Ravenous: Reporting from Steemfest, the Best Session Yet of the Steemit Book Club (#9)

First of all, hello from Amsterdam.

It has been amazing to meet fellow Steemians and Steemit Book Club members here. It’s such a great community of people, with so many diverse interests yet so much in common too.

Big respect and awe to @roelandp for organizing this with such professionalism and excellence. Everyone’s expectations were far surpassed.

Even my son’s:

So here’s hoping this is not just Steemfest, but the First Annual Steemfest.

In the meantime, I was flying to Europe during the call, but left some notes for the Steemit Book Club, which I’ll include below.

Also below, here’s the call report from @the-alien – plus call-in information for next week.

Chapter eight opens a new window into the personality of the main protagonist, Leopold Bloom. While we’ve known Bloom to be clever, sarcastic, and living in a deep pain after the death of his young son Rudy, we now get to discover the human side to Bloom.

In this chapter we see Leopold helping a blind person cross the street. We discover his compassionate side when he sees Simon Dedalus’s little daughter sitting hungry on the streets while her father is drinking the family’s money away.

“God made food; the devil the cooks.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses, Chapter 8: Lestrygonians

Chapter eight takes place at 1 p.m which can be considered as sort of a post-lunch meditation. As Bloom walks past the Liffey river he stops by to observe some sea gulls, then feeds them Banbury cakes, which they devour in no time. Even the birds seem ravenous, the reason for which you’ll discover below.

As he keeps walking, Bloom meets an old flame he hasn’t seen for a long time. She tells him that she is married now. Her name is Mrs. Breen after she took her husband’s name.

As she leaves a cloud passes the sun—perhaps an omen—and he becomes immediately depressed as the clouds began to paint the sky in grey.

Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.

Bloom then goes to the Burton Hotel’s restaurant to have lunch but he soon gets disgusted by the piggish manners of the clients and immediately leaves to Davy Byrne's pub to get a Cheese sandwich.

Outside the bar, he notices a little girl who is starving in the street while her father is drinking inside the bar. This girl is Dilly Dedalus, Stephen’s sister.

Hunger, and digestion seems to be the two main dominant themes of Lestrygonians whether it’s the seagulls at the bay, the little hungry girl outside the bar, the repulsive eating at the restaurant, or the hungry people at Dublin. In fact it is the latter who probably represent the closest parallelism to the Lestrygonian tribe.

In Homer’s Odyssey, after Odysseus and his men leave Aeolus, they take on the sea again and arrive in at the island of the Lestrygonians.

The Lestrygonians are a cannibalistic tribe that not only decimate their own numbers but also feast on their guests, thus breaking all guest/hosts travel protocols of that era. Starting with their king, all members of the community participate is those cannibalistic activities. All except for the queen and the princess.

Coincidently, Bloom happens to sympathize a lot with women in this chapter, maybe there’s a connection there.

On that subject, one of our Book Club members had a interesting observation that all the female main characters in Ulysses so far are given a name that start with the letter ‘M’: His wife Molly, his daughter Milly, his platonic lover Martha, Mary Dedalus…etc.

Could it be some hidden meaning behind that? If you have any thoughts, please share them in the comments below. Also let us know your thoughts on the “u.p.” riddle in Neil’s comments below.

#Food, Sex, and Parallax

Aside from food, the other theme that The Lestrygonians chapter also deals with sex.

Leopold is often caught trying to avoid thinking about the upcoming affair between his wife and Blazes Boylan that is set to happen in less than two hours.

“Today. Today. Not think." He says to himself.

(Side note: How many parallels are there to Leopold Bloom today. This book and its themes are as eternal as The Odyssey itself.)

For more interesting conversation, here’s the entire recording of session 8 meeting of The Steemit Book Club:
https://soundcloud.com/user-471385730/steemit-book-club-part-9

NEXT WEEK’S SBC CALL
Steemit Book Club, Session 10

Book: James Joyce, Ulysses (Preferably Gabler Edition)
Reading Assignment: Chapter Nine (“Scylla and Charybdis”)
Date: Monday, November 14th
Time: 6 p.m. PST / 9 p.m. EST / 2 a.m. GMT / 11 a.m. (Tuesday) UTC
Phone: (800) 719-6100 or (218) 339-7800, access code 629-1831#
Web audio link (and location for international call-in
numbers): https://hello.freeconference.com/conf/call/6291831
Chat: #steemit-book-club channel on steemit.chat

And finally, for the hardcore:

These are Neil’s line-by-line notes (from the Gabler edition) for discussion on the call:

The Lestrygonians are the Cannibals from Ulysses. And the theme of the chapters is the digestive process. So look for those themes of eating and cannibalism and oral fixation.

On line 41, Bloom sees one of Simon Dedalus’s daughters, and there's another criticism of Stephen’s father as inadequate.

On line 67, you get the line, "Hamlet, I am they father's spirit." And you can make this read here: "Stephen, I (Bloom) am thy father's spirit. Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth (Bloom as the Wandering Jew).

