You learn something new everyday, or so they tell me. Or, as my dad is fond of saying, "I just learned something I didn't know before."

I'm still trudging through page 37. During my online research, I came across this Sheila Variations website post.

That post pointed out that James Joyce makes exactly one reference to a fact about Stephen that might be crucial to understanding this chapter: It turns out that Stephen broke his glasses the day before.

In the chapter where Stephen and Leopold Bloom are in the brothel, Joyce gives Stephen these lines:

STEPHEN: (Brings the match near his eye)
Lynx eye. Must get glasses. Broke them
yesterday. Sixteen years ago. Distance.
The eye sees all flat. (He draws the
match away. It goes out.) Brain thinks.
Near: far. Ineluctable modality of the
visible. (He frowns mysteriously) Hm.
Sphinx. The beast that has twobacks at
midnight. Married.

Ah, that makes sense. This goes a long way in explaining why Stephen happens to be thinking about the "ineluctable modality of the visible." After all, he's having trouble seeing. And, instead of interpreting this as Stephen's questioning of reality, maybe it's just Stephen is trying to find another way to experience reality (since he can't rely on his eyes).

That post also goes on to note that much of Stephen's descriptions in this early chapter center around sounds (since he's having trouble seeing), and many of the visual descriptions are fuzzy.

I'll have to keep an eye on that.

So, while this and subsequent discussion of Stephen alienation is still relevant, it's nice to know that there's also a literal component to this passage.

For the last couple of day, I've said that the Proteus chapter of Ulysses is not easy. But Joyce probably meant it to be hard to read. He's put us into the mind of a tortured (or at least clinically depressed) young man. How can that be an easy read?

You can't read this chapter like you would most books. It doesn't offer a conventional story with compelling characters and surprising plot twists. For the first couple of chapters, this might have been possible. But that comes to a screeching halt with the words: "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes."

With this chapter, the reader is thrown into Stephen's "stream of consciousness" and left to sink or swim. That in itself is disorienting; but add on all of the literary and historical references, and it's all but impossible to get a handle on this material in the first or second read.

This chapter forces the reader to slow down and pay more attention (or simply skim over the whole thing, hoping it will become more interesting later...but I'm not gonna do that). Not just slow down, but really . . . slow . . . down . . . and . . . read . . . every . . . sentence . . . and . . . every . . . word.

Consider reading this chapter as you would a poem. Read it once closely (maybe looking up the occasional word in the dictionary), then read it out loud to yourself, and then read it more closely for meaning.

It will take me at least another day to finish annotating this page, and I'm sure none of the other pages will go any more quickly. But if you come to this site and find that no new pages have been added, I encourage you to re-read the page that is posted. If nothing else, the pace of my annotating will force any visitors following along to read the pages more slowly and carefully.

(By the way, does anyone come back to this site more than once?)

Robert Berry of the excellent UlyssesSeen mentioned during a recent Twitter exchange: "The Proteus chapter is hard. Best estimates claim this one sentence as the major hole in the floor most readers fall through."

I couldn't agree more.

Don't be another Ulysses casualty. Remember that Joyce is doing this on purpose, and nobody is meant to understand all of this. But it's worth struggling with this stuff. Besides, we're reading this together, right? And once we make it through this chapter, we will find our reward:

Leopold Bloom!

I came across the following explanation of the opening line of the Proteus section. It's from the Joseph Campbell book, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce. He makes it much simplier than my explanation.

I didn't realize that Campbell was such a big fan of the book. I recognized Carl Jung in many of his ideas, but only now do I see the Joyce influences.

The story goes that he was living in Paris and came across an early copy of Ulysses. What he read pissed him off, and he went to the publisher to complain. But the book's editor set him staight and explained how the book works.

He was converted and spent much of his early life studying and lecturing on James Joyce and his work.

I plan to order a copy of this book and recommend that you think of buying it (from Amazon, if you're interest).

Anyway, here's the quote:

Ineluctable modality of the visible:…Ineluctable
means you can’t get away from it; modality refers
to the formal aspect of experience, to forms that are
visible and mobile, not to the substantiality which
cannot be penetrated by our eyes. The ineluctable
modality of the visible is what we behold.

