calypso ulysses
TRANSCRIPT
EPISODE 4
Calypso
“Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and
fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart,
liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he
liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of
faintly scented urine.” (U4.1)
Leopold – Means “the people’s prince” and
implies birth under the “constellation of the
Northern Crown” the sign of ambition,
beauty, dignity, empire, eternal life, glory,
good fortune, history, honor, judgement,
and the female principal.
“They call them stupid. They understand what we say better
than we understand them. She understands all she wants to.”
(U4.26)
“When I play with my cat,
who knows but that she
regards me more as a
plaything than I do her?”
–Michel de Montaigne
“She blinked up out of her avid shameclosing eyes, mewing
plaintively and long, showing him her milkwhite teeth. He
watched the dark eyeslits narrowing with greed till her eyes
were green stones.” (U4.33)
“All the way from Gibraltar, Forgotten any little Spanish she
knew. Wonder what her father gave for it. Old style. Ah yes! of
course. Bought it at the governor’s auction. Got a short knock.”
(U4.60)
Molly Bloom
was born and
brought up in
Gibraltar.
Presumably
Molly and her
father moved to
Dublin in May
or June of 1886.
“Still he had brains enough to make that corner in stamps. Now
that was farseeing.” (U4.64)
Tweedy, a stamp collector, had
apparently bought up all available
copies of an unusual stamp
before the stanp was recognized
as valuable.
“The sun was nearing the steeple of George’s church.” (U4.78)
St. George’s church is an
Anglican church. It was
designed by architect Francis
Johnston to whom Dublin
also owes the General Post
Office and the renovated
Viceregal Lodge.
“Boland’s breadvan delivering with trays our daily but she prefers
yesterday’s loaves turnovers crisp crowns hot.” (U4.82)
After the Lord’s
Prayer, “Give us
this day our daily
bread.”
A period
advertisement for
Boland’s Bread.
Dark caves of carpet shops, big man, Turko the terrible,
seated crosslegged smoking a coiled pipe.” (U4.89)
Turko the
terrible - A
pantomime
popular in
Dublin and a
character in
that
pantomime
“Strings. Listen. A girl playing one of those instruments what do
you call them: dulcimers. I pass. Probably not a bit like it really.
Kind of stuff you read: In the track of the sun. Sunburst on the
titlepage. He smiled, pleasing himself.” (U4.97)
In the track of the sun –
Frederick Diodati Thompson, In
the Track of the Sun: Diary of a
Globe Trotter. Thompson traveled
west from New York and
returned via England. Thompson
concentrates on his travels in the
Orient and the Near East, as
Bloom’s reverie suggests.
“What Arthur Griffith said about the headpiece over the
Freeman leader: a homerule sun rising up in the northwest from
the laneway behind the bank of Ireland. He prolonged his
pleased smile. Ikey touch that: homerule sun rising up in the
northwest. (4.101)
The Freeman’s Journal and National
Press, a daily morning newspaper
in Dublin was editorially pro-
Home Rule but essentially
moderate-conservative in its
point of view.
“He approached Larry O’Rourke’s. From the cellar grating floated up
the flabby gush of porter. Through the open doorway the bar
squirted out whiffs of ginger, teadust, biscuitmush. Good house,
however: just the end of the city traffic. For instance M’Auley’s down
there: n.g. as position.” (U4.105)
Larry O’Rouke’s –
Laurence O’Rourke,
grocer and tea, wine,
and spirit merchant.
“The Russians, they’d only be an eight o’clock breakfast for
the Japanese.” (U4.116)
O’Rourke’s prediction of
the outcome of the Russo-
Japanese War, while a little
too pro-Japanese, was not
entirely inaccurate. The
Japanese had much shorter
supply lines than the
Russians; they also enjoyed
naval and military
superiority.
“Then, lo and behold, they blossom out as Adam Findlaters
or DanTallons.” (U4.127)
Adam Findlaters – Tea,
wine, and spirit and
provision merchants.
"How much would that tot to off the porter in the month? Say ten
barrels of stuff. Say he got ten per cent off. Or more. Fifteen. He passed
Saint Joseph's National school. Brats' clamour. Windows open. Fresh air
helps memory. Or a lilt. Ahbeesee defeegee kelomen opeecue
rustyouvee doubleyou. Boys are they? Yes. Inishturk, Inishark.
Inishboffin. At their joggerfry. Mine. Slieve Bloom." (U4.134)Sait Joseph’s National School –
The National Schools weere the
Irish counterpart of the
American public schools,
although they bore more
resemblance to trade or
vocational schools because their
emphasis was on practical
education for the working and
lower middle classes.