On line 73, the gulls are like the attacking Lestrygonians.

Note that any time we see the number 11 (as in the advertisement here), it's a reference to Bloom's son Rudy, who would be 11 now.

Line 112, "met him pike hoses" is a callback to Molly in the fourth chapter where we meet her (Calypso), asking Bloom about metempsychosis.

LIne 252, "indiges" is obviously "indigestion" - part of the peristaltic process

Line 257, this insult "u.p.: up" - any idea what it means? This is one of the big mysteries of Ulysses Let me know if anyone solves it.

Line 289 is a call back to page 56, when Bloom on the toilet, reading about Matcham's Masterstroke. He is wondering now if he flushed the toilet.

Here we see the theme of cannibalism in the line "feast for he gods" above, and around line 367 where he's talking about breast feeding. Similarly, the constables on line 406 are also the Lestrygonians

Line 428, like Stephen's family, Boom doesn't like Buck, who he may be referring to with "those medicals" at the protest against the Boer War that he was at

Line 465, you have parallels all around this to Lestrygonians, but here most clearly "stuff them up with meat and drink," like the Lestrygonians stuffing Odysseus's crew before planning to eat them.

Line 475, this whole paragraph is a great reference to Ulysses itself: "trains passed one another, ingoing, outgoing, clanging. Useless words. Things go on same, day after day...those two loonies mooching about..."

Line 550 is Bloom trying to be a poet, similar (yet very different to Stephen). Earlier, on page 125, he tries a different version of this line.

Line 571, just a cool thing Joyce does: Here Bloom corrects his mistake (about the ball falling at Greenwich time) - compare it to a few pages earlier: Page 126, line 109

Line 578 and earlier, there's a theme of parallax. Look it up (it’s basically the way an object appears to change location, direction, or size, depending on the position from which it’s viewed). And in a way, Bloom is a parallax: different people see him in different ways. He's a weak cuckold, a powerful freemason, etc, etc.

Line 581, you get Bloom's view of history here (and another reference to the journey of Stephen and Bloom)

Line 618, parallels Stephen Dedalus thinking about himself in Paris "other fellow: other me"

Line 653: We get to the real Lestrygonians in this chapter: The hungry people of Dublin

Line 695: I always enjoy this line, where Bloom feels awkward, so he pretends like he's looking for someone. "Not here. Don't see him."

Line 725, just FYI for this paragraph, Bloom used to work for a cattledealer

Line 742: Biblical/food pun here "Ham and his descendants mustered and bread there."

Line 772: This is definitely a pun on Boylan and Bloom's wife: "Who's getting it up then" And the same can be said a little later for line 785 "Part shares and part profits.” In other words, Bloom shares and Boylan profits.

Top of page 144, the food has moved from this savage feeding to refined dining. We are leaving the land of the Lestrygonians for safety.

Line 910, this is Bloom thinking of the day he proposed to Molly.

Line 940, think this is obvious, but it's them talking about Bloom (the parallax). Line 960, when they say "he's in the craft," that's a reference to him being a freemason, same with "it's a fine order"

Line 987, question for the group, when they say about Bloom "But there's one thing he'll never do," I think it refers to signing contracts. What do you think?

Line 1017, When Bantam Lyons says "I'm going to plunge five bob on my own," he's referring to when he thought Bloom was giving him a horse racing tip for Throwaway on page 70, line 530

Line 1020, Bloom raising three fingers in greeting - could this be a freemason sign?

Line 1062, "Today. Not think." That's Bloom trying not to think of Boylan.

Line 1108, Here Bloom thinking is about what it's like to be blind, just like Stephen in the Proteus chapter

Line 1114: "Penrose! That was that chap's name" is a reference to his thought earlier on line 178. These are his thoughts from earlier digesting.

Line 1145 is a reference to the General Slocum tragedy

Line 1168 "Yes it is. The walk. Not see. Get on." This is Bloom seeing Boylan.

Line 1170: Swerving to the right is Bloom escaping Boylan, and Odysseus steering ship escaping the Lestrygonians

Line 1175: This is a great cross reference. Boylan didn't see him because of the light in his eyes. The prejucided Mr. Deasy says on page 28, line 361, says that Jews sinned against the light.

LIne 1192: Bloom is trying to look busy again, then is "safe" - has escaped the Lestrygonians and Boylan. End of chapter!

Next week's chapter is the toughest chapter along with the Proteus chapter. We are back in the world of Stephen Dedalus for Scylla and Charybdis.

Here's some help with it.

Shakespeare = Bloom - Odysseus = ghost

Ann Hathaway = Molly = Penelope

Hamnet = Stephen Dedalus = Hamlet = Rudy

Enjoy, talk to you all next week.

Best,

@neilstrauss, @the-alien, and the #steemit-book-club

P.S. Note that the Comments section of this post will also serve as a discussion forum for the current reading.