Odyssey Funmaries #3: Proteus (Book IV)

By JERRY GRIT

Let me start this funmary by saying … and this probably doesn’t have much to do with our Ulysses reading (but a helluva more relevant than Ben’s Nestor, the Long-Eared Donkey reference) … that this Helen of Troy person is one piece of work.

This lady…yeesh.

Events proceed according to Athena’s most ridiculous plan ever (Athena, *not* the goddess of efficiency optimization).  Telemachus and Nestor’s son Pisistratus (who was probably itching to get away from the old windbag) arrive in Sparta to visit with Menelaus and *maybe* learn about Odysseus.

If we apply the Rat Pack schema to the Trojan War Archaean military leadership, it goes something like this…

Menelaus?

• Menelaus is like the Nat Benchley of the crew (dupe and historian) 
• Agamemnon is Sinatra (conniving and greasy pack leader)
• Achilles, Peter Lawford (whiney pretty boy)
• Odysseus, Humphrey Bogart (wit and PR guy) … or maybe Sammy Davis, Jr.? (clown, wily dancer)
• Ajax … Dean Martin … maybe? (self-destructive dope).  

Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Ajax…Live at the Sands!

So Telemachus and Pisistratus show up at Menelaus’ palace while he’s hosting a double wedding feast for both his son “hardy” Megapenthes (quite a name)  and his daughter. And in ancient Greece, when you have uninvited guests, you’re pretty much expected to drop everything. Double wedding feast plans be damned.

The film reputedly inspired by the road trip Telemachus and Pisistratus take to the kingdom of Sparta.

So Telemachus and Pisistratus derail this double wedding, and instead of celebrating the the brides and grooms, Menelaus throws a dinner honoring the wedding crashers. Athena is still with them, and still dressed like a dude.

At the dinner, Helen comes prancing in from her “scented, lofty chamber.” This lady ran off with Orlando Bloom to Troy, which was used as a pretext to start the largest war in all antiquity, with countless lives, years, and resources wasted, and who is basically the reason Odysseus is stranded on some island with a horny nymph and Ithaca is without its king. 

How does she act, now that’s she back with Menelaus? 

Like a piece of work.

At first, she seems to show the appropriate shame for all the death and destruction, by denouncing herself  a “shameless whore.” But before they can really grasp the scope of loss she is responsible for (just as Pisistratus breaks down in tears while retelling the story of his brother’s death at Troy), she loads them all up on “magic to make us all forget our pains” (valium?). More appropriately, it’s magic to make them forget all the pains she caused.

With everyone strung out on valium, Helen tells everyone that at Troy she knew all about Odysseus’ horse trick, but decided not to tell the Trojans or her lover because, “my heart had changed by now…I yearned to sail back home again!” And then she blames Aphrodite for luring her out to Troy.

Whatever, lady.

And Menelaus, good sport that he is, seems to call her b.s. (well-acquainted with it as he must be by now), telling another story about how when the Archaeans were hiding in the wood horse after it was brought into Troy, Helen paraded around it calling their names out, putting at risk the entire mission.

What do you want, lady?

The night ends, the guests are oiled up and bedded.

The next dawn (which is invariably rose-red fingered I’m finding) Telemachus and Menelaus get some alone time. Telemachus asks if Menelaus knows anything about his dad (like does he really have to ask?). Here, Menelaus tells him the story of Proteus, which is of essential significance to Ulysses.

On the trip back from Troy, Menelaus says that his ship was stranded by a calm sea and everyone was starving (I’m sure old Helen was doing fine). They go onshore to a nearby rocky island Pharos, where Menelaus runs into, and starts complaining to, Eidothea, daughter of Proteus (some sort of sea God that sleeps with seals). She tells him if he’s able to hold down Proteus when he comes out of the sea (to go sleep with his seals), Proteus will tell him why he’s stranded and anything else he wants.

So Menelaus dresses like a seal and and gets the drop seal-loving Proteus.

Proteus begins turning into things: a lion, serpent, panther, torrent of water (huh?). Exhausted, Proteus finally gives in. (Note: The notions of a mutable identity and shape-shifting through time characterize chapter 3 in Ulysses.)  

Proteus starts spilling the beans on the post-Trojan War deaths of Ajax and Brian Cox…er, Agamemnon (i.e., the Clytemnestra fiasco), and tells him about Odysseus stranded with the nymph.

Doomed Agamemnon (Brian Cox) and cuckolded Menelaus (Brendan Gleeson) give each other face time in 2004’s “Troy” (which was not that bad, btw).

Proteus also tells Menelaus that his own future is secured. Since he has Helen now (who is a daughter of Zeus), the gods will make sure he lives on easy street. No wonder Menelaus puts up with Miss Thang. 

Telemachus is grateful for the story and announces he needs to get back to Ithaca. Menelaus gives him a bowl.

Back at Ithaca, the couch-surfing slobs realize Telemachus has been away. (Why this is a surprise after Telemachus announced that he was going away is further evidence of their doomed ineptitude.) They decide to get a ship together and kill him on his return. 

