Sunday, June 21, 2009

#2 Intelligent is my favourite kind of Smart People

(The above title is a joke and yes I am aware of how ridiculous it sounds :P)

So last night, my friend Isabelle invited me to partake in Molly Bloom's Night (which was actually the 17th but Saturday night was easier to hold the gathering). If you don't know what that is, then don't worry, I didn't know what it was until I actually sat there and listened. If you do know, yay, you're education has been touched by James Joyce's Ulysses, the alleged 'most brilliant novel of the 20th century' and so immensely difficult to understand that scholars study it for years and still have no idea what the hell Joyce was on about. (So basically Molly Bloom's night is discussion of the Novel, where readers gather and read and eat Irish dishes and it's really fun)

It was actually a wonderful night, one filled with Literary discussion. I was supposed to just be an observer, and was treated as such, until they mentioned the Ulysses link with Homer's Odyssey. I then just blurted out some fact about Epic Poems, and ended up telling everyone about Classical Societies and Cultures (basically just repeating what I've studied for the many SACS we've done this year in that subject). So it was fun, to have some input. They invited me back next year =]. Hopefully by then I will have actually read Ulysses, or at least some of it.

I have a driving lesson tomorrow. That should be interesting. Except, not really, seeing as after completing something like 97 hours out of 120, I'm pretty sure I can drive. At least, I hope so. All I need to be taught now is how to Reverse Parallel Park. Yeah, that one. I will let you know how it goes.

See you tomorrow!

Books read these holidays: 0 (book 1 still in process...)

6 comments:

Nick said...

Good luck with the driving lesson!

I should really get around to those, some time...

lazyage said...

ah the reverse parrallel. so far i am yet to use one of those since my test. but it's a useful skill...i supose....

Kartar said...

"education has been touched by James Joyce's Ulysses"

Hmmm "touched"? "scarred" perhaps. :)

And avoid Finnegans Wake like the plague. Dreadful novel.

minuteforce said...

You're not eighteen yet and you've already driven more than I have, wow. ;D

I'd completely forgotten to check up on your stuff for a while, so I crashed through the first four chapters of "Silver Sky" just now.

I like it so far, I suck at critiquing, so that's all I can say. :)

Anonymous said...

Hearing that this might have been the best book ever, I read about 15 pages of Ulysses two years ago. It is so so so so..sososo unexciting, crap and convoluted. The exact opposite of everything you would expect from a Mr Men Book. Did I mention that it is convoluted? Because it is like an impossible rigged Rubik’s cube. To rate its beginning it gets the opposite of 5 stars, whatever that is, a black hole.

Anonymous said...

I think the reason it has the status that it does, is because people pretend to enjoy it, as if to give others the impression that they must have understood it and would therefore be intelligent.