UD‘s exciting Bloomsday last year, where she sang and read from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in front of a packed gathering at the Irish embassy, is followed by a quiet one now, beachside.

Beachside like Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, Chapter Three, where, in despair, he walks along a beach near Dublin. A young ambitious writer who’d gone soaring off to the continent to write his great books, he’s come crashing to earth – and Ireland – in the guilty, grieving aftermath of his mother’s death. The whole chapter’s his interior monologue on themes of soaring life, haunting death, sex, love, family, and ambition, as he broods along the beach.

His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.

proud rhythm/sand furrows: You see the matched pair, the metered poetry, mirroring his metered walk. Also the subtle assonance of it all: the f‘s and the v (feet/over/furrows), the monosyllabic, final d of sand and proud, taking along with them for good measure the d of sudden. The poetry too of those liquid l‘s in along/boulders/wall; the yet more poetry in all those long lovely open ah’s: march/along/wall. This is gentle prose, echoing the gentle setting of sand and waves and wind on a summer afternoon, the quietness of a solitary man walking and thinking. The storm is inside his mind; when we come to his monologue’s content, to the thoughts themselves, the prose will take a much harsher turn. But here we are still in third person, the consciousness of indirect discourse picking up on externalities.

Proud means bold means our genius is going to choose boulders, and gold , but never bold; he won’t say bold, but while we read, inside our own internal monologue, the word bold, the idea of boldness aligned with pride, will somehow bubble up, somehow subaquatically accompany all of this — haunt it, if you like, the way Stephen’s mother’s death will haunt his thoughts, present, and even insistent, but not quite there on the page. And that is the mind, that is the way it is, as our feet march in proud rhythm. Under the rhythm there’s another rhythm, deeper and always insinuating and complicating and – for Stephen, right now – dead calming, keeping him, despite his full-of-beansness, his amazing libidinal energy – from soaring.

(For an American analogue, there’s this famous passage, from A River Runs Through It:

Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

James Joyce can actually capture these underflows verbally. Norman Maclean wrote a great book but like virtually all other writers, he can’t do that.)

He stared at them proudly, piled stone mammoth skulls.

Stephen’s morbid set of mind perceives the boulders as massive skulls, a collective grave all piled up, and of course he’ll think much more directly in those everything-I-see-is-death terms in this chapter — Omnis caro ad te veniet he will say to himself a few moments after this passage; all flesh shall come unto thee. From a requiem mass.

The beach is a graveyard of all manner of things tossed up after being spun forever in the underworld. Much of this chapter will be Dedalus describing the washed up dead things he sees. But the narrative of this short paragraph, like the narrative of his long day and night, June 16, 1904, will be an effort to rouse himself from his dead calm, to defy death and the guilt and fear and despair it occasions, so that he can live and love and write:

Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.

It’s high summer, mid-June, a very sunny day; the world bids him notice the buzzing above the oceanic cemetery. As it bade him in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, just before he left for the continent:

A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the sea-dusk over the flowing waters.

A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal, and soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret, quietly and swiftly.

Joy; the sky above the waters. So Dedalus will, in this slender Ulysses paragraph, go with the sun, with the brightness that illuminates a rickety but real world – the slender trees, frail but lit up; the lemon houses, lemoned for a moment by the sun. It’s just a moment, but it’s real enough. It’s even poetic, with slender and lemon making another assonantal pair.

Soon enough, Dedalus will meet up with our man of the moment, Leopold Bloom, the two of them making a pair that poeticizes and makes bearable, makes legible, and lovable, the world of the living.

… containing the philosophy of Leopold Bloom as it appears in the novel Ulysses by James Joyce, of which you may have heard.

It’s going to be a handmade book, and… well, watch the film. It tells all.

Now that Joyce’s work has been liberated from the grasp of his grandson, projects like this one are flourishing. UD is excited, and has just done her bit – by way of a financial contribution – to The Works of Master Poldy. She can’t wait to see it.

… in this film, has died.

… comes to China.

[See AP photo here.]

… is ambivalent about this latest homage, a portrait of the artist made out of tulips. It’s a co-production of the Dutch Embassy and the Irish Botanical Gardens, and all you can see right now (here’s another image) is Joyce as a bunch of bulbs and stakes.

The specific tulip in the design is a new Dutch cultivar intended as a gift to Ireland and named Molly Bloom.

I dunno. It’s a bit on the sweet side for Jamesy. Not as bad as, say, Prague creating a smiley-face balloon homage to Kafka, but similarly problematic.

Today In University Life begins with the theft of “tens of thousands of dollars worth of bronze” from the base of a statue of James Joyce at a Jesuit university in Denver.

