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Ulysses & The Odyssey: Cyclops
The Odyssey – Book IX Following their misadventure with the Lotus Eaters, Odysseus and his fleet come to the home of the Cyclopes, a rude, violent and uncivilized people. Odysseus and his men enter the cave dwelling of the Cyclops Polyphemus while he is out tending to his sheep. They eat Polyphemus’ food while waiting…
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Fuga Per Canonem
“Since exploring the resources and artifices of music and employing them in this chapter, I haven’t cared for music any more. I, the great friend of music, can no longer listen to it. I see through all the tricks and can’t enjoy it any more.” – James Joyce, 1919 Joyce’s ambition for “Sirens,” the eleventh…
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“Sirens” Songs: The Croppy Boy
This is part one of a two part series about select songs from the “Sirens” episode. You can read part one here. Ulysses’ eleventh episode, “Sirens,” closes with its second major musical set piece – “base barreltone” Ben Dollard’s rendition of the ballad, “The Croppy Boy.” Set during the 1798 Rebellion, “The Croppy Boy” tells…
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“Sirens” Songs: M’Appari
This is part one of a two part series about select songs from the “Sirens” episode. You can read part two here. Stuart Gilbert, in his book, Ulysses: A Study, explained that in the view of the average Dubliner, music was an “essentially Italian art.” Simon Dedalus recalls the music of Italian sailors to Ben…
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Who were the real people in the Ormond Hotel in “Sirens”?
“Sirens,” the eleventh episode of Ulysses, is memorable for its musical prose, but it also stands out as an episode of revelry in the bar and restaurant of the Ormond Hotel. While Bloom cringes in anguish watching Blazes Boylan jingle-jangle off to meet Molly, the other colorful characters drown their sorrows in booze and song.…
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Ulysses & The Odyssey – Sirens
The Odyssey – Book XII Circe advises Odysseus on the route to take home to Ithaca, warning him of the Sirens, fearsome creatures who sing beautifully to lure sailors to their island, where they sit enthroned among the bones of all the sailors they’ve eaten. Circe tells Odysseus to have his crew block their ears…
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Stephen Dynamo
In the thirteenth section of “Wandering Rocks,” Ulysses’ tenth episode, we meet Stephen Dedalus once again, gazing into the window of Old Russell the lapidarist. We last saw Stephen descending the stairs of the National Library with Buck Mulligan in “Scylla and Charybdis,” seeking augury from absentee birds. Mulligan is meeting Haines at the DBC…
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Sweets of Sin
In the tenth section of “Wandering Rocks,” the tenth episode of Ulysses, we rejoin Dublin’s Odysseus, Leopold Bloom, perusing some reading material in a bookseller’s stall in Merchants’ Arch. What ancient tome of grave import is our hero uncovering? Recall an earlier scene in “Calypso,” in which Molly was disappointed with the insufficiently smutty novel,…
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The Most Historic Spot in All Dublin
The eighth section of Ulysses’ tenth episode, “Wandering Rocks” opens with “two pink faces” greeting a third in some dark, dusty chamber. We are reunited with two characters we haven’t seen since the “Aeolus” episode: Ned Lambert and J.J. “Jack” O’Molloy. Ned is accompanied by an entity introduced simply as a clergyman with a “refined…
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Who was the real Almidano Artifoni?
This post is a part of an occasional series on the real people behind the characters in Ulysses. In the sixth vignette of Ulysses’ tenth episode, “Wandering Rocks,” we see Stephen Dedalus chatting with Almidano Artifoni, a music maestro with comically starchy trousers. Their conversation is written entirely in untranslated Italian, so if, like me,…