Odyssey Completed !

After two months of nightly work and a lot of confusion, I can finally cross another item off my “To do before you die” list. Last week I finished reading James Joyce´s “Ulysses”. I´ve been working on and off since freshmen year at Rolla on a list of the top 100 novels of all time. I read one off the list every so often, and I think I´m about half done. “Ulysses” is number one on the list and many years ago I tried to start reading it. I literally couldn´t get through the first page. So I decided to leave that one off until I had a bit of time on my hands (I was thinking retirement, or rehabbing from major surgery), but I think Peace Corps service is an even better opportunity.

I had to do some research work first by re-reading Joyce´s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and reading Homer´s “Iliad” and “Odyssey”. All together with “Ulysses” and the annotations that I had to read in order to understand the novel, I ended up reading 2,427 pages in order to semi-understand a 782 page book. I say semi-understand because that was about all I could do. Here are two examples from the book to show what I´m talking about and an explanation in my words. (Note: These excerpts are being disseminated without the expressed written consent of the Author or Major League Baseball)…

Excerpt #1 – This is from the second part of the first episode

INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro de color che sanno. Limit of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane, adiaphane. If you put five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut you eyes and see.

Excerpt #2 – This is from the first page of the eleventh episode

BRONZE BY GOLD HEARD THE HOOFIRONS, STEELYRINING imperthn thnthnthn.
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips. Horrid!
And gold flushing more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the
Gold pinnacled hair.
A jumping rose on satiny breasts of satin, rose of Castille.
Trilling, trilling: Idolores
Peep! Who´s in the . . . . peepofgold?
Tink cried to bronze in pity.
And a call, pure, long and throbbing. Longindying call.
Decoy. Soft word. But look! The bright stars fade. O rose!

Explanation??

OK, so the whole book is written about one day and it is the stream of consciousness style. Excerpt #1 is one of the main characters (also the main character in “A Portrait..”) on the beach near Dublin. He is thinking about Aristotle´s views on the lack of interaction between what is seen and the seer (as opposed to hearing, taste, touch). He then contrasts that in his flow of thought to the views of Jakob Boehme and George Berkeley. He then performs a thought exercise on how Aristotle would refute the other´s views in a manor similar to Samuel Johnson. Then he quotes a line from Dante that refers to Aristotle and finishes with a comic saying similar to one of Dr. Johnson´s definitions to act as a counterbalance to the high thought.

Excerpt #2 is from a chapter that was written to parody the scene in “The Odyssey” where Ulysses/Odysseus and his crew encounter the Sirens. Since the Sirens lure the crew with singing, the whole chapter is written as a fugue, a type of music perfected by Bach and most popularly know in the repetition of the chorus of “Row Row Row Your Boat” by several people starting at separate times. Therefore, Joyce must write or “play” all the notes and themes of his chapter at the beginning and then gradually elaborate and combine them into the desired harmony. The excerpt is the “notes” that will be elaborated on. For example Bronze and Gold are the colors of the hair of the bartenders where this chapter takes place, the hoof irons are from a carriage that passes in the middle of the chapter, “imperthn thnthnthn” mocks the lisp of the bar back, and “Chips, picking…” is the sound of another main character cleaning his fingernails as he later enters the bar.

Joyce uses eighteen different writing styles for the episodes in “Ulysses” and references everything from the lives of the Saints to modern song. Obviously I couldn´t get all of this myself, which is why the annotations and pre-reading was necessary. I also have to thank Conor Magee for his help while he was visiting (and from discussions in college and while we were living together in Chicago) on Irish history and the independence movement of the nineteenth century.

As you can see from two paragraphs, getting through 782 pages was a chore. I´m glad I did it, and highly recommend it to someone with a bit of time. It was an enjoyable book to say the least and I learned a ton of useless facts (some of my favorite things). One example to end this subject with. Did You Know? That the term “Hocus Pocus” comes from a modification of the Latin Hoc es Corpus, which means “This is the body”. This modification of the language of the Catholic mass was done by some Protestants to invalidate the Catholic belief in the transubstantiation, or the changing of host and wine into the body and blood of Christ by referring to it as “Magic” or “Hocus Pocus”.

So for some actual work I´m supposed to be doing. I had an extremely busy week because it was time for the monthly “Cobro” or “Charge” at the community bank. I spent 9, 10, and 8 hours respectively on Wednesday through Friday. I´m learning a lot about the system, so on Thursday morning I pretty much ran things while my counterpart was at work. It feels good to help out, but the system they have could be improved. I´ve offered my suggestions, but they want to stick with what they have.

I also was asked to help in an interesting agricultural problem (that is what I´m supposed to be doing full-time, right?). One of the ladies I know asked me to look at her sheep the other day. I had a little training on animal care, but I really don’t want to spend much time with animals, so usually I tell people that I can´t help them with that. Since this lady is always nice to me, I said I´d take a look. Unfortunately our training didn´t cover this particular problem. She showed me the sheep she bought for breeding and pointed out it´s “huevos”. I said OK, and then she pulled up it´s tail and showed me the sheep´s vagina too. I don´t know how to say hermaphrodite in Spanish and it isn´t in my dictionary, but that is what she had. She wanted to know what to do with it: sell it or try to breed it. I thought a second and said that we should eat it. She didn´t like that answer and is currently trying to sell it. So buyer beware!

I also saw that my neighbor had planted the radish seeds that I gave her. She had just thrown them in a row in an empty space in her field. They were all coming up on top of each other. I explained that they needed space, so we had to transplant them (even though you shouldn´t do this with root vegetables). She didn´t agree, so I did most of it myself. She did a little, but still didn´t give them enough space. I left some planted the original way, so we can see the difference with the three groups in a couple of weeks. The people in my site have been growing crops their entire lives, but only onions and potatoes. I have about as much gardening experience as Eva Gabor in “Green Acres”, but a little common sense goes a long way.
Got some bad news from the garden at the High School this week. We had a bad hail storm the other day (The worst I´ve ever seen), and it killed pretty much everything in the garden. We ripped it all out and put it in the worm bed, but it was disheartening. Luckily, my cabbage wasn´t hurt too bad.

Finally, happy Turkey Day to everyone! I´ll be spending mine at the residence of the United States Ambassador to Ecuador. I guess she was impressed by the visit to my site, or I just replied to the invitation first. Either way, I´ll be enjoying and fancy dinner with a couple other PCVs in Quito. Afterword we are planning on watching some football together, so It´ll be just like home (minus family and both my Grandma´s pecan pies).
One Note: The stores down here all have had Christmas decorations on sale for a week now. Christmas in November, that´s one American custom I could do without.