Virginia Woolf was well known to have little patience with
Ulysses. Joyce Carol Oates, in her book
The Faith of a Writer suggests that part of this may have been the jealousy of one genius admiring the aplomb and power of another. Following is a quotation from Virginia Woolf's diary available from
Fathom.
"I have read 200 pages [of
Ulysses] so far," Virginia Woolf writes in her diary for 16 August 1922, and reports that she has been "amused, stimulated, charmed[,] interested ... to the end of the Cemetery scene." As "Hades" gives way to "Aeolus," however, and the novel of character and private sensibility yields to a farrago of styles, she is "puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned"--by no grand master of language, in her characterization, but "by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." No artifact of elite difficulty,
Ulysses becomes for Woolf the "illiterate, underbred book ... of a self taught wor…
I used to go to Borders regularly because it had the best selection of new books, CDs, and DVDs around. But, now I haven't been in a Borders for several years because its inventory is no longer the best in town. B&N, although not having a large selection outside of the best sellers, is still better now than Borders.
ReplyDeleteThere's an independent bookstore still around, although probably not for much longer, that specializes in mysteries, which I visit regularly.
One comment on the article--that looks like a shift from a merchandising focus to a service focus.
ReplyDeleteFew large corporations are flexible enough to change course in a short period of time.
Dear Fred,
ReplyDeleteTo your last comment--true--but when you're in a commodities market, one of the things that markets your commodities are the services that you layer around it. Many companies are feeling this painful crunch in business today.
Shalom,
Steven