Apparently it's one of the antiphons used in the Roman Catholic mass. (I'm referring to this article from Wikipedia). It's part of a series of rituals that the priest carries out before going up to the altar and seems to be a prayer for the clergy alone. I imagine this is why Buck Mulligan intones it as he is shaving.


Joyce is also Bloom...

Daedalus is one of those characters that is (for me at least) endlessly fascinating.
He builds the bull which enables Pasiphae to mate with the black bull of Poseidon.
He then builds the labyrinth to incarcerate the offspring born of this mating (the Minotaur).
He is then imprisoned at the centre of the labyrinth so that the secret of how to escape from it will never be discovered.
He then builds a set of wings so that both he and his son, Icarus, can escape.
As everyone knows, Icarus can't get the hang of regulating his altitude and ends up plummeting to his death.
Daedalus survives.

So this means that the surname has so many connotations. Is Ullyses a labyrinth? Who or where is the minotaur (I suppose the equivalent might be the cyclops in the pub)? The story of Minos and Daedalus is full of father/son, father/daughter, mother/son relationships: Minos to Ariadne, Pasiphae to the Minotaur, Daedalus to Icarus, Venus to Lucifer. It is implied at various points that Stephen sees Bloom as some kind of surrogate father and Joyce had problematic relationships with his own son and daughter (and there are a few connotations that could be drawn from the story of Daedalus?).

I've also read somewhere (though I forget where) that an aspect of the Dedalus/Bloom relationship is actually reflecting the relationship of Beckett to Joyce.

Stephen Dedalus first appears in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was my first experience of Joyce (aged, I think, 16 or so). I loved it then but I wonder whether I'd love it if I read it again.

It's also over 10 years since I read Ullyses. Time to go back I think. But not yet.

The internet now is very useful tool. I keep forgetting.

Further progress in the understanding of atoms did not occur until the science of chemistry began to develop. In 1661, natural philosopher Robert Boyle published The Sceptical Chymist in which he argued that matter was composed of various combinations of different "corpuscules" or atoms, rather than the classical elements of air, earth, fire and water.

As copyright is concerned it says here: This is crucial now that the copyright protection for the first-edition text of Ulysses has expired in most of the world and will end soon in the United States, with the result that many editions are becoming available.

It is written in Afterward by Michael Groden in August of 1993.

Thank you. I at list made a small step toward reading this book.

This is precisely why I suggested starting with Portait of the Artist as a Young Man, t-p: Joyce's experiments with narrative language begin there, and it's a shorter and (comparatively) easier book to assimilate than either Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake. Don't forget that you really need a working knowledge of Homer's Odyssey to appreciate the narrative structure of Ulysses, too: there's a constant interplay between the the two plots, often of a parodic nature: the very name of Joyce's book itself being but the first reference to this.

I'm not saying that Portrait is necessary to introduce a reader to Ulysses, hh, but I am suggesting that it's an easier way into Joyce, and his stylistic games.

The fact that Joyce invents, reinvents and reconfigures language almost continually makes him a daunting enough prospect for most native speakers of English, let alone someone who still appears to be acquiring it, hh.

I'm rather mystified why t-p's Irish friends should have encouraged her to set off on such an enterprise as reading Finnegan's Wake when it seems likely to involve a learning curve similar to that of a rocket trajectory.

I first read Ulysses in English when I was sixteen.

I still haven't read it