Ulysses Reading Group 2023

[ValentineGreen]

Hi all, on the back of a thread currently in Chat 'have you read Ulysses' it seemed like it would be a good idea to form a Ulysses Read-a-long group here.

No experience required, this thread is open to anyone who fancies reading it for the first time or the 100th time!

I don't know yet the best way to structure it, as in how many pages we all agree to read given that some 'chapters' are far denser than others. I'm totally open to anyone who has set up something like this before and knows what will work well?

For some context, I did not study English Literature but have always been an avid reader. I read Ulysses once, many years ago and while I say 'read' I mean my eyes read each word but I cannot say my brain decoded them all whatsoever.

Now, nearly 30 years later, and after a lifetime of reading, including Portrait and Dubliners as well as a lot of reading around the meaning of Ulysses, I wish to re-read it. But I would love to read it with others where we can share our thoughts and interpretations and knowledge as we go.

I find myself growing ever more fascinated by Joyce and his life and I really want to 'know' this great masterpiece and understand it (if I can!)

Please don't be shy! Come and join me...

Between us we can work out the best way to structure this undertaking.

That's all really interesting @SerafinasGoose. I have not read ahead & am only going by what I've read I far.

In this episode Bloom is watching a young maid from next door & having thoughts about her body & hoping he will be served in the butchers quickly enough to be able to follow her so he can keep looking at her.

In this introduction to them as a couple Molly seems a bit bossy & lazy. Being brought breakfast in bed & issuing orders about scalding the teapot. They really do give a sense of long years together and having reached a somewhat comfortable domestic arrangement.

I am looking forward to reading more about them..

Thursday again....the weeks are rolling by..I hope we still have lots of people reading along?

Thursday 29 June - Thursday 6th July
Episode 5 - Lotus-Eaters

Time: 10am
Scene: Bath
Colour: Brown
Technique: Narcissism
Correspondences: Ulysses; Nausicaa; Erylochus; bather; communicants
Science / Art: Chemistry, Botany
Meaning: Seduction of the faith
Organ: skin; genitals
Symbols: Host, penis, flower, drugs

I'll be back once I've read it cold....

I am reading, but got some way ahead. Am doing the 'Oxen of the Sun' section which is one of the more challenging episodes.

Also came across this edition at my local library. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ulysses-Oxford-Worlds-Classics-James/dp/0199535671

The introduction seemed really good, though the book as a whole seemed less well produced - in terms of page and font size than my very ancient Penguin edition.

What I liked about the intro to the Oxford edition was the way it raised the question of whether Ulysses should be considered as a novel. I think Joyce referred to it as an encyclopaedia, and that seems quite a good way of thinking of it.

I've had trouble posting but I think I've tackled the glitch. Still here anyway.
Interesting about the novel/encylopaedia thing. Not sure it's really either: a thing on its own.
I think Molly is a diva@ValentineGreen and therefore it's her role to be demanding. It's Leopold's role to indulge and admire and also to keep out of the house on this particular day.

Good morning! Greetings from sunny Paris!
I have fallen behind in my reading due to holidays & the usual pressures of finishing work & getting ready to leave etc.
I am in paris right now & about to go check out some Joyce associated locations today so I will report back later

I hope everyone else is still reading & enjoying??

Paris - how lovely! This thread is certainly inspiring me to partake of a Bloomsday in Dublin, perhaps next June.

Also quite excited that, my chapter on Joyce's sublimative epiphanies has now been peer-reviewed for publication with only minor corrections. It was fortuitous that I was just completing that project when I ran across these threads, and that I'm also extending that chapter into a longer one for a book project and can coincide my rereading of Ulysses with that work - and this thread! Thanks so much to all who continue to inspire me.

It's noteworthy from this last chapter how different Bloom's stream of consciousness is by comparison with Stephen's. His sentences are shorter, more staccato, and his mind frequently jumps from point to point as he continues in his perambulations. I can see a lot of similarities here with Woolf - her short-story 'The Mark on the Wall' has a similar representation of these jumps in consciousness.

Looking forward to your Joyce locations report. Have you read his Paris notebooks? They are in The Workshop of Daedalus, a now quite old publication bringing together his rough notes and notebooks, including the epiphanies. Another scholar is at work on a more updated version, which I WILL invest in the moment it comes out!

@ValentineGreen I hope everyone else is still reading & enjoying??

I am!

Just started reading Hades. I'm enjoying the book so far, it's a lot more accessible than I thought it would be, and I really like the use of language.

Just finished Lotus Eaters. Bloom’s interior monologue covers dialogue with himself, observing his surrounding, reflections, workings-outs, corrections, reminders. His thoughts intersect and overlap with encounters. He manages to conduct a conversation with McCoy while still wondering what’s in the letter, and processing what he sees across the street outside the hotel. A staccato style occasionally expresses this multitasking of consciousness and figuring-out: “the man, husband, brother, like her”; and when he misses the anticipated leg flash: “ Flicker, flicker: the lace flare of her hat in the sun: flicker, flick”.

There is plenty of slang in this episode, but once again fewer learned references - and even when there are, it’s demotic (“glimpses of the moon” from Hamlet referencing women’s buttocks rather than Stephen's highfalutin ideas). There are numerous links to the ‘lotus eater’ theme - I felt that the final one (Bloom envisioning himself in a bath) was a wee bit too detailed for stream of consciousness. Though I liked the sacrilegious use of “This is my body” - it anticipates the also-splendidly-blasphemous Mass scene in Circe featuring a priest’s “grey bare hairy buttocks between which a carrot is stuck.) My body.”

Another thing of note in this episode, in a novel about Dublin’s middle class, are the rare glimpses - by Brady’s cottages off Lime Street, then by a timber yard - of the urban poor. I think they pop up again in Hades.

