How to use this Page

Given what I learned in a little research last week about why Ulysses was banned, and that this week I was going to be reading that episode, episode 13, Nausicaa, I expected fireworks. I got fireworks. Really, there are fireworks that go off at a particular moment. You know the moment, the one where in old movies when the couple is kissing they cut away to ocean waves, waterfalls, rockets, and um, fireworks.

One expects that if a book is tried for obscenity that there would be something obscene in it. But honestly, a 22-year-old girl woman showing some thigh and Bloom playing pocket pool until the fireworks go off, well, it isn’t very shocking. Illicitly reading the first chapter of Judy Blume’s Wifey when you’re 12 and your mom is away at the grocery store and might be home any minute is more shocking as are many books since then. Different time, different values, right?

So most of the chapter is told from the point of view of Gerty, the girl who shows some thigh. She is sitting on some rocks at the beach with a couple of girlfriends and down the way a little sits Bloom. Gerty is a pretty girl and dressed up special in hopes that the boy she likes would see her. But she caught Bloom’s eye instead. She sees him looking at her and they carry on a bit of a flirtation with looks. Gerty gets bold and starts swinging her feet a little so Bloom can see the buckles on her shoes as well as a little ankle.

Gerty starts imagining that Bloom has fallen in love with her and that he will marry her and she will make him a good wife. And on and on her imagination runs, building a life and family with Bloom. Gerty’s friends have no idea what is going on. They are distracted by Cissy’s younger siblings who were brought along and are running around making a general nuisance of themselves.

But finally it is getting late and Cissy, who has noticed Bloom and keeps trying to catch his eye and flirt, runs over to him to ask the time. Bloom, afraid the jig is up, quickly pulls his hands out of his pockets. Cissy has no clue what is going on. When she returns back to her group, Bloom puts his hands back in his pockets and resumes his work.

As Cissy and the other friend are packing up to leave the beach, a few fireworks are shot up. They go running with the children to get a better view but Gerty stays on her rock and Bloom doesn’t budge either. As the fireworks display progresses, so does the display Gerty gives Bloom, lifting her knee so he can see more of her leg and then leaning back, back, back to better view the fireworks of course. Bloom gets a look right up her skirt to her knickers and, queue fireworks finale.

Then we switch from Gerty’s point of view and the rest of the chapter is back with Bloom as he leaves the beach and thinks about Gerty and Molly and Martha (his epistolary affair) and sex and his now sticky shirt that is cold against his stomach, and a few other things.

Oh, and while Gerty and Bloom are on the beach there is a mass being said in the church just up from them, a mass for the blessed Virgin, and they can pretty much hear the whole thing down on the beach. And Gerty’s part of the narrative is a sort of parody, as is her name, of a book called The Lamplighter by Maria Cummins, a sentimental novel published in 1854 that was an immediate bestseller.

Are you hot and bothered? Offended? Me either. I found the chapter to be both funny and sad. The funny is probably not too hard to guess at. The sad, well that would take a whole other blog post so you will just have to read the book for yourself to find out what I mean.

This being Banned Books Week, it is only appropriate that I am reading Ulysses by James Joyce. Prior to the book being published, it was serialized beginning in 1922 in The Little Review, a Chicago-based literary magazine. All was going well until the Nausicaa episode (chapter 13) was published. It contains a masturbation scene.

In 1933, Random House owned the rights to publish the entire book in the United States and arranged to import a French edition which would be seized by U.S. Custom officials when it arrived. It was not immediately seized but eventually it was. The Assistant U.S. Attorney took seven months to decide to prosecute for obscenity. The case, United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses,” can be read online as well as the appeal. The judge in the case decided the the book was neither pornographic nor obscene and the decision was upheld in appeal.

It would have been really awesome if I had the Nausicaa episode to talk about today. I would have if I had managed to finish episode 12 last week. But sometimes life encroaches on reading time and there is no help for it.

So this week is episode 12, “Cyclops.” It was not well-served to have had to break it up over two weekends, but it was still a good chapter. The narrator of the episode is unnamed as is another character we know simply as “the Citizen.” Recall in the Odyssey that Odysseus told the cyclops, Polyphemus, that his name was “Noman.” So when Odysseus blinded the cyclops and the other cyclopses (cyclopi?) called out what’s the matter, Polyphemus yelled that he’d been ruined by “Noman” and none of the others came to his aid. There is no cyclops or blinding in the chapter but the Citizen, a staunch Fenian and anti-Semite, is blinded by prejudice. The Citizen is goaded by Bloom at the end as Bloom leaves the pub and reminds him that the Citizen’s Savior was Jewish. The Citizen throws a biscuit at Bloom’s head and misses.

What is the most interesting thing about this chapter is that it has 33 passages interrupting the narrative. These passages are all parody, written in the style of medieval romance, Irish legend, newspaper accounts, legal documents, etc. Sometimes a passage will comment on the section that came immediately before it. Sometimes it restates it. And sometimes is continues the narrative.

