It’s a sunny, breezy day in Princeton, New Jersey, and I am sitting at a dining room table built by two of my three housemates (the one in the architecture school, not the one in the English department with me), and the table is covered on books on reading James Joyce, and cups that no longer have coffee in them, and here, select cadre of blog readers, is my hunch: my hunch is that I am kind of shooting myself in the foot with this no-first-person-ever blog rule. I have been known to be somewhat rigid as a human. I like systems and rules. I like clarity. Categories.

But I am writing this paper, right? And the paper is about how James Joyce really freaks us out, for various cultural and institutional reasons, and the undercurrent of the paper, and the thing that I have come to during my time defining my academic interests and then beginning to investigate them, is that what I am interested in is the interplay between the “intellectual” and all the stuff that “intellect” is supposed to define itself against. David Pierce wrote this book called Reading Joyce that I picked up for my paper because I expected it to be a good example of the construction of a reader that happens when academics try to explain Joyce to “regular people”—and you know, it wasn’t. It wasn’t at all. I haven’t gotten to sit down and read it straight through yet, but the fact of the matter is, this book does it right. Pierce offers expertise gently, opens space for critical engagement, doesn’t foreclose interpretation or condescend. I had to rework the entire section of the paper on guides to Joyce to account for the unexpected excellence of this book.

Anyway, the point is: the collision of the intellect and affective pleasure. One of the things that makes Pierce’s book work so well is the strong, reliable first-person voice he uses. It made me think about my strong aversion to the first person. It made me think about how I really, really, really want to do some writing about the train trip I am taking this summer but probably none of it would be appropriate to put here given the way I have thus far defined my mission statement here, but what, really, I’m going to start another blog which I will maintain for five weeks and then abandon? Really? That doesn’t seem like such a hot idea. But I really do want to write about that trip. So I think that I’m going to. Be prepared for a little first person, internet. I am (probably) not going to start writing paeans to the perfect crispy crust on my fried egg this morning or anything (although: damn), but internet, it is time for me to remember how much I love to put a good sentence together, and it is time to remember that sometimes things work sideways and unexpectedly. So I hope it is okay that I might start trying to reduce the intensity of my drafting process and letting some personal stuff slip through the cracks.

Just not right this second. Because of James Joyce.