Leopold Bloom
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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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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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“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. “Bloom’s, the novel’s, and, apparently, Joyce’s answer to a rancid discourse of Irish nationalism appears to be nothing more than gas, flatulence induced by an Irish diet too rich in that unctuous, “grosser”…
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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. (Part two coming soon!) 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…
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Ulysses & The Odyssey – Sirens
“A musical episode was easy to place in Dublin, for Dublin is, or was, a musical town, with a particular passion for vocal music. A few Dubliners of the older generation meet in the lounge of the Ormond Hotel and a couple of songs, with an improvisation on the piano, constitute the entertainment. No writer…
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Sweets of Sin
“… a volume of peccaminous pornographical tendency entitled Sweets of Sin, anonymous author a gentleman of fashion…” “…I wonder what kind is that book he brought me Sweets of Sin by a gentleman of fashion some other Mr de Kock …” In the tenth section of “Wandering Rocks,” the tenth episode of Ulysses, we rejoin…
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Ulysses & The Odyssey – Wandering Rocks
‘Wandering Rocks,’” following immediately on Stephen’s theorizing, is Joyce’s most complete celebration of Dublin, demonstrating succinctly his conception of the importance of physical reality, meticulously documented, as the soil from which fictions may best grow.” – Clive Hart The Odyssey – Book XII Circe advises Odysseus on how to sail safely home. She warns him…
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Lapwing
Near the end of “Scylla and Charybdis,” Ulysses’ ninth episode, Stephen realizes his lecture on Hamlet is rapidly disintegrating before his eyes. Not only are John Eglinton and the rest wholly unconvinced by his arguments, but he also has Buck Mulligan nipping at his heels, undermining him at every opportunity. Stephen looks to the heavens…
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Ep. 151 – Blind Stripling
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…
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An Intimate Portrait of Mr. W. H.
“The Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that…