Girl Detective

“Molly Bloom (Caraid O’Brien),” by Louie Correia.

If you would like to listen to the last chapter of Ulysses, Penelope, read aloud, this link at LISTEN is a good one.

And, we’re done!

Chapter 18: Penelope, is Molly’s voice, and the last of the book. It’s interesting that we got 17 chapters of He Said, and that the 18th, She Said, is one of the most popular, with its famous last line

yes I said yes I will yes.

Though, since the foregoing chapter had no punctuation (Molly’s stream of consciousness is the most stream-y) this is technically the end of the one, long sentence.

Who finished? Who tried but didn’t?

ADDED LATER: Together, I think chapters 17 and 18, Ithaca and Penelope, were my favorites. I also think many things were revealed in them that might have had more impact for me if they hadn’t been foretold in the notes from earlier chapters. I’m not sure I could have read this entire book without notes, but I wish that the notes that exist weren’t so cavalier about the details just because this book has been around for over 100 years and others besides me have read it.

I thoroughly enjoyed Molly’s chapter, her voice, and her observations. That said, I think it’s important to remember that this is a chapter written by a man in a woman’s voice. It’s good, but I can’t say I stay up thinking about sex all the time and obsessing about how men view me, so while Joyce gets some of this right, I do think he sexualizes to an extreme that is more a male fantasy than an everywoman’s viewpoint.

Molly’s chapter is divided into eight “sentences” with no punctuation, so it can be hard to follow. The summary at Schmoop.com is helpful. I took this to mean that her stream of consciousness is the “streamiest” and more water-y and mothering than those of the other men in the book.

I will do a follow-up post on the whole book, but this wraps things up for now. Thanks for those who have come along for the journey.

Past posts:

Week 1: books 1 and 2
Week 2: books 3 and 4
Week 3: books 5, 6
Week 4: book 7
Week 5: book 8
Week 6: book 9
Week 7: book 10
Week 8: book 11
Week 9: book 12
Week 10: book 13
Week 11: book 14
Week 12: book 15 part 1/3
Week 13: book 15 part 2/3
Week 14: book 15 part 3/3
Week 15: book 16
Week 16: book 17

“What caused him consolation in his sitting posture?
The candour, nudity, pose, tranquility, youth, grace, sex, counsel of a statue erect in the centre of the table, an image of Narcissus purchased by auction from P.A. Wren, 9 Bachelor’s Walk.” (U17.1426) from Joyce Images

Oh, fellow #TCUlysses readalong-ers, how I have dragged my feet on writing this post! I actually finished not only chapter 17, Ithaca, but also 18, Penelope, and thus the whole megillah (Judaism reference!) last Friday, and was just basking in the feeling of finished-ness.

A few days ago I steeled my resolve and went back to the notes. I read the pages about Ulysses in Joseph Campbell’s Mythic Words, Modern Worlds. They were interesting, especially the comparison to Dante’s hell, and the descent and return. A few too many “of course” and “obviously”s. Then I read the chapters in Blamire’s New Bloomsday Book. As usual, they gave a good reading of what I’d just read, helping me to understand, even if I did not always agree with the interpretation. Also, some “of course”s. If you write, don’t include “of course” because whatever you’re talking about is either obvious or in dispute, and if you write “of course” then you sound like a pompous blowhard. Then, as per my usual, I went to Ulysses Annotated, and friends, I got lost. It was as if I’d descended to hell, and could not slog through those 60 pages.

I found it interesting that I read chapter 17 rather quickly, and found it very accessible, not just in comparison to some of the more abstruse chapters. But the 60 pages of detailing a 70 page chapter exhausted me, and left me not much more enlightened, and certainly with more ill-will toward the book. Then I read the summary and analysis at schmoop, and those were a walk in the park, though as usual not entirely accurate.

Now that I’ve written ad nauseum about my experience of reading 17 and about 17, let me talk a bit about the chapter itself.

In 17, Bloom and Stephen go to Bloom’s house. They’re locked out, Bloom sneaks in, let’s Stephen in, they talk and drink cocoa. They’re revealed again as both similar and different. Bloom offers Stephen a place to stay, and is declined. They go outside to micturate before Stephen leaves. Bloom goes upstairs and hits his head when he enters the room because the furniture has been moved around. This is a callback to when Ulysses gets a stool thrown at him by one of the suitors when he returns to his home, disguised as an old man. There is other evidence of Blazes Boylan, including a dent in the mattress and flakes of potted meat. Poldy thinks about revenge but in the end works his way through it to forgiveness and understanding, both of Molly and the men she’s loved. He crawls into bed with Molly, head to foot, (69 position, I thought), and the chapter ends with a big fat black dot.

What was your interpretation of that black dot? The ones I read suggested it was Poldy’s place in the world, or other things. I can’t help feeling that it illustrates the wet spot from the earlier sex that poor Poldy has to sleep in.

Would I have EVER thought such a thing about a book before reading THIS book? I don’t know.

The chapter is written as a series of questions and answers, in the catechism style of Catholicism, which Poldy converted to in order to marry Molly. There is a reference to something in Judaism itching at my brain, some particular work that is structured also in question and answer, just as in the Passover hagaddah book, e.g., “Why is this night not like all other nights?” I thought it might be the work of Moses Maimonides, who is mentioned in the chapter. He wrote a book with one of my favorite titles ever: Guide for the Perplexed, but did not find evidence of such. Is it the Talmud? The Mishnah? Some other resource I can’t remember that is commentary on the Torah or the Talmud? If anyone knows, please enlighten me.

This little paragraph, in the section about Poldy finding Molly intellectually deficient, provides a great segue to our next, final chapter, 18:

What compensated in the false balance of her intelligence for these and such deficiencies of judgment regarding persons, places and things?

The false apparent parallelism of all perpendicular arms of all balances, proved true by construction. The counterbalance of her proficiency of judgment regarding one person, proved true by experiment.

Basically, Molly knows Poldy, and he knows that she knows him.

Join us here next week for the last post from the #TCUlysses read.

There is no punctuation in the chapter so it can be hard to parse. If you’re struggling, take a look at part 1 and part 2 of this, recommended by Ulysses vet Wilson Varga and see if it helps.

6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18 and the whole thing!
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Past posts:

Week 1: books 1 and 2
Week 2: books 3 and 4
Week 3: books 5, 6
Week 4: book 7
Week 5: book 8
Week 6: book 9
Week 7: book 10
Week 8: book 11
Week 9: book 12
Week 10: book 13
Week 11: book 14
Week 12: book 15 part 1/3
Week 13: book 15 part 2/3
Week 14: book 15 part 3/3
Weeks 15: book 16

Welcome back, Ulysses friends; we’re in the home stretch! And we’re rewarded this week with a relatively straightforward chapter mostly about Bloom and Stephen hanging out in the wake of the bizarre events, real and imagined, of chapter 15, Circe.

Any thoughts on what this chapter’s song should be?

Bloom picks up Stephen, who says he’s thirsty, and they go to a cabman’s shelter since the bars are closed; it’s 1 a.m.

In the Odyssey, Eumaeus is the faithful swineherd of Odysseus’, and Odysseus and Telemachus meet up in this tent. Their loose analogs are Bloom and Stephen and there is no direct analog to the swineherd.

The style of the writing is loose and loopy–think of a student staying up too late to write a paper. It’s not the crisp intellectual prose of chapter 1.

Bloom, on how the stories are always about the husband coming home, never the wife on a journey:

Never about the runaway wife coming back, however much devoted to the absentee. The face at the window! (Vintageg 624)

Stephen, in a rare moment of empathy, and in one of his several points of departure from Bloom, who is nagging him about prostitutes:

Fear not them that sell the body but have not power to buy the soul. She is a bad merchant. She buys dear and sells cheap.

The Irish hero Parnell is mentioned throughout. His political career was wrecked after his affair with a married woman was made public. The questions of who is a hero and cuckoldry continue.

