Thread by @PaulMavroudis

Twenty years after I first tried and failed to slog my way through it, I'm having another go at Ulysses.

The Australian comedian Steve Abbott, in his Sandman guise, wrote a book during the sharehouse heavy era of Aussie comedy, which included the advice to always be the second person to arrive at a party, and the second last to leave; that way you'll never be gossiped about.

Anyway, this newspaper editorial room episode is savage. Joyce sticks a bunch of intellectual lightweights in a room, and has them spouting self-important nonsense, alternately in the form of hot takes and nostalgia.

Even worse, they take the piss out of Leopold Bloom when he's not in the room for his lack of, I suppose they'd call it learning. They also try to rope in Stephen Dedalus (an intellectual superior) to their ranks.

Their sense of self-importance is so outsized, that it's fair to say Joyce is being cruel. Marginal intellects running a marginal newspaper in a marginal city of Empire, passing judgment on the world. The lower case "p" for the professor among the height of Joyce's contempt.

And for all the highfalutin spiels of the editorial team, when the newsboy runs out to sell papers, his call out is "racing special!".

The virgins climbing Nelson's Pillar story is so over the top literary lowbrow.

As valid as Joyce's criticisms might be of what he saw as the small-minded and intellectually shallow Irish nationalist cultural revival, I still feel a bit queasy having that come from someone who's fled the scene, so to speak. It's a bit Australians fleeing to England.

Stephen Dedalus, questions of metaphysics at the forefront of his view of life. Leopold Bloom, always asking what are people trying to sell me?

It's certainly an interesting way to explore anti-clericalist and anti-Catholic thinking. On the one hand, Stephen Dedalus is a product of the best of the Jesuit education system. Leopold Bloom, on the other hand, is a half-Jewish ad man, cynical from experience and profession.

A lot of talking about women (like one Stephen's sisters selling off furniture), but not much talk from women, yet. Very segregated society, at least the way Joyce presents it.

Pretty sure I've passed whatever section it is that I got to last time I tried to read this.

Hamlet - slain father
Stephen - negligent father
Leopold - suicide father

Characters existing around their fathers' real and metaphorical ghosts.

"Resp girl (R. C.) wishes to hear of post in fruit or pork shop."

I assume RC stands for Roman Catholic.

So much code that'd be obvious to someone of the time, and so much that's buried anyway. Collaborative effort over a century of scholarship and book clubs trying to unpack this book.

The short five, six, seven or eight word sentences remind me of an old uni tutor of mine, whose exegesis to his creative arts doctorate was a relentless stream of aphorisms, one after the other.

"I was happier then. Or was that I? Or am I now I? Twentyeight I was. She twentythree when we left Lombard street west something changed. Could never again like it after Rudy. Can't bring back time."

There's something about the narrative pacing in this novel. It drifts, then races, and then both at once during the interior monologues. It's easy to overlook details, acceptable to skim through, to forget and then recall. Bloom and the reader become close to one in such moments.

I'm 39, nearly 40. Bloom is apparently 38. Hackneyed as it sounds, it makes sense that Portrait made more sense to me twenty years ago than Ulysses did.

Bloom's disgust with animal humanity during his scanning of the restaurant, lol.

Half of the Lestrygonians episode seems to be a meditation on "Why *not* eat humans? We damn well eat nearly everything else".

Bloom here is presented as sympathetic and empathetic. He acknowledges the rotten deal Irish women have. (think that Family Guy bit with the animatronic Irish woman going back and forth between praying and giving birth.)

And the scene with the blind man; it's not just pity, and it's not just literary gamesmanship, toying with the reader who can't see exactly what Bloom/Joyce sees. It's trying to understand the pedestrian's experience of blindness.

There's also references to Zionism and freemasonry, but how much connection to any mass movement Bloom has, seems an open question. He's probably most connected to Molly, but physically, emotionally, psychologically she's somewhere, and with someone, else.

But there's also this: forget the Latin, the Shakespeare, the politics, and the shops. The most distant cultural reference is the music. Recording technology is still in its infancy. What are the tunes? The styles? And what do individual tastes infer about a person's character?

The Scylla and Charybdis episode... eavesdropping on an arcane discussion about classical aesthetics, among other things. Bit alienating, little doubt by design.

Though I do enjoy the intertextual (metatextual?) moment where Stephen reminds his interlocutors that Shakespeare walked London's streets; that he existed outside of the work he left behind.

I know barely anything useful about the works and life of William Shakespeare to make any comment on the merits of Stephen's defense of Anne Hathaway, other than at least someone seems to be arguing against the blunt misogyny of the other characters.

Easy to forget, within the context of an outwardly pious and in some cases borderline theocratic society, that there was a strange kind of interest in Oriental religions among the learned and semi-learned.

"Our national epic has yet to be written, Dr Sigerson says."

Well, putting obvious commentary on the legacy of this book aside, how many national epics does any nation need?

And now that there's a Quaker character in the room, I regret not reading Christopher Hill's "The World Turned Upside Down". Still, it's on my shelf and therefore might yet get read someday.

