Travis > Recent Status Updates

Taking bets on whether this saves or breaks me, get in on the action while you can

The Part About The Crimes

I spent too long not reading this part. This is not pleasant, or heartening, or interesting. The gut-wrenching sickness that pervades this section is somehow hidden behind yet amplified by Bolaño’s completely disaffected prose. Check it out for a nice view into hell. Beautiful

The Part About Fate

The Part About Amalfitano

The Part About the Critics

I can’t wait for this to be the only thing I unbearably yammer on about for months to come

Aaaaaahhhhhhhbhb

Circe
Not sure if I’ll keep doing this. Feels wrong, somehow both reductive and self-congratulatory. Anyways another banger episode

Oxen of the Sun
or: A Supposedly Genius Episode I’ll Never Read Again

Nausicaa
It's over. We are back. Gerty presents a truly interesting diegetic puzzle: Are we treated to her true mind in the first half of this episode, as she stereotypically dreams of marriage and clothing and beauty products, or is she a fiction of the advertiser Bloom's onanistic desires? I-a-c, Bloom is here still as pitiable as he is fun to inhabit, clearly hurt by his wife but more than that afraid. "I AM A..."

Cyclops
Whew…okay not sure how to talk about this one. On the one hand, some of the most beautiful prose and funniest jokes yet, with an amazing ending rife with both. On the other hand, about halfway through this episode I lost faith in either my ability to read and process English or language as a method of information conveyance as a whole, I could not tell. Joyce is testing me, but I persist.

Sirens
One of my favorite eps yet, especially the beginning overture, totally incomprehensible until you see it unfold throughout the following pages. The way Joyce blends his prose into Si's song (or vice versa) is incredible, characters whisking together until the moment the music ends and their identities are restored. Blazes escapes the sirens in the Ormond bar, but it is hard to tell if Bloom did too in time.

After a hiatus we are back

Wandering Rocks
A nice reprieve smack in the middle of the book's episodes, here we get to see all the din of Dublin alive and simultaneously. With the episode split into 19 sub-chapters and each interloping on the others, the city is presented as if to some higher-dimensional voyeur, or a perhaps child playing with his or her model town set. I learned about the General Slocum disaster

Scylla and Charybdis
Well, I got what I asked for. Back with Stevie D, this episode is a doozy of dialectics as Dedalus shoots the gap between Aristotle and Plato, the death and life of the author, and the difference (is there one?) between fathers and sons. One of the denser chapters thus far, but one I can see myself coming back to. Very fun to find the Shakespeare references like Easter eggs.

might start doing this i.o.t force myself to reflect on chapters

Lestrygonians
Insufferable in his relatability, Bloom's mind constantly races between both delicious and unpalatable thoughts of food ("the feety savour of green cheese"), economics, personal history, and his currently-cheating wife. Even if I miss the head of Dedalus, it's hard not to enjoy this guy's perspective.
"See ourselves as others see us."

We’re back and we’re starting from ground zero on this bad boy