I enjoyed many of the sentences in this chapter, like this one about bad coffee:

Over his untasteable apology for a cup of coffee…

followed by:

Stephen…shoved aside his mug of coffee, or whatever you like to call it.

The chapter ends with Bloom inviting Stephen to his home. He’s thought variously of exploiting Stephen, first for his writing, and at the end for his good tenor singing voice. This is one of their points of disagreement. Bloom is thinking like an agent, Stephen like an artist. Still, though, they have more in common than not, and walk off looking like a married couple, sharing stories.

What did everyone else think of Eumaeus?

We only have two chapters, but 3 weeks to go! I propose we take next Monday off, and “meet” up again in two weeks to discuss 17, Ithaca, in full. That will give those who are behind time to catch up.

Schedule and past posts:

6/1/15 week off to catch up and read section 17
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18 and the whole thing!
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Past posts:

Week 1: books 1 and 2
Week 2: books 3 and 4
Week 3: books 5, 6
Week 4: book 7
Week 5: book 8
Week 6: book 9
Week 7: book 10
Week 8: book 11
Week 9: book 12
Week 10: book 13
Week 11: book 14
Week 12: book 15 part 1/3
Week 13: book 15 part 2/3
Week 14: book 15 part 3/3

Stephen, prone, breathes to the stars. (Vintage 607)

The above illustration is by Jun-Pierre Shiozawa, who read Ulysses last year and started a project to illustrate it.

Welcome back, fellow friends and masochists, who continue to blaze and slog through Ulysses. Congratulations on making it this far! In my Vintage edition, we are over 3/4 of the way through, and this chapter, 15, Circe, was nearly a quarter of the book, pages-wise at least.

The song for this week is “Start Me Up”, by the Rolling Stones, which has a lyric that matches a passage I’ll quote below.

After the full-on masochistic fantasy of last week, I thought I’d reached my limit of being shocked by this book. But no, Joyce had further provocations in mind, as he brings us back to the erection of a hanged man, earlier referred to in the Cyclops chapter:

–There’s one thing it hasn’t a deterrent effect on, says Alf.

–What’s that? says Joe.

–The poor bugger’s tool that’s being hanged, says Alf.

–That so? says Joe.

–God’s truth, says Alf. I heard that from the head warder that was in

Kilmainham when they hanged Joe Brady, the invincible. He told me when they cut him down after the drop it was standing up in their faces like a poker.

–Ruling passion strong in death, says Joe, as someone said.

–That can be explained by science, says Bloom. It’s only a natural phenomenon, don’t you see, because on account of the…

And then he starts with his jawbreakers about phenomenon and science and this phenomenon and the other phenomenon. (Vintage, 304)

Lo and behold, in the final third of the very long chapter 15, Circe, look what pops up again when The Croppy Boy is hanged. Forgive me for the naughty pun, but I don’t think Joyce would disapprove. Also, if I didn’t do it, reader Vince probably would.

He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts
of sperm spouting through his deathclothes on to the cobblestones.
Mrs Bellingham, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs
Mervyn Talboys rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it
up.)

I must say, that’s an image I’d prefer to not have encountered.

And the other eyebrow-r

aising passage for me was:

Bloom, holding [Stephen’s} hat and ashplant, stands erect. A dog barks in the
distance. Bloom tightens and loosens his grip on the ashplant. (Vintage 609)

If you, as I am, read Stephen’s ashplant as an extension of his phallus, then that is pretty explicit, and not necessarily the kind, fatherly figure of the rest of the passage.

As for the rest, we zip in and out of Bloom’s and Stephen’s brains. Stephen has an encounter with his dead mother, reminding me of the ghost scene in Gertrude’s closet from Hamlet.

The reality of this last segment was clearer to me, though, than in the earlier parts of the chapter, as Bloom pays for and looks out for Stephen, who ends the chapter drunk and passed out, but not beaten or in jail or robbed. The paternal care is emphasized by the appearance of Leopold’s dead son Rudy, as he might’ve looked if he’d lived.

What did everyone else think?

Join us next Monday 5/25 (yes, I know, it’s Memorial Day) for chapter 16, Eumaeus (the poor but loyal pig keeper of the Odyssey.) Just over 4 weeks till Bloomsday!

Past and future:

Schedule and past posts:

5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Past posts:

Week 1: books 1 and 2
Week 2: books 3 and 4
Week 3: books 5, 6
Week 4: book 7
Week 5: book 8
Week 6: book 9
Week 7: book 10
Week 8: book 11
Week 9: book 12
Week 10: book 13
Week 11: book 14
Week 12: book 15 part 1/3
Week 13: book 15 part 2/3

After reading chapter 15 of Joyce’s Ulysses for our pre-Bloomsday readalong, I noticed again some interesting sex and gender blending and switching in the text. It reminded me of Jung’s theory of anima/animus.

From Freud, Jung, and Joyce: conscious connections (via the Ulysses page on www.planetbookgroupie.com):

Although, Joyce vehemently denied being influenced by the ideas of Freud and Jung, referring to them derisively as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, his writings indicate that not only was he very familiar with the substance of their ideas and theories but that he could also apply them when exploring the minds of his characters.

I also found (in what Jung refers to below as one of the zillion ‘peregrinations’ that reading Ulysses prompts), found this on Open Culture about Jung’s review of the book, his letter to Joyce himself after the review was published, and a little about their ongoing relationship after that (Jung treated Joyce’s daughter Lucia for schizophrenia.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter.

Over the course of reading and reading about this challenging (the MOST challenging) novel, I empathize with Jung’s struggle. That Jung would find it difficult and boring, but ultimately not only worthwhile but also deserving of singular praise, bolsters my spirits, and makes me look forward even more to the final chapter, Molly’s, which Jung says is “a string of veritable psychological peaches.”

Welcome back, you few, you happy few, who are still brave enough to continue with Joyce’s oh-so-challenging Ulysses. This week finds us in the mucky middle of book 15, Circe. Oh, what a long, strange trip it is.

I picked the section that begins with Zoe saying “Talk away till you’re black in the face,” which is an interesting twist on the “blue” we’re more accustomed to. Blue indicates lack of oxygen, while black points to death. Bloom has a short interlude of lucidity with Zoe, but he goes in and out of fantasy. I could tell what was fantasy and what not mostly but not always by when the “real” people in the room spoke, rather than the objects, such as Lynch’s cap, Zoe’s buckles and Bella’s fan; or imaginary people, such as Virag (Bloom’s grandfather), and others.

An extended and jaw-dropping (and likely censor-enraging) dream sequence begins when the madame, Bella Cohen enters and says “My word, I’m all of a mucksweat.” Everything from there till when she asks “Which of you was playing the dead march from Saul?” is Bloom’s imagination, his subconscious and secret thoughts dragged out of the dark and brought to life.

To briefly summarize, Bloom and Bella switch roles. She becomes a man named Bello, he a woman referred to still as Bloom but with feminine pronouns. Bello, like Circe did to Odysseus’ men, makes Bloom piglike and alludes to many porcine things. In an inversion of the play Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, many of the things Bello as a man does to Bloom as a woman echo those that Wanda does to Severin. I was fortunate to see a modern retelling, Venus in Fur, a few years ago, so I recognize the references.

Bello rides Bloom as a horse, which the other prostitutes clamor to do also. Bello puts out a lit cigar on her ear, and auctions her off to other men, after this: “[Bello] bares his arm and plunges it elbowdeep in Bloom’s vulva.”

For the record, Joyce got his words mixed up. Vulva refers to all of woman’s external genitalia such as the labiae and the clitoris, south of the pubic bone. North of it, with the hair, is the mons. The reproductive canal is the vagina, which is what Bello plunges his arm into up to the elbow. This is not, as schmoop notes in its summary of 15: Circe, the same as “Bello elbows Bloom in the vulva.”

