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 Radio 4 to celebrate Joyce's Ulysses with fresh take on iconic work?

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Tiger:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/latestnews/2012/radio4bloomsday.html

Gwyneth Williams is "delighted" to give Radio 4 over to this book.


Really..this book should be treated with caution. I read parts of it when my father died, because it was on his bookshelf..and have never wanted to return.I was 13.


It is truly depressing that the Radio 4 lovies have picked such a work..because they can somehow profess its worth in their ivory academic towers that know nothing of the subject in real terms but adore themselves by trying to understand it!


This is pretension beyond words!


This book is very dark, and has issues.

When we see elements of the BBC being dumbed down on the one hand to attract a younger audience and then on the other Ulysses being put out there, by the controller of R4 in an attempt to appear an educator of the nation , it just says this is misjudged and actually damaging.

Tiger:
I have heard this broadcast so far today.

AND I understand ,of course, the concept of a stream of consciousness it is one day.

AND I recognise that it is an important work.And lends itself to radio.

BUT I totally disagree with this work, taking over Radio 4. It has issues..and I had to turn off the 12pm broadcast because my youngest son was clearly disturbed.


Because this is a disturbing work. I have read it..


A clever idea, but this book is so impossible to read at times that any educative role by Radio 4 is lost in translation.


I feel that it has been an exercise in loveydom and was too much of a show case for those who want to seem to be too clever for their boots?

Tiger:
This thread has been my own stream of conciousness as a reaction to Ulysses taking over Radio 4.

I accept that it is indeed about the human condition.

The fact that I cannot find anything  to inspire true humanity within its pages..is my personal problem, literature is subjective. I am wary of the indulgence of selfishness without thought, with arrogance and possibly the ignorance of others?


BUT go ahead Radio 4 glorify this book and its ideals..let it be released as reading matter for the next generations.


BUT do not be surprised , if there is some critism. Not least about what lays on the cutting room floor literature that could have been  dramatised and celebrated today..and actually would have encouraged a national reading?

darcysarto:
Dear Tiger,

I have not read Ulysses, although I am aware of it.

I struggle to comprehend beyond loveydom why, as Radio 4 controller you'd wish to cram the whole thing into one day, it is about one day, which took 10 years to compose, so I suppose that is artistic freedom.  As a celebration of radio and literature I do hope all those who managed to tie their ears up to their dials yesterday for such marathon event enjoyed it, to do so myself though would have involved more of a fight than Lord Justice Leveson would have had wrangling his eyebrows during Brown's and Osborne's evidence this week.  At least we can be pleased it wasn't the stream of 'conciousness' from Cheryl Coles twitter account?  And if Ben Cooper ever reads this, Ben that last sentence is not a 'vision'.

For my ears, although I found myself excluded from elite yesterday, I heard plenty about the human condition in the very excellent From Our Own Correspondent and even The Week In Westminster and of course from reading your own beautiful words here.

Yours.

Darcy X

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