Penelope finds out and is worried. But Athena has the message delivered that Telemachus will be fine.

Are we allowed to feel any suspense reading this thing?

Countdown to Bloomsday…

We read page 1 of Ulysses in 16 days!

Be a good person and join Wandering Rocks!

Odyssey Funmaries #2: Nestor (Book III)

by BEN VORE

First off, let’s dispel some misconceptions that have been passed down through the ages concerning King Nestor:

• Though described (in the Fagles translation) as a “breaker of horses,” Nestor was not — as has been widely rumored — the Greek equivalent of Luca Brasi. (Consider.) “Breaker of horses” can be roughly translated as an accolade meaning “Marlboro man who engages in cowpunching and/or battle in a better fashion than all the others.” (I consulted David Stanley and Elaine Thatcher’s indispensable Cowboy Poets & Cowboy Poetry for this bit of scholarship.) In Richard Lattimore’s translation of Homer’s The Iliad, the final line of the poem is, “Such was their burial of Hektor, breaker of horses.” In summary, “breaker of horses” = the shit.
• The Greek Nestor was not the inspiration for the animated Christmas special “Nestor, the Long-Eared Donkey.” (Shelly Hines voiced Nestor.) The Greek Nestor did, however, have Spock-like ears which frequently drew the jibes of his junior high classmates.

• Finally, to find yet another way to bring up “Lost” as it may or may not relate to Wandering Rocks, the mythological Nestor is not in fact the inspiration for “Lost’s” Richard Alpert … but that character is played by the eyeliner-loving Nestor Carbonell! Possibly true fact: Carbonell was doomed to a forgotten Hollywood career until ear-reduction surgery made him palatable to behold with mortal eyes.

 

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s cut to the chase: Nestor is a good-natured windbag. Nestor is basically that war veteran you had to interview for a fourth grade English assignment, the one where your teacher told you to pick someone from your church or community who had Valuable Life Experience and Wisdom to impart. Your parents knew Nestor from the nursing home where your grandmother stayed, so they arranged the interview. You went into it thinking, “This might be all right if this guy was in combat and is going to recount for me thrilling tales of heroism.” But once the interview begins, you realize that this whole assignment is merely an exercise better described as “Listening To Old People Ramble And Impart Unsolicited Advice” and could go on for as long as three hours. Because once Nestor has an audience, all he wants to do is talk it to death. (Lucky you!)

This is what garrulous Nestor does to poor Telemachus, who just wants to track down his dad. A simple “Go talk to Menelaus” from Nestor would have sufficed. Instead, he winds himself up with ominous, throat-clearing lines like, “Ah dear boy, since you call back such memories,” and “Gladly, my boy, I’ll tell you the story first to last.” In a bit of dramatic irony, Nestor tells Telemachus

“But so many things we suffered, past that count–

what mortal in this wide world could tell it all?

Not if you sat and probed his memory, five, six years,

delving for all the pains our brave Achaeans bore there.

Your patience would fray, you’d soon head for home…” [3.125-130]

 

Frayed patience, indeed. There are so many red flags in Nestor’s preambles that it’s hard to keep track. Nestor addressing Telemachus as “boy” (a sure sign that the elder has long-winded wisdom to impart); repeated acknowledgments of “such memories,” a black hole of nostalgia the hearer will soon vanish in; and Fagles translating Nestor’s first words with this preface: “Nestor the noble charioteer replied at length.” Indeed.

Telemachus is shrewd enough to know that flattering Nestor is better than saying, “Enough, old man, I’m out like the fat kid in dodgeball.” He eggs Nestor on with lines like, “Nestor excels all men for sense and justice/his knowledge of the world.” Like many old people who ramble on and on, though, Nestor works up an appetite and rewards Telemachus’s patience with a whole bunch of food. Say this much for Nestor: He knows hospitality. He invites Telemachus back to his “regal palace” and mixes a bowl of eleven-year-old wine (no Two Buck Chuck, these spirits). The next morning he gets his son Thrasymedes to chop up a heifer ( “the ax chopped/the neck tendons through,” translates Fagles), tells his youngest daughter Polycaste to rub Telemachus down with oil (awkward), then serves up prime cuts and more wine before giving Telemachus “a good full-maned team” of horses. So all-in-all he’s a pretty swell guy. You’d just better be comfortable once he starts talking.

Countdown to Bloomsday…

We read page 1 of Ulysses in 17 days!

Don’t get caught unawares!

Odyssey Funmaries #1: Telemachus (Books I-II)

By JERRY GRIT

So how does an epic poem begin? With an invocation to the muse, of course. The writer (or more properly, the singer) asks for the strength to tell the story of “the man of twists and turns”…i.e., Odysseus. I wonder how Ulysses will begin?

The singer catches us up on how things are. Things are crappy. After defeating Hector and conquering Troy with his Trojan horse trick (seriously, how do you fall for that one?), Odysseus is still not home since leaving Ithaca 20 years ago. The singer tells us King Odysseus’ crew is dead, he’s the only survivor, and he’s homesick on some  island, where the bewitching nymph Calypso spends all day trying to get in his draws.

