On Joyce...

[desperance]

...or, how writers give themselves away. These are four contemporaries, on first reading 'Ulysses' or parts thereof:

"But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce?"

"Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book."

"I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it."

"The book of a self-taught working man ... a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples."

One could make a parlour game out of this, 'identify the writers concerned, from the self-exposure inherent in even such brief quotations.' Personally I hate guessing-games, so I wasn't going to; but actually, it's so easy to slip a cut into an LJ post, I might as well.



They are, of course, in order:

Gertrude Stein
Ernest Hemingway
T S Eliot
Virginia Woolf

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Ah, you've worked out how to do a cut!

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Hey, I worked that out, ooh, days ago. See under fish pie; if I'm going to talk about food (and let's face it, I am), it seemed only fair to keep the recipes out of plain sight, not to bother the incurious with forty minutes of this and stiffly whipping that. Now I'm only showing off my new-acquired skills. But did I have to do the end-cut thing at the bottom, given that it was also the end of the post? Would it still have cut without that? These are the questions that trouble us, as we fumble towards some kind of competence...