The above terminology, and the importance of using it correctly, is from one of my new favorite books, which I’ve found not surprisingly often relevant to this reading of Ulysses, Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski. The subtitle of the book is probably more for getting attention. I find the website’s description a better one: “An essential exploration of why and how women’s sexuality works–based on groundbreaking research and brain science.” Poldy and Molly could really have used this book. So could Joyce. Here’s Matisse’s take on the anatomy in Chapter 15, Circe:

Back to Ulysses. Bloom gradually returns to a state of masculinity and Bello to Bella. Reality is again broached when Bella asks about the piano.

You can visit the summary at Schmoop.com and the analysis if that helps. Again, they’re not precise, but I do find them broadly helpful.

Did anyone else see Venus in Fur when it was in Minneapolis? Excerpt video here, and review here.

What did you think of this part of chapter 15?

Let’s meet here next Monday 5/18/15 to discuss the last part of chapter 15, and the chapter as a whole.

Apologies for this week’s late post. I visited my parents this weekend with my sister to help them clear out the house while they’re still alive and well, which I wrote about here. I highly recommend doing this, both getting together with the nuclear family, and going through things before one has to. We’ve all been influenced by one of my other recent favorite books, Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Too see a video where she helps a woman sort her books, go to this link at Boing Boing.

Blogging about it on Monday was perhaps an ambitious goal. I’ll adjust the schedule to Wednesday, I think, when we read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer.

Future schedule and past posts:

5/18/15 discuss and tweet 3475-end, and all of section 15
5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Past posts:

Week 1: books 1 and 2
Week 2: books 3 and 4
Week 3: books 5, 6
Week 4: book 7
Week 5: book 8
Week 6: book 9
Week 7: book 10
Week 8: book 11
Week 9: book 12
Week 10: book 13
Week 11: book 14
Week 12: book 15 part 1/3

“Even the allwisest stagyrite was bitted, bridled and mounted by a light of love.” 15.111-12

So says Stephen Dedalus, having an anti-feminist moment on his way to visit prostitutes. In Ulysses Annotated, Gifford links the line to the above work of art, “Phyllis and Aristotle” by Hans Baldung, from the Louvre.

After the dense and thorny chapter 14, Oxen of the Sun, we are given a breather, in both white space on the page, and humor. Alas, I’m feeling rather glum and beaten down by Ulysses. Unlike the many other recent readalongs I’ve done–Bleak House, David Copperfield, Moby Dick, Sandman, and Odyssey–Ulysses continues to confound. With other books, I’ve thought, wow, there’s a lot of great stuff in here, and it’s not as intimidating as I’d feared.

I’m not sure if I’ve disclosed this before, but in literature, I’m basically self educated. I had a typical low-quality US education through high school, required to read not that many classics, and skiving off reading several of those. I was immature and my teachers gave me As because I was clever and they were easily fooled, and I was more interested in the works of Stephen King, Anne McCaffrey, and Kathleen Woodiwiss at the time.

In college I majored in marketing, and took one English class in which we read (and I actually DID read) only 3 books: The Iliad, War and Peace, and Hemingway’s In Our Time. After having my soul sucked from working in marketing for several years, I went to graduate school in religion, and finagled a Shakespeare class out of that but not much more in literature. So I am far from an expert in literature, just a very curious amateur.

Ulysses is at least as intimidating as I’d feared, not least because Joyce was being wilfully abstruse and trying to push the envelope of the novel. While I can admire the ambition, and agree that he succeeded, this doesn’t make the novel much of a pleasure to read at least on this first time through.

In my attempts as moderator of this readalong, I’ve explored different things to try to better understand this book. I’m reading the notes in the exhaustive and exhausting Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford. I am reading Schmoop.com’s summaries and analyses of the chapters. I have gotten both the original and updated version of Harry Blamires’ Bloomsday Book from the library. A work by Joseph Campbell looked promising, but was only mine for a few weeks in which I was too busy to appreciate it.

When I came across a title called Virgin and Veteran readings of Ulysses by Margaret Norris I was excited, because I had begun to wish for notes and references geared to me as a first-time reader. Alas, this is not that book. It is written in what I refer to as high academ-ese, and is a book about the pedagogy of Ulysses and how to teach it. As I tried to wade through the introduction, though, two things caught my notice.

Ulysses can arguably be “read” by a first-time or virgin reader, but can be fully “understood” only by a veteran reader who brings knowledge of the whole work, including the ending, to any part of it. (p2)

Norris notes that many guides to Ulysses, in explaining certain passages, give spoilers from the veteran readers. For example, most notes talk about Bloom’s Jewishness before it is made explicit or even implicit in the text.

The most notable example for me was when schmoop noted that Poldy and Molly hadn’t had sex for ten years. Yet the text only said something that alluded to this, which is gradually explained over the rest of the book.

Which raises (NB, does not “beg,” which is so often misused) the questions: do the notes “spoil” in multiple meanings of the word, the experience of reading this book for the first time? Is reading Ulysses the first time rather like having sex for the first time: awkward, bewildering, embarrassing, sometimes painful, fleetingly delightful, but seriously, it gets GREAT the more you do it? Is there a point to reading Ulysses one time only?

On that cheerful note, let’s talk about the first part of 15: Circe. Overall, 15 is a hallucinatory play that alternates between fantasy and reality. I was reminded both of Kafka and of A Christmas Story. Then I watched last night’s Mad Men; that series is full of imaginary episodes comes to life, sometimes with no clear mark of what is read and what is not. Schmoop mentions Mel Brooks movies, and I’m sure there are loads more works of art we can think of that alternate and blur fantasy and reality. The stopping point I chose, at about line 1955, is just as Bloom is coming out of an imagined Alleluia chorus and brought into reality by Zoe, a prostitute, (I will not use “whore” to refer to these women as the notes often do. Prostitute is a job; whore is a suitcase of value judgments.) who comments:

“Talk away till You’re black in the face.”

The gist of it, though, and I’m trying to stick to just the facts, ma’am, and not include any spoiler-y notes, is that Bloom is following Stephen and Lynch into Mabbot Street and nighttown, a bad area. Bloom wants to get Stephen before he spends his money and body and inner self with prostitutes. Bloom’s stream of consciousness comes to life, though, and we see his ego and insecurities played out, as well as some of his past.

The lemon soap gets its own line, the shriveled potato is mistaken for a sign of STD, and Bloom seems to have a very confused, or defiant, sense of what is kosher. Camels make an appearance, and they’re not kosher, as they have cloven hooves.

What did everyone else think? Stay with me; we can get through this. I will climb out of my slough of despond.

Your assignment for next week, should you choose to accept it, is to read to this line, which signals another shift from dream to reality:

“(The figure of Bella Cohen stands before him.)”

It’s on page 554 of my edition, the Vintage. In the online Columbia, it’s 15.3474

We’ll meet here next week to chat about the middle of chapter 15 to that point. The schedule for the rest:

5/11/15 discuss and tweet on 15, lines 1956 to 3474
5/18/15 discuss and tweet 3475-end, and all of section 15
5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Past posts:

Week 1: books 1 and 2
Week 2: books 3 and 4
Week 3: books 5, 6
Week 4: book 7
Week 5: book 8
Week 6: book 9
Week 7: book 10
Week 8: book 11
Week 9: book 12
Week 10: book 13
Week 11: book 14

[Personal note: Bass Ale was my favorite beer when I was drinking, before I became a teetotaller who favors ginger cordials. I used to drink it at The Black Rooster Pub, at 1919 L Street NW in Washington DC with my friends who went to George Washington, and condescended to hang out with me even if I did go to Georgetown.]

Sorry, but I’m still researching this chapter, trying to figure out why all the women wanted to have sex with a bull, whether those guys were getting drunk in a hospital, and whether Mrs. Purefoy and her baby lived. So if you are ahead of me, and understand more of it, comment away!

Proper entry to come. 11yo Drake just got over strep, 9yo Guppy got pneumonia, I got pinkeye, and G. Grod become very afraid. Things have not been very good in the plague house but we’re on the mend, so things should be back on track soon.

This was really not my ideal week to read chapter 14, which I found extremely challenging. Maybe I was just feeling Cyclopean from the pinkeye. I hope you all had an easier time parsing this one than I did.