"He halted before Dlugacz's window, staring at the hanks of
sausages, polonies, black and white. Fifteen multiplied by. The
figures whitened in his mind, unsolved: displeased, he let them
fade." (U4.140)
A polony sausage is
made of partially
cooked pork and thus
looks mottled, black
and white.
“The model farm at Kinnerethon the lakeshore of Tiberias. Can
become ideal winter sanatorium.” (U4.154)
The farm was founded
and advertised by the
Palestine Land
Development Company
to train Jewish workers
and to prove that a farm
employing Jewish workers
could be profitable.
"Moses Montefiore. I thought he was." (U4.156)
Sir Moses Haim
Montefiore became a
wealthy English
philanthropist who used
his influence and wealth to
secure political
emancipation of Jews in
England, to alleviate
Jewish suffering elsewhere
in Europe, and to
encourage the
colonization of Palestine.
"They like them sizeable. Prime sausage." (U4:178)
The minimum height requirement for the Dublin
Metropolitan Police in 1904 was fie feet nine inches, well
above the stature of the ordinary Dubliner.
"To purchase waste sandy tracts from Turkish government and plant
with eucalyptus trees. Excellent for shade, fuel and construction.
Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa. You pay
eighty marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives,
oranges, almonds or citrons." (U4.192)
Palestine was part of the
Turkish empire from 1516
until the end of World War
I.
"Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa." (U4.194)
Jaffa – A seaport in Palestine
"You pay eighty marks and they plant a dunam of land for you
with olives, oranges, almonds or citrons. Olives cheaper:
oranges need artificial irrigation. Every year you get a sending
of the crop. Your name entered for life as owner in the book
of the union. Can pay ten down and the balance in yearly
installments.” (U4.194)
The offer is that the company
of planters will buy the land
for an investor or prospective
settler, plant, and harvest for
him, and ship him a portion
of the crop as a return on his
investment.
"On earth as it is in heaven.
A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.
No, not like that." (U4.217)
From the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy
kingdom come. Thy will be done
in earth, as it is in heaven.”
"Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the
earth. No wind could lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy
waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the
plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a
dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race."
(U4.219)
In the mid-nineteenth
century, the Dead Sea
was assumed to occupy
the giant crater of a
dead or inactive volcano.
"Got up wrong side of the bed. Must begin again those
Sandow's exercises.” (U4.233)
Eugene Sandow, a strong
man who advertised
hiself as capable of
transforming the puny
into the mighty. Bloom’s
bookshelf contains a
copy of his book Physical
Strength and How to Obtain
it. It includes a program
of exercises and a chart
for recording
measurements, as Bloom
apparently did.
"Quick warm sunlight came running from Berkeley Road, swiftly in
slim sandals, along the brightening footpath. Runs, she runs to meet
me, a girl with gold hair on the wind." (U4.240)
As the cloud moves eastward on the
prevailing westerly wind, sunlight
moves along Eccles Street toward
Bloom, and he has a momentary vision
of his blond daughter, Milly, running
to greet him.
"- What are you singing?
- Là ci darem with J. C. Doyle, she said, and Love's Old Sweet
Song." (U4.313)
La ci darem la mano, Italian: “Then
we’ll go hand in hand” a duet in Act
I, scene iii, of Mozart’s opera Don
Giovanno
"He felt here and there. Voglio e non vorrei. Wonder if she
pronounces that right: voglio. Not in the bed. Must have slid down.
He stooped and lifted the valance. The book, fallen, sprawled
against the bulge of the orangekeyed chamberpot." (U4.327)
Voglio e non vorrei – Italian: “I want to
and I wouldn’t like to.” Bloom misquotes
Zerlina’s line from the duet in Don
Giovanni.
"Families of them. Bone them young so they metamspychosis. That
we live after death. Our souls. That a man's soul after he dies,
Dignam's soul..." (U4.351)
In circus tradition,
children of trapeze
acrobats are intensively
trained from a very
early ago.
"In the tabledrawer he found an old number of Titbits. He folded it
under his armpit, went to the door and opened it." (U4.467)
Titbits from All the Most
Interesting Books, Periodicals and
Newspapers in the World, a
sixteen page penny-weekly.
Some historians of
journalism suggest that
modern popular journalism
was born with the first issue
of Titbits in 1881.
"Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah!
Costive. One tabloid of cascara sagrada." (U4.509)
Cascara Sagrada – Spanish:
literally, “sacred bark.” A
mild laxative made from the
bark of the buckthorn tree.