Pages 146-something

I forgot to look at what page I was up to this morning; Bloom has finally left the funeral after about 60 pages. In any other book 60 pages at a funeral would be at least a quarter of the whole novel.
 
Now Bloom has gone to the local newspaper office, where he seems to work as an ad man. We are not in his head anymore, so it is difficult to figure out what he's on about; he seems like a stranger. He seems to be very intent on getting the look of an ad for a guy called Keyes right. (He want a picture of crossed keys in the ad as some kind of pun on his name).
 
The entire male population of the town seems to be hanging out in the newspaper offices this morning, just talking about stuff. I am finding it very difficult to keep track of who is who. Stephen Daedalus (of Chapter 1 and the snotrags) has turned up, to ask if they can publish Deasy's letter about Foot and Mouth. Someone else has also put in a bit about the funeral, and a list of who showed up.
 

Joyce uses headings in this section

All the time. My theory is he realised he needed to break up the text so that people like me would feel like they were getting somewhere. I'm finding this bit really tough going, and am even wishing we were back at the funeral.
 

A discussion on whether Joyce is a genius

At the moment I'm thinking maybe you had to be there to get all excited about Ulysses. I guess it must have been pretty outrageous and different for its time; it certainly may have freed other authors from the obligation to use punctuation and to make sense. I think TS Eliot's quote "it is the work to which we are all indebted" is a bit ambiguous, really, he could have been thinking "because it makes us all look good in comparison". Or maybe Eliot was just totally over commas and quotation marks and saw Ulysses as a revolutionary act in that regard.
 
I'm starting to think that the genius of Ulysses is that when something does actually happen or a fact is revealed (like when we found out Bloom's Dad had committed suicide) it seems totally amazing because for most of the time nothing much is going on. For exmaple, I think I may be reading too much significance into the death of Bloom's father and the mysterious man in the mackintosh, but I've got to get my kicks somehow.
 
Joyce does also use a lot of pretty language. I don't hate Ulysses or anything...I'm just finding it very easy to be distracted.
 

Bloom seems an outsider

Again, this might be me reading too much into things, but I'm thinking that Bloom is on the outer of the male bonding group in the newsrooms because he's Jewish. Perhaps that's why he seems like a stranger in this section. They don't seem to include him in much, and seem to think he's a bit of a pain. There were a few non-favourable remarks about Jewish people too, from what I can remember.
 
Sigh...better get back to it...