As an example, our group of men are sitting round their table, drinking their pints and the Citizen is reading out the births and deaths from the newspaper. In comes Little Alf Bergan, Bob Doran in his bath slippers, and Doran’s wife, “an unfortunate wretched woman trotting like a poodle.” Here is the parody of their entrance in the style of 19th century translations of Irish myth and legend:

And lo, as they quaffed their cup of joy, a godlike messenger came swiftly in, radiant as the eye of heaven, a comely youth, and behind him there passed an elder of noble gait and countenance, bearing the sacred scrolls of law, and with him his lady wife, a dame of peerless lineage, fairest of her race.

As you can imagine, the parodies are frequently quite funny and I liberally scrawled “ha!” in the margins of the book.

The parodies made a chapter in which nothing really happens other then men sitting around drinking and arguing, into good entertainment. Breaking it over two weeks caused me to lose the thread in the middle and have to backtrack a bit, which made me grumpy, but it ended on a good note. Next week, we’ll see just how “o

Once again Joyce leaps out into the wondrous in Episode 11, Sirens. What else would a chapter called Sirens be about but singing, temptation, music, sex and farts? The first two pages of the episode had me mightily worried. It is fragment after fragment and none of it made sense but somehow my annotation book had references for every line and I’m thinking, am I so stupid that I am missing something? How does Mr. Gifford of the annotations know that “jingle jingle jaunted jingling” is Mr. Boylan arriving at the hotel in his carriage? I had momentary flashbacks to a fiction survey class my freshman year at college in which we read Joyce’s story “Araby” and the professor, a former Marine, took great pride in humiliating every one of us for missing most of the references in the story. If there were such a thing as English literature bootcamp, that professor would have made the perfect drill sergeant.

I could feel a Joyce panic-attack coming on, something that has not struck me thus far and that I thought I had gotten over because I am falling in love with him. But you always hurt the ones you love, right? Wait, not quite. But I found myself wailing in despair, “Joyce! Joyce! How could you do this to me? I have embraced you and now, you toss my half-eaten bones upon the rocks like the Sirens!”

Ok, maybe that’s a bit melodramatic but I have been reading old-timey gothic fiction lately so it seems quite natural. Good thing I didn’t faint though because I have no smelling salts on hand.

It turns out the chapter is written in the style of a fugue according to rule, which is the old-fashioned name for what we simply call a canon. I Have no musical background whatsoever, and even after reading about it I don’t understand it. I do know that all those fragments in the beginning of the episode are meant to serve as an introduction to the rest of the piece. They do get picked up throughout the chapter, sometimes they are exact matches, sometimes the sentence is slightly different, sometimes the fragment turned out itself to be made of fragments. I can kind of see the musical underpinnings to it, or what I imagine them to be. But while I enjoy listening to Mozart or Bach or the like from time to time, music to me is kind of like someone going to a museum and liking Van Gogh’s Sunflowers because their favorite color is yellow.

While I appreciated the structure of this chapter, what I enjoyed most was the sound of the words. Every page or so there was a little paragraph that made me smile and read it again. A paragraph like this one, for instance:

Miss Kennedy sauntered sadly from bright light, twining a loose hair behind an ear. Sauntering sadly, gold no more, she twisted twined a hair. Sadly she twined in sauntering gold hairs behind a curving ear.

Miss Kennedy is one of the two barmaids in this chapter. She and Miss Douce serve the men their food and drink and flirt shamelessly:

Smack. She let free sudden in rebound her nipped elastic garter smackwarm against her smackable woman’s warmhosed thigh

A group of men, among them Simon Dedalus, Stephen Dedalus’s father, are playing the piano and singing. Leopold Bloom is eating and writes a short letter to Martha, a woman with whom he seems to be conducting an epistolary affair that is moving towards non-espistolary consummation. But the singing also reminds him of his wife, Molly. And he kind of blends them both in his mind as he starts thinking about sex:

Bloom. Flood of warm jimjam lickitup seretness flowed to flow in music out, in desire, dark to lick flow, invading. Tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her. Tup. Pores to dilate dilating. Tup. The joy the feel the warm the. Tup. To pour o’er sluices pouring gushes. Flood, gush, flow, joygush, tupthrop. Now! Language of love.

My oh my. Is

I just realized this week that I am halfway through Ulysses. Not halfway by page count but halfway by chapter count. Over halfway really since this week is Episode 10. There are 18 episodes. Since there still seems to be more pages before me than behind me, however, I suspect that some of the chapters ahead of me are going to be getting longer. I’ll worry about that later. In the meantime, there is episode 10 to consider.

