dovegreyreader scribbles

Homeward Bound

Home safely yesterday evening even though I took a wrong turn heading for my departure gate at Dublin airport ( just how on earth did I manage that) and ended up in customs and passport control for flight arrivals and entry into Dublin. Fortunately no one else there and the policeman took one look at my face when he told me I'd need to walk out of the airport, walk right the way round, come back in, book in again, go through departures again, and I think fearing he'd have to make a 999 call if not resuscitate me himself if he didn't move fast, he whisked me through all the coded security doors and let me back into Ireland so I could leave again, and I promised not to tell anyone so if you could keep that bit quiet I'd be grateful.

As you can see a huge number of passengers alighting from the enormous plane at Plymouth airport...this was the sum total of us with a few more carrying on to Newquay. You can imagine the crush in baggage reclaim.

My window the second from the front and in that bag I am carrying...wait for it...

Some of you may recall my last visit and that really excellent twenty-one volume series of James Joyce Studies books for sale at the National Library in Dublin. Well to my delight, as I nipped in to see the Yeats exhibition once more, a little sign saying 'Library Shop - Closing Down Sale.'

Last visit, being a wimp and thinking I couldn't carry them all I bought about six volumes and had been unusually organised this time and noted down the ones I still needed, and at 1 euro each that seemed like a bargain. So I pulled them all out and then noticed the sign saying ' Complete Set 5 euros.' I think we can all do the maths there, so my right arm is straining under the weight of twenty one volumes of James Joyce Studies, the very weighty copy of Ulysses Unbound, a copy of Ulysses given to me at the talk, the books I took along to read, some wool, gifts for the family,...usual story.

So three very wonderful days, and my sincere thanks to blog-reader Brenda who I met yesterday morning and apart from the wonderful bookish natter, Brenda, a Dubliner born and bred, really got my history up to scratch before very kindly dropping me off at the prison.

Kilmainham Gaol the location for the execution of the prisoners after the 1916 Easter uprising, and Brenda was right, it is indeed very sobering to stand out in the stonebreaker's yard on the spot where James Connolloy was tied to that chair..

By my pedometer calculations about thirty miles of city walking done so I feel a bit jet-lagged today, I mean that flight was all of fifty-five minutes.

More about Dublin slotted in over the next few weeks but meanwhile today has been more preparation for the imminent arrival of the book room woodburning stove and we are bracing for one of life's inconvenient days tomorrow, major electricity work somewhere out on the grid so no power all day, which also means no water, no phone, no internet, no work, no e mails, might as well be round the dark side of the moon, so it'll be a bit like the olden days and I'll just have to read a book I suppose.

 

Bloomsday and that Martello tower...

Oooops ...SandyCOVE not SandyMOUNT...so did you all buy the train ticket that didn't take you far enough and then wouldn't let you through the turnstile at the other end as well?? My fault, sorry.

And didn't we get a little soaking there, my Gaelic with the help of signs is clearly improving. I'm very taken with listening to the weather forecast that's for sure, what an intriguing language. I walked past a party of Gaelic-speaking schoolchildren en route and the chatter was incredible but we were right about the rain.

So having headed out to SandyCOVE on the Dart train because it said that's were the James Joyce Museum and the mythical Martello tower were, except you then find it's a bit of a trick because there it was on the very far and distant horizon like a mirage. So we took a long but pleasant forced march walk around the sea front to get there and you can all add 16,000 steps to your pedometers for today...but Team Ulysses and supporters, thanks to the Irish Tourist Board, (and I am very grateful, they have been very kind) we have been there at last.

Past the Forty Foot bathing pool...

and on into the tower.

A nice collection of James Joyce memorabilia and a stove to be reckoned with

I nipped up onto the roof just so I could say I'd been on the roof of the Martello tower that features in Ulysses and that involved the narrowest little spiral staircase known to mankind but worth it for the view back across the walk we'd just done...yes, ALL of that..


The stairs made even more impossible with a rucksack so I had to keep unwedging myself and hope no one was thinking of coming up while I was thinking of going down.

A centenary stone to mull over in the park nearby...

And in the end there was nothing for it ..I've been taking hits on your behalf all day.

So if my precious little camera was going to break anywhere I can't think of a nicer, more special place for it to have happened...this its final picture, the very last gasp before it keeled over, the automatic lenses went into a frolic of their own, made some wheezing death rattle noises and refused to play anymore. If it's really gone I shall be sad, RIP my trusty Olympus All-Weather AF Zoom 5.8- 17.4mm 6.0 megapixels, which has mediated between my eye and almost every picture on this blog, we've been friends for a very long time.

I feel as if my right arm's been chopped off.

Good excuse to upgrade...I'm over it.

Bloomsday Breakfast at The Gresham Hotel

So I looked a lamb's kidney in the eye but that's as far as it went...I'm sorry I just couldn't.


But a really sumptuous breakfast of cholesterol plus trimmings on a plate (hope the Practice Nurse isn't reading this) in the Ballroom of the Gresham Hotel on O'Connell Street where, surrounded by Edwardian costume (even the babies) I felt distinctly under-dressed in my walking togs.

There followed a brilliantly acted homage to scenes various from Ulysses, very very funny when it is brought to life in this way ..

And I managed to snap Leopold tucking into his breakfast as I left.


To Sandymount this afternoon, lovely warm sunny day though I felt sure the TV weather forecast rain, but it was in Gaelic so I could be wrong.

OK follow me, we're off to that Martello Tower.

Failte chuig Baile Atha Cliath

I am very reliably informed that means Welcome to Dublin and I have ignition on the wireless signal so we are all systems go, though I'm working on my tiny netbook so seeing the screen and hitting the right keys is a bit haphazard, my apologies for typos.

I think I might know why Plymouth Airport is closing... and I'm not complaining at all but I have never known security like it and I guess with so few flights leaving they do have the time to be thorough. So my suitcase, and only mine was selected for a spot check and complete unpack at check-in. Might as well have had it all in a carrier bag and packed it on the counter.

Do I look shifty??

Anyway into departures after much more bag searching and shoe removal where I made friends with a lovely Irish nun going back home for a week. Sister Mary told me she was always being stopped and searched because no one trusts a nun these days, it's the garb of choice for the drug smuggler apparently. And the metal head band in her wimple always sets off the alarms and we agreed that she could indeed get a fair stash of all manner of illegal bounty under her veil. I am working on the assumption that she really was Sister Mary of course.

But 'twas lovely to fly up and over Plymouth and as the plane headed towards Newquay I feel sure we must have flown over home, and many apologies to the Canadian gentleman sitting in the window seat next to me who had to put up with me leaning across and snapping away with the camera. But we had a geography lesson too and how incredible the Tamar looks from the air and then the china clay pits in Cornwall, a really dramatic impact on the landscape.

So I am installed, have had a wander through Trinity College and meant to go to St Stephen's Green but found myself in the wonderful Hodges Figgis bookshop and well, doesn't time fly.


Tomorrow it's Bloomsday Breakfast along O'Connell Street and it's suddenly dawned on me that it might be fried kidneys which is likely to turn it into more of a bushtucker trial where I'm concerned, but I'll do my best for you all.

 

 

Bloomsday Eve

Never mind all this going to Italy from the armchair (and I am so looking forward to that reading holiday through August,) when I really should have been concentrating more on the fact that today, thanks to the Irish Tourist Board, I am flying to Dublin again, this time to be in the city for Bloomsday on June 16th, tomorrow.

Excited?? Hell yes I should say so.

I've been revisiting Team Ulysses  and my copy of the book in readiness, and to my surprise it is still as fresh and vibrant in my mind as it was last year, so I am really looking forward to seeing how Dublin marks this day of all days and I think it will be pretty amazing.

My copy of the book now full of postcards and pictures from my last trip, and this visit I have a little more time so I'm hoping to get to Sandymount and I will be doing one of the organised James Joyce walks too. I've been invited to a quiz night, themed questions on Dublin 1904, so I may not exactly be an asset to the team that gets lumbered with me. I'm also looking forward to a session at The Flying Book Club entitled 'Feel the Fear and Read it Anyway!' ...a guide through reading Ulysses. I'm still unlikely to be an asset but at least, thanks to Team Ulysses, I'll know what the talk is about. As on every trip I try to catch up with some of you too so I am hoping to meet Brenda in or near the wool shop she very kindly told me about after my last visit.

To get in the Dublin mood I've also been dipping into W.B.Yeats & George Yeats The Letters and if the book didn't weigh as much as my entire packed bag I'd be taking it with me. The twenty-two years of correspondence between Mr & Mrs in a beauteous new edition from OUP. From homes in Merrion and Fitzwilliam Squares Dobbs kept 'Willie's irons hot in Dublin' while he travelled, wrote, networked, earned money on lecture tours and wrote home to ask for things like a spare vest or some money in the bank account. The little details that I love to find in letters, the everyday in amongst the creative genius.