[imagined version of Buck Mulligan’s from Romping Through Ulysses)

EDITED TO ADD: I strongly recommend the summary and analysis at Schmoop this week. It notes that Oxen of the Sun is perhaps the hardest chapter, perhaps more so coming right after Nausicaa, one of the more accessible.

Also, my husband G. Grod and I borrowed a copy of Harry Blamires’ The Bloomsday Book from our local library, and it’s short chapter on this long one helped immensely. It’s more intelligent than schmoop, and more helpful in understanding content than the Gifford, in my opinion. BUT hard to find at library. Pro tip: use Interlibrary loan via MnLINK.

Yes, they WERE drinking in the hospital, and had to be told more than once by the nurse to whisht. Mrs. Purefoy had a boy and both are alive and well for the moment. And the bull was a metaphor for Henry VIII, among others, hence many women wanting to have sex with him. Glad I got those questions cleared up.

Interesting analog to the Odyssey is that the Oxen of the Sun episode is Odysseus’ worst point, and Nausicaa is a chapter in which he’s fed, clothed, lauded and sent on his way. This is another example of how super-meta this chapter is. I did not enjoy reading it (cue recording of me whinging: “it was HARD!”) but can’t argue that’s it’s bloody brilliant. It’s written to mimic about 20 different styles of English/Irish literature, and so shows a progression of literary history. Also, the styles and substance are married, so they mirror one another. Also, the chapter progresses as does a woman through pregnancy and labor. I’m stopping here, because the list of also’s from this chapter is, perhaps, infinite.

Important takeaways: Bloom (and presumably Joyce) has sympathy for women especially around pregnancy and birth. Bloom and Stephen connect in this chapter. Bloom feels paternally to Stephen, and they’re both shown as outsiders, lonely, and Stephen perhaps smarter than the rest, Bloom more empathetic and kinder than the rest.

How about this for an example sentence:

An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most mollificative suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous flambeaus of the paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium of connubial communion. (14:351-354)

Gifford’s Annotated Ulysses has almost nothing on this, but that it imitates work by the aforementioned Fletcher and Beaumont, and I think means roughly:

a pretty poem to persuade young lovers whom the witnesses with flaming herbal torches escort to the bridal bed for sex.

Which I think means that the pretty poem makes the sex sound much more nicer than the awkward painful, excretion-filled mess it’s about to be.

For those of us who read Moby Dick there was a mention of spermacetic oil in line 600.

And for those of us who read David Copperfield, that was nodded to both in style and substance from lines 1310 beginning:

Meanwhile the skill and patience of the physician had brought about a happy accouchement.

And the homage is cemented with the use of Doady (Dora’s nickname for David) and the phrase “with the old shake of her pretty head” similar to what Dickens wrote of Dora on her deathbed.

On the re-read, I think my favorite sentence is:

The aged sisters draw us into life: we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die: over us dead they bend. (14.392-3)

The notes in Gifford says this equates the midwives with the three fates, which are familiar to those of you who participated in the #SandMN readalong: mother, maiden, crone.

I wondered at this:

First saved from water of old Nile, among bulrushes…at last the cavity of a mountain, an occulted sepulchre. (14.394-5)

The Gifford says both the beginning and end reference Moses, but the latter brought to mind Merlin to me, trapped in his cave by Nimue.

I think that’s all I have for this week, but I haven’t yet re-read the pages, and am girding my loins to do so.

I have not yet figured out how we’ll take the behemoth 15 online, but I’ll keep you posted. Ideas welcome; email them or put them in comments.

What did everyone else think of 14? Do you feel you lived through a giant ordeal?

Future and past:

(3 weeks to read the very long section 15 which we’ll spit into three chunks)
5/18/15 read, then discuss and tweet all of section 15
5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Past posts:

Week 1: books 1 and 2
Week 2: books 3 and 4
Week 3: books 5, 6
Week 4: book 7
Week 5: book 8
Week 6: book 9
Week 7: book 10
Week 8: book 11
Week 9: book 12
Week 10: book 13

Welcome back the Ulysses readalong. We’re through more than half the chapters, but not quite through half the book.

I was excited when chapter 13 began with three women friends on a beach, with straightforward storytelling, albeit in romanticized prose. As we spend more time in Gerty’s mind, it becomes clear she has been brainwashed by women’s magazines and novels and thinks in romantic cliches.

This chapter has a lot of close echoes of the analogous scene from the Odyssey, in which Odysseus is washed up on the shore of a river and falls asleep in a shrub. He wakes when a group of giggling young women, led by the princess Nausicaa, play with a ball that lands near him.

Gerty is daydreaming about a young man named Reggie, when she spots a dark man a little way up the beach. Her romantic imaginings transfer to him as she catches and holds his attention. Fireworks start, a nearby church is having a temperance meeting and service, Gerty shows some leg to the man, and becomes aware that he’s masturbating. Around the part of the chapter, the POV switches and we find it’s Bloom (Joyce had been withholding this detail from us till now) and we’re back in his stream of consciousness. I may have the sequence mixed up a bit–they are tangled in my memory.

Ah!

Mr. Bloom with careful hand recomposed his wet shirt. O Lord that little limping devil. Begins to feel cold and clammy. Aftereffect not pleasant. Still you have to get rid of it someway. They don’t care. Complimented perhaps. (13.850-854, Gabler)

I sensed Joyce provoking the reader in this chapter. We open with a seemingly charming tableau, which becomes less lovely as we read Gerty’s silly romantic notions, her dislike of the mess and noise of children, and her deliberate and escalating provocation of Bloom, who is a willing participant. This felt like Bloom at his least likeable, ogling and jacking off to a young woman, one he thinks less of once he sees that she’s lame, also one not much older than his daughter, Milly. We hear more about his troubled marriage with Molly, and the scene ends with him dozing, interspersed with the cries of “cuckoo,” which I took as reminders of his supposed cuckolding by Boylan.

I suppose this interlude with Bloom’s masturbating was inevitable–we’ve read about him taking a shit, farting, and now this. Bloom is a man with a messy, noisy body. Additionally, Gerty, for all her outward beauty, has some ugly thoughts, and a disability. She is a virgin, but also sexual, so she denies the madonna/whore dichotomy.

What did everyone else think?

I’ve found the resources at schmoop.com helpful for summaries and analysis. Like Wikipedia, though, it’s not to be trusted completely. Searching this weekend, I also found posts on a book blog I admire, The Sheila Variations, here is the LINK to the post on Nausicaa.

Join us next Monday 4/27 to discuss chapter 14: Oxen of the Sun.

The rest of the schedule, and what we’ve done already:

The schedule for the rest:

4/27/15 discuss and tweet section 14
(3 weeks to read the very long section 15 which we’ll spit into three chunks)
5/18/15 read, then discuss and tweet all of section 15
5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Past posts:

Week 1: books 1 and 2
Week 2: books 3 and 4
Week 3: books 5, 6
Week 4: book 7
Week 5: book 8
Week 6: book 9
Week 7: book 10
Week 8: book 11
Week 9: book 12

Well, sort of. I read the chapter in its entirety and was left with the uncomfortable feeling of having bathed in so much anti-semitism that it wouldn’t wash off. The things people say about Bloom are so appalling, and I take umbrage on his behalf as if he were a friend, which he is rather getting to be over this book, even with all the TMI of shitting and farting and such.

I do not yet feel I can write a proper post on Cyclops, though, because I’ve only read it once, and am not yet even halfway through the Gifford notes. Which, if you’ve read the chapter and encountered those long Biblical-begat-esque lists, you know are a killer this week as they attempt to ’splain every Tom Dick and Harry in a chapter Joyce was working hard to make the most reference heavy EVER.

But I’m a day late in putting up this post, for two reasons. One, I had to take my elder, 11yo Drake, in for a strep test yesterday. It’s a weird parental thing where I both hope he is positive to justify having schlepped in for a test, and negative because, well, duh. He was positive so now we have to make sure he takes his anti-b’s 3x a day for 10 days. I made a chart so we don’t forget.