This episode is also known as “The Wandering Rocks.” In the Odyssey Odysseus never sees the wandering rocks. Circe tells him he can choose his path between Scylla and Charybdis or try his luck with the wandering rocks. However, no one but Jason in the Argo has made it through the wandering rocks successfully and he only did it because he had the help of Hera. Odysseus can’t rely on any help from the gods so he goes the Scylla and Charybdis route. Nonetheless, we have a wandering rocks chapter in Ulysses. It seems to act as a sort of interlude as nothing really goes on in it but various characters we’ve met in the previous episodes going about their business. We could say they are wandering but none of them are really wandering, they are all walking about the streets with a destination in mind more or less. The reader wanders from scene to scene but the reader is directed by the narrative and the narrative is so tightly and intricately constructed that it can’t be called wandering. Maybe it doesn’t matter who is wandering and who isn’t.

What does matter is how fantastic this chapter is. Because writing and reading is linear, we can only follow one character or group of characters in one location at any given time. But what if an author wants us to know what Stephen, Bloom, and a bunch of other people, are doing all at the same time? Joyce sets out to do just that and pulls it off brilliantly.

The episode begins as we follow Father Conmee, walking down the street, thinking and looking about him, engaging people he knows in conversation, making observations about individuals he sees on the street. Then the narration changes and all that follows is broken into sections. Each section is a different person out on the street. Father Conmee maybe saw that person, or the person could have been seen by one of the other people the narration follows in a different section. In almost all of these sections is one or more intrusion, which, sometimes if I wasn’t paying attention I’d go right by and wouldn’t even notice. Other times, the intrusion is such a non sequitur that I had to notice. These intrusions serve the purpose of placing the section in time with other sections. Sometimes the intrusion refers to a section that happens later in the episode. Sometimes it refers to a section that I had already read.

Does that make sense? Let me try an example. In one section, a character is walking down the street and sees a figure hunched over a book cart looking through books outside a bookseller. It is Leopold Bloom. Then several sections later we are with Bloom as he is looking through the books on the cart. The same sentence that was the intrusion in the section also appears in Bloom’s section.

Then there are some characters who don’t get their own section but turn up to be noticed in various sections throughout the episode. Like the four men wearing sandwich boards advertising a stationery shop. Or the marvelous Mr. Denis J. Maginnis, professor of dancing, &c., who recalls the character of Mr. Turveydrop in Bleak House, also a dancing master and known for his deportment. Here is Mr. Maginni walking down the street

in silk hat, slate frockcoat with silk facings, white kerchief tie, tight lavender trousers, canary yellow gloves and pointed patent boots, walking with grave deportment most respectfully took the curbstone as he passed lady Maxwell at the corner of Digman’s court.

What an outfit, eh? Wilkie Collins and his b

Episode nine is also called “Scylla and Charybdis” and I can tell you I felt like I was trying to navigate between the two. My Scylla took the deadly form of the book of annotations I have to help me through Ulysses. In chapter 9 Stephen goes to the library and has a long discussion and debate with the two librarians and his friend Mulligan (appearing mid-chapter) about Plato and Aristotle and Shakespeare and the literary references flew hard and fast. So, do I hew to Scylla’s cliffs, the annotation book, and risk killing the pleasure of the chapter with constant referring to the notes so I could follow all of the references and thus, most of the discussion? Or do I ignore Scylla and risk being sucked into Charybdis’ whirlpool of dizzying confusion because I didn’t know what was going on? Like Odysseus, I chose to stay close to Scylla’s cliffs. It didn’t totally ruin the chapter but a few of my crew were eaten.

References in the chapter are made to pretty much every single play Shakespeare wrote as well as his sonnets and other poems. However, the majority of the Shakespeare references were to Hamlet since part of the discussion was about fathers and sons and Hamlet being Shakespeare’s real son Hamnet. All the Shakespeare references were pretty overwhelming and it didn’t take me long to realize that what I thought was a pretty good grounding in the works of the Bard from past study was pretty much only a speck of dust. Note to self: when the day comes that I read Ulysses again, make a careful reading of Hamlet first and do a plot refresher of the other plays.

But Shakespeare references weren’t the only literary allusions flying about. As I said, there was also Aristotle and Plato and Socrates via Plato since Socrates never wrote anything down. There was also Goethe, Walt Whitman, Greek myths, Oscar Wilde, William Blake, Milton, Swinburne, Shelley, Boccaccio, Yeats, Dante, Freud, Marlowe, Ben Johnson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Robert Burns, Emerson, Browning, and loads of others that I didn’t bother writing down because I was getting tired.

All of this swirling around in discussion about, among other things, Shakespeare’s love life and suspicions about why he left Anne Hathaway his second best bed and not the first best. She was his wife after all. There are also loads of puns and playing with the names of the two librarians. And Stephen, who earlier in the book seemed all quiet and shy and had moments of self-doubt about his writing ability, suddenly becomes another person, extemporizing theories about Shakespeare and engaging in some witty repartee.

