Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Bloomsday 2009



Street marker, Dublin: "You're in Dawson Street, Mr. Bloom said. Molesworth Street is opposite. Do you want to cross? There's nothing in the way." Photo credit: Brian Cormack

"Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves," notes Joyce's Stephen Dedalus.

And as someone else once noted: Meeting ourselves might mean meeting the occasional asshole.

In the pre-dawn hours -- before those rosy-fingers deigned to stretch out pink -- I checked my often over-wrought social calendar, only to discover that today has only one goings-on:

BLOOMSDAY 2009.

Hmmm. Ulysses on the brain! What are the odds, d'ya think, that vague electrical shorts of memory are what caused me to inexplicably go Homerian a few days ago?

All part of a desperate attempt to remember Bloomsday, 24 hours of anacoluthon, achoo, bless you!

Today, June 16, is The Day which takes place within James Joyce's Ulysses: it is a Dublin-y Day in the life of Leopold Bloom.

Remembering was easier a few years back, in the excitement of the centenary. No, that's not it. Remembering was not so lonely, is all.

Anyway. For a few of the very weird, Ulysses by Joyce shadows and minnows The Odyssey; It out-homers Homer.

And were I feeling collegiate, or even convivial, I'd lay out the correspondances between Dedalus and Telemachus, Bloom and Odysseue, and, of course, Molly and dear, dear Penelope.

But that is not how the feelings are splayed out upon the page, today.
It's more offal. Sweetbreads.
It's downright gamy -- that celebrated taint:

"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."
All that grease on the linen napkins!
So hunker down in your body, be as corporeal as can be. Raise a glass, it's the centenary and a few, but more than that -- it's the same day, all over again:

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."

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