[Borges]

“blasphemies hitherto associated with the most degraded orgies of Satanism and the Black Mass.”

Put that on the dust jacket today and you’d have a best seller.

[C19fan]

Isn’t Ulysses the most famous book nobody reads?

[Larry Lucido]

Good song.

[proxy_user]

Actually, it’s Finnegans Wake that is unbelievably filthy. Strangely, no one has ever complained about it, and copies are freely available to impressionable teenagers.

[Billthedrill]

I keep a copy to slide into a plate carrier if I ever get into a gunfight. It’s impenetrable.

[RushIsMyTeddyBear]

Bkmrk.

[PapaBear3625]

You want nasty? A much nastier book was written over two centuries ago:

The 120 Days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade relates the story of four wealthy men who enslave 24 mostly teenaged victims and sexually torture them while listening to stories told by old prostitutes. The book was written while Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille and the manuscript was lost during the storming of the Bastille.

[CaptainK]

Ulysses was the first modern novel of indisputable literary intent to explicitly depict its characters engaging in the universal bodily routines of human beings—shitting, fucking, farting, jerking off, etc.—and, perhaps even more shockingly, the first to affirm, often in the coarsest terms, that when they were not engaged in those activities, they spent a good deal of their time thinking about engaging in them.

The Canterbury Tales makes many references to bodily functions. Centuries earlier.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

I take it this is about the book written by James Joyce and not HOMER’s Odyssey.

[ifinnegan]

I read this a few days ago. Nice article.

Chabon does a good job. I don’t know how spinny the article is, though.

It’s fun because it’s the same Bennet Cerf who was in To Tell the Truth and put out kid joke books.

I’d also read Chabon’s earlier article on Finnegans Wake and thought it was good.

Chabon seems to be a good writer,Nat least if these type if essays. I never read any if his novels. I read many of the pieces in Maps and Legends, which is a collection of pieces like this one. I got that book because I wanted to read his story Golems I have known.

There’s a recent entire book on this subject regarding Ulysses publication in the US.

[Do_Tar]

Hard Choices by Hillary Clinton