Back to (Almost) Normal, Falling Off the Mountain, A Reading Challenge

**NEWS FLASH** I AM BACK!!!!!!!!!!

If you read my blog, thank you very much! I hope you missed me -- I missed you! Feeling much better, not quite 100%, but getting close. I have missed blogging very much and am quite happy to be back.

During this hiatus, I have had lots of time for reading and reflection. Health issues have a way of focusing the mind. And, in times of crisis some important things are no longer important. Please pardon the confessional bits here -- I have always taken too much pride in my smarts. I have smarts. But, I also lack the common sense gene. I admit it! I set high expectations for myself because I have to live up to my smarts, but the reality is, I spend (spent!) a lot of time doing this and that because I thought it was absolutely necessary to accomplish these things. One of these "things" is reading Ulysses. So, in the spirit of stepping away from what I used to think was SOOOO important, I am calling a halt to the Mt. Ulysses expedition. I was very enthusiastic and enjoyed the endeavor at first. While down and out I felt guilty for not reading, listening, or researching Ulysses and Joyce. As I began to feel better, I started listening to the dramatization again and realized it did not appeal to me at all. In fact, it was boring, tedious, unintelligible, and too much WORK. It became obvious that I was no longer enjoying myself and if I am retired and in control of my own doings, why do something so awful? Clarity is good. So, thanks to the gods of recuperation, I am embarking on new adventures and leaving James Joyce and his genius behind. I hope no one is disappointed, (she smirks). We are officially OFF the mountain! Fair warning, this might not be the only project I abandon. If a book does not grab me I will let it go.

First things first before we can really move on. Let's clear our agenda for a fresh start in 2016. Taking stock of past reading projects I see we have three unfinished sojourns.

-- The Collected Stories of Colette
-- The Mountains of the Moon
-- Pepys' Diary

All are worth finishing, so look for coming posts on these in the new year.

I am still using LibraryThing and its Legacy Libraries feature as my reading guide. So far, I share books in my library with 52 Legacy authors (there will be more when I have cataloged my entire library). Homer's works are those most commonly shared, 34 out of 52 authors having at least one of his works in common with me. I have read and discussed Homer so we are done with him, unless his work becomes part of another discussion. Moving forward, I want to divide my reading and the direction of this blog into several "groups". Since I have always had more than one book going at the same time, I want to keep (loosely) to something like this:

-- History & The Classics

-- Biography, Diaries, Letters

-- Travel, Nature

-- Literature, Poetry, Essays

-- 2016 Reading Challenge

-- Everything Else (includes art, movies, and life in general)

Finally, at this time of year there are tons of "Best of" lists and reading challenges for the coming year. One of the challenges I have always enjoyed (but have never accomplished because I am easily distracted) is the "Read xx number of books in the coming year" kind of thing. Without formally joining a challenge on another blog, I am creating my own challenge. You, dear reader, are not required to join in, but it might be fun for you to stroll through your "To Be Read" stack and pick out your own books to read in 2016. Clear those decks, forget resolutions, just read!

So here is the challenge:  Read 16 books from your To Be Read stack in 2016. Here are mine:

Stack #1

Stack #2

Stack #1:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke

     Currently on page 234, so have a head start but will finish in 2016 so it counts

Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich

The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather

The Leopard, Giuseppe Di Lampedusa

The Sea, the Sea, Iris Murdoch

Provence, Ford Madox Ford

Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson

The Virginia Woolf Reader, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska

Stack #2:

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard

Bad Land, Jonathan Raban

Venice, Jan Morris

Crossing Open Ground, Barry Lopez

The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One 1915-1919, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, Introduction by Quentin Bell

The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell

The Fact of a Doorframe, Adrienne Rich

The Art of Drowning, Billy Collins

Happy New Year, and gather those books for the 2016 Reading Challenge!!!

Windbags, Cannibals, and "Caught Between a Rock and a Whirlpool"

Aeolus, Ruler of the Winds

It is late morning in Dublin. Bloom is back from Paddy Dignam's funeral, and Stephen is off the beach. Episode 7 takes place in the Freeman newspaper offices.

