Today is Bloomsday... yes...
Bloomsday—June 16th—is an annual celebration among Joyce fans throughout the world, from Fort Lauderdale to Melbourne. It is celebrated in at least sixty countries worldwide, but nowhere so imaginatively, of course, as in Dublin. There the events of Leopold Bloom's day are reenacted by anyone who cares to participate, and his itinerary is followed all across Dublin.
The years since 1904 have made an exact replication of Bloom's route impossible—Bloom's home at 7 Eccles Street no longer exists and the red-light district ("Nighttown"), in which the hallucinatory Circe chapter takes place, has been leveled; only the street pattern remains.
Bloomsday celebrations also feature readings of Ulysses, James Joyce lookalike contests, various other semi-literary activities, and a good excuse for hoisting a few Guinnesses. In the eyes of many, it's easier and a lot more fun than trying to work your way through Ulysses.
The novel recounts the hour-by-hour events of one day in Dublin—June 16, 1904—as an ordinary Dubliner, Leopold Bloom, wends his way through the urban landscape, the odyssey of a modern-day Ulysses.
Streets, shops, pubs, churches, bridges—something of Dublin pops up on nearly every page. The city is always in our peripheral vision no matter how notoriously impenetrable Joyce's prose becomes.
Photo of James Joyce by Bernice Abbott
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I first read Ulysses, well, some of it anyway, while churning through my English major Liberal Arts education as Saint Michael's College in Winooski Park, Vermont. White topped Stowe Mountain was visible to the east, the broad expanse of Lake Champlain unfolded while driving west down University Avenue into Burlington.
"The Mill" in then down-at-the-heels Winooski, a shot and a beer hangout for degenerates of all ages, was the place where we could discuss literature, the idiosycrancies of our professors, and the assets of the girls who gloriously filled enrollment ranks at the University of Vermont, Trinity College for Women, and a crazy quilt of nursing schools.
The imagery and parallels to The Odyssey eluded me. Molly Bloom's soliliquy in the eighteenth, and final, chapter of James Joyce's novel Ulysses did not.
The spirit of Molly Bloom hovered over me in the blue haze of Marlboros and Lucky Strikes in the low ceiling quarters of The Mill. I would swim across the Atlantic to Dublin to meet a Molly, who would say...
"...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. "
Somewhere today, standing next to a Moorish wall, Molly whispers softly in my ear, presses her perfumed breasts against my chest, and yesly wraps her arms around me. Bloomsday. Yes.
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