Was fixing someone’s e-book reader, so for the day that’s in it I put on a copy of Ulysses. I’ll be surprised if he actually reads it on his Spanish holiday of course, but at least I committed larceny against the Joyce estate, something I feel is all our duty. This is the last chance in fact as next year the work will finally be free from copyright, which will take the fun out of it.
On the other hand it may help bring an end to the Great Ulysses Wank, the interminable argument about what is the one true and sole definitive version of a fictional work much revised by the author himself. This quote from Wikipedia should give you the flavour:
According to Joyce scholar Jack Dalton, the first edition of Ulysses contained over two thousand errors but was still the most accurate edition published. As each subsequent edition attempted to correct these mistakes, it incorporated more of its own. Hans Walter Gabler‘s 1984 edition was the most sustained attempt to produce a corrected text, but it received much criticism, most notably from John Kidd. Kidd’s main theoretical criticism is of Gabler’s choice of a patchwork of manuscripts as his copy-text (the base edition with which the editor compares each variant), but this fault stems from an assumption of the Anglo-American tradition of scholarly editing rather than the blend of French and German editorial theories that actually lay behind Gabler’s reasoning.
I can actually hear the skin-on-skin fiction.
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