I would have liked to read the chapter again, passing once more between Scylla and Charybdis and, as Odysseus did the second time through, take my chances with Charybdis. But it took me a couple hours to get through 30 pages and I was exhausted afterwards so I will just have to let it go and move on.

Another longish Ulysses chapter. I guess at this point I should stop being surprised when they are long and just expect them to be. By long I mean 25-35 pages. Because I am reading so slowly and carefully it takes me a good three or more hours to read 25+ pages. I didn’t take that into consideration and didn’t leave myself enough time to read the whole thing in one sitting this week. I managed all but about 5 pages in one sitting, but I was still a little disappointed that I had to break it up. I will plan my time better going forward and if the chapter ends up being short then I just have extra time to read something else.

This week I read episode 8, Lestrygonions. This chapter refers to Book 10 in the Odyssey when Odysseus’ ship lands at the island of the – wait for it – Lestrygonions! The king it turns out happens to be a giant and a cannibal but the wily Odysseus doesn’t fall into the trap.

There is no cannibalism in Ulysses but there is lots of eating and food references. In fact, this chapter would make a nice study for Emily’s disgust project. To wit:

Wretched brutes there at the cattlemarket waiting for the poleaxe to split their skulls open. Moo. Poor trembling calves. Meh. Staggering bob. Bubble and squeak. Butcher’s buckets wobble lights. Give us that brisket off the hook. Plup. Rawhead and bloody bones. Flayed glasseyed sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered sniveling nosejam on sawdust.

And this comes a little over halfway through the chapter after several other unappetizing food scenes. The reason for all the food and eating is that it is lunchtime and Bloom is hungry and he is walking through the streets trying figure out where to stop and eat. He is so grossed out by one place he enters that he turns around and goes back out. He sees someone coming out of “the vegetarian” and thinks about what that means:

Only weggebobbles and fruit. Don’t eat a beefsteak. If you do the eyes of that cow will pursue you through all eternity. They say it’s healthier. Wind and watery though. Tried it. Keep you on the run all day. Bad as a bloater. Dreams all night. Why so they call that thing they gave me nutsteak? Nutarians. Fruitarians. To give you the idea you are eating rumpsteak. Absurd. [...]

I wouldn’t be surprised if it was that kind of food you see produces the like waves of the brain the poetical. For example one of those policemen sweating Irish stew into their shirts; you couldn’t squeeze a line of poetry out of him.

Heh. The funny thing is, that by the time Bloom finds a quiet pub to have lunch in the only thing he can stomach is a cheese sandwich.

There are two curious scenes as Bloom walks along. First, he sees a poor child dressed in rags who is obviously hungry. All he does is look and pity. But not long after he passes the child he is walking along the quay where hungry sea gulls are screeching and flying about looking for food. He stops and buys two Banbury cakes for a penny, crumbles then up, and tosses them out to the gulls.

There is much humor in this chapter too. And puns. and wordplay. There is a pun on “Ham and his descendants” (that would be Noah’s Ham but it is said in reference to ham with mustard). And wordplay (“Do ptake some ptarmigan”). There is also Bloom musing on birth and death and how things don’t ever really change. And when Bloom steps out of the pub and goes around back to relieve himself, the few men in the pub have a conversation about him. We slip from Bloom’s head and stay in the pub to hear the conversation speculating about whether he is a Freemason.

It was a good chapter. I alternated between laughing and writing “ha!” in the margins to wrinkling up my nose and writing “yuck!

Episode seven of Ulysses was another long one, 34 pages in my edition. I like to read each episode in one sitting because it seems best to do it that way, more flow and continuity. But it takes so much concentration and energy that I had a small worry at about page 25 that I might not have the endurance to make it. Somehow I did it though and my brain was shot for several hours afterwards.

Pretty much all of this chapter takes place in an office of the Telegraph. I am not certain if everyone sitting around shooting the breeze actually works there or not. Bloom is there at the beginning and he seems to be their advertisement salesman. He rushes out to get an ad approved and paid for by the company that placed it.

While he is away, Stephen Dedalus shows up with the opinion piece written by the headmaster of the school where he teaches, the piece that Mr. Deasy gave him in episode two. While he’s there he gets drawn into the conversation of the men sitting around the office and the editor asks him if he will write something for the paper. Stephen is quite gratified and excited at the prospect but then seems to immediately begin worrying that he won’t be able to do it right. Ah, writers with low self-esteem, gotta love ‘em.

The really interesting thing about this chapter is that it is written with paragraph headers like news headlines. For instance, when we enter the Telegraph offices the headline reads: GENTLEMEN OF THE PRESS. Bloom still has the bar of soap he used for his bath in an earlier episode in his pocket. The brief scene in which he takes out his handkerchief to dab at his nose and it smells like Citron-lemon soap is called: ONLY ONCE MORE THAT SOAP. The scene in which the editor asks Stephen to write something for the paper is headlined: YOU CAN DO IT! I got a good laugh from that one. There are a good number of hilarious headlines toward the end of the episode that have to do with “two Dublin vestals” climbing to the top of Nelson’s pillar for the views after having saved up the admission price. There are innuendos about big columns and the fact that Nelson lost an arm and so is “onehandled” and whether, onehandled, he can satisfy the two “vestals.”

