"Well, well, well well!"

(298.6-300.8)  It looks like today's reading wraps up Dolph's geometry lesson.  This passage -- or at least the first page of it -- is a doozy.  I've spent a decent amount of time pouring over the first page, and it doesn't really make any sense to me.  Even when I consider what Tindall and Campbell and Robinson have written about it, nothing really clicks.

Here's what I can say for sure:  Dolph is summing up the lessons to be learned from his lecture, and he's getting into some math terminology that I haven't thought about in this millennium (stuff like sines, cosines, and logarithms . . . this is when getting away with not taking any math classes after high school works to my disadvantage).  

Here's what I can guess:  Dolph's summary establishes ALP as a parallel to HCE, particularly in terms of the way HCE was presented mathematically a few pages back (see this post).  There's a lot of stuff here about zeroes and amounts greater than and less than one and infinite figures "returnally reprodictive of themselves."  I'm thinking this ties into the ideas of ALP as a mother of nations and the perfect complement to HCE (combining her fraction -- her imperfect self -- and his fraction -- his imperfect self -- to make a whole one).  That's all I'm going to say about that for now -- I'm going to mark this page as one I'd like to follow up on later by consulting some more recent critical analysis.

The rest of the passage makes more sense to me.  With the lesson completed, Kevin weighs in.  And he's not really all that impressed.  It soon becomes clear that Kevin is mocking Dolph with sarcastic praise:  "Mother of us all!  O, dear me, look at that now!  My Lourde!  My Lourde!  If that aint just the beatenest lay I ever see!  And a superpbosition!  Quoint a quincidence! . . . Who in the name of thunder'd ever belevin you were that bolt?"  One gets the sense that Kevin's a bit offended by Dolph's display:  "Hear where the bolgylines, Yseen here the puncture.  So he done it.  Luck!  See her good.  Well, well, well, well!  O dee, O dee, that's very lovely!"  Perhaps Kevin believes that there's more to their mother than just the anatomy that Dolph has reduced her to, as when he says, "Her trunk's not her brainbox."  Regardless, he says they should've just talked about money:  "More better twofeller we been speak copperads."

The passage ends with Kevin offering biting criticism of Dolph.  Isabel addresses Kevin in the footnotes, saying, "Picking on Nickagain, Pikey Mikey?"  Thinking Dolph an idler, Kevin offers him the same advice that Joyce's father offered young Joyce when he tells him to think about taking a job at the brewery:  "Ever thought about Guinness's?"  Soon after, Kevin delivers sarcastic praise of Dolph's intellect, suggesting that his knowledge is impractical.  For example, he says, "You know, you were always one of the bright ones, since a foot made you an unmentionable, fakes!"  McHugh and the other commentators note that the punctuating words to Kevin's three sarcastic sentences -- "fakes," "hoax," and "carrotty" -- suggest that Dolph is lacking in the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.  This also indicates that Kevin sees Dolph as a kind of imposter.

With the geometry lesson completed, I've now hit the stretch run for this chapter.  Only four more days, and it'll be completed.