..a mild irreverence to add to the bracing blasphemy - when Bloom enters the church he thinks to himself "Something going on". Reminded me of Larkin's wry phrase in Church Going ("Once I am sure there's nothing going on")!

In Valentine's absence I'll post this week's correspondences:

Episode 6 – Hades

Time: 11am
Scene: Graveyard
Colour: Black, white
Technique: Incubism
Correspondences: Dignam = Elipinor, Menton = Ajax, Parnell = Agamemnon, O’Connell = Hercules, Cunningham = Sisyphus, Caretaker = Hades, the 4 rivers, Orion, Laertes, Telemachus, Antinous
Science/Art: Religion
Meaning: Descent to Nothing
Organ: Heart
Symbols: Cemetery, the past, the unknown man, heart trouble

@BaronMunchausen - your post's just reminded me how laugh-out-loud funny Ulysses really is. Bloom's letter is hilarious. As is the later scene in 'Circe' with the carrot ...

Bloom is a lot more earthy than Stephen. He revels in his proclivities, whereas Stephen tries to flee from his. I'm wondering if there's a connection between the constant bath imagery and Stephen's apparent hydrophobia by the time of 'Telemachus'. He's revulsed by the bathwater at his Clongowes school - images of which keep cropping up long after he's left - and the snotgreen sea, although Christened as such by Mulligan, is equally abject in its description. Going along with the blasphemy description, that might be read as a revulsion from the body (and bodily secretions) but also a form of ironic anti-baptism.

I have Steve Pinkerton's wonderful book Blasphemous Modernisms on Kindle - will have a quick scan of that and see what he says about Ulysses.

It's also interesting that Ulysses itself is an incomplete corpus - the human parts listed in all the episode correspondences never come together to make a complete body; likewise, there's never a faithful dialogue between the chapters of The Odyssey and those of Ulysses.

Thanks for posting the schema @SerafinasGoose

Paris is pretty glorious! I have mapped out a Joyce tour for myself with places they lived & the location of the original Shakespeare & Co etc
Last night, by chance, I walked past the apartment on Rue Cardinale Lemione that Valery Larbaud gave him on loan & where he finished Ulysses.
There's something really visceral about looking at those streets & knowing they formed similar memories for him too. We had a drink in Cafe Descartes on the corner & we could see the gates to the apartment & the street leading to the square.
Just before travelling I managed to track down a (now hard to find) copy of Richard Ellman's biography which I have along for company- I also have my copy of Ulyses..and tomorrow i plan to read Hades.

A friend here in Paris has just given me a loan of this book. I've never seen it before - have any of you come across it? Utterly fascinating images of the literary scene in Paris in the 30s

No, but it looks really interesting, I am reading Exile's Return by Malcolm Cowley, v interesting on Joyce but not flattering at all

I think a lot of myths about joyce abound. I'm reading Ellman's biography at ghetto moment alongside Ulysses. I've just read Brenda Maddox's Nora which was fascinating too.

Yesterday I walked to Rue L'Odeon & drank a white wine at a cafe practically next door to the original Shakespeare & Company bookshop. I was alone & sat there imaging all the writers who have so shaped my love of reading walking purposefully along that very street full of hope & anxiety to publish their work. And Sylvia Beach & Adreinne Monnier waiting for them. What a time. I especially pictured Joyce elegantly walking along there. It was a weirdly emotional hour I spent there. I'm loving discovering this side of Paris!

No idea where the random ghetto came from!!

Apologies for all the typos I'm posting from my phone.

Sounds great @ValentineGreen ! I visited "Shakespeare and Co" many moons ago, must admit I didn't realise at the time that the original was elsewhere.

@BaronMunchausen I think it's a little confusing alright. The original run by Sylvia Beach was on Rue L'Odeon & closed in 1941 I think due to the war & she never reopened afterwards although I read that she continued to live above it until she died.
Rue L'Odeon was apparently a significant street for Joyce as he lived in a smal room here on his first visit to Paris in 1902 & when he returned nearly 20 years later it had become this literary hub, which naturally was v auspicious to him.

I passed the other Shakespeare & Co today near Notre Dame. It was renamed to this in homage to Sylvia apparently....

Hello - just "dropping in" to say I am behind too, as I have just returned from holiday - but will be catching up this week. Loved the photos of Paris!

Welcome back @CryingAtTheDiscotheque !
I hope no-one else minds that I digressed by posting photos? I'm reading Hades here this afternoon. Will be back once I've read it through the first time.

One of my favourite passages in Ulysses comes from Hades. Mortality touches the heart. And the funny bone.

“—I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man’s inmost heart.
—It does, Mr Bloom said.
Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning. Pennyweight of powder in a skull. Twelve grammes one pennyweight. Troy measure.”

I have managed to catch up with The Lotus Eaters and Hades, and very much enjoyed both chapters. Bloom is a charismatic character and I find his thoughts easier to follow than Stephen's... his awareness of his status as an outsider is conveyed very subtly I think ... also really enjoyed all the popular culture references in Hades, theatre and song etc, very vivid. (I remember my father singing "Oh oh Antonio" when I was a child - goodness only knows where he got it from as I am not THAT old!)

Also 'Anyone here seen Kelly? Kay-Eee-double-ell-why'

City of Leeds Music Hall on the telly?

A significant 'event' in Hades is when Bloom spots Stephen on the road. Stephen is presumably en route to (or from) Sandymount Strand, walking to/from the railway station at Sandymount (having arrived there from Dalkey, or going back there from his walk on the strand) - which would I think put him on the route from Newbridge Avenue to town via Tritonville Road.

I’m generally curious about all the train and tram journeys that happen unremarked and ‘offstage’ in Ulysses to get characters from A to B - and wondering why public transport is offstage??