DONE

Well, I just finished copying out every single word of James Joyce’s Ulysses by hand into a series of spiral notebooks. I forget exactly when I started, but it was within the last two years. For some of you, this may require some explanation.

Basically, when I attended the Odyssey writing workshop in 2001, the instructor, Jeanne Cavelos, suggested that a worthwhile exercise might be to retype a short story by an author we admired and pay particular attention to how it was written. One problem for writers is that if a piece of writing is any good it sweeps you away into your imagination, leaving you with little or no awareness of mundane technical details such as verb choice, sentence length, or comma placement. Retyping a story forces you to actually pay attention to all that stuff. And I thought, hey, if retyping a short story is good, then retyping an entire novel must be even better. And if retyping an entire novel is even better, doing it by hand must be better still.

I discovered that not only was this very educational, it was also very fun, nay addictive. I found it very relaxing and also found that it put me into a mental state that was conducive to thinking over many things besides just the text in front of me. I did one entire novel, and then another, and then another, and then another. I started off with writers who wrote like me only better, then moved on to writers who wrote less like me but still great, then on to writers I didn’t actually even like but who were undeniably skilled. Which brings us to Ulysses.

I’d never read Ulysses. I’d never actually read anything by Joyce except Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I mostly disliked. (I’ve since read Dubliners, which I liked better.) My reasons for deciding to copy it out are now growing hazy after two years, but I near as I can recollect: 1) There’s a reference to it in Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, 2) When I lived in Ireland, I was really struck by the fact that the Irish put a writer — James Joyce — on their currency, something that would never happen in America, 3) It was listed as the greatest novel of all time by the Modern Library, 4) Mike Canfield said he liked it, 5) Some famous writer I can’t remember was quoted as saying “We are all struggling to be contemporaries of Joyce,” 6) Some other famous writer I can’t remember said that Ulysses deploys every literary technique ever invented, which seemed like something good to know, 7) I once embarrassed myself in front of another writer when I got “Molly Bloom” confused with “Judy Blume,” and I wanted to make sure that never happened again.

Anyway, it’s now 3:17 a.m. and I’m off to bed. I may post more on this later. But for now … I’m DONE.