Also I started the book Reconstructing Amelia that my friend Sam lent me ages ago, and while I almost put it down at the beginning because I felt like I could see where it was going, I’m glad I didn’t, because it spun out to satisfying and in many ways unexpected conclusions. But that meant I didn’t get to chapter 12 of Ulysses till Sunday, which was too late for this behemoth of a chapter. It’s not like I wasn’t warned: the title is Cyclops after all.

So, before I delve back into the notes and a re-read, here is what I’ve got for you: the chapter is narrated by a nameless man, one who nearly loses an eye right off the bat:

a bloody* sweep came along and he near drove his gear into my eye

The chapter is interspersed throughout with long parodies of other written material, such as legal writs, Irish folktales, newspaper articles, and more. These alternate with the conversations of the unnamed Cylopean character with others in the bar as they drink. A lot. One man, named only The Citizen, becomes increasingly incensed at Bloom.

*Gifford’s note: A mysteriously offensive curse to the Victorian and Edwardian ear that continued to be offensive until the 1930’s; no one can quite explain how or why. Joyce thought, or at least said he thought, that it derived from By Our Lady; others suggest By God’s Blood.

My own idea: no matter its origins, I suspect an inferred connection to menstrual blood is what made it so offensive for so long.

On a completely different note, I enjoyed this malapropism, which made me picture someone throwing edible flowers at people:

Don’t cast your nasturtiums on my character. (vintage 320)

I will embiggen this later after I’ve finished Giffording, Schmooping, and re-reading. EDITED TO ADD: I found this note at Schmoop.com helpful. The myopia of the chapter applies to nationalism, to racism, and even to just sitting in the bar:

As readers, we’re subjected to the narrator’s very limited point-of-view, and we begin to notice just how constraining it can be to hear a story in the first person. The pronoun “I” becomes another metaphor for the Cyclops, for only being able to see things one way. It’s directly opposed to the idea of parallax — seeing one thing from a number of different points of view in order to get a fuller sense of the thing— that runs through the entire novel.

What did everyone else think?

See you here next Monday 4/20 for chapter 13: Nausicaa. Which I might just supplement with a viewing of Miyazaki’s debut masterpiece of the same name.

The schedule for the rest:

4/27/15 discuss and tweet section 14
(3 weeks to read the very long section 15 which we’ll spit into three chunks)
5/18/15 read, then discuss and tweet all of section 15
5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Past posts:

Week 1: books 1 and 2
Week 2: books 3 and 4
Week 3: books 5, 6
Week 4: book 7
Week 5: book 8
Week 6: book 9
Week 7: book 10
Week 8: book 11

Welcome back the Ulysses readalong. You can join in by commenting here, or by tweeting with the hashtag #TCUlysses. This week we tackled Chapter 11: Sirens. The first time through was somewhat bewildering for me, as is often the case. I was helped immensely by the note in Gifford that this is a musical chapter, and the opening is like a rehearsal, or perhaps an entr’acte?, that glides over the major points to follow, and concludes with “Done!” and the action begins with “Begin!”

As in music, several motifs are repeated throughout. The sirens of the title are most obviously the two barmaids who flirt and are flirted with. Less obvious, though, I suspect it’s the siren call of the past and the lotus-like inertia brought on by nostalgia.

Bloom sees Boylan for the third time that day, and dares to follow him into the Ormond hotel. I’m not sure I have this right, but it seemed like Bloom feared Boylan’s assignation with Molly would take place at the Ormond, but Boylan leaves before Bloom does. Is he off to see Molly? Is Bloom imagining the affair?

In any case, Bloom eats lunch, listens to the music, then feels lonely, writes back to Martha, then breaks the spell by leaving before the end of the song The Croppy Boy that the other men are so moved by. And ends the chapter by avoiding a homely prostitute he’s been with before, and farting intermittently then loudly when loud street sounds will cover it.

What did everyone else think this week?

Join us next week on 4/13/15 for Book 12: Cyclops. The schedule for the rest:

4/20/15 discuss and tweet section 13
4/27/15 discuss and tweet section 14
(3 weeks to read the very long section 15 which we’ll spit into three chunks)
5/18/15 read, then discuss and tweet section 15
5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Past posts:

Ulysses readalong week 1, books 1 and 2
Ulysses readalong week 2, books 3 and 4
Ulysses readalong week 3, books 5 and 6
Ulysses readalong week 4: book 7
Ulysses readalong week 5: book 8

Ulysses readalong week 6: book 9
Ulysses readalong week 7: book 10

Image from Amanda Visconti’s site Literature Geek. Amanda is also the curator of Infinite Ulysses, which you should check out if you haven’t yet.

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Twin Cities Ulysses readalong, book 10: The Wandering Rocks.

EDITED TO ADD: I continue to find the reading process that works best for me is to read the chapter in one fell swoop, read Gifford’s notes, read the Schmoop summary and analysis, and then re-read. That makes for a lengthy process though, so I’ll add later thoughts and notes at the beginning of each post.

One thing I missed the first time that Gifford pointed out were the references to Bleak House by Dickens, which I read in a group a few winters ago. First, there’s the description of the professor of dancing:

Mr Denis J. Maginni, professor of dancing, &c., in silk hat, slate frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender trousers, canary gloves and pointed patent boots, walking with grave deportment most respectfully took the curbstone as he passed lady Maxwell at the corner of Dignam’s Court. (220 Vintage)

This is a nod to the elder Mr. Turveydrop, the dancing teacher who is known for his deportment in Bleak House.

Later are allusions to the court system and to Miss Flite:

Lawyers of the past, haughty, pleading, beheld pass from the consolidated taxing office to Nisi Prius court Richie Goulding carrying the costbag of Goulding, Collis and Ward and heard rustling from the admiralty division of king’s bench to the court of appeal an elderly female with false teeth smiling incredulously and a black silk skirt of great amplitude. (232 Vintage)

And later:

An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of chancery, king’s bench, exchequer and common pleas, having heard in the lord chancellor’s court the case in lunacy of Potterton… (Vintage 236)

And my favorite sentence of the section was this:

…and when we sallied forth it was blue o’clock the morning after the night before. (Vintage 234)

END of ADDITION

Initially this post will be brief. I have only read chapter 10 once, not yet notes, analysis, or re-read it, all of which I plan to do.

In book 10, the stream of consciousness jumps from character to connected character. I found this segment much more accessible than last week’s Book 9 (the post for which I have embiggened after re-reading 9 and appreciating it more). I also really loved getting to hear different character’s voices, and getting the Rashomon-like perspectives of the same scene from different views.

Because I couldn’t recall the Wandering Rocks episode from The Odyssey, I checked at Schmoop and found out there was a good reason:

It’s interesting to note that there isn’t actually a “Wandering Rocks” episode in the Odyssey. Circe warns Odysseus that no man has ever passed through the rocks alive and thus advises him to pass between Scylla and Charybdis. It’s almost as if Joyce, in his creative ebullience, refuses to take Circe’s advice.

My favorite line this week eludes me but I did like this even though I’m not a gin person:

Hot spirit of juniper juice warmed his vitals and his breath. Good drop of gin, that was. His frocktails winked in bright sunshine to his fat strut.

But, the following made me hungry and I might well make scones today:

Two melanges [a mixture of fruit in cream], Buck Mulligan said. And bring us some scones and butter and some cakes as well.

then:

He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream. Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith. He bit off a soft piece hungrily…[Haines] tasted a spoonful from the creamy cone of his cup.

That’s all I’ve got thus far. As seems to be my MO, I will embiggen this post once I’ve done my due diligence for the book. But, in the meantime, what did everyone else think?

Add your thoughts in the comments, or come tweet them on Twitter with the hashtag #TCUlysses.