…at least that if no more,…Stephen is trying to identify
the things that one can be sure of. This is the visible
world. What’s the substance behind this modality?
Who knows? There may or may not be a metaphysical
problem defining it. It’s ineluctable. What Stephen
knows about this modality of the visible is:

…thought through my eyes. The thought has come to
Stephen through his eyes. They are open and see only
these modalities.

-- James Joyce, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce, page 66

I'm still plugging away with page 37. I'm almost done with the first paragraph. (Oh, boy!)

Joyce is starting to convince me that he's being purposely obscure in this chapter. I'm thinking that this section is so dense with allusions not so much because Joyce wants to impress with his learning, but because he wants to demonstrate precisely how trapped Stephen is by his own thoughts, his own learning.

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen bloviates at length about the true nature of beauty and art. He is enraptured by is own vision of art. The book end with him going out into the world to create art:

"Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality
of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated
conscience of my race." (from the end of Portrait)

Now, a couple of years later he's back in Dublin, his mother has died, and he's miserable. And all of his intellectual gymnastics don't mean anything.

At least in the first page (and throughout the rest of the chapter?) Stephen is pondering reality. Like I said yesterday, "What if you're all a figment of my imagination?" For instance, he wonders to himself whether the world (or at least the visual world) ceases to exist when he closes his eyes.

But more and more I'm thinking that the interesting things is not all of the allusions that Joyce can pack in a single paragraph; what's interesting is that Stephen seems incapable of an original thought. Think about it for a moment: as readers, we struggle through these words, but nowhere do we get the impression that Stephen is doing much more than spouting things he learned elsewhere.

He's reached an intellectual deadend.

So, no, it is not an easy chapter, nor is it meant to be easy. But this entry might help.

Page 37 has been posted.

This is the start of Chapter 3, sometimes called Proteus, named after the creature that Menelaus struggled with when he was marooned near Egypt on his way home from Troy.

Proteus was a sea god (by some accounts second only to Poseidon, and by other accounts as a more ancient god) that could shift its shape at will.

It's an appropriate image for this chapter because, like Proteus, the words following the shifting thoughts of Stephen's "stream of consciousness" as he wanders the beach outside Dublin.

This is an especially "difficult" chapter, and I've hardly made a dent in annotating it. Where to start?

On my first approach, I tried to decipher "Ineluctable modality of the visible." But it's too tightly bound to the rest of the page to make much sense on its own.

My second approach was to start by translating all the foreign phrases. But I got bogged down by parsing the difference between "nacheinander" and "nebeneinander."

In both approaches, it seems like the reader is thrown in the middle of a philosophical arguement that Stephen is having with himself. Some people might be clued into the various points of view, but I'm lost. It will take a good bit of extracurricular reading to understand this stuff better.

However, one name comes through clear: Aristotle. It's a name that has cropped up earlier in the book, but now Joyce seems to assume greater familiarity with the man's work. Ugh.

Any suggestions on which work of Aristotle's to start first? Could any of it be considered Summer Reading?

I just finished reading Harpo Marx's autobiography, Harpo Speaks!. For the most part, it was an entertaining read, told in a conversational style that allowed Harpo to tell whatever stories came to his mind.

I particularly liked the stories of the early days, when they started as a very poor family that only rose in the ranks of vaudeville through the single-minded devotion of their mother, Minnie.

Later, after the Marx Brothers start gaining success on Broadway, Harpo's attention moves from the brothers and to his circle of friends. Maybe some readers might be interested in the Algonquin Round Table, but I was really only interested in the the Marx Brothers. Whenever Harpo moved away from that, I started losing interest. And by the time the Marx Brothers were making movies, Harpo's attention seemed to shift completely away from that.

Still, I'd recommend it. (Here is the link to buy the book from Amazon.com) Sometimes authors become more than narrators; in cases like this, the reader feels they are in the presence of a friend who can tell a good story.

Harpo married late in life and then adopted 4 children. While the other Marx Brothers were "marriage challenged," Harpo stayed married to Susan until the end of his life.

Late in the book, when Harpo is talking about being a father, we lists the rules of the house. I've listed them below.

