ULYSSES p. 2-3, “Telemachus”

By JERRY GRIT

I read the first page* of Ulysses today. Hopefully, you did too.

I tweeted while I read it, which was not easy. Keeping “insights” to under 140 characters at a time is not conducive to literary analysis. It also took me less than 2 hours to read the page. I do not recommend this at all. Going forward, I’m going to tweet just once after every page I finish. 

For what it’s worth, here’s all the tweet action today, with some links added.

1. I’m going to read page 1 of Ulysses now. I’ll give myself 1 hr to finish. I’m starting with 16 followers in twtr. Will probably end with 2. [12:17 pm] 
2. Have to find a copy online first. Had to loan gfriend my copy since I lost hers. No idea what happened. This whole thing has me frazzled. [12:20 pm] 
3. Alright. Here we go, (deep breath) “Robert Langdon awoke slowly.” Wha?! Hey, that’s not right. [12:25 pm] 
4. Now here we go. Starts with a big “S” in “stately” and then “plump” and that’s all for page 1! Easy. [12:32 pm] 
5. Should read next page. Before I do, checking Don Gifford. S stands for Stephen, Subject (1st part of syllogism, there is a logical structure). [12:41 pm] 
6. 2 other parts of the book start with a big M (Molly, middle) and P (Leo-Poldy, predicate). Medievals regarded S-M-P as the order of thought. [12:48 pm] 
7. If S=M, and M=P, then S=P. M, the middle term drops out, combining the subject and predicate. Molly brings together Stephen and Leopold. [12:51 pm] 
8. Moving right along to word 2…nothing on “plump”…though funny to think of someone stately and plump, I guess. Are we getting satire here? [12:53 pm] 
9. Reading the full sentence. Buck Mulligan is coming from the stairhead with a bowl (which will become a chalice according to Don) and razor. [12:55 pm]
10. “Yellow dressinggown, ungirdled”? Gross. Did dudes girdle? I will never finish this page. Been reading for 30 mins. Need to power thru. [12:57 pm]
11. 1st line of dialogue, Introibo ad altare Dei means I will go up to God’s altar. Said in Catholic Mass. Like Homer, an appeal to divinity. [1:05 pm]
12. Also, Buck is having a laugh at Catholic ritual, & poking fun at his tower-mate (they’re living in an actual tower), Stephen. [1:08 pm]
13. He gets Stephen to the towertop, calls him Kinch & fearful Jesuit. To Don, Kinch sounds like a cutting sound. Sounds a like stupid nickname. [1:10 pm]
14. This guy is putting a lot into his shaving ritual. Why hasn’t Gillette optioned this for a commercial. The Mach Mulligan. Ba-dum-bump! [1:15 pm]
15. There’s our boy, Stephen Dedalus. Displeased & sleepy. But I can’t tell who has the equine face, untonsured (!?) hair, pale oak complexion. [1:18 pm]
16. Looking it up…and not finding it. I’m 65% sure it’s Stephen with the horseface. Been at this an hour. Need to pick up the freaking pace. [1:30 pm]
17. Back to barracks…a military command. Buck has both national and religious significance. It’s tuff to do this under 140 characters, btw. [1:41 pm]
18. To Don, the genuine Christine is jokey reference to black mass (and not Applegate), where a woman’s body is used as an altar. Weird joke. [1:45 pm]
19. Chrysostomos is not a sentence! Is this the narrator speaking? Word means golden-mouth, referring to Buck’s gold-capped teeth and big mouth. [1:51 pm]
20. Who’s he’s whistling to? And what’s the current? Looking it up… [1:53 pm]
21. No idea who whistles back. Don & the comic are no help. Current seems to be the wind, which he’s telling god to turn off. What a jokester. [1:59 pm]
22. If the plump shadowed face=Buck, then Stephen must have the horseface! Mystery solved! Can you have just one jowl? Checking… [2:01 pm]
23. According to Webster, jowl just means slack flesh, usually associated with cheeks, lower jaw, throat. Buck probably has a double chin. [2:02]
24. To Don, face description suggests Pope Alex VI, corrupt Renaissance leader/arts patron (good call?). Anyways, a symbol of decadent power. [2:07 pm]
25. Buck makes fun of Stephen’s name. Stephen=1st Christian martyr; Dedalus=ancient Greek artificer, killed his own son with the wax wing plan. [2:08 pm]
26. Stephen still hasn’t said anything yet. Just follows Buck onto the towertop, sits on the gunrest. Is he the resting gun? I’m going nutz.  [2:10 pm]
27. And that’s it! Read page 1 in less than 2 hours. This is going to be a breeze! [2:11 pm] 
28. Signing off. Need to do some actual work, even though this completely exhausted me. Maybe will take a nap. I end with all 16 followers! [2:13 pm]

