Blog
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Who was the real Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell?
“Dubliners were proud of Endymion. They were proud that they tolerated Endymion, but also that he tolerated them. Most people watched him and remembered him with affection, and only a few were aware of the darker side to some of his mutterings.” – John Simpson This post is a part of an occasional series on…
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U.P: Up
“Of course, there is the possibility that it means nothing whatever; then Denis Breen is projecting his own mental disturbances on an essential blank.” – Robert Adams, Surface and Symbol Bloom’s route to lunch in Ulysses’ eighth episode, “Lestrygonians”, is littered with obstacles. After dodging the Hely’s sandwichmen and crossing Westmoreland St., Bloom bumps into…
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Kino’s & Hely’s: Two Ads in Lestrygonians
Leopold Bloom, adman extraordinaire, can’t help but notice the dozens of ads he passes throughout the day in Ulysses. Some delight Bloom so thoroughly that what seems like innocuous visual noise takes on important symbolic resonance throughout the whole of the novel. Others need a punch up to meet Bloom’s exacting standards. Let’s take a…
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Parallax
As Leopold Bloom makes his way to lunch in the opening pages of “Lestrygonians”, the eighth episode of Ulysses, he meets a sight familiar to anyone who has followed Bloom’s trail through Dublin’s city center: the Ballast Office (now called the Ballast House), just past O’Connell Bridge: These details might seem minor, but they reveal…
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Elijah is coming! Is Coming!! IS COMING!!!
As “Lestrygonians,” the eighth episode of Ulysses opens, Leopold Bloom’s tummy is rumbly. He’s on his way to a late lunch as the sights and sounds of Dublin stir his appetite either directly or symbolically. This foody-focus in James Joyce’s mind is a characteristic of the episode’s peristaltic technic. You might think that Peristaltic, or…
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Ulysses & The Odyssey – The Lestrygonians
The Odyssey – Book X After their dust-up with Aeolus, Odysseus and his crew are feeling pretty low. Worse still, the winds refuse to aid them, so they must row day and night. After a week solid of rowing, they try to take refuge in Lamos, the land of the Lestrygonians. Odysseus sends some of…
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A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or the Parable of the Plums
In the final sequence in Ulysses’ seventh episode, “Aeolus”, Stephen Dedalus and the men from the Evening Telegraph office, having exhausted themselves with lofty rhetoric, set out to wet their whistles at nearby Mooney’s Pub. As they step onto the street, Stephen announces to Professor MacHugh that he “has a vision.” The professor is intrigued,…
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The Language of the Outlaw: John F. Taylor’s Speech in “Aeolus”
To listen to a discussion of this topic, check out the podcast episode here and here. In the closing pages of “Aeolus,” Ulysses’ seventh episode, the men gathered in the offices of the Evening Telegraph share a smoke as they recite their favorite bits of oratory. In response to attorney Seymour Bushe’s eloquent courtroom defense…
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Decoding Dedalus: The Opal Hush Poets
This is a post in a series called Decoding Dedalus where I take a passage of Ulysses and break it down line by line. The passage below comes from “Aeolus,” the seventh episode of Ulysses. It appears on page 140 in my copy (1990 Vintage International). We’ll be looking at the first paragraph in the…
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A POLISHED PERIOD
“—He spoke on the law of evidence, J. J. O’Molloy said, of Roman justice as contrasted with the earlier Mosaic code, the lex talionis. And he cited the Moses of Michelangelo in the vatican.” To listen to a discussion of this topic, check out the podcast episode here. In Ulysses’ seventh episode, “Aeolus”, Evening Telegraph…