Headlines in Large Bold Type

disrupt the narrative text and the interior monologue of previous episodes is mostly absent. Leopold Bloom stops in to discuss a newspaper ad for one of his clients. Staff is gathered in the front office listening to one of their colleagues mock a political speech reprinted in the morning newspaper. Interspersed with this oration are various jokes, riddles, bragging, philosophical arguments, and predictions about today's horse race. Basically, it is a gathering of windbags, including the editor, dawdling through the late morning. Simon Dedalus, Stephen's father is also present.

"The episode parallels the aftermath of Odysseus's visit to Aeolus, the god of the winds in the Odyssey. One of Odysseus's men disobeys him, opening a bag of winds that then blows them off-course. In the "Aeolus" episode of Ulysses, wind is represented by the windy rhetoric used in journalism and oratory. The newspaper-room setting of the chapter, the episode's headlines, and men's own inflated speech, together with the conversation about rhetorical and journalistic triumphs, all support the theme of the episode." 

And, as Odysseus was blown off course, so Bloom has a setback getting an ad into the newspaper. His client wants the ad only for the month of July; the foreman asks for "a three months' renewal". Bloom spends the rest of the episode attempting to reach his client and being rebuffed by the editor as he hopes to circumvent the foreman's three-month renewal dictate.

After Bloom ("the Father"), leaves the office, Stephen Dedalus ("the Son"), enters. He joins in the general conversation and is asked by the editor to write a piece for the newspaper. At one point, narrative changes to Stephen's interior monologue. Reacting to part of a bombastic speech, he thinks: "Gone with the wind. Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings." My first thought on reading this was "a ha!, Margaret Mitchell took this line for the title of her masterpiece and the name of Scarlett O'Hara's plantation." No, both Joyce and Mitchell lifted them from lines in the poem "Cynara" by Ernest Dowson. Makes one feel very un-read.

At the end of the episode, Bloom and Stephen cross paths as they meet on the steps of the newspaper office as staff are leaving for lunch. Bloom approaches the editor about his ad but the editor has no time for him. He is more interested in what Stephen is saying.

The Isle of Cannibals

"Bloom is primarily alone in episode 8, "Lestrygonians". He does not have any errands to run yet; he is merely strolling the city street and looking for lunch. In episode 4, we were first introduced to Bloom as a preparer and eater of food, and, most notably in the opening lines, a meat lover. Yet, now, outside his own home, the prospect of getting and eating food is more overwhelming and problematic. Episode 8 corresponds to Odysseus's visit to the island of cannibals in the Odyssey. Under this thematic menace, the meat-loving Bloom opts not to eat at the Burton, where men shove meat into their mouths, and heads instead to Davy Byrne's for a vegetarian lunch.

The episode opens outside a candy shop, and food pervades Bloom's thoughts and serves as a tie-in with many other disparate topics. Thoughts of food connect with thoughts of pregnant women, from Molly's hunger for certain foods while pregnant to Mina Purefoy, currently in labor with many other mouths to feed at home. Food connects with sex, in Bloom's memory of making love with Molly years ago on a hill as she fed him a seedcake out of her mouth, and in his thoughts of aphrodisiacal food." 

As Bloom wanders, he thinks of the scientific term "parallax" and its meaning. The word is "an astronomical term that roughly refers to the way in which an object seems to be positioned differently when viewed from a different vantage point." This is a key to understanding Ulysses. The way we think of events and people in the novel will change as we read about the same events and people from a different character.

At the diner, patrons gossip about Bloom behind his back. Bloom daydreams while he eats and contemplates beauty. He thinks about the statues in the National Museum and wonders if there is anything under the statues' robes and decides to sneak a look later in the day.

Underlying Bloom's thoughts throughout this episode is his fear that Molly will be having sex with Blazes Boylan later in the afternoon, in their home. The episode closes as Bloom spots Boylan across the street and ducks into the gates of the National Museum to avoid him.

Scylla and Charybdis

or

"Caught Between a Rock and a Whirlpool"

Episode 9 is all about Stephen and his "Hamlet theory". He is expounding it in the National Library (part of the National Museum) director's office to his literary friends, Eglinton, a critic; A.E., a poet; and Lyster, a librarian. "Stephen contends that Shakespeare associated himself with Hamlet's father, not with Hamlet himself." And, he says that Hamlet was based on Shakespeare's dead son Hamnet. He also says that Shakespeare's unfaithful wife, Ann Hathaway, was the inspiration for Hamlet's unfaithful mother. In episode 1, Stephen's friend Buck Mulligan teased him about this theory, saying that Stephen would explain it algebraically to the Englishman Haines after they had a few pints at The Ship bar.

