Author Archives: Beth Klein

https://vimeo.com/circuitmedia/review/823474172/bee8e3bc09

Done. Another transformative writing completed. This was not the carefree story I recall as a child. Maybe I only read Tom Sawyer. HF is a dark comedy of murder, abuse and the horrors of slavery written through the eyes of a 14 year old nearly illiterate and gullible boy. The moral dilemmas of whether to free a friend or be caught freeing a slave are unthinkable. But the threads of this inhumanity live large in MAGA Land.

A story of a boy beaten by a drunk father so much that the boy stages his death to escape the abuse. Helpless women with no rights or power look on or are duped by pretend kings and dukes. Feuds kill the young and promising. Tom Sawyer is an incompetent posing as a sophisticate — who delays Jim’s right to freedom with silly and fake prisoner escape plans.

As a child I focused on the river and now the injustices jump out. Calling for a solution

Bucket list item checked.

A book that has its moments, but it’s generally packed with junk and useless information and prattles on for thousands of words.

Other than reading about the law of Shelly’s and other ancient property cases designed to legally dupe certain people out of inheritances, I have never been so glad to be done with a book. We all know… “certain interests in property must vest, if at all, within 21 years after the death of a life in being at the time that the interest was created.”

Arbitrary rules to keep lawyers paid in perpetuity and arbitrary books to keep English departments in existence.

This piece by Jared Pollen sums it all up.

https://quillette.com/2022/01/31/a-world-of-waste-stripped-of-transcendence-james-joyces-ulysses-at-100/

Cottage industries to get the reader through on the book have sprung up – Read alongside guides, audio books, pod casts and tic toks. I used every modality to finish this.

I can say that every book I read from now on will be far more enjoyable and easy.

And in the end I agree with Virginia Woolf:

. . . have been amused, stimulated, charmed interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters–to the end of the Cemetery scene; & then puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.

On to Faulkner and Woolf and other things about which to write —— including my horror stories, one of which I will read to Aspen Writers on Thursday night.

Sedona is a magical place. The red rocks of the ancient beaches of Pangaea blaze red in the sun. Creating vortexes of reflection and renewal. Grounding us to the earth and reminding us of the gift of our time alive. Anointing oils, sage smoke and ritual. Meditation, dance and the laughter of 17 wise women filled seven of my days.

Time with healers. Time to create the temple of our own bodies and nurture our selves with food, ideas and movement. Time in the sun and warmth after a long winter. Time to walk in the rain. See the stars.

Ulysses came with me and mashed the ideas of an Irish writer pushing against censorship in the early 1900’s to the ideas of now. Two similar times.

The debate for the right for women to vote and participate in government. And now the right of a woman’s autonomy over her body.

A wise and bold woman came to the aid of Joyce, and without her action, Ulysses would not have been published in America or Britain where it was banned. Sylvia Beach, the American owner of the Shakespeare Book Company in Paris, printed 1000 copies. The copies spread like wildfire, and the book burnings could not keep up. Ms. Beach gave America the most brilliant book written in the 20th century and saved us from repression and the prudish hate on the rise in the 1900’s. And later she stood up to the Nazis when they occupied Paris. A wise woman who used her life to the fullest. She left life yearning for nothing.

I was anointed with Hyssop oil on the top of my head in order to heal, to open to new ideas, and to ground with the rituals of the past. Hyssop was considered in ancient times to be the symbol of faith, physical purity and moral regeneration. For me this ritual and oil activated yearning for living fully. To completely use up this life and leave nothing when death comes.

Ulysses the Hades episode takes us to the cemetery – the parallel of Hades. Mr. Leopold Bloom goes to the funeral of a friend at 11:00. The priest says the same words over and over over the dead. The undertakers hmm along and run their profitable business. Death is and decomposition is simply a process. Money to be made.

In a horse drawn carriage, dressed in black Bloom passes by the grave of his son who died in childbirth. Bloom thinks how much he would have loved his son Rusty and shown him the world. He thinks about his father’s suicide and how the only way to replace the pain of that death was to be a father to a son. But he will never be a father to a son. Imagined future of the past. He imagined his son’s eyes as his eyes.

