"with a meticulosity bordering on the insane"

(171.29-174.4)  I went a little long on today's passage because it ends with a paragraph that stretches for almost a page and a half.  I was going to cut off the reading in the middle of that paragraph, but I got on a roll.  Besides, it can't hurt to go over to make up for lost time.

Anyway, the reading picks up with the narrator continuing to explain Shem's "lowness."  Now there's an example of an encounter Shem had with a girl who attempted to shoot Shem with her "coldblood kodak."  (The camera girl here calls to mind Mr. Bloom's daughter Milly, who works in a photo shop in Ulysses.)  Upon seeing the girl with the camera, the "cowardly gun and camera shy" Shem is said to have darted away.  The girl apparently knew Shem was "a bad fast man by his walk on the spot."  

The narrative is then interrupted by an ad for Johns butcher's shop, which is called "a different butcher's," perhaps to differentiate it from a butcher's shop that Shem might patronize.  This brief paragraph is notable for it's last lines:  "Feel his lambs!  Ex!  Feel how sheap!  Exex!  His liver too is great value, a spatiality!  Exexex!  COMMUNICATED."  (The "spatiality" links this particular butcher's with Shaun's philosophy from the previous chapter.)

Returning to Shem, the narrator adds that around the time of the kodak incident, the general public hoped that Shem would "develop hereditary pulmonary T.B." and commit suicide.  But despite his poor shape, Shem refused to take his life, leading the narrator to lament, "With the foreign devil's leave the fraid born fraud diddled even death."  Shem did, however, try to cable his brother for help, but his brother refused (in keeping with Shaun's answer to the previous chapter's eleventh question).

We now come upon the long paragraph I mentioned at the beginning of the post.  Here, the narrator says that "the tom and the shorty of it is:  he was in his bardic memory low."  (The "tom" and "shorty" here, coupled with the "trickle" and "freaksily" in a preceding phrase, recall our old friends Treacle Tom and Frisky Shorty, the two lowlifes who helped to spread the Cad's story about HCE.  Could the story about Shem that the narrator tells in this chapter be a similar type of unreliable rumor?)  Because his bardic memory -- or his authorial imagination -- was low, Shem, who was "covetous of his neighbour's word," spent his time collecting bits of overheard conversation for his writing.  Sometimes, while he was listening in on others' conversations, people would talk to Shem to encourage him to reform his life.  Thus engaged, Shem would take the opportunity to tell "the whole lifelong swrine story of his entire low cornaille existence, abusing his deceased ancestors wherever the sods were."  As he would go on and on deprecating his family and leaving out "the simple worf and plauge and poison they had cornered him about" (i.e., Shem), his listeners would lose interest and ultimately fall asleep "utterly undeceived" about Shem's "lowness."