James Aloysius Joyce, OG Turntablist

I'm up to "Nausicaa" now, but a couple months ago while I was reading "Sirens," I realized that all its playful echoes of lines and phrases from the earlier parts of the novel basically amount to sampling.

Take, for instance, the famous opening sentence of "Calypso": "Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls." That's old ha, old high grade ha. In "Sirens," we get that line cut up, reworked, and dropped into a new context: "As said before he ate with relish the inner organs, nutty gizzards, fried cods' roes while Richie Goulding, Collis, Ward ate steak and kidney, steak then kidney, bite by bite of pie he ate Bloom ate they ate." We've gone from Bloom eating breakfast alone in his kitchen to him dining at a restaurant with Richie Goulding after a chance meeting on the street.

Of course, we get a common thread that connects the two episodes: Bloom's correspondence with Martha Clifford. In "Calypso," he's receiving a letter from her; in the latter chapter, he's writing a response. The new context of "Bloom ate with relish" then shows how alienated he's become, as he's gone from domestic comfort to a strained, rather lonely dinner that he spends spying on the action of the scene. The contextual change works both way, though; the mood of "Sirens" is melancholy ("I feel so sad"), and as we learn later, it is during this chapter that Boylan is tipping her tepping her tapping her topping her Molly Bloom; consequently, if we follow the connective thread backward from "Sirens" to that kitchen scene in "Calpyso," we see that Bloom's solitude ("So lonely blooming") is quite profound and acute and existed even back then. The very aroma of the earlier chapter subtly shifts all thanks to DJ Joyce's sampling.

Bloom's relish is not the only the only example, but the first off the top of my head (see also the textual introduction of Mina Kennedy and Lydia Douce, which samples their obfuscated debut in "Wandering Rocks") -- and hell, what is the overture of "Sirens" if not a cut-and-paste, sampled collage? So keeping the musical motif of the chapter in mind, the collagist excursions simply lead me to conclude that Joyce anticipated sampling by 40 years.

Indie rating: DJ Shadow - "Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt"

What I'm reading: Ulysses

I'm rereading Ulysses for the first time in nearly half a decade, and for something like the fourth or fifth time ever. (The last time I picked it up, I didn't finish it.) The intervening years between reads is enough to "reset" my style gauge such that the stream-of-consciousness strikes me as weird and at times artificial (which, I've been told, is why Joyce abandons the technique after "Wandering Rocks"), whereas the first time I read it I just took it as an aesthetic given (ah, impressionable youth).

I'm presently stuck in "Hades" (so to speak), and plugging along very slowly (I'm reading it right before I go to sleep). No radical insights thus far, though I was amused that Bloom sort of anticipates Ulysses with his idle thoughts about writing down the things Molly says and the time at which she says them -- connecting time with the quotidian in Bloom's incomparable prose style.

I still find Stephen's chapters dull, though, since he seems so much more elusive as a personality than Bloom does because he wraps himself so thoroughly in abstraction. (Translation: Stephen makes me feel dumb. Like, I still don't get "Ineluctable modality of the visible"? And I kind of want to, like, side with Buck Mulligan against Stephen?) Though while on the topic of young Dedalus, I've forgotten what animates the feud between Stephen and Mulligan beyond the latter making fun of Stephen's mother, more specifically what prompts Stephen to call Mulligan a usurper. Is he worried that Mulligan is trying to replace him with Haines?

I'm really looking forward to climbing into the later chapters, "Circe" and "Eumaeus" in particular, though "Sirens" was once upon a time my favorite chapter.

Indie rating: The Raveonettes - "Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)