If my technology holds up you won't miss out ...if it fails then I'll catch up when I get home.

I have travel reading sorted too. I have almost finished James Cain's Mildred Pierce on my Kindle and have skimmed but not read an article this weekend, about Kate Winslett's recent role in the TV dramatisation of the book (and heaven knows how we get to see it on Sky Atlantic on June 25th... America I think you are getting it first on HBO??) so I'm keen to tie up all the loose ends on that and will write more soon.

Plus I will be sharing more about some of the authors I hope to be meeting in the dovegreyreader tent at the Port Eliot Festival in the coming weeks, but suffice to say this week I am concentrating very hard on the writing of Gillian Slovo, with her memoir Every Secret Thing and her novel Black Orchids. Both so good that I will have to break my 'travel light' rule and take the books with me. Fortunately I have read Ice Road or that would have severely tested the baggage strategy.

But how sad is this, all these years that Plymouth has had an airport, sixty to be exact and I have never used it until today because they never seem to have flights to where I want to go, so we trek up to Exeter or even further up to Bristol. I can't be the only one because through lack of use Plymouth City Airport is closing down later this year and suddenly I'm going to miss it.

We drive right past the runways on our way into Plymouth, always enjoy seeing a plane taking off in front of us (we don't get out much) and soon it will be gone, and once more Plymouth becomes that isolated outpost that's a little to far west for shops like Habitat or Ikea to consider. But at least I'm going to get today's aerial view of the city we've lived in or near since 1976 and on my way to Dublin and Bloomsday 2011.

 

Badaude paints in Paris

Badaude, the artist j'adore, has been commissioned to paint a Christmas window for the Shakespeare & Co bookshop in Paris this weekend, one of the spiritual homes of Ulysses thanks to the vision and tenacity of  then bookshop owner Sylvia Beach. Badaude is sleeping in the bookshop (as you do with this bookshop)  and is busy with the brushes as I type, with regular progress updates on her blog.

The theme is a literary dinner party with James Joyce at the piano creating the knees up (yes, dear reader, I too saw that piano) and our artist has been concentrating hard on Allen Ginsburg's derriere today and is now asking for suggestions about the music James Joyce should be playing. My suggestion of Come Into the Garden Maud quite likely to upset good friend Yeats and therefore perhaps not a good idea.

Being an artist of the Immature School myself (limited if any progress beyond the age of 6yrs) I always find real pleasure in watching gifted others creating something like this, and sneakily sat and watched Badaude draw whilst at Port Eliot last year, saving her from that wasp sting you may recall. She ran an innovative little scheme a few weeks ago to provide some comic books for the children she was teaching... in return for sending a book from  her Amazon wishlist she sent out two signed posters, so I now have some treasured Badaude of my own on the Book Room wall.

It all makes you want to be in Paris right now, but failing that we can but admire the progress and cheer her on from afar.

Dublin & James Joyce

My hotel was down on Sir John Rogerson's Quay, so walking to and from there took me right through Bloom walking territory and I took in quite a few of the streets, Lombard Street East, Lime Street, Hanover Street East but it was Eccles Street I really wanted to see, even given that No7  is long gone.

Hopefully this gives you the general gist

The Writer's Museum just along the way in Parnell Square was well worth the visit if only to lay eyes on one of 'these'

and capture in my mind's eye that unique shade of blue-green for fabric purposes, it's all begging for something to be made. A first edition of Ulysses, but of course plenty more to see here as well on other famous Irish writers, why hadn't I realised that Bram Stoker of Dracula fame was Irish,  and an intriguing group painting of them all... imagine finding all these in the same room.

Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Beckett, Behan et al.
The lunch was good and my feet said thank you for the rest.
Next just a short walk to pay homage to the Eccles Street front door, as previously mentioned, now the property of M&S but on display at the James Joyce Centre.

Time also to take in the Joyce exhibition and more of my favoured mock-ups of original settings, and all very accessible, no roped off areas.


I find the whole idea of death masks both macabre but also quite intriguing, a sort of purge for my inquisitive nature. Being able to look on that face as it really was all these years later stirs up strange emotions and so I gazed for quite some time at James Joyce.

As I've said before this week, strange and ongoing things are still happening in my mind with regard to that reading of Ulysses. Not only do I want to read around it and dip into it again, but I now realise it wasn't just a box to be ticked, a book that had to be read. It's infiltrated at a much deeper level than I would have thought possible, all much enhanced by a walk around Dublin of course.
But time is moving swiftly on and I've now eaten into the three hours that I had been advised to allow for the trip out to Sandymount and the Martello Tower, so I opted instead to stick with Dublin city, because with a fair wind and sail I could get on the last tour of the day around the famine ship, the Jeanie Johnston, moored on Custom House Quay alongside Beckett Bridge, and near the hotel and my luggage.
Yes we're off to sea me hearties.

Team Ulysses debrief...

I have been so busy 'playing' this week that I completely forgot my planned Team Ulysses debrief for today, the 16th, but no matter, Faber to the rescue with a post I wrote on the whole magnificent experience and you can read it over at Faber's  Thought Fox today.
I feel as if we made a little bit of history between us and I'm wondering if anyone else feels a I do, a real sense of satisfaction after our year, and perhaps new and refreshing reading habits creeping in... there's a lot of 'out loud' going on here.

Happy Bloomsday Team Ulysses...

" A long narrative requires impersonation, hallucinating when you don't know the answer, turning water into wine, making a silk purse out of a string of coloured scarves and extracting a white rabbit from a sow's ear, knowing how and when to hold the carrot in front of the donkey's nose and sublime confidence..."

William Maxwell on the raptures of reading per se, but somehow that feels like a perfect fit for this year-long reading of Ulysses, and I'm in raptures along with some of you today so please excuse the bling...

In fact I can hardly breath I'm so excited and I have to keep pinching myself when I look at this too...

This seemingly impossible book which has warmed and moulded to my hand (thank you OUP) and been seen all over the house for the last year and now we're there and soon I'll be putting it on the shelf...or will I?
I think I will dip into it for evermore and I may just buy the most beautiful edition I can find too.
I finished Ulysses...or Oolissays as I now discover James Joyce called it, reading Penelope on Saturday morning and very appropriately lying in bed, though thankfully and unlike Molly without a pair of smelly feet in my face.
What a sensational and fitting last section this proved to be, especially given my increasing awareness of the Odyssean connections as the book has progressed. To finally meet Molly and hear her side of the story, her life before and her life now with Poldy, and how odd that this wasn't the Molly that I felt I knew. Penelope was a complete revelation, Molly much more down-to-earth than the book had led me to believe
And I walked on a cloud for the rest of the day because I feel as I've joined a club... I've finally read it and as we strolled through Launceston I wanted to stop people and say

'...erm...excuse me but I've read Ulysses'.

Whilst casting no literary aspersions on the good people of Launceston I doubt anyone would have been impressed, so I didn't and the urge soon passed.
But I couldn't possibly have done it without the cheerful company of Team Ulysses.
Those who have read along too, those who have cheered us from the sidelines in comments and been there with the hot soup when we've needed it and all those lovely words of encouragement .
I must also thank Declan Kibberd who really cranked the whole thing into life for me with his book Ulysses and Us and its reassuring clarion call for the book to be returned to the ordinary reader, for pleasurable reading, not academic dissection.
The people like his Dublin-born father who had imbibed it throughout his life and the assertion that this is the work of a storyteller not a novelist.
Declan doesn't know it (he doesn't do the internet, though I did meet his editor when I was at Faber recently and asked him to convey my thanks and I will write to him properly now) but his encouraging words saved my bacon on several occasions.
There can be something daunting about knowing I have committed to reading a book like this and then actually having to.
Writing from the heart about it each month, especially on those months when I might not have felt like picking it up (and reader as you know, there were some, but I did) or when I hadn't really followed a word, just emerged with a mood rather than comprehension.
The chance find of a book by Frank Delaney has helped immeasurably too, and he does know because I e mailed to thank him very early on in the read. James
Joyce's Odyssey- A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses has added even more visual substance to this wonderful writing. Incidentally you might want to check out Frank Delaney's regular weekly five minute podcasts of extracts from Ulysses together with his sharing of the unraveling of it all and  starting on his website today...the lilting Irish accent .. oh you won't want to miss that.
I think I'm about to start all over again and for anyone who missed the 'off' last Bloomsday, well there you go, another chance perhaps?
Nor do I use 'wonderful writing' lightly or in a fawning way. Ulysses has been a memorable read, so much of the book, even the tricky parts, have harmonised their way into the deepest recesses of my memory. I have a strange feeling that when I'm tucked up in a nursing home at ninety I may have forgotten the name of the Prime Minister and be hopeless at counting backwards from a hundred and subtracting four each time, but I'll be loudly proclaiming

'If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock she was to blame'

and I'll probably be put on stronger meds.
It was William Butler Yeats's birthday at the weekend and The Writer's Almanac celebrated with his poem The Second Coming.  Now when I started this I had no idea beyond a vaguely confirmed assumption that Yeats and Joyce were contemporaries, writing at about the same time, presumably with their eyes fixed on similar worlds. Yeats I then discover born at Sandymount where Ulysses opens, and I discover late in the Team Ulysses day that James Joyce was his protege.

