Simon Dedalus
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Ep. 95 – Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit.
What kind of person has a picnic party in a funeral carriage? Topics in this episode include a heartfelt thank you, cats that hate technology, the name Poldy, Eton suits, the Blooms’ middle class pretensions, Rudy’s conception, Raymond Terrace and the cease to do evil, Milly Bloom, crustcrumbs and picnic parties, Milly’s trip to Lough…
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Ep. 94 – A Fine Old Custom
I’ll tickle his catastrophe, believe you me! Topics include Ulysses tarot cards, incubism, the system of correspondences found in Ulysses, Martin Cunningham, Mr Power, Simon Dedalus, armstraps, caring for corpses, women’s role in caring for the dead, hats as identities, economic incubism, Bloom’s outsider status, Irish funeral customs, embalming, why Dignam’s widow doesn’t attend his…
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Who Was the Real Reuben J. Dodd?
“ I never liked Jimmy Joyce. He used to drink the altar wine.” – Reuben J. Dodd, Jr. This post is a part of an occasional series on the real people behind the characters in Ulysses. To listen to a discussion of this topic, check out the podcast episode here. The Dublin of Ulysses is…
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Ulysses & The Odyssey: Hades
Part of an occasional series on the Homeric parallels in James Joyce’s Ulysses. The Odyssey, Book XI: Odysseus travels to the underworld and meets the prophet Tiresias, who reveals the ultimate fate of Odysseus and his crew. Odysseus has a chance to speak to other souls in the underworld, including his mother, a parade of…
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Ep. 57 – Full fathom five thy father lies.
The end is nigh. Kelly and Dermot discuss in the depth the drowning motif of “Proteus”. Other topics include The Tempest and Ariel’s Song, the wily nature of the sea, Stephen’s estrangement from his father Simon, the role of alcohol in the lives of Ulysses characters, quitting alcohol, rising corpses, sea change, porpoises, the ancient…
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Decoding Dedalus: Full Fathom Five
“I haven’t let this young man off very lightly, have I? Many writers have written about themselves. I wonder if any one of them has been as candid as I have?” – James Joyce to Frank Budgen This is a post in a series called Decoding Dedalus where I take a passage of Ulysses and …
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Ep. 33 – Nuncle Richie
Stephen contemplates the horror of a visit to his Aunt Sara and Uncle Richie’s house. We discuss parallels in this scene with Joyce’s real life aunt and uncle, why Joyce’s Aunt Josephine gave away her first edition of Ulysses, the intractable Dubliner/culchie divide, middle class pretension, Hiberno-English, Wilde’s Requiescat, and the difficulty of parsing conversations…