Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for June 16, 2023

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a razor and a mirror lay crossed.

Everyone be sure to stock up on steel-toed boots!

I understood it. Finnegan’s Wake was a bit of a struggle, though.

Where do audio books fit in?

Pearls is quite literary this week!

Kerouac’s “Visions of Cody” is another difficult book to read.

“Yes I said yes I will yes”

“Their arrogant” - cheek? No, not the face cheek.

Joyce was obviously paid by the word.

Bloomsday (TMI?): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday

It’s a Bloomsday Device.

Today is also Captain Picard Day (Thanks to the Savage Chickens comic by Doug Savage for referencing this.)

My Left Foot day is 24 February

I’d rather read tweets from Nell Kellty. (That movie with Jodie Foster from 1994.) And yes, I just checked, there is a Twitter account of this.

My book, Just Lucky, was about 310,000 words. I edited it severely and published it in two volumes of about 95,000 words each. Book 1: Friends and Enemies and Book 2: Love and Hate available on Amazon.

What’s so hard to understand? Joyce chronicles the daily life of Leopold Bloom establishing a parallelism between the unfolding of his day and the adventures of Ulysses in The Odyssey, including the relationship with his wife Molly (as Penelope) and his friend Stephen (as Telemachus), and the political situation of the day between Ireland and Britain. The novel is considered the primary representation of the Modernist movement due to its original structure and prose as well as for the “stream of consciousness” technique. I can tell you even more about it but I haven’t read it yet :D

Ironically, the biggest snob is Rat. He looks down on so many people.

I’m surprised Goat wasn’t already celebrating

Finally! Something logical to celebrate on June 16! Thanks, Rat!

I can’t tell if this is a jab at social media always making up random holidays or if Rat is just talking.

On My Left Foot Day, you can celebrate the works of Christy Brown

What ever the literary merits of Ulysses it was a very important legal case (1933) that struck down laws that banned books such as Ulysses as being obscene.

I must confess that I have yet to read that book.

June 16th is Fresh Veggies Day, National Fudge Day, and National Career Nurse Assistants Day. So, what’s your pleasure, veggies, fudge, or nurse assistants?

If you want to pick on authors and books, I propose Vonnegut. I hated Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat’s Cradle.

Also read a couple books by Joseph Franzen, who I found overbearing and pretentious, and in two separate books he referred to characters defecating into the mouths of others.

Sometimes it’s just better to skip the high minded literature and read the latest book by Grisham.

You understood ‘Ulysses’? I used to carry it to the beach, leave prominently displayed. Known Babe Magnet-but they all wore half-glasses on a chain and had a pencil stuck over their ear. (Remember pencils?)

When is Gravity’s Rainbow day?

He should throw that book at passers-by from that stand a few days ago.

Funny. I didn’t have any trouble understanding ‘Ulysses.’ The one usually said to be incomprehensible is ‘Finnegans Wake.’

We should celebrate books. Well, the books written by great authors, like Twain.

I brought “Lolita” on a trip to Hawaii, but stopped reading it after all the weird looks I was getting from parents of young girls

I first read (or attempted to read) Joyce’s Ulysses at age 16. It became one of those books that I have revisited and reread at least once in every decade of my life and have discovered something new every time I’ve read it. It is on my list of top 10 books I would want if stranded on a desert island.

Back in the late ’60s, when I was living in Dublin, I did the Bloomsday Pub Crawl – visiting and slaking me thirst in all the pubs ( in one day ) mentioned by Joyce in his book.

I had trouble understanding even the simplest of classic literature………..like War and Peace. Or Great Expectations.

Rat is right. I tried reading ‘Ulysses’ and I just couldn’t finish reading it. I think the worst part about it is that you don’t know where conversations start and end.

It’s all downhill after The Epic of Gilgamesh.

I’ve been listening to a set of audio lectures about Ulysses. They’re pretty enjoyable and make it a lot more clear about what’s going on. (Some of the mapping between the Greek story and what Joyce wrote seems contrived, but that’s the world of literary criticism for you).

There is a copy of Finnegan’s Wake on my bookshelf, staring at me. It frightens me. :-)

Ah yes, that’s right. I just became aware of Bloomsday a couple weeks ago and made a mental note of it. Thanks for the reminder, Rat.

What if I understood all of them but prefer Encyclopedia Brown?

Will tiny purple fishes run laughing through your fingers???

Why not? We celebrate other things in June which only represent a very small % of the population. Why don’t we have a “Hawaiian Pizza” day, too; while we’re at it!

We must wait till our California Division of Editors rewrite it.

I’m glad pearls is going back to its roots.

“…and the head coach want’s no sissies, so he reads to us from something called Ulysses” – “Camp Granada” by Alan Sherman

A couple of relevant Stephan quotes, which he applied very successfully and wisely to the above strip: “I like what I like and don’t care what anyone else thinks.” “[In the last panel] shorter is usually better.” “Cartoonists who proclaim the importance of keeping the comics page fresh and new should retire when their comic starts to consist of running the same ten jokes on repeat.” (that last one has never been directly attributed to Stephan, but it seemed worth including).

As long as there are sadistic English teachers, James Joyce will always be read. Not understood, just read.

I completely agree with Rat’s sentiments ♥

…ankles?

Zero Mostel did ULYSSES IN NIGHTTOWN on Broadway in 1974.

Lead actress Fionnula Flanagan was nude 90% of the time,so nobody was looking at Zero,not even Zero.

Calling Rat a philistine seems to be low balling things. Goat should have know there was a catch.

I enjoy reading Joyce, and I celebrate Bloomsday.

So, here’s a big fat raspberry for Rat: THPPT!

And now we know the team reason Rat was giving books away a few days ago…

Where’d Rat get the extra 50,000 words?