As we reached the 100 year anniversary of the publication of Ulysses by James Joyce, Stalker reckoned it might be worth a look to see if mushrooms were much mentioned in the modernist tome.
Not much turned up unfortunately, except a mention of “punnets of mushrooms” in the Dublin Corporation Fruit Vegetable and Fish Market. There was also mention of “Kerwans mushroom houses” which referred to some low-cost housing units as opposed to a modern mushroom farm unit.
The search lead to some interesting views on mushroom, mycology and fungi in the other more complex modernist text by Joyce, namely Finnegan’s Wake.
There’s mention of fungopark, which was a reference to the Phoenix Park apparently. Stalker unearthed a paper entitled Cryptogrammic Crptograms: Fungi in Finnegan’s Wake, a paper that makes claim to a lot of mushroom method in Joyce’s manuscript.
Perhaps worth a look if one is of a literary bent!
