Big Saturday catch up on your emails!

Oops! Dozed off part way through! If you are counting, that's two!

Yes, I am counting. It’s going to go on the website when I have a chance to add a tally! Please keep telling whenever it happens.

Quite an insight into Mr. Bloom. Just haven't figured him out Do we know his age?
Curiosity about his age sent me back to Google. So Bloom is about thirty-five. Made some assumptions about his behavior towards women. Of course that led me back to Google and James's marital status. Not necessarily all that relevant to episode 5, but it does explain some of his thoughts and behavior towards women.)

Yeah… there’s A Lot going on there. You might appreciate this essay on how this “dangerous, voyeuristic, transgressive, exciting” novel has “been welcomed as a gift by writers such as Edna O’Brien, Eimear McBride and Mary Costello, while his innovative genius is more often declared a burden by the men.”

It gives me a chuckle that this writer’s mother confiscated her copy of Ulysses, while I’m reading it with mine. Although—we wouldn’t have done this when I was 14 for a number of reasons.

The other biggie is his relationship with the church. Why if he was on his way to a funeral would he stop in a church and attend a mass? In earlier episodes he made enough references to the bible and Catholicism that we can conclude, he no longer adheres to the church. He has had sufficient religious training... upbringing that scriptural references and Catholic connections come to mind. "This is my body" Will he get to the funeral?

I think Bloom going to church is funny; it’s Joyce’s irony at work. Bloom is Jewish, and it seems to me that he goes to church to kill time and fantasize about women. He’s obviously an absolute skirt-chaser. This episode left me feeling like I’d been cat-called, honestly.

But we’re in the Lotus Eaters episode! My annotations book tells me that the Lotus Eaters are “Cabhorses, Communicants, Soldiers, Eunuchs, Bather, Watchers of Cricket.” I can’t help but think of the old Marx saw “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” Bloom (a Jewish man) visits a foreign place (Catholic church) and finds it inhabited by people addicted to a food (the Eucharist) that keeps them under its control (think back to Stephen’s “servant of two masters” comment at 1.638). It’s almost too on the nose!

And at the same time, Bloom feels like something of a Lotus Eater himself in his obsession with sex: his drug of choice is women. After all, the organ for this section is “The Genitals.”

My take on Ulysses so far is that it’s basically all just world-building. Except instead of an epic fantasy world of, say, hobbits and wizards and elves and orcs (or gods, monsters, kings and sailors), it’s Dublin on a particular day in 1904.

The sexism and antisemitism on display are a part of that world, and something that, I think, JJ is attempting to skewer. Which isn’t to say that JJ wasn’t weird about women in his own way… but there’s a lot going on here, and it is leading up to the inside of Molly Bloom’s mind—the mind of a woman modelled after Joyce’s beloved partner—with an inner monologue that was, for its time, if not revolutionary then at least a Hot Take that raised some eyebrows.

It’s going to take some patience to get there, tho.

K.