II - Chapter 9

Overall chapter impression:

The bard gets the Ulysses treatment. Stephen releases his Hamlet theory mentioned in Chapter 1. Poor Haines doesn't get to hear it because he's buying a book. Antisemitism is rife.
Oh, and Mulligan returns.

Notes: (commentary and/or scribble I wrote to look at/up later)

Goethe definitely looks to be in my future.

Sinkapace: ok, so we choose the unusual or foreign or otherwise esoteric instead of commonplace words (irides for irises', rufous for red, FFS), but we substitute the common (vulgar) when it comes to the bard's verbiage? Cinquepace is what you mean. Funny how I totally didn't see that.

Twicreakingly. This doesn't work. The lack of online analysis suggests I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Corantoed. We do not like Shakespeare, do we?

Ok, it's a Dedalus chapter.

Most people generally are alive 15 minutes before they die. I should probably look up that reference.

Are these the same medicals that Bloom got mixed up with?

Do I have to read Milton? Ok.

Why sorrows of Satan?

Who is Cranly? Have I asked this?

I want to know the end of that poem. I think it involves the word pussy.

Rufous: again Joyce, why? Oh, of course. It's a urine colour.

He's an ollav and a sizar within two sentences? 😄

He made a trumpet out of his bum. So I'm reading Dante as well? 🤣

Moreau likes painting young boobies.

Ineffable is a lovely word.😄

This verily is that.

Dunlop, Judge -> H.P.B.'s elemental. Very dense and too many names. ToDo: re-read.

How on earth is a Platonic-Aristotlean comparison blood boiling? Obvious, necessary, required are words i'd use.

Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. You read it and it makes no sense, and then you look closely at it and it's obvious and obviously true. Also, Picasso.

God: noise in the street: very peripatetic. Heavy, man.

'creepycrawl after Blake's buttocks'. What? 'auric'? Golden? No, of aura. Ahhh, look at that - golden aura is tautological.

Earth is the living mother ... that's familiar.

I don't know, I've never kippled. Stephen is funny.

'concentration camp sung by Swinburne', but we haven't had WW2 yet. <Does research.> Oh. Oh fuck.

That fast boy got a syndrome named for the book after him.

So this is Stephen's Hamlet theory from chapter 1? Shakespeare is Hamlet's dad (also Hamlet, if memory serves), and Shakespeare's son is - not Hamlet - a stillborn twin or something? Is Judith supposed to be Hamlet, then? And then we get into an argument with ourselves in Shakespearean voice? Coz, of course. Also, have we met Georgina Johnson before? Also, also if Dedalus' is autobiographical, I find it hard to believe Joyce spent any extended period of time in someone's bed. Also, also, also ditto Dedalus.

Other you didn't get pound, and even if he did, you you are responsible for his debts. False-premise philosophy doesn't overrule reality.

Entelechy: again with the esoteric bollox. You've already introduced 'actuality': use that, but call it Aristotelian, or something.

A man of genius makes no mistakes. Straight-up wrong. 'A man of genius in a particular field makes almost no mistakes in that field' is closer. And even then, not if he is in new territory.

Why is Xanthippe a shrew?

Caudlectures: Mrs. Caudle's curtain lectures? ToDo: find time to read.

How did Sinn Fein get to ancient Greece and/or Stratford?

Naggin: 😁

Baldpink lollard costard. I've been looking at that for 2 minutes. I think it means 'Stephen's head'.

The hath a way joke was done better - if it was done at all - in the sonnet. And rubbish. Bill was a Playa.

And my turn, when? See? I said he wasn't in anyone's bed! Later: spent most of the pound, not time???

Come! Coz why not?

I don't remember Shakespeare doing that repetition thing with words. Is that meant to be parody?

Who's Piper? Is there a point to the incorrect Peter piper line?

The paragraph of mysticism is beyond me. Except I understand: yogibogeybox.

Headless caubeen: Why?

Casque. Argal. I am crying.

Now he's stream-of-consciousnessing the conversation around him?

The Moore/Martyn joke went over my head (for now).

Cordelia. Cordoglio. Lir's loneliest daughter. Prolly no idea, but: lir popped up earlier: (mananaan, maclir ...) (later: nope wrong about that. This is serious Celtic mythology), and how do you pronounce cordoglio? 🤣

Stephen rises, Stephen sits down. Starkey?

God ild you: cannot parse this.

Bullockbefriending again

Altitude - chopine. I see what you did there. Did the librarian actually change his neatsleather shoes or is that metaphoric?

Where is mention of the reconciliation? Am I being ignorant or have I missed something in the book?

Christfox in leather trews. Great imagery but what? Oh, George Fox of the Quakers. I get it.

