(In case you missed last week participating in the virtual events celebrating Bloomsday, below are two links that could be of interesting:
Bloomsday Readings and Songs from the James Joyce Center, Dublin
I Said Yes: A Celebration of Bloomsday at The Rosenbach from The Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia)
The reading stopped at ". . . be paid." (12.1359)
Summary:
The citizen's next remarks about strangers coming over here to Ireland filling the country with bugs (12.1141) aimed obviously at Bloom, a foreigner amidst the Dubliners, are ignored by Bloom. He looks to be awfully deeply interested in nothing, a spider's web in the corner (12.1160), . . . the citizen scowling after him, and the old dog at his feet looking up to know who to bite and when (12.1161). It is a very picturesque sentence. One can almost breathe the anti-semitic, anti-foreigner air in the room.
As the citizen's next remark about a dishonoured wife (12.1163) induces Alf Bergan to produce, gigglingly, a copy of the Police Gazette, a forerunner of today's tabloids, John Wyse Nolan and Lenehan enter, having come from a meeting in the city hall. It is time for another interpolation with a reference to the most obedient city (12.1185).
There is more nationalistic talk amongst the pub-goers, who praise the Irish language contrasting it with English, triggering another interpolation, written about an ancient Irish hero in the old Irish past. Bloom mingles in the talk a little awkwardly and uncharacteristically aggressively. The talk eventually moves on to how England exploited Ireland and left it virtually without trees. (The issue of deforestation was indeed a genuine concern at the time.) The ensuing interpolation, true to type, brings up the idea of breeding trees in a parody of a tree wedding.
The aggressive talk continues to how the English starved the Irish, how they were cruel in discipline and training . . ., then to the French and the Germans. The talk about the British heralds another hilarious parody of the Catholic Credo!
(Excerpted from Ulysses for the Uninitiated)
