In Bloom

Apollonio, Adventures of Ulysses (1435)

Today being Bloomsday, and I being a fan of James Joyce and Ulysses, I feel need to recognize this day from other days and raise a glass of burgundy. Opinion's being what they are, some may think me a complete horses ass for doing so, others still, will join me in raising said glass. I am well aware that Ulysses doesn't suffer for champions, but least anyone doubt Bloomsday as nothing more than a literary version of the Renaissance Fair, I take pause to point out that just about every other "real" holiday I can think of, is based on some esoteric text (actually most of them can’t even claim that level of authenticity: see Christmas) that most people never read, but still believe they are qualified to serve as experts on. I will take my Bloomsday and you can roll the rock back over whatever cave it is you stepped out of. But I digress, Ulysses, is a great book. This is what I think. I think this because I have read it. Furthermore, I enjoyed it. So let's dispense with all the bullshit of what is the greatest book, what is not great, who reads what, why they read it, what exactly crawled up Jonathan Franzen ass and died, and if there is anyway to possibly remove said obstruction. Instead, let me blabber a bit about why I like this book.

I read Ulysses for the first time in 2004 shortly before I moved to California, It was one of the first books I ever read that required me to read a series of other books in order to understand the first book. Unlike most people I thought this was cool. The act of deciphering Joyce's code, following the almost endless layers of symbolism through an intense ritual linguistic intercourse blew my fucking mind. It was not  unjustifiably difficult or experimental to the great loss of traditional novel procedure. In fact it succeeded in the most traditional sense if I understand the essence of the novel of a many voiced choir.  Nor do I find Ulysses to be elitist.  Much of this choir is composed of the lower middle class world of 1904 Dublin, Ireland- and not as a mater of parental disapproval as one find is too many other modernist including Eliot, Pound, and Wolf. Though Both the male poets supported Ulysses Virgina Woolf stated in her diary that Ulysses was an ”illiterate, underbred book … of a self taught working man.” (Quote Source). So When I say that Ulysses "Blew my fucking mind", I am not just being crude for effect, there are few books that employ the word "fuck" as eloquently as Ulysses. There is enough fucking going on June 16th of 1904 to make San Francisco's city planners  consider changing the date of the Folsom Street Fair (normally in September)  to coincide with Bloomsday.

He wouldnt have made us the way He did so attractive to men then if he wants to kiss my bottom ill drag open my drawers and bulge it right out in his face as large as life he can stick his tongue 7 miles up my hole as hes there my brown part then Ill tell him I want $1*

(*should be the symbol for an Irish pound- substituted a dollar symbol in it's stead)

I know every turn in him Ill tighten my bottom well and let out a few smutty words smellrump or lick my shit or the first mad thing comes into my head then Ill suggest about yes o wait now sonny my turn is coming  

The lines are from the last chapter of the book, the Molly Bloom/Penelope chapter. Molly is both wife to Ulysses, and mother to Telemachus, as such she gets the final word, a resounding YES. Bloom is laying in bed after being out all night with Stephan Dedalus, who himself is now sleeping in the other room. She recounts her life's several romantic tryst in vivid detail, including her day of infidelity now past with her manager (Molly is an accomplished professional singer, as was Joyce) as well as a fantasy involving Stephen. She is hardly the only sex fixated voice in the novel though; Bloom masturbates on the rocks of a public beach for a young woman who willing allows her skirt to lift just enough to reveal the promise land. Bloom is also having an affair of sorts, all though more emotionally than physically with a pen pal on the west coast. Once united, Stephen and Bloom pass an hour at a bordello, Bloom nervously watching out for Stephen who continues to consume drink with passion while uttering incantations of grotesque vision that transform Dublin’s red light district into a layer of hell. Despite all this fucking however, poor Poldy (as Molly calls her husband) and Molly haven't slept together in 10 years, since the death of their non spiritual son. Ulysses begins with a death, a dead body, a dead dog in the marshes, a funeral. Stephen wears black for her mother who died some months before. He is haunted not only by her memory, but also his refusal of her last living wish that he take communion. Everybody losses something, no one is being completely honest, and through all the fucking and death, the plump rounds, and fecundity, Ulysses would not be complete if did not end in birth, as it does.

It is the city that makes these connections possible. Bloom and Stephen wander Dublin's streets consumed by their own betrayals and trespasses just as they suffer the same onslaughts against themselves. Throughout, Joyce's Map of Dublin is filled with historical, sociological, political, mythological, spiritual, physical, and temporal occurrences, in short, it is as Baroque as it is Modern. It is one of the most complete spatial urban, fictional works of art as does exist. Joyce stated his own attraction to place this way:  

For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.(source)

Italio Calvino echos this practice in Invisible Cities, it also calls to mind Charles Olson's practice who, despite several other comparisons that could be made between the two, seems to have rejected Joyce's system.

On the 100^th anniversary of Bloomsday in 2004, I had been living in Oakland for less than a month after moving from the Massachusetts Cape Ann area where I had grown up. I had only finished Ulysses a few months before. On June 16^th that year, I left my aunt’s house where I was staying at time and tried to stay out all day walking around Oakland, as much for the want of a home as for effect, I ate a sandwich composed of left over grilled vegetables and Gorgonzola cheese, I had a Guinness after dinner because the bar I went to didn't have Burgundy. I decided I didn't like the bar I was at and drank my beer down in a hurry and left to wander some more. A few days before a women’s body had been discovered by authorities in the Rose Garden just down the street from where I was staying. As a part time reporter for a local newspaper, I was asked to cover the story. There were not many details save that after the women had been strangled to death and her dead body set on fire. Pending an investigation, the police would not release any more details on the case, I was told to abandon the story. At the time I was torn between the two different paths represented by Bloom and Stephen, the white collar worker, or an exiled artist. I am embarrassed to say now how much I identified with Stephen at the time, my initial reading of his character was too literal and I see now how I mistook comedy for tragedy in order to justify the draconian battles with myself and everyone in my life. From the bar, I walked down Grand St to Lake Merritt and sat on the benches along the water gazing at the strands of white lights circling the perimeter of the man-made lake, the shimmering reflection from the traffics lights across the water reflecting as if off a gigantic broken mirror giving an otherwise alien place to me, the illusion of home. I thought a lot about islands, Ireland, Ithaca, Gloucester, the last now looming, as Melville said it would, like some insular Tahiti in my soul from which I had left and now understood what he meant by never able to return.Three months later, my best friends welcomed their daughter into the world. Piece by piece we attempt to reconstruct the mirror. I might stay here, I thought that night, it might be as good as another place, yes. 

There is plenty enough that has been said about Ulysses, and more I could say. Neither Joyce, nor his book are perfect. Some of  the experiments don't come off as well as others because they are...well, experimental, and all of Joyce's work (and for that matter everything one reads, hears, or watches) should be read with a good dose of feminism, not to discredit the work, but to understand better the portrait this artist drew. Joyce was as much a brilliant artist as he was an arrogant, repressed, sexist, drunken, pervert, but the same could be said of plenty other luminaries, most of whom received a free pass presumably because they did everything they could to hide the truth about themselves.