Way back during my Freshers’ Week (October 2004 – fact fans) I finally got my reading list for the first term. Why Greyfriars hadn’t been able to post it to me is a question I still haven’t found the answer to, although I’ve got my suspicions… Anyway, said reading list featured, amongst a variety of (mostly Irish) modernist literature, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I had just taken a month over the reading of Ulysses and was less than keen to spend any more time in the literary company of Jim Joyce. As I recall I spent the best part of an evening screaming a blue streak and generally making a nuisance of myself after the pubs had shut.

So that was my first night at Uni, a fairly massive turning point. And the reason that I bring it up is that I’ve now come to another corner of similar magnitude; I’ve been out of Oxford now for just over a year, left the city about a month ago after a year as VP (Finance) for the Student Union and am now about to take the next step. That shuddering, utterly eye-bulging revulsion at the thought of having to read Joyce evaporated early on (thanks to Clare Hutton, my tutor, and a fantastic lecture series by Jeri Johnson – the only series I ever actually completed…) and during the last year I got a place at UCD to read for an MA in Anglo-Irish Literature. Now I’m trying to find the money to actually pay for it, which is an experience I’d liken most to having all my teeth pulled without anaesthetic. By a vet. With an attitude problem.

But enough of that for the time being – I don’t really want this to become too maudlin. I don’t really know what I want from it to be honest. I suppose that it’s partly mindless self-indulgence (I’m convinced that’s a factor in all blogs, whatever the author might claim) and partly a desire to record my opinions as they form, so that I’ve got something to look back on at a later date. And that’s the point of the Joyce anecdote really; looking back at it now I can remember the extent of my rage, but for the life of me I can’t quite imagine that I’d have had such such an adverse reaction to what is now, by far and away, my favourite book. Next year I’ll either be in Dublin or working some job (probably in London, maybe in Oxford, hopefully not in Bournemouth). Either way this blog will follow me, giving me something to do during my downtime and hopefully reflecting enough of what I see and think to give me something to look back on when I reach the next major turning point…

Oh, and in case you’re wondering about the title: that comes from the Johnson lecture series. It’s a description of Stephen Dedalus, protagonist of A Portrait and an increasingly peripheral character (eventually antagonist) in Ulysses. Stephen is a perennial fish out of water, at least partially due to his thoroughly obnoxious personality, and his story describes a series of success followed by failure followed by success; boom and bust, if you will. By the end of Portrait he seems to be on a final, gloriously Daedalean upswing – about to shake off the cloying atmosphere of Dublin with an escape to a (highly fetishised) Paris. By the time Ulysses opens only a short time has gone by and yet Stephen is back in Dublin, working a job he hates to pay for the rent on a tower bedsit he shares with the worst of friends. In the first week of September I’ll be heading to Dublin with roughly 100 Euros in my pocket and no guarantee of getting the funding for more than a couple of weeks of the course. Daedalus or Icarus – I guess we’ll find out.