"pure mousefarm filth"

(182.30-184.10)  Today our attention shifts slightly away from Shem and focuses upon Shem's house, which is known, appropriately enough, as the "Haunted Inkbottle."  This passage, which is one long paragraph, is actually fairly easy to read (once you've taken some time to digest it) and, as with much of the Wake, pretty entertaining.

The narrator rates the Haunted Inkbottle as "the worst, it is hoped, even in our western playboyish world for pure mousefarm filth."  This is the place, after all, where Shem, "the soulcontracted son of the secret cell groped through life at the expense of the taxpayers," so I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that it's the worst, or as the narrator adds, "a stinksome inkenstink."  Much of the paragraph is devoted to the narrator's catalog of items littered on the warped flooring, soundconducting walls, support beams, and shutters.  Among these cataloged items are full works of literature ("burst loveletters" and "telltale stories"), fragments of literature ("alphybettyformed verbage," "once current puns," and "quashed quotatoes"), food remnants ("doubtful eggshells," "amygdaloid almonds," and "rindless raisins"), and garters from a secondary catalog of women (which includes "schoolgirls," "merry widows," "ex nuns," and "super whores").

Quite a mess, right?  If you can stand the "chambermade music" (another reference to Joyce's collection of poems, Chamber Music) of the house, the narrator says that one might -- "given a grain of goodwill" -- stand a fair chance of seeing Shem himself.  Here, Shem is described as "Tumult, son of Thunder, self exiled in upon his ego."  At night, he shakes "betwixtween white or reddr hawrors," and at day he's terrorized "to skin and bone by an ineluctable phantom," while he's "writing the mystery of himsel in furniture."  As the chapter progresses, the narrator (and Joyce, by extension) seems to paint a gloomier and gloomier picture of Shem (and Joyce, by extension).