On top of that, a bunch of freeloaders (calling themselves “suitors”) have overrun his palace in Ithaca, drinking and eating his wealth, threatening his kid Telemachus, and trying to sleep with his ever-faithful wife Penelope.

Also, the sea god Poseidon has it in for him. Because Odysseus blinded his one-eyed son (ha!). 

However, Poseidon is now “worlds away.” Which means, what, Saturn? Nope, Ethiopia, which is only like a couple hundred miles from Greece. Couldn’t Fagles have revised this thing to give us a more appropriately distant place…like Indiana?

With Poseidon away, Athena (Zeus’ sparkling-eyed daughter and goddess of wisdom, war, the arts, industry, justice, and skill…a real Type A goddess) recognizes an opportunity.  As the rest of the gods are complaining that mortals wrongfully blame them for miseries in the wake of the Clytemnestra fiasco, Athena tactfully points out Poseidon has been serving up a shit sandwich to Odysseus. The gods (recognizing an opportunity for damage control?) agree to support her helping out. Athena, also the goddess of PR? 

So she teleports Odysseus home to Ithaca and slaughters all the suitors.

Of course not. Instead, she goes to his son, Telemachus, in some gender-bending disguise (which doesn’t fool anymone) and encourages him to sail off to Pylos and Sparta where he *might* learn something about a dad that he doesn’t know.

Way to lend a hand, war god.

We also learn that Penelope has been successful putting off the suitors who are spend all day at her house, eating her food, drinking her wine, while trying to marry her (what kind of courtship is this?). She tells them she’ll marry whoever after she finishes sewing a shroud, which she begins everyday and secretly undoes everynight. She gets away with this FOR THREE YEARS. Holy moly, the detachable thumb trick would have these people on the floor.

No wonder Penelope is holding out for Odysseus. It’s been a lonely 2 decades, but that’s no reason to slum it with one of these numbskulls.

Telemachus announces his travel plans to an assembly of Ithaca elders, who are all pretty disgusted by what’s happening at Chez Odysseus. And they support him, but he still gets beef from the freeloaders. They demand if Telemachus is unsuccessful in finding any information, he has to give up his moms to one of the couch-surfing slobs.

And then (and I think this comes up in Ulysses), two eagles “wing to wingtip” fly over the assembled crowd and then start fighting each other. Old man Halitherses recognizes this as a symbol that Odysseus will be coming home and that he will kill the slobs.

The slobs respond, “flocks of birds go fluttering under the sun’s rays / not all are fraught with meaning” [2.204-205]…i.e., a cigar’s just a cigar…meaning they’ll die horrible deaths.

Telemachus once more announces his plans to leave. If he finds out that his dad is dead, he’ll give Odysseus the proper funeral rites and gives his mom away to one of the douchebags. If not, he’ll wait *another* year.  

Why does it take this guy 20 years and divine intervention to get the rocks to simply find out what happened to pops?  

Athena secretly puts together a crew and fully supplies a ship so Telemachus can sneak off to Pylos. Maybe she should have told Telemachus that it was going to be a secret trip before he announced it to the entire kingdom?

Great job, Athena.

Countdown to Bloomsday…

We read page 1 of Ulysses in 18 days.

Join THE FUN!

Odyssey Funmaries…THE SCHEDULE!

By JERRY GRIT

Tad’s comment yesterday made me realize that I needed to be clearer about what and when we’re funmarizing from the Odyssey.

As I mentioned, Joyce plays it pretty loose with the events he uses from the Odyssey to structure Ulysses. The events Joyce uses in Ulysses do not occur in the same order as they do in the Odyssey, although the 3 major sections are the same. He also uses multiple events from a single book in the Odyssey to frame entire chapters. If you’re not familiar with Ulysses, confusion may abound.

 So to help all those playing along at home, I’ve created this helpful and colorful fun schedule! Print it and keep it in your pocket!

*You are sincerely encouraged to contribute a funmary. Ben and I are already burning the candle at both ends here, and he’s totally freaking out. Pick one toward the end, let me know, and it’s all yours. Learn how fun a funmary can be!

 

**An event involving some Wandering Rocks does not occur in Odyssey. It’s only referred to. Not sure what’s going to happen here.

Odyssey Funmaries Begin THIS FRIDAY, May 28th!

We Read Page 1 of Ulysses on Tuesday, June 16th!

We’re Coming for You!

Ultimate Army: Nathan Jones and John Heidenreich (UPW – NJPW)

Odyssey Funmaries…THIS FRIDAY!

By JERRY GRIT

Ben Vore and I are hard at work practicing our body slams and drilling our analytical skills, to get ready for our countdown to Bloomsday…The Tag-Team Odyssey Funmaries! Super fun summaries of each of Odyssey’s 18 books Joyce uses to structure Ulysses…culminating in day 1 of our reading of Ulysses, when we read page 1 on June 16th, Bloomsday (we’re starting slow, so no worries).

