Actually there is more talk about sex than consummations, but when these do occur they are hilarious. Page after page delineate Caleb's yearnings for Lillian Cloud, the mother of his child who prolongs a no-touch flirtation, or for Gloria Keith, his bored and sexually accessible landlady, or for Belle Cingani,a free spirit and a writer who collects male partners as easily as picking up apples. These three women decide when the coital moment is possible.
For all Caleb's longing, women do the seducing, though, since he is so drab and puny, their attraction is mysterious. Maybe the women like the talk of sex more than the practice.
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Fortunately for him Caleb is well versed in badinage. A rare critic and possibly reader has made the point that Bayliss seems to be condemning modern life for its greed and the capitalist system which is its predominant form in the United States as somehow destructive of qualities which are aesthetic or that would lead "pilgrims" on voyages of creativity and discovery; not to mention the system's likelihood or certainty of booms and busts..
Yet "pilgrim", meaning tourist, and "kilroy"; meaning driver of heavy rigs transporting frozen fish, are two of the most derogatory terms in the book. Since so many of the characters, from whatever persuasion, are held up to ridicule, I do not find Bayliss's scorn for modernity to be altogether the case. He is fascinated by the intricacy of machinery and the chicanery of the free market as reflected in the quasi-legal machinations of the Graveyard, read Wall Street.
Bayliss shows how the lending and borrowing of money and the charging of interest can lead to moral and physical failure or to hypocrisy and commends Catholicrats Democrats , despite backslidings to Return on Investment ROI , and deprecates Protesticans Republicans , who don't backslide as they are already happily there. As Caleb asserts sometimes proudly and sometimes sotto voce, he is a member of the Resistance.
Bayliss delights in describing scenes and scenery in Gloucester, Massachusetts but he also delights in describing scenery in locations outside Gloucester. The description of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge is masterful whereas the description of Purdeyville, read the existing Dogtown moraine that captivated artist Marsden Hartley, is misleading and perfunctory. Bayliss's cosmopolitan, philosophical and economic interests tend to disperse attention away from a city renowned for its sights and smells. Instead Bayliss concentrates on the simultaneous Chapter of the Vine meeting which is to disclose maybe?
Caleb says he needs to know who his father was so he can get a passport to England, which is a lame, possibly implausible, excuse not in the tradition of Homer's Telemarchus, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Joyce's Stephen Dedalus. I do not pretend to offer a key to the book, but I think the brief description of the rotating performance of Romeo and Juliet and Midsummer Night's Dream by local high school thespians conveys a hint of what is to recur over and over in the book.
The theatrical version of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" occupies seven chapters or tablets, the term mythologists, anthropologists and Bayliss use. The tablets end when Gilgamesh forms a bond with his rival for power and love, the wildman Enkidu. One presumes that if the last book in the trilogy, "Gloucestermas", is completed the remaining four tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh including the death of Enkidu, the story of the great flood, and the embryo beginnings of concepts of justice and of virtue will be presented.
The title of the third volume, "Gloucestermas," may also indicate that the Festival of Saint Peter is going to get a neglected going over. So far, in a book in which the idea of tragedy is averted or diverted, there is no real tragedy and no real suffering. Every character manages to set off the foolishness of others and one feels like echoing Puck "what fools these mortals be" or "Democritus, Junior", Robert Burton's mouthpiece, who said: Caleb's mother, Mary Tremont, may be an exception.
She emerged from a madhouse to which she was probably unjustly committed.
After a traumatic experience of suffering and guilt she found in Jesus and the Brotherhood of the Peaceable Kingdom an altruistic and self-sacrificing solution toward which Caleb, self-centered and bitter as he is, has no sympathy. Sadly Cuchulain was later to have a son, Connla, whom he killed in battle. Gloucesterbook began the Gloucesterman saga and introduced readers to the complex fiction-world of Jonathan Bayliss.
