Discussion - Week Three - Ulysses - Episode 7 & 8

[Jim]

This discussion covers Episodes 7 & 8 of Ulysses

Part II – The Odyssey

Episode 7, Aeolus
Scene: The Newspaper
Hour: 12 noon
Organ: Lungs
Art: Rhetoric
Color: Red
Symbol: Editor
Technic: Enthymemic

Break out your copy of Aristotle’s Rhetoric for this episode!

Mr. Bloom is in the offices of the Freeman’s Journal working out some advertising issues with the staff. He heads out on errand and just misses Stephen Dedalus who’s come to the office to deliver Mr. Deasy’s hoof-and-mouth disease letter. Much witty banter ensues before they head out to lunch.


Episode 8, Lestrygonians
Scene: The Lunch
Hour: 1 pm
Organ: Oesophagus
Art: Architecture
Symbol: Constables
Technic: Peristaltic

Mr. Bloom walks the streets in search of lunch. Everywhere he looks he sees his favorite things – meat and women – but somehow he’s repulsed by what he sees of his fellow Dubliners chomping down their greasy victuals. Just below the surface of his reveries, he is agitated about Molly’s impending nooner with Blazes Boylan – who Bloom almost encounters at the end of the episode, narrowly escaping into the gate of the museum.

[Whitney]

I don't really have anything terribly insightful to say, but I loved the banter in the newsroom. The content of a bunch of guys BS'ing may vary, but the form is essentially unchanged. I was also happy to learn that Yoda speaks in hyperbaton (take note James - if that isn't relevance for the modern reader, I don't know what is :-).

[Whitney]

Oh, and this sentence fro Aeolus: "Gone with the wind. Hosts at Mullaghmast and Tara of the kings." An obvious reference to the plantation Tara from 'Gone With the Wind'. Joyce was so erudite he even referenced books that wouldn't be written for another 15 years!

[Sue]

Need to find something to say. Talk about this book somehow. Find interesting quote to discuss. Looking at book. Wondering what might be interesting?

[Sasha]

Hi everyone! I'm late to the party and weeks behind, but I'm working on it. I actually read the Weeks One & Two threads in entirety, so there.

Okay, I have a question. Do the headlines in Chapter 7 contribute any meaning to the story? They don't seem to - they comes across as sortof jokey little plays, like how an irreverent blog might preface a paragraph on Lady Gaga with "Elsewhere in Madonna's Twisted Nightmares..."

Not that I disliked them - I actually liked them a lot - I'm just curious about what others got from them.

I am reading Ulysses without the benefit of specific other books, although I'm spending some time looking stuff up as I go. Wish I'd had that color-coded annotation from the beginning; that shit is brilliant.

[Whitney]

Alex wrote: "Do the headlines in Chapter 7 contribute any meaning to the story? They don't seem to - they comes across as sortof jokey little plays, like how an irreverent blog might preface a paragraph on Lady Gaga with "Elsewhere in Madonna's Twisted Nightmares..."

Hi Alex, welcome aboard! That's how I took the headlines, the narrator of Ulysses is a playful fellow. Also in keeping with the 'Aeolus" theme, they call attention to the self-important, overblown rhetoric of the newspapers.

Yeah, I am loving the color coding, and the hover and view annotations that are much less disruptive than scanning back and forth between books. I thought there may have been some errors starting with 'The Sirens', though, although sometimes it seems the line can be blurry between the narrator and Bloom's stream of consciousness.

[Casey]

I don't know about others, but I absolutely loved Lestrygonians. There's quite a bit of playful meta-commentary in here, e.g. "That's how poets write, the similar sounds." But the section was more than that. I enjoyed Bloom's melancholy memory of an intimate moment with Molly:

"Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweet and sour with spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft, warm, sticky, gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes."

That mawkish cake is a brilliant play on words, and somehow Joyce makes the moment sound beautiful. As an aside, I don't think my boyfriend would think it was cute if I chewed up some cake and then put it in his mouth, but to each their own.

Anyway, the description of Bloom hiding when he sees Boylan was simply fantastic. This section gives us a feel for how much Bloom loves Molly, and how much her affair hurts him (even though he pretends it doesn't).

[Carly]

That's what I more or less like about the book - the banter back and forth, and Bloom's thoughts.

I really like him - he's more interesting than Stephen (Sorry, James Joyce).

Right now, I'm simply listening to the book in an easy manner. Getting and laugh here and there.

Haven't been trying to analyze anything.

[Carly]

I'm not even sure what section I'm currently listening to - well into the 16th disk, I know that.

And I'm reading the Bloomsday book as I'm going along as well as Delaney's book on it.

So one way or the other, I'm 'getting it'.

[Catherine]

I've finally reached this section! Yay for me!!! Finished Episode 7 and found the headlines to be wonderfully funny. They added not just to the structure of the section, but gave insights to the chacracters and events. And, as I was reading in short little bursts, they helped by giving me "map markers" in my reading.

And I just love that first paragraph in Episode 8. The words brought this image of a hungry Bloom looking into a sweetshop seeing school kids, faces bright, mouths smeared with candy. The feel of the street scene is there. Great!