JJ BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION JANUARY 2020

JAMES JOYCE BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION AT OLLI

FRIDAY JANUARY 31, 2020

IN LECTURE HALL (CLASSROOM A) AT 4801 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE NW:

• 10:30 AM - 12:00 NOON - Reading of Chapter 8 of Ulysses (the Laestrygonians Episode)

• 12:00 PM - 12: 45 PM - Lunch/Birthday Party (in Social Space on 5th Floor)

• 12:45 PM - 2:15 PM - Reading of Chapter 9 of Ulysses (the Scylla & Charybdis Episode)

• 2:15 PM - 3:45 PM - Showing of Bloom (2004 film, website)

FREE EVENT - RESERVATIONS FOR NON-READER ATTENDEES WILL BE PROVIDED FOR ON OLLI EVENTS CALENDAR

OUR READERS:

• Geri Critchley

• Robert Aubry Davis

• Marilyn Wong Glysteen

• Christopher Griffin

• Dorothy Haase

• Enid Hyde

• Sandy Leibowitz

• Gail Lelyveld

• Walter Kamiat

• Marcia Kass

• Bob Kolodney

• Dee Mahan

• Patricia Aycock Mertz

• David Palmeter

• Dennis Shaw

• Andrew Walker White

• Marc Wall

PROGRAM NOTES:

Episodes Eight and Nine are special and different, as are all the chapters of Ulysses.

In Laestrygonians Leopold Bloom is the living camera that Joyce uses to delve into the function and experience of eating from a variety of perspectives. In Scylla & Charybdis Stephen Dedaelus fences with leading literati - with thrusts and parries of wit he transmogrifies Shakespeare.

The chain of consciousness technique becomes more and more extensively ingrained in the texture of the novel, first with Bloom, then Stephen as narrator/participant - bits of words and phrases and memories and allusions and tales and songs and observations and reflections and thoughts about reflections about thoughts are the mental flotsam that accompanies us as we sweep along with the flow of Ulysses.

SUMMARY OF EPISODES 8 AND 9 BY THE ROSENBACH LIBRARY (where the manuscript of Ulysses resides):

8. Lestrygonians (pp. 124-150)

1:00 p.m., at Davy Byrne’s Pub and the National Museum.

The subject of food and eating is explored here with the detailed attention afforded death and decomposition two episodes ago. We follow Bloom through a panoply of lunchtime noises and smells and their associations in search of an aesthetically satisfying bite. Along the way, he bumps into Josie Breen, who updates him on the unpleasant status of her own life with her lunatic husband. Bloom also learns from her about Mina Purefoy, who’s been in the maternity hospital three days already, and demonstrates his characteristic empathy. Feeling relaxed and satisfied from a cheese sandwich and glass of burgundy at Davy Byrne’s, he takes a walk, helps a blind man cross the street, and ducks into the National Museum (to avoid bumping into his wife’s prospective lover).

9. Scylla and Charybdis (pp. 151-179)

2:00 p.m., at the National Library.

Meanwhile, not far from Bloom, we find Stephen at the National Library, hard at work selling his Hamlet theory to another hardworking group of literati. Shakespeare, it is suggested, was father not merely of his own children but of his own grandfather, a ghostly father of all his race. Stephen sees Shakespeare’s work, pervaded as it is by the themes of usurpation, adultery and exile, as an art born from the anguish of impotence. The quasi-Socratic dialogue, pitting Aristotle (Stephen) against his teacher Plato (the mystic A. E. Russell), is interrupted by the spirited arrival of the profane Mulligan, who has just come through the Museum, where he noticed Bloom.

Here is the link to the FULL ROSENBACH SUMMARY OF ULYSSES

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ATTACHED DOCUMENTS:

• Program

• Reading Assignments

• Script in Word Format

• Script in PDF Format