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Gloucestertide is the next installment in this important series, characterized by intricate prose, mathematical and philosophical puzzles, and references to ancient history and mythology. Gloucestertide expands on Bayliss's themes: This novel begins very conveniently with Bayliss's protagonist Caleb Karcist briefly reviewing major points from Gloucesterbook. Though it's part of the Gloucesterman series, the pleasures of Gloucestertide speak for themselves.
A chapter wherein Karcist and his beloved Lilian Cloud visit Mount Auburn Cemetery is among the most profound episodes in the saga so far. Cora Kryothermsky's description of her troupe's proposed Rock Dance for the Gloucestermas festivities is an eloquent defense of the value of human endeavor in the face of impersonal historical forces. A sobering reminder of the inevitability of entropy is conveyed when Buck Barebones's machine shop is gutted by fire. Elsewhere, Karcist's Gilgamesh play is presented within the text of Gloucestertide, and there are interesting parallels to the action in Dogtown; novelist Jock Merrimack visits Doc once again, for an intellectual summit at the Main-Top bar; Father Duncannon conducts a summit of his own with insidious financier Arthur Halymboyd; and the spring awakens lusts both physical and philosophical among many of the characters.
There are many treasures to enjoy here, not least of which is Bayliss's fascinating use of the English language. Readers interested in literary challenges couldn't ask for anything more rewarding than Gloucestertide. Get to Know Us. Not Enabled Word Wise: Not Enabled Average Customer Review: Be the first to review this item Would you like to tell us about a lower price? Delivery and Returns see our delivery rates and policies thinking of returning an item?
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Visit our Help Pages. Audible Download Audio Books. The enigmatic motto taken from Richard Henry Dana at the end of the book was written by an abolitionist who supported the emancipation of slaves, yet in the twist or is it gyre? I doubt very much that these readings would make it any simpler.
At times, however, I have made my own simplifications. In this spirit I offer the following as suggested narrative lines: The central and for the most part only character is Michael Chapman. Except for Caleb Karcist, his disciple, accessory characters and even Caleb are viewed through Michael's stream of consciousness. Of course, many of Michael's thoughts apply to Bayliss, but the reader should focus on the character rather than on the author.
Michael is self-educated and has a remarkable ability to recall bits of everything he has read and seen and to put them into a shifting mosaic as he traverses his outer and inner worlds. He is the husband of a woman called Ruth who is one of the Ruths who figure in the novel as objects of his desire, whether this desire be real or imaginary. Perhaps as with his wife when his desire is most real it is most imaginary and that is the reason why he and his wife harmonize only when their separate longings and imaginings coincide.
The book has two highpoints. The first occurs when Ruth, the wife, takes the man's role and rapes her husband, though the rapee achieves a peak of enjoyment that he may not have experienced in ordinary forms of coitus. This concupiscent melee, the reasons for it, and its results are steeped in irony. For some this incident and others of a like nature may smack of pornography. I can see why adolescents or young curious and poorly informed girls and boys, or men and women may experience salacious thrills by reading these pages For me it was not thus as I have read so much of a similar nature before and as life itself has already shown me the needs and extravagances of sex.
If the reader wants another Henry Miller or D. Lawrence exulting in the exchanges of connubial bliss this is the place to find it. To me the second highpoint was more mysterious and lasting than sexual euphoria. This was an incident that occurred to Michael while serving as a radio operator on his LST during a typhoon off a Pacific atoll. In the midst of this stormy scene Michael hears music coming from a record player owned by a superior officer which he later thinks comes from Bizet's Carmen, though it is not the too often heard Toreador song, and he has an esthetic sensation that comes from parts of his body or his mind that are not dominated by what he calls Mr.
I am willing to let this episode stand out because it is so compellingly told. The book is balanced by a party that Mike's colleagues give him on his thirty-fourth birthday, which happens to be very didactic, because, like the autocrat he is, Michael expounds on his favorite cultural subject the uses of ritual and myth and by another party at the end of the book, this time given by Mike. At this later party Michael does not expatiate but, internally if not externally, he has thoughts about world devastation and over population that accord with his vasectomy.
