penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some
| drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He
| shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior
| of the character which he is describing.
|
| I've tried, at least _five_ times to read the book... and failed
| each time. Then I tried the audiobook. Gave it up. I have to face
| it, I 'm just not up to the task.
| scandox wrote:
| I think the desire to understand the meaning of everything
| immediately defeats a lot of readers.
|
| If you're willing to read it more like a poem - to just
| experience it and only understand some portion of what's going
| on then it is quite an immersive book.
|
| Time has increased the obscurity of much of what is said and
| done. Also it was released at a time when the education of an
| educated person with respect to literature, the classics and
| language was at something if a peak in Europe.
| culturestate wrote:
| _> I think the desire to understand the meaning of everything
| immediately defeats a lot of readers. If you 're willing
| to...just experience it and only understand some portion of
| what's going on then it is quite an immersive book._
|
| I love this sentiment. So many people have been conditioned
| to look for the "truth" in _everything,_ when the reality is
| that not everything _has_ a fundamental truth that's meant to
| be universally understood.
|
| There was a thread on one of the design subreddits not long
| ago about London's book benches[1]. Some of the commenters
| were _absolutely convinced_ that the benches are deliberately
| designed to be hostile to the homeless, because the seat is
| curved and can't be easily used for sleeping - never mind
| that it's meant to _look like an open book._
|
| Sometimes a thing is just a thing; sometimes a book is just a
| poem.
|
| 1. https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/gallery/2014/s
| ep...
| krisoft wrote:
| > Some of the commenters were absolutely convinced that the
| benches are deliberately designed to be hostile to the
| homeless, because the seat is curved and can't be easily
| used for sleeping
|
| Why can't it be both? Hostile design in public
| infrastructure is absolutely a thing. I can't prove that
| the design was "deliberately" hostile but it's clearly
| hostile for sleeping on.
|
| > never mind that it's meant to look like an open book
|
| Cool. This bed is also meant to look like an open book:
| https://bookpatrol.net/ruth-beales-bookbed/book-bed-ruth-
| bea...
|
| Yet you can sleep on this one and not sleep on the other
| one. Obviously you can say that one is meant to be a bed
| and that one is meant to be a bench. But surely you can
| imagine a bench which is booth looking like an open book
| and can be slept on?
| InitialLastName wrote:
| > Some of the commenters were absolutely convinced that the
| benches are deliberately designed to be hostile to the
| homeless, because the seat is curved and can't be easily
| used for sleeping - never mind that it's meant to look like
| an open book.
|
| This is off-topic, but both things can be true. I would
| expect any competent organization who wanted to do hostile
| architecture in an aesthetic way would be able to find a
| solution like that.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| So you've read it cover to cover?
| scandox wrote:
| I don't want to misjudge you but the question kind of
| suggests that no answer will truly satisfy. I mean like you
| could ask did your eyeball rest upon each word? Did your
| brain decode the meaning of every word? I don't know.
|
| I read it when I was 17 and again at 21. Haven't read it
| since. I studied literature so I had to read it the second
| time. It's very far from being a favourite and lots of
| silly things are said about it but it is readable and
| evocative and interesting.
| xsmasher wrote:
| I wouldn't feel bad. I listened to the audiobook five times - a
| yearly pilgrimage to try and "get it."
|
| I loved the language and the cleverness from the start; and I
| understood more of the story each time. BUT I no longer feel
| like the "payoff" was worth the journey. I assumed there was
| some deep understanding or message that would come through
| eventually, but I no longer think that's the case.
|
| Robert Anton Wilson described the book as a joke at the expense
| of English majors (can't find the exact quote) and I tend to
| agree. Kind of like the obfuscated C contest; try to read it if
| it entertains you, but stop if it doesn't.
|
| I've decided it's a little too "inside baseball" for me.
| leephillips wrote:
| You may enjoy literature more if you don't reduce works of
| art to conveyances of "messages". _Ulysses_ is far better
| than that.
| phasersout wrote:
| I always assumed it's on of those books that everybody has in
| the bookshelf but no one ever really read.
| [deleted]
| paulgb wrote:
| This is a fun judgement to read. I wasn't aware of the backstory,
| but Ulysses was banned in the US after an excerpt was published,
| and this judgement is the result of Random House intentionally
| violating the ban by importing a single copy to force a court to
| decide on it.
|
| > Although Customs had been told in advance of the anticipated
| arrival of the book, it was not confiscated on arrival, and
| instead was forwarded to Random House in New York City. As
| seizure by Customs was essential to the plan for a test case,
| Morris Ernst, the attorney for Random House, took the unopened
| package to Customs, demanded that it be seized, and it was.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Book_Ca...
| erie wrote:
| Some books were banned in the US and US agents helped get its
| shipments burned, so censorship continued until a very recent
| time: ' until now no American publisher has dared re-release
| the book, which sold over a million copies worldwide and has
| been translated into seventeen languages. A devastating
| indictment of a media giant, a document of twentieth-century
| political upheaval, and a reminder of the dark undercurrent of
| pop culture, How to Read Donald Duck is once again available,
| together with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman.
| https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/donald-duck/
| intune wrote:
| Morris Ernst was an ACLU attorney who challenged other high-
| profile book bans during the period. He found a cooperative
| publisher and hatched the plan to import a copy of the book
| from France and have it seized by customs, although the getting
| it seized was more difficult than anticipated.
