The notes I took are gone, but I remember certain things. The pleasant disorientation of watching Augie March teach Nathan Zuckerman, for example. And the week we discussed Ulysses. That morning, we sat nervously as Bellow took his seat. “Have you finished the book?” he said. Had we read every page of one of literature’s most famously difficult offerings? In a week? Not one of us had gotten to that last Yes. Bellow laughed — not the marvelous, head back, teeth-bared laugh for which he was famous, but a small laugh — and brandished an ancient copy of the book, which, he said, had been smuggled into the country for him in the 1930s. And for the next hour, he read to us from Ulysses and, without notes, annotated it. Bellow’s deep recall, fluency, and confidence seems, now, to be a beautiful, cerebral high-wire act.
Bellow was eighty-five then…
June 17th, 2017 at 4:09PM
http://www.openculture.com/2013/08/vladimir-nabokov-creates-a-hand-drawn-map-of-james-joyces-ulysses.html