finish reading Ulysses

I may be done reading it from start to end this weekend.

Stephen and Lynch had gone off to the red light district by way of the train station. Bloom decides to follow them, worried as he is for Simon’s prodigal son. Apparently Mulligan trying to sneak back to the tower without Stephen, so they have some sort of argument. This is not clear to the reader. I’ll say it went past me, or I didn’t recall it when I later read the commentary.

Chapter Fifteen opens like a play, with Bloom arriving in ‘Nighttown.’ He’s tried to catch up with Stephen, only to end up snarled like fish in a net, in his own guilts and lusts. These take the form of hallucinations, randomly, chaotically presented in the form of theatrical script.
Bloom follows the melody of piano playing toward Bella Cohen’s brothel. There, he resists various magical attacks and confronts his own most perverse desires. Thus, he frees himself from Calypso’s snares.

Stephen also confronts ghosts, but for him they are of his mother. Striking out with his walking stick, he shatters a lampglobe. Bloom settles Stephen’s accounts and follows him out to the street, where the young man has begun arguing with two soldiers.One of them, offended, thinking Stephen insults the king and England, knocks him unconscious.

Here then, is where I left off last night.

And OH! I found a great way to learn and understand Joyce’s Ulysses:

http://www.robotwisdom.com/jaj/ulysses/

And here’s a site where you might join with others in studying and discussing Ulysses (of course we could do some of that right here, but we Joyceans are few and far between, methinks.)

http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/29/61/frameset.html

“Were there schemes of wider scope?

A scheme to be formulated and submitted for approval to the harbour commissioners for the exploitation of white coal (hydraulic power), obtained by hydroelectric plant at peak of tide at Dublin bar or at head of water at Poulaphouca or Powerscourt or catchment basins of main streams for the economic production of 500,000 W. H. P. of electricity. A scheme to enclose the peninsular delta of the North Bull at Dollymount and erect on the space of the foreland, used for golf links and rifle ranges, an asphalted esplanade with casinos, booths, shooting galleries, hotels, boardinghouses, readingrooms, establishments for mixed bathing. A scheme for the use of dogvans and goatvans for the delivery of early morning milk. A scheme for the development of Irish tourist traffic in and around Dublin by means of petrolpropelled riverboats, plying in the fluvial fairway between Island bridge and Ringsend, charabancs, narrow gauge local railways, and pleasure steamers for coastwise navigation (10/- per person per day, guide (trilingual) included). A scheme for the repristination of passenger and goods traffics over Irish waterways, when freed from weedbeds. A scheme to connect by tramline” (to read more go to:

http://botheration.org/ulysses/

I had a double volume to which I had been listening, back since 1994. I misplaced them last year.

by Don Gifford.

This is an awesome literary research and study tool. I had first found this book at the Memphis library, when I first started to read Ulysses in 1987.

I’ll not give up on Joyce’ Ulysses, going day by day, till I finish it. Then I’ll probably read it again, from the beginning.