Calypso ulysses
- 2. “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.
- 3. “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
- 4. “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)
- 5. “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.
- 6. “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.
- 7. “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.
- 8. “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.
- 9. 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
- 10. “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.
- 11. “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.
- 12. “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.
- 13. “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.
- 14. “Then, lo and behold, they blossom out as Adam Findlaters or DanTallons.” (U4.127) Adam Findlaters – Tea, wine, and spirit and provision merchants.
- 15. "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.
- 16. "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.
- 17. “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.
- 18. "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.
- 19. "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.
- 20. "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.
- 21. "Orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa." (U4.194) Jaffa – A seaport in Palestine
- 22. "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.
- 23. "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.”
- 24. "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.
- 25. "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.
- 26. "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.
- 27. "- 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
- 28. "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.
- 29. "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.
- 30. "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.
- 31. "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.