Harpo Marx's Family Rules

1. Life has been created for you to enjoy, but you won't enjoy it unless you pay for it with some good, hard work. This is one price that will never be marked down.
2. You can work at whatever you want to as long as you do it as well as you can and clean up afterwards and you're at the table at mealtime and in bed at bedtime.
3. Respect what the others do. Respect Dad's harp, Mom's paints, Billy's piano, Alex's set of tools, Jimmy's designs, and Minnie's menagerie.
4. If anything makes you sore, come out with it. Maybe the rest of us are itching for a fight too.
5. If anything strikes you as funny, out with that too. Let's all the rest of us have a laugh.
6. If you have an impulse to do something you're not sure is right, go ahead and do it. Take a chance. Chances are, if you don't you'll regret it--unless you break the rules about mealtime and bedtime, in which case you'll sure as hell regret it.
7. If it's a question of whether to do what's fun or what is supposed to be good for you, and nobody is hurt by whichever you do, always do what's fun.
8. If things get too much for you and you feel the whole world's against you, go stand on your head. If you can think of anything crazier to do, do it.
9. Don't worry about what other people think. The only person in the world important enough to conform to is yourself.
10. Anybody who misteats a pet or breaks a pool cue is docked a month's pay.

We've just finished Chapter 2 of Ulysses (that is, finished with page 34 and completed page 35 and page 36).

If you are visiting for the first time, this is a good time to get caught up. In the next couple of days we will start on Chapter 3, which is one of the more difficult chapters of this book. Whenever people say they quite reading this book very early, they are often talking about this chapter.

It is basically Stephen walking alone and letting his mind wander. Stream of consciousness.

On one hand, it makes good reading if you take your time and accept it for what it is; but it can also be deadly dull. But when you get bored, just think of it this way: if we can make it through this chapter, we can make it through anything.

Goodbye Mr. Deasy

With the end of this chapter, we can say good bye to Mr. Deasy. And not a moment too soon. We've talked about how his anti-Semitism, but in these last pages he also proves himself a misogynist.

Here is our last image of him:

"A coughball of laughter leaped from his throat dragging after it a rattling chain of phlegm. He turned back quickly, coughing, laughing, his lifted arms waving to the air."

By the time Stephen leaves the school, we are as relieved as he is.

Some Housekeeping

We're still trying to handle all of the spammer that visit this site. If any of you have Drupal experience, please let me know if there is a good module for filtering out spam.

In the meantime, we've added a step in the sign up process. When you sign up, you just have to wait until we have the chance to grant access. Many of these spammers seem to be automatic, and adding this step has greatly reduced the spam.

I'll change it back as soon as I find another option.

Thanks.

As an Allusion to French Poetry

The phrase "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake" is a nice phrase. But maybe the idea of history as a nightmare isn't especially original.

According to Gifford, this phrase has its source in Jules Laforgue (1860-87). The original quote that Gifford cites is, "la vie est trop triste, trop sale. L'histoire est un vieux cauchemar bariolé qui ne se doute pas que les meilleures plaisanteries sont les plus courtes."

Yahoo Babelfish translates this phase as:

"The life is too sad, too dirty. L' history is an old multi-coloured nightmare which does not suspect that the best jokes are shortest."

Are there any French speakers out there who can give me a better translation?

As Joyce Copying Joyce

In Ulysses it can become too easy to find allusions in everything. It's almost like a conspiracy theory, where you don't know what the source is but it has to be in there somewhere.

Another options is that, surprise, maybe Joyce thought of some of these things himself.

In reading about this phrase, I came across a book that suggested another source of the quote: James Joyce himself.

On page 98 of James Joyce and the Language of History, Robert E. Spoo, the author, quotes a passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It happens at the end of Chapter 3:

"Another life! A life of grace and virtue and happiness! It was true. It was not a dream from which he would wake. The past was past."

It's an interesting comparison between the younger Stephen and the older Stephen. The younger character found at least a brief respite in religion; the older character has grown and learned that the dream was actually a nightmare, and he hopes to wake from it.

It's nice to see a character develop from one book to the next.

We're still on page 34 of Ulysses.

