If there were a throwdown to determine the reigning monarch of Modernism, Virginia Woolf would whup James Joyce's ass so badly he'd be crying for his mommy all the way home to Dublin.

No way! Flann O'Brien!

The course mainly made me a huge fan of Yeats and John Millington Synge.

For me, J.M. Synge, NSM, but Yeats, hell yes.

mmmmm....Yeats.....

Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart.

How can you not love that? Okay, it's one line out of a 900 page book, but it's not the only great one. Honest.

It did leave me with one of my philosophies of life: "Sufficient onto the day is the newspaper thereof."

Would that be the newspaper Bloom wipes himself with?

Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive. One tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly. Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke by which he won the laughing witch who now. Begins and ends morally. Hand in hand. Smart. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds, thirteen and six... He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it. Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled back the jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom into the air.

Again I ask, how can you not love that?

Oh, Yeats....

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you
and loved the sorrows of your changing face

... sigh

Again I ask, how can you not love that?

Pretty easily, all told.

If something's read,
and I don't know it,
Chances are,
it was by a poet.

Pretty easily, all told.

Oh come on, that's got to be the greatest literary poop of all time. The only contenders are Pantagruel wiping his ass with a live goose, Barth's The Floating Opera and the opening of Brecht's Baal.

Though I must also note the scatalogical genius of the comic Ed, The Happy Clown

Oh come on, that's got to be the greatest literary poop of all time.

The great turning point in Catcher in the Rye was Holden's bout of diarrhea in the museum bathroom.

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

and loved the sorrows of your changing face

Ow. Old memories there. Ah, the passion of youth.