"He never met Haines and Buck at the Ship pub at 12:30, as they arranged this morning...Stephen is trying to interest Eglinton and A.E. into publishing the theory and in his own talent in general...There are frequent interruptions and digressions, and Stephen often ad-libs, using thoughts or the words of others from earlier in the day. Episode 9 corresponds to Odysseus's trial-by-sea in which he must sail between Scylla, the six-headed monster situated on a rock, and Charybdis, a deadly whirlpool. The concept of negotiating two extremes plays out several times within the episode, most notably in the Plato-Aristotle dichotomy that Stephen mentions. Like Odysseus, Stephen sails closer to Scylla, and thus Stephen's thoughts and theories owe more to Aristotle's grounded, material, logical sense of the world (symbolized by the rock) than to Plato's sense of unembodied concepts or ideals (symbolized by the whirlpool)."

As Stephen contends that Shakespeare based his work on the realities of his own life, his friends argue that a writer's personal life should not be used to judge the works produced by that writer. During this conversation, Buck Mulligan enters the room and begins to mock Stephen with his extreme physical-based humor. Stephen is annoyed by Mulligan and wants to be accepted by his literary friends. And, he is sad that they have not included him in their upcoming compilation of young Irish poets.

Stephen and Bloom again cross paths as Bloom is following Stephen and Mulligan out the door of the National Library. Mulligan had earlier seen Bloom peeking under a statue in the lobby and jokingly warns Stephen that Bloom must be homosexual.

"The cameo appearances of Bloom in this episode remind us of the sonless Bloom's suitability as a replacement father figure for Stephen. The schematics of the chapter reinforce this sense. Though Stephen himself seems to be the Odysseus figure for a time in the 'Scylla and Charybdis' episode, in the schematic of Shakespeare, Bloom seems to be the father figure (Shakespeare) and Stephen, the son (Hamlet). Bloom is aligned with Shakespeare through their similarly unfaithful wives and dead sons, Hamnet and Rudy, respectively."

Episode 9 is especially down in the literary weeds. I relied a LOT on SparkNotes throughout this post, but especially for the episode 9 section. All quoted sections in this entire post are thanks to SparkNotes. I appreciate all of the online resources now available for interpreting Ulysses. No wonder this book has been considered inaccessible to the general reader since its 1922 publication. Even with reading aids, it is still WORK for me to understand it, but we are now just about halfway through the book, thank goodness!

My next Ulysses Project post will be on episodes ten, eleven, and twelve. See you then!

The View From Here

Fellow climbers, we have reached the 1/3 mark on our haul up Mt. Ulysses! Six "chapters" completed, twelve to go.

The climb has been greatly aided by RTE's radio dramatization of Ulysses. Here is a link to the actual recording.

Audio Recording of Ulysses

I listen to a chapter then read the text. This method makes it easier for me to follow the story as a character's thoughts are differentiated from narrative by a change in the voice of the narrator.

After finishing the first section, the "Telemachiad", we begin the "Odyssey" section. Whereas the Telemachiad is about the "Son", Stephen Dedalus, the Odyssey is about the "Father", Leopold Bloom.

A nice touch by Joyce is having Stephen and Bloom both notice the same cloud covering the sun while they wander through Dublin on their separate journeys.

Calypso's Island

The first section of the Odyssey is "Calypso". In Homer's The Odyssey, Calypso is a nymph who keeps Ulysses captive on her island for seven years by bewitching him and using him as her lover.

Joyce introduces us to Leopold Bloom, the "Ulysses" to his wife Molly's "Calypso". Bloom is in advertising. He is middle-aged and lives with his wife Molly in a middle-class neighborhood in Dublin. He waits on Molly hand and foot, is obsessed with what she is doing when he is away, and suspects she has a lover, one Blazes Boylan, a concert producer. Molly is a singer and performs in musical revues and concert tours. She is preparing to go on the road with Boylan's production company.

Bloom and Molly have a fifteen-year-old daughter, Milly. She lives away from home and works as a photographer's assistant. She may be the young woman referred to by Buck Mulligan in Chapter One as the "photo girl" recently befriended by an acquaintance of his and Stephen's. The Blooms had a son, Rudy, who died several days after his birth. Bloom still grieves for his lost son.