Now I remember why I stopped posting on Ulysses for a while. I'd annotated about half that page and then lost all of the changes. Not the end of the world or anything, but school work came in and distracted me.

Ah, well. We're back, aren't we?

History is a nightmare

Here is perhaps the most famous line from the book: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." But I really like the whole section:

"—History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which
I am trying to awake.

"From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring
whistle: Goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back
kick?

"—The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy
said. All human history moves towards one great goal,
the manifestation of God.

"Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:

"—That is God.

"Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!

"—What? Mr Deasy asked.

"—A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging
his shoulders."

After a full morning of listening to Brits bloviate about the inevitability of history, Stephen finally finds his retort.

I've been meaning to take a closer look at these contrasting perspectives on history: history as a straight line toward progress, and history as a cycle of recurring themes. But it became too intimidating, and I wasn't in the mood to spend time with Hegel, so we'll just pass on by, appreciate this passage, and move on.

This Is God?

That "history is a nightmare" line gets all of the attention, but the lines following it made me really like Stephen. Maybe for the first time.

Deasey talks about history inevitably leading to the manifestation of god, and Stephen comes back with the observation is, "That is God," referring to the sound of children playing outside and "a shout in the street."

Heck, it's almost a Zen-like response. If you were to say "That is God" in a normal conversation, there probably would be a moment of stunned silence before the other person would think to ask, "what is God?"

The answer would be everything that happened after you'd finished talking and before the other person started talking. Every sound, Every sensation. Every thought. It would all be God--everything and nothing.

Yeah, Stephen gets respect from me for that bit of snark.

History's March Forward

A few weeks ago, my brother reminded me of this appropriate quote from President Obama:

"In retrospect, America's march forward seems inevitable. But time and time again, it's only made possible by generations that are willing to work and sacrifice and invest in plans to make tomorrow better than today. That's the vision we can't afford to lose sight of. That's the challenge that's fallen to this generation. And that's the challenge we meet."

The final act of King Lear (Act 5) has been posted.

That was a downer. Sure, I remembered that everyone died at the end of this play, but it's still a downer. Cordelia dies off stage, and King Lear dies of a broken heart. "General woe" pretty much covers it.

Anyway, I did not have the chance to see the Shakespeare Theatre Company's production of King Lear. It ended before I could shake myself loose from schoolwork. So, now I can look forward to the next production.

The next production is The Taming of the Shrew. They're calling it the Free For All, and it will be playing for free downtown for about a month. That's right, it's playing for free (as in "free beer"), so there can be no excuse for not going--especially since school is over.

Did you hear that? I said that school is over. After two years, I'm a Master. And suddenly I will have open nights and freetime again. What does that mean?

For this site, it means that I'm going back to Ulysses. Finally!

We start again tomorrow. See you then.

This is just a quick note that we've posted Act 4 of King Lear.

All of the pieces are in place, and Act 5 is the big finale.

Right. Where was I before we were so rudely interrupted?

I've posted the rest of King Lear Act 3, but you can also pick up with Act 3, Scene 4 if you don't want to re-read too much.

Here's the plan. I'll post Act 4 tomorrow and Act 5 on Sunday. Then, by Monday I'll be done with my final school work and can turn back to the REAL project: Ulysses.

It's been too long since I've spent time with that book, and I'm looking forward to returning.

Tied to the Stake

Anyway, one of my favorite Shakespeare lines comes in these pages. When Regan and the Duke of Cornwall are torturing the Earl of Gloucester--but before they tear his eyes out--he shouts:

"I am tied to th' stake, and I must stand the course."

The image here comes from bear baiting, where they would tie a bear to a stake and then sic attack dogs on it. Basically, it's a particularly nasty cousin to cockfighting and dog fighting. The "game" was in betting how well the bear fought and how many dogs the bear would take with it.

A gruesome image, isn't it?

For me, it's a striking image of forbearance (no pun intended, but not unwelcome either) in the face of almost certain defeat. Commitment despite discouragement.

A Bit of Lovecraft

Speaking of forebearance, thank you for not losing patience with the religious tracts that have sat on my front page for too many days. I liked them because they were comics and the "message" was an unfortunatley side effect.

