The Cycle Continues

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Advance copies now in my hand of the Overlook "upper back" edition of Dæmonomania, which naturally resemble the others, though it's blueish rather than brownish. Only now and far too late do I realize that the cover pictures should have been taken from Arcimboldo's series The Seasons (or The Elements, maybe even better.) Like Joyce accounting for the oddities of Ulysses by connecting them to episodes in the Odyssey (or letting Stuart Gilbert do so) I can show how each of the four books of the Cycle, as it is now denominated, is a Season and an Element of the old four as well as a Quaternary of the zodiacal houses (only this last was exactly planned in advance) and probably a Body Part and an Erogenous Zone and a Liberal Art too. What smart fellow was telling me the other day about Joyce responding to someone claiming that his fussing over the multiple meanings of a word in the Wake was trivial: No sir, it's quadrivial."

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