Ben Vore and I look like this! 

The Dynamic Dudes: Johnny Aces and Shane Douglas (WCW)

We’ll begin posting Funmaries THIS FRIDAY. We’ll focus on only those 18 books (and the events therein) that Joyce uses to structure Ulysses (not all 24 books of the Odyssey). And we’ll post them in the order in which they appear in the Odyssey, not the order they occur in Ulysses, for the sake of those reading along. Joyce loosely uses the events in the Odyssey to structure his book, and he also plays it pretty loose with their order. For example, “Nausicaa” should come in 5th, after “Calypso”…but in Ulysses, it happens 13th.

Head spinning? Splash some cold water on your face!

If you have a chance to read the Odyssey before we begin Ulysses on June 16th, I strongly recommend you read along with us. Knowing the Odyssey won’t leave you completely clueless during the Ulysses, but it will deepen your experience. It helps to come to Ulysses with some outside knowledge, and the Odyssey is a key “knowledge piece.” 

For those following the stomach ache-inducing Eastern Conference Finals, think of it as a coping strategy. Here’s to Hedo Turkoglu getting a charybdis in his eye!

Odyssey Funmaries Begin THIS FRIDAY, May 28th!

We Read Page 1 of Ulysses on Tuesday, June 16th!

Brace Yourself for Rad Awesometimes!

Some Stuff To Know About Ulysses Before Reading It, Part 4: Ulysses And Love

By JERRY GRIT

This next post is kind of cribbed from my undergrad thesis, a confusing morass of sophomoric textual analysis having something to do with the “Circe” chapter, the thematic centrality of love, and the reasons why Hans Gabler is a douche.

I called my thesis, seriously, “What’s Love Got Do With It.” I included the period in title, to make it clear that I wasn’t (like in Tina Turner’s hit) rhetorically asking, but that I would be authoritatively telling. What was love but a second hand emotion, indeed.

• The 1984 Gabler edition caused a teapot tempest for including additions and edits Joyce pencilled in on numerous manuscripts of Ulysses, but that never made it to a final print edition. The most dramatic addition concerned the phrase “the word known to all men.” This phrase recurs in Ulysses 3 times (a very symbolic number…if only we had a symbologist to elucidate it…), but it was not until the Gabler edition that it was explicitly connected to the word “love.” Other words had been postulated before 1984, including “love,” but also “homosexuality” and “omphalos” (as if!). But Gabler added in a line to a passage and Bloom now thinks, “Love, yes. Word known to all men.” The line had come from a note Joyce handwrote on one manuscript. The “omphalos” backers threw a tizz.
• The addition was superfluous, tacky, and even damaging. Even to a bull-headed undergrad, it’s clear what this book is about. For a writer who refuses to give away what’s most important with Dan-Brown-esque clunky exposition, the addition is not in keeping with the Joycean aesthetic. Joyce is a master at coming at his most important themes indirectly, following Dickinson’s counsel to “tell the truth / but tell it slant.” He wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) have made such an explicit assertion of the universality of love, just as he wouldn’t have had  Gabriel Conroy say at the end of “The Dead” say, “Wow, that snow’s linking me the reality of decay and death that constitutes life.”
• Joyce’s choice of the Odyssey, instead of let’s say, the Iliad, to structure his text is proof of the centrality of love. Where the latter is about crybaby Achilles’ hurt feelings, the Odyssey is about a journey motivated by a love of home and all it entails (wife, child). It’s one of the first examples in antiquity where love is driving the plot.
• Joyce’s choice to use June 16th, 1904 also underscores the centrality of love. It was the day of Joyce and Nora Barnacle’s second encounter when (pardon this…) she gave him a handjob (even the New York Times says so!). Ellman, although he doesn’t include this detail in his Joyce biography (classy guy that he is), notes that something happened on that day between Joyce and Nora that deepened their relationship. And it was this deepening of the relationship that was meaningful enough for Joyce to choose this date to set his opus. Ellman observes, ‘To set ‘Ulysses’ on this date was Joyce’s most eloquent if indirect tribute to Nora… [It was the day upon which] he entered into relation with the world around him and left behind him the loneliness he had felt since his mother’s death.”
• The plot itself hinges on an act of love, a loving and generous act that also initiates the Joyce-like youth Stephen Dedalus (who is also isolated in cerebral omphalos-gazing and private tragedy) into a relationship with the outside word beyond himself. What is the act? Start reading, folks!

Some Stuff To Know About Ulysses Before Reading It, Part 3: Ulysses and Music

“Lord knows what my prose means. In a word, it is pleasing to the ear…That is enough it seems to me”

–J.J.

This post focuses not so much on what you could know to help you read Ulysses, but more on how you could read it.

There will be a lot of seemingly impenetrable passages throughout the book. My suggestion: appreciate their sound, don’t try to understand their meaning. Although Joyce vowed he could justify the meaning of every single line in all his books, it’s very unwise for you to have he same expectation of understanding.

Instead, appreciate the sound.

