![…and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921
[THE END]
Itinerant Autumn concludes.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kr1vpzT1Rf1qz5qzvo1_500.jpg)
…and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921
[THE END]
Itinerant Autumn concludes.
a late night contemplation of the qualities of water enjoyed during an early morning drive to work
or this is water
“Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator’s projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 % of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.”
(via Ulysses by James Joyce)
Love’s Old Sweet Song - J. L. Molloy words by G. Clifton Bingham
Once in the dear dead days beyond recall,
When on the world the mists began to fall,
Out of the dreams that rose in happy throng
Low to our hearts Love sang an old sweet song
The song that Molly is supposed to be rehearsing for Blazes Boylan during his afternoon visit.
I have been listening to Ulysses during my daily commute and it is an experience that I highly recommend. I started listening at the point in the novel where I left off reading, but now, I plan to listen to the whole thing from the start when I reach the end. The recording uses songs to introduce each episode, and this one is used to introduce The Oxen and the Sun. I was going to rip the track containing the song, but on a whim I looked at the last disc in the set and saw that it had mp3s of all of the music as well as some other great reference materials. Thank you Naxos for your excellently produced audiobook.
(recording via the Naxos AudioBooks recording of Ulysses by James Joyce.)
WRATH
I saw the vanity plate, “WRATH’” on a battered old car. She looks tired. Some deprecated god collecting scraps of worship from the ire of the lonely crowd surrounding her, fuming at her faithless children feasting in the killing fields of the world. My methods are new and are causing surprise. To make the blind see, I throw dust in their eyes. If I look past the King and Queen, their green lit crowns blinking with red aircraft warning lights, I can see a tower where I spent years, thirty stories tall, empty now. Its sign dark. Stay left and through a gap in the oncoming traffic, the window, small but near, to the room where my daughters were born and a hundred thousand since. A rare morning view, but I try daily. A quiet moment and a sight of the city from a high hill, and then I pay the toll.
two birds, one stone, twenty-two cds
Changes to my schedule have interrupted my steady progress through Ulysses, and NPR has changed in a way that has made it much less interesting to me, so I am going to try listening to this for a while. Floyd has already finished, but she and the oversight committee at itinerant autumn have officially approved this as a legitimate method of finishing the book. I wonder how one hundred minutes of Joyce per day is going to influence my outlook.
my lovely girls
They have been making fun of us for taking so long to finish one book. Floyd is trying to prove that it is a difficult book to read quickly, but they are not convinced.
the man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead
(via Ulysses by James Joyce)
“The man in the yellow hat is not your friend” had been my default hello-world-mic-check-test-message for years, but now it has been usurped.
…and high in the middle
I found this Evergreen Edition, collecting four short pieces by Samuel Beckett, at a thrift store that is not on my usual circuit. I have been there before, and it is not a great thrift store for books or anything else, but every once in a while I will go back.
This recent thrift store used book score contains the short play, Ohio Impromptu, which was written by Beckett to be performed during the 1981 Beckett Festival at the land grant diploma mill that I may or may not have attended many years ago. The play draws some of its inspiration from his time as James Joyce’s secretary but also from Beckett’s lifelong insomnia, night terrors, and panic attacks. Somehow I had never heard of this play until earlier this year, and I have never found Beckett in a thrift store before; it is uncanny that this volume would be the first.
Nothing is left to tell.
bloom spies on a pair of girls who are relaxing on the strand. he masturbates.
I do not know if I am relieved or disappointed that Danny’s summary of this episode was not more graphic. Mostly disappointed, I think. Immature, yes. But also disappointed.
(via Danny Dries Ulysses - Nausicaa)
Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now.
Other I got pound.
Buzz. Buzz.
But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms.
I that sinned and prayed and fasted.
A child Conmee saved from pandies. I, I and I. I.
A.E.I.O.U.
James Joyce (ULYSSES - Scylla and Charybdis)See the animals feed.
Men, men, men.
Perched on high stools by the bar, hats shoved back, at the tables calling for more bread no charge, swilling, wolfing gobfuls of sloppy food, their eyes bulging, wiping wetted moustaches. A pallid suetfaced young man polished his tumbler knife fork and spoon with his napkin. New set of microbes. A man with an infant’s saucestained napkin tucked round him shovelled gurgling soup down his gullet. A man spitting back on his plate: halfmasticated gristle: gums: no teeth to chewchewchew it. Chump chop from the grill. Bolting to get it over. Sad booser’s eyes. Bitten off more than he can chew. Am I like that? See ourselves as others see us. Hungry man is an angry man. Working tooth and jaw.
…Eat or be eaten. Kill! Kill!
ULYSSES - Lestrygonians
mr leopold bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls…
Itinerant Autumn continues apace.
stately, plump…
We started today.
time to clear the deck
It is covered with fallen leaves. Also, Floyd and I had fun reading Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System together so we are going to read Ulysses together this Fall.
reblogged from readingulysses
from the Aeolus Episode - James Joyce (a 1921 recording of himself reading from Ulysses)
He began:
—Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses.
His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smokes ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. And let our crooked smokes. Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself?
—And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised in a tone of like haughtiness and like pride. I heard his words and their meaning was revealed to me.
FROM THE FATHERSIt was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That’s saint Augustine.
—Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen: we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity.
Nile.
Child, man, effigy.
By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man supple in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.
—You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name.
A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it boldly:
—But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage, nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor ever have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.
happy saturday mister chairman, ladies, gentlemen, egyptian priests, nomads, tribesmen, outlaws, chosen people and imaginary constructs -mumblelard
(via The James Joyce Audio Collection and Project Gutenberg)
