In my wayward youth it was considered terribly uncool to profess any enjoyment of the music of Barry Manilow or Abba, and (by an extraordinary lack of coincidence) this dismissive attitude was often held by the very same people who would browbeat the rest of the uncultured swine for not swooning over Joyce's Ulysses.
It was about that time I felt shamed into reading Ulyssses. Or rather, starting it. While I concede it is stylistically an impressive achievement, the experience left me very much less impressed by the sweeping pronouncement on quality or the lack thereof by the self-appointed gatekeepers.
I found that life was much better when you feel no pressure to be ashamed at enjoying a superbly crafted pop song, like many of those that flowed from the hand of Manilow or Andersson/Ulvaeus.
In fact, if pressed for my favorite disco song, I would most days pick the Donna Summer recorded version of "Could It Be Magic," which (along with the 1963 Dusty Springfield hit "I Only Want to Be with You") I consider near perfect examples of the best pop songs of their respective periods.
The whole experience did somewhat unfairly sour me on Joyce, with the result that it took some years before I picked up Dubliners, which I must admit is very good.
Dubliners is genius! And if you've never seen The Dead, the John Huston adaptation of the last story in Dubliners, give it a shot. I watched it with two friends (on a VHS rental) in about 1991. We sat there watching it, mesmerized. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen, so let the credits roll--as I thought my friends were. Finally I exhaled a "wow!" and glanced from one to the other of them, only to see they'd both fallen asleep. "Most boring movie I ever saw in my life," they both said, more or less. Yet it slew me. So YMMV.
Huston's The Dead is one of my favorite movies. I wept openly at the end when Donal McCann's Gabriel Conroy speaks his final monologue as he looks at his sleeping wife and then out the window at the falling snow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRD_UNGE4Zs).
Exactly! It's one of the most perfect movies ever made. (And truth be told, the reason I "let the credits roll" rather than turning to my friends immediately was that I was waiting for the tears to stop streaming down my face.)
In my wayward youth it was considered terribly uncool to profess any enjoyment of the music of Barry Manilow or Abba, and (by an extraordinary lack of coincidence) this dismissive attitude was often held by the very same people who would browbeat the rest of the uncultured swine for not swooning over Joyce's Ulysses.
It was about that time I felt shamed into reading Ulyssses. Or rather, starting it. While I concede it is stylistically an impressive achievement, the experience left me very much less impressed by the sweeping pronouncement on quality or the lack thereof by the self-appointed gatekeepers.
I found that life was much better when you feel no pressure to be ashamed at enjoying a superbly crafted pop song, like many of those that flowed from the hand of Manilow or Andersson/Ulvaeus.
In fact, if pressed for my favorite disco song, I would most days pick the Donna Summer recorded version of "Could It Be Magic," which (along with the 1963 Dusty Springfield hit "I Only Want to Be with You") I consider near perfect examples of the best pop songs of their respective periods.
The whole experience did somewhat unfairly sour me on Joyce, with the result that it took some years before I picked up Dubliners, which I must admit is very good.
Dubliners is genius! And if you've never seen The Dead, the John Huston adaptation of the last story in Dubliners, give it a shot. I watched it with two friends (on a VHS rental) in about 1991. We sat there watching it, mesmerized. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen, so let the credits roll--as I thought my friends were. Finally I exhaled a "wow!" and glanced from one to the other of them, only to see they'd both fallen asleep. "Most boring movie I ever saw in my life," they both said, more or less. Yet it slew me. So YMMV.
Huston's The Dead is one of my favorite movies. I wept openly at the end when Donal McCann's Gabriel Conroy speaks his final monologue as he looks at his sleeping wife and then out the window at the falling snow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRD_UNGE4Zs).
Exactly! It's one of the most perfect movies ever made. (And truth be told, the reason I "let the credits roll" rather than turning to my friends immediately was that I was waiting for the tears to stop streaming down my face.)