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Oxen of the Sun. Jesus. Probably the hardest section thus far. There's a paragraph after the opening three sets of three incantations in which I kept expecting a comma which never came,

"Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitable by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature's incorrupted benefaction."
 

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Finished Oxen... last night and within maybe the last ten pages or so, if that, it kept throwing things at me which I'd recently noticed or mentioned elsewhere. I saw someone refer to accelerationism as "acc/kali" ("kali" presumably meaning Kali Yuga) then the term Kali appeared in the book. I made a joke about Leo being Geriatrix from Asterix then it said "old man Leo". I was reading about the ongoing Trump shitshow and the book referred to "Trumpery insanity". I read Matthew's Quietus piece where he mentioned different forms of yoga, one of which was the path of knowledge, the intense study of books, then Mulligan said "Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods."

The Trump one was the last which popped up and I did actually say something out loud at that point. I can't remember what though. Think it was just like "Fucking hell. What?!". Felt as though the book had been observing me and kept dropping hints.
 

catalog

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This is exactly what happened to me, but a bit later on in the book, when bloom is doing all the questions.

It was around the time of BLM and George Floyd and it was like I was being sung to whether I had the book or not.

I was walking round the garden looking at stuff, having random thoughts, writing them down, then I'd go and read the book and it was all the same things.

On one particular morning, it was like a game, like I wrote 3 things down and then in the next 20 pages they all came up.

I wrote it all down and have screenshoted the relevant pages so could probably bring it all together but it would be a bit of work.

Leaving it for a while seems the right thing to do just at the moment.
 

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Another one was Luka saying this in The Pit,
Probably a bit of that grot you get from being indoors too much breathing dust and not seeing your friends enough too.
And this appearing in the book a few hours later,
Mr M. Mulligan (Hyg. et Eug. Doc.) blames the sanitary conditions in which our greylunged citizens contract adenoids, pulmonary complaints etc. by inhaling the bacteria which lurk in dust.
 

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Love this bit,

The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence: silence that is the infinite of space: and swiftly, silently the soul is wafted over regions of cycles of cycles of generations that have lived. A region where grey twilight ever descends, never falls on wide sagegreen pasturefields, shedding her dusk, scattering a perennial dew of stars. She follows her mother with ungainly steps, a mare leading her fillyfoal. Twilight phantoms are they yet moulded in prophetic grace of structure, slim shapely haunches, a supple tendonous neck, the meek apprehensive skull. They fade, sad phantoms: all is gone. Agendath is a waste land, a home of screechowls and the sandblind upupa. Netaim, the golden, is no more. And on the highway of the clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion, the ghosts of beasts. Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come trooping to the sunken sea, Lacus Mortis. Ominous, revengeful zodiacal host! They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned the giantantlered, snouter and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning multitude, murderers of the sun.
 

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Circe's the section which seems to have had the greatest influence on GR. The animals and objects speaking, the impossibility of telling hallucination and fantasy from reality. The way stuff fades in and out. People just appear out of thin air then vanish as quickly.
 

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Circe's the section which seems to have had the greatest influence on GR. The animals and objects speaking, the impossibility of telling hallucination and fantasy from reality. The way stuff fades in and out. People just appear out of thin air then vanish as quickly.
BLOOM I was just going back for that lotion whitewax, orangeflower water. Shop closes early on Thursday. But the first thing in the morning. (He pats divers pockets.) This moving kidney. Ah!

(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new clean lemon soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.)

THE SOAP

We're a capital couple are Bloom and I;
He brightens the earth, I polish the sky.


(The freckled face of Sweny, the druggist, appeals in the disc of the soapsun.)
 

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THE VEILED SIBYL

(Enthusiastically.) I'm a Bloomite and I glory in it. I believe in him in spite of all. I'd give my life for him, the funniest man on earth.

BLOOM

(Winks at the bystanders.) I bet she's a bonny lassie.

THEODORE PUREFOY

(In fishingcap and oilskin jacket.) He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature.

THE VEILED SIBYL

(Stabs herself.) My hero god! (She dies.)

(Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also commit suicide by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic, opening their veins, refusing food, casting themselves under steamrollers, from the top of Nelson's Pillar, into the great vat of Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads in gas ovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping from windows of different storeys.)

