SOUNDTRACK: THE YOUNG DUBLINERS-Rocky Road ep (1994).
The Young Dubliners are not really a trad Irish band. They play a sort of folk rock in the vein of The Waterboys (anthemic rock that soars and soars).
I believe I bought this on the basis of their awesome cover of “Rocky Road to Dublin” which is somewhat traditional in the beginning but which bursts into a rollicking, punky good time.
The rest of the tracks are okay. None of them are all that memorable, but neither are they terrible. Although I’m just reading that “Last House on the Street” was a radio hit. They’ve toured with Collective Soul, which should tell you a lot about their sound.
They’ve released a number of albums since this ep, including one in 2009, but I pretty much still only like “Rocky Road to Dublin.” I’ll bet they are fun live, though.
[READ: Week of August 9, 2010] Ulysses: Episodes 13-14
Only two episodes this week, but man, that second one killed me. Pages and pages unbroken by paragraphs. Paragraphs and paragraphs about heaven knows what. Holy cow! Sure and begorrah!
Episode 13, however, was a treat. It was sweet and tender and beautiful and vivacious and lascivious and sexy and dirty and and and ahhhhh.
Episode 13, Nausicaa
This episode opens with a very simple style of writing. It reads like a breezy story (which is a nice change from the exhaustion of previous episodes). It shows three girls on rocks by the sea. Cissy Caffrey and Edy Boardman are minding the twins Tommy and Jacky Caffrey and Edy’s baby. They are playing along the water. The other girl with them is Gertie MacDowell. But who was Gerty? the book asks us.
“Gerty MacDowall…was in very truth, as fair a specimen of winsome Irish girlhood as one could wish to see” (286).
We learn a little about her past (she’s related to the Citizen of several chapters ago–the owner of Garryowen!). And she is a very good daughter to her mother and very proper indeed. But mostly we watch her watching her friends and their children.
When one of the naughty boys kicks the ball very hard, it lands by a gentleman. He throws it back to the kids. And we hear church bells from a temperance meeting.
Then she becomes aware that the man who threw the ball back is looking at her. That’s why he’s there, to watch her. And she instinctively feels for him:
The very heart of the girlwoman went out to him, her dreamhusband, because she knew on the instant it was him. If he had suffered, more sinned against than sinning, or even, even, if he had been himself a sinner, a wicked man, she cared not. Even if he was a protestant or methodist she could convert him easily if he truly loved her (293).
The kids are getting tired and cranky, and Cissy asks the man who threw the ball what time it is. The man gets nervous, takes his hand out of his pocket and starts playing with his watchchain. He tells her his watch is broken but it must be after eight.
And then begins the long slow seduction of Bloom by Gerty. (Wikipedia suggests that the whole thing is in Bloom’s head, and given the tone of the section, it is entirely believable that it is). But taken as read, Gerty enjoys Bloom watching her. And she slowly leans back, imagining, stretching out, thinking, allowing him to see her legs, and more, her thighs, and more, even her underpants. When the bazaar fireworks start shooting off over the water, and her friends run to get a closer look, Gerty refuses to move.
The pace of the writing grows faster as the things grow warmer and hotter until:
And then a rocket sprang and bang shot blind and O! then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream of rain gold hair threads and they shed and ah! they were all greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lively! O so soft, sweet, soft!
(300).
The voice of the story pans back to reveal who the man is: Leopold Bloom (“for it is he) stands silent, with bowed head before those guileless eyes” (300). And Leopold feels guilt for what he has done. Especially when she gets up and he sees that she is lame. But the guilt is short lived: “damned glad I didn’t do it in the bath this morning” (301).
And then, as is his way, he thinks about Molly and Milly. And his thoughts for Molly are very fond (as they tend to be), especially remembrances of their younger days.
Then he’s back to the present. “Darling, I saw, your. I saw all. Lord! Did me good all the same” (305). And he decides he should go look in on Mrs Beaufoy, uh, Purefoy (I love that he gets that wrong throughout the book) at the hospital to see how she is doing.
But before he can go there he has to tidy up: “This wet is very unpleasant. Stuck. Well the foreskin is not back. Better detac. Ow!” (306). And then, on the breeze, he smells Gerty’s perfume (she had waved her kerchief at him when she left, so maybe it’s not all Bloom’s imagination). Bloom thinks about human scents, and decides to smell himself but all he can smell is the soap in his pocket. Finally, he thinks some even more lascivious thoughts:
Like to be that rock she sat on. O sweet little, you don’t know how nice you looked. I begin to like them at that age. Green apples. Grab at all that offer. Suppose it’s the only time we cross legs, seated. Also the library today: those girl graduates. Happy chairs under them (308).
The church bell rings and a sparrow, no a bat, flies around Bloom’s head. And Bloom can hear the voices in the church which makes him think, yet again, about advertising:
Pray for us. And pray for us. And pray for us. Good idea the repetition. Same thing with ads. Buy from us. And buy from us (309).
The chapter ends with nine peals of the cuckoo.
Episode 14, Oxen of the Sun
Okay, so I just read the summary at Wikipedia about Episode 14, and I rather wish I had enjoyed it more (and that I wanted to read it again). I’m going to quote this here in case I decide I need to read it again:
This extremely complex chapter can be further broken down structurally. It consists of sixty paragraphs. The first ten paragraphs are parodies of Latin and Anglo-Saxon language, the two major predecessors to the English language, and can be seen as intercourse and conception. The next forty paragraphs, representing the 40 weeks of gestation in human embryonic development, begin with Middle English satires; they move chronologically forward through the various styles mentioned above. At the end of the fiftieth paragraph, the baby in the maternity hospital is born, and the final ten paragraphs are the child, combining all the different forms of slang and street English that were spoken in Dublin in the early part of the 20th century.
That sounds pretty fantastic. But it’s those parodies that were so hard to cope with. I will accept that the parodies are spot on, I just simply don’t know my history of English lit that well. And now I finally see that my suggestions that you need to know Ireland and Irish history are simply inadequate.
Yet for all of this chapter’s length, not a lot happens. Basically, Bloom and Stephen finally meet and converse. And Mrs Purefoy has the baby.
There is a lot of talk about birth, science, medicine, death. Buck Mulligan enters the picture and we can kind of see that Stephen is an outcast even among his peers.
The most notable feature of this chapter is that Bloom–who does not have a son and whose daughter is away–feels very paternal towards Stephen.
I will not be quoting the text or really revealing much in the way of detail. It was very difficult Episode for me to follow. I am planning on listening to Ulysses on CD (as soon as it comes in from the library) and I’ll see if I enjoy this any more the next time through.
But bearing in mind that the whole Episode is meant to should the development of the English language from the earliest days to projected street slang (and the Purefoy baby is meant to come out of the womb speaking like that) is conceptually genius, I must say.
Leave a Reply