Who's getting it up?

In Lotus Eaters, as Bloom pursues alternatives to pondering his wife's upcoming assignation with Boylan—dreaming about Ceylon, lusting after an unknown woman who is above his social station, reading flirtatious correspondence—the world around him seems to be trying to remind him of his cuckolding, in a maniacal, hallucinatory version of Freud's "return of the repressed." Trying to tune out the annoying M'Coy, he unrolls his newspaper and sees an ad for Plumtree's Potted Meat, announcing that without it home is incomplete. He tells M'Coy about Molly's impending concert tour in Belfast and M'Coy asks him, "Who's getting it up?" Bloom answers evasively that "There's a committee formed. Part shares and part profits." Slightly later, a song verse floats into his mind about a woman who "didn't know what to do / To keep it up." All these details knock on Bloom's skull to remind him that is not getting it up and Boylan will.

John Hunt 2022

The headquarters of the Peoples Daily newspaper in Beijing, which has kept internet censors working overtime for a decade. Source: www.macleans.ca.