I would hold Nabokov to be as 'musical' with words as Joyce, although in a very different way. Beckett too, in an equally different way again.

The sirens chapter truly is remarkable, but so is just about every other chapter!

The Sirens chapter has the advantage, though, of being quite short (if I remember correctly - I'm too lazy to go and get it down off the shelf...), and there's no reason that you couldn't read it and then go back again to where you were. Like much (all?) of the rest of the book, though, it is rather densely referential - does the edition you are reading have good/useful footnotes to help you find your way?

My book has afterward, but I can not find any comments on things that I don't know.
Before my friend left he started to read a little bit of chapter 11 (Sirens).
If you read the text like poetry it sounds like a horse galloping (or whatever horses do) and then they make that noise sometimes, like breathing out.
I like how Joyce is inventing new words (or rather sounds).
Imperthnthn thnthnthn
Chips, picking chips off rocky thumbnail, chips.
Horrid! And gold flushed more.
A husky fifenote blew.
Blew. Blue bloom is on the
Goldpinnacled hair.


I will need some help with that, but for now I think may be Joyce was a foreigner like me. He seems to find the words that sound the same, but mean different things and have different spelling.

You allow your servant to read Ulysses?

(Apologies if this reference to British legal history is impenetrable from your side of the globe, Robert.)

I did, in fact, catch that reference,but only because somebody had mentioned this earlier in the thread.

Ah, no wonder it was in my mind!

The paper is in Joyce Studies series, year 2004. The article is by Judith Harrington and is called "Suburban Tenor".
The authore writes that "Sirens" is the musical and emotional center of Ulysses. The episode opens with a stunning overture of sixty-three lines, constructed with very short phrases from characters or conversation in the episode along with abbreviated bits of song fragments and an array of percussive sound effects. For Sirens Joyce assigned the technique of a Fuga ad canonem, which is imprecise, since "Sirens" ignores the structural rules for a fugue, although the writing certainly takes flight. (The word fugue comes from the Italian for flight.)
Bowen has written that "Sirens" features some forty-seven songs: we'll only be able to look at a few of the songs. Bloom has gone to the Ormond hotel for an early meal - hoping to distract himself from thinking about Molly's four o'clock assignation with Blazes Boylan. However, Boylan startles Bloom by dropping into the Ormond Hotel Bar for a quick drink before continuing on to his appointment with Molly. Bowen and Knowles have each explored how canny Joyce can be. Simon Dedalus plays 'Good buy Sweetheart Good Buy' on the Ormond Hotel's bar-room piano - only while Boylan is there.
The article is about 37 pages long. It will take me a long time to understand the chapter Sirens with all distractions I have. 

I had no idea that Joyce had musical ambitions. Loigi Denza (composer and professor of singing) was impressed with Joyce's voice. Joyce took the third prize in Feis Ceoil competition because he refused to sight-read a third song. Palmieri offered Joyce three years of voice lessons in exchange for a percentage of future earnings. The offer was not accepted.
There are still Feic Ceoil competitions now. It is just becomes more and more fascinating for me.

I am not sure about Joyce's son being a tenor.  He also had a daughter.

Bloom eats his meal at the Ormond Hotel with Richie Goulding. Simon Dedalus' brother-in-low. Goulding talks obsessively about the tenor aria - Totto e Sciolta or All is lost now' from Bellini's La Sonnambula. (One of Joyce's poems is also titled 'Tutto e Sciolto'). In "Sirens", Goulding rattles on and on about Joe Maas' great rendishion of the Bellini aria. His aggravating one-song conversation finally annoys Bloom, who thinks Richie is failing.
The pretext for Boylan's visit to Molly is to bring her the up-coming concert program. She is scheduled to sing 'La ci darem la mano' from Mozart'sDon Giovanni with J C Doyle. (Joyce sang with Doyle at the Horse Show Concert in 1904). Molly is also to sing 'Love's Old Sweet Song,' whih runs through both Bloom's and Molly's minds all through Ulysses.
In Mozart's Don Giovanni Zarlina finds herself tempter. We can't help it but compare Zarlina and Masetto with Boylan, Molly and Bloom. Instead ot facing the implications of her affair, Bloom fixates over the promumciation and phrasing in La ci darem, which he characteristicaly has slightly wrong.