Parry, Parry, Thrust, Thrust, Good

I am afraid that my post this week on Ulysses is going to be one episode short. I left for vacation in the middle of last week, and despite my best effort to convince myself otherwise, I decided to leave Ulysses at home. The idea of carting that chunkster on the plane - instead of easing along with my nook - combined with the idea of intellectual difficulty - instead of mindless reading - just made me cringe. So I copped out.

Before I left, I did get the opportunity to read another two episodes, the fourth and the fifth, in which we are introduced (finally) to Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce's story, and our more modern Odysseus.

In Episode 4, called Calypso, we first meet Mr. Bloom as he feeds himself, his wife, and his cat. Shortly after he must leave the house, and what follows is this brilliant little fantasy in which Bloom posits that if one were to always travel ahead of the sun, one would stay young. I really enjoyed Bloom's flights of fancy, especially since they seemed less flighty and less obnoxiously intellectual than Dedalus's. They were still, however, not exactly easy to understand. What follows is a lot more walking and a lot more thinking. And then there's the potty scene: yep, we actually get to read about Bloom's bowel movements. Apparently this event is the one which people really latched onto in an effort to get the book banned. Seriously? It wasn't that graphic.

Episode 5 is called The Lotus Eaters (one of my favorite anecdotes in The Odyssey). The bulk of the episode takes place inside Bloom's mind as he wanders the streets, chatting with the mundane, picking up his mail, thinking dirty thoughts about various women...

I have a few paragraphs left in the episode, so my thoughts aren't fully formed yet. Then again, are my thoughts ever really fully formed on this novel? I can already tell that this is one I would need to read and re-read (and possibly with annotations) in order to fully understand it. But that is for a later date...

Even 5 episodes in, I am still enjoying Ulysses despite the difficulty. I hope you are all too (those reading it anyway)! For those who are not participating in the readalong, I do recommend picking it up at some point. The writing is so creative and the opportunity to be so involved in characters' thoughts intrigues me.