Thursday, June 5, 2014

[Bloom's lucky potato]

4.73 Potato I have.

8.1189 Trousers. Potato. Purse.
   
14.1480 Sir? Spud again the rheumatiz?       

15.201 (he feels his trouser pocket) Poor mamma's panacea.       

15.242 (...Bloom pats with parcelled hands watchfob, pocketbookpocket, pursepocket, sweets of sin, potatosoap.)       

15.290? (She hauls up a reef of skirt and ransacks the pouch of her striped blay petticoat. A phial, an Agnus Dei, a shrivelled potato and a celluloid doll fall out.)

15.1309 (Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket and brings out a hard black shrivelled potato. She regards it and Bloom with dumb moist lips.) BLOOM A talisman. Heirloom.

15.1316 (She puts the potato greedily into a pocket then links his arm...

15.1355 Sir Walter Raleigh brought from the new world that potato...  a killer of pestilence by absorption

15.1952 Potato Preservative against Plague and Pestilence, pray for us.

15.3505 BLOOM (Gently.) Give me back that potato, will you? ...(With feeling.) It is nothing, but still a relic of poor mamma.... There is a memory attached to it. I should like to have it.

15.3524 ...and unrolls the potato from the top of her stocking) 

15.4577 Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears seated on a toadstool, the deathflower of the potato blight on her breast.

Theory: Bloom's lucky potato is 57 years old. (40%) Lucky because it recalls the Famine.
His mother died c1886

"Potatoes infected with late blight are shrunken on the outside, corky and rotted inside." [wiki]

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