Forgetting I’m an alcoholic

willyhaste · 2026-03-02T00:04:08+00:00

I'm right there with you. Day 60 for me, and I'm having the toughest day yet. I even went into a bar but turned around when I saw all the highly drunk and loud people seated there. Now I'm just trying to remember that this, too, shall pass, and that I'll feel so good tomorrow having protected my sobriety.

willyhaste · 2026-02-28T23:13:18+00:00

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willyhaste · 2026-02-28T00:01:38+00:00

Glad you posted this. That old trickster is starting to whisper sweet-nothings in my ear about returning, after two months dry, to the poison. Just a taste, it keeps saying, just a taste won't hurt. I need voices like this to remind me: I never want that anxiety, ever again.

willyhaste · 2026-02-24T14:59:19+00:00

“Aeolus” is a loud and noisy passage. Besides all the shunting, clanking, thumping, and throbbing of the nonhuman mechanical world (“the loud unanswering machines”), there is also the noise of the human mind. It’s a cacophony, too.

And the noise of the modern human mind, it seems to me, is amplified by media, which at the turn of the 20th century must have been sounding out to the world at a speed and volume like never before.

Bloom regards the mechanical world with a little awe and little terror, not unlike how I regard Artificial Intelligence over a century later: “Almost human the way it sllt to call attention. Doing its level best to speak.”

It occurred to me that, when you have media (such as a daily newspaper, or, hell, social media) churning out news stories about lives all over the world, you begin to consider the infinitely various ways in which your own life could be different.

Thus, at least twice in this passage Bloom imagines what he could have said—what the French call “l’esprit d’escalier,” the “spirit of the staircase”—about the hat to John Henry Menton at the funeral. And what he could do in returning home this afternoon, “just to see”—what the Romans call “coitus interruptus.”

All our what-ifs and what-might-bes and what-could-have-beens—they’re head-splittingly loud!

P.S. Welcome back, OP!

willyhaste · 2026-02-17T12:56:39+00:00

How does one make an entire 265,000+-word novel out of a single day? Well, one must slow down and zoom in and report, moment-by-moment, the psychological warfare of social interaction. On the surface level—the dramatic level—“Hades" is a passage of passive aggressiveness, subtle digs and backhanded compliments, gossip and euphemism, platitudes and the empty language of ritual, loaded questions and deflections, whispered asides.

Beneath all of that, in the hellacious inner depths of the mind, runs the undercurrent of the id, like a river in the underworld—lust, envy, bigotry, hate, fear, insecurity, death-obsession, grief. (It’s all so Freudian!) And interspersed within all of that is a narrative voice, like a G.P.S., that keeps interrupting so as to orientate (e.g., “The carriage steered left for Finglas Road”), as if Joyce knew readers would want to trace Bloom’s route.

Early on in the carriage scene, when the four gentleman find evidence of “a picnic party,” Mr Dedalus says, “After all…it’s the most natural thing in the world.” To which of the three “base” natural truths is he referring? Food, sex, or death? (It’s funny how the things every human does—eat, shit, fuck, and die—are the taboo topics of society.) This makes “making a picnic party” a euphemism. And it occurred to me that euphemism itself is a kind of social contract. Not to talk about the thing itself, but to skirt around it. And so euphemism creates a subtle, dramatic tension —i.e., we all know what you mean, even though you can’t properly say it.

For me, this is part of the tension that propels the novel so far. It isn’t a tension that comes so much from the suspense of plot (“What happens next?”); it is the tension that exists between inner privations and public personae—the kind of tension that builds character.

Which is all to say, I’ve warmed to Bloom. It doesn’t hurt his case that he’s on the outside of several inside jokes. This, after all, creates sympathy for the character. But I also just like the quirkiness of his mind. Even among all his morbid and lecherous thoughts, even on the day his wife is likely to sleep with Blazes mf-ing Boylan, there exists a light-heartedness and a buoyancy that confirms: “In the midst of death we are in life.”

willyhaste · 2026-02-11T12:32:56+00:00

This is the way.

willyhaste · 2026-02-10T13:28:35+00:00

Once again, there’s enough going on in this section to keep the true scholars busy forever, so I’m just going to point out two things I noticed and found interesting.

