as sasha has noted its getting a bit denser…… i had to re-read many sentences and paragraphs, though in the end, scarcely anything in the way of action happens in this section. stephen walks along the shore and he thinks. he thinks of the history of his country and the land he walks and of the history of himself—of his father (who is maybe dead? or at least estranged) and his mother and his aunt and uncle (who he thinks about visiting but in the end does not) and his brother and of Paris and of a woman. [he also sees a dead dog and thinks about that drowned man. some other people are walking along the shore and their dog finds the dead dog and then digs something up and the much beloved fox burying his grandmother riddle makes an encore.] eventually he tears off a piece of the headmaster’s letter and he sits down and writes a bit. then he jerks off, using language and morbidity to get off—’in a quivering of minnows’. awesome. also awesome: ‘oomb, all-wombing tomb’. [i hope to do drawings on these eventually but if i don't in the end at least know i meant to.] he has no handkerchief—-mulligan took it?—so he leaves his seed where it has fallen and leaves some snot on a rock.
i also wanted to say that i like how joyce uses these very tangible items like the letter and the handkerchief to carry what action there is through these heady sections.
excellent point on the use of tangible elements to tie this wandering group of phrases to the rest of the story. without the letter and the handkerchief, this could otherwise take place in nearly any time or place within the book.
wow, three drawings for the prize of one, and with a lot of freudian meaning on them. mmmmm I like them. Are you keeping the drawings. At the end of the experiment we should try to do a catalogue or something with them.
yeah, am keeping them, mostly in one notebook but the last one i drew at the globe the other night (on the back of our pitiful quiz answers). it is now stored with the others. i agree we should do some kind of catalog.
He “jerks off”!
At that point in Proteus, is he masturbating? Not urinating?