Achilles, disguised and raised as a girl to avoid dying in battle; lower middle class Irish boys like Stephen, raised by mothers, aunts, and older sisters in the absence of neglectful fathers, before being shunted off to the Jesuits and the world of men, intellectual Sparta.

Bono was singing some version of this on a barge in 1981.

Buck Mulligan, self-aware court jester. You need someone like that in a novel like this, maybe in life in general.

This chapter requires having or making at least a cursory familiarity with the Irish writer John Millington Synge, and Joyce/Dedalus' relationship to him. joyceproject.com/notes/090011sy…

Three years after Bloomsday, Synge puts on a play featuring patricide which leads to riots in Dublin, and obscenity charges in the US.

Having read no further since the last tweet, but with a cold and waking up at about 2:30am, thinking about this probably inconsequential chapter and its meaning.

The voices of the scholars in the library, old, young, wannabe, merging with the internal thoughts of Stephen Dedalus, thoughts and speech crashing and melding into speech and thoughts, wondering if there's an Irish literary vanguard and if so, how close they are to its centre.

The discussion on Synge is important because it highlights the depths of Ireland's colonial history. Dublin was founded as a coloniser's city. Ireland is colonised not just by Vikings, Normans, Scots, and English, but also by Christianity, Catholic and then Protestant.

Synge takes an interest in the Gaelic west of the country, and gets pilloried I'm his time for not showing enough deference to the virtues of the common Irish person. Meanwhile Stephen and his cohort obsess over the most canonical English writer.

I suppose the solutions then to this cultural moment are to become completely sincere about Irish cultural nationalism; or to retreat into canonical sholarshop; or to take the piss out of it; or to runaway to the Continent.

How aware are Shakespeare or Joyce or <insert your preferred writer> about their work changing the world? Is it a case of aiming for greatness or merely hoping? Do they realise halfway through that this might be more than just a way of paying the bills?

Apparently by losing "thou" from most variants of everyday English, contemporary audiences are unfamiliar with the use of the "thou" by Shakespeare to often denote someone of a lower social status.

A brief moment of narrative and discursive clarity when it becomes a play, each man taking his turn, before that device is dispensed with.

"He laughed to free his mind from his mind's bondage."

Human beings have bodies, human beings are bodies, etc.

It's not a scientific analysis on my behalf - and Joyce only gives us a sample size of about three or four pages - but Father Conmee is somewhere between 15% and 30% of the way to being a real piece of work.

Your own estimation of his moral character will depend on whether you endorse his desire to fare evade on the tram, and on whether his not doing so - because he believes that's the day he'll get pulled up for going without a ticket - should be considered noble or ignoble.

But which of us wouldn't be at least a little judgmental when coming across a young couple who've clearly been having a frolic in a field?

There's this whole exchange in Italian between Stephen and an Italian musician, where the non-Italian reader has to decide whether looking up a translation is a form of eavesdropping.

Today I learned that the entire Dublin tram system, a crucial part of this book - at least one shop even makes grocery deliveries using it - got dismantled by the 1950s. Then they started a new tramway system in 2004.

A devil of a time trying to figure out what Tom Rochford's invention is.

Also, quite clear that the idea of guilty pleasure (in this case a mystery novel) is an old one; or potentially being caught with a "sensation novel" would be considered scandalous?

Leopold has a little less shame/guilt about buying erotic literature for his wife.

We also get what is apparently the only reference to the date in the novel: June 16, 1904.

Simon Dedalus is a bum.

Joyce reminds us that before the disaster of the Titanic, there was the disaster of the General Slocum. Nearly a thousand dead.

It says something about Father Conmee's theology that he is motivated to do the right thing in this case more by fear of judgment or by fear of punishment than he is by the righteousness of the act in its own right.

https://twitter.com/PaulMavroudis/status/1681113257116078081?t=2iNmx38lJ3TlADNUXadFtg&s=19

I will note however that my sum total of reading on Aristotelian ethics and virtuous characters is a chapter from The Simpsons and Philosophy from about 20 years ago. So, you know, it's not exactly my area of expertise.

Today I learned about the Heenan vs Sayers fight, mentioned in Ulysses via a faded poster already 44 years old on Bloomsday. google.com/amp/s/amp.theg…

Of Stephen, Buck Mulligan says "That is his tragedy. He can never be a poet". Poor Joyce. Ends up writing a novel based on a poem. Do all novelists secretly yearn to be poets instead?

Mulligan and Haines discuss the as yet unrealised and may never be realised potential of Stephen Dedalus. Mulligan suggests, based on probably a thousand uncritically examined variables - call it instinct - that Dedalus will write something in ten years.

It is a gut wrenching throwaway exchange for this reader. Some of us or many of us are always examined for signs of potential. If we run out of it, we are no longer of interest. If we squander any part of it, interest focuses on what we failed to achieve, rather than what we did.

It's not bad enough to have your own regrets; others have to regret your life for you as well. Have not quite felt this way since the conclusion of Narziss and Goldmund.