Joyce has already shown us Stephen's morning on this June 16, 1904. Now we follow Bloom on the same day as he gets up, prepares Molly's breakfast, feeds the cat, and leaves the house to buy a pork kidney for his own breakfast. Not kosher...here we see Joyce setting up Bloom as a secular Jew in the very Christian Dublin. Remember Mr. Deasey, at the close of Chapter Two, telling Stephen the joke about Ireland not persecuting the Jews because "she never let them in". Obviously not true.

Bloom reads a letter from Milly while he eats his kidney breakfast and thinks about the funeral he will attend later this morning.

Where Stephen is cerebral, Bloom's physicality is in the foreground. He is a sensual man, practically a walking groin as he has carnal thoughts about most of the women he sees carrying on their own business around town. Joyce takes us along to the outhouse with Bloom, and in the next chapter into his head as he thinks about masturbating in the bath he plans to take before attending the funeral.

The Lotus Eaters

In the second section, "The Lotus Eaters", Bloom walks through the streets of Dublin as he completes several errands. The Homeric parallel is Ulysses' telling King Alcinous about the land of the Lotus eaters where his men were drugged by eating flowers and no longer cared about returning home. Ulysses gathers his men together and returns them to the ship to set sail once again.

As he is wandering, Bloom daydreams about the exotic east. Molly was born in Gibraltar. She exudes a Mediterranean languor and as she is usually in Bloom's mind, this exoticism extends to other thoughts as well. He also has voyeuristic fantasies (the walking groin again) about women he sees on the streets. He stops by the Post Office to pick up a letter from a woman named Martha with whom he is having a surreptitious correspondence using the alias Henry Flower. He keeps the Post Office card in the sweatband of his hat, out of Molly's sight.

After he reads Martha's letter, he goes into a church and takes a seat near the door at the back. He ponders Catholic rituals, especially the idea of communion being the drinking of Christ's blood and the eating of his corpse. He also thinks the church would be a "nice discreet place to be next to some girl". Walking groin, in a church. Was it just Joyce, or were most men obsessed with sex in the repressed early 20th century? Maybe most men still are?

Bloom goes to a chemist's shop to have a lotion made up for Molly. He buys a bar of lemon scented soap to use in the public bath house. This section ends with Bloom's fantasy about masturbating in the bath before he goes to his friend Paddy Dignam's funeral which is at 11:00.

He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.

Hades

The third, and final section for this post, is "Hades" and is primarily concerned with Paddy Dignam's funeral. The Homeric parallel is Ulysses' trip to Hades to seek advice from dead friends and relatives about the course of action he should take to return home.

Bloom shares a carriage with three acquaintances as they travel in the procession behind the hearse carrying Paddy in his coffin. One of the acquaintances is Simon Dedalus, Stephen's real father.

The four make small talk and comment on people they see on the street as they move along. Bloom sees Stephen on the sidewalk and points him out to his father. Simon makes disparaging remarks about Stephen's friends, especially Buck Mulligan. The carriage passes Blazes Boylan at the same exact time Bloom is thinking about Boylan's upcoming visit to Molly this afternoon.

Bloom is set apart from the group in the carriage because he is Jewish and because the men consider Molly, a singer on the stage, to be a loose woman. A chance remark he makes about dying in one's sleep being the best way, causes a reaction as the other men silently disagree because Catholics fear sudden death since they would not have time to repent. They also refer to Molly as "Madame" (a veiled insult) when speaking of her upcoming concert tour. Bloom seems to be vaguely aware of these slights.

He also thinks of his own father's suicide and appears not to notice when a member of the party speaks disparagingly of suicides. 

At the funeral, Bloom is preoccupied with thoughts of his own dead son, wonders how the cemetery attendant, living so close to a graveyard, convinced any woman to marry him and bear his children. He thinks about the horror of being buried alive and how telephones in coffins could prevent this. Rather than being respectful and thinking of his friend and his friend's family, Bloom is being self-centered and thinking irreverent thoughts.

