The reading group has been split into two halves. The first half met on Oct. 20th and the second on Oct. 27th.
Both groups completed Hades, episode 6.
Summary (till the end of the episode):
At the end of the last reading, we had left Bloom thinking of using gramophones to remember dead people by recalling their voice. His pondering continues for a while and moves on to the ways in which - apart from burial in the ground - dead bodies can be disposed of: cremation, the Parsee tower of silence, burial in the sea, . . .
Soon gloomy thoughts leave Bloom. He feels that there is plenty to see and hear and feel yet (6.1003). He meets Martin Cunningham and John Henry Menton. Menton is quite abrupt with Bloom, who crestfallen, moves on reflecting over Menton's behaviour. (Gifford*/6.1025 explains that this last incidence has a Homeric echo. At the end of Book 11, Odysseus encounters in the underworld the shades of several of his former comrades in arms, including Ajax, who refuses to speak to Odysseus because he is still "burning" (angry) over the fact that in the contest over who was to bear Achilles' arms after his death, the Lady Thetis and Athena awarded the honour to Odysseus.)
* Ulysses Annotated by Don Gifford, ISBN 0-520-06745-2
(Summarized from the book, Ulysses for the Uninitiated.)