To cleanse the palate, a visitor posted a link to a nice spoof of Jack Chick tracts. Called "Who Will Be Eaten First?" It uses some of the original art from "The Choice" (which can still be found on this blog post) but replaces the text with a Lovecraftian slant:

"The stars are right! The Elder Gods are going to rise and eat us all!"

Good stuff.

I haven't read any Lovecraft, but would like to give him a try. Any recommendations?

Sorry for not writing more these past couple of weeks. As I may have mentioned earlier, I'm completing a Masters degree in Publishing through The George Washington University. Almost there.

It's been a rough few weeks: 6 papers and 3 presentations. Next week we finish our last classes, and hopefully all of the papers will be written and submitted by then.

Sometime in the next couple of weeks I'll have time to resume my reading of Ulysses and post new content here. In the meantime, I'm just trying to keep my head above water.

Here's some entertainment for anyone who's interested. The Kinks are among my favorite bands; for me, they are as good as anything that came out of the "British Invasion" (except the Beatles, of course). And this is one of my favorite songs--Better Things--mashed with a vintage cartoon. A nice combination.

Anyway, it's helped to keep my spirits (and motivation) up.

"Here's wishing you the bluest skies..."

Enjoy.

Congratulations UlyssesSeen

Congratulations go to Rob Berry and the good folks at UlyssesSeen. On Friday, Paste Magazine did a write up on the site; you will find it here.

For those of you following us on Twitter (@difficultbooks) and Facebook, Rob generously loaned us a beautiful watercolor portrait of James Joyce that we plan to incorporate into this site (once I figure out how to do it--I'm still learning this web design stuff).

UlyssesSeen is doing some great work over there, and any promotion that draws more attention to them is a good thing. Maybe someday we're prove that Ulysses isn't as inaccessible as people claim (or fear?).

Some Housekeeping Issues

In other news, I've hit the homestretch with my masters degree. About a month from now, I will finish class work for my Masters in Publishing from The George Washington University. That's good news, but between now and then I have a lot of work to do. For some reason, the teachers decided that this last term would be the right time to dump a lot of papers and busy work on the students.

That means that I will not have the time to keep to a regular schedule posting Ulysses pages. Instead of posting pages just to post them, I plan to just step back for a couple of weeks, though I will try to post Joyce related stuff when possible.

In the meantime, I'm hoping that Boomer can keep posting King Lear.

Page 33 has been annotated and Page 34 has been posted.

Deasy's Letter Full of Rubbish

I started annotating the first full paragraph but decided that it's more of Mr. Deasy's letter, and Stephen is only scanning over it. The specifics are not important. All you really need to know is that he believes that the continental Europeans have found a cure for hoof and mouth disease, but according to history he's a bit premature.

If you feel that you really can't sleep without learning the state of hoof and mouth disease at the beginning of the 20th century, Don Gifford's Ulyssses Annotated will send you on your way to finding the answer.

But I think it's relevance to the book is that the subject is boring and that Mr. Deasy is a bully and a blow-hard of the first order.

Another Anti-Semitic Brit in Ireland

The meat of the page happens a little farther down, when Mr. Deasy finally shows his hand:

"Mark my words, Mr Dedalus....England is in the hands of the jews. In all the highest places: her finance, her press. And they are the signs of a nation's decay."

If you didn't like this character before, Joyce has all but guaranteed that Deasy moves from being a standard-issue blow-hard to becoming "The Execrable Mr. Deasy"©.

Stephen tries to parry this comment by saying, "A merchant...is one who buys cheap and sells dear, jew or gentile, is he not?" This comment subtly pricks at the English (and Deasy's praise of all English as monetary geniuses). But it sails right over The Execrable Mr. Deasy's© head.

Judaism is a running theme of this book. So far, we have both references of the British Emprire--The Execrable Mr. Deasy's© and Haines--spout off about how the Jews are destroying the empire. Deasy does it here, and Haines, of course, says, "I don't want to see my country fall into the hands of German jews either. That's our national problem, I'm afraid, just now."

And of course the honorable Leopold Bloom is Jewish.