And keep turning pages.

Some connections between Joyce, Ulysses and music.

• Joyce had a great voice. Like Stephen Dedalus, he was an exceptional tenor, had voice teachers, and toyed with the idea of going professional.
• Although Joyce has a modernist ambition to represent human consciousness, he still has that musician’s desire to make it pleasing to the ear. This makes a big difference. Check out Djuana Barnes’ Nightwood if you want modernism without music. Yech.
• There are songs throughout the Ulysses. Ben has promised to post his own recordings of each and every one.
• Joyce wrote using musical structures to structure the text. The “Sirens” chapter is structured is like a fugue. 
• Joyce identified Odysseus as an artist in that he is willing to put himself a great risk just to hear a tune. Here’s my favorite Joyce quote recorded in Ellman’s biography: 

The most beautiful, most human traits are contained in the “Odyssey”…Ulysses is a great musician: he wishes to and must listen; he has himself tied to the mast [in order to listen to the beautiful but destructive sirens’ song]. The motif of the artist, who will lay down his life, than renounce his interest.

So when you come across some Joycean muddle, don’t be disheartened. Step back. Read through it not to figure out what’s going on, but to simply appreciate the order of sounds. Whatever self-destruction you risk, preserve your interest…in finishing.

And keep turning them pages.

Odyssey Funmaries Start Thursday!

We Read Page 1 of Ulysses in 24 Days!

Announcing Odyssey Funmaries … BEGINNING MAY 29th!

By JERRY GRIT

In order to get AMPED for day 1 of our Ulysses reading project (launching in 26 days!) Ben Vore and I thought it would be pretty rad to reread Homer’s Odyssey (specifically, the Fagles translation). And while we’re rereading, we’ll blog about it! Sound cool?

Ben and I will tag-team write summaries, alternating authorship, focusing only on the 18 books Joyce used for each chapter of Ulysses. We’ll use Joyce’s chapters as the template and elucidate on those characters/events from The Odyssey that will frame our reading of Ulysses.

If all goes to plan, we will finish these summaries the day before we begin Ulysses on June 16th. It’ll be our countdown to Bloomsday! 

And I mean, it will literally be like an eighties-era WWF tag team writing these things…like two muscled mullet dudes in tight matching spandex underwear sitting down to a computer, trying to find something to say about antiquity’s greatest epic poem.

The Killer Bees: “Jumping” Jim Brunzell and B.Brian Blair (WWE)

“Jumping” Jim sez, “Odysseus is going to kick suitor ass!”

In order to lessen the burden the task, we’ve decided to focus on the more fun aspects of the Odyssey. So instead of lame plot summaries and banal commentary (where you can get anywhere in these internets), we’re giving you…that’s right…FUNmaries. We’ll be angling for laughs and joy, not insight!

If you would like to contribute a funmary or two, that would be awesome! But not as awesome as these guys…

The Midnight Rockers: Shawn Michaels and Marty Janetty (AWA)

Marty sez, “No one can beat the Toxic Telemachus Torso Flip!”   

Odyssey Funmaries Begin Next Thursday, May 28th Friday, May 29th!

We Read Page 1 of Ulysses on Tuesday, June 16th!

Join the team!

And check out this tag team gallery. Holy moly.

 

 

 

 

Some Stuff To Know About Ulysses Before Reading It, Part 2: Ulysses and Exile

By JERRY GRIT

“You have to be in exile to understand me”
–J.J.

For “Lost” fans, I’m posting my next set of bullets to the theme of exile in Ulysses. The theme of being home-but-not-at-home resonates with the show in many ways. I’ve saved my comments on the show and Ulysses for the end.

• Although the story is set in the Dublin, the home of main characters Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, these two avoid their nominal homes. They are exiles in their own city.
• Joyce very much felt himself an exile. He wrote a play called “Exiles.” He lived most of his life in self-imposed exile from Ireland, moving to Greece, Zurich, Paris. One reason: He and Nora Barnacle boinked in sin (a big “no” in an oppressively religious country). Another reason: He wrote freely about masturbation and the pleasures of defecation. (More on that later!)
• Joyce is voicing his own sentiments when Dedalus remarks in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets … Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.”
• For Dedalus in Ulysses, he’s still caught up in nets of nationality, language, and religion…leaving him unsettled in Ulysses. In perhaps the biggest “wah-wah” moment in western literature, after Dedalus’ dramatic resolution to leave Dublin at the end of Portrait to go to Paris to become a famous writer, we find him back in Dublin at the beginning of Ulysses having completely flubbed his escape, slumming in a tower with a bunch of douchebags.
• For Bloom, he is exiled by his own feelings of impotence (unable to satisfy a wife he loves) and guilt concerning his son’s death (death from illness, Bloom feels his deficient genes or a turn-of-the-century “life-force” were responsible…or something like that).
• For story purposes, characters in exile is useful. Ernest Renan (I think) once described how feeling unsettled and “not-at-home” (unheimlich) is a moral feeling because it forces you to reconsider your established beliefs and life or whatever. So to have characters feeling “not-at-home,” you have them extra-sensitive to the strangeness of themselves and of their surroundings. Internal monologue, the style for a lot the book, is especially suitable. We’re confronted with their amplified sensitivity and uncertainty.

