Corpsey

bandz ahoy
this poetic exclamation is followed by five Q&A sections of scientific analysis crammed with astronomy, geology, biology, physics, mathematics, and logic, leading to another question: "His (Bloom's) logical conclusion, having weighed the matter and allowing for possible error?" Answer: "That it was not a heaventree." The dialogue between poetry and science reflects Joyce's engagement with another writer who folded scientific thinking into his art. Bloom and Stephen's vision of the stars reenacts one that Virgil and Dante enjoy at the end of the Inferno, when they emerge from Hell into the night air. For Dante the stars are a broad highway to God. For Joyce they are not.
 

luka

Well-known member
What exchange of money took place between host and guest?

The former returned to the latter, without interest, a sum of money (£1-7-0), one pound seven shillings, advanced by the latter to the former.

What counterproposals were alternately advanced, accepted, modified, declined, restated in other terms, reaccepted, ratified, reconfirmed?

To inaugurate a prearranged course of Italian instruction, place the residence of the instructed. To inaugurate a course of vocal instruction, place the residence of the instructress. To inaugurate a series of static semistatic and peripatetic intellectual dialogues, places the residence of both speakers (if both speakers were resident in the same place), the Ship hotel and tavern, 6 Lower Abbey street (W. and E. Connery, proprietors), the National Library of Ireland, 10 Kildare street, the National Maternity Hospital, 29, 30 and 31 Holles street, a public garden, the vicinity of a place of worship, a conjunction of two or more public thoroughfares, the point of bisection of a right line drawn between their residences (if both speakers were resident in different places).

What rendered problematic for Bloom the realisation of these mutually selfexcluding propositions?

The irreparability of the past: once at a performance of Albert Hengler's circus in the Rotunda, Rutland square, Dublin, an intuitive particoloured clown in quest of paternity had penetrated from the ring to a place in the auditorium where Bloom, solitary, was publicly declared to an exhilarated audience that he (Bloom) was his (the clown's) papa. The imprevidibility of the future: once in the summer of 1898 he (Bloom) had marked a florin (2/-) with three notches on the milled edge and tendered it in payment of an account due to and received by J. and T. Davy, family grocers, 1 Charlemont Mall, Grand Canal, for circulation on the waters of civic finance, for possible, circuitous or direct, return.

Was the clown Bloom's son?

No.

Had Bloom's coin returned?

Never.

...

What did each do at the door of egress?

Bloom set the candlestick on the floor. Stephen put the hat on his head.

For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?

For a cat.

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rere of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.
so annoying and lame
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
@Corpsey where do you go next? The Cantos?

Dug my yellowing copy of Ulysses out today and I'm tentatively considering trying it again cos I smashed the Anathemata this week and can't afford to buy any new books for a while.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Nearly a year ago now

 

luka

Well-known member
was just having cocktails with kit mack we was talking about you. h said you emailed him the interview with him. he reckoned he already knew what had happened.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I mentioned I'd just seen it, and he said he didn't know it was on the net and no way on earth was he gonna click on it! I guess he's embarrassed about it and doesn't want anyone to watch it.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Read the first 3 chapters, and going over them again by listening to the 1982 RTE radio adaptation which is on Spotify. I'm against audio books generally but this version is quite decent actually, good for when you have to do the housework.

Am I turning into Corpsey?
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
@Corpsey I need your expert opinion. At the end of Proteus do you reckon Stephen cracks one off on the sly, or is he simply having a piss? Critical opinion seems to be divided.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I didn't notice a wank myself but Kenner says there is one. It would make sense as (spoiler alert) Proteus is the "twin" chapter to Nausicaa.
 
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