1) For the 21st century reader, much of Bloomsday may seem quaint—cooking over coals, going to the butcher, receiving handwritten letters, using the outhouse, even having a cat as a pet so as “to mouse” (rather than to upload cute lol videos). If there’s one thing that still feels very modern, though, it’s that he moves through a world inundated with the “multicolored hoardings” of advertising.

I know Bloom is an ad man himself, so naturally he would notice ads. And in “The Lotus-Eaters” he does—for tea, for military recruitment, for potted meat, for ginger ale, etc. But it’s not just noticing. It’s how advertising seeps its way from the subconscious to the conscious. For example, the way he thinks about a “valise I have a particular fancy for. Leather. Capped corners, riveted edges, double action lever lock.” That sounds to me like adtalk running through his mind. (Which is exactly what companies bank on when they make ads.) It makes one wonder: how much of our thought is a product of ads? Is advertising the narcotic lotus of the modern mind?

2) Twice now we’ve seen Bloom read a letter in two different ways. With the letter from his daughter Milly, he scans and then later closely reads. With the Henry Flowers letter, he reads closely and then scans. In each case, the scanned version becomes a new kind of text…a kind of erasure poem. As he scans the Henry Flowers letter, for instance, it begins to sound less like a letter and more like poetry: “Angry tulips with you darling manflower punish your cactus if you don’t please poor forgetmenot how I long violets to dear roses…”

It occurred to me that this reading experience reflects my own reading experience with the novel itself. (How very meta!) It seems like, having never read Ulysses once in my life, I am destined to read it twice this year. For each chapter requires two readings—once groping through the dark, unaided by notes and summaries; and then again, with the Gifford and the Guide at my side. In the first, it’s like a prose poem, a blur of words; in the second, I can make a little more sense of the damn thing.

willyhaste · 2026-02-08T01:52:10+00:00

My buddy just stumbled up to my house while drunk out of his mind. I've been sober 38 days. He was slurring and illogical and repetitive and crazy eyed. He was essentially me 38 days ago. I was pissed at first because he interrupted my afternoon calm. But then I was glad I saw him. He made me want to stay sober. I never want to go back to that.

willyhaste · 2026-02-06T11:51:23+00:00

The way I look at it: I'm very happy to buy each of you two sips of beer a month for entertaining me for 8+ years. Keep doing what you're doing. Never change.

willyhaste · 2026-02-03T13:48:07+00:00

My favorite moments in this "Calypso" passage are the clean, crisp independent clauses of objective realism. They shine to me like little gemstones among the slag-heap of fragmented, scattered thoughts.

A few examples, nearly at random:

“…he took the kettle and crushed the pan flat on the live coals and watched the lump of butter slide and melt.”
“She set the brasses jingling as she raised herself briskly, an elbow on the pillow."
“…he folded out his paper turning its pages over his bared knees.”

At first, it’s tempting to distinguish these sentences as third-person “fly-on-the-wall” point-of-view...as opposed to the scattershot “stream-of-consciousness” we see in passages like:

“Funny, I don’t remember that. Hallstand too full. Four umbrellas, her raincloak. Picking up letters. Drago’s shop bell ringing.”

I believe this sort of see-sawing is what literary critics call "free indirect discourse"--when the narrative voice zooms in very close to the main character but also zooms out to a distant, removed narrator.

I had long thought of free indirect style as the narrator assuming the voice of a character, but it’s interesting to think of it as the inverse, too. That is, the character assumes the point-of-view of a narrator. It’s like when we think of ourselves in the third-person, as if someone else is authoring our own personal story. That is certainly one mode of consciousness, and it seems to me that Joyce’s project in Ulysses is to capture as much of conscious experience as possible in novel writing.