'Turning and turning on the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand....

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?'

The Second Coming published in 1921 and in its entirety a poem of incredible beauty and potency that seems open to a wide range of interpretations, the obvious contemporaneous ones, but for me almost ninety years on, right now, this minute, I can allow it to hold relevant Ulyssesian ones.
If ever a book set the literary world aflame Ulysses was surely the one.
The book that upturned the tables in the temple and let loose something dangerous and seemingly uncontrollable on the literary world.
Things did fall apart, the 'ceremony of innocence ' was indeed drowned, the book's very style and explicitness opened new doors, new ways of thinking and writing; its detractors hated it with that 'passionate intensity', the censors thundered down from on high.
If ever a book rocked the gentle literary cradle to nightmare, dissent and a change of rhythm this was surely it... has there been one since?
I can't think of one.
Perhaps it's true to say that literature has indeed been unwittingly yet steadily treading and searching that path ever thereafter as it 'slouches towards Bethlehem'  and all thanks to James Joyce. From my lofty perch on the top of this mountain, with this flippin' flag flapping in my face, I understand that and so much more now.
Thank you Team Ulysses, it's been the most fantastic climb, you've helped me achieve one huge lifelong reading ambition and I've loved doing it with you.
So shall we reconvene here, rested and ready for Team Tolstoy and Anna Karenina (or do you want to do War and Peace?....No?....are you sure?) on September 9th 2010...Tolstoy's birthday.

Team Ulysses - Camp Eleven

Phew!

No I can hardly believe there's a post here today either and I'm hoping you're not expecting coherence from me this morning after last night's concert and after-concert party. I'm sorry, this is on the typepad auto-timer and I'm probably still snoring away in my tent here at Team Ulysses summit minus one, if someone gets the eggs and bacon on I might be tempted to emerge.

And you won't be surprised to know that I'm a bit behind times with this month's Ulysses reading, just scraping through to finish Ithaca two days ago so hardly time to process it.
Apart from being frantically busy on all fronts...work, home and leisure I had purposefully taken my time with this chapter. I was actually enjoying Ithaca so much that I decided not to rush for the sake of pitching up here all present and correct, but to read and savour because I think these are proving to be some of the best chapters in the book for me.
And might this be where that phrase 'The university of life' originated, I wondered as I came across it here.
In the end I was taking in just a couple of paragraphs at each sitting and reveling in this method of storytelling, in the way James Joyce builds from something seemingly insignificant and parochial into a theme of national and universal import and all in just a few sentences.
This struck me as wordsmithery at its pinnacle.
Or in others he seems to cock a snook at life...did anyone else feel these frequent little displays of erudition were done tongue in cheek much of the time...

 'the infinite possibilities hitherto unexploited of the modern art of advertisement if condensed in trilateral monoideal symbols vertically of maximum visibility (divined) horizontally of maximum legibility (deciphered) and of magnetising efficacy to arrest involuntary attention, to interest, to convince, to decide.'

Meanwhile, so much more is being revealed as Joyce moves towards offering a deeper understanding of both Poldy and Stephen and after 640 pages finally we learn what Bloom looks like. I think I found out more here than I had in the entire book to date. So many tangible visual references to surroundings that in the end felt a bit like a treasure hunt as I started to look up things like moustache cups (who knew) lisle hose, Plumtree's Potted meat and holland roller towels,(I couldn't find a better picture)  Epps Cocoa and blue enamel pans.

Just about every book of essays, diaries, letters or interviews that I open bears fruit when I look up James Joyce and Ulysses in the index. He is the common denominator, everyone has an opinion. Seeking out and finding the Paris Review Interview with Nabakov (another new reading trail for me, more about it soon) in an old Penguin volume which I bought for 1p on Amazon, the book also revealed an interview with Anthony Burgess talking about Nabakov.
Whilst crediting Nabakov for some of his inspiration Burgess was lukewarm about many aspects of Nabakov's writing and when push came to shove...

Interviewer : Does Nabakov rank at the top with Joyce?
Burgess : He won't go down in history as one of the greatest names. He's unworthy to unlatch Joyce's shoe

So just Penelope left to read before my much-thumbed and cuddly old copy of Ulysses goes on the shelf and I'm off to make some bunting for our summit attempt on Bloomsday, June 16th 2010.
Out of interest, how many of you might be planting that flag with me?
And surely the most pressing question of the day has to be

'What were Stephen's and Bloom's quasisilmultaneous volitional quasisensations of concealed identities?

Answers on a postcard.

Team Ulysses - Camp Ten

Are you still there Team Ulysses?
Despite the cloud of Icelandic volcanic ash currently shrouding UK airspace we have the summit in our sights, and trying to be very efficient I read this month's chunk of Ulysses on my e reader whilst travelling on the train up to London about three weeks ago. The journey flew by and I was sufficiently engrossed and interested to be worried between Reading and Paddington that I wouldn't have time to finish the chapter, and I definitely wanted to.
One heck of a lot of reading water has travelled under the bridge since then, so coming back to it now felt like quite a challenge until I opened the book again, and this time not the electronic version but my much-loved and now very well-read paper version.
I remember thinking as I read and paused for the occasional gaze across the scenery flying by, how few people may have read this section of the book compared to the number that start reading Ulysses, and how sad to miss out on Eumaeus, and I suspect Ithaca and the final chapter Penelope to follow, and what I think may turn out to be the crowning glory and among the very best chapters in the book.
Best in that they are certainly among the most readable, defined in the notes in my copy (yes, I've looked at them occasionally this month) as 'narratively normal', but also for the content which suddenly seems to transform  the book I've read and imbibed so far, and often through that great cloud of unknowing.
Suddenly I think it might all start to fall into place though I have to own up I still feel like the most naive reader James Joyce may ever have had.
Stephen Dedalus, by now legless from the demon drink, is in need of a father figure, and here I felt Leopold Bloom came into his own. I think I understood something about the pain of this man who continues to come across as consistently likeable... or have I got that wrong?
Is anyone else a fan of Poldy's?
Nothing has yet given me any cause to truly dislike any character I've come across in Ulysses, that can't be right, who have I forgotten that I should be hating...even Blazes Boylan doesn't seem the sleaze that he's supposed to be to me.
But caveat lector say those notes and imagine my surprise when they proceed to suggest that I should be frantically confused about whose narrative voice I might be listening to...an ominiscient one...or was is Stephen's or Bloom's, whilst I was also supposed to be deeply anxious about the dissolution of these boundaries.
In fact I just sank into Eumaeus with a sense of huge relief at the ease of the reading after so many readerly challenges to get there. Whilst knowing (well, not knowing actually but thank you to the notes for telling me) that Eumaeus was a good and loyal swineherd who gets Odysseus out of a spot of bother I couldn't help allowing the word to slip into Emmaus with its biblical connotations of companionship along the road.
That worked in two ways, both from the Stephen-Bloom meeting but also from knowing that some of you have been reading this at the same time as me.
Yet whilst busily thinking about all the Odysseyian connections I was missing, which incidentally I would really love to rectify after this with some Homeric reading, I had completely forgotten that Hamlet features powerfully here too. I've done Hamlet to death over the years so I'm surprised not to have clocked that one sooner.
So have I been seduced by the ease of reading not to be prompted by the 'vigilance' and 'scepticism' the notes suggest?
Lisa in Oz explains it all so well here , and I think she may have forged on in her summit attempt, gone ahead to get the pitons knocked in for us to hang on to. In travelling with us Lisa has written the most incredibly comprehensive reader guide to Ulysses which will stand as a wonderful record of this amazing journey, because Team Ulysses we are but one Ithaca camp away from our final Penelope attempt on the summit on June 16th 2010.

