Note: There will be no Zoom meeting on Thursday, the 13th of May 2021, as the day is the Day of Ascension.
The reading on Thursday, 6th May stopped at "... says he." (12.67)
(We completed Sirens, episode 11 and started with Cyclops, episode 12.)
Summary:
Episode 11
The episode 11 in which music is present in various forms, in its structure and terminology as well as in the reference to arie, songs, and musical instruments, reaches its high point (if one has to settle for just one) close to the end when Ben Dollard sings the tragic Irish ballad, The Croppy Boy, moving with his voice the hearts of all those assembled in the Hotel Ormond. Bloom wants to leave the hotel before the song ends. He is occupied with thoughts of Boylan, imagining how just at that time Boylan would perhaps be knocking at the door of Eccles street 7.
Listen to Kevin McDermott (1844-1892) rendering The Croppy Boy.
Episode 12
Cyclops, the succeeding episode, is a very funny and at the same time a serious episode. Its special characteristic is the insertion of 30 and more parodies/interpolations to highlight a particular point of interest.
The episode opens with a narrator, who is, and remains nameless. It is five o'clock in the afternoon, and as he is just talking to old Troy of the D. M. P. (an inspector of the Dublin Metropolitan Police), a chimney sweep passes by and nearly puts out his eye with his broom and ladder. The near miss of the chimney sweep’s broom and ladder (reminiscent of Odysseus’s burning pike of olive wood) suggests that the narrator is one of the Cyclopes (Gifford, 12.2-3). He sees Joe Hynes coming down the street, and tells him about this encounter with the chimney sweep. When Joe asks what the narrator is doing in these parts of the city, the narrator replies how he has been trying, without success, to collect bad debt from a plumber called Geraghty, who had bought nonperishable goods such as tea and sugar from Moses Herzog, a Jewish dealer, but then failed to pay.
Joe Hynes, a reporter, has been at a meeting of the Cattle Traders Association in the City Arms Hotel. He wants to inform someone referred to here as the citizen, for reasons not told, what went on at this meeting. He and the narrator walk round to Barney Kiernan's, 1 pub at 8-10, Little Britain Street near the courthouse on Green Street. Indeed, barristers from there used to adjourn to Barney Kiernen's to drink and discuss cases.
(Excerpted from Ulysses for the Uninitiated)