“LOST” AND ULYSSES

As the survivors return to the island toward the end of Season 5, Benjamin Linus is seen reading Ulysses (and the evil-or-good genius that he his, he bought the 1961 Vintage edition). I think it underscores the larger theme of exile and the longing for human connection in the show, but also draws attention to specific aspects of Ben’s character.

Ben Linus (“L.B.”; Leopold Bloom=”B.L.”) is very much a Bloom-like character at this point in the series. He is returning to his home, the island (Ireland’s on an island?). But he’s been ousted as the Others’ leader, and teleported by that steering-wheel-in-the-wall-with-ice-on-other-side thing. Ben, too, will be an exile in his own home. And once he’s on the island, he’s unsettled. He can’t get into shenanigans like the old days. I think it makes him a more likable and likely character, but also a vulnerable one, much more easily manipulated by black smoke and alterna-Lock. He once had the wit and cunning of an Odysseus, but now has the reduced status of Bloom. And like Bloom, he’s also haunted by a child who’s death he feels responsible for. But, sadly, he has no Molly. Or even a Stephen. Or does he? Might we look to Ulysses for clues to Season 6?

A Word About Our Moderator

By BEN VORE

As an active recruiter for (and humble participant in) Wandering Rocks, I have found myself answering the same question from would-be participants: Who is this jerrygrit? And would he be on my side in a bar fight? (Also, why does he hate Ayn Rand and like to key Mazda Miatas?) 

While I am certainly not qualified to speak to the true spiritual depths of jerrygrit (a rudimentary understanding of the French language qualifies you to appreciate the wordplay of his online nom de plume), I can at least shed some light on our would-be Virgil. What are my qualifications, you ask?

• I was a fellow undergraduate (and English major) with jerrygrit.
• I lived in very close quarters and shared a shower and toilet with him our senior year.
• I have visited his birthplace in Vermilion, Ohio and glimpsed his humble beginnings as a Joycean scholar.
• I donated my kidney to him in 2003.

 

And now, you may be asking (as I have been asked), what are jerrygrit’s qualifications to guide me safely through the literary morass that is the confounding Ulysses? 

I would translate the QBQ there (QBQ being corporate-speak for the Question Behind the Question ©), at least to those who only know jerrygrit through his forays into the Voreblog comment boards, as, “This jerrygrit, though no doubt a swell guy, occasionally comes across as — how should I say? — a bit pretentious, often critical, occasionally hostile, sometimes inflammatory and every now and then a bit opprobious.”

What would lead to such a question? Consider a random sampling of jerry’s comments at voreblog:

• “Eat it, hosers!”
• “Sorry for the high-brow list [of favorite books], you anti-intellectual hosers. I’m smart!”
• “You’re right to say I’m right, and I’m aware how wrong you’ve been.”
• “This is a complicated issue. With a lot of good points on both sides. Especially on my side. Let’s all just agree to disagree.”
• “Sasha Frere-Jones is a terrible person without a clue.”
• “Your critical acumen is Paste-level at best.”
• “I can’t believe just anyone can listen to music and have an opinion about it. Your post is clear evidence this has oversight has reached crisis proportions. I beg you to destroy your listening devices immediately. Or apply for a license.”
• “If I walk into your house and any of this junk [music] is playing, I’ll head directly to your garbage disposal, stick my hand in, flip the switch. The sound of my own screams would be far more pleasant than this dreck (even at the cost of my irrecoverably mangled flesh!).”

 

What if he turns his withering critical eye on me? I’ve been asked by many a fearful soul. His judgment is no less sweeping and devastating than the Eye of Sauron from the dark heart of Mordor! These conversations usually end with me hugging these terrified individuals as they resort to sucking their thumb.

Yet those who have pondered the nature of the man behind these remarks have also commented to me their glimpses of a kindler, gentler jerrygrit, coinciding with the launch of Wandering Rocks. Where once was a clenched fist, they say, is now an open hand awaiting a shake, and possibly a vaguely homoerotic bear hug, depending on his level of inebriation. 

Speaking as someone who was personally rebuked for my fear-mongering regarding the monumental breadth of this project, I can attest that jerrygrit’s big-hearted compassion is no anomaly (though it may sometimes require a bit of digging to locate). Yes, he gets grumpy without a gallon of coffee in the morning. Sure, he can be testy when threatened by plebeian musical tastes. But here’s the core of the jerrygrit paradox: He is critical because he cares. To withhold his scrutiny would be to withhold his love. And, as he has reminded us, what is Ulysses but a book about love?

That is why I can personally assure you we are in good hands. When I texted jerrygrit in a panic today after surveying all the Ulysses commentaries available to the layperson for purchase at his or her local independent bookstore, he texted back immediately with words of reassurance, concluding with this comforting admonition: “Don’t panic.” Nor should you, dear reader.

