Thread by @TheUntranslated

Reading Ulysses 2019-2020

This thread is for quotes, titbits, vocabulary words, and observations cropping up as I make my way through James Joyce's masterpiece.

"A deaf gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face, pushes his mower on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grass-halms."

agenbite of inwit - remorse of conscience collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/eng…

filibeg - the kilt worn by Scottish Highlanders

Word origin: C18: from Scottish Gaelic fēileadhbeag, from fēileadh kilt + beag small collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/eng…

"A poor soul gone to heaven: and on a heath beneath winking stars a fox, red reek of rapine in his fur, with merciless bright eyes scraped in the earth, listened, scraped up the earth, listened, scraped and scraped."

"Across the page the symbols moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes."

"The pluterperfect imperturbability of the department of agriculture."

" On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins."

"What has she in the bag? A misbirth with a trailing navelcord, hushed in ruddy wool. The cords of all link back, strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks."

"The hundredheaded rabble of the cathedral close. A hater of his kind ran from them to the wood of madness, his mane foaming in the moon, his eyeballs stars. Houyhnhnm, horsenostrilled. The oval equine faces."

"A choir gives back menace and echo, assisting about the altar’s horns, the snorted Latin of jackpriests moving burly in their albs, tonsured and oiled and gelded, fat with the fat of kidneys of wheat."

"Galleys of the Lochlanns ran here to beach, in quest of prey, their bloodbeaked prows riding low on a molten pewter surf. Danevikings, torcs of tomahawks aglitter on their breasts when Malachi wore the collar of gold."

"A school of turlehide whales stranded in hot noon, spouting, hobbling in the shallows. Then from the starving cagework city a horde of jerkined dwarfs, my people, with flayers’ knives, running, scaling, hacking in green blubbery
whalemeat."

"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."

tenné (also tenny) - Heraldry
Orange-brown, as a stain used in blazoning. lexico.com/en/definition/…

"Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpoise."

"Bag of corpsegas sopping in foul brine. A quiver of minnows, fat of a spongy titbit, flash through the slits of his buttoned trouserfly. God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain."

"Dead breaths I living breathe, tread dead dust, devour a urinous offal from all dead. Hauled stark over the gunwale he breathes upward the stench of his green grave, his leprous nosehole snoring to the sun."

Bladderwrack - Fucus vesiculosus, a seaweed found in cold marine waters. The way this word sounds, it was made to be used by Joyce!

Cormac McCarthy was not even born when Joyce was doing it!

Cf. Stefano D'Arrigo's Horcynus Orca: "and below that frightening, gigantic, and tempestuous profile, the pellesquadre looked like impotent dwarfs, like the damned or like lunatics who were trying to empty the sea with the palms of their hands."

Lochlann - This name derives from the Irish (Gaelic) “Lochlann” (Norrænt, Norðurlöndin), meaning “one who dwells at the fjord-land”. This was the Irish term for invaders from Scandinavia. name-doctor.com/name-lochlann-…

Left - a pyx, right - a monstrance. I don't know why, but I've always confused them.

Barnacle Goose

darkmans British slang
night-time
collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/eng…

farl - a small thin triangular cake or biscuit made especially with oatmeal or wheat flour
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/farl

"And thy quarrons dainty is"
quarrons (pl. quarronses)
obsolete - the body
wordsense.eu/quarrons/

gamp
informal, dated British
An umbrella, especially a large unwieldy one.
lexico.com/definition/gamp

"Falcon is poised over fell in the cool,
Salmon draws
Its lovely quarrons through the pool."

W.H. Auden "The Orators"

"Critics who tended to scold the author of About the House for using rare words might consider the following (and their use) in The Orators: mawmet, gletcher, concha, oxter, barratry, darkmans, quarrons, pooty, blips, bambling, gonsil, and so on."

"He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."

"The ferreteyed porkbutcher folded the sausages he had snipped off with blotchy fingers, sausagepink. Sound meat there like a stallfed heifer."

"Now it could bear no more. Dead : an old woman’s : the grey sunken cunt of the world." That's the only occasion when the word "cunt" is used in Ulysses. I'm looking at you, Irvine Welsh!

Metempsychosis in "Historical Dictionary of Ancient Greek Philosophy" by Anthony Preus

"The pulp fiction in which Molly encounters the word metempsychosis, "Ruby: the Pride of the Ring," is based on an actual book published fifteen years earlier by Amye Reade, Ruby. A Novel. Founded on the Life of a Circus Girl (London, 1889)" joyceproject.com/notes/040021ru…

"A paper. He liked to read at stool. Hope no ape comes knocking just as I’m. [...] Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper turning its pages over on his bared knees. Something new and easy."

lorry - not a truck here (episode 5) but a waterside crane

"Leah tonight: Mrs Bandman Palmer. Like to see her in that again. Hamlet she played last night." footlightnotes.tumblr.com/post/430573964…

hazard
"in Dublin at least, “hazard” used to be the actual term for a taxi-rank, or its forerunner, the cab-stand." irishtimes.com/opinion/pubic-…

"Martha, Mary... that picture" - Christ in the House of Martha and Mary by Jan Breughel the Younger and Peter Paul Rubens.

craw-thumper Irish informal
an ostentatiously pious person
collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/eng…

"throw it away" - Throwaway - the name of a racehorse!

scut - tail of a rabbit

"By Brady’s cottages a boy for the skins lolled, his bucket of offal linked, smoking a chewed fagbutt."

