Puzzles, Bonuses, and Onions in the Thrilling Second Meeting of The Steemit Book Club, Plus Details for Session 3
"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant." – James Joyce.
NOTE: There is a time change for next week’s call: By request, it will be one hour earlier so that members can watch one of the most highly anticipated and surreal U.S. presidential debates in history.
Second Note: There are 15 faces in the optical illusion above, which is what Monday's book call was all about...
Before we recap this week’s call and share the details for next week, here are some bonuses for Book Club participants…
Bonus number 1: A helpful Podcast explaining all the details of James Joyce’s literary work:
http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/
Courtesy of @asaule
Bonus number 2: In case you want to listen to Joseph Campbell narrating while you drive:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hy62n_wings-of-art-joseph-campbell-on-james-joyce-2-6_creation
Courtesy of @shawnlauzon
Last Monday was the official second meeting of the Steemit Book Club, as we picked our way through the bread crumbs, peeled the layered mysteries, and deciphered the Latin phrases strewn throughout the brain-picking classic that is Ulysses.
For those who missed the SBC meeting, here’s a quick recap. Or you can skip straight to the recording below:
We started last Monday’s session by exploring the similarities between one of Ulysses’ main characters, Stephen Dedalus (based on a young Joyce) and Homer’s Telemachus from The Odyssey.
We then dove into the parallels between Dedalus and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
And then we looked at Dedalus as representing Ireland (especially the artist), and his housemate Haines as England.
Then Dedalus as Jesus, with Leopold Bloom as the Father.
Soon we were down the rabbit hole: What ties these themes together is that Dedalus, Telemachus, Hamlet, and Ireland are/were all dealing with usurpers. With people coming to stay, using them, and putting them in menial positions.
Now add in the father/son relationship of Odysseus and Telemachus, the symbolic father/son relationship of Dedalus and Bloom, and the consubstantial relationship of Jesus/God (theorized to be of the same substance).
And—stay with me here—now imagine Joyce layering all these metaphors, parallels, and symbols into one sentence or paragraph, and you have the first chapter of Ulysses.
As one Book Club member said in the steemit chat room: It’s like an onion of parallelisms.
Puzzles that will keeps professor busy for centuries? That doesn’t seem so far-fetched after all.
Yet we managed to crack the first chapter so everyone could understand it, and leave the first chapter with Dedalus/Telemachus about to begin his wanderings: “I will not sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go.”
If you want to join us in our weekly head-scratching, mind-expanding adventures, you can find the details below. But first, here’s the entire recording of the second Steemit Book Club meeting:
https://soundcloud.com/user-655948001/steemit-book-club-meeting-part-2
NEXT WEEK’S SBC CALL
Steemit Book Club, Session 3
Book: James Joyce, Ulysses (Preferably Gabler Edition)
Reading Assignment: Chapter two, which is a small one.
Date: Monday, September 26
Time: 5 p.m. PST / 8 p.m. EST / 1 a.m. GMT / 11 a.m. (Tuesday) UTC
Phone: (800) 719-6100 or (218) 339-7800, access code 629-1831#
Web audio link (and location for international call-in numbers):
https://hello.freeconference.com/conf/call/6291831
Chat: #steemit-book-club channel on steemit.chat
Reminder: The weekly meeting will start one hour earlier than usual, due to popular demand since many Book Club members want to watch the shitshow immediately afterward.
Don't forget to download this one-page map to Ulysses, which we mentioned on the call. It will be a huge help with the readings:
To answer some of the most recurring questions, here you can find a free ebook:
On Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-James-Joyce-ebook/dp/B002RKT6QK#nav-subnav
Or in any format you prefer: http://manybooks.net/titles/joycejametext03ulyss12.html
However, I strongly recommend getting the paperback version of the Gabler edition. Besides being my favorite, it has line numbers in the margins so we can all communicate clearly and be “on the same page.” You’ll notice on the call that it was a challenge when we weren’t:
https://www.amazon.com/Ulysses-original-James-Joyce-ebook/dp/B017WQ5WTI/
The good news for those who missed the second meeting is that we have only read the first chapter so far. So it’s not too late if you’re just seeing this: You can be caught up in no time to join us for our third session.
(See the preliminary post for more details but in a nutshell, all Steem Dollars generated from the weekly posts of the Book Club will be divided equally among book club members after finishing each book.)
This is shaping up to be an interesting adventure and we hope that you can join us.
Best,
@neilstrauss, @the-alien, and the #steemit-book-club
P.S.: Note that the Comments section of this post will also serve as a discussion forum for the current reading.
Halo
Going to kick off the discussion.
Looked up analysis of the Yeats poem Who Goes With Fergus, since it plays such an important part in the chapter. This is what I found, and it seems to touch on the dueling forces at play in Ulysses and in Dedalus:
"On one level, the poem represents Yeats' exhortation to the young men and women of his day to give over their political and emotional struggles in exchange for a struggle with the lasting mysteries of nature.... A return to Fergus entails a move away from the reference points of contemporary politics, toward the mythology of the Irish people."
Interesting, especially since I love Greek Mythology and am Irish, but that's a little different from Irish Mythology adding more interesting flavor. :)
By mysteries of nature, does he mean the wisdom and knowledge of the druids?
That sounds like a good possibly. Seems quite fitting enough. Some of the things that fit into these stories is amazing. Hadn't realized this book was going to be more like a puzzle! Will have to read more into this idea.
Farmers in Oz, NZ and UK refer to cattle as beasts, if you are unable to tell the sex.
Buck is a medical student, dissecting peeps up..... kind of like an abattoir, where at a glance, you can't see the sex of an animal......nor that of the patient unless you be doing an op on the genital area....just human blood and guts.... loose idea?
There are lots of cattle references in this book.
That Ulysses even hit shelves, could be as elusive as life on earth...... The mob that bankrolled Joyce across WW1 continental war zones, oceans were a bunch of system f#ck you rebel raisers. The went hand over fist to by pass sphincter clinching puritans known as the Society for the Suppression of Vices...who went to great lengths to ensure this "filth" didn't corrupt the public’s mind.
Dora Marsden, was a bad ass suffragette... Winston Churchill who was addressing some mob in Southport England for funding malarky all pomp and wind….. when Winnie declares to the crowd ....it represents the will of the electorate...Dora pipes up from the attic that she had been hiding through the cold wet night to hola out….. "But it does not represent the women, Mr Churchill" ..and was arrested…again……... she later morphed out of straight up activism and started a journal called The Freewoman, which morphed into The Egoist, that...through blood sweat and tears, no iphones or land lines, serially publish Portrait and Ulysses....leading to a change in women's rights and what we consider as Art. ...... reading a book called "The Most Dangerous Book-The Battle For James Joyce's Ulysses" By Kevin Birmingham.....
Amazing - hope you can make the call on Monday. Would be great to have you share some of this!
Missed tonight. Setting up for/watching the debate. This is the first time a woman is in a presidential debate. I'm so excited and happy! Yay!
Neil, thank you for being so kind in having a book club. And thank you to everyone who helps make it a lot of fun. I'll be there next week. Hugs to all.
Hi
Listened to the recording of the call, was great, goes into a lot of detail. Cant wait for chapter 2 to be up. I'll try and make the next call for chapter 3.
One thing in Chapter 1 that struck me was the repetition of lines 103-106, and lines 270-272, the description of his mother coming to him in a dream. Why would Joyce use the exact same paragraph to describe it, twice in the space of a few pages? It seems peculiar given how much he had obviously thought about each word, he could have made it different if he wanted. I wondered if there was a significance in it.