Team Ulysses ~ Camp Nine

Well Team Ulysses, I don't know about you but I'm feeling in a fairly buoyant Ulyssesian mood this month.
Spring is sprung here and while we've been wintering our way through Sirens and Nausicaa ,and Oxen in the Sun, Lisa in Oz has been sweltering through summer and doing a proper job for us.
Don't miss her schoolgirl recollections of the Joycean streets of Melbourne.
It's been really good to laze my way through three months of Circe and not feel rushed about it, time to gather up some energy for the final push. Slowly but surely any intentions to read notes and understand more deeply, which, despite my best intentions otherwise seemed to hit me as I approached the halfway mark, have fallen by the wayside.
I've let go and laughed out loud through Circe, and constantly imagined how this must have been received back in the 1920s.
Thank you to Marcia who sent me a link to Garrison Keillor's A Writer's Almanac  ( a revelation to which I have now subscribed by e mail) and an entry about William York Tindall, a James Joyce scholar born in 1903 in Vermont. Having heard about this 'notorious book' William Tindall decided to buy a copy when he was in Paris, discovering that it 'wasn't a dirty book but a fascinating one' and to his amazement he had made his purchase on June 16th.

"When he returned to the U.S., he started teaching a course in modern literature at New York University, and he was one of the first professors in the United States to assign Ulysses to his students. The book was still banned in the U.S. at the time, so his students had to read a bootlegged copy that was chained to a desk in the library."

I feel slightly chained to my copy too.
It's been wandering around the house with me for the last nine months, a sort of constant in my reading life, when the time finally comes it will feel very strange to put it back on the shelf.
But it's too big to travel with and I've seriously considered but resisted the heinous crime of  taking a scalpel to it and dissecting it into smaller parts on several occasions through this year. I once watched someone do this to the Norton Complete Shakespeare at an Open University Summer School and the tutor group bar one all followed like lemmings.
The 'bar one' was me weeping over in the corner at the carnage.
However I do have several longish train journeys coming up before June so I've settled on buying an electronic copy for my e reader instead. I still heart my e reader and as Ulysses only set me back £1.59 I don't feel too out of pocket.

How it will feel to read it on screen I don't know and I wonder what James Joyce might have thought of such electronictrickery ?
I did come across a review of Ulysses by another favourite writer, Jorges Luis Borges.

'I am the first traveller from the Hispanic world to set foot upon the shores of Ulysses, a lush wilderness already traversed by Valery Laubard, who traced its dense texture with the impeccable precision of a mapmaker, but which I too will describe, even though my visit within its borders has been inattentive and transient.'

and at least he was honest...

'I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages...and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.'

Written in 1925 Borges seems to have taken a courageous stance when the book was getting such a mixed reception elsewhere and of Circe he writes

'Joyce sketches a delirious brothel scene, and the chance conjuring of any loose phrase or idea ushers in hundreds - the sum is not an exaggeration but exact - of absurd speakers and impossible events.

Calling James Joyce a 'millionaire of words and styles' Jorges Luis Borges predicts that

'ten years from now...we will still enjoy him'

The Tinker's lifetime on (he was born in 1925 and will be eighty five any day now... he's very well and I'll bring you news of his next exciting escapade soon)  Borges was not mistaken and adds something I'm certainly starting to believe too,

'Be what it may, I will always esteem and adore the divine genius of this Gentleman, taking from him what I understand with humility and admiring with veneration what I am unable to understand.'

Team Ulysses - Camp Lost Count but think it might be Eight?

I've chosen us a different mountain today...

...not in the least connected to Ulysses to my knowledge, but I am very taken with this picture of Buachaille Etive Mor up near Glencoe since mentioning Susan Fletcher's forthcoming book Corrag earlier this week and the discovery that this is the peak that features on the cover.
Next month, this month and last, which I will have spent taking a leisurely stroll around Circe, have felt like a bit of time to rest up and gather some energy for those final three chapters of Ulysses which will take us from March to April to May to June and Bloomsday. Time to enjoy the scenery and breath in deeply and I must say I'm starting to get a little twinge of pride when I gaze upon my well-thumbed copy of Ulysses now because until Team Ulysses banded together I really never thought I'd do this.
The book has become a constant friend, it's always on a table somewhere, and I must confess it's also been an occasional foe when I've felt slightly defeated, but at times like that I think of Mr Kiberd senior, father of Declan Kiberd author of Ulysses and Us and his assertion that the bits he didn't understand were best left to those who did.
I knew there was a reason I had wanted to remember February 2nd, Candlemas, and it's because it was James Joyce's birthday. As it is I forgot, but I have been doing a bit of reading about Joyce himself and learn that much of Ulysses was written whilst reclining on a bed wearing a white suit and life happening around him which seems to make it even more of an achievement. Declan Kiberd makes the point that whilst novels deal with ready-made societies, 'Ireland in 1904 was still a society in the making' and Ulysses somehow fits this metamorphosis, 'more than a collection of stories...not quite unified enough to be a novel.'
I think I've gathered all that quite clearly now, this far in and on the home run I'm still trying to work out what it is I have read and am reading, and how I might feel when I turn that final page on Molly's exultant and I think probably very happy 'yes' now that I've discovered what she's doing.

I was delighted to read Frank Delaney describing Circe as a psychedelic hallucination because this second instalment has felt exactly like that and I'm wondering if Ulysses achieved any sort of resurgence in popularity in the 1960s as a result. It's like taking a seat at a farcical play or a circus and not quite knowing the cast, the plot or anything about it whatsoever, endless surprises on every page, some that trigger memories from elsewhere in the book, plenty that seem to make no sense at all. If I was really watching this happening I'd be jumping out of my seat with shock and surprise and having heart attacks every twenty seconds, I think I'm just experiencing the literary equivalent.
The Cheat's Guide to Ulysses which I discovered on the BBC website of all places, and written to mark the centenary in 2004, has this as the entry for Circe

"Reader
(horrorstruck) Blimey, this looks like heavy going.

Stephen's Dead Mother
No kidding! There's over 100 pages of this stuff, all written in the style of a play script. But all you need to know is that Bloom follows Stephen to a brothel where they have lots of freaky hallucinations. "

The banter which follows is hilarious including "Man goes for walk around Dublin, nothing happens" from someone in Newport Pagnall, until in steps Stephen Fry with this retort

"Ulysses is the greatest novel of the twentieth century. It is is wise, warm, witty, affirmative and beautiful. it is less pretentious than a baked bean. Read it. read it out loud to yourself. It won't bite. It wasn't written either to shock or to impress. Only pretentious barbarians believe artists set out shock: and how these philistines delight in revealing how unshocked they are. Those who attack it are afraid of it and rather than look foolish they prefer to heckle what they don't understand. Ignore all this childish, fear-filled criticism, Ulysses will be read when everything you see and touch around you has crumbled into dust."

It seems to be a book that polarises opinion and generates assumptions, mostly perhaps among those who haven't read it and perhaps something to do with a sort of 'holier than though' attitude amongst those who have.
I'm promising myself that I won't become a Ulysses brag-and-boast bore... well until it gets to the Endsleigh Salon theme in October that is... 'The Book You Must Read Before You Die'.
But even then I'm still not sure Ulysses will be my choice.
I think the pendulum of public opinion will forever swing uncontrollably on this book but here's an interesting little quote from Susan Hill writing recently,

'Nor can I read Ulysses, though Stephen Fry, cleverer and better read than anyone I know swears by it. He told me that it was just a case of diving in and swimming fast. Not for me it wasn't, I drowned. But I will go to gallows to uphold the right of Ulysses to be called a classic.'

Even better, here's George Orwell writing a letter to Brenda Salkeld in 1934

'I managed to get my copy of Ulysses safely through this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same as ever.'

I wonder does anyone else have a clear picture emerging yet, have you been feeling, perhaps a bit like me, that you've been on a glorious word-fest with moments of acute clarity... 'events as they occur in life and not as they occur in fiction,' according to George Orwell.
But now I find that as the mist (poetic license, I think we'll call it a Scotch mist today) is clearing and the nearer I get to the end, I have a feeling I'm about to become a lifelong fan.

Team Ulysses - Camp Seven

'...in the convex mirror grin unstruck the bonham eyes and fatchuck cheekchops of Jollypoldy the rixdix doldy'

Sort of trips off the tongue doesn't it and I'm feeling a bit skippy light-fantastic because I can see the end and I've loved doing this.
But dear Team Ulysses, where are we exactly?
Which side of the mountain are you all on?
On a week-long stint of night duty we used to call night four rather indelicately 'Over-the Hump' night, and Team Ulysses we're there, past midway, but this is perhaps a good moment to pause, rest and take a compass bearing and plot our course June-ward and make sure we're all on the same trajectory for that Bloomsday 2010 party.
I've stuck roughly to the 60-70 pages a month rule, which in my Oxford World's Classics edition has settled very conveniently into two chapters, so this month I'm up to Circe which, for those without notes or headings, is the chapter beginning in italicised stage directions

'The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, read and green will-o'-the-wisps and danger signals...'