Join us next week on 4/6/15 for Book 11:Sirens. The schedule for the rest:

4/13/15 discuss and tweet section 12
4/20/15 discuss and tweet section 13
4/27/15 discuss and tweet section 14
(3 weeks to read the very long section 15 which we’ll spit into three chunks)
5/18/15 read, then discuss and tweet section 15
5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Past posts:

Ulysses readalong week 1, books 1 and 2
Ulysses readalong week 2, books 3 and 4
Ulysses readalong week 3, books 5 and 6
Ulysses readalong week 4: book 7
Ulysses readalong week 5: book 8

Ulysses readalong week 6: book 9

EDITED TO ADD: this was not a fine moment for me as a reader, or as a moderator. I resorted to one of the least mature reading criticisms of them all, one that I typically deplore: (whiny voice) *it was HARD. I didn’t LIKE it.*

Welcome to Ulysses, b1tch. Why do I think I’m doing this? For enjoyment? No, for pleasure, which is that complicated mix of enjoyment and almost pain when I am pushed to my limits and made to WORK, to think, to LEARN.

Also, because I told a lot of other people I would and it would be lame to quit.

I apologize for being so flip in the post below. BUT I’m going to leave it up, because it is a valid, if not valuable and if childish, response.

After going through the notes, and reading an online analysis, and re-reading, I was actually delighted by all the Hamlet talk, by Stephen’s comparison of Penelope and Ann Hathaway and by extension Will and Odysseus, and his theory that Shakespeare identified with the ghost because Ann had an affair with one of his brothers, both of whose names were villains in his plays. I also appreciated the contrast between the “don’t consider the context” school of criticism versus the “reading way too much biographical material into a work of art” rock and hard places.

And, in a clever turn of the “Titular Line” concept, Joyce calls out to his chapter Scylla and Charybdis:

Between the Saxon smile and yankee yawp. The devil and the deep sea.

END OF EDITED ADDITION

***

Soundtrack to today’s chapter: “Wrapped Around Your Finger” by the Police, since it names Scylla and Charybdis.

Comment here or on Twitter with the hashtag #TCUlysses

I feel like a bad moderator, but I did not enjoy this week’s reading. I felt good about last week’s book 8, felt like I understood it and enjoyed the time in Bloom’s head. This week, though, we’re back in Stephen Dedalus’ head, and I don’t like it there.

Stephen’s something of a self-satisfied intellectual ass, and he and the others spent the book discussing Shakespeare and Aristotle and Plato and the intellectual wanking exhausted me. I wanted to run into the room, kick them all in the shins and run out again in a childish bid to bring them back to earth.

I read book 9, then read SO MANY PAGES of Gifford’s notes on the book 9, then read the summary and analysis at Schmoop.com, and I’m not sure I have much more to offer you than:

Stephen and some of his friends sit around and pontificate on theories about Shakespeare.

I’m a Shakespeare geek. I love Shakespeare and enjoy nerdish discussions about who wrote the plays, and who was the model for which character. I did not enjoy them here, though. Stephen and the others lack a humor, lack the earthy realism of Shakespeare (and Bloom) that allows me to connect to the plays, their author, and dicussions about them.

What I believe we’re supposed to take away is that both intellectualism and earthy realism are important, that art can (and should?) be based from life, and that Stephen is trying to figure out how to make art based on life. (Hint: get out of your head.)

What did everyone else think?

Join us next week on 3/30/15 for Book 10: The Wandering Rocks. The schedule for the rest:

4/6/15 discuss and tweet section 11
4/13/15 discuss and tweet section 12
4/20/15 discuss and tweet section 13
4/27/15 discuss and tweet section 14
(3 weeks to read the very long section 15 which we’ll spit into three chunks)
5/18/15 read, then discuss and tweet section 15
5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

For reference, here are the past posts:

Ulysses readalong week 1, books 1 and 2
Ulysses readalong week 2, books 3 and 4
Ulysses readalong week 3, books 5 and 6
Ulysses readalong week 4: book 7
Ulysses readalong week 5: book 8

Welcome back to the Ulysses readalong! You’re still here, right, reading along? Because that’s why I’m here, because I told a bunch of people I was going to do this and blog about it, and even though it’s really hard and sometimes boring, I know it’s really good for me, and I’d feel lame if I quit.

You can comment here, or on Twitter with the hashtag #TCUlysses.

So, here we are, book 8, subtitled in Joyce’s notes as The Laestrygonians, which is a really fun name to say. For those of you who read The Odyssey with me (and aren’t you glad you did? Me too.), the Laestrygonians were the giant cannibals that Odysseus and his men encountered. Appetite is echoed throughout this chapter in the theme of hunger, but was particularly explicit when Bloom goes in the first diner, The Burton, and is repulsed by all the eating.

Before that was one of my favorite passages, though:

A warm human plumpness settled down on his brain. His brain yielded. Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore. (168)

*whew* *fans self*

This section is mostly Bloom’s stream of consciousness, wandering around hungry, but then switches to the conversation of others as he leaves the pub towards the end. In this chapter we see again that Bloom has an enormous capacity for empathy. Given how earthy and randy his thoughts are, I was shocked and saddened to learn that he and Molly haven’t had sex since poor little Rudy died ten years ago.

Finally, I liked this insight about the chapter from the site Schmoop:

As Bloom wanders around town, his thoughts are constantly linked to his surroundings. Different storefronts in Dublin make his mind race from one thing to the next. When we read the scene where Bloom leads the blind stripling (young man) across the street by his elbow, we might think of this as what Joyce is doing for us. After all, most of us are not in Dublin. We can’t see what the words are referring to and have only the language to guide us: we’re blind. And Joyce, as he leads us on this grand tour of Dublin, is a great deal like Bloom, gently leading us — the blind stripling — through a city that we cannot see.

What did everyone else think?

Join us next week for Book 9: Scylla and Charybdis, the proverbial rock and a hard place. The schedule for the rest:

3/23/15 discuss and tweet section 9
3/30/15 discuss and tweet section 10
4/6/15 discuss and tweet section 11
4/13/15 discuss and tweet section 12
4/20/15 discuss and tweet section 13
4/27/15 discuss and tweet section 14
(3 weeks to read the very long section 15 which we’ll spit into three chunks)
5/18/15 read, then discuss and tweet section 15
5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

For reference, here are the past posts:

Ulysses readalong week 1, books 1 and 2
Ulysses readalong week 2, books 3 and 4
Ulysses readalong week 3, books 5 and 6
Ulysses readalong week 4: book 7

Welcome back to the Ulysses readalong! Just one long book this week rather than two short ones, and I enjoyed having only one style to manage, though this week’s style was a head turner. Remember, you can comment here or on Twitter with the hashtag #TCUlysses.

Book 7 is called Aeolus, a reference to the king in The Odyssey who gives Odysseus a bag of wind that gets him within spitting sight of Ithaca, at which point he takes one of a couple inconvenient naps. His men speculate on what’s in the bag, decide it’s treasure, and it blows them backwards to Aeolus’ place, who will no longer help them because they’re obviously cursed (or, stupid. Take your pick.)

In Ulysses, the bag(s) of wind are in the newspaper room, and can refer either to the shifting winds of news, or to the back and forth of the men who work there. This is a visually arresting chapter, interspersed with headlines taken from the men’s discussion rather than Bloom’s imagination. The book begins and ends with Nelson’s monument.

Bloomian aside: I may get myself a little bar of lemon soap and keep it in my purse to be periodically surprised by how lovely it smells.

Stephen, with new boots (the ones from Mulligan at the bottom of his pants?) comes into the office where he’s doted upon and puts forth Deasy’s foot and mouth letter, which the paper will publish. Not so the Keyes ad that Bloom is trying to get in. Once again, we see Bloom on the edge of a group, the excluded observer.

I was delighted many times by the words this week. A few of my favorites (pages from Vintage edition):

McHugh murmured softly, biscuitfully to the dusty windowpane. (123)

Hush, Lenehan said. I hear feetstoops. (128)

The loose flesh of his neck shook like a cock’s wattles. An illstarched dicky jutted up and with a rude gesture he thrust it back into his waistcoat. (136-7)

His mouth continued to twitch unspeaking in nervous curls of disdain. (138)

I have often thought since on looking back over that strange time that it was that small act, trivial in itself, that striking of that match, that determined the whole aftercourse of both our lives. (140)

The former is from Stephen’s inner monologue, not Bloom’s and is overdramatic in the style of Dickens and others (and not true).