But if he asks you for a kidney, run.

Some Stuff To Know About Ulysses Before Reading It, Part 1: Ulysses and the Odyssey

By JERRY GRIT

I may have oversystematized “Ulysses.”
–J.J. to Samuel Beckett

To help everyone who’s preparing to read Ulysses beginning on June 16th (and even for those few eager beavers who started early), I will tell you about stuff that might help. And I will do so with slick levity, utilizing my marketing career-honed bulletpoint skill, to ensure–respectively–fun and easy-reading.
 
I’ll contain my first set of bullets to Ulysses’ tangled relationship to the Odyssey. 
 
Caveat: I am no expert. So take my information with great suspicion, or lax scrutiny.

• The Odyssey takes place over years. Ulysses is just one day.
• The Odyssey follows Odysseus all over the Mediterreanean. Bloom just wanders through Dublin.  
• Leopold Bloom is a comic Odysseus. He’s an advertising salesman, not an exulted king/military leader. He can’t go home, not because a cyclops or a charybdis or a sea is in the way, but because he knows his wife (Molly Bloom) intends to boink a douchebag (Blazes Boylan). He’s also looked down upon by most his contacts because of their anti-semitism (Bloom is Jewish, furthering his identification with exiles…more on that later). And he has major paranoia and self-consciousness issues concerning his wife’s adultery and his own feelings of impotence. 
• Leopold Bloom is a real-deal Odysseus. Whatever laughs J.J. intended with Bloom’s homeric parallel, it also amplifies Bloom’s more tragic and heroic characteristics. Much like Odysseus, Bloom is also motivated by the same love of home. But unlike Odysseus, his wife is unfaithful, his child died very young. His return to a loving home is irrecoverably lost to him. He also displays similar heroic qualities such as presence-of-mind and paternal protectiveness, generosity.
•  The Odyssey is used to structure Ulysses. Although Joyce didn’t explicitly title his chapters based on the Odyssey, he did lay out the Odyssey-system in letters to various critics at the time (each chapter also has its own color, symbol, body organ, style, etc…we’ll get into that later…or not). Now it’s customary to see the book in three parts: Part 1. “The Telemachiad”–The first three chapters focusing mainly on the Telemachus-like character, Stephen Dedalus. Part 2. “The Odyssey”–The next 12 chapters (and the majority of the book) focusing mainly on Bloom’s wanderings, culminating in Bloom’s and Dedalus’ meeting in Dublin’s red-light district. Part 3. “The Nostos”–The last 3 chapters depicting Bloom’s homecoming and the infamous  “Penelope” chapter (an unpunctuated stream of Molly Bloom’s consciousness as she drifts to sleep).
• Homeric references recur throughout Ulysses, to both comic and dramatic effect. There are cameos from a cyclops, sirens, a Nausicaa-like hottie. If you have the Odyssey fresh in mind, you can have a pretty satisfying time picking out the subtle (and not s0) correspondences.  

I’ll probably add to this list. I just started rereading the Odyssey (this time, the Fagles edition!). 29 days before we start our voyage, just enough time to do your own reading of the Odyssey!

Must Have: “Ulysses” Annotated

By JERRY GRIT

Despite what the cold-sweating Vores would have you feel, there is really nothing to fear in reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce famously said about writing Ulysses, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries.”

Suckers that professors are, they completely fell for it. (And the self-conscious, irony-loving suckers that they are, they will often preface their criticism with that same quote…wah-wah.)  Ulysses is perhaps the most written about novel, period. There are literally a ton of resources out there to help. And you could spend a lot of time trying to process the plethora of insights and close readings. I neared insanity when writing my criticism on the book more than a decade ago. I had such heedless balls.

With all this help out there, I want to call your attention to just one very necessary guide: “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s “Ulysses” by Don Gifford and Robert Seidman (University of California Press)(and do what you can to buy it from Ben’s bookstore…although they devote an entire section of their website to the upcoming Da Vinci Code sequel (who saw that coming?), it is a fine institution you should support).

Although we will gain a lot of insight from each other as we collectively move through the book, there will be more than a few references we’ll miss. Unless you have immediate recall Robert Greene’s “A Groat’s Worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance (1592)” or of obsolete Irish idioms such as “tare and ages,” their key significance will float right passed. However, with Gifford and Seidman in our corner, we will know that “a groat was regarded as a trivial sum” and that “tare and ages” was “a mild Irish-English oath from ‘Tare and ouns,’ the tears and wounds of Christ.” See, wasn’t that helpful?

It is a little annoying to read a book of annotations along with the book itself, making subway reading impossible. My apologies. But trust me, it’s worth it. If there was a ever a book to read another book with, it’s Ulysses.

It’s even recommended that you read Ulysses twice: once while going back and forth to the annotations, and then the second time straight through. I did it ten years ago, but I was going nuts, stuck in a snow entombed one-room cabin in the middle of Ohio. 