Once I surrendered all hope of sense and sensibility I was into Circe and will be going round in circles for some time. This the longest section of Ulysses, in my edition 160 pages, and I plan to eke this out through February and March too, leaving Emaeus to talk about in April, Ithaca in May and ending in a blaze of glory with Penelope on Bloomsday, June 16th 2010 and already I'm starting to feel a twinge of excitement about crossing the finishing line with you all.
I think we'd better plan to hold hands around the world and run through that tape and head for the party food together.
Perhaps this gives us time for a breather too, time for others to catch up if they want to and I also have a personal plan to take stock and reflect on what's gone before, perhaps revisit Oxen of the Sun which got rather short shrift from me in December.
I've stumbled through the haze of words this month and kept Erika's wonderful advice to the fore, remembering to laugh and see Joyce's humour and that hasn't been difficult, there seems to be a great deal of laugh aloud humour in Circe. Thanks are also due to Frank Delaney and his Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses for giving me some meaningful context and shedding some light on what I have been reading. Much as I have wanted to read with that naivete of the ordinary reader, there's a bit of me that can't cope without an element of understanding.
Plus how could I go through life a minute longer not knowing what a pig's crubeen was?

The setting is Nighttown, the red-light district of Dublin where, according to Frank Delaney, two thousand prostitutes plied there trade, Montgomery Street (Monto) considered to be the worst slum in Western Europe with a reputation for 'unlimited bawdry.'

One of Frank Delaney's anecdotes made me smile

' Julia Hooligan, engrossed in conversation with a friend in Grafton Street one day, was unwittingly barring the path of a well-known lawyer. "Out of my was woman," he throated. " And who do you think you are?" Julia nipped back. "Madam - I am the most famous Crown solicitor from here to Balbriggan." "That's nuthin'," chuckled the undaunted Julia."I'm the most famous half-crown solicitor from here to Belfast."

The pictures alone reveal two different Dublins I think and it's clear from Circe, as if wasn't clear enough already, which one James Joyce inhabits.
And thanks again to Frank Delaney for confirming what I thought I knew from reading, but then you can never quite be sure with James Joyce because nothing is as it seems, but Circe is indeed fantasy merging into fact, a heady brew of

'psychedelic hallucination and fantastic nightmare written as dramatic performance,characterisations and descriptions embodied in stage directions - reactions, imaginations and subconscious fears in the verbal exchanges.'

Echoes of Macbeth, Tennyson and The Charge of the Light Brigade and heaven knows what else, it's all in there and echoes of Ulysses itself with the return of Paddy Dignam from the grave and not looking his best it must be said.

The notes in my copy suggests the text is 'recirculating itself' with 'hundreds of displaced repetitions' and a multitude of minor characters reappearing, so I feel sure Circe will be a good test of how much I have taken note of what has gone before.
Frank Delaney suggests this is all a

'long, mad, luminous swirling saraband of images that fog and fill your mind and drag you along in a crazy punk rag-doll dervish dance.'

I have to say, and not that I'd know, but this must be like a drug-fuelled journey without the bother of the drugs.
James Joyce rewrote Circe nine times, and who can know what he was on each time, before declaring it 'the best thing he had ever done' and on that verdict I couldn't possibly comment, but I have laughed out loud and gone with the flow especially when treated to the The World's Twelve Worst Books.
Meanwhile I've been hunting around for more old pictures of Dublin because the city previously unknown to me is starting to shape up in my mind's eye, and I came across this site from whence I have 'borrowed' today's pictures.

Glories await there for anyone else interested in matching up that mind's eye picture to the reality and also a chance to eavesdrop on the ongoing and sparkling conversation between the Dublin expats as they debate the locations of the old photos, hundreds of them.
Talking of pig's crubeen as I was, here's Marco Pierre White deciding what to do with his.

...trotters to the rest of us and let's hope Joan, Lesley-Ann et al are there in comments with the soup as usual.

Team Ulysses - Camp Five

A really tricky reading month here but I'm not going to mess with the mountain or make excuses Team Ulysses because I think that's been more about me than the book. It's all been down to other books which I haven't wanted to set aside and trips away which play havoc with life in general and my reading in particular. I choose traveling reading which is most definitely not Ulysses, so I knew I was going to be very last minute, if I made it at all.
But I did and even managed some background reading from  Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation - A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties & Thirties by Noel Riley Fitch.
The more I read the more I feel I want to know (it always happens, I can't stop myself) about this book's background and its genesis in the Shakespeare and Company Bookshop. James Joyce declared by Leon Edel in the puffs on the book to be

'the most incredible literary leech of all time.'

But with relevance to the two sections I have read this time, Sirens and Cyclops just knowing those extra details about the friendship between Sylvia Beach and Joyce has added an extra level of enjoyment to this month's reading.
James Joyce described in a play by Tom Stoppard as

'an essentially private man who wishes his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized'

The whole process of publication seems to have been akin to the twelve labours of Hercules for the poor long-suffering Sylvia Beach who admitted that Joyce's affairs were considerably more trouble to her than many an ordinary author. This all compounded by her willingness to allow Joyce the indefinite right to correct the proofs. Joyce made copious additions and the proofs became legendary for containing more handwriting than print.

' There were light moments of friendhsip and mutual excitement associated with the birth of Ulysses. Joyce would read aloud from Ulysses for her, often the Cyclops section. They would burst into peals of laughter at Joyce's rendering of the dog and joke about the growth of the novel. Joyce would tell her that Ulysses was no longer than many other novels, such as The Forsyte Saga, only instead of running into many volumes, his was packed into on hold-all.'

Sirens was a mystery read in a cloud of unknowing here, and but for footnotes I would have had little idea of the musical connotations that Joyce was aiming for. The deeper into Ulysses I wander the more aware I become of those parts which need to be read aloud and which I do in a sort of sotto voce mutter which would sound very odd if you overheard me. But I am also picking up the Odysseyian hints more frequently and given my scant knowledge of the sirens and their ability to lure the sailors onto the rocks, though I nearly ended up on the rocks again myself, I did see those analogies with the bar maids and the punters. I did emerge from that section, yet again, and to my ongoing complete and utter amazement, with some sense of what had happened, and of course laughing at Leopold's final Pprrpffrrppfff.
How long did it take James Joyce to work out how to spell flatulence I wonder?
With occasional mention of stars fading, that line from The Duchess of Malfi also kept flitting into my mind,

'Look you, the stars shine still'

Please don't think I have The Duchess of Malfi, at my fingertips because I don't, but that was quoted in a book I read last year, Molly Fox's Birthday by Irish author Deirdre Madden, and it's stuck in my mind.
However I was a bit pleased with myself and kept dashing to the footnotes thinking I'd been really clever to pick up a Joycean reference to something obscure, only to find that I seem to be on my own with that connection.
Heading on into Cyclops, feeling slightly one-eyed and mystified, how pleased I was to be able to say I've been there when the reading of the obituaries mentioned Barnfield Crescent in Exeter and I've probably been driven past 179 Clapham Road, Stockwell on many an occasion.
How odd that something like that draws you back into a book and much to laugh at alongside James Joyce and Sylvia Beach, especially the list of those Irish heroes and heroines of antiquity engraved on the seastone girdle 'which dangled at every movement of his portentous frame'...William Tell, Thomas Cook & Son and the Last of the Mohicans suddenly making an appearance and lest we forget, the Queen of Sheba, and Lady Godiva.
I'm also getting a sense of other people's unfavourable opinions about Leopold Bloom and also wondering when Stephen will really come to life, he seems like a minor and rather undeveloped character thus far.
I keep thinking back to Declan Kiberd's reference to his Dublin-born father's love of Ulysses, parts known by heart, parts glossed over and wondering which they were and for this month I'm trying yet another new schedule, the book is sitting on my desk and I will read a few pages each day.
Time for Joan's thermos of comfort soup now I think but don't miss Lisa's fantastic in-depth Team Ulysses thoughts over at ANZ Litlovers Litblog and please let's hear news of how you are all doing, the suspense is killing me....
Simon S is that you waving at us from the peak of Mount Garnet Vickers?
Ellinchador did you make a dent in it?
KevinfromCanada still with us?
Cheryl are you still have those trudging pages with moments of joy? I am!
Lisa have you sent the spouse away again?
Lauren, Curzon and Lesley Ann are you still there pitching the tents ahead of us and cooking up a feast?
Lesley have you got your breath back and stayed with us?
Erika, could you pass those chocolate biscuits around?
Novel Insights and Knitting Out Loud can you hear me...are you still there?
Caroline, have you given up your footnote tendency and has Declan Kiberd helped? Declan has been my best friend this month.
ss are you still doing the listening version and swimming gently rather than climbing strenuosly?
Sandpiper, did you ditch that bookmark?
Jean, any more unexpected crevasses to distract or are you bivouacked here at Camp Five already?
Do you all realise that by Camp Six we will have passed the halfway point?
How amazing is that?

