Bloomsday!

Ireland, mourning a former Prime Minister, cancelled its Bloomsday celebration, but in the US we’re still gathering in bars.

After hoisting several Guinness’, most anyone will start babbling an incoherent stream of (semi) consciousness. But today you can pass that slurring off as “intellectual”! So, even if you can’t make it to an official event, locate your nearest Irish pub and offer a toast to Leopold and JJ.

Sean, yes I said yes I will have a Guinness today SF metroblogging, June 16, 2006

As I have done each June 16 since taking Marty N.’s seminar on James Joyce, today I pulled down my tattered copy of the tome and reread a paragraph here, a margin note there, assorted slips of paper quoting Marty, and Chapter 18 in its entirety.

Yes, it’s Bloomsday again. The fifteenth that I’ve marked. I grow old.*

You know, reading Joyce, heck, reading any of the “heavier” books, requires a time-space that few of us willingly make. Oh, the children, we chide. Ah, work, we moan. Oh, dear, the chores, the errands, the lawn, the home-improvement projects. We toss the books aside in dismay because they are no easier now than they were when well meaning English teachers and professors pressed them on us in our teens and early twenties.

Bulletin! They were never meant to be “easy.”

Happy Bloomsday.

Bloomsday, Mental Multivitamin, June 16, 2006

Friday.

Current mood: Disgusted and mortified

I didn’t want to be here on this day. I didn’t. I hate Joyce. I just loathe Joyce. I hate stream-of-consciousness. I hate the plaques on the ground around Dublin. I hate the framed picture on the wall. I hate I hate I hate.

Owen (from Dublin), Bloomsday, June 16, 2006

So you know what they’re talking about over the pint of stout, here are the Ulysses cribnotes, in flash form. They pretty much cover the book.