Outside, there was a striking contraption in the care of a couple of talkative young chaps who might once have been art students. It was clear that a great deal of work had been put into the contraption, made out of bits and pieces gathered up here and there, incorporating, inter alia, two cycle seats from which to pedal the thing about. Pedaling about which included, I was told, a long trip to Portugal which involved getting the thing across the Douro, at which point they came close to being arrested. They were let off when a policeman noticed the ancient Brooks saddle, something, it turned out, he knew all about.
The spokes of the large wheels at the front were thin wire, entirely flexible and those of the small wheels at the back were rubber. Very London Eye. Pedaling was hard work and going down hill was a lot worse than going up hill, apparently due to the vagaries of rear wheel steering.
We did not make it inside, but as it turned out it seemed entirely appropriate that, propelled by a few stray pages of Ellman on Joyce last week, I had brought along 'Ulysses' for a spot of holiday reading, a book I have not read seriously for quite a long time, despite owning a handsome Bodley Head edition from the sixties, a time when such books were made with properly thin paper and were properly bound. From Graham York Rare Books on the edge of Honiton. See reference 2.
Oddly, for a married man with two children, Joyce seems to have retained a childlike fascination for bodily functions, both alimentary and sexual. A clear case of arrested development.
Also a book of its times, with a very well read author with a penchant for including small chunks of French and Italian in his stories. And rather more remarks about Jews than would be considered proper these days. Very much along the lines of his contemporaries Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence and E. F. Benson to name but three.
Plus, in this case, intimate knowledge of Dublin, its suburbs and doings. Perhaps the fascination of an exile for what he no longer has. An intimate knowledge translated into all sorts of odd stuff, most of which is already more or less incomprehensible without a crib. And that without some of the more or less incomprehensible prose, said by some to reflect the sense and nonsense continually drifting through our conscious minds - on which point I am not so sure. Perhaps a carefully wrought caricature of same. Will it survive another hundred years?
All that said, a strangely compelling read, shot through with brilliant flashes of insight, humour and verbal trickery.
PS: I can also claim to being making amends for having failed to mark Bloomsday this year.
Reference 1: https://www.poomuseum.org/.
Reference 2: http://www.gyork.co.uk/.
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