Poor jugginses! Damn all they know or care about anything with their long noses stuck in nosebags. Too full for words. Still they get their feed all right and their doss. Gelded too: a stump of black guttapercha wagging limp between their haunches."

"With careful tread he passed over a hopscotch court with its forgotten pickeystone. Not a sinner. Near the timberyard a squatted child at marbles, alone, shooting the taw with a cunnythumb. A wise tabby, a blinking sphinx, watched from her warm sill."

"Corpus. Body. Corpse. Good idea the Latin. Stupefies them first. Hospice for the dying. They don’t seem to chew it; only swallow it down. Rum idea : eating bits of a corpse why the cannibals cotton to it."

"The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shrivelled smell he seems to have. Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher’s stone. The alchemists."

"Donnybrook fair more in their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M’Carthy took the floor." youtube.com/watch?v=orkQfE…

Harking back to the earlier episodes: "The Song of the Cheerful (but slightly Sarcastic) Jesus" is a poem by Oliver St. John Gogarty. It was written around Christmas of 1904 and was later published in modified form as "The Ballad of Joking Jesus" youtube.com/watch?v=6yq1Uh…

skeowways - askew

"Nothing between himself and heaven" - what a poetic way to say that somebody is bald!

"Father Coffey. I knew his name was like a coffin."

"Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life."

"Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job."

"One of the drunks spelt out the name : Terence Mulcahy. The other drunk was blinking up at a statue of our Saviour the widow had got put up. [...] And, after blinking up at the sacred figure, Not a bloody bit like the man, says he. That’s not Mulcahy, says he, whoever done it."

"Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I’d like to know? Now, I’d give a trifle to know who he is." I like the hypothesis that it's Joyce himself.

"How many! All these here once walked round Dublin."
Cf. T. S. Eliot's "I had not thought death had undone so many" taken from Inferno:
“si lunga tratta
di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto
che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta.”

"As you are now so once were we."

"Well and what’s cheese? Corpse of milk."

"Where is that Parsee tower of silence? Eaten by
birds." slate.com/human-interest…

Tantalus glasses

spaugs - big, clumsy feet

Irish Gaelic spàg - the paw or limb or claw of an animal, transferred to humans as pejorative or for club-foot

wordsense.eu/spaugs/

"We serve them. I teach the blatant Latin language. I speak the tongue of a race the acme of whose mentality is the maxim: time is money. Material domination. Dominus! Lord! Where is the spirituality?"

"Kyrie! The radiance of the intellect. I ought to profess Greek, the language of the mind. Kyrie eleison! "

"— But my riddle! he said. What opera is like a railway line?
— Opera? Mr O’Madden Burke’s sphinx face reriddled.
Lenehan announced gladly :
— The Rose of Castille. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!"

"Madam, I’m Adam. And Able was I ere I saw Elba."

"Two Dublin vestals [...] They want to see the views of Dublin from the top of Nelson’s pillar. They save up three and in tenpence a red tin letterbox moneybox."

The Nelson pillar was damaged in an explosion in 1966. bbc.com/news/magazine-…

K. M. A. - kiss my arse
K. M. R. I. A. - kiss my royal Irish arse

brawn (British English) meat from a pig’s head that has been boiled and pressed in a container and is often served in thin flat pieces SYN headcheese (American English)

ldoceonline.com/Food-topic/bra…

shaughraun

1. (Anglo-Irish, Canadian) a wanderer, a vagabond
2. (Anglo-Irish, Canadian) a state of travelling or wandering

Origin
Irish seachrán.

yourdictionary.com/shaughraun

A relatively recent article: "James Joyce’s joust with journalism: The Freeman’s Journal in Ulysses’ Aeolus chapter" irishtimes.com/culture/books/…

And this evoked an episode in Pynchon's Against the Day:

"Met him pike hoses" for "metempsychosis". The pun was nicely translated in the Russian version (tr. Khinkis and Khoruzhiy) as "metim psu khvost" for "metempsihoz" (literally: we are raddling a dog's tail)

greenhouse - here not a conservatory but a public urinal

"She used to say Ben Dollard had a base barreltone voice. He has legs like barrels and you’d think he was singing into a barrel. Now, isn’t that wit?"

"Hot mockturtle vapour and steam of newbaked jampuffs rolypoly poured out from Harrison’s. The heavy noonreek tickled the top of Mr Bloom’s gullet."

"Flapdoodle to feed fools on."

"One born every second somewhere. Other dying every second. Since I fed the birds five minutes. Three hundred kicked the bucket. Other three hundred born, washing the blood off, all are washed in the blood of the lamb [...] Cityful passing away, other cityful coming"

"Butchers’ buckets wobble lights. Give us that brisket off the hook. Plup. Rawhead and bloody bones. Flayed glasseyed sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloody-papered snivelling nosejam on sawdust."

"Dignam’s potted meat. Cannibals would with lemon and rice. White missionary too salty. Like pickled pork."

"He hummed, prolonging in solemn echo, the closes of the bars :
Don Giovanni, a cenar teco
M’invitasti."

"What does that teco mean? Tonight perhaps." No, "teco" is an archaic form which means "con te" - with you.