Stephen, his blood wooed by grace of language and gesture, blushed. (140)

The book finishes with a long anecdote, “the parable of the plums” about two virgins climbing Nelson’s monument, eating plums and throwing down the pits. This, like much of the book, seems to be about how much English occupation of Ireland sucks. Stephen refers to Nelson as “the onehandled adulterer” which amuses the others.

I don’t quite get how people would climb this. Inside, like Statue of Liberty? Or, it’s a parable and didn’t really happen and important because it’s an English statue in the middle of Dublin, which would so upset people that the IRA would later blow it up?

Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated says that the epithet is because Lord Nelson lost an arm in an unsuccessful battle and later had an affair.

My favorite note from Gifford this week was on Antisthenes, from the amusingly titled section “SOPHIST WALLOPS HAUGHTY HELEN SQUARE ON PROBOSCIS. SPARTANS GNASH MOLARS. ITHACANS VOW PEN IS CHAMP.”

McHugh comments that Stephen reminds him of Antisthenes, who

wrote a book in which he took away the palm of beauty from Argive Helen and handed it to poor Penelope. (148-149)

According to Gifford, Antisthenes apparently argued (the work has been lost) that

Penelope’s virtue made her more beauitiful than Helen , whose virtue was somewhat less solidly demonstrated.

Snerk.

And that’s all I have for book 7. Sorry for the delay in posting. Had a little detour this morning to Urgent Care after 11yo Drake slipped and fell on ice that looked like a puddle, and earned the dubious distinction of the first broken bone in the family. He is doing well now, though, and insists that it sounds worse than it is. He hasn’t tried to sleep or remove his shirt, though. We’ll see how tonight goes.

Reminder: we meet back here, same bat time, same bat channel, on Monday 3/16/15 to discuss Book 8 Laestrygonians. For all you who didn’t read The Odyssey, the Laestrygonians are the giant cannibals, so it will probably not be boring, and starts off with these delicious words:

Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. (151)

The schedule for the rest (never too late to join–we’re only at page 150!)

3/16/15 discuss and tweet section 8
3/23/15 discuss and tweet section 9
3/30/15 discuss and tweet section 10
4/6/15 discuss and tweet section 11
4/13/15 discuss and tweet section 12
4/20/15 discuss and tweet section 13
4/27/15 discuss and tweet section 14
(3 weeks to read the very long section 15 which we’ll spit into three chunks)
5/18/15 read, then discuss and tweet section 15
5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

For reference, here are the past posts:

Ulysses readalong week 1, books 1 and 2
Ulysses readalong week 2, books 3 and 4
Ulysses readalong week 3, books 5 and 6

Welcome back, fellow fearless Ulysses readers!

I was away for a long weekend at a yoga/writing/meditation retreat, so while I read 5 & 6 once, I don’t yet feel up to commenting much on them.

Book 5: The Lotus Eaters. Leopold Bloom wanders around, gets mail under an assumed name, Henry Flowers, and sits in a church.

Book 6: Hades. Bloom and Dedalus and others are in a coach on the way to Dignam’s funeral and Bloom muses about death and dying.

I’m off to read the notes before giving them a second read. Wilson Varga also suggested on Twitter checking out Joseph Campbell’s commentary in this: https://t.co/ZQ4NT5Bgnc.

What did everyone else think? I like spending time with Bloom, and think Joyce tried to scare us off with the esoterica of book 3.

Edited later to add:

After re-reading, I was struck particularly by the number of allusions to flowers in ‘The Lotus Eaters’. The first time I read the chapter I thought Bloom was having an affair of the flesh, but he’s only exchanging naughty letters. I also thought that the bath at the end of the chapter was taking place, not something he was thinking about. I am glad for the notes to set me straight on what is actually happening versus what is only being thought about.

Poor Bloom, who is figuratively cock-blocked by McCoy, first from reading his sexy letter and then from ogling the woman across the street.

In ‘Hades’ I was most struck by the whiplash point-of-view shifts. We go from Bloom interacting with this friends, to his stream of consciousness, to people talking about him, and in and out again. This echoes Odysseus’ trip to Hades, when he was swarmed by ghosts of the dead, and finally had to run away from the many, many voices clamoring to tell their story. I wondered: why does Martin Cunningham always get referred to both by first and last name?

I find the last sentence curious. Taken out of context it sounds positive:

Thank you. How grand we are this morning.

But since Bloom is repeating John Henry Menton’s snubbing words of him (leaving Bloom ‘chapfallen’ rather than crestfallen, wonderful wordplay), it’s a sad, bitter twist of sarcasm to a chapter that had some humor, but a great deal of sadness for Bloom: thinking of his father’s suicide, his father’s dog Athos (a mirror of Odysseus’ dog Argos), his dead son Rudy, his friend’s anti-Semitism and exclusion of him. Yet Bloom, unlike Stephen Dedalus (who is seen in passing from the carriage window by the men including his father Simon), who seems more weighted with depression, though with far less baggage than Bloom has. Bloom, to me, seems as if he was float, like his languid floating flower at the end of ‘The Lotus Eaters’ and his memory of the image of a person floating in the Dead Sea.

For the reading of Ulysses in general, this approach is still working for me:

1. read chapters quickly for big chunks of events.
2. skim the notes in Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated in order to get a sense of the bigger picture but not the tiny bits of Dublin street furniture like who really existed where, and what things were actually in the paper.
3. read the summary of the chapters at schmoop.com
4. re-read the chapters more slowly.

This is time consuming and multi-stepped, but the read->research->re-read has me feeling as if I’m sorta kinda getting it which is actually pretty exhilarating.

How is everyone else feeling? Exhilarated and floating, or weighed down? What is your reading pattern and is it working for you?

(image from the 1967 film, the re-release reviewed here)

Hello, fellow Ulysses readers. You still with me? I’m not sure I am still with me. I read books 3 and 4, pushing through, fighting sleep, feeling like I understood maybe one word in 100, and those were the ones about snot, boobs, ogling, and poop.

And yet, and yet, I will not give up.

I will edit and lengthen this entry once I do some more research, but for now, let’s get this discussion started.

Chapter 3: Stephen walks on the beach, thinks a lot, and sees a dead dog, then leaves a booger on a rock.

Chapter 4: We meet our protagonist, Leopold Bloom, who is a man who likes his brekkie, and even better, takes care to make a good brekkie for Molly, who is still abed. He likes to eat organ meat, and is kinda pervey, as we learn when he follows a woman out of the butcher shop in order to ogle her. The chapter ends with him having a bowel movement.

Seriously. It is very clear why people give up on this novel. BUT I WILL PERSEVERE. There is lovely language, poetry, but if it doesn’t mean anything, or doesn’t mean anything to me, is it worth it?

Help me to understand, kind readers. What did everyone else think?

EDITED TO ADD: I have now skimmed the Gibbons annotations for 3 and 4, re-read the chapters, plus read the summaries and analyses (starting here) of them at schmoop.com. I feel guilty about the latter, as it seems like it’s cheating, as it’s a Cliffs Notes-y site, and yet, I enjoy their commentary and learn from it, so it floats my boat. Like Wikipedia, though, I take it with grains of salt–I have found some errors in it.

What I’ve learned about book 3: Proteus. Like the god it’s named for, this is a slippery chapter, and Stephen’s mind can’t hold onto one thought for very long. For this entire book, he walks on a beach and thinks. He does not visit relatives, he just imagines what would happen if he did, and what they would say about him. He does not visit a man named Egan, he remembers spending time with him in London. In short, Stephen is brilliant, easily distracted, lonely, isolated, and up in his head.

My favorite line of poetic prose was

These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here.

