weekly check-in (Ulysses ep 14)

This a recurring weekly online meetup to discuss what we've read, what we're reading, and what we want to do.

The motivation behind this is two-fold:

1. I've put James Joyce's Ulysses on the schedule for December; it has 18 chapters, and I promised readers that we would have a bi-/weekly meetup to review our progress.
2. We keep reading books about self-improvement, and yet this 'self' continues to struggle to improve. Maybe this is a chance to join with other strugglers to move forward.

Here's a link to the Ulysses resources that I find useful.

Episode 14, "Oxen of the Sun"

• Bloom visits the maternity hospital where Mina Purefoy is giving birth, and finally meets Stephen, who has been drinking with his medical student friends and is awaiting the promised arrival of Buck Mulligan.
• As the only father in the group of men, Bloom is concerned about Mina Purefoy in her labour. He starts thinking about his wife and the births of his two children. He also thinks about the loss of his only 'heir', Rudy.
• The young men become boisterous, and start discussing such topics as fertility, contraception and abortion. There is also a suggestion that Milly, Bloom's daughter, is in a relationship with one of the young men, Bannon. They continue on to a pub to continue drinking, following the successful birth of a son to Mina Purefoy.
• This chapter is remarkable for Joyce's wordplay, which, among other things, recapitulates the entire history of the English language. After a short incantation, the episode starts with latinate prose, Anglo-Saxon alliteration, and moves on through parodies of, among others, Malory, the King James Bible, Bunyan, Pepys, Defoe, Sterne, Walpole, Gibbon, Dickens, and Carlyle, before concluding in a Joycean version of contemporary slang.
• The development of the English language in the episode is believed to be aligned with the nine-month gestation period of the foetus in the womb.