There is much hilarity in the newsroom itself as well with jokes and a bit of slapstick and word games and what not. Under the headline ORTHOGRAPHICAL, one of the paragraphs goes like this (read it out loud for best effect):

Want to be sure of his spelling . Proof fever. Martin Cunningham forgot to give us his spellingbee conundrum this morning. It is amusing to view the unpar one ar alleled embarra two ars is it? double ess ment of a harassed pedlar while gauging au the symmetry of a peeled pear under a cemetery wall. Silly, isn’t it? Cemetery put in of course on account of the symmetry.

Heh. There is also a great bit under the headline the GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME about cloacæ, sewers, waterclosets. It is hilarious and brilliant and unfortunately is too long to quote so you will have to take my word for it.

Something else that struck me about this chapter is that it is mostly in the third person. In all the other chapters we’ve been in either Stephen’s or Bloom’s head with no outside perspective and here, we are on the outside with only an occasional slip in behind their eyes.

Just when I though Joyce had settled into something regular for the rest of the book he goes and tosses out a surprise. It was quite a delightful surprise. I am looking forward to finding out what else he might have hidden up his sleeve!

Hey Kids! What time is it? It’s Howdy Doody time! No, not really. This being Monday it is Ulysses update time. But first, did anyone watch Howdy Doody as a kid? It was one of my favorite TV shows. My sister hated it because, puppets, which were almost as bad as clowns. And just so you know, I watched it in reruns because when it first aired on TV I wasn’t even a twinkle in my mother’s eye. Heck, I do believe my mother watched the show when she was a kid. None of this has anything to do with Ulysses, so onward and to the book.

This week I read episode six, also known as Hades. I discovered that what I thought last week was the funeral mass and funeral was not and so I am uncertain why Bloom stopped off in a church before having his bath. How do I know I was mistaken? Because in this chapter it is crystal clear that Bloom is attending a funeral. He rides in a carriage to the cemetery and among the other occupants of the carriage is Stephen Dedalus’ father. And of course they see Stephen along the way and Stephen’s father says some not nice things about him. But his father, being a not very nice man, says some not very nice things on other topics besides his son so he’s an equal opportunity meany.

Like any funeral, those attending talk about the deceased and the deceased’s family, look at and comment on who else is attending, tell stories about the deceased as well as unrelated stories, and tell off-color jokes. But most of all, the mind wanders to thoughts of life and death.

Bloom’s mind wanders back and forth, thinking about the death of his and Molly’s eleven-day-old baby, thinking about the suicide of his father who was in ill health to begin with, thinking about what happens to the body after death and to the life that inhabited the body. Bloom also wonders at the cost of a funeral and if it wouldn’t be better for funerals to be less of an affair so the money could be spent on helping the living. He also wonders about being buried alive by accident.

Bloom also thinks about sex. He still has the letter he got from the post office in the previous chapter in his pocket and he has a moment of concern that he left it somewhere by accident.

There are quite a few beautiful scenes and images in the chapter. One of my favorites is after the funeral is over and the gravediggers have finished filling in the grave:

The gravediggers put on their caps and carried their earthy spade towards the barrow. Then knocked the blades lightly on the turf: clean. One bent to pluck from the haft a tuft of grass. One, leaving his mates, walked slowly on with his shouldered weapon, its blade blueglancing. Silently at the gravehead another coiled the coffinband. His navelcord.

I love the coffinband being called a navelcord, as though we are born into life and then born again into death. And in a sense we are and what a beautiful and subtle way to signify it.

And now for a joke (couched in a serious thought) that I have never heard before and so it cracked me up:

The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job.

Get it? Come forth and he came fifth? Hah! Hey, I never claimed to have a highbrow sense of humor.

This chapter is the longest one so far. Up until now they’ve been about 15 pages but this one was 25. But it was oh so good. All the images, all the thoughts on life and death, all the memories and the events happening at the moment bouncing around together, running into each other, leading the narrative this way and that. It really is marvelous the way it all progresses in such a meandering way. The initial orienting myself is over and I feel as though I have settled in to the book and am really enjoying the journey. That’s a good thing because

First, hooray I have Internet again!

Now, down to business. I read Episode 3 of Ulysses over the weekend. Here are my thoughts on this chapter.

