You know I always think of Wandering Rocks being constructed like one of those solar systems scale models suspended on wire, like the Orrery invented by Philly’s own David Rittenhouse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrery But with meteorites and comets whizzing by in near-misses, and space junk and moons all following their own orbit but somehow syncing.

It’s the episode I recognize most too, out walking the streets in Philadelphia and making comparisons to Ulysses, thinking of the tapping blind strapling and the sweep almost putting Lenehan’s eye out with his gear. I imagine Joyce wanting to write the whole book like that, all of the interconnecting, fleeting interactions, Whitman-esque in their way, the peripatetic thinker in his element.

There’s many false paths here still. Things that seem to allude to new dramas which we’ll never see unfold. Most of them surround notions of poverty or government or invention. We’re given to believe these are important sketches of how everything might be related, but quite a few just give us background to major confrontations in “Circe” and “Cyclops.” But the meat here isn’t the separate mini-dramas but the mise-en-scene. This is also a rare chapter in which narrative voice is subordinate to dialogue and physical description. It’s possibly the most voyeuristic chapter in the book, something anyone with a background in comix should be happy to come to at last.

And it serves as intermission. Dead in the center of the book we finally get to step back from the canvas a bit and see the way little flourishes of mark making come to form a complete picture.

Here’s a funny story of my own troubled history with this book.

I started trying to read it when I was in high school as I heard so much about it being “the toughest novel of pure cryptic genius ever.” Couldn’t manage it a bit of course, which, of course, bothered the shit of my eighteen-year-old arrogance. I kept trying every couple of years as friends who were going on for degrees in English kept talking about it. Still couldn’t manage and it was becoming a bit of an embarrassment to me (though I told no one, of course).

Fifteen years after my first attempt and fourteen years past from today, my fifth reading of the novel was a breakthrough. I was living in Florence at the time after a failed relationship that led to a profitable year as a painter. I spoke only fumbling, touristy Italian and had begun to miss the jokes and idioms and concerns of my own American-meta-textual-Roseanne-Barr-television-savvy culture. So I picked ULYSSES up at a used bookstore on Via La Scalda hoping to use my time apart to really dig my heels into figure the damned thing out.

This was the breakthrough for me because this is when I realized that ULYSSES was a comedy. The most sophisticated, structurally keen set off of fart jokes ever offered up to the English language (it’s more, of course, but this is the first time I got that all important access point to the novel’s greater poetry). I never made it past “Scylla and Charbydis” before and now, flying through those earlier chapters I read four times before, i was able to see the tricks and puzzles and poetics in a new light.

“Wandering Rocks”, however, was something quite different.

Have you ever been alone in a strange and foreign city, one where you’ve spent days trying to understand why they do things their way instead of yours, where asking the simplest questions like “what’s going on?” and “who’s that guy?” aren’t immediate nor conversational nor easy? Where customs and social behaviors, jokes even, that seem so familiar to everyone around you make you feel like you’re a child for not understanding them? Have you ever felt that the baggage you carry from one city of your own upbringing might mean nothing to people in this other, new and foreign city you’ve gone to?

“Wandering Rocks” is, and was for me fourteen years ago in Florence, the moment where your sitting in a streetside cafe of the world and the city that Joyce has constructed and, suddenly, surprisingly, makes sense. Where you start to understand the beat of the city and of the people in it and, somehow, it doesn’t seem alien any more. I’ll always link my love of this book to that moment in my life and the rare sensation of knowing that the comfort of understanding comes slowly, but can happen anywhere.

Oh. And Stephen speaks excellent Italian here, not the language of a student. The passages with his music teacher are written with idioms from the regional Italian found in Treiste, the Joyce exiled himself to when leaving Ireland.

Smart, smart guy who’s work gives you new connections every time you revisit it.
-Rob