He walked cheerfully towards the mosque of the baths. Remind you of a mosque, redbaked bricks, the minarets. College sports today I see. He eyed the horseshoe poster over the gate of college park: cyclist doubled up like a cod in a pot. Damn bad ad. Now if they had made it round like a wheel. Then the spokes: sports, sports, sports: and the hub big: college. Something to catch the eye.
There’s Hornblower standing at the porter’s lodge. Keep him on hands: might take a turn in there on the nod. How do you do, Mr Hornblower? How do you do, sir?
Heavenly weather really. If life was always like that. Cricket weather. Sit around under sunshades. Over after over. Out. They can’t play it here. Duck for six wickets. Still Captain Culler broke a window in the Kildare street club with a slog to square leg. Donnybrook fair more in their line. And the skulls we were acracking when M’Carthy took the floor. Heatwave. Won’t last. Always passing, the stream of life, which in the stream of life we trace is dearer than them all.
annotation:
I chose the passage about the sign over Trinity College gates mostly because I work as a graphic designer and I love that Bloom is critical of the ad. So critical in fact that he suggests how they could have made a better one. His idea of incorporating the architecture of the door is really clever although I don’t really know how well it would read. I am also not sure as to whether my interpretation of the sign he was criticizing is correct. By that I mean I’m not sure if the sign had a literal biker on it when the text talks about the “cyclist doubled up like a cod in a pot”. I looked for images of gates to parks in Dublin, and have a pretty vivid memory of walking through this one when I visited Trinity to see the Book of Kells. Joyce made it very clear that this was the gate when he wrote Bloom’s description of what he thought a better sign would look like. On an artistic note I find the drawings more difficult when Joyce calls out specific architecture in Dublin. In these cases I feel like I have an obligation to Joyce to do them justice. Maybe one day I’ll do a gallery of all the historic landmarks I’ve drawn so far.