What the heck is he talking about? Check annotation book. Aristotle? He’s going on and on about Aristotle? Do I need to know this stuff? Do I need to read all these annotations? I’m not going to do it. I just can’t. I’ll leave Aristotle for a reread or something. So why is Stephen walking down the beach with his eyes closed? Does he still have his eyes closed? Did he go to Aunt Sara’s? No Aunt Sally’s. But did he really? I don’t think so. I think he is just thinking about when he went to Aunt Sally’s. Or maybe Aunt Sara’s? No, Aunt Sally’s. I think. He is still on the beach. Are his eyes still closed? “When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…” heh, most excellent!

Okay, are we still on the beach? Aunt Sara’s maybe? No, on the beach in Stephen’s head as he thinks about things. Stephen’s head is a really weird place to hang out. Columbanus! Hey I know who that is from some proofreading I did at Distributed Proofreaders a couple weeks ago. Who knew proofreading would lead me to get a reference in Ulysses? Proofreading rocks!

So his eyes are open now. Bloated dead dog, live running dog. Compare and contrast. More dog stuff. Wow, Joyce really liked Hamlet. I should probably reread that one of these days. This free association thing is starting to grow on me. It’s kind of jazzy. Oh wow, that’s good. Oh wow. Oh! Wow! Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow. Oh! That’s the end of the chapter. Wow!

So there you have it, Episode 3.

I have no idea what the Aristotle stuff is about. Modalities of vision and hearing, etc. I didn’t bother trying to get all the historical references to Church and Irish history. I don’t think any of that matters right now on this reading. What matters in this chapter is the language and the sound of the language and the rhythm. Oh, did it ever just tickle me happy. I also realized Joyce makes up words sometimes: abstrusiosities.

I also realized that he likes tongue twisters:

In long lassoes from Cock lake the water flowed full, covering greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing.

And:

Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds.

Marvelous, eh?

I have made it through section one. When I begin section two, I will finally get to meet Mr. Leopold Bloom.

Mondays seem like a good day to give Ulysses updates. I don’t know if I will do an update every Monday, but while I am at the beginning of the book still, it seems like it won’t try your patience. For now.

I had hoped to read episodes two and three over the weekend but only ended up having time and energy to read episode two. But it was good! I actually find myself enjoying how Joyce manages to magically be in the middle of a dialog and then in the middle of a memory with no big bump to let the reader know there is a change in what is going on. It is such a seamless transition but yet not impossible to follow. I don’t know how he does it.

The language continues to be awesome and the story is even funny. And the nice tension between Stephen and Mr. Deasy, Stephen’s heretical remark about God, and Mr. Deasy Stephen wouldn’t be teaching at the school for long, most excellent!

Two things I find myself wondering about though.

One. Each episode has a name, like episode two is “Nestor.” But this isn’t printed in the book anywhere. I only know this because of the Notes on Joyce book I have for reference. I am wondering where these episode titles came from? Did Joyce outline them somewhere? Or are they the result of some clever people who went through and made commentaries on the text?

Two. How old is Stephen? He’s teaching so I know he is older than Portrait of the Artist. But he still seems young in many ways. So what is he, like 20 maybe? Not that knowing his age will make much difference, but I am curious and it keeps distracting me.

That ended up being a shorter update than I expected. Maybe more next Monday, maybe not.

Here we are, already three days into July. I was tidying up my books read list yesterday and I have managed to read 24 books for the first half of the year. Not too bad for having to fit in my reading between work and school. The really funny thing is though, six of those 24 books were read in June after school was done. It’s like the dam holding back the flood broke.

I’m also halfway through a three-day weekend. Have been doing some gardening and walking around the lake. This afternoon Bookman and I made some vegan ice cream. Oh, is it ever yummy. Chocolate. Our first venture into flavor. Last year when we made vegan ice cream for the first time we stuck with standard vanilla. Granted, chocolate isn’t that adventurous, but it is for the homemade kind. I am sure as we improve our vegan ice cream making skills there will be attempts at increasing the variety of flavors. I bet Ben & Jerry are quaking in their boots.

I am happy to report that I have gotten through episode one of Ulysses without mishap or swearing and there was even enjoyment. My reading is slow and careful and I have worked out that I will only refer to the companion book of annotations when Latin or another non-English language pops up, when there is a slang word I don’t know, or when the characters make a reference to something I am not familiar with like a song or a pub or how many shillings are in a quid or something like that. So I am feeling pretty good about Joyce and Ulysses at the moment. I’ve still got a lot of reading ahead of me, episode one is only about 24 pages or so. But I am feeling more confident than I did when I began reading. Now if only I can manage to sustain that through the whole book.

And can I add how wonderful just the sound of the language is sometimes? I love the first sentence:

Stately, plump, Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

And then later, a paragraph with an abundance of “w’s” that ends:

Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.

Isn’t that marvelous?

I am still very much at the beginning of the book in case anyone is feeling tempted to read it over the summer. Company and support. Just saying.