Recipes inspired by James Joyce's Dublin for Bloomsday irishcentral.com/culture/food-d…

Food for Thought: Cannibalistic translation in the Lestrygonians episode of James Joyce's Ulysses hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v12_1…

neat's leather - oxhide

neat (n.)
oxen, bullocks, cows, bovine cattle collectively," Old English neat "ox, beast, animal
etymonline.com/word/neat

ollav
variants: or ollave or ollamh \ ˈäləv \
plural -s
: a learned man in ancient Ireland

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/oll…

"Glittereyed, his rufous skull close to his greencapped desklamp sought the face, bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He laughed low : a sizar’s laugh of Trinity : unanswered."

sizar
"a student (as in the University of Cambridge) who receives an allowance toward college expenses and who originally acted as a servant to other students in return for this allowance"
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/siz…

"Ed egli avea del cul fatto trombetta." That's Barbariccia, a demon from The Divine Comedy trumpeting through his ass.
Mandelbaum:
"but first each pressed his tongue between his teeth
as signal for their leader, Barbariccia.

And he had made a trumpet of his ass."

"Khaki Hamlets don’t hesitate to shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne."
poetrycat.com/algernon-charl…

Tir na n-og
"a paradise and supernatural realm of everlasting youth, beauty, health, abundance, and joy."
irishcentral.com/roots/history/…

caubeen - an Irish beret

gombeen
noun Irish English.
usury.
1860–65; < Irish gaimbín interest, especially exorbitant interest, literally, bit, small piece, diminutive of gamba lump, hunk
dictionary.com/browse/gombeen

scortatory - pertaining to lewdness or fornication; lewd.

thefreedictionary.com/Scortatory

pogue mahone! - (Irish) a dismissive retort, lit. ‘kiss my arse’.

greensdictofslang.com/entry/hguz2fq

"The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas."
It IS!

"God : noise in the street: very peripatetic. Space: what you damn well have to see. Through spaces smaller than red globules of man’s blood they creepycrawl after Blake’s buttocks into eternity of which this vegetable world is but a shadow."

"His look went from brooder’s beard to carper’s skull, to remind, to chide them not unkindly, then to the baldpink lollard costard, guitless though maligned."

costard
1: any of several large English cooking apples
2 archaic : NODDLE, PATE

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cos…

" If others have their will Ann hath a way." Anne Hathaway -the wife of Shakespeare

"Crosslegged under an umbrel umbershoot he thrones an Aztec logos, functioning on astral levels, their oversoul, mahamahatma. The faithful hermetists await the light, ripe for chelaship, ringroundabout him." As good a summary of any occult BS as we can get.

"Stephen looked down on a wide headless caubeen, hung on his ashplant-handle over his knee. My casque and sword."

"Coffined thoughts around me, in mummycases, embalmed in spice of words. Thoth, god of libraries, a birdgod, moonycrowned."

"You’re darned witty. Three drams of usquebaugh you drank with Dan Deasy’s ducats."

usquebaugh
Irish, Scottish
Whisky.
Origin
Late 16th century from Irish and Scottish Gaelic uisge beatha ‘water of life’
lexico.com/definition/usq…

"Enter Magee Mor Matthew, a rugged rough rugheaded kern, in strossers with a buttoned codpiece, his nether stocks bemired with clauber of ten forests, a wand of wilding in his hand."

honorificabilitudinitatibus
"may be rendered more succinctly as “of honour”.
worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-…

"Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuck Mulligan clucked lewdly."

"A dark back went before them. Step of a pard, down, out by the gateway, under portcullis barbs."

Bad cess to
"To say bad cess to you to somebody is to wish them bad luck" worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bad1.htm

vesta - a match (after the brand)

"Down there Emmet was hanged, drawn and quartered. Greasy black rope. Dogs licking the blood off the street when the lord lieutenant’s wife drove by in her noddy."

Raise a glass to Robert Emmet, the Irish rebel leader executed on this day in 1803

irishcentral.com/roots/history/…

" Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones."

"Born all in the dark wormy earth, cold specks of fire, evil lights shining in the darkness. Where fallen archangels flung the stars of their brows. Muddy swinesnouts, hands, root and root, gripe and wrest them."

"Grandfather ape gloating on a stolen hoard." Gifford relates this to Yeates' "The Eaters of Precious Stones":

"One day I saw faintly an immense pit of blackness, round which went a circular parapet, and on this parapet sat innumerable apes eating precious stones out of the palms of their hands. [...] I knew that I saw the Celtic Hell, and my own Hell, the Hell of the artist"

puckers - boxers

tallyho
a call of a huntsman at sight of the fox
merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tal…

Almidano Artifoni "Taught accountancy for the evening school of the Società degli Impiegati Civili in via Giotto and probably helped Joyce obtain a position teaching English in the same school between 1910-13." museojoycetrieste.it/english/artifo…

"Wandering Rocks" - a series of portraits

niamhcunningham.com/wandering-rock…

"When a "car" is mentioned in Ulysses, it is usually a "jaunting car," also known as an "outside car" or "outsider," a horse-drawn equivalent of an automotive taxicab."
m.joyceproject.com/notes/050013ja…

M'appari (sung by Simon Dedalus in the Ormond Bar)
youtube.com/watch?v=yfQWjL…

"By Bachelor’s walk jog jaunty jingled Blazes Boylan, bachelor, in sun, in heat, mare’s glossy rump atrot, with flick of whip, on bounding tyres : sprawled, warmseated, Boylan impatience, ardentbold."

