Wandering Rocks
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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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Ep. 176 – Almidano Artifoni
I hope you didn’t expect us to know Italian. Topics in this episode include the real Almidano Artifoni, why he wears such stiff trousers, what he and Stephen are talking about in “Wandering Rocks,” James Joyce’s early passion for the Italian language, Joyce’s early days in Trieste, his friendship with Artifoni, the Nolan, Christopher Nolan,…
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Ep. 175 – Father Conmee
What is Dublin without Church and State? Topics in this episode include Stephen/Joyce’s past with Father Conmee, what Father Conmee represents, the eternal battle between Church and State (is it even a battle?), the collusion between Church and State, Father Conmee’s fondness for high-class women, which children Father Conmee likes, Father Conmee’s love of the…
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Ep. 174 – The Wandering Rocks
Here be dragons. Topics in this episode include why “Wandering Rocks” is the least Homeric episode of Ulysses, why the name “Wandering Rocks” isn’t quite right, how Jason escaped the Wandering Rocks, how Leopold Bloom is a mightier hero than Odysseus, correspondences for “Wandering Rocks,” the “blind mechanism” of the Wandering Rocks, clockspeed, how to…
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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,…
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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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Ulysses & The Odyssey – Wandering Rocks
The Odyssey – Book XII Circe advises Odysseus on how to sail safely home. She warns him not to attempt sailing through the Wandering Rocks, a stretch of sea so difficult to cross that not even birds can fly over it and live to tell the tale. The only ship to ever pass through safely…