Ulysses is now getting truely kinky in a fascinating way given that we're talking about a 1922 work. Bloom is now in a bisexual S/M scene and being topped by a guy. My my. I had been thinking it was Victorian and was really amazed then. It being written in the experimental 20's makes more sense.

One good link I found is:
http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/ulysses/

I just love this quote:
Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession."
[endquote]

cloaca is sewer or the common chamber into which the intestinal and urogenital tracts discharge according to http://www.m-w.com.


From the same site is the first paragraph of Joyce's biography
(http://www.online-literature.com/james_joyce/):
James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish novelist, noted for his experimental use of language in such works as Ulysses (1922) and Finneganns Wake (1939). Joyce's technical innovations in the art of the novel include an extensive use of interior monologue; he used a complex network of symbolic parallels drawn from the mythology, history, and literature, and created a unique language of invented words, puns, and allusions.
[endquote]

No wonder I'm lost most of the time. He makes trying to understand Camile Paglia's writing seem easy (though he's certainly more artistic that Paglia). (And I've long since decided that it wasn't worth the trouble to grasp what Paglia was writing about save as a checklist of things I should be more familiar with - like various works in Greek literature.)

Joyce is really base as I'm sure I've noted before. Though having sexuality addressed (sort of) as early as the 20's is refreshing, but you can find it also in Virgina Woolf's Orlando or works by E.M. Forster like Maurice or The Life to Come.

I'll stick it out till the end of Volume 2 and then I'm going to move on to other things as I think I've gotten what I wanted to learn about the book. (Mostly what's all the fuss about?) Since I like Dedalus I think I'll try Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (which I may have already read but it's been a while.)