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Monday 28 November 2016

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


Monday 21 November 2016

Thursday, 17 November 2016

The group has started episode 17, also referred to as “Ithaca”, and stopped at: “a wooden revolving roller” (17.235)

Catherine Meyer, although wary of the episode's foregrounded form – questions-and-answers, geometry, maths – was still curious to dwell on the opening lines, What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?”, to try a response in image. She writes:


For the start Joyce chose a complicated term in the sense of maths, art and daily life. In mathematics, lines are parallel if they are always at the same distance from each other. They never meet. In art, you have a vanishing point where all parallel lines meet. So, the further away a track is the smaller it appears. And in daily life, “parallel” can also mean: more than one event happening at the same time.

My painting shows parallel lines depicting water in its universality, the kitchen in Bloom's home and, figuratively, the question-and-answer form of the catechism in the blue water's light and dark colours. Technique: watercolour.

Catherine Meyer © Zürich 2016


Tuesday 15 November 2016

Thursday, 10 November 2016

The group has reached the end of episode 16 (“Eumaeus”) and will start episode 17 (“Ithaca”) this week.

Catherine Meyer, local artist and long-standing member of the reading groups, sends her rendering of the last reading. The passage that held her attention and tickled her creative energy most this time was:

“Und alle Schiffe brücken” (16.1884). She explains: 

Fritz said he thinks this could have something to do with the German term “Schiffbruch”, and what came to my mind immediately was the disastrous shipwreck of the Medusa (1816) and Géricault's large and well-known rendering of it: He painted the ca. 5 x 7 m  Raft of the Medusa in 1818 and it became a great scandal. It is hanging in the Louvre. But even more important is the fact that Friedrich von Flotow wrote an opera called Le Naufrage de la Méduse (1839 Paris) (Ge, Die Matrosen, 1845 Hamburg). 

“Schiffbruch” in German is also used as an image to express personal failure in the phrase “Schiffbruch erleiden” (similar to the image of the shipwreck in English). Also “in die Brüche gehen“ (going to pieces) is a negative statement and, at least in sound, is close to “Brücken“ (in meaning, though, it would express the opposite of “to bridge”). Anyway, something goes wrong here, this much is probably agreed.

To underline this statement  Joyce has Stephen say that he does not understand why they put the chairs upside down on the tables. In Züri- and Berndeutsch we use the expression “usestuele“ meaning “jemanden vor die Tür setzten, kündigen, feuern etc. auch oft benützt für den Rauswurf in einer Beziehung” (to kick someone out, to fire them, also with regard to a relationship).
Granted, this may all be a little far-fetched but after all, Joyce forces you to think around the corner (to translate directly from the German idiom for “to think outside the box”).

My small-sized picture shows the chairs, the “Schiffbruch” and the two men walking home to 7 Eccles street.

Catherine Meyer © Zürich 2016


Monday 7 November 2016

Thursday, 3 November 2016

The last reading stopped at: The Arabian Nights Entertainment was my favourite and Red as a Rose is She.” (16.1681)

The reading was another “exciting and enthralling one”, says Catherine Meyer, who sends a rendering of it in one of her own equally engaging paintings. She writes:

Earlier in the day Bloom had seen those Grecian statues, perfectly developed as works of art, and wondered whether they also had an anus or not. Thinking back to those perfect statues and looking at an old photograph of his singing wife which he has been showing stephen, he then remembers “the morning littered bed etcetera and the book about Ruby with met him pike hoses (sic) in it which must have fell down sufficiently appropriately beside the domestic chamberpot with apologies to Lindley Murray” (16.1472).
I chose these thoughts for a visual interpretation. It is an echo to the third chapter where Stephen thinks about the “ineluctable modality of the visible” (3.1).

Audible and written words = nacheinander
Visible and paintings = nebeneinander

So, you can see Bloom’s various thoughts in one picture. I had a lot fun with this subject and have thus painted it in lively colours.

Catherine Meyer © Zürich 2016