I'm thinking of Joyce, having dedicated a decade of his life to this novel, preparing to send it into the world. If it doesn't succeed, does he become remembered, barely, as merely someone who wrote a good one-off collection of short stories?

The poster makes one wonder how old nostalgia is.

https://twitter.com/PaulMavroudis/status/1683681805277495298?t=Pj1zO5YNJC8DNUcprn5SeQ&s=19

The funeral of Dignam reinforces the point that memory of you will fade quickly. 100 people at the funeral, 50 at the wake, and then...

At best you might become captured for posterity in a novel, only for a century later to have people think that someone like Joyce invented you, like Cashel Boyle O'Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell.

Assuming anyone's still reading said novel even a few months after its release, let alone a century down the line.

Gendo Ikari needs to get a move on with the Human Instrumentality Project, so we can finally become one consciousness.

Not just the present day viceregal cavalcade to emphasise Irish and especially Catholic subservience to the Empire, but that damn statue of King Billy's horse, too.

"He is remembered only a little more cordially than Cromwell as a great oppressor. The emphasis on the horse in this passage recalls a traditional Irish toast: 'To the memory of the chestnut horse [that broke the neck of William of Orange] joyceproject.com/notes/100001ki…

The Earl of Dudley, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, whose cavalcade is the hub around which the spokes of the lives of the other characters revolve around, was later Governor-General of Australia.

Wearing your hat at a rakish angle sounds like it was the 1904 version of wearing a baseball cap sideways.

Wandering Rocks is an artistic triumph. The novelist as deist god observing all (exterior and interior lives) but not interfering. The characters observing each other and themselves. Windows, doorways, blindness, mirrors, coffins.

And the device of the cavalcade as literary, ceremonial, and administrative panopticon. The officers of Empire catching the occasional eye and salute of a largely powerless and feeble colonised population, unable/unwilling/unsure how to communicate its displeasure.

The lines blur between royalty and celebrity. Nobility here still has a tangible administrative function, as well as spectacle. But there's also posters of boxers and singers, celebrities in their own right, esteemed and recognisable from image even without personal interaction.

An interesting thing to do when you're like a third of the way through this book is to have your bookmark fall out of the book while it's in your bag; in the quest to find your resumption point, you see passages you've read and forgotten, and appreciate the novel's depth.

Like, there's an earlier aside about the two possible outcomes you get if you join Sinn Fein. If you back out, you get the knife in the back; if you stay, prison or death at the hands of the colonial forces.

And if you don't join but still want to make a difference? So you get hounded from public life like Charles Stewart Parnell? Or participate impotently like John Parnell? Or gasbag in an editor's office? Or just go about your business as normal until someone else effects change?

"...and a bag in which eleven cockles rolled to view with wonder the lord mayor and lady mayoress without his golden chain."

At some point in the past, Molly chose Leopold Bloom. Then she unchose him. Then she chose Boylan. The stress and grief of it all for Leopold is obvious, but what can he do?

This is a challenging beginning to the chapter as the music of the cavalcade interferes with the dialogue and exposition. But much easier to understand thanks to having read some Pi O; the sound poems, not those crazy number ones.

The English in Sirens has been excised of complexity; the sentences (but not the meaning) have become frayed, thin, brittle. It's a sort of broken English, but not in the conventional sense; this is language being broken down, trying to find its least and only indispensable parts

I'm reminded of Chuck Palahniuk's Pygmy, which while it used broken English within the more conventional meaning, it still tried to use it for a similar purpose - to strip English of all its superfluousness, all those words which obscure and obfuscate.

Anyway, the textual intrusion of the cavalcade and the musicians tuning up reminds us that contemporary auditory culture is very different to that of the past. Music is near everywhere now, whether asked for or otherwise. Pubs, shops, stadiums, train stations.

The change in ambient, incidental, and environmental noise is not just a matter of technology, but one of a fear of silence; one where we can't block out not just others' thoughts, but our own. Why listen to internal and external monologues, when you can drown them out?

My tweets about Ulysses' Sirens chapter getting liked by pornbots is... something, irony, something, Joycean, something, sad.

But ambient noise. I did 3 months work for the dole in 2022 in a Salvos, with nonstop KIIS FM playing the same 15 or so songs, no hiding from it even in the back room. Now in court for a year, it's all monologues, digital static, hallway echoes, keyboards clicks, elevator chimes.

The point being, as renegade as Joyce adding out of tune instruments to his text was, at least the auditory environment allowed him to do it artistically; now he would have to fill whole pages with office worker slave galley 4/4 beats or banal cafe cool electronic chillout jazz.

Without wanting to come across as some sort of nostalgic anti-technologist, I think we take music for granted now. There's too much of it, and it's too easily accessible.

I shouldn't have done it, but curiosity got the better of me, and I looked up whether Sceptre was a famous horse in its time, and by implication, whether it won the race various characters placed a bet on. Crucial spoiler when reading about horses in Ulysses. Well, we press on.

Sceptre's owner/
trainer Bob Sievier led quite the action-packed life adb.anu.edu.au/biography/siev…

Anyway, it occurred to me that these people are betting on horses and boxers they have never seen. Madness.