(Still) reading Joyce

I plough on slowly, usually reading snippets of Ulysses on my HTC smart phone while I sit in my van in the car park of Sydney College of the Arts waiting for Spike to clear up in the glass studio and / or mold room.  (Tonight it was the mold room and plaster-coated representations of short, thick sticks, one of which is ant-infested apparently).  Anyway, I on the second-last episode, Ithaca.  Stephen has just sloped off into the last vestiges of night and Leopold Bloom has unbuttoned most of his garments before heading to bed.  It was at this point I learned / read that Leopold:

... compressed between 2 fingers the flesh circumjacent to a cicatrice in the left infracostal region below the diaphragm resulting from a sting inflicted 2 weeks and 3 days previously (23 May 1904) by a bee.

Kilmardinny Loch

I do wonder why I'm still reading after 700, maybe 800 pages.  I know it's great literature and I'm mostly enjoying it (there's a racism that's difficult to forgive, even allowing for the 'different era' line of argument).  But the remembrance of things past?  A bee sting?  Maybe that's what makes it a great modernist work of hyper-real  fiction.  We sometimes remember the bee stings in life ... for example, I recall that Roger Brown was stung 4 times by bees that got inside his clothes one summer's day at Kilmardinny Loch.  We were eleven or twelve years old.  We must have been bee-bothering that day, more than forty years ago.