Bloomsday News and Report from the May 2011 Meeting

Happy Bloomsday! If you're in Philly (and if you belong to the Philly Finnegans Wake Reading Group, you probably are), there are a number of fantastic events coming up the week of June 16th. Visit the Rosenbach Museum & Library for the Exiles and Expats exhibit, which explores Joyce's years in Paris -- expertly curated by Melanie Micir! The Rosenbach will be hosting its annual outdoor reading all day on June 16th. If you'd like a different take on Joyce, head over to 17th and Delancey to Plays and Players, which will be running Patrick Fitzgerald's dramatic adaptation of Ulysses, Gibraltar, a moving retelling of the Blooms' love story.

Finally, I'm sure you've been following the work of Rob Berry and Josh Levitas on Ulysses Seen, a comic book adaptation of Joyce's novel. They've been releasing new pages for Calypso every week since May, with the entirety of the episode due to be up by Bloomsday -- just in time for the release of their iPad app! Rob will be speaking with Patrick Fitzgerald and Mike Barsanti on June 15th at Plays and Players on the joys and challenges of adapting Ulysses.

And now...the really big news for this month: the Philly Finnegans Wake Reading Group is up to page 85!

Pages covered: 81-85

We began trying to figure out who "the pair" consisted of. "The pair" hearkens back to a number of possible formulations: HCE and the cad, Buckley and the Russian General, Napoleon and Wellington, Shem and Shaun -- all figures of conflict and attempts to overthrow the guy in power ("struggled apairently"). The Shem/Shaun conflict -- brother on brother and son on father -- will recur over the course of the pages we read. This is also placed within the larger context of war, imperialism, slavery. References to World War I appear ("tipperuhry"), as does the abolition of the slave trade in England ("six victolios fifteen pigeon"). Of course the same story is told again and again (as we'll see next month when we work on the Festy King), and as the two men struggle over who will give money for drink, the conflict echoes HCE's fight in the park and his fall, and the spirits echo his resurrection: "after the solstitial pause for refleshment, the same man (or a different and younger him of the same ham)" -- note the Ham reference again, too -- Noah's son who shamed his father's drunkenness.

Conflict and struggle is also caught up with language here; the two are inextricably linked in "collidabanter." One of the pair becomes HCE on the bottom of page 82, as we can tell from the stutter ("Woowoo would," "mohomoment") and the use of "hesitency." Interestingly, the explicit reference to HCE and his trouble also brings about more explicit references to language, law, and religion, and the connections among them: "Which at the very first wind of gay gay and whiskwigs wick's ears pricked up, the starving gunman, strike him pink, became strangely calm and forthright sware by all his lards porsenal that the thorntree of sheol might ramify up his Sheofon to the lux apointlex...(in the Nichtian glossary which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language in any sinse of the world...)." Violence and force and language and religion all come together here: language and sin are joined. The scene shifts to the pub (or several pubs), where "gamy queen Tailte" says she'd know our hero anywhere "in or out of the lexinction of life."

The next scene is an elaborate boxing match: "his face all covered with digonally redcrossed nonfatal mammalian blood as proofpositive of the seriousness of his character and that he was bleeding in self defience." Then we leave these arenas of masculine conflict both in word and deed (men created language AND war) and see ALP: "leaving clashing ash, brawn, and muscle and brassmade to oust earthernborn and rockcrystal to wreck isinglass but wurming along gradually for our savings backtowards motherwaters so many miles from bank and Dublin stone." All of the fighting, and the arrival on the scene of the woman who might end it, prepares us for the Festy King section next: "His ALPenstuck in his redhand, a Highly Commendable Exercise, or, number two of our Acta Legitima Plebeia, on the brink...of taking a place upon a public seat."