Though I haven't read up on it, I'm guessing that Judaism is a symbol for Ireland's outsider status. And I suspect that once Stephen and Leopold finally meet up, they will find common ground in the mutual alienation.

New Contributed Pages

In annotating this page, I've added or updated the following pages:

• An update of the Jew page, because on this page Joyce gives us another crucual example of British anti-Semitism.
• The William Blake poem Auguries of Innocence, which Stephen quotes in reference to The Execrable Mr. Deasy's © screed.
  

Page 33 has been posted.

When posting these pages, I vacillate between posting a page only after I've done the annotations and posting a page and then working on annotations later. It's the cathedral versus the bazaar.

(Yes, yes. I know that this article is about software development, but the concept can be applied in other contexts, right?)

The cathedral approach is to work on the page alone and not posting this content until it is "ready." It might give the impression of this as an authoritative site (hah!) and lend it some much-needed credibility (double hah!). Visitors could come here and read each content-packed page as they're posted. But how interesting is that?

I've posted page 32 of Ulysses.

This page continues Stephen's conversation with the talented Mr. Deasy. The first thing that I noticed on this page was that Stephen has been standing up the whole time. I'd imagined that Stephen was sitting across from his boss, but--no--Deasy has to give permission first.

So, Deasy puts the finishing touches on his article about hoof and mouth disease, and Stephen entertains himself with his own musings. But so far that's the most entertaining parts for me.

Joyce as Poet

I'm not the only one. While researching this page I came across the Poetry Score blog, which has taken some Ulysses passages and broken them into lines of poetry. It works. Here's an example from this page:

Where Cranly led me to get rich quick
Hunting his winners among the mudsplashed brakes
Amid the brawls of bookies on their pitches
And reek of the canteen

Over the motley slush

Even money Fair Rebel: ten to one the field
Dicers and thimbleriggers
We hurried by after the hoofs
The vying caps and jackets

And past the meatfaced woman
A butcher's dame, nuzzling thirstily
Her clove of orange.

I especially like the phrase "and past the meatfaced women, a butcher's dame, nuzzling thirstily her clove of orange."

For me, that's the money line of the page.

Like Dylan?

It reminds me of Bob Dylan's use of the phrase "jelly-faced woment" in Visions of Johanna:

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, "Jeeze
I can't find my knees"

Poetry Score also includes a link to a Google Books selection of a Nabokov lecture on Ulysses. That's one Difficult Book author writing about another Difficult Book author, which means I'll have to track down that resource.

Stephen's Gruesome Imagination

The "meatfaced woman" phrase might be the money line, but I also laughed at the way Stephen's mind wandered while Deasy finished typing the paper. He starts by thinking about horses, then kids playing field hockey, then jousting, and then battlefield carnage:

"Again: a goal. I am among them, among their battling bodies in a medley, the joust of life. You mean that knockkneed mother's darling who seems to be slightly crawsick? Jousts. Time shocked rebounds, shock by shock. Jousts, slush and uproar of battles, the frozen deathspew of the slain, a shout of spearspikes baited with men's bloodied guts."

The Final Paragraph

Finally, I puzzled over that last paragraph until my sources pointed out that it is Stephen scanning the article, which perfectly explains the scattered images.

In general, the "Galway Harbor Scheme" was an attempt to make Galway an anchor in a trans-Atlantic steamship line. It would have made some sense since its location to the extreme west would mean that ship traffic would not have to hazzard the narrow waterways leading to Scotland, Wales, or England.

"European conflagration. Grain supplies through the narrow waters of the channel."

While there seems to be no evidence that a Liverpool ring stopped this from happening, there were rumors that the time that efforts were being sabotaged.

Basically, it's just Deasy being Deasy.

Another Deasy-ism is "pluterperfect." We can only guess what that is supposed to mean.

Onward and upward . . . to Page 33.

Page 31 has been annotated.

That whole page was a dense piece of work. Stephen, the Catholic, sits across the desk from Deasy, the protestant. Mr Deasy, the English patriot, pays Stephen, the Irish national, for his labors.

Mr Deasy is a stand-in for the English, one of the two masters that Stephen mentions on page 21. He keeps a photo of King Edward on his wall and generally extoles the virtues of the British. All the while, he speaks of being a loyal Irishman, as if the two weren't incompatible.

