June 16, 2008

Here it is Bloomsday again ...

... and though I had the pleasure of spending last week with a veritable omnium gatherum of Joyce scholars, alas, today has been relatively joyceless. So I thought I'd regale you with a few notations from my undergraduate copy of Ulysses.

(Wait ... I did just use the word "Protean" in conversation with the dean here, a classicist ... so that kind of counts as a Joycean interaction, right?)

OK, here goes:

new sight - double sight,
End of the world.
What you laugh at, you will nevertheless serve:
Cuckold horns,
Old Man Cancer,
Song he sang at mother's deathbed ...
Third train ride


I don't write in my books much ... I consider it a bad habit that bespeaks a certain hubris. A more interesting read than these meager interlinear ejaculations would be reading only the passages I've underlined throughout the novel. For the life of me, I can't guess why I marked some of them. At least I didn't mark the word "buttocksmothered." (Bring it on, Googlists ... I'm ready for the traffic.)

Hmm, maybe I should read Ulysses again. Or maybe we all should.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://home.bway.net/hunger/ch1-ulys.html

NYMary said...

Hmm, maybe I should read Ulysses again. Or maybe we all should.

Okay, I'll race you.

JB said...

Well, the race goes not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill ... what was I saying again?

Tom said...

I feel compelled to point out, in my "You couldn't be more wrong" way, that the practice, even the encouragement, of appending comments to on-line blogs is very much the virtual analogue (to coin a phrase) of the much older practice of writing comments in the margins of books. And I feel only a touch of hubris in appending that to your blog.

JB said...

Let's face it, hubris and blogging are first-cousin bedfellows.