So, there you have the most recent three chapters and are caught up to the end of this part of the Mt. Ulysses climb. I will be honest and say that except for the idea of "Why do you climb this mountain? -- Because it is there", I would not read Ulysses. It is not an enjoyable read, it is work, and frankly not very interesting. I still appreciate the literary genius of James Joyce, and will definitely finish the book primarily for the sake of his memory, and because it is there.

Thanks to SparkNotes and Kate Topper for the fine analysis of these three chapters.

Ulysses On Archive.Org

A short post to let you know I found an audio recording of Ulysses on Archive.org and it is wonderful! Here is the link to Ulysses:

Audio book link

This is much more than someone just reading the book. It is like listening to a radio play. The narrator's voice changes when the text is an internal dialogue which makes it so much easier to understand.

I have changed my approach now that I am finished with the first three "chapters". I am listening to a chapter before I read the text. And, I am continuing with the Delaney Podcast.

My goal is to finish the book by the end of the year. I will check in here each time I complete three chapters. In a few days I will post about chapters four through six.

I hope you check out the recording. It is a really good way to "read" Ulysses if you do not want to plough through the text.

Proteus

Proteus, the god of "elusive sea change"

Here we are again, climbing Mt. Ulysses. The end of the three episodes of Part One, the "Telemechiad", is a good place to catch our breath.

We have discussed "Telemachus" and "Nestor", episodes one and two, here. They describe the early and mid-morning of the young intellectual, Stephen Dedalus. Joyce has cast Stephen in the role of Homer's Telemachus, son of Ulysses, who goes on a journey to find his missing father. Stephen wakes up after spending the night in a Martello Tower rented by his ersatz friend Buck Mulligan. Buck's bullying and cajoling gets on Stephen's nerves and he vows to sleep elsewhere in future. Stephen goes on to teach a history class to a group of upper class boys in the school run by Mr. Deasey. Joyce has cast Mr. Deasey as a father-figure and mentor to Stephen. In Homer's Odyssey, Telemachus seeks out Nestor, a wise old man and friend of his father for advice on how to find the missing Ulysses. In Stephen's mind, his "Nestor" is a fool and a cranky old man. Mr. Deasey gives Stephen a letter he wants published in the prominent Dublin newspapers and he hopes Stephen will pass it along to some of his journalist friends.

Episode three, "Proteus", finds Stephen walking along the beach at Sandymount Strand. He is killing time between his teaching gig and an appointment at The Ship pub where he is meeting Buck Mulligan for lunch and a drink.

"Proteus" is the chapter that usually turns off new readers to Joyce and is where I have given up more than once. It is so multi-layered it took Frank Delaney 67 episodes to cover it. Mind you, these are weekly episodes, so more than one year! Delaney says that Joyce once told a friend he wanted "the professors to spend three hundred years figuring out Ulysses". I have twice read through "Proteus" and have listened to all of the podcasts and will now do my best to give you a summary. This is based on Delaney's episode 157 where he outlines the major themes of the story so far and how they relate to Stephen's actions on the beach in "Proteus".

We already know about Joyce using Homer's Odyssey as a loose framework for the plot of Ulysses. Whereas Telemachus was looking for his actual father, Stephen is looking for a father-figure. His own father is alive and well but Stephen has rejected him as a basically worthless human being. The father-son relationship is a major theme in Ulysses. Joyce touches on Hamlet's quest to avenge the death of his own father, Christianity's trinity -- Father, Son, Holy Ghost -- and on Stephen's grief upon the recent death of his mother.

Joyce referred to this episode as "Proteus" because it is about the sea and about change, which creates uncertainty. While walking on the beach, Stephen is doing some major navel gazing. His inner thoughts, in a stream of consciousness form, are interspersed with Joyce's narrative and it is sometimes very confusing which is which. Here he sees a dog trotting along the shore:

"Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull...He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenney a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests every ninth, breaking, plashing, from far, from father out, waves and waves."

The first, fourth, and maybe the last sentence are Stephen's thoughts, the rest are Joyce's narrative. See what I mean?

Like Joyce, Stephen has very poor eyesight. He has lost his spectacles, so everything appears as if in a mist. It is mid-day, when sunlight creates a sort of "miasma" along the shore, so Stephen finds everything sort of undefined. His mind goes off to Aristotle and his writing about how we perceive the physical world through our senses. The idea of "if you can't see something, does it exist?". Like the "if a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear it, does it make a sound?". Stephen closes his eyes and thinks about what he smells and hears. This leads to hazy snatches of memory about the time he spent in Paris where he met a friend of his fathers, an old Irish bomb thrower, Kevin Egan. He imagines a visit to his Uncle who lives nearby on Sandymount Strand. He thinks he sees two midwives and wonders if they are burying a dead fetus on the beach. He imagines Eve who had no navel. Then he thinks of the umbilical cord as a telephone line to "Edenville".

