Once every semester my students perform what I call the Molly Bloom exercise in class. We read aloud the first page of Molly’s soliloquy from Joyce’s Ulysses and I proffer my completely invented notion of Joyce’s technique. He decided, I say, to set down as closely as possible the contents of Molly’s mind as she lay in bed. He determined that thought never stops, and most of us think in words. He decided that Molly did not “think” punctuation. And he figured that Molly had a word, or phrase, that she was apt to use and that suggested something about her personality: the word, in Molly’s case, was Yes. I then instruct the students to choose a person they know very well, picture that person engaged in some activity during which they can think to their heart’s content, and choose that person’s word or phrase (common choices: like, dude, I dunno, seriously, OK, this is the …
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On Quantity
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