"In liver gravy Bloom mashed mashed potatoes."

"Corncrake croaker: belly like a poisoned pup."

Parallel Fifths, Parallel Lives: Miscommunication and Failed Interactions math.grinnell.edu/~simpsone/Ashp…

Visualizing Joyce's Ulysses: "Sirens" as a Graphic Score emilyfuhrman.co/projects/joyce…

Blindness and Inwit: James Joyce and the Sirens a
Reading of Chapter 11 of "Ulysses" ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewconten…

THE MUSICALITY OF "SIRENS" jamesjoyce.omeka.net/exhibits/show/…

"Chamber music. Could make a kind of pun on that. It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make most noise."

The Croppy Boy youtube.com/watch?v=_QMx1l…

"Ruin them. Wreck their lives. Then build them cubicles to end their days in."

"Ben Dollard bulkily cachuchad towards the bar, mightily praisefed and all big roseate, on heavyfooted feet, his gouty fingers nakkering castagnettes in the air."

"In Lionel Marks’s antique saleshop window haughty Henry Lionel Leopold dear Henry Flower earnestly Mr Leopold Bloom envisaged candlestick melodeon oozing maggoty blowbags. Bargain : six bob."

Ezra Pound, the first censor of Ulysses, did not like the music with which the Sirens episode ended. From "Language, Sexuality and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos" by Jean-Michel Rabate:

Also see: "Ezra Pound's Censorship of "Ulysses"" by Paul Vanderham jstor.org/stable/2547366…

Finally, hit the Cyclops episode where the true stylistic madness begins.

There isn't a lot of exaggeration in this parody of legalese. I used to work as a sworn in-house translator and saw much worse!

"Thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach, pineapple chunks, Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs, drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of iridescent kale, York and Savoy...

and trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and punnets of mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious,...

and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes."

'The figure seated on a large boulder at the foot of a round tower was that of a broadshouldered deepchested stronglimbed frankeyed redhaired freely freckled shaggybearded widemouthed largenosed longheaded deepvoiced barekneed brawnyhanded hairylegged ruddyfaced sinewyarmed hero'

"Beneath this he wore trews of deerskin, roughly stitched with gut. His nether extremities were encased in high Balbriggan buskins dyed in lichen purple, the feet being shod with brogues of salted cowhide laced with the windpipe of the same beast."

"the foaming ebon ale which the noble twin brothers Bungiveagh and Bungardilaun brew ever in their divine alevats" Those are Sir Edward Guinness, Lord Iveagh, and Sir Arthur Guinness, Lord Ardilaun.

"he had heard from more favoured beings now in the spirit that their abodes were equipped with every modern home comfort such as tālāfānā, ālāvātār, hātākāldā, wātāklāsāt and that the highest adepts were steeped in waves of volupcy of the very purest nature."

stravage

1. Scot., Irish, and North England. to wander aimlessly.
2. to saunter; stroll.

dictionary.com/browse/stravage

Some of the funny names:
Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone
Grandjoker Vladinmire Pokethankertscheff
Archjoker Leopold Rudolph von Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler (Penis-in-the-bath Inhabitant-of-the-valley-of-testicles)
Herr Hurhausdirektorpresident Hans Chuechli-Steuerli

Those German compound nouns!

"Nationalgymnasiummuseumsanatoriumandsuspensoriumsordinaryprivatdocentgeneralhistoryspecialprofessordoctor Kriegfried Ueberallgemein"

Long before David Foster Wallace's O.N.A.N.! The acronym for Friends of the Emerald Isle is F.O.T.E.I. The word "fotei" is the Occitan for "I fucked". See Guilhèm de Peitieus's "Farai un vers pos mi sonelh": "Tant las fotei com auziretz" trobar.org/troubadours/co…

"In the course of the argument cannonballs, scimitars, boomerangs, blunderbusses, stinkpots, meatchoppers, umbrellas, catapults, knuckledusters, sandbags, lumps of pig iron were resorted to and blows were freely exchanged."

In his definitive biography of Michael Cusack, Marcus de Búrca makes the point that due to the scarce attention the Clare man was paid for decades after his death, Joyce's caricature in Ulysses remained the dominant representation of Cusack for a long time irishtimes.com/sport/cusack-s…

sky pilot - clergyman, specifically: chaplain

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sky…

shoneen - an Irishman who imitates English ways
C19: from Irish Gaelic Seoinín, diminutive of Seon John (taken as typical English name)

collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/eng…

pishogue
Irish
sorcery; witchcraft

collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/eng…

A mnemonic for tree names:

"and he quite excited with his dunducketymudcoloured mug on him and his old plumeyes rolling about."

"The scenes depicted on the emunctory field, showing our ancient duns and raths and cromlechs and grianauns and seats of learning and maledictive stones, are as wonderfully beautiful and the pigments as delicate as...

when the Sligo illuminators gave free rein to their artistic fantasy long long ago in the time of the Barmecides."

"What say you, good masters, to a squab pigeon pasty, some collops of venison, a saddle of veal, widgeon with crisp hog’s bacon, a boar’s head with pistachios, a bason of jolly custard, a medlar tansy and a flagon of old Rhenish?"

"— Who made those allegations? says Alf.

— I, says Joe. I’m the alligator."