Delaney points out that Joyce is a master of "show don't tell" writing. Here is his description of a gypsy couple Stephen sees scavenging shellfish on the beach:

"Shouldering their bags they trudged, the red Egyptians. His blued feet out of turnedup trousers slapped the clammy sand, a dull brick muffler strangling his unshaven neck. With woman steps she followed: the ruffian and his strolling mort. Spoils slung at her back. Loose sand and shellgrit crusted her bare feet. About her windraw face her hair trailed."

Word combinations, like "turnedup" written as one word convey a visual image of the man, as does "windraw" used to describe the woman's face. OMG Joyce. And, I just realized, OMG Dylan Thomas ("a springful of larks in a rolling cloud..." and "the heron priested shore"). I think I am beginning to understand "show don't tell".

Since I do not want to spend three hundred years writing this post, and you, dear reader, do not want to spend three hundred years reading it, I will not recount the hundreds of other thoughts in Stephen's mind as he ambles along the beach, takes a break, sits on a rock, ruminates, masturbates, urinates, and picks his nose. Yes, really. I admit that I did not recognize the bodily functions as such on my first read through. Suffice to say, there is no doubt this is definitely Mt. Ulysses at its most steep.

Delaney concludes his summary by saying that at the end of this chapter, we "know who we are dealing with". From now on, when Stephen appears in the story, we will recognized who he is because we know him, we know what to expect. Joyce has given us a complete characterization.

And, finally, we are free to meet the next and even more major character. Coming up -- our introduction to Leopold Bloom.

Shakespeare & Company

Memoir of a Paris Bookshop in the 1920s

American ex-pat and arts scene insider, Sylvia Beach, opened her Paris bookshop and lending library, "Shakespeare & Company", in late November, 1919. It was an English language bookshop and the opening coincided with an influx of American and British artists and writers to Paris after World War I, now referred to as the "Lost Generation". The bookshop was an immediate success. As Sylvia says:

"A good many friends had been waiting for the opening of Shakespeare and Company; and the news soon got around that the time had come. Still I didn't really expect to see anybody that day. And just as well, I thought. I would need at least twenty-four hours to realize this Shakespeare and Company bookshop. But the shutters in which the little shop went to bed every night were hardly removed (by a waiter from a nearby cafe) when the first friends began to turn up. From that moment on, for over twenty years, they never gave me time to meditate...The news of my bookshop, to my surprise...spread all over the United States, and it was the first thing the pilgrims looked up in Paris...Often, they would inform me that they had given Shakespeare and Company as their address, and they hoped I didn't mind."

In the summer of 1920 Sylvia attended a party where she was introduced to James Joyce. This meeting proved to be a watershed moment for Shakespeare and Company and for James Joyce. He became a "regular" at the bookshop, often sitting next to Sylvia's desk and telling her of his life and the difficulties of being a poor writer with a family to support. At this time Joyce had been working on Ulysses "for seven years and was trying to finish it". Between 1918 and 1920, twenty-three installments had been published in The Little Review, an American literary journal. When obscenity charges were leveled against the journal, publication of the installments ceased. Joyce was left in limbo and was seeking a publisher. Sylvia Beach offered to publish Ulysses and the rest is history.

Shakespeare & Company tells the story of the publication of Ulysses, but it is also a fascinating tale of the "Lost Generation" in Paris. We are introduced to Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish, Stuart Gilbert, Djuna Barnes, Sherwood Anderson, D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda (later a friend of Georgia O'Keefe when they both lived in the Taos, New Mexico art colony).

Although I read this book for background on The Ulysses Project, it proved to be about so much more. It has languished on my bookshelf for years but this was definitely the right time to read it. Funny how that works!

If you are interested in the "Lost Generation" and life in 1920s Paris, I highly recommend this wonderful book.