🤣
 
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"I'd give my life for him, the funniest man on earth" sounds like something Luka would say about Craner.
 

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THE VEILED LUKA

(Enthusiastically.) I'm a Cranerite and I glory in it. I believe in him in spite of all. I'd give my life for him, the funniest man on earth.
 

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ELIJAH No yapping, if you please, in this booth. Jake Crane, Creole Sue, Dave Campbell, Abe Kirschner, do your coughing with your mouths shut. Say, I am operating all this trunk line. Boys, do it now. God's time is 12.25. Tell mother you'll be there. Rush your order and you play a slick ace. Join on right here! Book through to eternity junction, the nonstop run. Just one word more. Are you a god or a doggone clod? If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready? Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ, it's up to you to sense that cosmic force. Have we cold feet about the cosmos? No. Be on the side of the angels. Be a prism. You have that something within, the higher self. You can rub shoulders with a Jesus, a Gautama, an Ingersoll. Are you all in this vibration? I say you are. You once nobble that, congregation, and a buck joyride to heaven becomes a back number. You got me? It's a lifebrightener, sure. The hottest stuff ever was. It's the whole pie with jam in. It's just the cutest snappiest line out. It is immense, supersumptuous. It restores. It vibrates. I know and I am some vibrator. Joking apart and getting down to bedrock, A. J. Christ Dowie and the harmonial philosophy, have you got that? O.K. Seventyseven west sixtyninth street. Got me? That's it. You call me up by sunphone any old time. Bumboosers, save your stamps. (He shouts.) Now then our glory song. All join heartily in the singing. Encore! (He sings.) Jeru...
 

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I was reading a bit earlier and thinking how much it reminded me of Burroughs then got hit with this,
VIRAG (Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips.) She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orange flower. Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. (He sticks out a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork.) Messiah! He burst her tympanum. (With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the cynical spasm.) Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!
I dunno whether Burroughs used this bit in his cut ups, but if you were to show me that line "With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in cynical spasm", I'd swear down it was Burroughs and not Joyce. The reference to baboons, the jerking hips, the spasm. The "flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue" line is pure Burroughs too. He's always giving people weird, arthropod-like qualities.

"... profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips... " is also very Burroughs.
 

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It's that fixation on waste and bodily fluids and functions too. "... profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips." Sometimes you feel as though the page itself might start oozing and weeping.
 

linebaugh

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I think even the delivery of joyce/Burroughs is like the slow ooze of a liquid. the way qualifiers and adjectives are stacked without filter or mind to grammar. 'stream' of consciousness, of course.
 

catalog

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I'm watching this documentary called the Joycean society, about a group of people doing a big read together of finnegans wake. It's quite funny, there's a few jibes between the characters.

And lots of interesting close reading and analysis going on. One of the things they talk about is a notebook of Joyce's which is filled with words used by Freud... Just written in a long list.

And apparently "joy" is Freude in German... They're saying Joyce recognised they shared names.
 

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Eumaeus was a proper slog, but I loved the ending with the driver watching Bloom and Stephen wandering off down the street,
The driver never said a word, good, bad or indifferent, but merely watched the two figures, as he sat on his lowbacked car, both black, one full, one lean, walk towards the railway bridge, to be married by Father Maher. As they walked they at times stopped and walked again continuing their tête à tête (which, of course, he was utterly out of) about sirens, enemies of man’s reason, mingled with a number of other topics of the same category, usurpers, historical cases of the kind while the man in the sweeper car or you might as well call it in the sleeper car who in any case couldn’t possibly hear because they were too far simply sat in his seat near the end of lower Gardiner street and looked after their lowbacked car.
Something about him seeing these two figures in the distance who, to the rest of us, are these well-known, beloved characters, continuing their back and forth on all the topics of the book. I couldn't help feeling they're eternally wandering down that street, that you can still see them nearly a hundred years later.
 

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What lines concluded his first piece of original verse written by him, potential poet, at the age of 11 in 1877 on the occasion of the offering of three prizes at 10/-, 5/- and 2/6 respectively by the Shamrock, a weekly newspaper?

An ambition to squint
At my verses in print
Makes me hope that for these you'll find room.
If you so condescend
Then please place at the end
The name of yours truly, L. Bloom.
 
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