This is a clockwork of an episode: JJ wrote the thing while looking at a map, and worked out all the timings of the characters. And yes, some dingdong with a stopwatch determined that "the spatiotemporal interrelationships in the episode all work out properly with respect to each other and the topography of Dublin" (Slote et al. [437] citing the work of Clive Hart, who I am sure isn't actually a dingdong; JJ's just making me cranky).

So we've got 19 mini-episodes unfolding between 2:55 and 4 pm—small scenes of Dubliners dublining their way around Dublin. All reasonably readable except for one trick: there are "interpolations" from one minisode to another, in which little flashes of the action happening elsewhere break into the scene we're reading. So it's not that, for instance, at line 56 that the dancing teacher Maginni actually passes Father Conmee on the street. Rather, JJ is letting us know that in the moment when Father Conmee continues walking after the kiddo mails his letter, Maginni is walking elsewhere in Dublin. They're about 800 metres apart in 'reality,' even though Maginni gets a paragraph in Conmee's story. It's like that Simpsons episode, "22 Short Films About Springfield."

It's not easy to track all the stuff that's going on here without a thorough knowledge of Dublin geography, and a good memory for names. If you're reading along and something seems out of the blue, it's probably because it's actually happening a mile away at the same moment.

Here are a couple of annotations that stood out to me. The curaçao one cracks me up; scholars all use the Gabler edition but they never miss a chance to snipe at his work.

10.547: curaçoa
Curaçao: A liqueur consisting of spirits flavoured with the peel of bitter oranges, and sweetened'; curaçao is the proper Spanish spelling, but curaçoa is a common misspelling in English (OED). Joyce wrote this without the cedilla (Rosenbach f. 18). Gabler emends based on an ambiguous mark on the typescript as well as the conventional English spelling JA. vol. 13, p. 17; UCSE, pp. 502-03, 1740).

10.950-51: he can put that writ where Jacko put the nuts
Put it where the monkey put the nuts: a late 19th century exclamation of coarse dismissal, 'i.e., shove it up your arse!' (Jonathon Green, Cassells Dictionary of Slang). Jacko: generic name for a monkey (OED, s.v. jocko).

And since I shared what a Latin Quarter hat looks like, a "tallyho cap" (10.1264) looks like what you'd expect.

Glancing ahead to episode 11, I feel like I should prepare you a little. This episode, the Sirens, is very musical as you would expect. There are apparently all kinds of complicated things going on in terms of an underlying musical theory based on fugues. It's enough to send one into a fugue state (har har). Here's what's up with the opening lines of the episode:

11.1: Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyringing
The first fifty-nine [one-line] paragraphs of this musically inflected episode function like the exposition to a fugue. "The exposition of a fugue is the opening section in which the voices enter one by one, each stating the principal theme, or Subject, of the fugue, followed by the Countersubject if present (Grove; Witen, James Joyce and Absolute Music, p. 166 n. 31). That is, this opening section consists of a succession of short, often abbreviated or syncopated quotes from elsewhere in the episode, mostly in order, and thus serves as a listing of the various themes and motifs from the episode (see note at 11.633). This particular line is a shortened version of the first line of the episode proper, 'Bronze by gold, miss Douces head by miss Kennedy's head, over the crossblind of the Ormond bar heard the viceregal hoofs go by, ringing steel' (11.64-65); this line was also anticipated in Wandering Rocks (10.962-63 and 10.1197-99).

You'd better still be reading this damned book. I'm at a stage of questioning what even is a novel and why do we read and what is fiction supposed to do and what is reading for and what makes a book good and literally why? People hold up Ulysses as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and I just wonder how it could be. Is it doing what it set out to do? Did JJ achieve his vision? And even if the answer to those last two questions is "yes", does that make it a good novel from the perspective of a reader?

Thanks for the birthday wishes. I'm taking it easy today—off to the library to pick up some Ulysses-related books because this thing that you wanted to read has taken over my life—and get some coffee. [Husband] and I are going to go into the city on Saturday to celebrate properly.

Love,

K.