Thursday, 24 November 2016

The reading stopped after an account of ten year old Stephen inviting Bloom to dinner on a rainy Sunday in January 1892, which Bloom “very gratefully, with grateful appreciation, with sincere appreciative gratitude, in appreciatively grateful sincerity of regret” in the end “declined” (17.476).

Catherine Meyer, still taken by the dominating question-and-answer structure of the episode, has made it the theme for this week's painting too. She writes: 

I chose four ladders with their rungs and the space between them as a symbol for question and answer and, at the same time, they stand for Bloom‘s  bloomy declining of the invitation (still the same ladder, but the space in between varies). We're in Bloom’s picturesque kitchen with all the stuff on the three shelves, the eye-catcher on the coralpink tissue paper half disrobed (slightly erotic) and the “double falciform ejection of water vapour from under the kettlelid” (17.273). The observer under the shelf is me.

Catherine Meyer © 2016 Zürich