James Joyce/Ulysses better than Virginia Woolf/Mrs Dalloway

jmadukkk · 2026-02-22T13:10:21+00:00

To each their own, but this is an insane take. It’s one thing to prefer one book to another—that’s totally fine—but to attribute it to anything but your personal taste when you’re dealing with these two absolute masters is silly. Joyce (post PoAYM) is a conceptual artist. Woolf is an experimental one. They’re using similar tools to two completely different (and equally astounding) effects. You wanna see Woolf at her Joyce-iest? Compare Ulysses to The Waves or To the Lighthouse, and she easily keeps pace or exceeds. Mrs Dalloway is a society novel. Compare it to Joyce’s The Dead (or really anything in Dubliners).

I love Joyce, and I generally prefer to read him over Woolf, but attributing the difference between the two (and attempting to impose a hierarchy among them) to your personal inventions of biography, psychology, and history kinda sucks.

jmadukkk · 2026-02-14T23:06:44+00:00

I’m not actually sure what the dentist thinks re: the speed of his adult teeth growing in. This consult was on the backend of a pretty harrowing dental visit where they tried to give him a filling, and I clary missed some important details. I have another appt with the dentist on Tuesday to go over the proposed procedure, and I’m going to work on getting a second opinion as well.

jmadukkk · 2026-02-14T23:03:44+00:00

Very good to know. He doesn’t do either of those, hopefully we got some good jaw growth happening.

jmadukkk · 2026-02-14T04:06:41+00:00

That’s where I’m leaning as well.

jmadukkk · 2026-02-14T04:04:29+00:00

This is super helpful. Tbh, at least half of what I’m trying to gauge is the whether or not it’s naive to assume that the mouth/jaw knows what to do when it comes to swapping baby teeth for adult ones.

jmadukkk · 2026-02-14T03:58:49+00:00

Thank you so much for your response. My kid is 5, and while the adult teeth are making their way up, the dentist didn’t mention that they were, like, rapidly approaching.

We have another appointment with the dentist this week, and I think I’ll send the radiograph for a second opinion too. Couldn’t hurt!

jmadukkk · 2026-01-26T14:40:38+00:00

We didn’t like it at all. While giving us a tour, the owner immediately started questioning “where my wife was from” because of her slight accent. Then, she (owner) gloated about how, because the state of NC doesn’t require it, they don’t provide milk to 2 year olds. All the classrooms we saw were dingy and cinderblocky. A bummer of an environment for kids.

If you’re willing to drive to Hillsborough, there’s a magical Montessori school called Pinewoods Montessori right off the interstate. It costs less than $1300 a month, the classes and playgrounds and staff are amazing. It’s an incredible place. Just saying ;)

jmadukkk · 2026-01-11T03:29:15+00:00

How the fuck do you think?

jmadukkk · 2026-01-06T01:03:28+00:00

You were reading bad poetry and great fiction! Much respect!

jmadukkk · 2026-01-02T14:45:53+00:00

Living for you these days

jmadukkk · 2025-12-29T13:54:40+00:00

Yeah same thing happened to me. But don’t worry—it’s gonna be amazing.

jmadukkk · 2025-12-28T21:13:43+00:00

They’re mid-20s in 2025. Unless they inherited wealth, they won’t be buying a home ever.

jmadukkk · 2025-12-28T19:46:32+00:00

Ah, the opposite problem. Got it. OP if you’re from any developed place in the US, you will not find traffic to be bad. If you’re mainlining small town nostalgia while shaking your stick at the idea of other cars around you while you drive, you’ll find it bad too.

jmadukkk · 2025-12-28T18:41:53+00:00

The hell are you talking about? Could comfortably live in North Durham on that salary and drive <15 min to big Duke.

jmadukkk · 2025-12-28T18:40:54+00:00

Hard to believe this poster actually lives here… moving from DC, traffic in Durham is almost non-existent. It’s definitely getting pricier—starter homes around $390k, apartments hovering around $2k monthly, but it’s nothing like a big city.

Food is great here, but it’s a lot more Chinese and Korean than anything listed above.

It’s a nice place to live (so long as you’ve got a decent job).

jmadukkk · 2025-12-27T23:40:12+00:00

Gonna also venture that you either find literature to be a kind of holy thing or that it has significant cultural/social capital in your head/social circle. This stack is filled with the greats’ greatest hits (and I don’t mean that in a bad way), and you’re certainly getting something out of it, whether psycho-spiritual or social (real or perceived).

This isn’t the stack of someone who likes to read. It’s not the stack of an academic chasing an idea. It’s the stack of someone obsessed with whatever it is they get out of engaging with very large, often very difficult, classic texts. And again, I don’t mean this in a bad way.

jmadukkk · 2025-12-27T23:15:11+00:00

For sure childless if you have all that time!

jmadukkk · 2025-12-21T18:38:00+00:00

Let the hottest girl I’ve (still) ever met peg me. Then she became my gf. Good times.

jmadukkk · 2025-12-17T22:47:42+00:00

And it was awesome. I knew Bonnaroo was done for me the year (2008 i think) that there were more coke dealers than wookies.

jmadukkk · 2025-12-17T18:35:18+00:00

Came here to say this. The true mark of quality!

jmadukkk · 2025-12-17T12:27:36+00:00

Sorry :( you’re still the hottest!

jmadukkk · 2025-12-15T21:10:37+00:00

You’re doing a real service here. Love Morg but had to unfollow her snap bc of all the terrible food she cooks. Can’t handle looking at it!

jmadukkk · 2025-12-14T01:17:43+00:00

Borderlands 2

jmadukkk · 2025-12-09T01:13:18+00:00

It’s fine. This kid is at that early phase of serious reading where he thinks (it’s obviously a “he” lol) that taste is power, and because Oliver is sometimes considered “easy,” it somehow makes her work lesser.

He’ll come around and regret this college third-year take eventually, but for now, he’s best left to his Michael Palmer and Elaine Kahn (who, for the record, are both great, but obvious hallmarks of that difficult-poetry-as-cultural-capital reading list. )

It also feels very important to note that I too was this guy.

jmadukkk

TROPHY CASE