It must rankle Stephen to have to sit and listen to Deasy babble on and on about the England every payday. As he said in the previous page:

"The same room and hour, the same wisdom: and I the same. Three times now. Three nooses round me here. Well? I can break them in this instant if I will."

I added a lot of hypertext annotations to this page because it covers much ground. Basically, during their conversation, they summarize hundreds of years of subjugation of the Irish under British rule. It covers Daniel O'Connell, the Potato Famine, the 1800 Act of Union, the Orange Lodge, Irish Plantation laws passed by Queen Elizabeth I, and more.

Much of this information was new to me, and I enjoyed reading up on it. The history itself is fascinating. But we're dealing specifically with James Joyce and Ulysses here. What is it's relevance to this book?

Did Joyce write a political tract in Ulysses, or are the political elements just another aspect of Joyce's realism (i.e., Irish nationalism was unavoidable at that time)?

What do you think?

I've posted page 31 but won't start annotating the page until later today.

Please leave comments with any annotation suggestions (or take a shot at creating a page yourself; it's fun and good for you.)

Page 30 has been annotated, though according to Gifford many of the people that Stephen owes money to appear in Portrait. So, I'll probably have to track down those passages and incorporate them. Update: Sure enough, each of these names have real-world counterparts; I've added links to most of them. (Funny how one of them,George William Russell, was also a player in the Irish branch of Theosophy, which seems to be cropping up a lot in this book. )

Anyway, Mr. Deasly continues flaunting his English-ness. And at one point, when Deasly gazed out the window at the sea, Stephen compares him to Haines:

His seacold eyes looked on the empty bay: it seems history is to blame: on me and on my words, unhating.

New pages include:

• If Youth But Knew, a little piece of doggerel by Elinor Sweetman;
• The words to the poem Rule Brittania! by James Thomson;
• A passage from Herodotus containing the inspiration for the phrase, "The sun never sets on the British Empire;"
• A return to the Buck Mulligan page;
• And the passage in Shakespeare's Othello where Iago says "put money in thy purse." [Also, in keeping with Difficult Book practice, I posted a page with all of Act 1, Scene 3 of Othello, with hopes of eventually posting the full play.]

Stephen seems to get a kick out of Deasly's referring to Iago as an example of thrift. Iago was a mean bastard (but not "mean" as in thrifty) who only wanted Roderigo and his money to bring down Othello. (It might also be worth mentioning that Deasly butchers to quote from "put money in thy purse" to "put BUT money in they purse.")

Is it coincidence that Joyce alludes to Othello the Moor here, only lines after alluding to two other Moors: Averroes and Moses Maimonides?

How about this one -- Is it coincidence that in this same passage from Othello, Roderigo talks about wanting to drown himself, which is a running theme of this book?

Coincidence? It's hard to say; but I know that coincidence plays a role in Bloom's whole day, and Joyce did pay close attention to detail.

But I can accept that I'm reading too much into this.

A Late Addition from Morning Edition

NPR's Morning Edition ran the piece Bloomsday Honors Irish Author James Joyce by Rob Gifford.

Two things struck me while listening to this story (and as I followed other Bloomsday coverage, for that matter).

First, I enjoy how polarizing this book is. Those who haven't read it or who've tried but never finished seem to react defensively: James Joyce was an elitist and readers claiming to enjoy the book are pretentious. Meanwhile, those who've read the book go out of their way to insist that Ulysses is actually very accessible.

I'd hedge my bet on this and say that Joyce definitely had grand pretensions for this book and that parts of the book are actually accessible.

Also, the character Stephen Dedalus is definitely pretentious. His head is stuffed full of arcane references, and his internal dialogues put this learning on display. I think Joyce purposely made Stephen pretentious; it might reflect his judgement on his own self as a young man, and it serve as a contrast to Leopold Bloom.

It's probably safe to assume that an overwhelming number of people who never finish the book, never get beyond the first three Stephen-centered chapters. That's where Stephen's pretensions are most on display, and it might help to explain why so many find the book pretentious.

If the book had started with Bloom taking his morning duke, on the other hand . . .