So, let’s take stock of what happens on page 1. Buck comes to the top of the tower, where he’s living with Stephen. He brings a bowl of lather, a razor, and a mirror, supposedly to shave. He’s still in his yellow(ed?) pajamas. Before he begins to shave, Buck makes fun of Catholic ritual and Stephen (with a bunch of weird, not-funny jokes) while posing as a loud-mouthed, decadent authority figure. He intonation to God parallels to invocation to the muse at the beginning of the Odyssey.

He calls horsefaced Stephen up to the top of tower. Stephen just stares, probably just waking up, and probably annoyed that he was woken up to watch this dude shave. This is probably the roommate situation from hell.

Their residence here is based Joyce’s own brief unhappy residence at Martello Tower, built a century earlier to defend Dublin against a possible Napoleonic invasion. It was 40 ft high with thick walls. It’s single door was 10 ft off the ground, only reached by rope ladder. Sounds like fun, but that rope ladder would get old quick.

Martello Tower.

Joyce lived there with Oliver Joseph St John Gogarty(who is now immortalized as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan). According to the Ellman biography, Joyce had a pretty unfortunate roommate situation living with Gogarty, who was sarcastic, a drunk, and probably really disrespectful of Joyce’s space. I’m imagining Taco Bell wrappers everywhere.

The setting of the top of the tower also recalls Hamlet (act 1, scene 5), where Hamlet confronts the ghost of his father.  Stephen definitely thinks of himself as a more Hamlet figure than a Telemachus one. And just coming off our funmaries, so would I. 

Some questions for discussion:

• Who whistles back to Buck? Is this just the wind?
• Who’s the narrator here? It’s definitely 3rd, but not necessarily omniscient or objective. Definitely seems to have it in for Buck.
• What exactly does it mean to have *untonsured* hair?
• What are the significance similarities/differences between Hamlet and Telemachus?
• Is Buck’s reference to the feminine Christ a subtle nod to Dan Brown’s work?

Adopt-An-Episode Update: We’re only have a little over a third of the episodes in Ulysses adopted. Please find it in your heart to become a parent!

NEXT: I will read 10 pages and post tomorrow!

Adopt-An-Episode or they will die!

—-

* = Technically, I read the first 2 pages of Ulysses. Page 1 just has a big letter and 2 words.

Odyssey Funmaries #18: Penelope (Book XXIII) **FINAL!**

By BROOKE JACKSON

As the first lady to contribute to Wandering Rocks, it is of course appropriate that I be the one funmarizing about our hero’s first lady, Penelope.

So as we know by now, back at the ranch, Penelope is on year 20 of same sh*t, different day. She has waited, weaved, unweaved, weaved again, unweaved again, wailed, whined, weaved some more and waited some more. I mean, it has been a really long freaking time.

Let’s put this in some perspective here: Remember Castaway? You know, Tom Hanks gets stuck on a tropical island, loses 140 pounds, learns how make fire and becomes BFF with a volleyball. All the while Helen Hunt keeps the search going for him, is told she’s crazy to think he’s still alive, holds a funeral, then finally gets over it and ‘lets him go.’ By the time Tom finally makes his odyssey back to Memphis, she’s married, has a new house, and even has a kid with the guy (a.k.a. “the suitor”). (But hey, at least she kept the car!) All this, in only FIVE YEARS, people. Five.

