Aquacity and originality (Bloomsday)

From the “Ithaca” episode of Ulysses. In the early hours of June 17, 1904, Leopold Bloom washes his hands and invites Stephen Dedalus to do the same. The catechetical narrator of this episode reports Stephen’s response: no, he is hydrophobic. He hates “partial contact by immersion or total by submersion in cold water” and last took a bath in October. He distrusts “the aqueous substances of glass and crystal” and “aquacities of thought and language.”

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

[Bloomsday : “the 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses” (Oxford English Dictionary ).]

“Kraahraark!” (Bloomsday)

It’s June 16, 1904, and Leopold Bloom is, as he often is, inventing. From the “Hades” episode, after the graveside service for Paddy Dignam:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Mr. Bloom would no doubt be interested in AI efforts to ventriloquize the dead. And in hologram performances by the dead. And in gravestones with QR codes and recipes.

I think Joyce would have been amused by this story of an Irish voice out of the grave. But he’d have to go to YouTube to get the video that captured the moment.

Related reading
All OCA Joyce posts (Pinboard)

[Bloomsday : “the 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses” (Oxford English Dictionary ). “Wisdom Hely’s”: Charles Wisdom Hely, (1856–1929), Dublin printer and stationer. Another mourner in this episode recalls that Bloom as having been “in the stationery line.” “Yes,” says another, “in Wisdom Hely’s. A traveller for blottingpaper.” In other words, a salesman.]

Missing posts

For some reason, two Bloomsday posts today never made it to my RSS, The Old Reader. I don’t know about other services. So just in case, here they are: “Fellows of the right kidney” and How to enjoy Ulysses.

Bloomsday 2022

Stephen Dedalus closes his eyes as he walks with his father Simon:

James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

Thursday, June 16, 1904. The day begins:

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922).

Bloom is indeed a fellow of the right kidney. The left too. But Simon Dedalus could never have imagined his son in the company of Mr. Bloom.

I have to grant that the kidney bit is almost certainly no more than coincidence. But if Hugh Kenner can make meaning of his car’s odometer reading on Bloomsday, I’m entitled to this kidney connection.

Related reading
All OCA Bloomsday posts

[Bloomsday : “the 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses” (Oxford English Dictionary ). Stephen’s closing his eyes as he walks already prefigures the Proteus episode of Ulysses.]

Bloomsday 2021

From the National Jukebox at the Library of Congress, “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” music by J.L. Molloy, words by G. Clifton Bingham, sung by Corinne Morgan, recorded October 3, 1904. Listen.

Here is a 2008 Bloomsday post with more about the song and its place in Ulysses.

Related reading
All OCA Bloomsday posts

[Bloomsday : “the 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses” (Oxford English Dictionary ).]

Bloomsday 2020

From “Ithaca,” my favorite episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Here is Leopold Bloom, “potential poet”:



Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)
2014 (Bloom, Stephen, their respective ages)
2015 (Stephen and company, very drunk)
2016 (“I dont like books with a Molly in them”)
2017 (Bloom and Stephen, “like and unlike reactions”)
2018 (“One sole unique advertisement”)
2019 (“To knock or not to knock”)

[Bloomsday : “the 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses” (Oxford English Dictionary).]

Bloomsday 2019

From “Ithaca,” my favorite episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). In the wee small hours of the morning of June 17, 1904, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus arrive at Bloom’s place, 7 Eccles Street, Dublin:



Bloom, a wily Odysseus, gains entry by climbing over the railing, dropping down into the area, and opening the door to the kitchen. He then walks upstairs and lets Stephen in through the front door. No. 7 was torn down in 1967. The door and its frame were saved.

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)
2014 (Bloom, Stephen, their respective ages)
2015 (Stephen and company, very drunk)
2016 (“I dont like books with a Molly in them”)
2017 (Bloom and Stephen, “like and unlike reactions to experience”)
2018 (“One sole unique advertisement”)

[Bloomsday : “the 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses.” Area : “a sunken court giving access to the basement of a house, separated from the pavement by railings, with a flight of steps providing access.” Definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary.]

