Another ULYSSES reader

A Zoetrope colleague, Deb Turner, a South African living in upstate New York, has started reading ULYSSES and sends me this note:


I'm on page 11 (after four days of serious reading!) but actually I'm really enjoying it. I like hearing Stephen's voice.

Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brow and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coat-sleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown grave-clothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits of loud groaning vomiting.

Now, so this is the dream and the reality of his conversation with his friend. I love how he leans against his frayed cuff and tells us first that he is being haunted by the dream of his mother. Then through the frayed cuff again he brings us back to his present conversation with his friend regarding the sea looking like a great sweet mother - and then he connects it to his consciousness with the sea looking like his mother's bile. To me this is perfection in writing. I simply and absolutely love it.


To me he connects with that deeper energy like poetry. It is hard and difficult writing but incredibly rewarding in my opinion.