|
| > A few days later the book showed up at Random House--it had
| passed through customs. Furious, Ernst personally marched the
| package over to the customs office and demanded that it be
| searched. When the inspector opened it and found Ulysses, he
| muttered, "Oh, for God's sake, everybody brings that in. We
| don't pay attention to it." Ernst insisted that he seize it. On
| May 8, the book was officially seized by customs.
|
| In lieu of the usual fees, he would receive 5% of the book
| royalties should it be legalized and published (not a bad
| deal).
|
| More backstory here: https://crimereads.com/banned-books-
| ulysses-joyce-morris-ern...
| rendall wrote:
| > _In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in
| the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that
| his locale was Celtic and his season spring._
|
| He's saying that the Irish are horn dogs, isn't he?
| bell-cot wrote:
| "Anti-Irish sentiment was rampant in the United States during
| the 19th and early 20th Century." -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Americans#Discrimination
|
| IANAL, but my sense is that Judge Woolsey was not himself
| inclined to anti-Irish bigotry - but he was willing to make use
| of such bigotry to buttress his decision. Actual bigots
| protesting against his ruling might find themselves arguing
| that the Irish lower classes (note how the ruling calls out
| their social class a few paragraphs earlier) are too virtuous
| and pure to entertain carnal thoughts in everyday life...a line
| of argument which most such bigots might be less than
| comfortable in making.
| I_complete_me wrote:
| He takes persons of the lower _middle_ class living in Dublin
| in 1904. Just to be precise.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Talking about his season being spring - I note JJ was born in
| February, is this some horoscope-adjacent belief?
| rendall wrote:
| I think the judge was referring to artistic choices made in
| _Ulysses_ ; that JJ's _choice_ of season was spring and
| _choice_ of locale was "Celtic", just as "his setting", in
| _Ulysses_ , was Dublin. "His season was spring" is a
| shorthand was of saying "his chosen season was spring".
| MereInterest wrote:
| I'd see it more as a cultural reference to spring as the
| season of new growth and more frenetic activity. Where in the
| preceding winter, food would be stored and activity
| minimized, spring means a comparative abundance of food.
| (Tangent: I'd love to see whether the decreased use of
| seasonal metaphors is correlated with the prevalence of
| refrigeration. Spring is less culturally relevant now, with
| refrigeration reducing the fear of starving in the winter and
| increasing availability of seasonal produce.)
|
| For a humorous comparison, see "The Lusty Month of May", from
| the 1960 musical "Camelot". (Link to a good performance:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=t--e0S5kelY ). It's basically an
| entire song about how great it is that spring is here,
| because spring is a wonderful time for sex.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| You just sent me on one of the oddest paths to gathering
| research on something I've ever taken. :P
|
| The song reminded me of a much more recent one, Jonathan
| Coulton's "First of May", which I decided to look up the
| inspiration of.
|
| From https://wiki.jonathancoulton.com/First_of_May:
|
| > * The chorus is a variation on an old folk/schoolyard
| rhyme, "Hooray, Hooray, the first of May! Outdoor fucking
| starts today!" In an April 10, 2007 blog post, JoCo
| credited John Hodgman with the idea for the song, and
| mentions that the modern dirty rhyme derives from an older,
| traditional dirty rhyme. Commenters Mike and Bry tracked
| the reference down to a poem in _Another Almanac of Words
| at Play_ by Willard R. Espy.
|
| > * The poem which Espy cites, in turn, derives from
| ancient Pagan customs celebrating fertility on the eve of
| Beltane, the Celtic name for the month of May.
|
| So, there's the exact cultural reference?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltane
|
| Incidentally, May is also International Masturbation Month
| for entirely unrelated reasons.
| herpderperator wrote:
| Shouldn't the title be 'v.' without the s? I've noticed that
| court stuff always uses just 'v.' - not sure why.
| dmoo wrote:
| For those of you who might be podcast inclined here is a link
| from RTE
|
| https://www.rte.ie/radio/podcasts/series/32198-ulysses/
| pseingatl wrote:
| The manga version is very helpful for those who just want to
| quickly grab the story.
| janmarsal wrote:
| Stay away from the books written by the dependency hell man. They
| got banned for a reason.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| You mean too say something like stay away from all books by
| Joyce or Hemingway or Poe or many other authors who had
| struggles with alcohol?
| xsmasher wrote:
| No, it's a reference to "dependency hell" -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_hell
|
| Large parts of the book don't make sense if you don't have
| the right cultural information "installed."
| lukas099 wrote:
| I think they meant that you have to know/understand too many
| outside cultural and linguistic references to understand a
| lot of Joyce's writing. Judging from the other comments here,
| this seems like a reasonable position.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Today is Bloomsday [1] and exactly one hundred years since
| Leopold Bloom's fictional wanderings across Dublin in Joyce's
| _Ulysses_.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday
| maze-le wrote:
| The Book was published in 1922, but the story takes place in
| 1904. So its actually the 118th Bloomsday.
| paulette449 wrote:
| Sorry to be a pedant - it's 118 years since the "original"
| 1904 Bloomsday but it's the 119th Bloomsday, if you include
| the first one. (1905 was one year after the original but was
| the second Bloomsday etc).
|
| There are events all over Dublin today to celebrate [1].
|
| [1] - http://www.bloomsdayfestival.ie/bloomsday-elfsight
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| Yes, my mistake. I originally wrote that, but then managed to
| confuse myself and immediately edited the comment to what it
| is now. Too late to change it now.
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(page generated 2022-06-16 23:01 UTC)