Ep. 151 - Blind Stripling

Leopold BloomLestrygoniansPodcast
Written By Kelly Bryan

A wild Blazes Boylan appears.

Topics in this episode include the incredible story of Reverend Thomas Connellan, the Bible Wars, Soupers, the Bird’s Nest orphanage, apostasy and conversion, a typographical error heroically corrected, the blind stripling, whether or not the blind stripling actually wants help from Leopold Bloom, Bloom’s savior complex, Bloom’s empathy, the history of blind piano tuners, whether or not blind people’s other senses are stronger than those of sighted people, whether or not wine loses its flavor based on appearance, parallels between the blind stripling and Stephen Dedalus, how Joyce’s eye trouble influenced the development of the blind stripling, how Joyce used the blind stripling to work out his personal stuggles on the page, the dreams of blind people, the General Slocum disaster, Sir Frederick Falkiner, the Mirus Bazaar, Handel’s Messiah, and escaping Blazes Boylan.

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Further Reading:

  1. Adams, R. M. (1962). Surface and Symbol: The Consistency of James Joyce’s Ulysses. New York: Oxford University Press.

  2. CORMIER, A. (2008). “Our eyes demand their turn. Let them be seen!”: The Transcendental Blind Stripling. Joyce Studies Annual, 203–226. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26288727 

  3. Geoghegan, P. (Feb 2011). Falkiner, Sir Frederick Richard. The Dictionary of Irish Biography. Retrieved from https://www.dib.ie/biography/falkiner-sir-frederick-richard-a2998  

  4. Gibbons, L. (2015). Joyce's Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory. United States: University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from https://www.google.ie/books/edition/Joyce_s_Ghosts/ko7JCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 

  5. Gifford, D., & Seidman, R. J. (1988). Ulysses annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses. Berkeley: University of California Press. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/vy6j4tk 

  6. Maume, P. (Oct 2009). Connellan, Thomas. In Dictionary of Irish Biography. Retrieved from https://www.dib.ie/biography/connellan-thomas-a1949 

  7. Mitchell, D. (Jan 2023). Seeing that Piano Tuning is for Both the Museum and the Agenda of the Movement. The Braille Monitor. Retrieved from https://www.nfb.org/images/nfb/publications/bm/bm23/bm2301/bm230117.htm 

  8. Morse, J. M. (1956). Joyce and the Blind Stripling. Modern Language Notes, 71(7), 497–501. https://doi.org/10.2307/3043224 

  9. Ramsden, J. (2018, August 2). Eating with the eyes. The Guardian; The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/jan/28/food-multi-sensory 

  10. Summer, J.V.  (2021, June 28). What Do Blind People Dream About? Sleep Foundation. https://www.sleepfoundation.org/dreams/can-blind-people-dream 

  11. Sorokowska, A., Sorokowski, P., Karwowski, M., Larsson, M., & Hummel, T. (2018). Olfactory perception and blindness: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Research, 83(8), 1595–1611. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1035-2

Kelly Bryan
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Ep. 150- Throwaway