Podcasts and "Planet Ulysses": An Update

Opening Paragraph Part I: Chapter One

TELEMACHUS

Reporting in with an update on The Ulysses Project. It is a long post because there is oh so much to cover. When I left you, I was on page 18 of "Mt. Ulysses" and bemoaning the slow progress. However, as I inch up the slope, I now understand why it has to be one small step after another. As I said in the beginning, Joyce is a Giant, and Giants must be placated or else! Where is that bag of beans? Oh, never mind...

Here is the thing. As I read along with Frank Delaney and his podcast Re: Joyce I am happy to move slowly because there is SO MUCH to glean from this masterpiece. Delaney explains the allusions, and points to references and influences that Joyce has woven into his story. Without awareness of the scope of Ulysses, reading all 783 pages would simply be an exercise. Yesterday I completed "Nestor" which is Chapter Two of Part I, and Podcast #89.

There are three main characters in Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus, a young intellectual, recently bereaved by the loss of his mother, referred to by Delaney as "the 'head' of the book; Leopold Bloom, who has yet to make an appearance, the 'heart' of the book, again per Delaney; and Molly Bloom, Leopold's adulterous and loving wife. The entire story takes place on June 16, 1904 in and near Dublin, Ireland.

Here are notes from some of my climbing aids:

From Monarch Notes:

"...there are three main parts: The Telemachiad, or account of Dedalus' morning; The Odyssey, or account of Bloom's wandering through Dublin; and Nostos, or the return home of Bloom to his wife and, symbolically, Stephen to his 'father'. Each part is made of chapters...named here in terms of their parallel in the Odyssey. Part One has three chapters describing Stephen's experiences at breakfast in Martello Tower on Dublin Bay, where he has been living (Telemachus 8 a.m.); Stephen teaching at a school in Dalkey, near the Tower (Nestor, 10 a.m.)..." We will see the summary of Chapter Three at the end of this post.

Delaney explains that Joyce packs meaning into nearly every word. Nothing is simple, nothing can be taken at face value. For example, Stephen's name: Stephen Dedalus. Our character Stephen is really the young James Joyce. His book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an account of Stephen's younger years and Ulysses picks up two years after A Portrait leaves off. Stephen was educated at a Jesuit school and the book is full of biblical allusions and Catholic traditions. These are fully explained by Delaney so do not feel intimidated. So, back to Stephen's name -- "Stephen" is the first Catholine martyr and "Dedalus" was the father of "Icarus". Remember Icarus from Greek mythology? His father (Dedalus) built him a pair of wax wings so he could fly but he flew too close to the sun, the wax melted, and he plunged to his death in the sea. Delaney says Dedalus was also a "cunning creator, innovator, and Knossos labryinth builder".  Monarch Notes says "Stephen is an intellectual Telemachus (Ulysses' son in the Odyssey), with the same qualities of the mythical Dedalus as we saw in A Portrait -- the artificer, the maker of wings of flight, all of this viewed partially ironically, since Stephen is still more the intellectual aesthetician than an artist." OK, now I need to read A Portrait next!

"The" Martello Tower

From Chapter One, Stephen's "flat mate" in the Martello Tower is the bombastic Malachi (Buck) Mulligan, a medical student. Buck bullies Stephen, especially around Stephen's massive intellect and his lack of faith. Delaney explains that Buck Mulligan is based on a real-life person, Joyce's false friend Oliver Gogarty. Notice the syllables -- Malichi Mulligan -- Oliver Gogarty. In later life Gogarty confessed that he was ruined by the publication of Ulysses because people who knew him and Joyce easily made the connection.

Joyce did have a massive intellect. Delaney tells how Joyce admired the 19th-century Norwegian playwright and poet Henrik Ibsen so much that he learned the Dano-Norwegian language so he could correspond with the great man. And, Sylvia Beach, the publisher of Ulysses, writes in her memoir of life in the bookstore of the same name, Shakespeare & Company, that Joyce had "a memory that retained everything he had ever heard. Everything stuck in it, he said". On a hospital visit to Joyce while he was recuperating from eye surgery he asked, "Will you please bring The Lady of the Lake. The next time I went to see him, I had the 'Lady' with me. 'Open it,' he said, 'and read me a line.' I did so, from a page chosen at random. After the first line, I stopped, and he recited the whole page and the next without a single mistake. I'm convinced that he knew by heart, not only The Lady of the Lake, but a whole library of poetry and prose. He probably read everything before he was twenty, and thenceforth he could find what he needed without taking the trouble of opening a book."