You can’t wait 5 years for this guy?

I guess when you look at it from this vantage, it’s not so difficult to understand that Penelope was in bed and depressed, deep in an Athena-induced-Vicodin-like sleep, when Odysseus came home. Penelope literally slept through the genocide of every Ithacan prince who has bothered her for the last two decades. Now they’re all heaped in a burning pile out back, and Odysseus is softscrubbing the whole bloody palace. And when her faithful, lifetime nurse comes upstairs to tell Penelope that her husband finally got home, Penelope gets ticked off that she was awoken from the best sleep she’s had in ages.

When she learns that the suitors have been slaughtered, she’s pretty excited, but she still refuses to believe that her husband has returned. It must be the gods, she explains to her loony nurse. But they still go downstairs to check out the scene.

Odysseus, long-enduring though he is, is probably pushing 50, which is no small thing given the life-expectancy back then (50 was the old 90). Plus, he still looks like a bum, smells like the doghouse, and just washed off gallons of blood with more gallons of household disinfectant and whatever he used to “purify” the castle. So, again, you can’t begrudge Penelope for being a little apprehensive.

Telly throws a hissy-fit that mom and dad aren’t getting along, so dad delegates him to take the wait-staff and throw a fake wedding party, to cover up the groans coming from the pile of mostly dead guys. I mean, we can’t have the neighbors talking. Better to have them first feel bad about not being invited to the wedding, and then have to hear it through the grapevine that the “party” was actually a mass murder.

So off they go, leaving the old lovers to chat. They go back and forth—half flirting and half fighting about who is more stubborn, and eventually Odysseus, master of tactics, simply threatens to go sleep in the guest room.

Of course, Penelope’s got a few tricks up her own sleeve. And they all involve the bed. (Cue sleazy porn music… now.) Penelope, calls the maid in, and asks her to move the bed out of the bridal chamber for their strange guest to sleep on.

Odysseus calls her bluff and proceeds to tell all about his mighty craftsmanship in building their unmovable tree-bed. An original, DIYer, Odysseus built the bedroom himself–around a big olive tree. But since left no room for a BED (hello!?), he chopped off the top of the tree, and carved a bed right into the trunk. Alright, it’s pretty cool, but it’s no treehouse:

Complete with tree-toilet!

He responds:

Woman—your words, they cut me to the core!

Who could move my bed? Impossible task,

Even for some skilled craftsman—unless a god

Came down in person, quick to lend a hand,

Lifted it out with ease and moved it elsewhere.

Not a man on earth, not even at peak strength,

Would find it easy to prise it up and shift it, no,

A great sign, a hallmark lies in its construction.

I know, I built it myself—no one else…

Ah yes, the great bed. This is an important symbol in our main attraction, Ulysses readers, so wake up, wipe the drool off your desk, and write this in your moleskine: Bed.

So Penelope finally believes that it is Odysseus after he spills the beans on the big tree-bed secret. And it MUST be him, since the gods can’t read blueprints, no one else could possibly know about this crazy bed that Odysseus, ever the talker, so mightily crafted. But I digress. They are happy, and eventually make their way to the big soft bed to “delight in each other.” But not before Odysseus tells Penelope that he’s going to have to leave again on a dangerous trip and kill a bunch of farm animals in order to apologize to Poseidon. If he does that, though, then they get a long, full life together.

Athena keeps it dark out (making this the Longest. Night. Ever.), and they make their way to bed, and now “rejoice in each other,” and then get caught up on the last twenty years, eventually falling asleep.

And great Odysseus told his wife of the pains

He had dealt out to other men and all the hardships

He’d endured himself—his story first to last—

And she listened on, enchanted…

Sleep never sealed her eyes till all was told.

Wandering Rocks starts Ulysses To-freaking-day!!!

Follow along in real time as Jerry tweets his way through page 1!

Starts at noon-ish!