Bloomsday 2018

From James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), a passage from my favorite episode of the novel, “Ithaca,” which takes the form of a catechism. What Leopold Bloom thinks about when he goes to sleep:



Many years ago I wrote a note in the margin for “one sole unique advertisement”: “in a sense he’s a poet, an Imagist.” Well, maybe. And another for “not exceeding,” &c.: “not Ulysses!” True that.

The word of the day from the Oxford English Dictionary today is Bloomsday: “The 16th of June 1904. Also: the 16th of June of any year, on which celebrations take place, esp. in Ireland, to mark the anniversary of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses.”

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)
2014 (Bloom, Stephen, their respective ages)
2015 (Stephen and company, very drunk)
2016 (“I dont like books with a Molly in them”)
2017 (Bloom and Stephen, “like and unlike reactions to experience”)

Bloomsday 2017

It is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) begins on June 16, 1904, and ends in the early hours of the following day. Here is a passage from “Ithaca,” the novel’s penultimate episode, and my favorite. (Episodes, not chapters: like the Odyssey .) Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are walking.



Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)
2014 (Bloom, Stephen, their respective ages)
2015 (Stephen and company, very drunk)
2016 (“I dont like books with a Molly in them”)

Bloomsday 2016

It is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) begins on June 16, 1904, and ends in the early hours of the following day. Here is a passage from “Penelope,” the novel’s final episode. (Episodes, not chapters: like the Odyssey .) Molly Bloom, Mrs. Leopold Bloom, is lying in bed awake and thinking.



So we know what Mrs. Bloom would think of Ulysses .

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)
2014 (Bloom, Stephen, their respective ages)
2015 (Stephen and company, very drunk)

Bloomsday 2015

It is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) begins on June 16, 1904, and ends in the early hours of the following day. Here is a passage from “The Oxen of the Sun,” the novel’s fourteenth episode. The setting is a maternity hospital, where a Mrs. Purefoy is in labor, and where Stephen Dedalus and medical-student friends carouse. In Joyce’s schema for Ulysses, the technic of “The Oxen of the Sun” is “embryonic development”: the episode is written in shifting styles that chronicle the development of English prose, ending in parody, slang, slurred speech, and the language of an American revival preacher: “The Deity ain’t no nickel dime bumshow.” It is getting late (“Keep a watch on the clock”), and Stephen Dedalus and company are very drunk:


[From the Modern Library edition (1961).]

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)
2014 (Bloom, Stephen, their respective ages)

Bloomsday 2014

It is Bloomsday. James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922) begins on June 16, 1904, and stretches into the early hours of June 17. Here is a passage from “Ithaca,” the novel’s catechitical next-to-last episode. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are in Bloom’s kitchen, sharing the sacrament of Epps’s Cocoa.

What relation existed between their ages?

16 years before in 1888 when Bloom was of Stephen’s present age Stephen was 6. 16 years after in 1920 when Stephen would be of Bloom’s present age Bloom would be 54. In 1936 when Bloom would be 70 and Stephen 54 their ages initially in the ratio of 16 to 0 would be as 17 1/2 to 13 1/2, the proportion increasing and the disparity diminishing according as arbitrary future years were added, for if the proportion existing in 1883 had continued immutable, conceiving that to be possible, till then 1904 when Stephen was 22 Bloom would be 374 and in 1920 when Stephen would be 38, as Bloom then was, Bloom would be 646 while in 1952 when Stephen would have attained the maximum postdiluvian age of 70 Bloom, being 1190 years alive having been born in the year 714, would have surpassed by 221 years the maximum antediluvian age, that of Methusalah, 969 years, while, if Stephen would continue to live until he would attain that age in the year 3072 A.D., Bloom would have been obliged to have been alive 83,300 years, having been obliged to have been born in the year 81,396 B.C.

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)
2013, 2013 (Bloom and fatherhood)

Bloomsday and Father’s Day (2)

[From the “Circe” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).]