He contemplates the banality of how life begins and ends and how Rusty was conceived in cream and “the tear that is never mended.” Death is an endless cycle. But so is life. Bloom is yearning for a son — a great importance missing in his life. Reconciling the yearning for a complete life with his reality by practicing irony. Irony does not heal this pain.

In Sedona we 17 wise women reconciled our yearning to live fully with reality with ancient practices of forgiveness. We grounded to the earth and forgave wrapped in the ancient scent of hyssop. Miserere Mei anointing with hyssop for self forgiveness, purification and renewal. Cycles of life and death. Cycles of the war of ideas. Go on.

Some say this is the most difficult chapter in Ulysses, and I agree based upon the tens of cases I have read so far. The writing is stream of consciousness of philosophy, student life in Paris (in French) and a dog on a beach. There is no action, but for the sand in the beach sucking Stephen’s feet into the water and shells and muck and the dog’s antics.

Famous people talk about Ulysses and claim they love it. They drop the famous quotes. “Snotgreen sea” and the first paragraph about Buck Mulligan in a “yellow dressing gown” from Chapter 1. No one quotes from Chapter 3. I don’t know if they actually the book.

Stream of consciousness modernism writing is a chore. It takes time and re-reading.

Now onto Chapter 4 where the hero Bloom is introduced frying kidneys and toasting bread for his wife who is having and affair. A cat is Bloom’s companion.

Reading Ulysses has been on my to do list for decades. I have listened to coaches on how to read this complex book, and the best advice was to read it for the words, read it aloud and approach it with joy. None of this actually landed upon me until now.

In the past I have read this book with the attitude of a prisoner being forced to break stones into pieces. A should. A must. Branding myself as a failure who can’t get into this so-called greatest book ever written in the common era. Typical beating up of self.

Today I read Chapter One and only looked at how many pages to go eight times. My mind wandered as the three young men are in an old fortress that they are renting. A medical student with a big mouth, an Oxford man, and Steven Dedalus who has recently lost his mom. Quarreling about virtually nothing. There is little action. But the detail of the insults and the tension and the snot green sea. Make this remarkable.

And now a second read after research. Chapter One is entitled Telemachus – the name of the son of Odysseus. Odysseus left home for war and his ten year journey as a warrior is the epic, Iliad. The Odyssey is the story of his ten year journey home. Some scholars believe that the Odyssey was written by a Mediterranean woman because the voice is feminine. Odyssey’s wife, Penelope has been waiting for 20 years for her husband to return. She struggles with her loneliness and suitors vying to replace a presumed dead husband. A woman’s dilemma. And her son, Telemachus watches and judges Penelope. Akin to Hamlet. A widow’s life; a new bride: a failed mother. A catch 22.

Next Day

Ulysses was written in the context of WWI and reflects a longing of a return home and a return to normalcy. The exhaustion of war and loss weighing heavy on the world. June 16, 1904 – BLOOMSDAY – the day during which this story happens, is years before the first world war has begun.

Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus. He feels guilty because he would not pray with his dying mother, and she haunts him in his dreams with smells of rosewood and memories of bile in a bowl. He thinks about her musty dance cards, beads and fans that were important memories to her, memories gone and forever to be secrets. A spot is noticed – a reference to Lady Macbeth. Guilt and regret.

His roommate Buck Mulligan is a chubby medical student and he bullies Dedalus about how he treated his mother while she was dying. Mulligan is dressed in a yellow swirling dressing gown showing his plump belly as he shaves on the roof of a tower. A clown. A mouth. Puce gloves. Green boots. Opportunistic, short changing the poor milk woman and his roommates.

Dedalus doesn’t want to return to the tower to live. Who can blame him.

Klein Frank P.C.’s case of Draper v. The Fire Place Company has been named as a Case of the Year Finalist. The Winner will be announced on May 11, 2023.