I found the moment Mr. Deasy is standing in the light shaft caught up by his own supposed “enlightenment” such a wonderful way to portrait his own darkness blindness.

Also, for those who recently read Zealot with me, how about those “Hellenise” suggestions and the quote about how complex the statement of “render unto Caesar” is–did those remind you of Zealot too, and give you a little dizziness of book groups crossing?

Funny line (page 6 in my edition): “He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers.”

Moby-Dick parallels? Sort of? Page 7 in my text, “… like the snout of a sleeping whale.” But good ol’ M-D- was never sleeping…

In section one, there was an interesting repetition of the word plump–one of the first words of section one and again in the last few paragraphs of section one. Not sure of the meaning for this, but it’s an interesting observation.

And wise words of the day: “Life is the great teacher.” (page 35 in my text)

I know I’ve wanted to read Ulysses for a long time so I’m fairly certain I was one in the chorus of people saying YES! to this scheme.

First: stuff I’ve found helpful/delightful.
1) that wikihow article Amy shared: http://m.wikihow.com/Read-Ulysses It gets cuts right to the heart of the academic elitism and snobbery surrounding the reading of Joyce’s masterwork and says, in essence, “Screw that. Have fun w/ this book because it’s a hoot.” And guess what? They’re RIGHT. There are some terrific summaries of the sections in terms of theme, how written, etc. that really demystify this intimidating tome. Bookmark it if you haven’t alre done so.
2) The schema Joyce himself drew up as helps to his pals Carlo Linati http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linati_schema_for_Ulysses and Stuart Gilbert http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_schema_for_Ulysses These are great for picking out themes, characters, structure; even colours (hey, was Joyce a synesthete?). I love these schema so much I devoted a handy little notebook to them.
3) Keep a notebook. No, really. If there’s stuff that puzzles you jot it down. Don’t break the flow of Joyce’s wonderful words (and they really are wonderful). Look it all up later as Kristin has done in annotations or Wikipedia or Google it. How fun is it to learn that Joyce (”Stephen”) himself lived for a brief time in a decommissioned military tower overlooking the sea? The rabbitholes are there to explore and delight. Have an adventure!

Thoughts on this week’s reading:
Episode 1 - Telemachus was more enjoyable for me than Episode 2 - Nestor. I’m a sucker for a seaside setting and how gorgeous is a description like “…wave white wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.” [Modern Library, 1946, p. 11]. The passage about the elderly milkmaid took my breath away with its beauty and Mulligan’s bawdy songs made me LOL (oh hey, guess what again, the real life person Mulligan is based on, one Oliver St. John Gogarty, also was infamous for bawdy verse. And he rented Martello Tower in Sandycove. Google it!). You really do have to read some of this stuff aloud for full effect. Try “A horde of heresies fleeing with mitres awry: ” [ML p. 22].

Episode 2 was a bit tougher going so I just decided to relax and enjoy that flow of words. Again, read some aloud. My favorite passage from this episode is on pp. 28-9 of the Modern Library edition: “A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped.” Truly. Gorgeous stuff.

Thoroughly enjoying the odyssey,
“heideland”