Lunar Ruminations

Last night, with my nipples about to fall off in the subzero twilight, I watched the earth’s penumbra slowly turn the moon from a bright coin to a fingernail sliver. Saturn and Regulus glittered brightly, as an aside.
Gazing at the spectacle, I wondered what the ancients made of this celestial event, when men on their [...]

T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” Line 128

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag-
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”
“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
“With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
“What shall we ever do?”
A grudging admiration of Stephen Dedalus’s dissertation of Shakespeare’s suggested intimacy with his work, Hamlet? [...]

Jerry Cornelius in the Wake

Delving in the Wake, one finds one’s perceptions reflected, one’s thoughts elaborated, one’s interests impounded on: the Wake is the mirror into the reader’s soul. Jerry Cornelius’s ambiguous nature was a short obsession of mine. His worldloving and wholehearted vileness still retains a tender place in my bookish heart. Certain passages smacked of the English [...]

Ulysses p. 187

Stephen Dedalus the alter-ego of Joyce reveals a portal of discovery into his own mind?
John Eglinton looked in the tangled glowworm of his lamp.
—The world believes that Shakespeare made a mistake, he said, and got out of it as quickly and as best as he could.
—Bosh! Stephen said rudely. A man of genius makes no [...]

Finnegan’s Wake p. 18

There is a sense of being led by hand through this fantastical world full of mundanes colored by lively language, like being shown rooms in a Hearstal mansion of the Folly of Human Nature by Joyce, our gracious, but unpredictable, host. This particular segment seemed particularly poignant, its message almost undecipherable on the tip of [...]