I was inspired by a message posted on the message board today.  Yes!  There are others who think like I do.  (See Kant's Greatest Joke and the post about the cow speaking to Paul)  Upon reading Ulysses, I find myself getting lost in my own tangents, my own situations.  Sometimes I wonder if Joyce wrote some of what he did while thinking of me.  And then I read the next line and remember that I'm in the Joycean labyrinth, full of word twists and idea turns, only a few of which are actually familiar.  Here are a few passages that caught my eye, make me blink and re-read. "Thus Spake Zarathustra."  - A statement by Buck Mulligan and also an existential philosophical work by Friedrich Nietzsche.  Existentialism is something that I have been studying off and on for several years and it was rather shocking to see the name of one of Nietzsche's more popular works in Ulysses "Daughter working the machine in the parlour.  Plain Jane, no damn nonsense."  Plain Jane is what my mother named my guitar.  She hasn't read Ulysses, thank you for asking.  I inquired about the origins of the name and she said that she named it Plain Jane because it was the most frill-less, lack-luster guitar she had ever seen but Jane got down to business when you plucked her strings. P.S. For those of you who don't know, the message board is at http://www.oocities.org/song_of_the_ocean/messageboard.html

And one more sidenote: oddly enough, before I started reading the Lestrygonians chapter, I had this weird craving for a cheese sandwich.  So while I was sitting, eating my cheese sandwich I came across Bloom's cheese sandwich in Ulysses.  Strange coincidence?  I think not.

POINTLESS CALCULATIONS: How many steps to work, how many ways to get to work, how much time is left in class in conjunction with the amount of pages I have left to read, how much money I'd win if I were on Jeopardy instead of just watching it on tv, the number of numbers I have to remember, average number of phone rings before someone gets annoyed and answers the phone, number of daytime minutes left on my cell phone, number of steps I can take between gongs of the Montana Hall bell tower, number of different cell phone ring tones I hear during a day, the number of keystrokes I make on my computer...the list goes on

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Journal Page Four

I have found that as Ulysses progresses, it becomes more and more complex.  It really does resemble reality in this aspect. I find that I have more things to do and a multitude of diverse things to think about as my day continues.  The further I get into my day, the more people I see like Bloom who encounters at least one different acquaintance in each episode.  The more I read Ulysses, the more I find myself making strange logical leaps and thinking in clips and phrases like Bloom.  It's easier to read his thinking when you find yourself writing and thinking the same way.

An idea:  Agenbite of inwit   Stephen is consumed.  He thinks.  He thinks great thoughts, philosophical thoughts.  But what does he do about them, nothing.  We see him walk along the Sandymount Strand thinking, thinking, stuck in his own mind.  We find him in Scylla and Charybdis using the brain that he left behind in Proteus on the beach.  Stuart Gilbert says that Proteus is one chapter in which very little action takes place.  This chapter is different than all the others in that respect.  After Proteus, we are introduced to Bloom whose thoughts are fueled by his action or the actions of others around him.  He is consumed by scientific, material things while Stephen is lost in the mystic and abstract.  In this sense, he is bodiless, organless.  He isn't consumed by the material, he thinks of God as a shout on the street, not as something represented by the Eucharist.  He thinks mostly of himself or how things relate to himself ("History is a nightmare from which I am trying to escape").  In Wandering Rocks, he is still thinking: "Orient and immortal wheat standing from everlasting to everlasting."  But he runs into Dilly, his sister, picking up a book of French.  And all he can think is "agenbite of inwit.  Inwit's agenbite."  Is this a sign that he doesn't want Dilly to be consumed by the same things that consume him?