Ironically, however, his wife Ruth has presented him with a fourth baby that like the third, who had unaccountable blond hair, may or may not be his. When he is not collaborating with Michael on a treatise about tragedy and the role of the hero in society, Caleb has a tempestuous affair with Hecuba a seemingly free-loose woman who is engaged to Silver Fox, a gangster impresario, with the understanding that she must produce a child.
Gloucesterbook - Jonathan Bayliss - Google Книги
Unbeknown to Caleb, at least at first, this is the reason for their assignations. Hecuba's situation is thus like wife Ruth's who wants a daughter so she can reproduce a successors to herself boys simply won't do. Hecuba gets her old-man "godfather" and also her baby, while Ruth gets her baby with or without Caleb's assistance, for Michael has had a vasectomy, but it turns out to be a boy. Michael's thoughts about this are not given, but, taking everything we know about him. After author Bayliss tires of calling Michael an archangel, he refers to him as a horned owl so there is indeed a possibility that he is a cuckold.
The subject of humor as an engrossing dynamic and life as a game is dropped thereafter for both Michael and Caleb concentrate on the plays and prose of William Butler Years. Michael's various esthetic and philosophical ideas occupy the book's syllabuses. I take this flashing display of ideas casually as it means more to Michael and Bayliss than it means to me. I think the meditations lead toward art for art's sake, which is to say that man's creative imagination is greater than any other faculty he may have to cope with urgencies, such as earning a living or procreating his kind.
Our servants will do that for us. PROLOGOS may be exhausting, but also, more often than not, it stimulates the reader due to the verve, playfulness and invention of its continually changing prose. While it is risky to say this, I think Bayliss was a process-oriented philosophy who like Heraclitus thought everything was constantly changing.
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This accounts for the shifts in Michael's consciousness, from high to low, from absurd to reasonable, from slang to pedantry. Unlike his other books Gloucesterbook and Gloucestertide, as far as style goes, I think the main inspiration for this book was Francois Rabelais c. As far as the ideas expressed go, when they are not torn by the tussles of sex, I think Jane Harrison was the source for the ritual-myth explorations.
Chapman mentions Harrison's name from time to time though he claims he has made his emendations. Eliot does not get a nod in this book as he does in Gloucesterbook; nevertheless it is interesting that Jessie L. Other than its use as a generating source any other city on the eastern New England seacoast would do as well. In the last chapter settled and resigned Michael sells restless Caleb his ticket to Gloucester thus making it possible for the book -- or the flux to continue with Gloucesterbook.
This book is astounding. There's precious little information about Jonathan Bayliss and his work either online or in the archives of literary criticism, but this novel should be acknowledged as a major work of twentieth-century literature. It's as vast in its vision as anything by Melville or Joyce, with whom Bayliss shares a familiarity with ancient history and mythology as well as a gift for expansive and creative language.
Michael Chapman is a book-buyer for a Berkeley, California shop during the Fifties. His world is divided among the demands of his profession, the needs of his family, and the attraction of his intellectual pursuits. This "trigeometry" forms the system that defines Prologos. Within it are many vessels containing information both philosophical and genetic, meaning both personal and social, and comedy both cosmic and commonplace. In Bayliss's hands, quotidian reality assumes a mythic proportion. A job in a boiler room becomes toil in the Inferno, the engine of capitalism itself.
A family trip to the zoo resonates with mythological import in the shadow of the shared history of all life on Earth. A ferry ride across San Francisco Bay is an opportunity to ruminate on the freight of civilization: Bayliss realizes the reader may feel daunted in the face of such a formidable, complex work, so he offers three courses through the system. If you read the work sequentially like I did , he has a diagram and chapter subtitles that clarify which area of Chapman's trigeometry is being described at each step. He outlines two alternate methods that allow more selective exposure to the network for those impatient with the novel's demanding regimen.
This is a novel for people who seek challenges, who want to be staggered by an author's imagination, who love books. Yes, if you're worth your weight as a bibliophile not the trophy-collecting type but the kind who loves the written word , this book will amaze you. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.
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