[briansteffens]

Ah, but you left out the first paragraph which clarifies the second entirely!

>riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

And you'll just have to read to the end of the book to find out how the sentence begins.

Joking aside, I actually love this style of writing even though I get virtually no narrative from it. I read it almost like some sort of abstract poetry, letting my mind wander as the words go by.

Also, I find it reads a lot better out loud than silently: easier to notice some of the strange dream-like word mixes. Like `venissoon` kind of sounds like `very soon`. I only saw `venison` until I read it out loud.

[9nGQluzmnq3M]

I love Jabberwocky as well, but that's a single page, not 500.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky

[mcv]

That is a great comparison. I love Jabberwocky, but you can't read an entire book in that style. Yet Joyce apparently did write that book.

I've never read Joyce, but based on these couple of lines I think I understand Wells' letter. It's magnificent to be able to write like that, but please keep it short. Nobody can withstand that for more than a page or two.

[swimfar]

I never realized that was Lewis Carroll. If you want to hear someone else pronounce it, Donovan made a song out of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnqK-1CPxLk

[082349872349872]

You might also like "abstract comics".

Here, Wells constrasts the work of writing for an english audience with the hack value of playing with english itself.

In our language, Joyce might've posted a "Show HN" of some reflective lispian tower that self-rewrites at runtime to collapse into monadic machine code, and Wells would comment that it was probably more fun to write than to use, and as for himself, he will keep on plugging along in javascript to produce value for his paying users.

There's more than one way to skin a cat.

[empath75]

Probably also helps to read it in an Irish accent.

[lucideer]

Unlikely.

Firstly, it's definitely not written in eye dialect (it's basically a dialect or language of Joyce's own invention)

Beyond that, even if you were to consider accents of Joyce & his contemporaries, along with the changes of accents over 100 years, Joyce—from a Catholic, but well-off background—had an accent[0] much closer to a modern English accent than anything else.

He also lived in Italy, Switzerland and France for most of his life.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhW0TrzWGmI

[Supernaut]

Hmm. I have to say that Joyce doesn't sound like any English person I've ever met! His accent is fairly typical of the educated middle class Dubliner of the era and can be heard in recordings of some Irish politicians from the period. Ireland was a dominion of the British empire during Joyce's formative years, and the influence of English RP is obvious. However, his Hibernian roots are also clearly audible, at least to me!