Team Ulysses - Camp Four

Oh dear, Team Ulysses, solidarnosc and all that, but what a feat of endurance this month's reading has turned out to be for me.
And how aptly named both sections have been, Scylla and Charybdis and Wandering Rocks, tell me about it. Having traversed that ice field and dragged myself up onto the Camp Four ledge I'm just hoping there are one or two of you still hanging on in there too...or was it just me who found these two sections quite tough reading?
I have had to permanently strap on my oxygen cylinder cleverly disguised as this.
Bless Marilyn for making it look so easy.
It's also been about motivating myself to pick up the book in amongst some stellar reading going on alongside. Each time that seems to involve putting down Stefan Zweig to pick up James Joyce.
Might this have been the point, if reading alone, that I would have thrown in the towel?
But interestingly, when I take a deep breath, sit down and think about my impressions of the book so far, it's all so pleasurable and interesting, there is so much that is firmly etched in my mind in a completely visual way.
The scenes feel vibrantly alive so how has that happened?
I'm picturing so much of it so readily, the Martello Tower, Poldy cooking his breakfast, the funeral, the newspaper offices and this time around Stephen's rather grand Shakesperean debate, that moment when Bloom brushes past him as they leave the library and then the individual little scenarios that followed.
How odd that they seem to have entered my consciousness too, yet as I read I felt sure I was taking nothing in at all. I sometimes get to the end of a page and wonder what on earth was all that about.
It was therefore interesting to fall back on Declan Kiberd's interpretation and read that he also saw these episodes as filmic, like early movie shorts. Much else of comfort from Declan too, suggesting that at this point readers may feel as if they are lost in a labyrinth and apparently that is exactly how James Joyce wanted us to feel, to sense that randomness of life which cannot be pinned down in a 'neat narrative.'
The episode when Bloom is so busy studying the stars that he misses someone having a good time with his good lady Molly is seen by Declan Kibberd as a means of expressing the dangers of systematising and how often and how easy it is to miss those homely things happening right under your nose. He then suggests it could also be seen as a warning to those who try to over-systematize Ulysses which of course was an idea I cheered at, because there's little chance of that happening here in Devon.
So I'm still here and I feel encouraged that I still am because slowly the book seems to be getting a hold on me, establishing itself in my memory. I quite thought I'd be reading to the end and then not have a clue or any recollection of what I'd read, but far from it, somehow Joyce's writing is embedding the detail quite securely in my mind. When I think back I can picture a scene surprisingly clearly which perhaps confirms my ongoing policy of not trying to understand too much but just letting the words work.
The one thing I am now doing is reading the scene-setting footnotes before I launch off because that is really helping me to get my bearings.
I'd also love to pick up and run with The Odyssey analogies eventually because those are starting to interest me more and of course are exposing great gaps in my knowledge of the Classics, but not yet. There was however going to be one sidetrack I wouldn't be able to resist and that was to read something of James Joyce's life.
To the rescue, a bite-sized introduction from the Very Interesting People series from Oxford University Press. Each book is based on the entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the link is on my toolbar and, thanks to my library ticket number log-in, I'm in there all the time. It  is all offering some real insights into episodes from the life of James Joyce that also feature in Ulysses and something I haven't really been ready to take in until now.
So how's it going Team Ulysses, are you still there and I do hope Joan's still around with the thermos of comfort because I feel as if I need a great big swig from it this time around.

Team Ulysses - Camp Three...do ptake some ptarmigan

Happy Ulysses Day everyone and hard to believe we've now been reading Ulysses for three months and I have actually stuck to my sixty or so pages a month. I didn't like to tell you as we sat at base camp that I might be tempted to race ahead to the summit and would have to resist.
In fact I'd hate to be ordered to read Ulysses fast. Sixty pages a month feels like just the right amount, usually without pressure and surprisingly pleasurable reading though I'll admit this month's been a bit busier than many, but I'm up to the end of Lestrygonians with Scylla and Charybdis to follow.
I feel as if I'm in my stride with Leopold Bloom now, sort of tagging alongside and really starting to grasp his stream of consciousness...'stream of life' and follow some, though be no means all, of those seemingly unconnected, often throwaway thoughts that he has.
I also began to wonder whether some of those phrases that have entered the vernacular may have had their origins with James Joyce. 'Bitten off more than he can chew' came to mind in this month's reading and strangely, because I might have thought this as I picked the book up back in June. Except I looked it up and that's a phrase that seems to have originated in the US in the 1880s to do with plug tobacco. But in searching I came across this interesting pictorial approach to Ulysses.
Alongside my Ulyssesian reading I've been browsing some of the books on my desk, usually collected writings of authors various, and checking indexes for references to James Joyce because just about everyone has something to say about him.
George Orwell in a talk broadcast in 1942, sets up an unlikely yet fascinating comparison between Ulysses and John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga. Both books,

 'cover an enormous canvas and get the spirit and social history of a whole epoch between the covers of a book...The Man of Property may not seem to us now a very profound criticism of society, but it seemed so to its contemporaries'

Orwell goes on to shape his comparison focusing on Joyce's interest in

'mere words, the sounds and the associations of words, even the pattern of words on the paper,' *

and I must admit this is something that really becomes apparent when I read Ulysses out loud, which I do quite a lot...I'm seriously tempted to buy an unabridged audio version eventually. I have a feeling it would make for quite lyrical, almost mesmerising listening.
But an even better anecdote came to light as I read The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig's autobiography (which I can't recommend highly enough for more reasons than I have space for here but I'll come back to them.)
Stefan Zweig met James Joyce in Zurich soon after the Great War.
Yet to become an exile himself, Zweig was nevertheless deeply moved by those he met who were without a country and uncertain quite where they belonged, and none more so than James Joyce. Describing him as compact, somber man, not prone to high spirits or laughter, in fact 'testy', led Zweig to conclude that Joyce's irritation led to the turmoil that in turn fuelled his creativity.

' A young man with a little brown beard, with keen eyes behind strikingly thick lenses sat, alone in a corner of the Cafe Odeon; they told me he was a highly gifted English author. When I became acquainted with James Joyce... he harshly rejected all association with England. He was Irish. True he wrote in English but did not think in English, and didn't want to think in English...'I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in tradition.'

Stefan Zweig goes on to describe Joyce's phenomenal knowledge of languages and his power with words and whilst all this is probably grist to the academic Joycean mill it was new knowledge for me.
I have come to Ulysses with very little background and few pre-conceptions about Joyce the man, and nor have I set out to read everything written about him, in the hope that glimmers of light would emerge when they felt like it. Thus Stefan Zweig's meeting offers me some unique insights and perhaps explains why James Joyce is so keen to subvert what had gone before and push the boundaries of language to its extremes.
I'm wondering how you are all doing and do hope I'm not on a solo climb or I shall start to wobble a bit.

* My Country Right or Left 1940 - 1943  Volume II Essays, Journalism & Letters

  George Orwell

Team Ulysses - Camp Two

Doesn't the 16th come round quickly when you're having fun...are you still there Team Ulysses?
So how's everyone doing this month?
Perhaps because I'm still at low altitude this hardly feels like a mountain at all at the moment, more like a relaxing stroll up a gentle incline. Though I am prepared for that to change.
Ulysses, the impossible book suddenly seems possible and all those tensions and anxieties that walked into those pages with me have dissipated as I realise how much I am enjoying the reading and looking forward to picking the book up, making myself put it down when I could easily carry on reading.
I started off on the two pages a day plan which fell by the wayside for reasons of flow.
I just didn't want to stop after two pages and if I did I ended up reading from the start again just to get into the swing of things. Effectively I'd be able to say I'd read Ulysses thirty times or so but decided that would impress no one I know in the slightest.
So I sat down and read this sixty or so pages in one sitting, read a great deal out loud and I loved it.
It's been wonderful to finally meet the famous Leopold Bloom and start travelling around Dublin with him, see the city through his eyes and pitch up to various events in his company. Being a non-lover of kidneys, I couldn't share in his delight at the breakfast treat but I thought the trips to the privy and the funeral were incredible, littered with comedy and often laugh-out-loud funny.
Little sayings are starting to stick in my mind and I'm wondering if these are some of the moments that so many Ulysses-lovers mention, the quotables,
'The Irishman's house is his coffin'
'Out of the frying pan of life into the fire of purgatory.'
And what about the drunk in the cemetery looking at the statue!
Alongside this month's pages I've been reading Frank Delaney's James Joyce's Odyssey - A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses which has maps and photographs, all invaluable to someone like me who knows woefully little verging on zilch about the city, the people or its history.
I'm really starting to get a feel for the book now.
Another book I plan to dip into with next month's reading is Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation - A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties by Noel Riley Fitch. Sylvia Beach of course, the owner of the legendary Shakespeare & Co bookshop and the publisher of Ulysses.
It was lovely to meet up with RevCheryl who ventured down to Devon on holiday last week. The wool shops are cleared out and she's perused those shelves you can see with a notebook in hand, but we did pause and draw breath to huddle over a copy of Ulysses and agree how much we were enjoying it, both the discipline of the regular reading and the book itself.
We even had one or two ideas about what we could read next year, once we've conquered Ulysses on Bloomsday 2010.
I've floated the idea of The Tale of Genji as a masterpiece of Japanese literature that would certainly open some new reading trails, and team-reading it here is about the only chance I think I have of conquering it, but we have plenty of time to think about that.
Meanwhile I can't wait to hear what you are all thinking about Ulysses now we are at Camp Two and please don't worry if you're elsewhere in the book or not even in it at all and just spectating our ascent. Fore or aft, it doesn't matter in the slightest, everyone needs to do this in their own way if at all.
I'm wondering is anyone reading the footnotes? I'm skimming them now, but only quickly.
Is anyone managing to follow the Odyssey theme? All beyond me I'm afraid but I should think if you know that territory this could be fascinating and this could well be something I start to delve into eventually. It's becoming a regular reference in so much of my reading lately and the more that happens the less I can ignore it.
On that note does anyone else feel that they are probably missing acres of significant allusions but they don't really worry about that right now?
Does the language and the writing feel like a window onto one great, big huge writer's mind?
I'm feeling slightly in awe of James Joyce as I read. Where on earth did all this come from?
Is anyone else smiling secretly as they read?
Both because it's genuinely funny but perhaps because you also feel a teeny tiny weeny bit smug that you're finally actually really 'reading Ulysses.'
Me too, which usually means I'm about to fall flat on my face but at least we're all in it together.