I’m willing to bet that Harold Bloom is wagging his meaty arthritic fist right now, decrying the declining influence of classical educations and the literary canon. Ah, yes, the classical education. Gone are the days when a crested Exeter boy was considered cultured if he knew his Greeks, could recite some Donne, and laughed at the right moments in As You Like It. I’m not going to say times were simpler then but…actually, yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to say. Times were simpler then.

People weren’t dumber and life wasn’t easier, but literary and cultural knowledge was more limited, because there were obviously limited choices. The average student these days is bombarded with countless opinions on how to feed a healthy brain, and as cultural content flows into the world at an exponential rate, it’s hard to know whether 20 hours are better spent reading Infinite Jest, watching Season 3 of The Wire, memorizing “The Wasteland” or listening to scratchy bootlegs of Robert Johnson.

This argument has surely been made before, and surely better, but as a writer I think it needs to be continuously addressed. Because for all the opportunities writers are afforded today, we are facing increasingly fragmented audiences. There are still perpetually curious folks out there, trying their best to sample everything from the buffet. My wife is one of them and her skills as a prolific devourer of books and media always astounds me. But the majority of people simply taste the king crab legs and decide, “well heck, king crabs are pretty darn good and thanks to those Deadly Catch fellas, we’re swimming in ‘em, so I might as well eat these long-legged SOBS until I go gentle into that good night.”

I speak of course of anyone who’s picked up some Stieg Larsson and decided that kinky and moody thrillers are the be-all-and-end-all, or anyone who’s buried themselves in paranormal romance and decided not to dig out until all the centaurs have found a hooflove, or…well, you get it. Genre has been around for a long time, but it’s more comforting than ever these days. Since there’s no such thing as a classical education anymore–since what’s deemed canonical is so daunting–you might as well become a specialist, an expert, a slavishly devoted fan.

I don’t really have a problem with this sort of fandom because I participate in it to a certain degree and, if I’m lucky enough to find my writing lumped into a zeitgeisty genre, I stand to make a few bucks and find a few readers from it. Yet it can be discouraging to a writer whose work doesn’t necessarily fall into a popular genre and sees his/her books added as #347 on peoples’ Goodreads “to-read” shelves and wonders, “when they heck are they gonna get to me? They still have all the Shopaholics, Tolkien and Dutch Transcendentalists to get through!”

Publishers know this better than anyone and that’s why they turn down some great writing in favor of some not-as-great writing. It’s a business, as you are constantly reminded, and market share ain’t necessarily achieved just because you can string together a better description of butterflies than Nabakov. If they can’t find a place to fit you into the “market,” then you’re left out in the cold.

One genre currently freezing its tuchus off is the comic novel f

"Perhaps you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it." 

A previous post explained how Ulysses "Seen," a graphic novel based on Ulysses, the James Joyce novel was modified to meet Apple's policy concerning cartoon nudity. In the case of this graphic novel, Apple has revised their policy, in order to include the original art work, according to a Yahoo News story from June 16, 2010.

The Banned Book Challenge continues until the end of June.

Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.

A MacWorld article reprinted from Macworld UK has information about a newly released comic book adaptation of Ulysses, the epic by James Joyce, entitled Ulysses "Seen". It is available from the U.S. iTunes Store and has been rated 17+ by Apple. The original, uncensored version is available for download from the Ulysses "Seen" website.

It is described by Apple this way:

Robert Berry's comic adaptation of the 1922 edition of James Joyce's epic novel, ULYSSES accompanied by a page-by-page reader's guide, dramatis personae, and pop-up translations of non-english passages. The reader's guide is enhanced with discussion groups and links to online information sources, photos, videos, and other assorted bric a brac allowing you to dive as deep as you like into the world of Ulysses. If you've always wanted to read ULYSSES, but have been intimidated by its size and density, this is a great way in and is a great new way in its own right to experience literature.

James Joyce is a designer and illustrator based in London. He is a distiller. A simplifier. His work reminds me of that of fellow Brit, Olly Moss, as well as Drawn! pal Frank Chimero. Also, his work is much more concise than that of the other James Joyce.

Posted by David Huyck on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Design, Frank Chimero, Illustration, James Joyce, Olly Moss

Shauna one of my BookFinder.com colleagues found two neat posts on Boing Boing today and I wanted to share them with you.

First.  Today is Bloomsday, and if you download this Mp3 you can hear the one and only James Joyce reading from his own Ulysses.  If that link dosen't work try this mirror link

Second.  If you are living in Canada, more specificly Ontario, there is a Book Drive for Aboriginal Youth happening until the 21st of June which is collecting books to send to isolated communities in Canada's north.  Here is the description from the original post:

The deadline, June 21, is only a few days away, unfortunately. If someone from outside Ontario REALLY wants to help out, feel free to get hold of me directly at [email protected] and you can make arrangements to send a book or two to me, and I'll get it into the donation stream. But for those of you who live in Ontario, or nearby (I'm lookin' at you, folks in northern New York, Michigan, Minnesota, etc.!) this is a great chance to get some new reading material into the hands of kids who really, really need it.

