Lucia Joyce dancing at Bullier Ball, Paris, May 1929

the kentucky derby is decadent and depraved

Ralph Steadman

words

olisbos
n. - a dildo

Etymology: ancient Greek ὄλισβος < ὀλισθεῖν to slip, glide + -βος , suffix forming nouns; perhaps a re-formation of ὄλισθος slipperiness, in Hellenistic Greek also an unknown fish with a slippery skin

on water

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.

Ulysses

words

psychrolute
n. - A person who bathes outside regularly throughout the winter.

nubiferous
adj. - That brings clouds; cloudy or full of cloud; existing in clouds
(cf. nubiform, nimbose)

murmell
v. - Sc. (now chiefly Orkney): trans. To complain of, bemoan; to lament over. In early use: †to mutter, mumble (obs.)--intr. Of a baby: to coo, to gurgle

omphalos
n. - In the temple of Apollo at Delphi: a sacred stone of a rounded conical shape, supposed to mark the centre of the earth--A boss on a shield--Archaeol. A raised prominence in the base of a cup, dish, etc.

Julia Stephen, mother of Virginia Woolf

by Julia Margaret Cameron

the land of spices

Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

George Herbert, "Prayer (I)"

words

palimpsest
n., adj.- A parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing.--Physical Geogr. and Geol. A structure characterized by superimposed features produced at two or more distinct periods.

Etymology: < classical Latin palimpsēstus paper or parchment which has been written on again < Hellenistic Greek παλίμψηστος scraped again, also παλίμψηστον a parchment from which writing has been erased < ancient Greek πάλιν again + -ψηστός < ψῆν to rub smooth ( < the same Indo-European base as Sanskrit bhas- , psā- to crush, chew, devour) + epenthetic -σ- + -τός , suffix forming verbal adjectives.

words

tarantism
n. - A hysterical malady, characterized by an extreme impulse to dance, which prevailed as an epidemic in Apulia and adjacent parts of Italy from the 15th to the 17th century, popularly attributed to the bite or ‘sting’ of the tarantula.
Dancing was sometimes held to be a symptom or consequence of the malady, sometimes practised as a sovereign cure for it.

cf. tarantella

a certain quiet

Plague took us, laughed, and reproportioned us,
Swelled us to dizzy, unaccustomed size.
We died prodigiously; it hurt awhile
But left a certain quiet in our eyes.

Jack Spicer, "Berkeley in Time of Plague"

the sensual memory

Glowing wine on his palate lingered swallowed. Crushing in the winepress grapes of Burgundy. Sun's heat it is. Seems to a secret touch telling me memory. Touched his sense moistened remembered. Hidden under wild ferns on Howth below us bay sleeping: sky. No sound. The sky. The bay purple by the Lion's head. Green by Drumleck. Yellowgreen towards Sutton. Fields of undersea, the lines faint brown in grass, buried cities. Pillowed on my coat she had her hair, earwigs in the heather scrub my hand under her nape, you'll toss me all. O wonder! Coolsoft with ointments her hand touched me, caressed: her eyes upon me did not turn away. Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy. Young life, her lips that gave me pouting. Soft warm sticky gumjelly lips. Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still. A goat. No-one. High on Ben Howth rhododendrons a nannygoat walking surefooted, dropping currants. Screened under ferns she laughed warmfolded. Wildly I lay on her, kissed her: eyes, her lips, her stretched neck beating, woman's breasts full in her blouse of nun's veiling, fat nipples upright. Hot I tongued her. She kissed me. I was kissed. All yielding she tossed my hair. Kissed, she kissed me.

Me. And me now.

Stuck, the flies buzzed.

Ulysses

words

facinorous
adj. - Extremely wicked or immoral; grossly criminal; vile, atrocious, heinous; infamous.

fenerate
v. - trans. To lend on interest.

a sentence

Afar, in a reek of lust and squalor, hands are laid on whiteness.

Ulysses

words

minim
n. - Music. A symbol (now usually drawn {minim}) for a note having a duration equal to half that of a semibreve; a note of this length.--A single downstroke of the pen; esp. the short downstroke used in the letters m, n, u, etc., in court hand or secretary hand. Also more fully minim stroke. Now chiefly Palaeogr.--The least possible portion of something; a tiny particle, a jot--Numismatics. Any of various very small, ancient (usually Roman), bronze or silver coins found in Britain and mostly produced locally.

words

drupe
n. - Bot. A stone-fruit; a fleshy or pulpy fruit enclosing a stone or nut having a kernel, as the olive, plum, and cherry.

words

ambry
n. - A place for keeping victuals; variously applied to a store-closet, pantry, or cupboard in a pantry; a wall-press; a dresser; a meat-safe, as in ‘ambry of hair,’ i.e. with sides of hair-cloth. arch. and dial.--In a church: A cupboard, locker, or closed recess in the wall, for books, sacramental vessels, vestments, etc. arch.--A place for books; library; archives. Obs.--A hutch for live-stock. Obs.--fig. Beneficence, bounty.

words

reredos
n. - A piece of wooden panelling attached to a wall either behind a seat to serve as its back or over a fireplace as an ornament. Obs. (hist. in later use)--The back or rear of an army. Obs.--A piece of armour for the back; a backplate. Obs.--The brick or stone backing of a fireplace or open hearth; a metal plate forming a fireback--An ornamental facing or screen of stone or wood covering the wall at the back of an altar-- = ROOD SCREEN--A velvet or silk hanging covering the wall behind an altar. Cf. dorse n.1 1, doss n.1, dosser n.1 1. Obs.

rood screen
n. - A substantial screen, typically of elaborately carved wood or stone and surmounted by a rood or rood loft, separating the nave of a church from the chancel.
Rood screens are found throughout western Europe, and date mainly from the 14th to 16th centuries. In Britain many were destroyed during the Reformation.

rood
n. - A cross, as an instrument of execution; A crucifix, esp. one positioned above the middle of a rood screen of a church or on a beam over the entrance to the chancel; (also) a figure of the cross in wood or metal, as a religious object

mona kuhn

photos by mona kuhn