S. Owen Caniculus - the citizen's dog
S. Anonymous - the anonymous narrator of the episode

"And all came with nimbi and aureoles and gloriae, bearing palms and harps and swords and olive crowns, in robes whereon were woven the blessed symbols of their efficacies, inkhorns, arrows, loaves, cruses, fetters, axes, trees, bridges, babes in a bathtub, shells, wallets,...

shears, keys, dragons, lilies, buckshot, beards, hogs, lamps, bellows, beehives, soupladles, stars, snakes, anvils, boxes of vaseline, bells, crutches, forceps, stags’ horns, watertight boots, hawks, millstones, eyes on a dish, wax candles, aspergills, unicorns."

"to bid farewell to Nagyaságos uram Lipóti Virag, late of Messrs Alexander Thom’s, printers to His Majesty, on the occasion of his departure for the distant clime of Százharminczbrojúgulyás-Dugulás (Meadow of Murmuring Waters)."

"Amid cheers that rent the welkin, responded to by answering cheers from a big muster of henchmen on the distant Cambrian and Caledonian hills, the mastodontic pleasureship slowly moved away"

H. R. H., rear admiral, the right honourable sir Hercules Hannibal Habeas Corpus Anderson K. G., K. P., K. T., P. C., K. C. B., M. P., J. P., M. B., D. S. O., S. O. D., M. F. H., M. R. I. A., B. L., Mus. Doc., P. L. G., F. T. C. D., F. R. U. I., F. R. C. P. I. and F. R. C. S. I.

As the New Year approaches, half of the novel is conquered. I'm looking forward to conquering the other half in 2020.

So, turns out there was a person called Praise-God Barebones.

The Sligo illuminators are the scribes who wrote the Book of Ballymote. isos.dias.ie/master.html?ht…

"An indication of the high value placed on these treasured family heirlooms can be gauged from the payment of 140 milch cows that Aed Óg Ó Domhnaill [...] paid The Mac Donnchaid (MacDonough) of Corann and Tirerril for the Book of Ballymote in 1522 [...] " irishtimes.com/culture/herita…

"Her figure was slight and graceful, inclining even to fragility but those iron jelloids she had been taking of late had done her a world of good"

Wigs on the green
"refers to a fight, brawl or fracas, or to a difference of opinion that could lead to fisticuffs"

worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-wig1.htm

mutoscope

"the photograph of grandpapa Giltrap’s lovely dog Garryowen that almost talked" That was the mangy mongrel in Cyclops! And, in fact, that was a real dog! "Garryowen was a champion Irish red setter, born in 1876 and owned by James J Giltrap, a law agent" irishtimes.com/culture/books/…

Garryowen (c.1900) [J.J. Giltrap's]

Obscenity Case Files: US v. One Book Called “Ulysses”
"the book came under fire after the release of Episode 13 [...], which features a story in which Bloom watches and fantasizes about a young woman named Gerty MacDowell as he pleasures himself." cbldf.org/about-us/case-…

The Trials of Ulysses
drb.ie/essays/the-tri…

"Roygbiv Vance taught us : red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet." Translation of the mnemonic in Russian Ulysses: "kak odnazhdy Zhak-zvonar golovoy svalil fonar" (how once Jacques the bell-ringer knocked down a lantern with his head). One word became a whole sentence.

"Then you have a beautiful calm without a cloud, smooth sea, placid, crew and cargo in smithereens, Davy Jones’ locker."

lutulent
[L. lutulentus, from lutum, mud.] Muddy; turbid; thick.

sorabji.com/1828/words/l/l…

inverecund - shameless

Latin - inverecundus

wordsense.eu/inverecundus/

with swire ywimpled - with the neck covered by a wimple

grameful

grame
obsolete
sorrow; anger

collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/eng…

"Lo, levin leaping lightens in eyeblink Ireland’s westward welkin!"

Treating a bee sting:

"the traveller Leopold came there to be healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice."

"And on this board were frightful swords and knives that are made in a great cavern by swinking demons out of white flames that they fix in the horns of buffalos and stags that there abound marvellously."

swink
archaic
: toil, slave

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/swi…

A tin of sardines described

" And there was a vat of silver that was moved by craft to open in the which lay strange fishes withouten heads though misbelieving men nie that this be possible thing without they see it natheless they are so. And these fishes lie in an oily water...

brought there from Portugal land because of the fatness that therein is like to the juices of the olive press."

Beer

"And they teach the serpents there to entwine themselves up on long sticks out of the ground and of the scales of these serpents they brew out a brewage like to mead."

franklin
a medieval English landowner of free but not noble birth

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fra…

aresouns - questionings

bedesman (also beadsman)

a person who prays for another as a duty, especially when paid.
an inmate of a poorhouse; almsman.

dictionary.com/browse/beadsman

palmer

a pilgrim, especially of the Middle Ages, who had returned from the Holy Land bearing a palm branch as a token.
any religious pilgrim.

dictionary.com/browse/palmer?…

"No question but her name is puissant who aventried the dear corse of our Agenbuyer, Healer and Herd"

anastomosis

technical A cross-connection between adjacent channels, tubes, fibers, or other parts of a network.

lexico.com/en/definition/…

"she is the second Eve and she won us, saith Augustine too, whereas that other, our grandam, which we are linked up with by successive anastomosis of navelcords sold us all, seed, breed and generation, for a penny pippin."