So in addition to Vintage edition of Ulysses (The Complete and Unabridged Text, as Corrected and Reset in 1961), I also recommend you picking up “Ulysses” Annotated. There is even an essay on Ulysses and its historical context, which is also helpful reading. 

We have 38 days before we begin on June 16th. More than enough time to get ready. As Winston Zedmore joyously declares in Ghostbusters: “We have the tools. We have the talent.” Nevermind the Vores and their glandular issues. 

We ain’t afraid of no seminal modernist text!

Plan for Action, Suggested Reading List, Note on Editions

By JERRY GRIT

PLAN FOR ACTION

We’ll read the first page of Ulysses on June 16 (to commemorate the date upon which Ulysses takes place…June 16, 1904). I’ll lead the discussion with a post on that day. Then we’ll rotate…alphabetically? age-wise? arm-wrestling contest-wise?…and the next person will decide how much we read and what we’ll discuss next. And we’ll try to do it on a weekly basis.

Before June 16th, do what you can to at least familiarize yourself with Homer’s Odyssey. It’s not essential to reading Ulysses, but it does help. The Odyssey is the framework used by Joyce to give shape to the encyclopedic mass of allusions and plot, and it does add deeper significance to your own reading experience to be familiar with the tradition Joyce set his tale in. Maybe we can do some preliminary postings on the Odyssey before the 16th?

And you are absolutely encouraged to invite anyone you think might be interested in participating. 

SUGGESTED READING

Suggested reading before June 16th, in order of importance:

• The Odyssey, Homer
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce
• Joyce, Ellman
• Hamlet, Shakespeare
• Dubliners, Joyce
• Divine Comedy, Dante
• Faust, Goethe (I dare you.)

Suggested Films: Hamlet, Nora (based on Joyce and Joyce’s wife), Michael Collins, Wind That Shakes The Barley (these last 2 films are set more than a decade after 1904, but they give a good depiction of the political tensions in Ireland…and Joyce wrote well after these events took place), and Red Dawn. 

NOTE ON EDITIONS

Finally, for Ulysses, I’ll be reading from the “Complete and Unabridged Text, as Corrected and Reset in 1961” put out by Vintage. There’s also the infamous “Gabler Edition” put out by Knopf Doubleday (with the lame modernist rendering of the title on the cover). I strongly recommend the former, for reasons I’ll give if you really want. Reason 1: Gabler’s a douche.

Get this one!

Wandering Rocks

By JERRY GRIT

I chose “Wandering Rocks” to title our endeavor to collectively read Joyce’s Ulysses for both its multiple layers of significance and because it is a lame pun, which is all very Joycean. I was going to call it “Wandering Cephallenians” (don’t ask)…but I think this is a little snappier. 

“The Wandering Rocks” is the title of book 12 of Homer’s Odyssey. Joyce uses the Odyssey to structure Ulysses, which depicts the day in the life (June 16, 1904) of 3 main characters: Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom (whose Homeric parallels are Telemachus, Odysseus, and Penelope…and whose names also have multiple layers of significance). “Wandering Rocks” figures as “chapter 10” in Ulysses.

In the Odyssey, this chapter’s action-packed. Odysseus sails through Scylla and Charybdis, dangerously listens to the sirens, and gets his entire crew killed. But no actual wandering rocks. They are apparently too scary for Odysseus to take on. Here’s the summary from the Gifford Ulysses Annotated:

In Book 12 of The Odyssey, Odysseus chooses to run the passage between Scylla and Charybdis rather than attempt the Wandering Rocks, which Circe describes as “drifters” with “boiling surf, under high fiery winds,” remarking that only the Argo had ever made the passage, thanks to Hera’s “love of Jason, her captain” (12:65-72; Fitzgerald, p. 223). Thus the episode does not occur in The Odyssey. The Wandering Rocks are sometimes identified with the Symplegades, two rocks at the entrance to the Black Sea that dashed together at intervals but were fixed when the Argo passed between them on its voyage to Colchis.

(from Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s “Ulysses” [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], p. 260

So in the Homeric parallel, our endeavor represents what is extremely difficult, often avoided, but which can be managed with a little love (from each one of us…aw). It also portrays Odysseus’ lame leadership skills, which should be warning to you all about me and my nominal role here. Don’t bother with what I say, or you will probably die…but I guess the sailors do die because they don’t heed Odysseus’ warning. So maybe it’s the opposite. Listen to me and you won’t die. Whatever.

I’m more excited about the lame pun. We’ll be like “wandering” through the text, as we follow Leopold and Stephen as they wander through Dublin, and as Molly wanders through her own mind. We should also be “wondering” at the text (both in the “wow” and “wtf?” senses).

And “Rocks” could be read as both a plural noun and a verb. As a noun, we’re like the rocks (“dumb as a rock”; “that dude is a total rock”; etc.) reading through Ulysses, trying to make sense of it with our limited training in classical literature and familiarity with the Dublin street grid circa 1904. And our endeavor will also “rock” in with Twisted Sister-esque loose, transgressive fun!

Won’t you rock and wander/wonder with me?