Second, I've seen a number of complaints from the Joyce-faithful moaning that too many non-Ulysses fan go to Dublin to celebrate Bloomsday. They drink too much, make too much noise, and cheapen the occasion.

I have no problem with that. Just think of all the people who celebrate Christmas and Easter without reading the Bible.

Last But Not Least
My buddy Rob posted a link to a sample of James Joyce reading from Finnigan's Wake: http://molly.open.ac.uk/mp3/joyce1.mp3.

It's not Ulysses, but it can certainly be considered a Difficult Book.

Actually, Finnigan's Wake might have been a more appropriate maiden project for this site, but it's still under copyright protection.

Let's all celebrate with a heathy shot of Jameson Irish Whiskey. Still the best for what ails you.

I'll try to post more in the morning, but now I'm trying to fix a problem with the web host.

I wish I was in Dublin today to celebrate. Maybe next year.

The James Joyce Centre offers a good introduction of Bloomsday activities:

• In Dublin
• In Ireland
• Around the world

The best bet I’ve found in Washington DC is a Bloomsday Reading at Mackey’s Pub (on L Street between 18th and 19th Streets, NW – take the Farragut North Metro). Festivities should start around 7.

The Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia makes Bloomsday an annual tradition.

The Bloomsday Run in Spokane, Washingtion, is also popular. But doing something healthy on this day somehow seems to defeat the purpose.

Irish Central has some nice photos from Bloomsday in Dublin. And you can never go wrong with a Google Image Search.

Those of you with no place to celebrate, maybe you'll want to take a quiz on the man. Here's one from the Guardian in the UK. Here's a spoiler:

14. "The only demand I make of my reader," Joyce once told an interviewer, is that . . . He should devote his whole life to reading my works."

It's been a productive day. I've annotated page 29 and posted page 30.

Stephen's conversation with Mr. Deasey begins, with Deasey paying Stephen his wages.

Stephen quotes part of the Gloria Patri, or lesser doxology.

In the annotations, we look at the contradiction between the Apostles preaching to the Gentiles and Jesus' instructions to avoid preaching to Gentiles. Oops.

I'll close my annotations of page 28 a look at Joyce's phrase "the obscure soul of the world."

This phrase calls to mind the Latin phrase anima mundi.

It could refer to either Giordano Bruno, a Theosophical concept, or both.

Either way, it's definitely obscure.

Anyway, I'm moving to the next page.

We're still far away from finishing Ulysses, but it's never too early to look for future Difficult Books. The next obvious choice would be Moby Dick--too bad Power Moby Dick has beat us to the punch.

They did some nice things to the text over there, and it's well worth checking out. It's effective and easy to use, and if I weren't already knee-deep in James Joyce I might read that book again.

I thinking about adding a feature to Difficult Books: a Shakespeare Club. The Washington DC area always seems to have at least one Shakespeare play in performance. A person could work their way through all of the Bards works by reading each play as it is performed.

The plan would be to first read each play on Difficult Books and then watch the performance. We would also keep a running tally of the performances we've seen.

Over the last few days, the spammers have found Difficult Books. Every couple of hours a new entry will be posted to the forum that is just a random list of words or phrases. Each word/phrase then hyperlinks to the same website. But those website don't have any content, so I can't figure out what they are trying to sell.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Page 29 is posted, though without hyperlinks.

We finally get our first taste of Mr. Deasy on this page. But I'll have to work on this page more tomorrow.

You see, it's summer, and I'm going to the park for some crabs and beer.

Cheers!

James Joyce mentions morris dancing on page 28, using an alternative spelling: "morrice." But I don't know why he says "grave" morrice; morris dancers always look very gay.

If you're curious, here's a sample of morris dancing. (It's a little known fact that all morris dancers must resemble CNN's Wolf Blitzer.)

I'm curious. One of the most popular search terms used to find Difficult Books is the Latin phrase: Liliata rutilantium te confessorum turma circumdet: iubilantium te virginum chorus excipiat.

I do have a short page with a brief description (which you can find here), but I'm wondering whether I'm missing something.

Should I add more content to that page?

What other context for this phrase should I consider?