Sums It Up Nicely

From...

Better Book Titles

Another page coming soon...

Glorious Drunk (11 of 738)

If this page were a Friends episode, I'd be tempted to call it, "The One Where Buck Sings About Drinking". But then again, Buck seems given to repetition, so it might be prudent to wait, so we don't eventually end up with "The One Where Buck Sings About Drinking Yet Again and Kinch Tells Him To Shut It Already."

The reason for Buck's exuberance is that Kinch is getting paid later in the day, with Buck going from borrowing a single quid to spending all of Kinch's income, four quid (pounds), on drinking. Buck indulges in a little word play that emphasizes the importance he places on money when he calls Kinch's prospective income "Four shining sovereigns," and "Four omnipotent sovereigns." Buck then bursts into a tune that starts...

O, won't we have a merry time
Drinking whisky, beer and wine

Buck tramped down the stairs leaving his nickel shaving bowl behind.  Kinch debates for two paragraphs whether he should forget the smelly bowl and leave it, and his friendship with Buck.  He ultimately decides to carry it, as he used to carry the bowl of incense at Clongowes (a Jesuit boarding school). He feels while he has changed since then, he is still in some way the same, a server of a servant.

Now, at least, we know why Buck refers to Kinch as the jejune jesuit.

Buck is cooking breakfast at the hearth in the living room, which is not well ventilated, as "a cloud of coalsmoke and fumes of fried grease floated".  Buck asks Haines to open the doors so they won't choke to death. Haines opens the first set of doors and asks the whereabouts of the key to outer door.  Kinch reveals it is already in the lock, and "when the heavy door had been set ajar, welcome light and bright air entered".

We finally meet Haines, the crazy Englishman from page 4, though here he does the sane thing and opens the door so that they don't choke on the smoke.  We find out that Haines is tall and likes to sit on a hammock when he is not opening doors. It also seems that having to open the doors is a usual occurrence and Kinch, being prepared, had left the key in the lock.

There are numerous interplays of light and dark on the page. We have "warm sunshine merrying over the sea", "two shafts of soft daylight" and the "welcome light and bright air" entering the gloomy living room. There is also Buck's gowned form moving "to and fro", hiding and revealing the hearth.  This serves to reinforce Kinch's ambiguous feelings about Buck.

Or not, maybe my brain is doing its thing and finding connections where none exist.  So I will stop staring at this page and stop thinking about Buck and the four quid he will borrow from Kinch that will make him an all powerful ruler of his drunken domain.

PS. I stumbled upon the "Annotated" Ulysses wiki, but the annotations are few and far between to date.  I wonder if the annotator succumbed to insanity after realizing what a sisyphean task it is.

Blessed Virgins (10 of 783)

When we last left Kinch (aka Stephen, aka Dedalus) on page 9,  he was remembering his mother's secret possessions. On page 10 he continues this by recalling her memories, including the performance of an actor named Royce whose songs as Turko the Terrible caused her to laugh.  He laments how memories are "folded away" and falls into his memories of her, finishing with "her shapely fingernails reddened by the blood of squashed lice from the children's shirts."

Kinch then recalls a dream where his mother visited him "to shake and bend my soul" and "to strike me down", which ends in our Latin challenge of the day...

"Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat."

Google Translate makes an, um, interesting attempt...

"Liliata glimmering confessors you surround company: jubilant chorus girls you pick."

As much fun as it would be to pick chorus girls, especially jubilant ones, it does not seem to fit with the passage. Fortunately there is a more apt translation at lindblommedia.com...

"May the crowd of joyful confessors encompass thee; may the choir of blessed virgins go before thee."

That sounds suitably more Catholic. I believe Kinch is wishing his mother a happy welcome to heaven.  She rejoins by calling him "Ghoul! Chewer of corpses!" He responds "Let me be and let me live."  It's clear that there was some conflict in their relationship over his profession, and he's tired of being troubled by this even after her death.

A multitude of colors and shades in Kinch's memories of his mother: the dark of autumn, the brown sugar, and the reddened fingernails.  The dream is dominated by smells: the odour of wax and rosewood followed by the faint odour of wetted ashes.