The scene: Bella Cohen’s brothel. Drunk, abandoned by his friends, Stephen Dedalus has insulted the king, and an English soldier has punched him in the face. Leopold Bloom, who knows Stephen's father Simon, has been following Stephen at a distance and comes to his aid. As Bloom assumes a fatherly role, he sees an apparition of his son Rudolph (Rudy), who died in infancy eleven years ago. Bloom : Stephen :: Odysseus : Telemachus. Father and son. This is one of my favorite passages in Ulysses.

Stephen is murmuring bits of William Butler Yeats’s poem “Who Goes with Fergus?” Bloom’s misunderstanding — “Ferguson, I think I caught. A girl. Some girl.” — is charming and quintessentially Bloomian.

Previous Bloomsday posts
2007 (S, M, P )
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (“Bloom, waterlover”)
2011 (“the creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)

Bloomsday and Father’s Day (1)

[From the “Calypso” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).]

“There is a young student comes here some evenings named Bannon his cousins or something are big swells”: dig the run-on sentence. Milly Bloom is her mother Molly’s daughter. But it’s her father Leopold who gets a letter. Molly : Poldy :: Milly : Papli.

The song “Seaside Girls” runs through Ulysses. The song’s writer: Harry B. Norris, not Molly’s “suitor” Blazes Boylan or any other Boylan.

Previous Bloomsday posts
2007 (S, M, P )
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (“Bloom, waterlover”)
2011 (“the creature cocoa”)
2012 (Plumtree’s Potted Meat)

Bloomsday 2012

From the catechetical “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922):

What is home without Plumtree’s Potted Meat?

Incomplete.

With it an abode of bliss.

Manufactured by George Plumtree, 23 Merchants' quay, Dublin, put up in 4 oz pots, and inserted by Councillor Joseph P. Nannetti, M. P., Rotunda Ward, 19 Hardwicke street, under the obituary notices and anniversaries of deceases. The name on the label is Plumtree. A plumtree in a meatpot, registered trade mark. Beware of imitations. Peatmot. Trumplee. Moutpat. Plamtroo.

The present time of Ulysses: June 16, 1904. (The novel ends in the early hours of June 17.) June 16 is Bloomsday, named for the novel’s hero, Leopold Bloom. “Potted meat” is death: yes, ads for Plumtree’s appear in the newspaper under obituary notices, and Bloom’s just-buried friend Paddy Dignam is, as Bloom thinks, potted meat. Potted meat is also sexual union, something missing from Leopold and Molly Bloom’s marriage. Without: incomplete. With: yes, an abode of bliss. Yes: that’s Molly’s last word, the novel’s last word. Happy Bloomsday.

[The Strand Magazine, December 1898.]

Other Bloomsdays
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)
2011 (“[T]he creature cocoa”)

“[T]he creature cocoa”

Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, and a moment of hospitality:

How did Bloom prepare a collation for a gentile?

He poured into two teacups two level spoonfuls, four in all, of Epps’s soluble cocoa and proceeded according to the directions for use printed on the label, to each adding after sufficient time for infusion the prescribed ingredients for diffusion in the manner and in the quantity prescribed.

What supererogatory marks of special hospitality did the host show his guest?

Relinquishing his symposiarchal right to the moustache cup of imitation Crown Derby presented to him by his only daughter, Millicent (Milly), he substituted a cup identical with that of his guest and served extraordinarily to his guest and, in reduced measure, to himself the viscous cream ordinarily reserved for the breakfast of his wife Marion (Molly).

Was the guest conscious of and did he acknowledge these marks of hospitality?

His attention was directed to them by his host jocosely, and he accepted them seriously as they drank in jocoserious silence Epps’s massproduct, the creature cocoa.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

Most of the events of Ulysses take place on June 16, 1904, Bloomsday. The above passage is from the novel’s catechetical “Ithaca” episode, set in the wee small hours of June 17. Massproduct: yes, there’s something sacramental in this scene.