An awful way to think of libraries. And backwards. Ofc, they are still, that's the point. They're there to save the future from having to do the research done by the past, but they don't prevent that.

Who is the 'most enigmatic' Eglinton talking about? Shakes, Starkey, Hamlet?

Bear with me. Ooooh, a challenge!

Hello Dante. Sigh. Already on the list.

The mole bit proves you owe the pound. You contradict yourself, Stephen.

He is in my father.i am in his son. I'm not sure that I want to know.

Do I put Hugo on the list too? Art of being a grandfather. Have to learn French, but.

Oh. Love is the word known to all men, not mum. Hmmm. Is that Thomas Aquinas?

I haven't read Shakespeare's sonnets. On the list.

Great auks only recently (last 1/2 century) became extinct.

Coistrel gentleman. Ha! I knew Stephen didn't like Shakespeare. Fie.

What is he talking about here? Who is the lordling, and who is he wooing on Shakespeare's behalf? Anne? Bill didn't write Cyrano.

The game of laugh and lie down. 🤣🤣 Humour in the middle of a bunch of poppycock. (Which is about as appropriate a word as any you've come up with Joyce.) Scuse the native maddo, but an 18 year old rooting a 26 year old is not losing 'the game of laugh and lie down'. That boar's tusk has definitely worsted the shrew to take an analogy far beyond where it should ever go. Also buonaroba - what a word!

I think he's talking about his own madness with his darker shadow passions. But, 'the two rages commingle in a whirlpool'; so we're in 'scylla & charybdis'? That's the first Odyssey reference I've got.

What's with all the lists listing about? Is it a ship reference?

Disagree with Stephen's estimation of ghostly powers. They know how they were killed, otherwise they would not be restless - having died in sleep they'd just pass over. Sounds like a sparkly vampire rule. You made it up.

Aha! I wondered why that unlovely English bit was in earlier. The language is maligned.

Why not 'its mole sinkaspotted'?

How did Jesus get back in the story?

Heeeeeere's Mulligan! Watch Stephen go from life of the party to morose bugger.

Ribald and sullen?

Gaseous vertebrate? Oh. God. Ummm, ok. Huxley was weird.

Panama. That's actually the same hat as before iirc

Why are they serving Mulligan. That's 12th night.

The music's inverted. But how to discern the notes? It's not really Gloria in Excelsis Deo, but close.

And here's Wilde again. Gay stuff ahead!

Colour and light and wild puns!

Is he telling himself off or congratulating himself?

I guess the rue Saint-Andre-des-Arts is from earlier books.

The wanderings of Oisin - WB Yeats

Good Friday?! It's bloody June!

I met a fool... A motley fool? Later: Was he blithe in motley or was that just Mulligan? 😄

Is Bloom here, too?

What's with the Evans, conduct ellipsis ellipsis bit?

Sheeny means Jew, apparently. At least one of Buck or James is antisemitic.

I don't know that he gets the hours and rots joke. Yes coz 'walk the night' and why else put it in, but there's no cleverness to 'rot' and there should be. He's using it entirely as decay.

He knows your old fellow.

... upon her mesial groove. Well that ended up not meaning what I thought it meant, but I bet it still does, somehow. 🤣 Also, Jesus is back. Again.

Canary is wine. Pretty sure cockcanary isn't.

She didn't borrow 40 shillings, she owed it.

Has anyone done a study on furniture bequests in Elizabethan times? I'll bet that 'second-best' bizzo is an in-joke or similar. And doesn't the wife get everything else in a will back in the day?

Catamite: Jeez, they were worse than us. At least we know that shit is wrong and evil.

Besteglinton: what happened there? We don't care which one it is for the story? We're drunk and starting to get confused? The two gentlemen are very close?

That's dodgy! Elizabeth didn't 'inspire' the merry wives of Windsor she requested it.

Stephen's losing it, arguing with himself.

Nephews with grandmothers makes no sense.

The son unborn mars beauty. Clueless idiot. That's like your bellybutton nonsense.

Come, mess. Not unusually.

Cuck Mulligan. Starting to think that cuckoldry is the central theme of this book.

The boy of act one is the man of act 5. Is that a Dedalus/Bloom veiled reference?

Life is many days. This will end. Words to live by. Also, Ecclesiastical.

Somewhere in the chapter is Stephen being asked to prove Shakespeare's Jewishness. Jews weren't even allowed in the country at the time.

Stuff I don't get:

Caudlelectures, almost all the Shakespeare references.

And, in conclusion:

So, we have some sense of a continuing story (at long last). Still not much idea why the story is being told. Also: oh, the smut. :-D