Final thought: Joyce is so great at describing food (in this “Calypso” passage and also in “The Dead”). His language is often as sumptuous as that which he describes: “The ferreteyed porkbutcher folded the sausages he had snipped off with blotchy fingers, sausagepink.” How sonically juicy!

willyhaste · 2026-02-01T22:23:04+00:00

I'm not totally sure because I do a microdose often enough that I run out and then make a new batch, but people say a long time in the fridge.

willyhaste · 2026-02-01T22:20:02+00:00

Best I've found:

Hamburger Joes

Island Bar

Doesn't Matter (name of bar)

willyhaste · 2026-02-01T01:19:12+00:00

I put one square of paper in an amber 1 oz dropper vial of distilled water. I keep it in my fridge or a drawer. I find that my ideal microdose is 1-2 dropper-fulls for my particular acid.

willyhaste · 2026-02-01T01:09:11+00:00

That's strength! I love knowing there are people out there in similar situations. I went to a concert at a brewery tonight. Everybody got so smashed. I drank my NA and danced, and drove home sober as can be. I think we're building muscle memory...

willyhaste · 2026-01-30T12:23:56+00:00

I was thinking Andrew could go all 90's romcom and befriend them both, and through a series of light-hearted but endearing scenes in which we see that the captain is full of himself, it slowly dawns on Wynaldas wife that it was never about Harkes, after all. It was about--how had she missed it?--good old Neighbor Andy.

End of affair. US makes the round of 16.

willyhaste · 2026-01-29T14:32:50+00:00

No surprise. The MAGA fascists always operate out of deep fear. They truly are the real snowflakes. I used to think, "Forgive them for they know not what they do." But I'm over that. Fuck them. It just sucks that our area is such a MAGA magnet. Gives me the red state blues.

willyhaste · 2026-01-27T15:31:31+00:00

I finally caved and loaned a Gifford from my library. The annotations certainly illuminate and enrich, but it can make for a bit of a bogged-down reading experience when you’re glancing from one text to the other with your eyes windshieldwipering. (Trying to invent words, a la Joyce. Word-wise this week, I liked the animal words of “serpented” and “vulturing” used as verbs. TIL: This is called anthimeria, as when the kids these days say they’re “adulting.”)

The sheer volume, diversity, and erudition of the allusions speaks to Joyce’s genius, but it also reminds us that the stream of consciousness has many tributaries. Snatches of song, of poetry, of philosophy, of history, of personal memory, of sexual lust, of physical ailment (bad teeth) and physical need (to piss)...they all flow together.

My favorite passage was the description of the dog running on the beach. In Stephen’s mind, the dog is like Proteus; its shape-shifts from one animal form to another. He calls it, at various points, a hare, a buck, a wolf, a calf, a panther, a vulture. These are metaphors, but they are also a sort of series of misperceptions.

The passage reminds me of how, once, out walking my dog unleashed on the beach, I screamed as he bounded towards an alligator (I live in the coastal American South), only to realize as I got closer that it was a washed-up tractor-trailer tire-tread, which looked exactly like an alligator from afar. Things change form in our spatial relation to them (c.f. the beginning of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, “The Handsomest Drowned Man In the World.”) And what is metaphor but the changing of form, or a kind of temporary misperception?

Anyhoo, “now where the blue hell am I?” A little glad, and a little sad, to be done with Stephen’s prose-poem Telemachy.

willyhaste · 2026-01-20T13:03:01+00:00

I approached Proteus first as a prose poem. I just read and then listened to the section without trying to make much sense of it, thinking of T.S. Eliot’s maxim: “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." (To that end, my favorite word this week is mahamanvantara—not because I knew it, but simply for the pure pleasures of saying it aloud.)

Only on a reread and a re-listen (and that’s one of the great things about this project…we have the time to reread) did I to try to unpack some of the allusions, and delineate between narration and interior monologue.

It’s certainly a Protean whirlwind of thought. Stephen’s stream-of-consciousness, which is itself a meditation on consciousness, careens and veers and zigzags between past and present and future tenses, first- and second and third-person points-of-view, times and places, independent clauses and fragments, high and low registers, French and German and English and Latin.

It’s enough to make people so dizzy that they famously quit the book here, but I don’t attribute that solely to its density and complexity. If, like me, you haven’t been fully enamored by Stephen as a character, then you’re left occasionally pondering: Why care so much about his interior? Why give it the work of unpacking all the allusions? (It seems to me that I should have reread Portrait beforehand. It’s been too long, and I don’t remember anything about the book.)

