(2.3.309.1-2.3.316.1)

We’re down the pub. Excellent. What language exits the mouths of one-eyed “old ballocks” who prop up bars (280; 1)!

In Ulysses, after Dilly quizzes her Father Mr Dedalus, “Were you in the Scotch house now?”; he retorts, “You’re like the rest of them, are you? An insolent pack of little bitches since your poor mother died” (228).

Reading that line, I suddenly latched a character onto Simon Dedalus: The character in question being a school-friend’s Dad. One day this Dad returned from the pub to discover his daughter and I had been out with a couple of boys…

“Your acting like a bitch on heat,” was the feedback. Never has sex education been so concise. The man knew his subject. His greyhound, Ginny, regularly escaped from her field and ran the mile down to the local pub to meet her owner, as he came from his early shift on the ferry.

From the first line in this chapter of FW, it sounds like someone at the bar has already lost it.

1. Joyce James. Ulysses: The 1922 text.Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008.

“Rachel, you should read Ulysses when you’re grown up.” My English teacher said, 16 years ago.

Done that, thanks to Professor David Spurr’s MA seminar at Geneva University (2010). So, as I am now officially grown up , I’ve decided to carry on with Joyce.

Last night I went to Fritz Senn’s Finnegans Wake reading group in Zurich. They read a page a week. It is excellent. Although the ultimate frivolity for me:  I took  10 hours to make the round trip in order to attend a 1 and a 1/2 hour meeting! Much as I loved the reading group, I doubt will be able to attend every week, for the next twelve years, in order to read my way around this text.

Adult I may be, but I’m still young enough to be impatient. So I’ve decided to sound out the Wake in a different way. I’ll be reading 10 pages a day, out loud, for the next 65 days: i.e. up to the Christmas holidays. I’m not reading for meaning, just for the sound of it. I’m using the Penguin Modern Classics edition (2000). So, please listen along!