[Borges]

It's not just literati, it's other writers. He's probably the most influential writer of the 20th century...Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Pynchon, Foster Wallace all inconcievable without him. And who cares if he was a drinker? That has no bearing on reading ‘The Dead’ which is very precisely crafted and bears no signs of carelessness.

[discostu]

Of course most of them are in that group of writers only read by the literati. The problem isn’t that Joyce was a drinker, the problem is that he wrote drunk and wrote like drunks talk, rambling, incomprehensible and pointless. Oh yeah “The Dead” from Dubliners, featuring “An Encounter” a story about kids running into a pervert who jerks off in front of them, indeed high literature everyone should read that. Yeah, that was sarcasm.