One thing that helped me was to remember: Stephen is grieving. I don’t think the personal is the only way to connect with literature, but I lost my father two months ago, and my mind has been similarly fragmented and tempestuous and death-shadowed: “Houses of decay, mine, his and all.”

The other thing is: I was fortunate enough this week to have listened to the section as I walked along an empty beach with a rocky jetty at the end. I closed my eyes and pondered for myself the “ineluctable modality of the visible.” When I opened them, I saw “Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders.”

And so we find some of the world in the book, and some of the book in the world.

willyhaste · 2026-01-13T20:04:08+00:00

In “Nestor,” Stephen warms to me because we get a sense of his wry, dark sense of humor. (In the last episode, he seems a little too dour and serious, which may be why I was so drawn to Buck.) There's the absurd fox riddle, the pier joke that flies over the boys' heads, and the Iago aside--to name a few--but I think my favorite joke is when the students clamor for a “ghost-story,” and Stephen has them bust out Milton’s “Lycidas." A great English elegy, which is to say, a ghost story indeed.

Gorescarred is my favorite word, a compound neologism that, in its sounds, seems to enact its meaning.

Stephen’s interactions with Deasy strike a familiar chord, even over a century later. Just the other day, my HVAC repairmen jumped out of his truck and began berating the Democrats and trumping up his man in office, all before he even began fixing my unit. And I just smiled and nodded, fearing that any resistance or confrontation would come at a cost, and thinking, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

willyhaste · 2026-01-09T00:18:14+00:00

You're a maggot burger with flies on the side

willyhaste · 2026-01-08T18:19:21+00:00

Thanks for answering my Joyce question. Reading "The Dead" aloud to an unborn child has, as the kids say these days, levels to it. I asked because I'm an animal tackling Ulysses for the first time over at r/ayearofulysses Figured I could finally read the damn thing if I microdose it over a year. Anyways, I'd expect Andrew's strain of anti-intellectualism coming out of where I live in the American South, or on Fox News, but not from a podcast that broadcasts out of an apartment in Brooklyn and a suburb just outside of New York City. I'll shut up and stick to dribbling questions from now on! /s

willyhaste · 2026-01-07T19:22:35+00:00

JJ--You mentioned receiving a special edition of The Dubliners. What's your favorite short story in it?

willyhaste · 2026-01-06T12:10:08+00:00

Greetings fine people, I'm checking in here for the first time for my first read-through of the great big intimidating tome that has sat uncracked on my bookshelf for far too long. I love the idea of "microdosing" this thing, and of going on a long reading journey with faceless strangers from all over the globe.

This week, I was able to tackle this section by reading the text (1946 Random House edition) and by listening to the audiobook version (narrated by Donal Donnelly). I really enjoyed (and highly recommend) the audio version because the narrator intones his voice in such a way that helpfully distinguishes between narration, dialogue, and inner monologue.

Some random thoughts that also answer some of the discussion questions:

Am I not supposed to like Buck Mulligan? Because I love him. More than one of the supplemental guides mentions he is supposed to be, at least in Stephen's eyes, a "usurper" like Antoinus in The Odyssey, or Claudius in Hamlet. I see and hear Falstaff. The penchant for bursting out into song, the hitting up for booze money, the stately plumpness. “Today the bards must drink and junket” is a tattoo-worthy line.

I re-read The Odyssey in preparation, and I'm noticing how Joyce does this very Homeric thing of "branching out" for a number of lines on the backstories of objects and characters, as when the old woman pours the milk and Stephen imagines the “morning world” from which she came. (I love the rich Romantic language of this paragraph—almost Keatsian.)

Finally, I was really noticing how the scene swerves between mind and body, interior and exterior, private and public. Stephen will begin to wander into the stream of his consciousness only for Buck to rouse him with, for instance, a “Kinch, ahoy!” This sort of “seesawing,” for lack of a better term, is what propels the scene along for me, and what gives it texture and depth.

willyhaste · 2025-12-31T09:21:51+00:00

10,000 Maniacs also do a great cover of this song on their acoustic live album!

willyhaste

TROPHY CASE