Alexx’s August Patreon Update

Accomplished over July and August:

• Helped annotate issue #11 of Cinema Purgatorio, featuring “My Fair Dahlia”, a musical treatment of an infamous Hollywood murder. Also, enough hints have accumulated that I was able to make some informed guesses as to what the heck has been going on in the frame story!
• Annotated the first two sections of the Jerusalem chapter “Round the Bend”. As mentioned before, I’m starting with the by-far hardest chapter, as that’s the one that most needs annotation. This is probably the densest material I will ever tackle, as the average number of interpretations per word seems to be about 3. Here's an example word, on the high side, but not extremely so:

“pharsycal” – “Physical”, “farcical” (ridiculous), “Pharaohs” (Egyptian monarchs who not infrequently married incestuously, leading to genetic problems from inbreeding) “sick all”. Possibly “sycamore” (type of tree).

• Section 1 – Breakfast
  In which Lucia Joyce begins her day with breakfast, then wanders the grounds of St Andrews Infirmary. She recalls her life in its broad outlines.
• Section 2 – Illusionary Giorgio Joyce
  In which Lucia recalls her childhood relationships with her family, especially her incestuous relationship with her brother Giorgio, whom she seems to see an image of.

I’ve also done a bit of forward planning, and it looks like “Round the Bend” will probably take about a year to do the basic annotation pass. There are 13 sections in all, though a couple of them are comparatively brief. After that, of course, there are still the other 34 chapters of Jerusalem, though my collaborators have done some work there already. And, of course, I’ll be continuing to work on Cinema Purgatorio.

Even more than usually, I welcome comments and suggestions from other readers. I’m catching a lot of stuff, but I am certainly missing a great deal as well.