As an aside, I admire and envy people who have a photographic memory. In my lifetime, I have known two such persons and remember one of these people asking someone to wait a moment while she "found the passage from a journal article" they were discussing. She was quiet for a few seconds and then recited the passage. The other person could discuss any subject, in great depth, anytime. Wow.

Now let's move on to Chapter Two, "Nestor". Stephen is teaching a history class at a "prep" school near Dublin. At the end of class, he tutors a student who needs help with his algebra. Stephen then goes to the headmaster's office to collect his weekly pay. Mr. Deasy (the "Nestor" character who was an aged mentor to young warriors in The Iliad, later sought out by Telemachus for information about his missing father, Ulysses) expounds, as an old man will, on political themes (Protestant vs Catholic, English superiority); financial wisdom (save money, buy a mechanical wallet to dispense coins); displays his bigotry toward the Jews and sexism "in its primal form", according to Delaney, when he reminds Stephen that "A woman brought sin into the world" (the odious excuse through the ages for discrimination against women). Stephen cannot wait to get out of Mr. Deasy's office but is held up while Mr. Deasy finishes typing a letter and asks Stephen to deliver it and a copy to any newspaper editors he may know. He wants the letter about foot and mouth disease in cattle to be published because he is sure he has the solution for preventing outbreaks. An old man's crusade, and like many of the Headmaster's opinions and "facts", ironically erroneous.  As Stephen takes his leave, Mr. Deasy makes a crude joke about Jews as he walks away. Stephen is resolved to quit his position at the school.

I made a few notes about Joyce's influences and references as I listened to the Delaney podcasts:

Ancient Irish myths
Shakespeare's Hamlet
Dante's Divine Comedy
Greek mythology
William Blake
Symbolist poet Jules Laforgue
Catholic religion
Milton
Aristotle

Thank goodness for Frank Delaney. He holds Joyce and Ulysses in very high regard. Here is what he says about Joyce and the contribution he made to the literary novel going forward.

"Joyce is a restless intellectual, an artist wandering the shores of thought and inquiry and art."

"He didn't just tip his toe in the exotic water, he plunged in the whole foot and sometimes the entire body."

"Using as literary material, as art, the most ordinary aspects of life. Real, mundane facts, details, occurrences, tiny incidents such as Mr. Deasy tweaking his nose -- all going to build the imagery of the novel...the ordinary lives of ordinary people on an ordinary day in an ordinary city BUT through James Joyces' writing the human condition thus becomes elevated through art. THAT IS GENIUS."

So now, we are moving up to Chapter Three "and Stephen walking on the beach at Sandymount, north of Dalkey ("Proteus", 11 a.m.)." -- Monarch Notes

Delaney warns us that "Proteus" will be a very intense experience. I will be reporting back to you when I finish Chapter Three.

P.S. Delaney refers to Ulysses as "Planet Ulysses". I think that is more apt than my "Mt. Ulysses", but I am going stick with my name for this wonderful book.

The Ulysses Project

James Joyce

(February 1882 - January 1941)

Not much has been going on here at Road Map headquarters. It has been a low-energy week. I have been inching up Mt. Ulysses with Frank Delaney, now on page 18. I know, it does not seem like progress, but you would not believe how much Joyce packs into one line of text. Sometimes into just one word. However, since I do not plan to devote the next year to The Ulysses Project, I will need to speed things up. Delaney's podcast is weekly, and he has about 275 episodes up on his blog, so I can move ahead with resolve until I have caught up with Frank. Then, I will be on my own with whatever commentary I can find to assist.

There is a lot to say but I am going to let it keep until I know more about Joyce and this wonderful book. Note the Aegean Blue cover.  Nothing is simple with Joyce. Think about the waters Ulysses sailed to reach his home in Ithaca.

1922 First Edition

Here are some more pictures of Joyce and Joyce-related things.

James Joyce

Sylvia Beach and James Joyce

Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore in Paris

James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier

Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore

 James Joyce Pub Award

Joyce Statue, Dublin

Joyce Statue, Trieste

Joyce Statue

Szombathely, Hungary

Joyce Statue and

Grave in Zurich, Switzerland

Bloomsday Festivities