"this rancid Shem stuff"

(180.34-182.29)  The description of Shem's lowness continues with the narrator explaining how Shem used to "boast aloud alone to himself with a haccent on it" that he he had been kicked out of all the "schicker" (McHugh notes that this is based on the German "schick," which means elegant or stylish) families that had settled in Dublin from surrounding countries and lands.  Why was he kicked out of these families?  "[O]n account of his smell which all the cookmaids eminently objected to as ressembling the bombinubble puzzo that welled out of the pozzo."  Or, in other words, because he smelled like the abominable stench that came out of the toilet.  What's worse is that instead of doing something respectable before getting booted from those households, he spent his time studying "with stolen fruit how to cutely copy all their various styles of signature so as one day to utter an epical forged cheque on the public for his own private profit."  His scheme was ruined, though, when the Dustbin's United Scullerymaid's and Househelp's Sorority got rid of him altogether.

The narrator's description (or take down) of Shem is again interrupted by an advertisement, this time apparently placed by Joyce himself.  "Jymes," the advertisement states, "wishes to hear from wearers of abandoned female costumes."  More specifically, he's looking for ladies' undergarments "to start city life together."  Say what you will about Joyce, but he wasn't timid about making himself the butt of the joke, and he relished in his own reputation for lewdness.

Getting back to Shem, the narrator says it's hard to tell exactly how many forgeries he's sent out into the world.  Regardless, the narrator asserts that Shem never would've been able to write a word if it weren't for the "light phantastic of his gnose's glow as it slid lucifericiously within an inch of its page."  In one sense, this means that Shem has a wicked gnostic muse, and, in another, it means that he's got a Rudolph-like nose that illuminates the page on which he writes.  "By that rosy lampoon's effluvious burning," the narrator says that Shem "scrabbled and scratched and scriobbled and skrevened nameless shamelessness about everybody ever he met."  He'd also draw "endlessly inartistic portraits of himself" in the page margins.  The narrator says that these self portraits feature Shem as a handsome, talented, rich, and well-dressed man.  Predictably, the thought of Shem's delusions of grandeur elicit a hearty "Puh!" from the narrator.