History
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Ep. 177 – The Reverend Hugh C. Love
All you need is Love. Topics in this episode include tertiary Ulysses characters, Ned Lambert, J.J. O’Molloy, the many lives of St. Mary’s Abbey, the Reverend Hugh C. Love, the Fitzgeralds, Silken Thomas’ rebellion, what Reverend Love gets right and wrong about history, how Church and State are allies rather than rivals, Irish history through…
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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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The Superior, The Very Reverend John Conmee S. J.
“Wandering Rocks”, Ulysses’ tenth episode, opens with “The superior, the very reverend John Conmee S. J.” stepping out of his presbytery on Gardiner St., just around the corner from the Blooms’ home in Eccles St. If you’ve read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, you’ll recall Fr. Conmee as the Jesuit priest…
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Ep. 123 – THE GREAT GALLAHER
What opera is like a railway line? Topics in this episode include MacHugh’s love of Greek, kyrie eleison, Lenehan’s riddle and limerick, the legendary Ignatius Gallaher, the real-life Gallaher, the Phoenix Park murders and the Invincibles, what Crawford gets wrong about the Invincibles, Gumley and Skin-the-Goat, Gallaher’s great scoop in the New York World, the…
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Ep. 119 – MEMORABLE BATTLES RECALLED
“… it would be a shrewd dialectician indeed who would make much sense out of the editor’s crowings about North Cork militia with Spanish officers in Ohio.” – Robert M. Adams Topics in this episode include the North Cork Militia, the Battle of Oulart, Ned Lambert’s superior improv skills, Bloom’s professionalism, Myles Crawford as a…
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The Invincible Ignatius Gallaher
“And yet it was in some way if not as memory fabled it.” – Stephen Dedalus To listen to a discussion of this topic, check out the podcast episode here. It seems that poor Stephen Dedalus can’t catch a break from the nightmare of history anywhere in this bloody city. While Stephen’s presence in “Aeolus”…
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MEMORABLE BATTLES RECALLED: The Sham Squire and the Boys of Wexford
“… it would be a shrewd dialectician indeed who would make much sense out of the editor’s crowings about North Cork militia with Spanish officers in Ohio.” – Robert M. Adams To listen to a discussion of this topic, check out the podcast episodes here and here. The nightmare of history is woven throughout “Aeolus,”…
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Ep. 46 – Paradise of Pretenders
Kelly and Dermot explore Ireland’s historic connections to various pretenders to the English throne, how this connects to Stephen’s unsquashable beef against Buck Mulligan, Solange Knowles, medieval abstrusiosities of all sorts, the mystery of the princes in the Tower, Dermot’s disdain for the Tudors, whether or not Ireland is still a “paradise of pretenders,” Stephen’s…
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Is Leopold Bloom Jewish?
“It is odd that the creator of the most outstanding Jew in modern literature did not at that time know any of the Jewish community in Dublin.” – Padraic Colum, p. 56, Our Friend James Joyce “Yes. Only a foreigner would do. The Jews were foreigners in Dublin at that time. There was no hostility…
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Ep. 44- Galleys of the Lochlanns
Kelly and Dermot set sail for the time of Vikings and jerkined dwarfs! They discuss the differences of similarly-shaped seafaring vessels, Lochlanns, Fr. Dineen’s Irish dictionary, the intersection of Viking and Celtic cultures in Ireland, torcs, tomahawk, the horrors of 14th c. Dublin, famine, plague and slaughters, the story of the time a pod of…