Very curious why Kinch's mother had a glass of kitchen tap water after approaching the sacrament and why it was as memorable as the roasting apple.  Was she washing the sacred out with the ordinary, or did the host simply make her thirsty?

Buck Mulligan interrupts Kinch's reverie with with a call that breakfast was ready. Still shaken by his thoughts of his mother, Kinch heard "warm running sunlight and in the air behind him friendly words" and turned to the warmth of breakfast. The page ends with Buck once again telling Kinch he told Haines of Kinch's "symbol of Irish Art", which Haines found very clever and Kinch should touch him for a quid.

It is finally time for breakfast and to turn the page.

This Ain't No Julie & Julia

While blogging one's way through Julia Child's recipes turned out to be film worthy, there is no way that slogging through Ulysses page-by-page will ever make it to Netflix download near you.  If, however, by some strange fluctuation of spacetime it does -- I think Amy Adams should play both me and James Joyce. That would be the only way to get the film made. I'd watch it. Of course, I'd probably watch Amy Adams read a cookbook for two hours...

Ahem. 

I left this blog fallow for six, Six, SIX, SIX years, but someone left a comment on it today (a real comment! -- one that wasn't spam for off brand anti-virus software), so I felt I should at least dust it off for the day.

Not sure this will be a permanent resurrection, or one last breath before dying. On the one hand, if I had kept going in the first place, I would have finished this four years ago and would now be giving Amy Adams insights on how to play the "real" me.

On the other hand, I would like to cling to my last shards of sanity and this book is -- in a word --insane. Blogging about reading it just tops the insanity with inanity.

That, of course, describes 99.98% of the internet, so what the heck.  I'll take a few days to work my way back up to the next page and if my eyes aren't bleeding too badly, I'll post about it.

Founded On a Mondegreen (Sort of)

OK, so the Cream song running through my head when I write this blog is not
"Tales of Great Ulysses", but
"Tales of Brave Ulysses" .

With tales of brave Ulysses;
how his naked ears were tortured
By the sirens sweetly singing.

Not quite a Mondegreen, but still a misheard lyric. It's all a sham now. However shall I go on?

This blog is beastly dead.

Fergus Rules the Brazen Cars (9 of 783)

And we're back. Might as well face it, writing about Ulysses every day is even more challenging than reading it every day. Heck, picking out the post title alone can consume 5 minutes or more. Tonight's was a no brainer. Though Sassenach do garner a few votes, there was something about Fergus that screamed "Page 9".

How's this for a seminal work. This book still has buzz, 80+ years after it came to be. Turns out I'm not the only idiot blogger reading this thing page-by-page. I can't find the link at the moment, but there is someone else out there.

For those of you reading vicariously through this blog (though bog might be the more appropriate term -- you silly gits), Kinch was offended by Buck's off hand remarks regarding his mother's demise. Buck has had enough of the conversation and retreats downstairs to cook breakfast, booming out a verse (poetry or song?) ....

And no more turn aside and brood
Upon love's bitter mystery
For Fergus rules the brazen cars.

Turns out Kinch was singing this song while his mother was dying, and she was crying for the words "love's bitter mystery".

There's some more color play between white and green on the sea, the "bowl of bitter waters." But what's the deal with this verse? Ah, it is a snatch from a Yeats' poem. Yeats is, I understand, an Irish author of some repute, but again my education, reading list and/or memory fail me and I cannot call to mind a single work.

The poem contains the line "White breast of the dim sea", which Kinch broods over, but he seems to brood over just about everything. As his mother is only recently beastly dead, we'll let him brood. As to the analysis of the poem -- that's outside the scope this blog for the moment.

This Page Intentionally Blank

I read my page, but I do not have time to post in full.

Beastly Dead (8 of 783)

I so enjoy a good story that I get caught up in the tale and often take the author's words literally, missing even the obvious symbolism. This sucked some 0f the joy out of literature classes, either the stories were such horrid reads that they existed only for their symbolism (think Hawthorne), or I was so busy looking for the "deeper" meaning I missed the story.