I think this is iambic heptameter, with alternating stresses, which is why it was fun to repeat aloud. (I had a crap American education in English, it was really light on poetry.)

Book 4, Calypso, stars the hero, Leopold Bloom, who is Jewish and Irish and fears his Molly is having an affair. He’s an earthy guy. The book starts:

Leopold Bloom ate with religh the inner organs of beasts and fowls.

Leopold is a funny guy. He talks to his cat, ogles the neighbor girl, worries about his daughter, and does not keep kosher, witness his pork kidney. Unlike Stephen, Leopod (or, Poldy), is whimsical and clever, but not intellectual, and attached to bodily, not theoretical things. The chapter ends with him having a bowel movement, and it was apparently this, not hot sex scenes, that were part of the outrage and accusation of obscenity when it was released. Also in this chapter, we get the first mention of a potato at 4.73 (57:2), which Gibbon’s notes:

A talisman, symbolic of the continuity of life and, in Jewish tradition, a central dish in the ritual meal after a funeral. The potato is also a reminder of the staple food of the Irish peasant and of the potato blight that triggered the famine.

As in books 1 and 2, we continue to see themes of Irish independence, Dublin “street furniture” (or myriad details about Dublin at the time), and anti-semitism.

Book 3 threw me for a loop this week, but I feel back on solid ground again after the Bloom chapter. My approach of reading, skimming annotations, re-reading, and supplementing with summary and analysis feels like a good one, if time consuming. But then, no one ever said it would be a quick read.

Sorry for lateness of edited post. Hope this helps/entertains.

Whose idea was this Ulysses readalong? I don’t think it was mine. I think somehow I just got swept up in someone else’s idea, ‘Yeah, let’s read Ulysses, what a great idea!’ and then made a schedule because I was avoiding something else, and told people about it, and got some friends interested, and now here I am, on the first date of the schedule, committed to writing something about Ulysses.

In the words of Anastasia Steele, she of the blockbuster weekend, Holy crap, people.

I started to read. Lo, and behold, what people told me was true: IT’S HARD!

I clutched my head and moaned. What did I sign up for? I’m no English major. I was a business major as an undergrad! Marketing, for heaven’s sake. I’m in no way qualified for this. WHAT WAS I THINKING?

And then several kind people on Twitter assured me, in large friendly letters: DON’T PANIC. Just read. Appreciate the words. Don’t fret about what you don’t know. It will be legion. Don’t get lost in annotations. Joyce meant it to be difficult. But he also meant it to be funny, and naughty, a riff on Homer’s Odyssey, and on Hamlet as well. I just finished The Odyssey, and found it not just accessible, but a thumping good read as well. I know Hamlet. I CAN DO THIS!

I read the first two books, then skimmed the annotations so as not to drown in them, then waited a few days, and read the two books again. The language is beautiful, the allusions plentiful, and the humor bawdy. Here, there is treasure, if I can brave the dragons Joyce planted throughout this deliberately challenging, boundary-pushing work of art.

I’m unsure how best to post about the books as we read them. Summarizing them would be long, and has been done elsewhere. I found the summaries of the books at Schmoop to be decent and readable: Book one: Telemachus and Book Two: Nestor.

Instead I’ll try super-short recaps, and what I noticed and appreciated. Let me know if this works, or or you want more, or less, by chiming in with comments. Comments don’t appear immediately. I have to moderate them so we don’t get slammed with spam.

from http://ulyssesseen.com/

Book One, Telemachus. Just as The Odyssey starts off with Telemachus rather than Odysseus, Ulysses begins with Stephen Dedalus rather than Leopold Bloom. He’s living in a tower with two men, Malachi “Buck” Mulligan, and Haines (which means ‘hate’ in French). It’s not long before we get the famous ’stream of consciousness’ for which Ulysses is known:

Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack, hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too. (p. 6 Vintage 1990)

Book Two: Nestor. Stephen is off to work as a teacher. The headmaster, Mr. Deasy, is an anti-semite and know-it-all who thinks he has the solution to hoof-and-mouth disease. Deasy is unpleasant, yet the last sentence of the book is about him, and poetic and lovely:

On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins. (p. 36 Vintage 1990)

Who is reading along? Introduce yourself in the comments, or tweet along with the hashtag #TCUlysses. TC is for Twin Cities, where this discussion starts but I hope is not limited to.

What did everyone else think?

Schedule:

2/16/15 discuss and tweet sections 1, 2
2/23/15 discuss and tweet sections 3, 4
3/2/15 discuss and tweet sections 5, 6
3/9/15 discuss and tweet section 7
3/16/15 discuss and tweet section 8
3/23/15 discuss and tweet section 9
3/30/15 discuss and tweet section 10
4/6/15 discuss and tweet section 11
4/13/15 discuss and tweet section 12
4/20/15 discuss and tweet section 13
4/27/15 discuss and tweet section 14
(3 week break to read the very long section 15)
5/18/15 read, then discuss and tweet section 15
5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16
(extra week to read the longer section 17)
6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17
6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18
6/16/15 Bloomsday!

We haven’t even begun the discussion of James Joyce’s Ulysses (that starts Monday 2/16), and already there are tons of resources kind people are recommending.

You can follow along on Twitter with the hashtag #TCUlysses (the TC is for Twin Cities)

A general article on How to Read Ulysses:

http://biblioklept.org/2010/06/16/how-to-read-james-joyces-ulysses-and-why-you-should-avoid-how-to-guides-like-this-one/

A key to chapter-less editions of Ulysses:

http://11ysses.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/18-nameless-episodes-of-ulysses-a-new-key/

A user-friendly free annotated edition of Ulysses from Columbia University:

http://www.columbia.edu/~fms5/ulys.htm

The annotations are adapted from Gifford’s Annotated Ulysses (notes only, not the text), which most regard as the standard, with additional notes from Harry Blamires’ New Bloomsday Book

A free audio recording, helpful for pronunciation:

https://archive.org/details/Ulysses-Audiobook

Infinite Ulysses, here, which might be putting together a giant crowd-generated online resource, but I’m not sure I’ve got the details of the project right but in any case, looks really cool:

http://www.infiniteulysses.com/

Other recommended resources:

James Joyce’s Ulysses, a study by Stuart Gilbert

Allusions in Ulysses by Weldon Thornton

Ulysses on the Liffey by Richard Ellmann

Reading Joyce’s Ulysses by Daniel R. Schwartz

The New Bloomsday Book by Blamires

The Chronicle of Leopold and Molly Bloom
Joseph Campbell’s Mythic Worlds, Modern Words

The Ulysses group readalong is happening! Read and tweet from February to Bloomsday (June 16) 2015, and I’ll blog about it here. We’ll tweet with the hashtag #TCUlysses

Twin Cities readers can celebrate when we’re done with a meetup at Anchor Fish and Chips. (I wouldn’t be opposed to weekly meetings there, either, though my cholesterol might.)

2/9/15 Start Ulysses which has 18 parts of various lengths

2/16/15 discuss and tweet sections 1, 2= 32 pp
2/23/15 discuss and tweet sections 3, 4=29 pp
3/2/15 discuss and tweet sections 5, 6=40 pp
3/9/15 discuss and tweet section 7=29pp
3/16/15 discuss and tweet section 8=28pp
3/23/15 discuss and tweet section 9=30pp
3/30/15 section 10=31 pp
4/6/15 section 11=31pp
4/13/15 section 12=45pp
4/20/15 section 13=31pp
4/27/15 section 14=37pp

5/4-5/18/15 read, then discuss and tweet section 15 (150 pages in my ed.)

5/25/15 discuss and tweet section 16=44pp

6/1-6/8/15 read then discuss and tweet section 17 (65 pp in my edition)

6/15/15 discuss and tweet section 18=37pp

6/16/15 Bloomsday!

Group meetup and celebration to follow at the Anchor Fish & Chips in NE Minneapolis.

I’ve never even attempted this behemoth—too intimidating. But I’m ready to give it a go, and looking forward to the support of a group while reading. Let me know if you have questions. I hope you’ll join us.