Team Ulysses - Camp One

NB Ulyssesian academics who have stumbled in here by chance might want to look away now or risk tearing their hair out.
So how's it going Team Ulysses?
Are you all still there?
Please don't worry if you're behind, ahead, haven't started, don't want to...this is for pleasure not pain, but I can report that I've been really good, haven't cut the ropes and climbed on ahead, just stuck with the first chapter for this month and ended up reading that three times now.
If I carry on like this I'll end the year being able say 'yes well actually I've read Ulysses three times' but we'll see.
I read over and again to give myself a bit of a grounding while the going was good, like digging in the foundations for when things get tough and the air gets a bit thin, which I have no doubt it will.
I'm also sticking to my pledge not to bring in anything other than Declan Kiberd's Ulysses and Us for guidance, so it's me and the words and that's it. I've no plans to cheat either and filch ideas from elsewhere and pretend I've had a brainwave, what I share will be my initial naive thoughts and if Declan or anyone else has had a hand in it I'll say so.
For anyone who might find it helpful, and my thanks to Faber for this, you can download the first chapter of Declan Kiberd's book here.
That said, I have ordered a book by Frank Delaney which looks interesting and relevant for me, James Joyce's Odyssey.
I've never been to Dublin and I wanted a book that gave me a Ulyssesian feel for the city because already I'm getting that sense of place and country from this first chapter and I feel as if I'm half blindfolded and missing sights and sounds along the way that I definitely don't want to miss.
It took me three readings to pick up the significance of the Martello Tower setting and not suprisingly, given my Tudor deficits, Irish history doesn't come high up my list of competencies either. Whilst I sense much reference to an Irish past and, what Declan Kiberd describes as the absolute penetration of a colonial power, I'm not as conversant with the intricate details as I should be, only with the fall-out in my own lifetime, but I'm sure that will change.
Declan Kiberd has already pointed out that whilst England was staging a Great Exhibition in 1851 and proclaiming herself the pinnacle of scientific and industrial achievement, the people of Ireland were dying of starvation on the streets.
It's a sobering thought and one the rather haughty Haines clearly understates,

'We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame'.

Placing the book in its historical context has felt important to me too because nor had I really appreciated that, as James Joyce was writing Ulysses, a world system was busy collapsing in Europe and Joyce was writing a book for the new order that would surely replace it,

' he would explore modes of teaching and learning which answer the emotional and intellectual needs of ordinary people in search of a wiser way of life.'

But in a way that's all extraneous, because what I am enjoying are the words and the flow and this sense of a single day, chosen because nothing great happened on June 16th 1904, nothing could detract from Stephen's life on that day.
How much easier to do that in 1904.
It made me think how it is virtually impossible to have a day like that now unless I make a conscious effort to ignore all media intrusions, no news, no papers, no radio, no sneaking a look at the headlines at the top of my computer task bar.
Just the discovery that we've lost soldiers in Afghanistan invades my day with a background of sadness and affects it in a way that I can't possibly avoid.
There is mention of the Jesuits and I'm getting little whispers of a Gerard Manley Hopkins-like prose at times too, he did a lot of treading and wreaking as I recall and often just a line of Joyce's would be enough.

'Seaspawn and seawrack...to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells'

had me thinking about Hopkins's inscape and instress, all studied at school and so long ago it's lost in the mists of essays for which I got B - and 'fair attempt.' I was far too callow to appreciate it all, that has come with the years, but I do still have my annotated copy from the sixth form with a couple of those terrible essays tucked inside.
These words of Joyce felt completely Hopkins-esque.

'Woodshadows floated silently by through the morning peace from the stairhead seaward where he gazed. Inshore and farther out the mirror of water whitened, spurned by lightshod hurrying feet. White breast of the din sea. The twining stresses two by two. A hand plucking the harpstrings, two by two. Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide.'

Joyce was at great pains to slow down the skimming speed reader, troubled by the fact that words were read at a far greater speed than the speed of oral delivery and Declan Kiberd makes a wonderful analogy with the flaneur whose

'languid gait on the boulevards was an attempt to decelerate the modern world, by reducing quick walking to a slow crawl.'

I'm being a Ulyssesian literary flaneur and loving the stroll and it makes me think that we are probably all seeing different things as we walk and gaze around which makes this quite exciting. To James Joyce the 'ordinary' reader mattered and I can only imagine how dismayed he may have felt to see his book taken hostage by the academy and perhaps how pleased he might have been to see the masses storming the ramparts and reclaiming it.
So Ulysses is like reading the inner ramblings of a mind or as Ruth over at Crafty People says, listening to her talking.

"I’m really enjoying the stream of consciousness of this book. The thoughts of the protagonists wander in much the same way that mine do. However, I’ve not yet mastered the trick of keeping my mouth shut and many of my thoughts just come flowing out sweeping unwary bystanders in their path. Those who know me just switch off but the uninitiated have been known to feel faint at the torrent of seemingly disconnected words and ideas rushing in their direction."

Ruth is a dear friend and won't mind me saying that she is indeed like a walking talking version of Ulysses and spending a day with her is not as she thinks about stopping up my ears but enjoying the listening. Ruth's creative stream of consciousness whilst strolling through Liberty's of London should be preserved for posterity:-)
There is an acknowledgment that many readers give up their reading of Ulysses at this point, about sixty pages in struggling with the impending density, but I'm feeling really up for whatever comes next, as Declan so comfortingly reassures,

' Joyce is laughing at the pitiful pretentiousness of the youth he once was. Nobody could understand all that Stephen says or thinks. Nobody could take all of his ideas with utter seriousness.'

In that vein I've been walking round saying

'well, it's the ineluctable modality of the visual...I'd have thought that was obvious.'

My mother always argued that a university degree was training for nothing and who knows whether she'd absorbed that from James Joyce or not, but she could have done because as Declan Kiberd elaborates, Stephen's over interpretation of events, his shyness, his bouts of arrogance all point to the fact that

'a college arts degree may unfit you for the world.' 

Mine seemed to expand and fit into the space waiting for it when I did it in my forties, but I doubt I would have taken so much life experience into it or gained as much from it if I'd done it in my late teens.
So that's me and with all that in mind I'm now really excited about moving onto Camp Two, how about you?
We'll bivouac here for the next month so please add comments whenever you want to, I can't wait to hear your thoughts and we'll reconvene on August 16th and see what we find when we get there.

Women Who Read Are Dangerous

I had decided I daren't pick up anything new until I'd conquered my forthcoming litfest stack, but rules are made for a bit of easing and stretching here and there and then there's this book which gave me every excuse and is distracting me hopelessly along the way.
I saw it shrink-wrapped in a book shop window in Crediton, couldn't look at it so didn't buy it,  but by the time I got home I knew I had to have it and quickly ordered it.

