20 (U432.2819)

THE HOOF: Smell my hot goathide. Feel my royal weight.

 20th cast. page 432, line 2819.

THE HOOF: Smell my hot goathide. Feel my royal weight.

 

BLOOM: (Crosslacing.) Too tight?

 

THE HOOF: If you bungle, Handy Andy, I’ll kick your football for you.

 

Episode 15. It is written in the form of a fantastic play.

 

Bella Cohen's brothel. Bella, the madam of the brothel, appears and has Bloom tie the laces of her boots on a chair.

 

Ulysses is based on a motif from Homer's Odyssey. Bella Cohen corresponds to the witch Circe.  Circe uses magic to turn people into animals.

 

The passage just before here says: “a plump buskined hoof and a full pastern, silksocked.” The pastern is "a part of the leg of a horse between the fetlock and the top of the hoof", so a hoof would be the foot of a Bella transformed into a horse's hoof. Or at least the foot of a hoofed animal.

 

Handy Andy is the main character in the novel Handy Andy (1842) by the Irish composer and novelist Samuel Lover(1797 - 1868). Hired as an servant of a landowner, Andy was a man of peculiar talent who did everything wrong.

 

At a later date, the proper noun "Handy Andy" became a general noun meaning "a hired hand who does all the little jobs," "a handyman," or "a do-it-yourselfer“. Today, it seems to have become a trade name for DIY stores.

 

I happened to find this passage in Chapter 9 (page 229) of Finnegans Wake. “Wild primates not stop him frem at rearing a writing in handy antics."

Handy Andy by Samuel Lover

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