100th Anniversary of Bloomsday!

Today is, as you may have gathered from one of the news stories on it, the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday-- the day on which the events of James Joyce's Ulysses take place. In honor of that momentous day in world literature, I'd like to pay tribute to Joyce with my own stream of consciousness on the reading of Ulysses:

Stately plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather-- funny how the book starts out with that giant 'S.' I wonder if that was Joyce's idea or just the publisher's. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Introibo ad altare Dei. Nobody reads Latin any more. Well, at least I know what Dei means. Come up Kinch. Come up, you fearful Jesuit. Nobody calls anybody a Jesuit any more. All one day huh? How long is this? Almost 800 pages. And to think people celebrate Bloomsday. It's sort of like all those Trekkies who celebrate the day that Zephram Cochran invented Warp Drive. And hey, wasn't Sherlock Holmes' 150th birthday this year? January 6th, because it's on Twelfth Night, not that anyone knows what Twelfth Night is any more either. Wow, 800 pages. I could read, like, five regular books in that time. Or at least finish The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay or something. Then catching sight of Stephen Dedalus he bent toward him and made rapid crosses in the air, gurgling in his throat-- what, is Dedalus a vampire? Maybe I need to go check LTHForum now. I can read this some other time. I mean, I know the ending-- yes she said yes oh yes yes yes, or something like that. 800 pages to get to that. Slam!

There was an article in Sunday's New York Times about the decrease in the Jewish population in Dublin entitled "The Fading World of Leopold Bloom." I didn't read that either.

Damn, Mike, you beat me to it...I was preparing a Molly Bloom-type soliloquy to post later tonight. Actually, though, I only got as far as the last few words "Yes, yes I said, yes I will...eat now."

Your idea of doing a parody of the first paragraph makes much more sense (it's about as far as most people ever get).

I can't parody, I can only copy--I mean quote. Let me enthusiastically recommend "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Joyce" by Sam Anderson in the summer issue of The American Scholar.

"One dubiously sunny Irish summer day in Dublin I was walking along the city's eastern beach-rim when my friend told that this wasn't just any eastern beach-rim--the kid of place in, say, Barcelona or Sydney where you might caually toss Frisbees--but in fact literary holy ground: Sandymout strand. A sophisticated modernist shiver, dressed in a bow tie and a bowler hat, with a pince-nez and a small mustache, sauntered up and down my spine."

Well worth the single copy price of $9, but don't subscribe because there's a note from Anne Fadiman in the front saying that she and four editors have been let go and that most of the contributing editors and editorial board members "have chosen to leave as well."