It begins...

I've avoided reading some things until now.... Tonight I start Ulysses, not with any great apprehension, but with a little regret. I've been soaking up writing by women, and now, I face the über masculine-- at least that's how it feels. As painful as Woolf is sometimes, she still holds her reader very close, with both the embrace and repulse of a lover. She is intimate. She is both lulling and shrill at times, but she is always there in her full presence behind the words.

Joyce fends the reader off at arm's length, proclaiming "this is magnificent!" Suddenly, it's a deistic universe where the motto is "sorry, you're on your own!" The author just set the world in place, now it's your job to get through it (while thinking it's fantastic), "good luck, see you at the end!"

(Sigh)

Hopefully I'll escape this mood, but it's where I am right now.