I'm going to miss a lot of symbolism in Ulysses, even with close reading. Joyce has layered it to the margins. Of course, one man's symbol is another's straightforward sentence. Words can be holographic, with multiple meanings intertwined along different wavelengths. The meaning can depend on the reader's phase, which can change depending on mood, circumstance, memory, and sanity. Some wavelengths are easily tuned, and others defy easy acquisition and are rarely revealed.

And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

The previous page had Kinch on the edge of revealing why he was upset with Buck. The mystery is revealed here. He is upset with Buck because is not showing the proper reverence for his state of mourning, in particular because Buck had introduced Kinch to his own mother with "O, it's only Dedalus whose mother is beastly dead." Buck flushes and takes the offensive to defend this comment, trivializing Kinch's sole experience with death by comparing it to his own daily encounters and trivializing death itself as "a beastly thing and nothing else." He attacks Kinch for not honoring his dying mother's last wish to pray for her, and finally less than quarter-heartedly apologizes "I didn't mean to offend the memory of your mother."

Kinch even more incensed states "I am not thinking of the offence to my mother."

Conflict: the basis of all interesting literature. Buck comes across as shallow and cynical at best, even if emotional detachment and the denial of death are necessary tools for a medicine man. Kinch is more sympathetic because his mother has recently died, but is refusal to pray for her tempers this feeling.

Now, is Kinch's dead mother a symbol with a deeper meaning? a way to make the reader feel for Kinch? or is it simply a source of conflict bewteen our two characters?

If it is a symbol, what is it a symbol of? the Catholic church? Ireland? the world? The last makes some sense. The feminine is more closely associated with the earth than the masculine, with its more heavenly aspirations. Does this mean the world is dead?

Does any of this tie into the "Greekness" of Kinch? Too early to tell, but the way Joyce has carried on about it, I'm sure we'll be discussing this again, and again, and again...

Giddy Ox (7 of 783)

One peculiarity of the blog is that it is inverted compared to traditional forms of written expression. The first page the reader sees is the last that the author has written. It stresses the current at the expense of the past, which is wonderful for news and people who like to read the end of the story first, but is hell on narrative structure. This becomes very apparent when one is using a blog to write a novel or, in this case, write about a novel. New readers (chuckle, chuckle) are treated to inadvertant in medias res. One must peruse the archives to find the start of the narrative thread.

I briefly considered inverting my order of review and beginning with the last page, so that when this sojourn is complete the blog would start with "Stately, plump Buck" and end where ever it ends. But my insanity did not reach that far. So, if you, dear reader, have stumbled here, my apologies. There is a link to the archives about if you really must know what bee is in my bonnet, or more sensibly hit the back button and forget your visit down this rabbit hole.

OK, this page makes it clear, Buck is not a priest --mea stupida -- he is a medicine man of some sort, as the lancet is his tool. This explains his ready access to cadavers and their clothes.

Buck is trying to get Kinch out of his blahs, grabs him by the arm , walks him around the tower and suggests that he tell Haines his remark about "the cracked lookingglass of the servant" and hit him up for some money. He flatters Kinch, entreats him to be more open and says together they could "do something for the island. Hellenise it." and tells him that if Haines is bothering him that he'll give (with Seymour's help) Haines a ragging worse than Clive Kempthorpe received.

There is then a long recounting of a party in Clive Kempthorpe's room, where young Clive was depantsed and was being chased by someone wielding scissors and did not want to be "debagged". All this activity was accompanied by shouts of "To ourselves...new paganism...omphalos."

When all the cajoling does not work, Buck asks Kinch "what have you against me now?" They stopped walking and Stephen freed his arm quietly.

Wow, a cliffhanger for a page ending. Almost makes me want to cheat...But I'll resist.

More Greek references. Buck wants to Hellenise Ireland. Not sure what he means: its art, its politics, its mood.

Then we have a party with "moneyed" voices, a party of people freed from morals, celebrating a new paganism, able to focus on the themselves and their own navels. Who else would be interesting. Is this something Buck aspires to and and cannot achieve?

It is also becomming clear that Kinch is a writer of some sort. He wields a "steelpen" and Buck has referred to him repeatedly as a "bard". Of course, he also has referred to him as a Jesuit, which caused me a wee confusion.