The main barrier to enjoying Ulysses is not the novel's incomprehensibility; it's the sheer tedium of some of its sections

            Last night, a former Clarion classmate and I were talking about the ultimate blow-off critique: "The writing in this is good." That critique got so ubiquitous at Clarion that the instructors started disallowing it.

That's because people use "the writing is good" to mean "this kind of looks and sounds like a real story, instead of something th…