"others whiles all chode with him, a murrain seize the dolt, what a devil he would be at, thou chuff, thou puny, thou got in the peasestraw thou losel, thou chitterling, thou spawn of a rebel, thou dykedropt, thou abortion thou"

"An exquisite dulcet epithalame of most mollificative suadency for juveniles amatory whom the odoriferous flambeaus of the paranymphs have escorted to the quadrupedal proscenium of connubial communion. " - A sweet poem for the newlyweds on their way to the bedroom.

"Go thou and do likewise. Thus, or words to that effect, saith Zarathustra, sometime regius professor of French letters to the university of Oxtail"

"Assuefaction minorates atrocities"
Sir Thomas Browne in Christian Morals: "Forget not how assuefaction unto any thing minorates the passion from it; how constant objects lose their hints, and steal an inadvertisement upon us." biblehub.com/library/browne…

A human life in brief:
" we wail, batten, sport, clip, clasp, sunder, dwindle, die"

"ubicity of his tumulus" - the site of his grave

"To tell the truth he was mean in fortunes and for the most part hankered about the coffeehouses and low taverns with crimps, ostlers, bookies, Paul’s men, runners, flatcaps, waistcoateers, ladies of the bagnio and other rogues of the game or with a chanceable catchpole...

or a tipstaff often at nights till broad day of whom he picked up between his sackpossets much loose gossip."

crimp

a person engaged in enlisting sailors, soldiers, etc., by persuasion, swindling, or coercion.

dictionary.com/browse/crimp?s…

sack posset

This original recipe from the 17th century was often used as a curative drink in wealthy households. The combination of eggs, sugar, cream and sherry results in an exceedingly luxurious dessert.

theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2…

"Doctor Rinderpest, the bestquoted cowcatcher in all Muscovy, with a bolus or two of physic to take the bull by the horns"

"He’ll find himself on the horns of a dilemma if he meddles with a bull that’s Irish"

Irish bull
refers to a play on words with phrases that sound quite normal at first, but quickly reveal themselves contradictory, incongruous, absurd and impossible.

ireland-calling.com/irish-bull/

bullgine - engine

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bul…

Joyce’s incorporation of literary sources in ‘Oxen of the Sun’

geneticjoycestudies.org/GJS9/GJS9_Sara…

Intertextuality and Joyce's "Oxen of the Sun" Episode in Ulysses: the Relation between Literary and Computational Evidence
web.philo.ulg.ac.be/rissh/wp-conte…

"Talis ac tanta depravatio hujus seculi, O quirites, ut matres familiarum nostrae lascivas cujuslibet semiviri libici titillationes testibus ponderosis atque excelsis erectionibus centurionum Romanorum magnopere anteponunt"

incipient ventripotence - emerging potbelly

"for he nauseated the wretch that seemed to him a cropeared creature of a misshapen gibbosity born out of wedlock and thrust like a crookback teethed and feet first into the world, which the dint of the surgeon’s pliers in his skull lent indeed a colour to, so as it put him...

in thought of that missing link of creation’s chain desiderated by the late ingenious Mr Darwin."

"Tare and ages, what way would I be resting at all, he muttered thickly, and I tramping Dublin this while back with my share of songs and himself after me the like of a soulth or a bullawurrus?"

soulth variant spelling of sowlth
ghost
Irish samhailt, literally, likeness

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sow…

"They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned the giantantlered, snouter and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning multitude, murderers of the sun."

Stephen about @TheTweetOfGod "an omnivorous being which can masticate, deglute, digest and apparently pass through the ordinary channel with pluterperfect imperturbability such multifarious aliments as cancrenous females emaciated by parturition, corpulent professional gentlemen

@TheTweetOfGod ,not to speak of jaundiced politicians and chlorotic nuns might possibly find gastric relief in an innocent collation of staggering bob, reveals as nought else could and in a very unsavoury light the tendency above alluded to."

@TheTweetOfGod "Outflings my lord Stephen, giving the cry, and a tag and bobtail of all them after, cockerel, jackanapes, welsher, pilldoctor, punctual Bloom at heels with a universal grabbing at headgear, ashplants, bilbos, Panama hats and scabbards, Zermatt alpenstocks and what not."

@TheTweetOfGod "Allfather’s air, scintillant circumambient cessile air."

@TheTweetOfGod Episode 14 Oxen of the Sun
youtube.com/watch?v=L5NG4g…

@TheTweetOfGod The Circe episode should be adapted for the screen by Peter Greenaway.

@TheTweetOfGod kithogue - left-handed or awkward person

homepage.tinet.ie/~nobyrne/k.htm

@TheTweetOfGod shanderadan = shandrydan

a rickety, old-fashioned conveyance

dictionary.com/browse/shandry…

@TheTweetOfGod hard hat - here a bowler hat

@TheTweetOfGod curtana
the unpointed sword carried before an English sovereign at a coronation as an emblem of mercy

C15: from Anglo-Latin, from Old French cortain, the name of Roland's sword, which was broken at the point, ultimately from Latin curtus short collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/eng…

@TheTweetOfGod "model young ladies playing on the pianoforte or anon all with fervour reciting the family rosary round the crackling Yulelog while in the boreens and green lanes the colleens with their swains strolled what times the strains of the organtoned melodeon"

@TheTweetOfGod "MRS BELLINGHAM: (In cap and seal coney mantle, wrapped up to the nose, steps out of her brougham and scans through tortoiseshell quizzing-glasses which she takes from inside her huge opossum muff.)"

