How to make reading Ulysess slightly more surreal...

As I think I have mentioned before, I have a rather deep weakness for Joyce. It is all my grandfather's fault, I'll wax esoteric on his influences sometime soon, suffice it to say he read me long portions of it as a child and it has all been downhill from there. One of the by-products of his influence is that I have reread a number of times (trying to offset that whole, "most owned, least read" mythos *g*).

I have relatively recently finished rereading it yet again. This time was different and really engaging. I "read" the Octagon (FSG)/Rosenbach facsimile reproduction of the manuscript and first printings. Reading the text, in Joyce's hand, is hard to describe...and somewhat hard to do. He had an interesting style in that he wrote "on an angle," which it to say the length of the lines at the top of the page are wider than the lines a the bottom...creating, when needed, ample room for marginal notation and/or changes. His handwriting becomes rather easy after a bit...but reading pages and pages of script is trying.

The facsimile of the first printings is effectively a "re-creation, in reverse order, of the evolution of Ulysses." A photo-copy of the first printing of the 1922 Shakespeare & Co. edition has been marked to illustrate the difference between it, the serialized version (published in The Little Review) and the original manuscript. It is *really* interesting. Well, all right, really interesting to that rather small group of demented humans enthralled by such things.

This has me thinking, once again, at what a loss there is with most modern writing practices. With the almost ubiquitous use of word processors, the "process" of the creation of a great work is almost always lost. This is, I think, a great loss. It is not that the "final product" isn't the most important....but *how* the author got there can add a great deal of depth. The interesting thing is that the technology, frankly, exists...to log each change and document it well. In a minor bit of poking around on the subject, however, I have not found a single writer or agent who is logging manuscript iterations.

Maybe it doesn't matter at all. I think it probably does...not I am not certain *how*. I suggest you can not *hold* the manuscript in Joyce's hand and not *feel* the creation of the book. I also suggest you could hold an external hard drive containing every "manuscript" of every significant book of the last decade or two and feel nothing at all. Ed Tenner wrote a great book, Why Things Bite Back, Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences...I highly recommend it.