It's Bloomsday!
So what the heck is Bloomsday? Why, it's the day that James Joyce's Ulysses takes place!
For most members of the Boomer generation, Ulysses was famously a "dirty book." And it really was banned in America for many years. That passed when the publisher, Random House, took the U.S. government to court. The judge in the case was one of the first to say, "This is literature, you dolts," and allow free speech for a mere writer here in the land of the free.
It's also a famously "difficult" book, which means a cult formed around it. The result? Bloomsday. In recognition that the whole book takes place in one day, even while duplicating the ten-year story arc of Homer's Odyssey, a couple of critics decided to follow the path of the heros of Ulysses, going from pub to pub until shitfaced. (They only made it halfway.)
And the book is bawdy, naughty, hilarious, deep, weird and delightful.
Most years, there are groups reading the book aloud. But we're in a pandemic, so people are reading it via Zoom. "From Bloomsday to Zoomsday" the saying goes. And I've dragged out my three copies, above: a genuine first edition, a controversial "corrected" text and the most commonly used Random House/Modern Library edition.
So--happy Bloomsday to all! Dare ya to try to read it. --AlextheKay, Literateur
For most members of the Boomer generation, Ulysses was famously a "dirty book." And it really was banned in America for many years. That passed when the publisher, Random House, took the U.S. government to court. The judge in the case was one of the first to say, "This is literature, you dolts," and allow free speech for a mere writer here in the land of the free.
It's also a famously "difficult" book, which means a cult formed around it. The result? Bloomsday. In recognition that the whole book takes place in one day, even while duplicating the ten-year story arc of Homer's Odyssey, a couple of critics decided to follow the path of the heros of Ulysses, going from pub to pub until shitfaced. (They only made it halfway.)
And the book is bawdy, naughty, hilarious, deep, weird and delightful.
Most years, there are groups reading the book aloud. But we're in a pandemic, so people are reading it via Zoom. "From Bloomsday to Zoomsday" the saying goes. And I've dragged out my three copies, above: a genuine first edition, a controversial "corrected" text and the most commonly used Random House/Modern Library edition.
So--happy Bloomsday to all! Dare ya to try to read it. --AlextheKay, Literateur
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