@TheTweetOfGod "From his forehead arise starkly the Mosaic ramshorns."

@TheTweetOfGod "The beagle lifts his snout, showing the grey scorbutic face of Paddy Dignam. He has gnawed all. He exhales a putrid carcasefed breath. He grows to human size and shape. His dachshund coat becomes a brown mortuary habit. His green eyeflashes bloodshot. ...

@TheTweetOfGod Half of one ear, all the nose and both thumbs are ghouleaten."

@TheTweetOfGod "He worms down through a coalhole, his brown habit trailing its tether over rattling pebbles. After him toddles an obese grandfather rat on fungus turtle paws under a grey carapace."

@TheTweetOfGod "Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour."

@TheTweetOfGod "Thirty two workmen wearing rosettes, from all the counties of Ireland, under the guidance of Derwan the builder, construct the new Bloomusalem. It is a colossal edifice, with crystal roof built in the shape of a huge pork kidney, containing forty thousand rooms."

@TheTweetOfGod "So they included a broken red line indicating a line under construction to New Bloomusalem, though “like the airport metro, it’s never going to happen in our lifetime”."
irishtimes.com/culture/ulysse…

@TheTweetOfGod "The floor is covered with an oilcloth mosaic of jade and azure and cinnabar rhomboids. Footmarks are stamped over it in all senses, heel to heel, heel to hollow, toe to toe, feet locked, a morris of shuffling feet without body phantoms, all in a scrimmage higgledypiggledy."

@TheTweetOfGod "Florry Talbot, a blond feeble goosefat whore in a tatterdemalion gown of mildewed strawberry, lolls spreadeagle in the sofa corner, her limp forearm pendent over the bolster, listening."

@TheTweetOfGod "Along an infinite invisible tightrope taut from zenith to nadir the End of the World, a twoheaded octopus in gillie’s kilts, busby and tartan filibegs, whirls through the murk, head over heels, in the form of the Three Legs of Man."

@TheTweetOfGod "Ben Jumbo Dollard, rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fatpapped, stands forth, his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of black bathing bagslops."

@TheTweetOfGod "(Virag unscrews his head in a trice and holds it under his arm.)

VIRAG'S HEAD: Quack!"

@TheTweetOfGod "The dwarf acolytes, giggling, peeping, nudging, ogling, Easter-kissing, zigzag behind him. His voice is heard mellow from afar, merciful, male, melodious."

@TheTweetOfGod "From a corner the morning hours run out, goldhaired, slim, in girlish blue, waspwaisted, with innocent hands. Nimbly they dance, twirling their skipping ropes. The hours of noon follow in amber gold." youtube.com/watch?v=sXjJxu…

@TheTweetOfGod "On nags, hogs, bellhorses, Gadarene swine, Corny in coffin. Steel shark stone onehandled Nelson, two trickies Frauenzimmer plumstained from pram falling bawling. Gum, he’s a champion."

@TheTweetOfGod "Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears seated on a toadstool, the deathflower of the potato blight on her breast."

@TheTweetOfGod "The manuscript, which shows significant differences from the final version, consists of 27 large sheets of graph paper, about 16 by 12 inches each, covered in Joyce's spiky penmanship." nytimes.com/2000/12/12/boo…

@TheTweetOfGod CHRISTIE'S TO AUCTION JOYCE MANUSCRIPT

youtube.com/watch?v=9TTv82…

@TheTweetOfGod "One typist's husband caught sight of the sexual material and threw part of the manuscript into the fire. Noel Riley Fitch writes in ''Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation'' (1983) that another typist threatened to throw herself out the window."

@TheTweetOfGod

@TheTweetOfGod "A rare James Joyce manuscript is on show in Dublin prior to its auction in New York. The hand-written pages are a complete working draft of the Circe Chapter of Ulysses and could fetch well in excess of a million pounds in the sale." rte.ie/archives/2015/…

@TheTweetOfGod "Autograph manuscript of the 'Circe' episode of Ulysses, a complete working draft with very extensive revisions, additions to the dialogue, word substitutions and other reworkings by Joyce" catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000…

@TheTweetOfGod "As will be shown below, a close comparison of the two texts confirms that Joyce drew on Masoch’s novel in great detail when writing the Circe passages." drb.ie/essays/an-idea…

@TheTweetOfGod growler - an iceberg less than 2 meters (6.6 feet) across that floats with less than 1 meter (3.3 feet) showing above water

nsidc.org/cryosphere/glo…

@TheTweetOfGod "apropos of the Fishguard-Rosslare route which, it was mooted, was once more on the tapis in the circumlocution departments with the usual quantity of red tape and dillydallying of effete fogeydom and dunderheads generally."

@TheTweetOfGod not care a continental

continental
a piece of paper money issued by the Continental Congress: it became almost worthless before the end of the war, hence the phrases not care (or give) a continental and not worth a continental

collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/eng…

@TheTweetOfGod A long convoluted sentence that didn't make sense to me even after several readings. Perhaps, you will be more fortunate.

