The Steemit Book Club Is A Nightmare From Which I’m Trying to Awake: Session 3 of the SBC, plus details for next week

Last Monday marked the official third meeting of the Steemit Book Club. For those who are not yet familiar, the SBC is a unique Book Club where all Steem Dollars generated from the weekly posts of the Book Club will be divided equally among book club members who complete the book.

Before we recap this week’s call and share the details for next week, here is a book recommendation from fellow Book Club member @tyger:

https://www.amazon.com/Read-Love-James-Joyces-Ulysses-ebook/dp/B00N2A6QN0/ 

It’s basically a book about “the least you need to know” to understand and love Ulysses. Looks great, and I’m about to pick it up myself.

And don’t forget last week’s helpful…

Bonus #1: A short podcast interpreting Ulysses line by painstaking line:

http://blog.frankdelaney.com/re-joyce/

Courtesy of @asaule

Bonus #2: Joseph Campbell is a fount of wisdom, and I just ripped these to audio so I could listen to them in the car today:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hy62n_wings-of-art-joseph-campbell-on-james-joyce-2-6_creation

Courtesy of @shawnlauzon

Chapter 2: Nestor

(Summary created by members of the Book Club)

The second chapter begins with Stephen teaching a history class. His students are showing very little discipline and much rather listen to their teacher's riddles and jokes than to the actual class. 

The lesson in question has as a prime protagonist the Greek hero Pyrrhus, another victim of usurpers and who also remained faithful to a lost cause to the end, like the Irish prophet Saint Malachy.

Homer’s character Nestor, after whom chapter two is titled, appears in the guise of Deasy, the headmaster of the school and Stephen’s boss, who is a British sympathizer.

During the class, one of Dedalus’s students doesn’t seem to be able to pronounce “Pyrrhus” correctly, but instead kept calling him ‘pier.’ 

Not willing to miss the chance to crack a good joke, Stephen then calls Kingstown pier "a disappointed bridge" and continued joking about the paradox of how Ireland tried for so long to be connected to continental Europe but ended up in total isolation.

The students always trying to cause distractions and get the teacher off track, began ask Dedalus to tell them a good ghost story, but Stephen declines and has a student named Talbot reading from Milton's Lycidas instead, a poem where Milton promised immortality for his drowned friend, Edward King.

As the boy reads, Stephen's thoughts start drifting towards the metaphysical. He is especially captured by Aristotle's ideas about thought, "Thought is the thought of thought." As you can see, multi-layers are not a short commodity in Ulysses.

After dismissing the class, Stephen decides to spend some extra time helping an under-achieving student named Sargent. In the process he realizes that the boy's mother must once have loved her child despite all his inadequacies, and so he couldn’t help but remembering the loss of his mother, Mary Dedalus. 

Fast forward, what we see in this chapter in is a series of life and death battles, varying from ancient Greece to modern day Ireland with constant references to the general Pyrrhus, Julius Caesar, and Helen of Troy, almost mocking these characters in the process. And as you expect, there were more allusions to betrayal and imprisonment of Ireland by England, ‘the usurper.’

A few of the most classic lines from Ulysses are in this chapter, including Stephen’s vision of history as “a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.” And his view of God as “a shout in the street”—in other words, a Joycean epiphany.

We also get a foreshadowing of the coming of Leopold Bloom as Deasy goes off on an anti-Semitic rant, including newspaper men in his list of offenders (of which Bloom is one). And Stephen, his metaphorical son, sticks up for him and takes his back. 

All and all, it was a very interesting chapter. Sadly, we had to cut the session short, because many Book Club members understandably wanted to watch the U.S. presidential debates.

We probably should have stayed on the phone and discussed that!

As a reward for reaching this far, below you can find the entire recording of the third Steemit Book Club meeting and we hope that you can join us next time. 

https://soundcloud.com/user-655948001/steemit-book-club-part-3 

NEXT WEEK’S SBC CALL

Steemit Book Club, Session 4

Book: James Joyce, Ulysses (Preferably Gabler Edition)

Reading Assignment: Chapter three (“Proteus”)

Date: Monday, October 3rd 

Time: 6 p.m. PST / 9 p.m. EST / 2 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

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:!

Many thanks to @shawnlauzon for moderating and leading the past Book Club Meeting.

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.