Celebrating Bloomsday
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009In my social circle, Alonzo Subverbo is the main evangelist for Joyce. I am glad to be on Subverbo’s mailist, which mostly focuses on music, but encompasses all things literary. I liked what he sent out on Bloomsday, and so, with permission, repost it here:
June 16th: Bloomsday
Another Bloomsday has come, the day that James Joyce set Ulysses, the day that Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus wandered the streets of Dublin being extravagantly modernist, the day that turned into the night that Molly Bloom lay in bed, contemplating desire and desire’s memory, saying Yes, saying it again. But though I am Bloomsday’s Proselytizer-in-Chief Among People I Know, have been for many years now, I find myself distracted from my devotions by an obsessive concern for the news from Iran, which has become extraordinary. This was poor planning on the part of the Iranians, surprising in such a literature-loving people. How can anyone concentrate on a properly self-indulgent stream of consciousness with all this going on? What has the one thing to do with the other and how might one mind encompass them both?– as one mind encompassed the world of Ulysses, created it, handed it over, a world almost as irritating and beautiful and pointlessly meaningful as our own. Connections must be found — the color green, meddlesome clergymen, the grand claims of Blake and Shelley and Whitman and all the unacknowledged legislators of poetry and freedom, of the undivided imaginations of the rooftop shouter and street demonstrator and of the scribbling blind Irish prick, who thought he was a genius.
When I once again put a potato in my pocket, as Bloom did on his day, and have the usual pints of Guinness, and wander around my city once more with the spuds and the book and the brown beer — as if something might happen, something requiring just this equipment — and remember Bloomsdays past and all those I have loved and given potatos to, this time it will be a bit different, this time that potato will be a fucking Freedom Potato, and the toasts will travel halfway around the world, and the untranslatable words will understand everyone, everywhere.
Happy Bloomsday.
