Miata Mailing List: June 1996, Message #132
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   From: LARRY 
Subject: James Joyce (the magnificent)
   Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 20:53:19 -0400

I am truly heartened to see the bulk of the Miata owners
defending the writer who conveyed his thoughts so well
despite evidently writing in his non-native language.  

However Allan says:

>James Joyce, one of the great literary minds of our time was a notorious bad
>speller, his stream-of-consciousness technique didn't allow him to 'waste
>time' searching for spelling mistakes. 

Sorry, I have to strongly object to this statement.  Joyce was NOT a
"bad speller".  He was a brilliant master of several languages.  
Not only did Joyce spell correctly but he went over the galleys
assiduously to ensure that nearly EVERY LETTER in his long novels
was correct.  There are perhaps a few mistakes the editors have made
in the various editions of _Ulysses_ which a newer edition is meant
to rectify.  However some scholars still question the validity of
even these "corrections".  Every paragraph, every sentence, every 
word, every letter was painstakingly selected by Joyce to be 
perfect.  And they were!

Perhaps you're thinking of _Finnegans Wake_ (apostrophe intentionally
omitted).  This novel was extraordinarily experimental (nothing else
truly compares to it) where Joyce often combined words from several 
languages to create words which were multitextured puns.

I'm not sure where you got the idea that Joyce wouldn't 'waste time'
looking for errors.  His perfectionism is the reason his two long novels 
took about 10 years each to write.  

(Not plumply stout) Larry.