Why “the creature cocoa”? The Oxford English Dictionary explains: “[After 1 Timothy 4:4 (‘every creature of God is good’).] Freq. in good creature. A material comfort; something which promotes well-being, esp. food. Obs.”

[Advertisement from The Popular Science Review (1871).]

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)
2010 (Leopold Bloom, “water lover”)

Bloomsday 2010

Bloomsday: Thursday, June 16, 1904, the day during which most of the events of James Joyce’s Ulysses take place. In the early morning of June 17, 1904, Leopold Bloom is putting water on to boil. He is making cocoa for his guest Stephen Dedalus and himself:

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

[Hydrokinetic: “relating to the motion of liquids.” Multisecular: “that has existed for many ages; recurring in, or involving many ages.” Luteofulvous: “of a tawny yellow colour.” Homothetic: “similar and similarly placed.” Waterparting: “watershed.” Rhabdomantic: “related to rhabdomancy” (”divination by means of a rod or wand; spec. a technique for searching for underground water, minerals, etc.; dowsing”). Hygrometric: “belonging to hygrometry; measuring, or relating to, the degree of humidity of the atmosphere or other bodies”. Scutch: “to dress (fibrous material, flax, hemp, cotton, silk, wool) by beating.” Lacustrine: “of or pertaining to a lake or lakes.” Definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary. This passage provides the first OED citation for multisecular.]

Other Bloomsday posts
2007 (The first page)
2008 (“Love’s Old Sweet Song”)
2009 (Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses)

Bloomsday

[Marilyn Monroe reading Ulysses, Long Island, 1954. Photograph by Eve Arnold, via UT-Austin.]

Other Bloomsday posts
Bloomsday 2007
Bloomsday 2008

Bloomsday 2008

June 16, 1904: Mrs. Leopold (Marion, Molly) Bloom will soon embark on a concert tour. Later today she's meeting Blazes Boylan, the (ahem) "organiser" of the tour, to (ahem) rehearse. Mr. Bloom notices a letter in Boylan's handwriting:

A strip of torn envelope peeped from under the dimpled pillow. In the act of going he stayed to straighten the bedspread.

—Who was the letter from? he asked.

Bold hand. Marion.

—O, Boylan, she said. He's bringing the programme.

—What are you singing?

—La ci darem with J. C. Doyle, she said, and Love's Old Sweet Song.

In the Homeric schema of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), Leopold Bloom is Odysseus; Molly Bloom, Penelope; Blazes Boylan, a suitor. "Love's Old Sweet Song" (1884, music by J.L. Molloy, words by G. Clifton Bingham) floats through the novel and suggests the crucial question of the Blooms' marriage: is Love's old song to be found only in memory, or might it (like Odysseus) yet return?

Once in the dear dead days beyond recall,
When on the world the mists began to fall,
Out of the dreams that rose in happy throng
Low to our hearts Love sang an old sweet song;
And in the dusk where fell the firelight gleam,
Softly it wove itself into our dream.

Just a song a twilight, when the lights are low,
And the flick'ring shadows softly come and go,
Tho' the heart be weary, sad the day and long,
Still to us at twilight comes Love's old song,
     comes Love's old sweet song.

Even today we hear Love's song of yore,
Deep in our hearts it dwells forevermore.
Footsteps may falter, weary grow the way,
Still we can hear it at the close of day.
So till the end, when life's dim shadows fall,
Love will be found the sweetest song of all.

Just a song a twilight, when the lights are low,
And the flick'ring shadows softly come and go,
Tho' the heart be weary, sad the day and long,
Still to us at twilight comes Love's old song,
     comes Love's old sweet song.

Related post
Bloomsday

A few words from Buck Mulligan

"Today the bards must drink and junket. Ireland expects that every man this day will do his duty."

Buck Mulligan, in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922)

I've taken these words out of context: Buck Mulligan is speaking of June 16, 1904, and he's parodying Horatio Lord Nelson.

But all that aside: Happy Saint Patrick's Day.

(The name Leddy is Irish.)

Related posts
Bloomsday
An Irish post