The sculpture was a tribute to ‘Ulysses.’ In the book there are 18 chapters and at the bottom of the sculpture there used to be 18 bronze plates.

“There was a quote from each of those chapters on each of the plates,” said Regis administrator Dr. Tom Reynolds.

UD thinks it sporting of the Jesuits to honor Joyce, who didn’t exactly praise them to the skies in his writing, and she thinks it’s a pity that they’ve lost part of what looks like a beautiful statue.

The news story about the theft includes the sort of spelling error Joyce would have put in Finnegans Wake (maybe he did): “It’s not just a chunk of inconsiquential detail.”

When Soltan finished delivering Molly Bloom’s orgasmic finale in the ambassador’s formal living room — “His heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes” — Collins stepped up the microphone and said, “Yes, indeed!” He noted that “Ulysses” had never been banned in Ireland.

An account of Bloomsday at the embassy features your blogger.

As I say in the post below, I’m not sure the ambassador’s “Yes, indeed!” was unreservedly thrilled …

This Bloomsday started like all of them – on the metro.

Hours before I’d been at the beach, and the sky was clear blue and the water windy and gray. I didn’t want to leave, of course, and I thought about a quiet life always at the shore.

***********************

I walked north from Dupont Circle up Connecticut Avenue, then climbed the hilly street of fine houses and clever little urban landscapes to the Irish Embassy. It was warm, but not too warm, and UD was nervous, but not too nervous, because before she left home she glugged some Gdansk Gold-Wasser Zlota Woda.

UD seldom drinks, but when she does, she’s amazed at how well it works.

***********************

The ambassador greeted me at the door. “You’re one of our readers!” he said.

“Yes. I’m your Molly Bloom.”

I said I’d worried a bit about the soliloquy’s obscenity. “My husband said there might be clergy in the audience.”

“Oh yes! There will certainly be clergy… I must say, I was listening to some actors practicing the Molly Bloom section earlier today and I was rather… uh… ”

“Well, I’ve chosen a series of short passages and nothing too over the top.”

*********************************

Four men preceded UD, reading a bit from various earlier chapters. It was a very full room, everyone standing and holding drinks. Some guests wore period costumes. UD spotted two priests.

The readers stood in front of a large fireplace; nearby windows gave out on a view of lawns and hydrangeas.

The ambassador stood just to UD‘s left — inches away. And as UD read Molly’s endless complaints about her husband (could have been a prima donna only I married him… O but then what am I going to do about him though…), she found herself using the ambassador as a stage prop, making him her Bloom. She cocked a finger in his direction with each complaint.

This certainly amused the crowd. I think it amused the ambassador, but I’m not sure.

****************************

I like performing Molly. After many years reading her thoughts, I think I am in love with her. Bloom and Stephen are Mr and Mr Gloomy Gus; Molly perks things up considerably with her unstoppable erotic drive.

The danger in reading Molly is melodrama. Overdoing it. The temptation is to be vulgar – either sexually or sentimentally. Molly is explicit, but she’s not out there.

I think what’s most striking about her – especially at the famous conclusion of the soliloquy – is her happy relationship to her own past. Her memories of her sexual power excite her, and indeed Molly gets the last word in the novel not only because she insists on living a full emotional, aesthetic, and erotic life, but also because she loves what she has been, cherishes her exotic past, and, in recalling it, delights and renews herself. At the end of Ulysses, Molly is ready for another day.

If you’re finally in the mood, here are UD‘s recent Bloomsday posts.

She and Mr UD are packing up to go back to Washington for UD‘s Bloomsday gigs at the Irish Embassy and the Cosmos Club.

… in my latest Inside Higher Ed post.

Read it here.

… is now up at Inside Higher Education.

… will appear at Inside Higher Ed tonight.

… revs up for her Bloomsday readings. Here.

Bloomsday Central, part of the Rosenbach Library website, lists details of Bloomsday (June 16) celebrations all over the world. It doesn’t yet list Washington’s, in which UD will perform, both at the Irish Embassy and at the Cosmos Club.

UD will read, at the Club, from the end of the Ithaca chapter from Joyce’s Ulysses, when after a long day Leopold Bloom finally falls asleep next to his wife, Molly. UD loves the way, as Bloom loses consciousness, the text itself drops off.

He kissed the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation.

Where?

At the embassy, UD will get about five minutes to read excerpts she’ll select from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. She is grazing that grassy consciousness now, seeking outcrops.

… at the Irish Embassy this Bloomsday (June 16) at 6 PM.

A lesser man might tremble at the thought of throbbing out those orgasmic yeses in front of H.E. Ambassador Michael Collins, but not UD! No sir! Lemme at him!