Happy Bloomsday everyone!

A-Level English was a long time ago, and I don’t remember an awful lot of what was said in class about our set texts. I remember our completely missing a very rude bit in Hamlet - it only dawned on me some years later that Shakespeare had smuggled an actual naughty sweary word into an exchange between the prince and Ophelia - and I recall several conversations about A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides being possibly the most boring thing any of us, including our teacher, had ever read. I also remember our wondering how Johnson had acquired such a reputation as a great wit when he clearly wasn’t very funny at all:

Johnson: I’ve got the best bed!
Boswell: If you’ve got the best bed, you must admit that I’ve got the best bedposts!
Johnson: Well, if you have the best posts, we shall have you tied to one of them and whipped!

Brought the house down in 1773, apparently. Maybe it was all in the delivery.

Anyway, one throwaway remark which has stuck in my head was our teacher’s explanation of why Joyce, in Dubliners, had included in his character description of Mr James Duffy, protagonist of A Painful Case, the following line:

“He had an odd autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense.”

Miss’s explanation for this was that it was to round out and press home the fact that Mr Duffy was a bit of a weirdo. I mean, it’s clearly a very bizarre practice. What kind of a strange potato must he have been to do that sort of thing?

I remember keeping my mouth firmly closed and looking down at the desk, not wanting to catch her eye or draw attention to myself, because there in my head was burning the thought: “I do that!”

Now, I was well aware that I was a bit of a weirdo, or at least that I’d never quite fitted in at my school. Still, this particular foible didn’t really seem to me to be such a strange habit - certainly not strange enough to be included in a character sketch simply to highlight weirdness. But this was clearly the Official Explanation, and thus all the explanation I was going to get. And so - as with Hamlet and his smuggled sweary - for me it would be years before any further light was shed on this particular issue.

It was only a year or two back, during an exchange on the Scattered Authors’ Society’s discussion group, that I realised: this is actually quite normal. At least, from what others were saying, it seems to be normal among published authors, and so - I assume - it’s probably quite normal among unpublished authors, and quite possibly among people who have never written a book and have no particular desire to. Quite a few of us seem to have little writers sitting in our heads who take details of not just our own lives but also things we observe or hear about, and - in the words of one of Jordan’s managers - write it into book words. Having said that, I don’t often do the full sentences in my head any more. Descriptive words and clauses, yes, and other sentence fragments, but gone - for the most part - are the full sentences containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense; and I think the reason I don’t compose entire sentences internally is that now I compose them onscreen, and not in isolation but as part of something.

Which brings me back to a thought I had not long after our teacher told us that Joyce had given Mr Duffy this habit to show what a weirdo he was, which was: how did Joyce know that some people do this, unless it was something he did - or had done - himself?

Perhaps in Mr James Duffy, Mr James Joyce had put something of his own character. Or perhaps what was being highlighted was not Mr Duffy’s oddness, but the wastedness of his life: here was a man with a head full of sentences, who never wrote them down - and who never moved beyond sentences about himself.

PS - I'm off to London in a few minutes; I'll be running in this year's London Marathon on Sunday. If you're going to watch, do keep a look out for me and cheer me on - I'll be wearing a green Stroud vest with a red and a blue stripe.

And if anyone would like to sponsor me, you can go to http://www.justgiving.com/johndougherty.

"I've been stuck in the elevator, suspended in utter coffin blackness somewhere between the third and fourth floors—listening to the cables quiver, and every so often hearing the distant shouts of emergency workers saying, Hang in there buddy! or what sounds like a very heavy wrench clanking on assorted beams as it tumbles into the abyss—and even though my laptop’s on, it sheds no light...”

That’s one of Ed Park’s ever-suffering office workers trapped inside an elevator and typing a long love-letter in the void. It’s a single block of text banged out on a busted laptop-computer, the breathless conclusion to his first-novel, Personal Days.

In addition to dreaming up this surreal fable about contemporary cubicle culture, Ed Park is a founding editor at The Believer and literary blogger over at The Dizzies. He’s our special guest this week, explaining how he wrote his this book and giving us a glimpse into the mind of an editor.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:

The final third of your book makes use of one of my favorite literary forms--for a lack of better term, I'll call it the long, one-sentence stream-of-consciousness slam-bam prose style. As far as I know,  no writer has ever given specific advice about how to handle this tricky form. How did you do it? 

Ed Park:
The final section is both my favorite part of the book and the one that caused me the most agony. I knew, relatively early on in the composition process, that the final portion of the book would be, at last, in the voice of a single, identifiable character. Continue reading...

Go, us!

http://sethabramson.blogspot.com/2007/03/2007-creative-writing-mfa-rankings-top.html