Bones for my steppingstones

We've started Ulysses in my Joyce class, and we'll be reading it until the end of the semester. I read the first three chapters this evening.

I...don't know how to mark it up. Nothing in my career as an English major and English grad student has trained me for this. So I'm just marking the lines I find beautiful, and anything to do with Irish literature or history or myth (which is rather a lot of things, admittedly). And if I had to guess, I would say that was Joyce's aim--to have you fall into the language and just roll around in it like a pig in mud. I have Gifford's annotations--and this is a separate book that is bigger than the novel--but I kind of hate to look at them, even after finishing a chapter. Turning it into a jigsaw puzzle of allusions takes much of the fun out of it.

(I think I'm considerably more sanguine about this than I could be because I know already that I'm writing my one paper for this class on Portrait, so I just have to absorb enough for class discussion rather than for production of something scholarly.)

Speaking of that paper...I have to have an abstract by Thursday, and it's driving me crazy. Everything I want to say is scattered across eight or nine bullet points in a Word document, but I can't seem to turn them into a 250-word piece of prose. This should be easy, but it really isn't. I may have to write the introduction and a body paragraph or two before I can abstract the thing.

I do have a title for it, though! "Joyce's New Mobile Aisling: Women as Aspects of Art in A Portrait of the Artist." It'll be great. And it ties into my thesis topic oh-so nicely, although probably I won't be able to use much of the text in the thesis, which is a bit of a drag, but, eh. Good background.

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Watched the newest episode of Bones today as well. ( A couple not-too-spoilery comments )

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I owe people comments, which I will totally get to soon. And then probably be on radio silence, because I have a comps study session tomorrow (yes, the orals are some fourteen months away. The reading list is five pages long) and another paper to write. And I have to finish Adam Bede at some point as well...