Women Who Read Are Dangerous by Stefan Bollmann and with a Foreword by Karen Joy Fowler.
A bigger diversion and a better book to leave lying around I'd be hard put to find and this one is being browsed endlessly.
There's something to be said about heading for visual respite after being as cod piece, doublet and hose-deep as I am in Henry VIII's wifely concerns this week (I seem to have been there for a very long time, Wolf Hall is a very long book) but as well as the beautiful pictures there is a fascinating commentary alongside.
A history of the reading lives of women down the ages and all transmitting a variety of attitudes, because if we're reading we're not being domestic and heaven forfend this could all lead to terrible trouble.
Much that I had been blissfully unaware of surrounding the growth and perceived dangers of silent reading, a relatively new practice but also a secret one, an act of 'friendly isolation' and one that makes the perfect artistic subject.
Many paintings of women reading that I had never seen before and many old favourites, this one especially because it arrived as a gift card years ago and now graces the cover of my Reading Journal.
Peder Severin Kroyer
Rose Garden (The Artist's Wife in the Garden at Skagen) 1893
There is a brief analysis of each painting alongside interesting observations such as here, suggesting what a pleasure it must be for Norwegians with their long winters to have warm summer days on which to sit out in the garden and read.
We know the feeling this year too.
Much summer garden reading in progress, squashed greenfly between the pages, Factor 20 foxing that will show up on the pages in twenty years' time.
The book is divided into categories of readers various, blessed , enchanted , self-confident, sentimental , passionate, solitary and as I turned the final pages, there was a burning recent question answered.
For the Team Ulysses assault on the summit  a few of us will be using Declan Kiberd's book Ulysses and Me as a trusty guide and there will be helpful pdfs here from that book too.
On the cover a picture of...well we wondered in comments, was that Marilyn Monroe reading 'our' book too?
Could we legitimately install Marilyn as the posthumous patron of our expedition?
If it's good enough for Marilyn then it's fine for us too.
Well yes it was and Eve Arnold the photographer reveals that when she met Marilyn for this 1952 photo shoot she was already reading Ulysses so this was no posed moment and I think the photos reveal that clearly. Marilyn reported that she liked the style of the book and would often read it aloud to better understand it, utilising the Marilyn method which was to just open Ulysses anywhere and read it on short disorganised bursts.
Talking of Team Ulysses, how's everyone doing?
I think it might be the second, third, fourth etc sixty pages that are set to trip me up because I've really enjoyed the first sixty so that can't be right.

Ulysses winners

We've done the Oxford World's Classics Ulysses draw tonight because we've had time to acclimatize and all this hanging around partying at base camp is doing us no good at all.
So if you can check it's really you against the numbers in comments and e mail your address to me at dovegreyreader at gmail dot com with "Ulysses Winner" in the subject line, things will happen and a mountain will plop through your letter box soon.

3  Curt Hopkins
10 Lesley-Ann (no escaping now LA, that's you roped and ready to climb!)
18 Loretta
21 Kit Berry
26 Nancy
30 Lesley

And doesn't that mountain look a little bit smaller than it did last week?

Team Ulysses is good to go

Having celebrated Bloomsday 2009 by declaring I was up for a read of the mighty Ulysses, who'd have thought so many people felt likewise and want to climb that mountain together. I can't tell you how relieved I am that I haven't got to do this on my own, thank you all very much for joining me, so Team Ulysses let's do that thing.
Faber have very kindly offered the use of some pdf files from Declan Kiberd's book Ulysses and Us, The Art of Everyday Living which started it all and don't miss news of two prize draws in the posts below this one.
My thoughts are that we convene here on the16th of each month having read as much or as little as we each feel able, but I'm planning a very slow read and aim to have reached that final word 'yes' by Bloomsday 2010, does that seem feasible?
I've said it now so I've got to do it and I feel comforted by Declan's father's permission to skip the baffling bits, though I'm hoping to stick most of it out.
732 pages so 61 pages a month, 2 pages a day even?
Surely I can manage that, but let me know your thoughts on that read-rate and don't feel obliged to adhere to mine.
So on the 16th each month I'll post my thoughts, and this will include the struggles and clouds of incomprehension of which I expect quite a sky full.
We can debate and share further ideas in comments throughout the month too.
I've set up a 'dovegrey readers' link over here >>>>  and I will tag all the posts together under the Ulysses link there.
Ulysses and Us, The Art of Everyday Living is the book I'm going to be following and falling back on for encouragement and good cheer as I read. Declan Kiberd divides the book up into 18 themes which I'm planning to follow chronologically, the first being 'Waking'.
I have no idea how that will work out but it feels like better scaffolding than anything Ulyssesian I've looked at in the past, and I think I do need a structure and commentary of some description to follow.
However there are no rules so please feel free to use whatever Ulyssesian reading aids (or not) that you feel suit you the best (are there York Notes?) and I doubt I'll be able stop myself delving into the life and times of James Joyce either, or the context of the times in which the book was written and published, so I think it will be a really interesting and exciting reading journey.
OK Team Ulysses, best foot forward and we're off.

Ulysses by James Joyce - prize draw copies

Many thanks to Oxford World's Classics who have very kindly offered six copies of Ulysses which they will post worldwide to the winners, so if you plan to join Team Ulysses, climb this mountain and read along with us for the next year, names in comments and Sherpa Rocky will oblige very quickly.

Ulysses and Us by Declan Kiberd - prize draw copies

Names in comments here if you plan to join Team Ulysses and would like the chance of winning a copy of Declan Hiberd's excellent book Ulysses and Us, The Art of Everyday Living as the oxygen to help along the way.

Happy Bloomsday

Hmm, well I'm thinking about heading right into very unknown territory here, summiting one very big mountain indeed.
I know less about James Joyce than George Orwell, so we'll write that on the stamp hinge, not even the back of the postage stamp, but the existence of Bloomsday has always intrigued me.
June 16th customarily the day that Dublin celebrates James Joyce and Ulysses , this the single day in 1904 when the book's action takes place.
Nor have I been to Dublin but there's something appealing about a day that celebrates a book, so with the arrival of Ulysses and Us, The Art of Everday Living by Declan Kiberd and published by Faber, I settled down to see if I could find an ounce of demystification that might signify a possible assault on the summit.
Might this be the oxygen to get me there?
Is it possible for an ordinary reading person to conquer Ulysses?
Because conquering is what I feel is involved with a book which has achieved a nigh on mythical status of impossibility in my mind, really it's only a book to be studied at university surely?
It's not really meant for me and thee is it , in fact why bother when anyone I know who has studied it has declared it impenetrable, meaningless, and life-sapping?
I've read about various Ulyssesian conquering ruses like reading the chapters in a special order but certainly not the order in which they are published. A sort of head up to base camp and then back down to the foothills, back up to Camp III , back to Camp I style summit approach.
Coupled with an urge to know more before I make my decision is the fact that one of our themes for the Endsleigh Salon next year  is The Book I Must Read Before I Die (September 2010, I've got time...at least I hope I have, DV etc)
I was heartened to hear from Declan Kiberd that his father loved Ulysses but would just gloss over the parts that 'baffled or bored him', that feels like permission to skim if necessary, which is nice to know.
Having prevailed on his father to attend a Trinity College symposium on Joyce back in 1982, all was going well in that Declan had managed to get his reluctant Dublin-residing father in the door, only to overhear other delegates discussing whether to book in for the session on "The Consciousness of Stephen" at which Declan Senior was very quickly back out of the door.
Declan Junior goes on the debate quite how Ulysses was 'wrenched out of the hands of the common reader' and I immediately felt like one of those common reader kindred spirits,

'A book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman endured the sad fate of never being read by most of them.'

Well that's true, this one's been too scared to even open it.
But, as Declan Kiberd proceeded to explain quite how common culture replaced by specialist elites led to a particular vein of thought, I began to feel that rising sense of indignation,

'No longer was the prevailing idea that anyone bright enough could read and understand Hamlet or Ulysses, but that anyone sufficiently clever could aspire to become one of the paid specialists who did such things.'

By now I'm feeling in that 'how very dare they' mood that descended the day I first read John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses and so by the time Declan declared,

'It is time to reconnect Ulysses to the everyday lives of real people.'

I was shouting loud from the balcony that I don't have, to the hordes that weren't gathered beneath,

'Yes, Declan, yes, let us go forth and do this great thing.'

I calmed down a bit but I've almost convinced myself it's a go-er because Declan says

'The need now is for readers who will challenge the bloodless, technocratic explication of texts: amateur readers who will come up with what may appear to be naive, even innocent interpretations. Today's students have been prevented by a knowing sophisticated criticism from seeking such wisdom in modern literature.'

Well I think roped up and with Declan leading the climb I can smell success of sorts, I can do 'naive and innocent' along with the best of them and I'm tempted by the privileging of Ulysses as 'wisdom literature' over Joyce as the 'supreme technician. Ulysses and Me is divided into themes, Waking, Learning, Praying, Drinking, Birthing, Ogling and more, so no chapter by chapter slog of analytical dissection to endure.
First of course I've got to lay hands on a copy and I'm going to have to make do with this tatty old edition I found for £1 in the market, do you think it will do?
Declan does say he's used the Penguin edition for quotes but I'll just have to manage with this...it's nothing special, I can underline and write in the margins no problem.