@TheTweetOfGod The Stylometry of Cliché Density and Character in James Joyce’s Ulysses lexicometrica.univ-paris3.fr/jadt/jadt2012/…

@TheTweetOfGod A Statistical Analysis of the "Eumaeus" Phrasemes in James Joyce's Ulysses ledonline.it/ledonline/JADT…

@TheTweetOfGod "Beggaring Description":
Politics and Style in Joyce's "Eumaeus"
muse.jhu.edu/article/244009

@TheTweetOfGod "There are thirty-seven French loanwords in the “Eumaeus” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, all of them italicized, and the very idea of translating them back into French, for a French edition of the work, seems paradoxical and doomed." journals.openedition.org/palimpsestes/1…

@TheTweetOfGod Finally reached the only chapter worth reading of this overrated book. slate.com/human-interest…

@TheTweetOfGod "its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts"

@TheTweetOfGod " its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea"

@TheTweetOfGod rhabdomantic instruments

@TheTweetOfGod "The incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius."

@TheTweetOfGod "Fanned by a constant updraught of ventilation between the kitchen and the chimneyflue, ignition was communicated from the faggots of precombustible fuel to polyhedral masses of bituminous coal, containing in compressed mineral form...

@TheTweetOfGod the foliated fossilised decidua of primeval forests which had in turn derived their vegetative existence from the sun, primal source of heat (radiant), transmitted through omnipresent luminiferous diathermanous ether."

@TheTweetOfGod "What events might nullify these calculations?
The cessation of existence of both or either, the inauguration of a new era or calendar, the annihilation of the world and consequent extermination of the human species, inevitable but impredictable."

@TheTweetOfGod "Did either openly allude to their racial difference?

Neither."

@TheTweetOfGod "astronomical kaleidoscopes exhibiting the twelve constellations of the zodiac from Aries to Pisces, miniature mechanical orreries, arithmetical gelatine lozenges, geometrical to correspond with zoological biscuits, globemap playing balls, historically costumed dolls."

@TheTweetOfGod "Was the knowledge possessed by both of each of these languages, the extinct and the revived, theoretical or practical?
Theoretical, being confined to certain grammatical rules of accidence and syntax and practically excluding vocabulary."

@TheTweetOfGod "The increasing simplification traceable from the Egyptian epigraphic hieroglyphs to the Greek and Roman alphabets and the anticipation of modern stenography and telegraphic code in the cuneiform inscriptions (Semitic) and the virgular quinquecostate ogham writing (Celtic)."

@TheTweetOfGod quinquecostate
having five lines or ribs
collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/eng…

@TheTweetOfGod "The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit."

@TheTweetOfGod "a number computed to a relative degree of accuracy to be of such magnitude and of so many places, e. g., the 9th power of the 9th power of 9, that, the result having been obtained, 33 closely printed volumes of 1000 pages each of innumerable quires and reams of India paper"

@TheTweetOfGod "So, it is quite unremarkable...
However, we must make allowances: Joyce’s performance in his school and university mathematics ranged from indifferent to abysmal. It is clear that he really meant “9 to the 9th power of 9″ From "Joyce’s Number" thatsmaths.com/2013/06/13/joy…

@TheTweetOfGod "Silent, each contemplating the other in both mirrors of the reciprocal flesh of theirhisnothis fellowfaces."

@TheTweetOfGod "Nought Nowhere Was Never Reached": Mathematics in "Ulysses" jstor.org/stable/2547386…

@TheTweetOfGod "first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition, their gazes, first Bloom’s, then Stephen’s, elevated to the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow."

@TheTweetOfGod "What selfinvolved enigma did Bloom risen, going, gathering multicoloured multiform multitudinous garments, voluntarily apprehending, not comprehend?

Who was M’Intosh?"

@TheTweetOfGod "What were his reflections concerning the last member of this series and late occupant of the bed?

Reflections on his vigour (a bounder), corporal proportion (a billsticker), commercial ability (a bester), impressionability (a boaster)."

@TheTweetOfGod "reclined laterally, left, with right and left legs flexed, the indexfinger and thumb of the right hand resting on the bridge of the nose, in the attitude depicted on a snapshot photograph made by Percy Apjohn, the childman weary, the manchild in the womb."

@TheTweetOfGod Some Textual and Factual Discrepancies in James Joyce's Ulysses: The Blooms’ Several “First Nights”

journals.openedition.org/variants/330

@TheTweetOfGod Aha, here it is: "This essay explores the notion that Bloom dies in the “Ithaca” episode" bertolini.net/articles/31.2b…

@TheTweetOfGod So, the last chapter is left and I know that when I'm done I'll be fighting the urge to reread the book immediately. Alas, we're all mortal and there are so many books out there...

@TheTweetOfGod "so as to wheedle any money she can out of him no fool like an old fool" Bloom is fucking 38.

@TheTweetOfGod plabbery

(Irish) foolish.

greensdictofslang.com/entry/exnumya

@TheTweetOfGod glaum
dialectal, chiefly British
grab, clutch, grope

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gla…

@TheTweetOfGod "sometimes he used to go to bed with his muddy boots on when the maggot takes him"

maggot
“whimsical, eccentric, strange, or perverse notion or idea”
worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-…

@TheTweetOfGod "the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes"

@TheTweetOfGod Bloomsday: Searching for the spot in Howth where Molly Bloom said ‘yes’

irishtimes.com/life-and-style…

@TheTweetOfGod "then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

And this concludes my reading of Ulysses. Yes.