Annotations Continued...

So, excuse the absence once again but I am playing catch up here a bit, reading over the annotations from the first seven episodes that I already read. Getting the background here is great, like backfilling a foundation beneath a scaffolding already laid. Also, reading this book of annotations, straight up, without referencing the original text, is ironically a similar experience to reading the original text itself. Reference after reference, thrown willy nilly together on the page. I love it actually, so much context, so many little stories (Bible stories, Jewish stories, Irish history, money, Greek literature, etc.). So much to learn. Here’s a few:

Did you know that the term “sea change” (one of my favorites, and a great album by Beck) was coined in Shakespeare’s The Tempest? This is referenced in Ulysses.

Did you ever check out what happened to Oscar Wilde (a fellow Irishman to Joyce)? This is referenced a lot in Ulysses.

There was a newsmagazine in the late 1800’s called Tidbits that is acknowledged as the first example of pop journalism, the first National Enquirer, if you will? This is referenced in Ulysses.

Did you know that, in his day, Wordsworth was seen as a big time sellout after accepting a government pension and the position of Poet Laureate of England? And that Tennyson, his heir, faired no better? This is referenced in Ulysses.

Anyway, you get the point. Just so much content. So much in fact that you wonder about Joyce‘s role here as author. Is he simply an assembler of reference? A conglomeration machine, assembling multitudes of disparate pieces of the human experience into a “coherent” whole?

So to end here, in true scattershot fashion, with a few favorite phrases highlighted in the annotations:

Someone is referred to as “an ornament of society.”
Someone is said to be “in the swim” which means they are scheming to make money.
A cuckold is a married man with an adulterous wife as opposed to a cuckstool which is a chair on which a scoundrel is tied to on their door step, so as to be exposed to public humiliation, with passerby’s hooting and pelting the victim.

Clearly the prefix “cuck” is a bad thing.